Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake)

by Rachel Caine

  I don’t know what to say. The tide of horror runs deep here, and I feel I’m being swept away. I finally manage a response. “You said there was a choice.”

  “I left you the choice.”

  I look around. There’s nothing, other than the speaker. The cord that connects it to the wall. The power outlet.

  “You want me to electrocute her? Strangle her?”

  He sighs, like I’ve missed the point. “No. That would be cruel.”

  I lift a shaking hand to my mouth to stop another scream, or a wild, mad laugh. That would be cruel. He’s insane. He’s utterly, batshit crazy.

  “I left you the gun,” he says then. “There’s one bullet. You decide what to do with it.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I gave Sheryl choices,” he says. “She was good at killing people, but you already know that. An old lady here, a husband there. But I needed to know how far she’d really go. Not every killer is worthy of my time. I told her about the lottery win. I told her I’d marry her, no prenup agreements. That I’d fly her to Paris in my private plane. But I wasn’t going to do any of that if she wasn’t free. That’s all I said. I didn’t tell her what to do. I gave her choices.”

  I feel the floor falling out from under me, and I have to brace myself against that clean, clean wall. “You . . . you . . .”

  “I told her to meet me,” he says. “When I got there, she was standing there, alone. No car. No children. She made her choice, Gina.” He sounds disappointed. “And she kept on making them. I suggested that there might be video of us in the house you visited, and that would be a problem. She took a gun and . . . corrected it. I suggested that Prester might be able to track us down. You know what happened; she was actually disappointed that he had a heart attack before she could kill him. I didn’t tell her to do it; she made her choices. Everybody does. And now it’s your turn.”

  “You’re a fucking monster,” I whisper. “No. No.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll let you think about it.”

  He stops talking. So do I.

  I sit down against the door again, staring dry-mouthed, dry-eyed at Sheryl. At a woman who, if I believe that smooth, calm voice on the speaker, deliberately chose to drown her two little girls so she could run away with someone who could make all her greedy dreams come true.

  Some people deserve death. I know that. I believe that. Melvin did.

  But not even Melvin deserved this.

  I put the gun down. The weight of it doesn’t comfort me anymore. I put my hands over my face like a hiding child.

  But there’s no hiding. Not from this.

  I have to make a binary choice. Let her die horribly, in agony, screaming, or end her suffering quickly.

  I let my hands fall away, limp, to my knees, and raise my face toward the ceiling. I can’t see the sky. I don’t know if God is up there. But I pray.

  And then I say, “What happens if I kill her, Jonathan?”

  He doesn’t answer. Maybe he doesn’t do anything at all. Maybe he leaves me locked in here with her rotting corpse to make even more horrible choices. Maybe I can hang myself with that electrical cord, at the last. Or maybe he wants me to believe something even worse: that he’ll let me out to live with it.

  The speaker finally says, “My dad always used to say that crisis reveals character. You’re Gina Royal. You helped murder defenseless young women.”

  “I didn’t,” I whisper. I feel so tired. So very tired. “I didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “Crisis reveals character,” he says. “So we’ll see.”

  When I call his name, he doesn’t answer anymore. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. Who I am. What he wants.

  I just weep and desperately, desperately wish that I’d told Sam I loved him one more time, that I’d kissed my kids and told them that they are my reason for living through the hell of my past. I want to tell Kezia that I’m so, so sorry.

  Just do it, I think, but the voice in my head isn’t right. It isn’t mine. And I know that the voice, just a whisper, is Melvin’s. A cool, calculating part of my mind that Jonathan wants to access and put in control. It’s trying to tell me that shooting her is a mercy, and I don’t know, maybe it would be. Or maybe it’s just the action of a killer. Melvin wants me to do it.

  That’s exactly why I can’t.

  Jonathan lost something huge when his skull was crushed. I don’t know what it was—what precise brain function should be there and isn’t—but what’s left is an emotionlessly logical decision-making process. He wins because he’s taken emotion out of the equation. Because he’s got the unique ability to endure.

  I take a deep breath, and when I stand up, I waver for a second. The gun is such an easy choice. So easy. It would spare her. It would spare me, too, in a sense.

  I sit down next to Sheryl, looking down at her. I put my hand on her cheek and I say, “I’m here, Penny Carlson. I see you. I’m right here. Everything is okay. I know you hurt. I know you’re confused. But I’m right here with you.”

  This is so cruel. So cruel I can barely look at what I’m doing. But her blood supply is low, almost gone, and so is her bag of pain medication. I sit and talk to her. She answers me in low, disjointed sentences, and then she starts to make sense as the meds lose effectiveness. We talk about her folks. She cries. We talk about being out in the sunlight and flowers and grass, and how the wind moves through the trees. I sing to her, low and quiet. Toward the end, when the bag is almost dry, she looks at me and her eyes focus and she says, “Are you here to kill me? ’Cause I did that to my kids?” Her eyes fill with tears. “I did. I did that. Why did he make me do that?”

  He didn’t. I know that, not because he told me but because he prides himself on control. He makes other people do terrible things. He baits them with whatever they want. What’s the old saying? You can’t cheat an honest man. But all of us, to some level or other, are dishonest.

  Even saints fail.

  I can’t take her hand, but I keep my palm pressed against her forehead. Just letting her feel the contact. “Penny, did he ask you to do anything else since that night?”

  “It hurts,” she says, with a strange sort of surprise. She takes in a sharp breath. Her voice trembles as she says, “It’s hurting, can you make it stop? Please?”

  “I will,” I tell her. It hurts to say it. “Did he ask you to do anything else, sweetheart?”

  She’s crying. Her breath is coming raggedly now. Faster. “I can’t feel my arms. I can’t move them.”

  “You’re okay,” I whisper, and stroke her forehead. “Can you answer my question?”

  She blinks, gulps, and says, “I had to. There were two people that saw us on the road. Had to do it.” That’s the man and woman Kezia found dead. “I was just protecting us.”

  “Did he ask you to do it?”

  “He said—he just said it was a problem. It hurts, oh God—” Her voice is thin now. She’s breathing faster, more shallowly. Her skin is turning pale. The blood supply that was keeping her brain and organs oxygenated is leaving her fast. She’s bleeding out. “I didn’t want to. I needed to. Or I’d lose everything.”

  I don’t have the heart to ask her about Prester. About anyone or anything else. I feel nothing but horror and revulsion and a strange, awful compassion for her right now, a naked connection of human to human, when all I can do is stay and bear witness.

  “Hold me,” she whispers. “Mommy—” She starts screaming uncontrollably. She’s trembling all over. It’s horrible, but I don’t hesitate; I rest her head on my lap, and I let my tears fall. I kiss her forehead and tell her it’ll be okay, okay, okay, until she’s no longer screaming, until it’s just ragged, convulsive whimpering. Until it slows to a whisper. Until she’s just . . . gone.

  It takes an eternity for her labored, wet breathing to finally hitch to a stop.

  I sit there. Unmoving. There isn’t a sound except for the last of her blood dripping into the dr
ain.

  Jonathan’s voice says, “Crisis reveals character.” I hear locks unfastening at the door. “All choices have consequences.”

  I find my voice, because I have to. I have no wish to speak to him ever again. “That wasn’t justice. That was cruelty. Do you even know the difference?”

  No answer. I leave the body of a child-killer, a murderer—in the end, just a desperate, sad, frightened woman—and turn the doorknob. Maybe I’ll die when I walk out. Maybe I won’t.

  I can’t really bring myself to care.

  He’s laid bare horrors to me: The horror of a mother killing her children for personal gain. The horror of her own death. The horror of how relentlessly hollow and easy it is to say she deserved it. Maybe someone else can make that decision. I can’t.

  There’s a hallway beyond. No traps. Nothing waiting.

  Above me, an intercom engages, and I look up at the black metal screen. “We played a game in the car,” he says. “After she killed her children. It’s called Would You Rather, do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “It starts out small. Would you rather have a nickel or a dime? Would you rather have a salad or an ice cream? But every question has to get bigger. So I asked, at the end, would you rather get shot in the head and die, or lose all your arms and legs and stay alive? And this is what she chose, Gwen. I didn’t choose it. She did.”

  I swallow a sick, horrible surge of bile. “It was a game.”

  “Not really. There’s a pattern. Bad people will choose greed and personal gratification. If you do it right, when you ask them, Would you rather push a button and kill someone else, or say no and lose a million dollars, guess what they choose? People are things they sacrifice to their needs. I wasn’t surprised at how Sheryl chose. She was only surprised I was serious.”

  It’s the logic of a child. The decision tree of a machine. I feel ill, hot, disconnected. I have to brace myself against the wall. The smell of blood and rot suddenly overwhelms me, and I nearly fall. I can’t do this. I can’t.

  “There are more rooms if you want to see the choices they made,” he says. “Every one of them was a murderer, not just once but many times over. I thought you were one of them. But it’s all right, Gina. You surprised me. No one else ever has. It took real courage to do that. Or real sadism. I’m not really sure which you showed me.”

  “I’m going to find you,” I tell him. “And you should be afraid of that.”

  He says, “I haven’t been afraid since that day.”

  I don’t ask which one. I know. At seventeen years old—the same age as my daughter, my God—he stopped being a person and started inhabiting a body on the day his sister died. This has been a long time coming.

  “Maybe you will be,” I say. “Before this is done.”

  “I hope so,” he says. He sounds wistful. “I really do.”

  “Where’s Kez?” He doesn’t answer. I turn in a circle in the hallway, and I shout it with all the rage boiling inside me. “Where’s Kez?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I will have to look.

  24

  KEZIA

  When the trap triggers, I’m a step behind Gwen, and it doesn’t help. I go down like a sack of sand, stunned by the strobes and the sound, and while I’m completely bashed into shock, I feel someone zip-tying my hands and ankles. A gag goes over my mouth. I try to get myself together, to struggle. I can’t. I curl into a whimpering ball, eyes squeezed shut and still burning from the lights that are beating into me, the sound so heavy it’s crushing me. I think of my child, begging him, her, the delicate life that’s just a fragile collection of cells right now, to fight. To live.

  I don’t know how long that goes on. I only know that it’s an overwhelming relief when I feel my body moving away from the assault of noise and lights, and then it’s suddenly, intensely gone. Like someone flipped a switch.

  Because someone did.

  I’m terrified for my child. I don’t know if the baby’s okay. You have to believe, I tell myself. And you have to survive.

  I can’t see, but I feel the changes. From smooth concrete to sudden warmth. Sun on my skin, humidity close. Fresh sea air, and the reek of the cannery subsides. Where’s Gwen? I try to blink away the glare, but all I can see are confusing, fragmented ghosts. My ears are ringing, and I can’t tell if I’m actually hearing anything or just imagining it.

  I’m lifted up and tossed inside something. I feel it give underneath me. Car, I’m in a car. I’m lying on a plush velour seat, I can feel the fabric. Someone’s talking. I can hear a voice. I don’t know what it’s saying. I’m scared down to my bones. I don’t know where I am, what’s happening, and until I can see and hear, I can’t act.

  The car starts to move. I know this isn’t the Honda; it doesn’t smell the same. Doesn’t feel the same. I’m in another vehicle, and I have the awful feeling that it’s not Gwen who has me.

  My eyes come back first, slowly painting in the world in grainy smears of color ghosted by white rings when I blink. I see the back of a seat, and the rough outline of a head. Not Gwen. The head is misshapen, disturbingly wrong on one side. Jonathan Watson.

  I try to breathe slowly, steadily, and take inventory. My head aches. My ears are barely working, still buried under high-pitched noise. The gag’s tight, expertly applied; when I try to scrape my face against the seat, it doesn’t move at all. The bonds on my wrists are tight enough to hurt, and my ankles ache too. I’m in trouble.

  He’s talking, I realize. But he’s not talking to me. He’s got a phone, and he’s talking into it as he drives. I hear only the sound of it, not the meaning.

  Then I hear the other voice. He’s talking to Gwen.

  I try to scream. The gag muffles it. I feel the car slow down and stop, and the driver’s side door opens, closes. A second later, the back door by my head opens, and light floods in on me. I blink, trying to really see him. I struggle.

  He pulls me out of the car and across a long, clean concrete surface. I’m in some kind of building, and when I manage to blink and focus enough, it disorients me. Just . . . space, going up into shadows above me, with a winding steel staircase vanishing into the distance.

  Lighthouse. I’m in the lighthouse.

  He doesn’t pause. Next thing I know, we’re in an elevator, a large freight-size thing that moves jerkily and stops with a jolt. By this time, I can see better. Hear more clearly. And none of it helps.

  I try to focus on Jonathan Watson. He seems utterly disinterested in me, other than moving me like a piece of furniture where he wants me to be. He pulls me into a corner and props me against the wall like a discarded mop, then walks away to the elevator. He slides a door shut and enters a code into the keypad beside it. I can’t focus enough to see what it is.

  There’s another way down, I tell myself. Stairs.

  Yeah, if I can cut myself loose. I look around. This is some kind of control center, maybe for the lighthouse itself; the consoles look new, shiny, fitted out with all kinds of touch-screen displays. I don’t see any sharp corners that I can rub these damn restraints against. There’s a single rolling office chair. On the other side from the rounded console, there’s a bank of monitors, and once I glance toward them, I can’t stop looking.

  There are nine monitors. Gwen is on one of them. She’s sitting in a room with a body, a mutilated body, and though I can’t see it in detail, I can feel the horror of it. I start to squirm forward, trying to find something, anything to use.

  Jonathan Watson walks back toward me and stands there, watching me. Then he shakes his head and says, “I’m not going to hurt you. You aren’t guilty of anything. But I can’t let you interfere either. This is important. You need to be quiet now.”

  I want to tell him about the baby. Maybe it will make a difference. But he doesn’t seem to care when I try to talk through the gag as he takes out a pair of handcuffs. He flips me on my side, cuts off the zip ties on my wrists, and I feel one set of the cuffs going on my
right wrist. He pulls me over to a standpipe that’s against one of the walls, and then the second cuff clicks on. When I lunge forward, I nearly jerk my arms out of my sockets, and have to pause to pull in painful breaths through my nose.

  He’s locked me to the pipe. I’m not going anywhere.

  He forgets about me almost immediately. He walks over to the chair, spins it around to face the monitors, and leans forward, watching. I look too. I can’t help it. My vision is getting clearer and clearer, and the horrible thing I’m seeing sharpens along with it.

  “She chose this,” he tells me. “Sheryl Lansdowne. You understand, I didn’t do it out of cruelty. I let her make all the choices. I always do.”

  I can’t answer him. I blink, and I see Sheryl is moving. Just her torso and head. Arms and legs pallid and still around her like some kind of horrific art installation. And even knowing what I know—or at least suspect—I feel a surge of sickness.

  “Gwen can stop her suffering, if she chooses,” he continues. “I think she will. That’s the easy choice.”

  Gwen has never taken an easy path. I don’t know what this man is thinking. Or why. Maybe I never will. I try to stay calm, but I’m scared. I don’t know if what happened to me back there at the cannery would have hurt my baby. I’m afraid that my nose will stop up and I won’t be able to breathe, and that would be a shitty, stupid way to die.

  I’m afraid that help isn’t coming. That Gwen and I will just vanish off the map like magic, alive or dead.

  I just want to go back to sanity. Safety. Javier and the baby and life.

  Jonathan keeps watching Gwen. He leans forward. Sometimes he talks to her, but mostly he just . . . watches. When Sheryl starts to scream, it’s horrible. I shut my eyes and try not to hear it, try not to hear Gwen offering what little she can in the way of comfort. It takes forever to stop. Don’t cry, I tell myself. You can’t cry. You need to breathe. Keep breathing.

  When I open my eyes again, it’s silent. Jonathan is sitting back in his chair. I think he’s surprised.

  He hits a button. He’s just unlocked the room, I realize. And Gwen—bloody, distraught, bone-pale Gwen—stands up and leaves.