Chapter 30
It is dark by the time we return to the cabin, and my limbs are throbbing dully with exhaustion.
I all but collapse on the sofa in the brick-red Santa Fe pattern and lie there for a long time while Corrine and Henry stand too close to each other in the kitchen area behind me and exchange words in heated whispers.
“She doesn’t have a choice!” Corrine explodes, and then I hear her heavy jock-girl footsteps come nearer to me. She half circles the coffee table and stands there, appraising me. I’m in the fetal position with my knees tucked into my chest.
“You need to shower.”
I stare up at her with undisguised contempt. Her thin blond hair is shellacked to her skull with sweat. A bald alien, beamed into my bedroom to abduct me for the purposes of their strange science. “That’s your concern at the moment?”
“Yes, because you look like a hostage.” She stares into the kitchen, where I assume Henry still stands. “Both of you do.”
“I am a hostage.”
“Get up, Faye.”
“Fuck you, Corrine.”
Corrine’s eyes bulge in her big bald-looking head. I wonder if anyone had ever said that to her before or if I have the honor of being the first. “Get the fuck up,” she growls, “before I shoot you in the face.”
I do not move. I’ve had it with her telling me what to do.
“You can’t shoot me,” I tell her with a heady rush of fearlessness.
“I can say anything I want to you, and you can’t shoot me.
I can call you a dead-eyed fish. I can tell you that your son is a sweet kid who stands no chance, because he has a mother who displays such obvious disdain for him.
And you have to take it because unlike you, I am a valuable, contributing member of society who has not murdered anyone for money.
” I raise my eyebrows at her tauntingly while Corrine chews up the insides of her mouth and undoubtedly fantasizes about pecking my eyes out of my head, but in the end, she takes it, and this emboldens me.
I am too important to kill. I do have a hand, and now is the time to play it.
I sit up on my own time and adjust my position so that I am longways on the couch and can turn my head between Henry in the kitchen and Corrine fuming on the other side of the coffee table. “Since when did this property pass to you, Henry?”
“Technically,” Henry answers, “it’s not mine yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because PT left it to Henry and Campbell,” Corrine says on the other side of me, “and no one knows Campbell is dead yet.”
I turn back to Corrine, see her licking her lips with abject pleasure that she is privy to all the gory details that I am not.
“Private property within a public park has always been a tricky issue,” she explains.
“So these guys have their little club to protect their little island and prevent the big, bad government from swooping in and taking what is rightfully theirs. There’s this language they’ve had formalized—willing seller, willing buyer.
Sadly”—she sighs, decidedly not sad—“Camps was unwilling.”
I swivel my head, slowly, to look at Henry, understanding beginning to dawn. “You’re selling?”
Henry bows his head. It’s a yes.
“But… why?”
“Faye.” Corrine laughs. “Why does anyone do anything? For money. Retire before thirty-five, buy a third house, hire a third nanny, never have to share a California king with a scummy finance bro again money.”
“This is the largest piece of privately owned land in all of the Adirondacks,” Henry contributes in a much more decent tone. “The Forest Preserve will buy us out and then some.”
“But then the lake won’t be private anymore.”
“Boo-hoo,” Corrine says. “We’ll just have to cry into our golden pillows.”
Henry rubs his shoulder, like it is sore from carrying Sarah, though how much could a skeleton weigh? It occurs to me, then, why we had to do what we did today. “If the lands are public, obviously you can’t keep a body buried here.”
“Do you feel better now?” Corrine says. “Nancy fucking Drew. You figured it out.”
“I’d like to know how you’re going to explain Campbell’s death. I’d like to know what you expect me to say and not say when you let me go. I’m not going to do any of it, but for shits and giggles, tell me.”
Corrine throws her head back on her neck, closes her eyes, and probably counts to ten in her head. “You need to shower,” she says after about four seconds. “We’re already off schedule here.”
“I’m not cooperating until you tell me.”
Corrine groans and opens her eyes. “I am going to sound the alarm tonight, okay?”
“Tonight?” I repeat, incredulously. Outside, the sun has left the clouds smudged like charcoal. It is tonight.
Corrine continues in a put-upon tone, like I am a parent who has asked their teenager to elaborate on their plans for the evening before I will agree to give them the keys to the family vehicle.
“Campbell was supposed to be here a few days to summerize the cabin. I’ve been getting messages and phone calls from him, but two days ago they stopped.
I got worried. Drove up here to check on him.
His car wasn’t in the parking lot, which was strange, but the boat’s there, so I took it to our cabin and poked around.
Okay, clearly he’s been here. The bed is slept in.
There’s food in the kitchen. But he’s not here.
I search the woods, in case he’s out there, injured or ripped to shreds by a bear.
God, wouldn’t that have been convenient?
Anyway. I’m truly baffled as to where he might be, and it’s getting dark, and so I decide to take the boat to the clubhouse to try and catch a signal and call someone.
And there, I come upon a devastating scene.
” Corrine says no more. She does not need to.
It is my handiwork she will discover. Henry never even moved the body.
My stomach roils, picturing Campbell lying there with one eye open and one eye shut while Henry and I carried on the way we did these last few days.
“Meanwhile,” Corrine continues, “back at the colleges, a secondary tragedy is unfolding. Twenty-two-year-old Emma King has overdosed and left a suicide note, confessing to her crime of passion. Campbell tried to break up with her at the lake and she lost it. She didn’t mean to hurt him.
One second that ceremonial rock was on the ground and the next it was in her hands and she does not know how to live with herself after what she’s done.
She threw it in the lake, thinking she would try to cover up her crime—those are your prints taken care of, Faye—but then she couldn’t figure out what to do with the body, and she just went back to the cabin and sort of disassociated for the next twelve hours.
” Corrine clucks tragically. “The police will find Campbell’s car at the train station, CCTV footage will show that Emma was the one to park it there within twelve hours of Campbell’s time of death, that she purchased a ticket for the R-10 local, exiting at the Geneva station and taking an Uber back to the colleges, where she bought some real bad shit to put up her nose with the intent to lay her head down and never wake up. ”
“Your second staged suicide,” I remark. “You should start charging for your services.”
“I basically have,” Corrine agrees with a laugh. “And my brother will be handsomely compensated, of course.”
I stare at her. “Your brother?”
Corrine gazes out the window, at the sky bruised with dusk.
“Right about now, my brother is on his way over there with the merchandise and some sad-sack story about missing her and begging her to give him another chance and an offer to get fucked up on his dime. You met my brother, so you will understand when I say that I have all the faith in the world that he will pull this off.”
What was his name again? Loafers without socks. Wet douche hair. Win. Yes. I too have faith. “And you think I’m going along with this?”
Corrine’s laugh is a harsh one syllable.
“That’s what Henry keeps promising. You have too much to lose to be snarled in scandal, so you’ll just keep your head down and make your movie and go on with your life.
But I am not convinced. You two seem pretty cozy.
I mean, you’re wearing his wife’s jewelry for fuck’s sake, and it is so not your style. ”
My hand flies to the heart at my chest, covering it reflexively.
“What I am saying,” Corrine continues, “is that I feel that we are still lacking… collateral… from you.”
“And my career-suicide post is not collateral enough?”
“While you’re here, yeah. But once you’re off this island, you’ll log in and change your password and we’ll lose the upper hand.
And in this day and age, women can pretty much make a case of anything.
You’re just gonna say you were abducted, you’re just gonna say you were traumatized and acting in self-defense. ”
I was gonna say that, if it came to it. “What is it you think you’re going to make me do?”
Corrine sweeps an arm in Henry’s direction, rather grandly. “Hen? I think it will be far more poetic coming from you.”
I turn back to Henry to find him looking at me with those cold blue eyes, sorry and not sorry, remorseless and full of remorse.
“It needs to look like you came here willingly,” he says.
There is tension at the corners of his mouth.
Not a smile, but an acknowledgment of the absurdity of the situation, that this is how it would end for us. “It needs to look like you love me.”