Chapter 39
BERNIE
Bernie peered out in the darkness at Imogen and Mark’s bedroom window, hoping to see a flash of movement, but there were no lights on in their room.
She hadn’t caught a glimpse of anyone in days and she was getting curious.
Yesterday, she’d gone over around midday and knocked on the front door.
When no one answered, she tried the door code, only to find that it had been changed.
She took the blinking red light as a personal affront.
The stories about the victims of the Inherit the Future Fund were plastered all over the news—sad stories of college funds, retirement savings, and first-home nest eggs gone up in smoke.
Bernie liked to read the comments on digital articles to learn how other people processed news (and so that she could share socially acceptable opinions at work).
The victims had garnered a lot of online sympathy, which was interesting, because Bernie felt mostly contempt.
If Imogen had stolen her money, she certainly wouldn’t be whining about it to a newspaper; it looked weak.
Plus, ever since she was young, she’d had her own way of dealing with people who crossed her.
About a year ago, Imogen had raised the possibility of Bernie investing with the ITFF.
Bernie remembered how casually Imogen had laid it out: the lump-sum investment, the high rate of return, the long list of satisfied clients.
Bernie replied that she’d think about it, and told Imogen to send her a package to run by her accountant (of course, she had no intention of following up—she didn’t need to become further enmeshed with her neighbour, or to have her finances complicate her social life).
But Bernie’s answer seemed to spook Imogen, who immediately backtracked, telling her that this was all a preliminary discussion, and that a spot hadn’t yet opened up in the fund.
Imogen never brought it up with her again.
Bernie plucked the blue toy car from her treasure bowl and ran it along the windowsill as she gazed at Imogen’s house.
The car had been her little brother’s favourite toy.
He was meant to be buried with it; at the visitation, her father had tucked it into the breast pocket of the first and only suit Rusty would ever wear.
When it was Bernie’s turn to approach the coffin, she looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching her, then snatched the car and secreted it away in her heart-shaped plastic purse.
The black velvet dress she wore to Rusty’s funeral had an itchy lace collar and her shoes pinched her toes, but Bernie didn’t have anyone to tell these things to because nobody paid any attention to her.
Her mother spent the entire day hunched over and crying or moaning with her eyes closed.
She wouldn’t open them to look at Bernie that morning, even though Bernie tried to entertain her by doing her very best cartwheels in the living room.
Bernie tried again to get her mother’s attention at the funeral home—there was a vending machine in the basement and Bernie wanted change for an Orange Crush—but her father shooed her away when she tugged on her mother’s sleeve.
That night, Bernie would have gone to bed hungry if she hadn’t stuffed her plastic heart purse full of cookies from the reception.
She thought it was very strange that no one had come to tell her to get ready for bed, but she didn’t particularly mind because she was enjoying eating Oreos while playing with her Barbies on the floor.
Rusty always wanted to play Barbies with her, but he wasn’t any good at following her directions and sometimes he tried to stick their little shoes up his nose.
She was happy he wasn’t here now to mess up her game.
Bernie knew that something was wrong the next morning—additionally wrong, that was, to her little brother being dead—when she woke up with a half-eaten Oreo crumbling in one sticky hand.
No one had come to check on her last night.
She took off her dress and changed into her favourite green sweatsuit, teeth still fuzzy from the night before.
Her parents were supposed to make sure she got into her pajamas, washed her face, and brushed her teeth every night, and when she did it without complaining, she got a sticker on the calendar in her room.
She felt that it was unfair she’d missed her chance to earn a sticker last night.
There were voices coming from the kitchen, so Bernie paused on the stairs because she didn’t know who was talking.
Her parents were there, but there was also an unfamiliar voice.
“That’s right, we’ll do an initial home-play session here—I’d like to observe her in her habitual environment—before starting any of the clinical assessments. ”
“This isn’t going to do any good,” said Bernie’s mother, through tears. “She’s bad, Pat. I told you, I want the priest to come.”
“We’ll do both.” All the life had been sucked out of Bernie’s father’s voice; he sounded flat as a crumpled juice box. “The priest can come tomorrow. Today, we do it my way.”
That’s how Bernie ended up getting her first psychological evaluation.
They never could prove that she’d meant to do it.
She wasn’t so stupid, even at seven, to admit to anything.
But her parents knew. Even before the diagnosis, before the slew of tests and therapy the psychiatrist prescribed for Bernie, before science provided a name for what was wrong with her, they knew.
Her mother, especially, never believed that it had been an accident, and Bernie hated her mother for not giving her the benefit of the doubt.
They never would have treated Rusty like this, Bernie was sure of it.
They would have believed him if he’d told them he was only showing her how to climb like SpiderMan and that he’d specifically told her not to jump off the roof.
That summer, Bernie’s parents sent her to a special camp for other children like her.
She didn’t know that it was a special camp at first, as her parents had told her she was going away to learn to swim and do crafts and play nicely, but she figured it out pretty quickly.
The mandatory group sessions were a pretty big giveaway, as were the attitudes of the other children.
Normally, Bernie would have had no trouble manipulating the other girls and boys, but her fellow campers were different.
Her parents were relieved when she came home better behaved, and she let them believe that camp had fixed her.
Bernie gently placed the blue toy car back into the treasure bowl and gave up on watching the window.
She flopped back into her easy chair and pulled out her phone to see if there had been any more updates in the neighbourhood Facebook group—the one she’d never paid much attention to before now.
Since the raid on Imogen’s house, the chat had gotten much more exciting; what was normally gripes about bins left too long on the sidewalk after garbage pickup was now gossipy tidbits about Imogen and the ITFF.
Bernie was surprised to see how many of her neighbours had invested with Imogen, the large sums of money they’d entrusted to the ITFF.
Did nobody do the bare minimum of due diligence?
Bernie snorted, self-satisfied, as she dipped her hand back into the treasure bowl.
She fingered Harry’s wedding band, then landed on the purple vibrator she’d liberated from Imogen’s bedroom several months earlier.
The sex toy gave her pause, and she thought back to the other items she’d spotted in the cluttered drawer. Bernie squinted out the window at Imogen’s house—which remained stubbornly dark—and wondered whether the investigators knew about the passport.