“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember much from that time.”
“I assisted in your group therapy sessions,” he said. “You were a standout. Sensitive and gifted in a room of maniacs.”
I was struggling to place him. But I really only remembered Dr. Chang, and some of the others-Dr. Rain, who taught science; Dr. Abigail, who did art therapy. There was a music teacher, young and very pretty. I remembered her, but not her name. I had no memory of Langdon at all. Really, in all the years we’d spent together at Sacred Heart, wouldn’t I have remembered before now? But was there something? Something deep within me that remembered him and had been drawn to him because of the memories? I don’t know.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
Now it was his turn to stare, the shovel in his hand. I waited for him to say something else. But he walked away from the grave then. As scared as I was, part of me was grieving, too. I’d trusted him and cared about him. Why is it that no one you love ever seems to stay?
When he came back, he had a gun. It didn’t look right in his hand. He was the kind of guy to carry a book, a laptop, a pen, not a semiautomatic.
“You killed her because she discovered your secret,” he said flatly. “You dug her grave. Then, in despair, you killed yourself and fell in with her. That’s how I found you. That’s what I’ll tell the police, and they’ll believe me. I’ll tell them that I’ve been watching you, following you for days, because I’ve been so worried.”
It would work. It really would. It was a perfectly logical story, fit right together when all my lies were revealed. It would make a fitting end to a tragic, titillating tale. Everyone loves a good murder-suicide.
“Don’t do this,” I said. “Please. We can both walk away from this, all of us can. Nothing has happened yet that can’t be fixed.”
“You confided in me that you had killed your mother,” he went on, blankly, almost trancelike. “That you let your father go to jail to protect you.”
“Is that what this is about?”
“Your father is a friend of mine,” he said haughtily. “We’re close.”
Was that true? I had no way to know. Was my father pulling strings from behind bars?
“This is not going to work,” I said. “It’s almost impossible to get away with a crime these days. The forensic science is too advanced. They’ll see the trajectory of the bullet. You’ll get caught and go to jail. You might even get the electric chair.”
I know I sounded rambling and desperate. And I saw with despair that he was beyond listening.
“If my father has anything to do with this,” I said, “he’s using you. Just like you used Luke. Just like you’re using me. We collude with our predators, Professor. Wasn’t it you who taught me that?”
He lifted the gun on me, and I closed my eyes. When the shot rang out, I wondered what it would be like to die, how long it would take, if it would hurt, what was waiting for me on the other side…
It was silent then for a long time, and finally I opened my eyes. I saw Langdon’s arm dangling over the side of the grave. Inspecting myself, I realized that I hadn’t been shot at all. Then a small white face, as pale and round as a moon, was floating above me.
Luke looked down at me and smiled. I could see that he held Langdon’s shovel.
“I hit him,” he said. He held up the heavy shovel. “With this. He was going to kill you.”
“Good job,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.
As glad as I was to see Luke, as glad as I was to see anyone, there was something unsettling about him standing so high above me, holding a shovel.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He dropped the shovel and started rummaging in his pack.
I shook my head and said, “Can you get us out of here?”
He looked up from his pack, and he gave me a grim little nod. “I’ll get you out. I brought a rope.”
“Do you see my pack up there?” I asked. “I need my phone.”
He didn’t answer me.
“Did you bring anyone with you, Luke? Did you call the police?”
“No,” he said. “I came alone.”
“Luke,” I said. “Where’s the gun?”
He looked over the side at me. “Who’s that?”
“That’s my friend,” I said. “She needs help. I need you to find that phone before you get me out of here.”
“Okay,” he said, and he walked off.
“How did you get here?” I called, just to keep him talking. The cold air was starting to feel painful now that I didn’t have adrenaline pumping through my blood.
“Same as always,” he said. He was still out of sight, and it was making me nervous. I got to work on that foothold again. “I rode my bike,” he was saying. He sounded far away. I looked up to see Langdon’s lifeless arm still dangling over the side.
“You’ve been here before?”
“You know I have,” he said. He was closer now. The sky was clearing and I could see a few stars. Beck was moaning, muttering something I couldn’t understand. I put my hand on her head, offered her some soothing words… “It’s okay… we’re okay… we’re going home.”
Then Luke was looming again, this time holding my phone. “You were in my room today, in my crawl space.”
I didn’t say anything. This was not the time for a tantrum.
“Right?” he said, when I stayed silent.
“We have a lot to talk about,” I said. I put on my best Dr. Cooper voice, soothing but firm. She always has such a clear idea about the right things to do and the right order in which to do them. I always admired that about her. “And we’ll do that. But right now we need to get me out of this hole, and call the police.”
“But I want to talk now,” he said.
He knelt down and I saw that he was binding Langdon, which probably wasn’t a bad idea. But I needed that rope, or the phone. And he obviously wasn’t in any hurry to deliver on either one.
“How about we play a game?” asked Luke.
Oh my God, really? I struggled to keep my composure, but the stress was starting to mount. I looked up to see that the gun lay on the edge of the grave and he had his hand on it. For fuck’s sake. I leaned against the wall and drew in a deep breath as I dug my toe into the hole I’d made, and started, as subtly as possible, pushing it in deeper. The dirt was cold and hard, and my progress felt painfully slow.
“What kind of game?” I tried to keep my voice steady. I didn’t want him to know how close to the edge of my endurance I was. Or that I was scared. So far, I’d never beaten him at any game we played.
“Twenty questions,” he said.
“And if I win?”
“Then I’ll help you and your friend out of the hole. And you can call the police.”
“And if you win?”
He smiled a little, and his eyes were shiny and dark with mischief.
“Maybe I’ll kill you all and fill in this hole, then go home and climb back into my bed. They’ll think I was locked in my room all night. The only two people who know I can get out are right here.”
I didn’t answer, just kept pressing my foot in, scraping and pushing, scraping and pushing.
“They’ll figure it out, Luke.”
He shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll help you anyway. If I win, I get to do whatever I want. Because you know what? I never get to do what I want. Do you know that? Kids never get to do what they want. It sucks.”
He was as sullen and whiny as any eleven-year-old. But he was fucking nuts, and that’s what made him dangerous-like those little African kids, high on drugs, carrying machine guns. Crazy, drugged, and violent as sin; it was a nasty, terrifying combination. I felt the rise of bile-it might have been anger or it might have been fear. So divorced from my emotions was I that I couldn’t tell which. But even so, there was an undercurrent of empathy for him. I understood him. I was him-if no longer, then once a long time ago.