Swim Deep

by BETH KERY

  “I’m not sure I want you to understand, Anna. The cost might be too high.” He noticed my angry, determined expression and exhaled in defeat before he continued.

  “Noah Madaster was an intimidating giant of a man. When I was a kid, he scared the hell out of me. As I got older, I realized he scared and manipulated nearly everyone he met, adult or child. With most people, he was charming at first. Smooth. Sophisticated. But he was never that way for me. He seemed to sense something special in my relationship with Elizabeth, something innocent maybe… somewhere he wasn’t allowed to tread. Somewhere he had no authority. It threatened him.

  “He was strict and controlling with Elizabeth when she was a teenager, but also strangely permissive, as well. It was like he constantly swung between spoiling her, and then punishing her for enjoying herself and escaping his authority. He monitored her interactions with boys and men obsessively while at country club parties or events, for instance. He wouldn’t allow her to date anyone unless he approved of him first, although he rarely granted his approval. But Madaster also gave Elizabeth that ridiculously expensive Ferrari when she was only fifteen. He supplied her with plenty of cash and credit cards. Elizabeth used them to escape his net of control, but he knew what he was doing all along. Because he’d given her those things—the car and the money—he always retained ultimate control. They were his tools, not hers. He seemed to enjoy seeing her push at the confines of her invisible prison. He seemed to love the moment when he reeled her back within his grip.”

  “And Elizabeth’s relationship with you? Was that an attempt by Elizabeth to escape her father’s influence?”

  “Yes, I suppose it was. But our relationship was unique, too. Innocent. Or maybe it wasn’t. That was the thing with Elizabeth. Just when you thought you understood her, just when you thought the connection between you was sound and genuine, she would turn around and do something completely inexplicable. She’d break the link willfully. Spitefully. Grotesquely. I used to think that our initial connection to each other was special. But as in all things, Elizabeth left you swimming in doubt. I still doubt, even today. Who really knew what she thought or wanted? Her desires had been forged and culled by her father, meticulously fashioned into the shape of his desire. Can the slave ever truly break free of the slave master? I don’t know. That was the problem. I never truly knew. I still don’t.

  “But all those doubts only came later. I was in awe of her in the beginning. I didn’t understand why she chose me, out of all the other boys and men who constantly surrounded her. But after we’d spent some time together, the layers of her—that outer cold, hard armor she wore—seemed to peel away. It was like my youth and inexperience rubbed off on her. Instead of seeming like fifteen going on forty, she started to act like a teenage girl: funny, impulsive, painfully insecure at times. Sweet.”

  He uttered the last gruffly. The look in his eyes brought a hard lump to my throat.

  “The first summer we met, we would hike out to this overlook a few miles from my house and talk about stupid things. Kids’ things. Or so I’d thought at the time. We’d play this game: wish upon a star, where we’d pick a star for the other person. If it was a bright star, you could make a big, important wish, if it was a small, dim one, you could only wish for a little thing… a passing fancy, like that when you got home, you found out that your mom had gotten all the stuff for ice cream sundaes, or that when I joined Elizabeth at Tahoe Shores High School in a year, we’d have the same lunch hour. Stuff like that.

  “I remember once, I picked the brightest object in the sky for her, even though it wasn’t a star. I picked the full moon. And I waited, wondering what Elizabeth Madaster’s biggest wish in the world could possibly be, the one that surpassed every other.”

  “What did she say?” I asked breathlessly when he paused.

  “She said that she wished she belonged to another family… a boring, regular family,” Evan said quietly, his expression grim. “She’d live in Kansas, or Iowa, or anywhere, really, as long as people didn’t look at her with so much expectation. Some place anonymous. Some place safe. She wished she could be invisible, for the most part. That she could blend into the landscape whenever she chose.”

  A foul taste had started at the back of my mouth. “She didn’t want other people to have an effect on her. Unless she chose it.”

  He nodded. “She’d been effected, nonstop, by her father since before she could remember. It was the first glimmer I had of the truth, but I was too young to understand. The hell that she went through day in and day out wasn’t something a thirteen-year-old kid from a happy, reasonably well-adjusted family could begin to comprehend. And the thing was, Elizabeth didn’t consider it hell. For her, it was all normal operating procedure. The air she breathed.”

  “When did you understand? That her father was abusing her?”

  “Not for a long time. Not until after we were married. Elizabeth always avoided the topic of Noah. But he was always there, a brewing storm on the horizon.”

  “When we were young, Noah tried to separate us. He’d forbid her from seeing me. I was a thorn in his side, the one thing he couldn’t erase from Elizabeth’s consciousness. Although I’ll bet he tried like hell to do just that with that damn Analyzer of his.

  “When I got to high school, Elizabeth and I would be together every chance we got. We used to meet in this old, unused stairway behind the gym. Sometimes, she’d escape out her window at night, and I’d do the same. She’d pick me up in her car, and we’d drive aimlessly. Or park. Anything, as long as we were together.”

  He paused here, the silence making me see it all. The beautiful girl and the young boy speeding through a starlit night, their faces alight and alive as they thirstily drank in the rare intoxicant of freedom.

  “Because he couldn’t completely control her when it came to seeing me, Madaster eventually sent her away to private school to separate us. But Elizabeth and I managed to remain in contact for years, all through the rest of high school, and then college. When we eventually announced our engagement, when I was twenty-two and she was twenty-four, Noah seemed to resign himself. He welcomed me into the family with open arms.”

  “You didn’t believe him, though?”

  “I wanted to. But no, I never trusted Noah. He’d made the mistake of showing me his true colors early on. He’d never bothered to charm me, and that was his mistake. To me, he was my enemy from day one. No matter how supportive and benevolent he began to act toward me, I understood on some elemental level that the only thing that mattered to him was Elizabeth, and that he considered me a barrier to her. Or at least a partial one.”

  “You didn’t know at that time of the engagement Elizabeth’s father had been… ”

  “Abusing her?” Evan asked when I faded off. “It wasn’t a matter of had been, Anna. Elizabeth and Noah never stopped their incestuous relationship. It continued from when she was nine years old to—presumably—just before she died.”

  My mouth dropped open. “But how could Noah possibly force her into something like that when she was an adult?”

  He shook his head. “Noah didn’t have to force Elizabeth into anything. She went to him willingly. The thing you have to understand is that Elizabeth was Noah’s greatest triumph, on so many levels. But one of the main reasons he coveted and prized her so passionately was that she represented his greatest victory. She was his main test subject for that Analyzer he’d created, the lie detector that was really a means for mental programming. He’d warped her since she was a child, even since before he’d first raped her. When Elizabeth went to him, she genuinely believed she did so of her own free will. Why? Because he’d brainwashed her until she didn’t know the difference anymore between her own desires and his.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The surface of my skin seemed to sting, as though I’d received some chemical burn. I noticed Evan’s narrowed eyed gaze on me.

/>   “I’m sorry, Anna. I’m sorry to have involved you in something so ugly.”

  “I don’t want your apologies,” I hissed, feeling vulnerable from his knowing stare. “I just want the truth.”

  He nodded, his face smoothing into a mask. Then he continued with his story, his manner reminding me of a man walking his last steps to the gallows.

  “I never fully answered your earlier question, about whether or not I knew when Elizabeth and I got engaged about Noah’s abuse, about the true nature of their relationship. The answer is no. I didn’t know it consciously, anyway. It’s hard to imagine something like that, when you don’t have any prior template into which to shape the thoughts. Over time, the outline became clearer and clearer though, even though it was years before Elizabeth admitted to me that he’d been abusing her—but of course, Elizabeth didn’t couch it in those terms.

  “But even before Elizabeth’s admission, there was always a vibe that Noah gave off with Elizabeth that made me highly uneasy. It was proprietorship. I got the message, loud and clear. I may become her husband, but that title was a far second to that of Father. And Elizabeth did her part to fan those flames. She’d be flirtatious and knowing with both of us, in turn. Noah didn’t seem to mind. He saw how much it bothered me, when Elizabeth paid attention solely to him. But why should it bother him if she occasionally made me her sole focus? He was confident about to whom she belonged.”

  I looked away, feeling nauseated.

  Evan noticed. “It’s not a pleasant story to hear. It certainly wasn’t pleasant living it, either.”

  “I’m listening. Go on,” I said, avoiding his stare.

  He exhaled heavily.

  “Noah offered to assist me in setting up my first fund when I finished college. I had serious doubts about accepting his patronage. I didn’t trust him. But at the same time, I wanted… no, I needed to become established if I wanted to marry Elizabeth. The only thing I had to support us was a very modest trust fund that my parents had given me. It wasn’t enough, not if I wanted to give Elizabeth even a little of the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. So in the end, I agreed to have Noah help me.”

  “You wanted Elizabeth that much? That you agreed to work with a man that you claim is right on par with the devil?” I asked, anger in my tone.

  His spine stiffened. “I don’t need you to tell me I was stupid, Anna. It didn’t take me long to recognize it would be an epic mistake, aligning myself with him. Not just potentially for my career. For my life. My identity. Noah’s influence was toxic from the outset.

  “At one point, he suggested I make a big splash with my first clients, using their money to invest outside the original parameters and specifications of the fund in order to spread the word of the fund’s success. He urged me to invest in a risky hedge fund in order to make enormous profits. I refused, recognizing the danger to my customers’ investments. When I wouldn’t do what he advised, Noah threatened to withdraw all his support. But this time, I managed to avoid the trap. I was adamant. Thankfully, I was able to make the fund a success despite Noah cutting off his patronage and refusing any further support.

  “Noah’s aim was to get a hook in me all along. It was a means for blackmail, a standard operating procedure for him. If the hedge fund gamble failed—which there was a high likelihood of it doing—I’d be forced to rely on Noah to cover the losses. Do that, or face financial failure and ruin and possible federal prosecution. If that gamble didn’t fail, then the next one he suggested would have. He had the power of odds on his side. Plus, he had the threat of exposure if I stepped out of line at any time. If I played his first game, that is. When I refused the bait at the outset, he was furious,” Evan said, his speech clipped now. His eyes had gone hard and silvery. I understood that the encounter he described had been a sort of watershed moment for him. At twenty-two, he’d stood up to a formidable, more experienced, and ruthless enemy. And he’d won the battle.

  The question was, who had won the war between Evan and Noah Madaster? Or was it still raging?

  I suddenly knew for certain that it was, silently and furiously.

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? You brought me here because of this vendetta… because of this war between you and Noah Madaster.”

  “Yes.”

  That swift admission sliced through me, the pain of it impossibly worse than all the previous blows. He stood abruptly, his expression growing anxious. I realized that tears had sprung out of my eyes, wetting my cheeks. He reached for me. I flinched back.

  “Goddamn it, Anna,” he muttered, pacing back and forth several steps. “Goddamn it. What do I do? This is me. It’s still me. What can I do to make this better?”

  But I was lost in misery, unable to respond to his agitation. I’d been transported back to that night he’d awoken me from my nightmare, that night when I’d demanded he tell me why we’d come to Les Jumeaux, and his answer: Because I’m sinful.

  But that’s not what he’d said. I knew that now. I’d misunderstood him, perhaps purposefully, because I didn’t want to face his real answer anymore than I had the false one.

  Because I’m vengeful.

  “You almost told me,” I said, wiping my cheeks with the back of my hand. “That night, when you woke me up from the nightmare. You told me we were here because you were vengeful. But you never said anything else.”

  “Only because you seemed to not want to hear it. You changed the subject,” he said, desperation in his tone. “I offered to take you away from here. If you only knew how hard this has been, how much I’ve been drowning in regret. I’ve wanted to tell you the truth for weeks now, but I didn’t know how—”

  “You hired a private investigator to find someone who looked like Elizabeth,” I interrupted, unwilling to hear about his feelings. It was difficult enough, bearing witness to his sins against me. Hearing his emotion—his regret and pain—was intolerable. “How long did it take you to find a double? How long have you been planning this, Evan?”

  He froze in his pacing. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Tell me the truth. Or whatever you’ve convinced yourself the truth is,” I grated out.

  His expression went stony. Unreadable.

  “I started planning about a year after Elizabeth disappeared. At first, I tried to come up with some kind of scheme that would expose Noah for what he is. I tried to meet with some of the people who had worked for him in the governor’s office. I got to know a few of them… a couple better than others. At one point, I thought the young female aide—the one who had first come out to the press about the fact that Noah had touched her inappropriately while he was using the Analyzer on her—would agree to tell more of her story to the press, putting his crimes in the limelight again.

  “In the end, Noah somehow silenced her, though. She started to refuse to take my calls. I don’t know how he did it. I’m sure it was related to how he silenced her after she told the press her story the first time. I told you that blackmail is his forte.”

  “I had to try another tack. For a year or so, I did exhaustive research into Noah’s financial holdings and contracts. I thought maybe I could find a way to expose any dark business dealings, contrive a way to bring about his financial ruin. Nothing ever paid off, though.

  “Finally, I realized that the only way to get to him was through his one weak point, his most single-minded obsession.”

  “Elizabeth,” I said.

  He merely nodded, that faraway, haunted look once again in his eyes.

  “I believe that at the end of her life, Elizabeth and Noah had a big blowout. I suspect that my pleas, and then my insistence, for her to sever her relationship with him had finally gotten through to her. Before she died, I’d told her that if she didn’t break off all ties with her father, I would divorce her for good. I couldn’t stand to see her debasing herself anymore. I couldn’t bear watc
hing her kill herself slowly.”

  “You think that Elizabeth told her father that it was either him or you… and she chose you?” I asked in a hushed voice.

  “I think that when she told him that his days of manipulating her every move were over, he ended her life.”

  My brain seemed to slam against a cold steel wall.

  “You’re saying Noah Madaster murdered his daughter?”

  His wintry gaze met mine. “Noah did murder Elizabeth. That’s why I’m here. That’s why you are. Because every day that passes that Noah goes unpunished for all that he’s done, the burn inside of me gets hotter and deeper. I can’t rid myself of the fury. The only thing that will give me peace is to see Noah Madaster finally face justice.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I felt the full force of his fury at that moment, that anger that he’d always carefully hidden from me. It awed and frightened me. Evan was right.

  His rage burned.

  “But how do you know?” I asked. “You yourself have said that Elizabeth was unpredictable. How do you know that she ever confronted him about his abuse and threatened to cut ties with him? How do you know that Noah killed her? The police never came up with any evidence like that, did they?”

  “No. The police had their suspicions about Noah, but never enough to make a substantial case against him. You ask me how I know. I can only answer from my experience with Noah Madaster all those years, and my experience of Elizabeth. I’ve done any number of stupid things in my life, Anna, but I’m not a stupid man.”

  “No,” I said, panting slightly, trying to catch my skittering, flickering thoughts. I was completely confused at that moment, but I completely agreed with that. Evan was the opposite of stupid. He was patient, hard, and ruthless.