Chapter 27
Henry must see us coming. He must be standing at the front windows, the same as I did when we first arrived, watching his captor return to him.
Corrine goads me down the dock with the gun at my back and has me unlock the door, and then, standing face-to-face with him, I nearly vomit again.
Henry regards me clinically, almost politely, as though I am no more than a stranger off the street.
He would not want to see me hurt, but if he did, he would also go home and make dinner and think no more about it. I’ve been a fool.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Henry says, but the statement is directed at Corrine.
“Like you can’t handle your shit?” Corrine snots back. She jerks her head. “Let’s go. Might as well get this taken care of since I’m here.”
Henry sighs in the way you do when someone is right but there is no way in hell you’d give them the satisfaction of admitting to it.
“Henry,” I try, though I know it is useless. He steps around me like I am simply in the way.
I sit on the back bench of the boat, knees pulled to my chest, watching as PT’s shoreline nears.
Corrine and Henry are having some kind of hushed argument at the bow of the boat, glancing back at me every so often to make sure I have not thrown myself overboard.
I have eliminated the possibility that they are having an affair.
Their dealings with each other are laced with a familial kind of tension, like siblings fighting over the cost of a care home for a declining parent.
With every spike of my pulse, I nearly say it—Corrine, Campbell is dead.
But I don’t know if she knows. I don’t know if this is a card I should hold close for now.
We get out of the boat, and I walk down the dock sandwiched between Corrine and Henry.
Corrine keeps stopping to check that I am still following, despite Henry bringing up the rear, and I could project all kind of meaning onto this, but I need to keep a cool head.
Still, it seems an important detail—Corrine doesn’t trust Henry.
We bypass the house, go instead to the small shed with a thatched, hobbit-like roof sprouting new spring grass, that shock-green, like vegetables tossed in boiling water.
Henry goes in and comes back out with shovels.
Shovels. Panic squeezes my chest. I stand there and I refuse to move, even when Corrine needles me between my shoulder blades with her index finger.
“No,” I keep saying. “No.” It seems the only word my mouth is willing to form, and then my knees rubberize and I’m sitting on the cool carpet of the woods with my legs straight out in front of me like a dummy whose ventriloquist has removed his hand from my back.
I’m suddenly reminded of horror nights at Universal Studios, one of my favorite things about living in Los Angeles—the unmatched production quality around the holidays.
I’d gotten tickets for the haunted house.
It was a replica of the house from Halloween, wasn’t it?
And around every turn, Michael Myers was waiting, and when my husband and I made it through to the end, he turned to me and he was laughing and he said, Do you realize you just kept screaming the word no? No. I will not die. No. Not yet.
“We’re not going to kill you,” Henry says with far more impatience than reassurance.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Corrine tells him over my head. I sit there, feeling like the child of divorced parents fighting over whose weekend it is with the child they don’t really want. It’s about winning, about ego.
“The two of us should just go,” Henry says. “Look at her. She’s in bad shape.”
“I’m not leaving the little escape artist alone.”
“Then you go and I’ll keep an eye on her.”
“So you two can run off and pin the whole thing on me?” Corrine says with an incredulous laugh.
Pin the whole thing on me. Corrine, glancing back at me and Henry to make sure we were still following her, that we weren’t conspiring behind her back. Corrine doesn’t know where she stands with Henry. She is off-balance. Time to knock her flat. “Campbell is dead,” I say. My ace, on the table.
“What did you say?” she all but gasps.
“Campbell is dead,” I repeat, articulating each appalling syllable.
“Campbell is not dead,” Corrine insists through tight lips.
“Campbell was murdered. By that little slut in polyester pants. The love of my life.” Corrine sniffs.
She pushes out her lower lip, makes it quiver.
“I don’t know how I’ll live without him.
” A knuckle into dry eyes; end scene. “How’d I do?
In your professional opinion, of course. ”
I stare up at her, bested, disgusted. Corrine is wearing navy leggings and a long-sleeve T-shirt from some watering hole in Newport, one of the last “authentic” spots that summer people gatekeep from the tourists so they may get bombed with the locals who water their hydrangeas in peace, and she has thrown a sweatshirt over her shoulders like it is a cashmere cardigan.
Her wispy blond hair is pulled into a low loop at her neck, and as ever, there is not a stitch of makeup on her face, the features of which are young because she is still young, though the overall effect is hard and weathered from so much sun.
The only piece of jewelry she wears is her gold wedding band.
Techincally, she no longer has a husband, and she is planning on blaming the slut in polyester pants, who must be Emma, and now I’m thinking about what Henry said, about the CCTV footage, about how no one could know we were in Albany, and I’m realizing that when the police go to check it, they will see Emma driving a dead man’s car, and that this has somehow been the plan all along.
I’m realizing the depravity that the two of them are capable of, and my stomach clenches my organs like a hostage negotiation—give me something to eat and I’ll release your kidney.
“We’ll get you a menthol tear stick,” I tell Corrine.
She rolls her eyes. “Good one, Faye.” She points the pistol at my scalp. “Now get the fuck up.”
Henry offers me his hand, but I slap it away. I get up fast. Too fast. My vision craters, and a small part of me is pleased when the spots multiply instead of clearing. Fainting will slow them down, and it will certainly piss off Corrine. My eyes flip into the back of my head, seeking the dark.