Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
PJ
By the time we get Fallon and Bruiser packed into my car, the sky has turned from light gray to a mix of pinks and purples and golds. Fallon’s dark hair reflects the light through the window. Between making sure nobody’s following us and keeping the car on the road, I try not to stare too much.
It isn’t easy.
“I thought you said it takes fifteen or twenty minutes to get to your place from mine.”
Fallon’s chewing at his thumbnail. The tip of the iceberg. Me, I’m about to come out of my skin.
“If someone’s had cameras in your house, they could have been following you as easily. I want to make sure nobody can follow us back to my place.”
Fallon falls silent again, save for the occasional sound of him biting his nail. And drumming his fingers on his thigh. And tapping his foot.
“Hey.” I reach across to place my hand on his jumpy knee. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How do you figure,” he snaps. “I have a drawer full of creepy messages from an unknown person, someone installed cameras in my house and has been watching me do God knows what for God knows how long, and I’m sleeping with my student, which is going to get me fucking fired.”
Jesus. Okay. He’s not wrong, but… “We didn’t know about the last thing until I walked into class this morning.”
“But now we do know, and after finding that out, I invited you over to my house, where you fucked me in broad daylight on the beach.”
“To be fair, it was nearly dinnertime—”
“PJ.” He blows out a heavy breath.
“Okay. Just trying to lighten the mood. I’ll stop. But really, don’t you think we can just keep it on the DL for a few months? The semester will be over before we know it.”
After class today, I went to see about getting my schedule changed, but all the other sections of the class are full. I was told I was welcome to check back to see if that changed, but I was also told not to hold my breath. People don’t tend to drop a class that’s required for graduation.
The lady suggested I could push off the class until next semester, but the thing is, I can’t. My next semester is packed with the final business courses I need, and my custodial job only grants me a limited number of credit hours per semester. I don’t know how I’d pay for the extra class.
“And what happens when you need me to fix a grade, or you miss class and want to know which test questions came from the lecture, or…I don’t know, you need to reschedule a test?”
Dammit, Fallon’s shaking, and I’ve got my AC on the lowest setting.
“I promise that won’t happen. Even if I asked, there’s no way you’d give me special treatment. I know you wouldn’t.”
“I’d want to, though.”
“I’d never ask.”
We get stopped at a red light, and I glance his way to try and gauge his reaction, but all I get is a tight clench of his jaw. This is not a situation I ever expected to find myself in, and I don’t exactly know the protocol.
Since we’ve got bigger things to worry about, and since I don’t want this to escalate into a fight, I change the subject.
“We need to talk about what happened at your house today. Did Everett have any way to find out where the cameras came from?”
“He said he’d try. He didn’t sound optimistic, though.”
“My money’s on whoever sent the creepy greeting cards, personally. Wait. Your books.”
His bouncing leg freezes beneath my hand.
“What about them?”
“You write mysteries. Some bored housewife goes around solving murders in between PTA meetings and baking casseroles. So if we pretended this was a book you’re writing, who would you peg as the big bad here?”
He’s silent for way too long.
“Fallon?”
“It’s just fiction, PJ. I don’t solve actual crimes.”
“Yeah, but I looked at that shelf of books at your house. You’ve written, like, ten of those things. I’ve read enough of the first one to know that there’s murder, attempted murder, theft, and money laundering.
“You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about crimes, Fallon. You have to have been thinking about this shit, right? What’s your gut telling you? If you’re writing this situation into a story, who’s the bad guy?”
More silence. A lot of silence. By the time I’ve looped through downtown in multiple directions and gone all the way out through the unincorporated area outside of Belle Argo and the neighboring town of Beacon Hill, I’m getting prickles of something that feels an awful lot like suspicion on the back of my neck.
“You know who it is, don’t you? Or you have an idea.”
He shifts in his seat. “This isn’t a mystery novel. Things don’t happen the same way in real life. Some things aren’t actually possible.”
“Come on, baby. I know you’ve heard the thing about how truth is stranger than fiction.”
“It’s not possible!” Fallon’s hand slams against the window.
Okay. “Are we in this together or not? Just tell me. Whatever it is, if you think it’s wrong, then we’ll be able to rule it out, and we can move on to other ideas.”
“No.”
I’m beginning to see the allure of that twenty-four-seven relationship Fallon had with Marina. She told him what to do, and he did it, and right now he needs to do what I fucking tell him to.
“Goddammit, Fallon. I can’t fucking help you if you’re not honest with me.” My hands are so tight on the steering wheel I swear I could rip it off.
You haven’t been honest about everything with him.
My conscience sounds weirdly like Evans, and I’m not at all ready to dig into that right now.
There’s a flash of lightning up ahead. “Baby.” I soften. “Come on.”
Fallon sighs. “I think I might be losing my mind, because this is going to sound delusional. If this were a fictional story and not my actual fucking life, I would probably set it up so that someone at the beginning of the story died or disappeared, but it turned out the person who died or disappeared, someone the reader had entirely forgotten about, actually wasn’t gone after all. ”
Thunder.
“That’s an oddly specific scenario.”
“Not really.” He’s tapping his fingers on the window now. I wrap my hand around the hand closest to me.
“A lot of books and movies use that plot device,” he continues. “One of the first mystery novels I read, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, uses it. The movie Identity, starring John Cusack, uh, The Lovely Bones, if I’m remembering correctly. The Book Th—”
Another crack of lightning.
“All right. I get it. So, who’s dead or missing that might want to stalk you and mess with your head?”
Another flash of lightning. More thunder.
“Marina’s brother.” he blurts out.
I flex my fingers, trying to loosen the tension. “You never mentioned she had a brother.”
“Because he died years ago, and because I don’t like talking about him. He was a fucked-up guy. All Marina’s life, he terrorized and bullied her. He’s the first person I can think of who would do something like this. It can’t be him, though.”
“How did he die?”
Fallon’s quiet again. “You can’t repeat this.”
“Promise. I’m good with secrets.” What the fuck kind of secret could it be, though? “Was it, like, something her family wanted to keep quiet? Autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong?”
Honestly, I’m proud of myself for even knowing what the hell that is. Thanks to Ravi and his research, I’m learning all sorts of shit. I had no idea people could accidentally kill themselves chasing the big O.
“Marina killed him.”
Shock has me slamming my foot into the gas pedal. The car lurches before I get it under control again.
“Didn’t see that coming.” Okay, maybe not the best response.
But he keeps going. “Like I said, he made her life hell. She said her best day was the day she left for college. Never returned if she could help it. Made excuses for breaks and holidays, found friends to stay with.”
Sounds like me as a kid, hiding at friends’ houses to avoid my mom’s boyfriends. “Something must have taken a left turn.”
I know it did for me.
“A few years after we got married, her dad had been diagnosed with cancer, and her mom was insistent that the whole family come home for Christmas. I’d had a book signing in Cincinnati.
My plane was delayed due to weather. Marina got stuck spending the night there without me.
Eric could charm the pants off anyone, so her parents never believed her stories about him. ”
My mind goes to June, one of my foster siblings. She was getting hassled by this older kid, Rubin, but nobody believed her. “Was he, like… You know…” I don’t want to upset Fallon by saying it out loud.
Fallon’s laugh is harsh. “That was about the only thing he didn’t do.
Eric was gay. But he was also some kind of psychopath, I think.
He enjoyed scaring Marina just to laugh at the look on her face.
They thought she had a problem with self-harm.
He’d cut her, burn her, break her fingers, and then force her to take the blame.
Once, he hid cameras in her room and sent the videos around their school.
Posted them on porn sites. For years, she had nightmares about being watched.
Marina also had issues with food because he gave her so much shit about her weight. ”
“Hidden cameras.” When I swallow, there are razorblades in my throat. “Sounds familiar.”
Fallon’s fingers clench and release in my grip. We’re almost to my apartment, but I wait. If he gets distracted, he might stop talking again.
His free hand rubs at his forehead. “The weight thing… He used to take her food, and he’d, like, make animal noises or call her names.
‘I’m going to steal your dessert and I’m going to eat it in front of you while I tell you what a pig you are.
’ That kind of thing. She knew he’d do it, so she poisoned her dessert and waited for him to steal it from her. ”
“Holy shit,” I breathe. “Honestly, that’s kind of badass. Now I kind of wish I could meet her. That’s hardcore.”
Fallon’s laugh doesn’t have any humor. “Something about that night flipped a switch for her. She said she’d spent her entire life afraid, and she’d decided she couldn’t live if he was alive anymore.”
I pull up behind my building. This place is a dump. I don’t like bringing Fallon here, but it’s safer than his place right now.
I pull the key out of the ignition. “Wait,” I say as he goes to open his door. “What if Marina’s brother hadn’t done the thing. Like, what if she’d poisoned her food, and he hadn’t taken it from her that time?”
Fallon looks out into the dark. “Like I said. She’d decided she couldn’t live if he was alive.
She told me that if he hadn’t eaten it, she was going to eat it herself.
Either way, she’d be free of him.” There’s a half breath, and his voice cracks on his last words.
“She’d taken the first bite. Raspberry gelato. Her favorite.”
That’s…that’s some serious shit right there. If this Eric guy’s still alive, I won’t let him terrorize Fallon anymore. I’ll make sure he never hurts anyone again.