Chapter 18
I half wake under a warm blanket, a fire smacking the metal screen.
Some of my limbs are asleep and some bunched up tight.
My eyelids drop again, and I go to turn over, get comfortable, and this is when I wake-wake with a violent jolt.
I am tied to the spindle-back chair in Henry’s cabin, and Henry is sitting across from me on the couch, brow furrowed indeterminately, his dark-blond hair ivied around his ears the way it would when we would stop for breakfast after the gym.
Our eyes meet, and something in the fire combusts with the energy of a gunshot.
I retrieve my voice, buried somewhere craggy and deep. “How long have I been out?”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Henry replies, his eyes drifting over me like I am a live specimen, something to be examined and tested with cruelty, if necessary. “You took a pretty nasty fall.”
“I forget. Is it medically advised to tie someone up after a potential spinal-cord injury?”
“You should not have run,” Henry says simply.
I lean forward as far as my restraints will allow. “What the fuck is going on?”
“You killed your good buddy Campbell, for one.”
I glare at Henry, waiting for him to take it back. I wait a long time.
“He’s dead?” I say in a dull voice.
“Very dead.”
I blink off some tears, then nod stoically. Okay, then. Well. I knew that. Didn’t I? “He was going to kill me.” I look to Henry for reassurance. Find none. “I had to do it,” I say, stressing the impossibility of my predicament.
“Didn’t stop you from enjoying it.”
“You think I liked killing Campbell?”
Henry brushes that lush lower lip with his thumb. “I know what you look like when you enjoy something, Faye.”
I refuse to flinch. I refuse to, even though arousal is butchering my middle. Why—why—am I like this? “Before I had to kill Campbell, he made me sign in to my email.”
It takes Henry several seconds to remember to blink.
“He deleted a message from PT. How come?”
Henry settles back into the couch, cocky, comfortable, those tree-trunk thighs spread obnoxiously wide. “If you have to ask,” he says, bouncing a knee, “I’m assuming you have not yet read Emma King’s script? Poor thing poured her blood, sweat, and tears into that, you know.”
“Hadn’t even opened the attachment.”
“You are a very important woman,” Henry says viciously.
“That has nothing to do with it.”
Henry laughs because I don’t deny it.
“I am overwhelmed easily. I shut down. It’s depression. It’s how I was raised.”
“How were you raised exactly?”
“To focus on one thing and be good at it. Everything else falls by the wayside.”
“Not your looks,” Henry says with sudden despair. “You stay on top of that shit.”
I glance at myself in the reflection of the window.
I should look like hell, after these last few days.
“The day of the funeral,” I say. “When Emma got me alone, said that PT canceled his classes the day before he died, that he had Band-Aids all over his hands, that he emailed her to come over first thing that morning. She was telling the truth.”
Henry makes a circular motion with his finger, near his ear. Keep going.
“Whatever she wrote, you guys didn’t want me to read.”
“Close, Faye. So close.”
My mind passes the needle through the loop, completing the stitch. “Something you didn’t want PT to read either.”
Henry’s face turns somber, giving me my answer.
“What could this girl possibly have written that would make PT distressed enough to have a heart attack? That has culminated in this?” I push my shins against whatever he has used to confine me to this chair, something rough and bristled that infuriates my skin.
Dock lines, I realize, and he has stripped off my sodden clothes, leaving me in nothing but a flimsy old button-down with fraying lapels.
He has put warm, clean socks on my feet and because I am bound to my knees, my thighs are spread at a porny angle.
Henry has covered my lap with a blanket, a laughable attempt at a gentleman’s gesture, then sat here and waited me out.
Henry jiggles one wide-angled knee anxiously, considering how to answer. “Something bad.”
“How bad?”
“Oh.” Henry lifts a hand. How to possibly put this?
“Goodbye, Campbell’s casual political aspirations bad.
Bye, Wee Burn Country Club membership, Brunswick enrollment for the brats, the annual chartered couples’ trip in the Bermudas.
” Henry pauses. “That sort of stuff doesn’t do it for me, but goodbye to everything that does.
” His voice takes on a wistful note that sounds genuine, but I am in no position to trust anything I hear.
“What did you guys do?”
Henry clears his throat, scratches off a speck of mud on his thigh with a fingernail.
“First, I need you to know it was an accident. And I have lived with the pain and guilt of it every single day since then. And sometimes I wonder…” He trails off, scrunches up his face like whatever he is wondering is too painful to imagine.
“Nah. There’s no use, and it wouldn’t absolve me of anything anyway.
” He studies the pale spot he’s left on his pants.
Along with the dirt, he scratched off some of the khaki color too.
“Sarah did not drown herself in Seneca Lake.”
It takes me a second to process this utterly explosive statement. “How do you know that?” I ask tremulously.
Henry closes his eyes and shakes his head. Shakes, shakes, shakes his head.
“Oh my God,” I hear myself say. “Henry. Oh my God.”
Henry heaves an agonized sigh. Opens his eyes.
Stares unblinking at the fire. “We were driving. I was driving. It was five in the morning? I don’t know.
We were going home. Or I was trying to. But Campbell wanted to go somewhere else.
He wanted me to drop him and he wanted my coke and I told him no, you know, you need to fucking call it.
We both did. And he started reaching, like, into my pockets.
Trying to find my cigarettes, my shit. And I was pushing him off me and I didn’t see her.
Obviously,” he groans, lightly, “I didn’t see her.
But that was what time the crew team met for practice, and Sarah always walked. ”
I wish I had my hands. I wish I could cover my mouth.
“She was gone. You know. No question. But we could see. In my headlights. We could see that along one side of my car, the paint was, like, sheared off, and she was covered in it. It was in her hair, under her fingernails. That fucking yellow paint. Everyone knew I drove that car.” Henry lifts his foot to the edge of the coffee table.
Pushes it away, then hooks his toes under to pull it back.
He can’t quite make it fit in the grooves of the rug and he leans forward and tries to line everything up with his hands, then makes a tossing motion, like throwing something out in the trash.
What’s the point? It will never look as it was again.
“I wanted to call the police,” he continues, a defensive edge to his voice, like I have asked why he did not immediately get Sarah help, “but Campbell knocked the phone out of my hand. He said she was dead. It wasn’t like there was anything we could do at this point, why ruin our lives on top of it?
I was…” He looks at me, his dark eyes utterly haunted.
“I couldn’t breathe, Faye. I was a mess.
I just clung to Campbell, who kept promising me everything would be okay.
We put her in my car and then he said let’s think about this.
PT was in LA for the week. We had a key to the house.
We knew she wanted a baby and it wasn’t happening.
There was a fucking negative test in the trash like it was ordained by God.
Campbell wrote something short and sweet on her computer and we pushed her scull into the water.
Then we started driving for the lake. This area, it’s so vast, but it’s someone’s, you know?
The land either belongs to the government or some off-gridder who will shoot you if he finds you trespassing.
You can’t leave a dead body in the lake—it will float.
I mean, that’s why they searched for her.
Because bodies float. It doesn’t always mean you find them, but we couldn’t take the risk.
It was safer—it was smarter—to bury her on our land.
But you will never, ever believe what happened when we got here.
” He lets out a brittle-sounding laugh. “The lake was frozen, but only on our side. It’s not like it had never happened before, our side is slightly more elevated, but not since our parents were kids.
” Henry stares hard at his hands a moment, turns them over in his lap, and frowns at them, like he is looking at an imposter’s hands.
“We weren’t trying to be cruel, burying her on PT’s land.
And I chose a nice spot. The little tear-dropped clearing by the Dorothy Parker tree.
I mean, it’s eleven thousand acres, he was never going to find her. He never should have found her.”
I’m aware of my breathing suddenly. Short, hot breaths, in and out, like I’ve just been sick over the toilet.
“A week ago,” Henry says. “Two weeks ago? Who fucking knows anymore. PT called. He needed to speak to me, in person.” Henry runs his hands down his face, pulls at the skin under his eyes so that I can see the pink, moist membrane underneath.
“I thought he was going to tell me he was diagnosed with cancer or something.”
When Henry arrived, he found Campbell already there.
PT had bandages all over his hands. His skin had a gray tint to it.
He told them to sit at the dining room table and he turned his laptop around and there it was, the title page.
The Accident by Emma King. He made them read the story of what they did to Sarah, and he watched them with his small, kind eyes, his breathing growing ever more shallow.