46. Crow #2
And in the end I had the finishing blow.
Here we are again. A pivotal moment, and I am the one hesitating.
Starling has led the charge this time, but Cuckoo and even Wren have picked up her cause, pushing our fabricated story so that we come out of this unscathed.
We are not the heroes of a story I would write, honorable and true at the end.
Instead, we are real and scared and scrambling, but we are using our best asset, the one we treasure so greatly: our intelligence.
We were the smart girls at school, and we are mirroring that now.
It is my turn. If we are not all on the same side, this will quickly fall apart.
All for one and one for all.
They have done me a kindness. This part of the story, at least, is true.
“Hugo killed another one of his partners,” I tell Patricia, and then I take a deep breath before I recount what happened to the other missing girl, the one who has been long forgotten and will never be found either.
Patricia listens in upset silence, tears flowing.
None of us are crying. Have we become that immune to all of this?
We have become monsters. Liars.
It’s what Goldie would have wanted, I am sure one of us will say later. Our calling card. Our faithful backup to everything we do.
But Goldie isn’t here, and I’m not sure we can trust that anymore. She hasn’t been here for years, and we need to stop pretending.
“So Cassandra helped cover up that poor girl’s death,” Patricia whispers when I am finished. She looks down at Cassandra’s body, which seems so small and vulnerable now. “And she almost was going to kill you.”
“It’s too awful to imagine,” Starling says easily.
Who does something like that?
“I have to apologize to you all,” Patricia says.
“Apologize to us?” Cuckoo shakes her head. This is too far even for her. “You don’t have to do that. What do you mean?”
“I did send the message. The one pretending to be Goldie. It was me.”
“What?” Cuckoo says. She is as stunned as I am. “You sent it?”
We suspected her, and we were right. She followed Wren that day to Cassandra Fletcher’s house, and the two of us confronted her, and we went away truly believing she was heartbroken with grief but not involved.
But now that I think back over the conversation we had in Goldie’s flat, the more I remember how clever Patricia was, how much she seemed to cotton on to things we were saying.
She was suspicious of us. Correct to be.
We won her over, in the end. Her grief, as it often does in people, got the better of her. She let her guard down.
“I had your numbers from her old phone,” she says.
“What I said before, it was all true. I just didn’t want to tell you about the message.
I wanted to see if it would trip you up in any way.
I wanted to prompt you into revealing where she was.
I wanted so bad for her to have run away to London. I wanted her to be alive so much.”
Maybe you imagined it and I ran away to London after all.
The message rings loud and clear in my head, and now it seems almost like a text Patricia wanted to send to herself.
All of this, and it was Patricia. Cassandra Fletcher told the truth in one regard: She really wasn’t the person who sent us that message.
“It’s okay,” Starling murmurs. “That doesn’t matter now.”
“I knew,” Patricia says, “when Goldie left that teddy bear behind . . . I knew in my heart something was wrong. That there was more to it. I should have listened to myself.”
“It’s okay,” Starling says again. “It’s okay.”
Is it? I think this is as far from okay as one can get, and we would know.
“What should we do about Cassandra?” Wren whispers.
In a mad moment I think Patricia will hold out her pinkie finger, make us swear not to tell a soul, that we will bury her in the grounds just as we did Goldie.
But of course that does not happen.
Patricia clasps her hands together. “I will call the police and confess. Tell the police everything you told me, about Hugo and Cassandra and that poor girl. The world is finally going to know the truth.”
“But what about you?” Cuckoo says.
“It’s an atonement,” Patricia says, “for how I treated my niece.”
“Patricia . . .”
“I should have been better. I could have been better.” Her voice is raspy, desperate. “I’m going to have to carry that forever. I might as well do it in prison.”
“It’s okay,” I say, because what else can I offer her?
She believes our story. She trusts us, and that spikes my heart.
“It’s not. I did try, sometimes.” She is soft now.
“One birthday I got her some new shoes. I’d saved for them, and I’d got it wrong.
She’d pointed them out in a magazine, and I thought that meant she liked them, but she’d hated them.
She’d hated them, and she thought I did that on purpose.
And then I got mad at her for being ungrateful. ”
“We can tell the police it was an accident with Cassandra,” I whisper.
“No.” She shakes her head. “You can’t change my mind here. I am glad, in a way, I have been able to avenge her.”
The others exchange a glance, and when they look at me, I know what they’re thinking. They’re appalled, they’re horrified, they’re nauseous—and they’re wondering if this is really happening. If we are going to get away with it.
What have we done? What are we doing?
We are getting away with it all.
Again.