Chapter 56
Two Weeks Later
They count thirty cars. Two motorbikes. Fifty bodies.
It takes them five days to drain the lake. The huge basin left in the centre of the town looks like a meteor hit, leaving crushed metal and broken bodies in its wake. But that’s not what happened here.
The county police put up screens and try to shield the worst of it. But the area is too big to contain. People find places to look, forming a sombre cordon around the lake, staring into the giant mass grave.
The FBI believe the oldest cars were dumped in here not long after the town was founded – almost fifty years ago.
But most were dumped later, after the mid-nineties, after Davey and Serena.
They found her car. A yellow VW Beetle. There’s no body, or at least not in the car.
There are plenty of scattered bones in the lake, the bodies dragged out and half eaten by gators. Identifying them all may take time.
All the accidental deaths in Serenity Falls are going to be re-examined. Stella will help. She’s kept records separate to the official ones.
The most recent bodies in the lake have only been there a few weeks. Chris and his family, the skin only just starting to peel from their bones, the bodywork on their car still glinting faintly in the sun.
There’s a smell around the whole town. Fetid, dank, bitter. I know it’s just the smell of the water and sludge from the lake, but I can’t help thinking it smells like death, and resolution.
I survive, obviously. Freya was a poor shot, thank God. I took the bullet in my upper arm. It hurt like hell. I bled a lot. But the doctors patched me up and sent me on my way with stitches and painkillers.
Davey wasn’t quite so lucky. A shot to the gut. He spent a couple of days in hospital, needed a few pints of blood. But thankfully, the bullet missed his major organs. He’ll live too. But both of us will carry the scars, in more ways than one.
Lorraine and Freya were taken away by men in black suits wearing black glasses and driving black sedans. Yeah, they really look just like they do in the movies.
Sadie and I were taken to a small grey room in a nondescript building and interviewed by different men in black suits (sans glasses) for hours.
We told them everything we knew. They listened, made notes, then told us we should forget everything we knew if we wanted to leave the building and get on with our lives.
Turns out neither of us has very good memories.
I signed a lot of forms, giving away my rights and probably my soul, and we were told that we were released from any contracts with Serenity Falls and free to sell our house and move back to the UK once the legalities were finalized.
The men in black suits advised us strongly to do that. And never come back.
Sadie was quiet when they dropped us back at the house. I had expected her to rail against the injustice, truth being subdued, the real story covered up, but I got the feeling that youthful idealism had come bang up against hard, scary reality in that grey room.
It happens to us all. Maybe not in such an extreme way.
But we all learn that life is about compromise.
Principles are great things, but they are not absolutes.
Life will bend them and sometimes crush them.
By the time you reach my age you’re lucky if you’ve managed to hang on to a few slivers.
It’s the best we can do and, ultimately, the best we can do is all we can do.
Turns out Jerry had been suspicious about Serenity Falls for a long time. A lot of what he had told me was true. He’d compromised his own principles for the sake of his wife, for the sake of their life here.
But one thing he hadn’t told me. His wife’s cancer had come back. And it was terminal. Millie only had six months to a year left. When Jerry found out, he’d got back in touch with one of his buddies in the state police, told them what he knew and what he suspected.
That’s when the FBI had got involved. Jerry had been feeding them information for the last few months. Of course, even Jerry didn’t know the full extent of what was going on in Serenity Falls. But still, Sadie and I have a lot to thank him for.
‘Don’t thank me,’ he told me when I called into his office.
‘You saved our lives.’
‘Yeah, and I wish I hadn’t had to. You and Davey and Stella. All of you. You fucked up my plans. If you hadn’t got involved—’ He broke off with an angry sigh.
‘You did the right thing,’ I say.
I don’t add, too late.
‘Yeah. Well, that’s no comfort to Millie. She’s heartbroken. And that’s not what I wanted for her.’
‘What did you want?’
‘I wanted her to die happy. Like she lived her whole life here. I didn’t want her dream to be shattered. And now it is.’
‘It doesn’t change the life she’s had here. The life she’s had here with you. That’s still real.’
‘Is it, though? You know what she asked me last night? “Did you know, Jerry? How could you not know?” I couldn’t answer her, and I saw the disappointment in her eyes. I just wanted a few more months so I wouldn’t have to see that.’
I felt like telling him that maybe he needed to see it. Maybe he should go take another look at Chris and his family, who were hauled out of the lake in their shiny SUV with their bags all packed in the trunk and neat bullet holes in their foreheads. Because they were a liability.
Or maybe he should look at the piles of yellowed bones still to be identified. People who asked too many questions, who didn’t fit in, who weren’t perfect enough. Innocent people left to rot down there.
But I don’t. Because Jerry knows. He has to live with it.
He just didn’t want his wife to die with the knowledge.
I get it. We protect those we love. But we protect ourselves too.
Like Jerry says, we don’t want to see the disappointment in their eyes.
We keep our secrets because we don’t want to lose their love.
It’s why I’ll never be able to tell Sadie about her mum. I suppose it’s also why my mum didn’t tell me about Harold or this place. She didn’t want me to know she’d betrayed Dad; didn’t want me to know that she was the reason he left.
But I also wonder if there was another reason. She knew too much about this place. After all, she worked at the club where Harold and his cronies met. Where, perhaps over whiskies and fat cigars, Harold espoused his plans for Serenity Falls and talked about his arks and the Flood.
The question is what do I do with that knowledge?
Serenity might be finished in many ways: the Hub shut down, the Conservators arrested, but if Harold was telling the truth, the Flood is still coming and it’s only a matter of time before something sweeps the globe like the dark, angry waters of the Old Testament and wipes the slate – the ‘slate’ being us, humanity – clean for a fresh go-around.
I’ve been thinking about that. A lot.
Sadie seems to have been thinking a lot too.
She’s been subdued, which perhaps isn’t so unusual given everything that has happened.
But I would have expected some kind of outburst by now.
Some release of the pressure valve. It obviously doesn’t help that we’re still living in the house in Serenity Falls until the final legal documents come through, which means we’re stuck in a kind of limbo.
I tell myself things will be better when we can get away from this place. Like a lot of things I tell myself, I’m not sure it’s true.
A few nights after the salvage teams haul the last of the cars out of the lake, I’m sitting downstairs, drinking coffee and reading an old paperback, when Sadie mooches into the kitchen.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey?’
She grabs a drink out of the fridge and sits down opposite me at the breakfast bar.
‘How’s it going?’ I ask.
She fiddles with the ring pull on her can. ‘D’you think you should always tell people the truth?’
I put my book down. ‘Whoah, that’s a heavy one. I mean, the answer should be yes.’
‘But?’ She looks at me quizzically.
‘But if telling the truth will hurt them or make their life worse, do they really need to know? Are you just telling them to make yourself feel better?’
‘But what if they should know.’
‘Well, that’s not always your call to make.’
I feel my stomach twisting and turning. Is this about Nat? It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask, when she says: ‘Davey went to see Father Miller today.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Miller knew his mom, and he saved Davey’s life.’
‘I guess.’
‘But?’
She reaches into her pocket and takes out a chunky silver crucifix on a chain.
‘Where did you get that?’ I ask.
‘When I fell in the lake, I told you, I saw Serena’s car.’
‘Well, you can’t be sure it was—’ I break off at the look on her face. ‘Okay, go on.’
‘This was inside it – it got caught around my ankle.’
I look at the crucifix. It’s quite distinctive. ‘Well, they found a few of Serena’s things in her car. I can give it to May. I’m sure she’ll be glad to have it.’
‘It’s not that.’ Her voice is fierce.
‘Then what?’
‘I already went to visit May in the hospital.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘Because you would have tried to stop me.’
‘Well … yes.’
‘I showed her the crucifix. She said it wasn’t Serena’s. It belonged to Milo.’
‘May has dementia, Sadie.’
‘She sounded pretty certain.’
‘So, what’s your point?’
‘Why did he give this to Serena – and when?’
I feel a coldness stir in my bones. ‘Sadie—’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the resemblance?’
I don’t need to ask what she means. Davey and Father Miller. I have, and I’ve wondered about it too. Miller was Serena’s friend. But was he something more?
‘I’m going to talk to Miller,’ she says.
‘No, you’re not. Jesus.’ I try to bite back my frustration. ‘Sadie, we’re a few days away from being able to leave this place. I’m not going to let us get dragged back in.’
‘Davey should know the truth.’
‘Why? The truth isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes it’s black and bitter and it has teeth that will rip your heart out.’
Sadie stares at me, tears in her eyes. ‘Is that why we don’t talk about Mum?’
I take a breath, and it hurts. It hurts bad. Teeth. Sharp teeth.
Then I hold out my hand for the crucifix. ‘I’ll go and see him.’