Chapter 68
Now
the day before the murders
iris
Kate Walker is sitting outside my sister’s house in her car, parked in her usual spot.
I’ve rarely come to this part of town in the last fifteen months, but everyone knows about Kate’s obsessive vigil.
We accept her. Just as we accept everyone who’s been damaged or destroyed in this town by the accident.
She doesn’t acknowledge me as I walk past her.
She blames me for Maggie’s suicide almost as much as she does Amy.
Kate knows Ashley Lincoln is the one who bullied her daughter to death; but Ashley is only a young girl, pretty and vulnerable, and until twelve days ago, she was in a coma. It’s us Kate holds responsible.
She’s right: we knew about the bullying, and we didn’t stop it.
Maggie’s note laid bare our failings. The online taunting, the fat-shaming, the disgusting deepfake pornographic photographs that seem to have been the final straw for a deeply distressed girl.
Amy knew about the pictures, of course, but Maggie had begged my sister not to contact the police for fear of escalating the bullying, and even I can’t blame Amy for not knowing the right thing to do.
Just as I can’t blame Kate for lashing out at her oldest and dearest friend because her anger has nowhere else to go.
Grief has brought out the worst in all of us.
My sister doesn’t answer her doorbell, so I bang on the window. She’s got to be here; Al’s Burgers doesn’t open until eleven during the week, and Amy has nowhere else to go.
But it’s my mother who opens the door.
‘She’s not in,’ she says.
I push past her, checking for myself. ‘Where is she?’
‘State Police barracks,’ Mom says. ‘Reporting Nicky as a missing person.’
‘He’s not missing,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t want to come back.’
‘Know that for a fact, do you?’
My mother hobbles to her worn armchair in front of the muted television. She’s not even seventy yet, but she could easily be a decade older. A lifetime of bitterness and spite soured and aged her long before tragedy shattered our family.
‘You robbed me of my grandson,’ she says. ‘Amy told me what you did. The lake took Finn, but it’s you who took Nicky from me.’
‘Amy took Finn,’ I say. ‘She knew he was trapped with those kids, Mom. She saw he was behind that door, and she didn’t tell me!’
‘And you saw Nicky on the beach, and didn’t tell her.’
‘It’s hardly the same!’
‘You left a traumatised child by the lake, and didn’t tell his parents he was alive,’ my mother says.
She rubs her palms back and forth on the arms of her chair, tense and agitated.
‘You didn’t tell anyone. What d’you think happened to that boy, Iris?
You think he just hitched his way to a brand-new life in California? You think he’s surfing in Malibu?’
I flinch. I’ll never stop feeling guilty about Nicky.
I should have told my sister he was alive, of course I should have told her; but back then my grief and anger had driven me half out of my mind.
By the time I realised Nicky wasn’t coming back, everything had escalated out of control and I didn’t know how to put it right.
So I told myself he’d made his own decision, that he’d come home when – and if – he wanted to; I refused to let myself even consider that maybe he no longer had a choice.
Because if I stopped to think about it, there was no good ending to his story.
‘He’ll be dead in a ditch somewhere,’ Mom says. ‘Or in some squat, shooting God knows what into his veins—’
‘What d’you want from me, Mom?’ I say, more disturbed by the image she conjures than I can bear to admit. ‘What d’you want me to say?’
‘You’re sisters. What’s wrong with you? Tearing each other to pieces like this. It’s not the way I raised you—’
‘It’s exactly the way you raised us,’ I exclaim. ‘You’ve pitted us against each other from the moment I was born. We loved each other despite you, not because of you!’
‘Don’t blame me for your mistakes,’ my mother says.
‘We’re your mistake,’ I say. ‘We are! What happened to this family, it’s down to you. You sowed the seeds, Mom. It’s like you wanted us to hate each other. The way you treated her! She must have wished I’d never been born!’
My mother picks at an egg stain on her skirt. ‘Your sister was a difficult child to love.’
‘You know that’s not true. I was the difficult one.’
‘Why should you care? Seems to me if anyone’s upset, it should be your sister.’
‘What did she do?’ I say. ‘What on earth did she do to you to make you hate her so much?’
My mother’s lips tighten. ‘We just didn’t get on, that’s all.’
‘You never liked her, even when she was a baby. Dad said you wouldn’t feed her when she was born; he had to do it. You never picked her up unless he made you.’
‘You’re nice and quick to judge my parenting, aren’t you?’ Mom says. ‘Your sister raised your son for you for a year.’
‘I was ill,’ I say.
‘Your sister’s the reason I had to stay in this country,’ my mother says. ‘I tied myself to a man I didn’t love because of her. I’d never have got diabetes if it wasn’t for her.’
She’s repeated her complaints so many times it’s become part of our family narrative, but Dad would’ve followed her barefoot across the Sahara if she’d asked him to, never mind back to England.
‘Bullshit,’ I say. ‘Try again.’
‘That girl ruined my life!’
‘How? She was a baby! What did she do that was so terrible?’
‘She took Colt from me,’ she spits out.
I’m confused. ‘What’re you talking about?’
‘I loved that man from the moment I met him,’ Mom says, the words suddenly tumbling out, as if she can’t keep her secret a moment longer.
‘I loved the very bones of him. But he had a wife, and I was three months pregnant with your sister when we met. I was going to get rid of it, but the only way I could stay in America and be near Colt was to marry Bob Gray. I thought, once I had the baby, I could get him to fall in love with me. I’d leave Bob and the stupid baby and he’d leave his wife and we could be together. ’
My mother is smiling, lost in her ugly fantasy.
‘He couldn’t keep his hands off me then,’ she says fondly.
‘Couldn’t get enough of me. He was always touching me, in the car, under the table in a restaurant.
’ Her expression suddenly sours. ‘And then the baby came along. Amy. I knew it was all over. He could never see me as a woman again. I was a wife. A mother. We kept on seeing each other, but it was never the same. Fizzled out, in the end. He’s always been very good to me, though. Very good to this family.’
Suddenly I can’t bear to be in this airless, unhappy room a moment longer. I stumble outside, sick to my stomach.
A firestorm of hatred and rage ignites within me: fury at Colt, at Jesse, at my mother, at the sister who watched my son drown to save her own.
I’m done with keeping their secrets.
Kate Walker is still sitting in her car, watching Amy’s house, waiting for her to come home, a constant, silent reproach.
I cross the road and thump on her window. When she realises I’m not going away, she lowers it an inch.
‘Amy knew,’ I say. ‘She knew those children were trapped in that corridor, and she locked the door and left them to die.’