Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
Natalie Shea was the first friend I ever made as Gwen Tanner.
That was probably her biggest mistake…and mine.
I had warned her not to mess with me, but she hadn’t heeded my warning then, and she certainly wasn’t heeding it now.
What was being thrown right back in my face, though, was how I never should have messed with her either.
Seeing her on that screen, looking like me—well, looking like how she would assume thirteen-year-old me would end up looking—it made me rethink everything.
She was only supposed to know me as Gwen, but she must have discovered my true identity somehow, and that had set her off.
She killed those men from my past, chopped off their arms, left them on my doorstep, to what?
Taunt me? Drive me crazy? I had to admit it was working.
Not to play Monday-morning quarterback, but if I had to name one person I knew other than my father who was capable of it, it was Natalie.
Natalie was an absolute wild card. I’d really liked her, but we hadn’t parted on the best of terms. I always assumed it was someone out to get Marin and never stopped to consider it could be someone who had it out for Gwen. What the hell was I supposed to do with that?
- - - - -
Elyse stared at the screen, clutching the phone in an unhealthy way. I gravitated closer to her as we watched together. Everything that had been taken from Elyse, it was my fault. All of it. It was my fault her family was dead and it was my fault it was all being thrown back in her face.
I wasn’t practiced in processing these emotions. I wanted Elyse to die. I wanted her to drop dead at my feet to release me from this feeling. Only not really—not even close. I reached over and took her hand.
Natalie was a better actor than I would have guessed—tearing up over the loss of her mother, overwhelmed with having to revisit that dark time in her life, clueless about who would want to hurt all these people in the name of her father but begging them to stop.
Elyse didn’t know this was an act. She didn’t know this was all for me.
When it was over, Elyse didn’t flinch; she just gazed at the screen. “I’m going to kill her,” she said, void of any rhetorical inflection.
“What?” I questioned, studying her profile, confirming I’d heard her correctly.
“Gwen…” She pressed her lips together as she put the phone down, considering what to say next.
She rotated her whole body toward me, acknowledging my hand now, using her own to control the strength of our grip.
“I want to tell you the truth. I don’t know why, but I feel like I can trust you. Tell me I’m not wrong.”
“You can trust me,” I said, not sure of what was coming but sure she shouldn’t trust me.
“I wasn’t at the park when my family was killed,” she admitted. “It’s just the story I went along with when the police found me there.”
My heartbeat became irregular. Bad things were coming.
“A couple days later, when James Calhoun came to see me,” she continued, “I confessed that I’d been there.
I told him it was Abel Haggerty who killed my family.
Cody hadn’t regained consciousness; that was a lie James told to explain how he knew to search the Haggerty house.
They found so much evidence there that James said it was an unnecessary risk for me to come forward.
“Abel wasn’t being shy about wanting Cody dead,” she continued.
“Once Abel’s identity was released, tons of witnesses came forward, saying he had been at the hospital, on Cody’s floor.
Even with Abel in custody, they worried about what he could do, what connections he might have.
James said if Abel knew I was the real witness, he would go after me.
Better to let the truth die with Cody. James told me to keep saying I had been at the park the whole time.
He really thought Abel would try to kill me if he knew. ”
She stopped for a breath and I lost mine. It hadn’t been Cody who’d brought down my father; it had been Elyse.
“Because that wasn’t the whole truth…” She paused so I could have the opportunity to stop her—a way out if it was already too much information to burden me, Gwen Tanner, with.
I abstained from casting a vote for my own salvation. She was going to keep going and I was going to hear it. I was detaching from her. I was detaching from myself. I knew what she was about to say.
“That day, I was playing outside. I was running around the neighborhood and I got hungry and headed back to the house. There was this loose board in the fence that I always ducked in and out through. I poked my head in and I saw my brother, Cody, in the backyard with Marin Haggerty.”
I squeezed her hand too hard and she stopped talking. I let it go, but she yanked mine back like she needed to be connected in order to continue.
“Cody was trying to kiss Marin, but she kept pushing him away. Normal kid stuff, but it was exciting to me because I was young and kissing was a big deal.” She almost smiled—how innocent she’d been back then; I couldn’t relate.
“Cody started to get mad and was calling her names—nasty things,” she continued.
“But Marin wasn’t having it. She kept staring at him—just looking at him.
I don’t know how to explain it, these evil eyes stuck on him.
Then he spat at her and she lost it. She tackled him to the ground and grabbed a rock and started hitting him in the head.
He gave up fighting, but she didn’t stop. ”
—
Sometimes I tell myself I didn’t realize I was killing him. How could a nine-year-old really understand the physics of it? But I knew. When his blood covered the rock, I knew. When he stopped moving, I knew.
—
“Marin Haggerty killed Cody,” Elyse admitted, her greatest secret, my greatest secret.
She wanted me to react, but I could only count her eyelashes, 1-2-3-4.
“I was so scared. I was only eight!” she exclaimed to fill the silence.
“I crawled back under the fence and ran. I sprinted all the way to this river down the street like I could jump in and it would carry me away, but I got there and realized I didn’t know what to do.
I needed my parents, so I turned back. I got there in time to watch through the window as Abel Haggerty released Blake’s neck and he slumped to the floor.
I waited for him to leave and then I crept into the house.
The blood was unreal. It was all over. I think he was trying to hide what happened, that Cody was killed by Marin first.”
It was true. It was why Cody had managed to hold on for those excruciating five days; I had botched the job.
I had disappointed my father and I remembered that being the worst part.
I’d wanted to blame him somehow—I still did.
It was his fault for not checking closer when he ran to their house to clean up my mess.
He was the professional; I was merely the protégé.
Cody must have still had a pulse, however weak.
My father’s faith in my abilities had clouded his reason.
If my father had checked Cody’s body, snapped his neck when he felt the pulse, then he would have been the killer, right? Not me.
“Why didn’t you say something about Marin?” I finally spoke, wishing in that moment that Elyse had said something. How would my life have been different if I’d received the treatment I actually needed? How would hers?
“I did! I told James Calhoun everything and he said he would take care of it. Then I was shipped out to the Berkshires to live with my mom’s aunt, who preferred to pretend I had fallen straight from God’s hands into her yard rather than acknowledge what had happened to me.
By the time I was old enough to understand how it had all played out, Marin was gone.
There was no trace of her. It just felt easier to block it all out than let it take over my life.
I trusted James Calhoun. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did, and I thought he must have had a reason not to tell anyone. ”
I guess it explained why James had brought me to that school and why he’d never come back.
He’d known exactly what I was, a monster like my father, but I was packaged in an “innocent” little girl’s body and it must have left him conflicted.
His hero complex had really screwed us. Elyse and I were more connected than I ever imagined.
“I tried to forgive her,” she continued, glancing back at her phone, where we had watched Natalie.
“Or at least forget her, but seeing her, I can’t.
” She turned back to me. “I hate to say it, but when they found James Calhoun’s body, I was relieved.
It was justice—justice I didn’t even realize I wanted.
He shouldn’t have let her get away with what she did. She shouldn’t get away with it.”
“Are you going to tell?” I asked.
Elyse shook her head. “She’ll just deny it. After all these years, who would believe me?”
“I do,” I said.
“It’s not enough.”
I knew what she was saying. I think if I were a normal person, I would have assumed it was all talk. I wouldn’t have worried she would do anything to Natalie, but I knew what it felt like to live with that exact secret my whole life, and if I could do something about it, I would.
“If you do something to her, it will change you,” I said. “What you’re talking about is revenge, not justice. You think it will end these feelings, but it won’t.”
“You don’t know that,” she said, and she was right. Maybe revenge was just the ticket.
“Then let me help you,” I said. Anything to ease her pain. Selfishly, anything to get her to keep me involved—anything to cling to in a situation I was clearly losing control of.
Elyse knew what had to be done and so did I. It didn’t matter whether she was Marin Haggerty or Natalie Shea; the woman on the screen had to be put down. I had killed before and I could do it again if I had to—for Elyse and for me. One more time. It was the only way out. And a good one at that.
Natalie wasn’t a kid anymore and neither was I. She was out in the world, severing arms. She had killed my mother. She was a ticking time bomb and I knew better than anyone that it would not be a good idea to let Natalie Shea explode.