Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
Early morning.
No sleep.
A haunted, hollow feeling in my stomach that comes from reading and rereading the last pages of Daisy’s diary until they’re all but memorized.
Now I carry them into the parlor, where I’ve gathered Ronan and Violet.
I fill them in on finding the missing pages stuffed into the wall—skipping the part about kicking the shit out of the baseboard because I was furious at them both.
I still am. They are the last people I want to be talking to right now.
But my discovery needs to be shared. I don’t want the responsibility of being the only person who knows.
“Daisy did it,” I finally say, tossing the ragged and yellow pages onto the table. “She killed all of them.”
Violet and Ronan read the lost diary entries as breathlessly as I did. If they’re anything like me, their hearts are beating so hard they rattle their rib cages. The truth is powerful like that. And the truth about Daisy has shaken me to my core.
Part of that, I think, is due to Ronan’s script, which had to take liberties beyond where the incomplete diary left off. The screenplay ends with Mrs. Semple possessed by the Darkness and Daisy killing her in self-defense by shoving her off the cliff behind the main house.
That, to me, seemed more likely than Daisy being the woman possessed. By madness. By trauma. By the aftershocks of abuse. Ronan likewise seems to have trouble wrapping his head around it.
“So Daisy was a psychopath?” he says after reading the pages.
“She was damaged,” Violet says. “None of this was her fault.”
Ronan coughs. “She murdered five people.”
“She didn’t know what she was doing! And no wonder, considering what her bastard father did to her.”
Their differing reactions aren’t surprising, considering their pasts. But there shouldn’t be a debate. Daisy suffered horribly, resulting in some kind of psychotic fugue state in which she reenacted the murder of her father again and again. As a result, innocent people died.
Including, I assume, Daisy herself.
“She committed suicide,” I say.
“You really think so?” Ronan says, and I wonder if he’s thinking about Elise right now. If he ever thinks about her. Violet watches me watch him, biting the inside of her cheek, trying to decipher whose side I’m on.
I still don’t know.
My own, I guess.
“I think so,” I say. “That stuff about heading to the light suggests that’s what she intended to do.”
“Then what happened to her? Why wasn’t her body found when they searched the island?”
Likely because Daisy leapt from the cliff or weighed herself down with rocks and waded into the lake. She still might be there, buried in the depths for the past hundred years.
It is, in many ways, a disappointing resolution. The diary’s hero turned out to be its villain, albeit an unwitting one. There were no ghosts, no evil entities, no women vanishing into thin air. Just a disturbed young woman and a tragic ending for all involved.
“Or maybe she surrendered herself to Azra,” Violet says with a desperate edge to her voice.
Hearing it, I finally realize how much these missing pages nuke her plan.
Before, there was just enough unknown to possibly pull it off.
Now that we have more answers, Ronan is less likely to believe an evil force is stalking New Avalon, pushing him to confess his sins.
His doubt is obvious as he picks up the last page and gives it another read. “But Azra didn’t exist. It was all in her head.”
“We don’t know that for sure.” Violet snatches the page from his hand, leaving the table dusted with flakes of dried paper.
“The diary doesn’t specifically say if Azra was a figment of her imagination or something more.
I think it was both. Daisy’s shattered psyche falling prey to something malevolent lurking on this island.
In fact, she even uses the word in her diary, ‘possession.’ In my mind, it’s absolutely possible that she was possessed by Azra when she killed the others. ”
“You still seriously think that?” Ronan says.
“How else can you explain what’s been happening this week?
Nothing in these pages changes our situation.
That was the past. This is the present. Susie, Heather, and Julianne are still gone.
And we don’t know how or why or who could be next.
We need to deal with that before another one of us disappears, possibly for good. ”
Ronan shifts in his chair, as if at least part of him still believes in the fictional haunting Violet and the others have created. I’d think him a fool if I hadn’t just believed it myself.
“It’s fine if you don’t believe it,” Violet says, reminding me how great of an actress she really is.
There she is, pretending she doesn’t hate Ronan, acting like he didn’t destroy Elise’s life, all so she can gently coax him into a situation that will likely end his career.
“But I do. I’m scared, Ronan. And if a séance, no matter how silly you think it is, might end this, then we need to try. ”
“Fine,” Ronan says with a defeated sigh. “We’ll do it.”
Violet looks my way, defiant. Her plan is still on track. All that remains to be seen is if I’ll agree to be a part of it.
“I’m going to make myself some breakfast and prepare for tonight,” she says. “Marin, would you like to join me?”
Ronan signals for me to wait. “I need to talk to you alone for a minute first.”
Violet leaves. I stay, even though being alone with him prompts a rising tide of dread. Especially when he says, “Hey, about last night. I’m—”
“It’s fine,” I say, cutting him off. I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. Not ever. I want to pretend it didn’t happen.
Ronan’s face brightens in surprise. “You sure?”
“Of course.”
“And you’re not mad at me for being, you know, inappropriate?”
Of course I’m mad, not to mention repulsed. The dread keeps rising—a numbness that’s moved past my waist and now shoots up my arms, making my hands shake. “Not at all.”
“And you’re not going to tell anyone, right?” Ronan says, each subsequent word descending lower into a whisper.
I wonder if he talked this way to other women, including the ones he’d fucked and filmed without their consent before dumping them. The thought makes my hands tremble even more. I hide them behind my back.
“I’m an unknown actress, Ronan. Who am I going to tell? And who would believe me if I did? As far as I’m concerned, we’re good. I’d honestly forgotten about it until you brought it up.”
Ronan lets out another sigh, punctuating it with an exaggerated wipe of his brow. “Thank you. I’m glad we could clear the air.”
I turn to leave, relieved to be done with the conversation. But when I reach the door, Ronan utters one last thing before I’m gone.
“But if you ever change your mind,” he says to my back, “you know where to find me.”
The same icy shock I felt last night returns, only worse than before.
Because the fact that Ronan won’t quit tells me he’s learned nothing from Elise’s death.
He’s still preying on actresses, angling for another conquest. The reason why eludes me.
Maybe it’s a power thing. More likely he’s just another in a long line of pathetic, toxic men who’ve been prowling the movie industry since it began.
Either way, it’s clear he’s not going to stop on his own.
Someone else needs to step up and do it.
I keep moving, again pretending I didn’t hear Ronan. Not because I’m worried about him firing me from the movie.
I do it because I know he won’t be directing it.
Rattled but resolute, I head to the kitchen. There, I stay just long enough to whisper two words to Violet.
“I’m in.”