“What was it like that night?”
Langdon was standing over me. He, too, was wearing very sensible shoes, those all-terrain Merrells-the perfect choice for hiking, climbing, and digging graves. Whose grave was it that he was digging? I wondered. Mine?
“It was Florida,” I answered. “So it was warm and humid. And it was more of a swamp.”
“But tonight is the night, right? Seven years ago tonight?” There was an unpleasant eagerness in his voice.
“Yes,” I said. I had forgotten. I didn’t mark the calendar with my personal tragedies anymore. I thought I was moving beyond it all, in the ways that you can. When you begin to heal, you can tell because you start living your life again. You start living in the present moment, in the here and now. You look toward the future. You’re not always looking back, wishing, always wishing, that things had been different.
“Why did you let her touch you?” he asked.
I dared to look up at him, and I swear, he didn’t even seem like the same person I knew. The angry, hateful expression on his face so transformed him that he looked like a ghoul. I wondered, would there be a stop on the Haunted Hollows tour for this site in a few years?
“Why do you care?” I asked.
I tried to push myself up, but he pushed me back down with his foot. It didn’t take much; the whole universe was wobbly. I could feel something in my pocket, something hard pressing against my hip. It was the Mace; I finally remembered that I was carrying it. I couldn’t have picked a better day. Too bad I couldn’t get to it with my hands bound.
“What does it have to do with you?” I said.
There was some kind of battle taking place on his face then-a battle between despair and rage. I realized then that he always knew who I was, what I was. I thought about Beck’s gossipy little dig: I heard he has a boyfriend in the city. Maybe there had been some kind of weird undercurrent between us. But Beck showed me something about myself that I hadn’t really understood. I’d been so wrapped up, so repressed in that way, I didn’t know what the hell I wanted. Now I did. I wanted Beck.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Where is she, Langdon? Did you hurt her?”
An ugly smile broke across his face and he walked away from me. I pushed myself up to sitting with my elbows, despite the binding around my wrists. I started trying to rub them free. And that’s when I saw Beck lying in a fetal position near the grave he’d dug. She was pale, and bound, just as I was. She was wearing what she’d been wearing the night I left her. I’d done this to her. It was my fault.
“Beck!” I yelled, but she was still, too still.
He put his foot on her shoulder. And I saw her move, I thought. Did she shift? Did she give a weak, frightened moan? He gave her a hard push and she rolled into the hole in the earth, landing with an ugly thud.
I need you to believe that I didn’t kill her, my father said in the car on the way home. I need you to understand that.
I believe you, I said. Even though I didn’t believe him at all. I mean, what are you going to say? And a numbness settled over me. I was comfortably sleepy.
I’m doing this for you, okay?
Okay.
Son, are you all right?
I’m fine.
Dr. Cooper and I have been over and over this conversation, how wrong the whole thing was, how manipulative and insane.
Now, this is how we’re going to handle it. We might have been talking about a particularly challenging school project. And he went on to tell me how tomorrow-after he cleaned up-he was going to report her missing. All I had to do was say that the last time I saw her was in the morning before I left for school that day. That I came home to an empty house, and assumed that she was working. And he said other stuff, too, but I don’t really remember what he wanted me to say to the police. Still, it was a fairly extensive coaching session on how to act and what not to say. Use as few words as possible when talking to them. Don’t answer any questions they haven’t asked. Don’t rush to fill silences.
I do remember when the police came the next morning, that detective gave me one look and knew. Later she would tell me that I was vibrating, giving off a terrified and grief-stricken energy that she picked up on right away.
But the question remains. Did my father kill her? The truth is that I just don’t know. I know they hated each other and that they stayed together just because of me. I know that he was having an affair-another woman, another child, another life that was better than the one he had with us. This information came out early in the list of things that damned him with me and everyone else. Beyond that: the police had visited our various homes several times, the neighbors having called to complain about raised voices and the sounds of violence. My father had been to a divorce attorney who would testify that he reacted badly when he learned how much a divorce was going to cut into his personal fortune. It was a lengthy and ugly list of damning activities. But there was no physical evidence, nothing that placed my father on the landing, nothing to show that he had pushed her. But how else might she have fallen? A thousand freak ways, the defense argued. Most accidents happened in the home. Or the missing lover had done it. Maybe he had pushed her.
But my father was convicted, and appeal after appeal was denied. And now the clock was ticking, his life winding down. For the first time, now that my own life was hanging in the balance, I began to wonder. Did I owe him something more? Was he on death row because he was a poor husband and worse father? Had someone else been there that day?
“Why are you doing this?” I asked Langdon. I am not sure he understood what I was saying, because it came out like a wail as I struggled to get to my feet.
“It’s where dirty little sluts like Beck-and your mother-belong, isn’t it?” Langdon said. “In an unmarked grave, deep in the middle of nowhere.”
His words, his tone, shut me down cold. A shudder moved through me and I let myself fall back.
“I’ve read every word ever written about you,” he said. “I know you helped him bury her body.”
“I was a kid,” I said. “I was a scared, confused kid.”
“Sure. I get that. But still. You helped him.”
I had heard this before, or rather read it. On those crime Web sites, where freaks gather to analyze various cases, people come to speculate and analyze media coverage, use pop psychology and knowledge gleaned from the myriad police procedure shows that dominate prime time to come up with their own personal theories. Much was made of this element of that case, of my supposed complicity. I always hated those people who tried to make me guilty, even as I pitied them. How sad, how pathetic and dull must their stupid lives be. Plenty of people believed that I killed my mother, and that my father went to jail to protect me.
In fact, even the private investigator who continues to lobby for my father’s release suspected my guilt at one time, though by this point he seemed to have dropped me from his list of suspects, for whatever reason. But it makes for a pretty story, doesn’t it, for my father’s fan club? He’s not a murderer, after all! He’s a hero! He went to jail to protect his crazy son. That’s why I wasn’t eager to return the calls I received from my father’s team. They’d been wrong about everything for years.