by Aitana Moore
Robert's heavy oak desk looked sturdy and uncomplicated. She opened and closed drawers and even lay on the floor to search under it for hidden panels. Nothing.
As Lee swept the feeble light around the room, her eyes fell on a cabinet against the wall, and she recognized it. A secretary cabinet, probably from the eighteenth century. Cabinets like that one had once been used as desks.
Most importantly, those cabinets often had secret compartments.
Robert was fond of antiques and would be aware of its secret features. On top, the cabinet had a built-in ormolu clock; the middle had vertical panels on each side and a bottom part that could be lowered to form a desk. There were gold decorations which Lee pushed aside until one of them moved, revealing a keyhole that was easy for her to pick.
Painted panels on both sides slid out and turned, revealing hidden drawers at the back, but there was nothing in them. She pushed them closed.
“Come on, come on, I know you’re here,” she mumbled.
The two vertical panels representing the lovers Pierrot and Columbine were held in place by golden screws. She pressed them, but the drawers that popped out only contained antique pots of ink and pens.
There was, right in front of her as she sat down, a horizontal centerpiece depicting a more elaborate Venetian carnival scene. It was made with pieces of light and dark wood carefully weaved together. Harlequin's black mask seemed slightly more dented than the rest of the panel. She pressed it and almost jumped back as the desk opened and a box rose, pushed up by a hidden mechanism.
It was an old but sturdy wooden box. Lee picked the lock.
It was full of photographs.
She put them on the desk and shone the phone light on them. They were images of different women, many of them naked. The newest photographs, printed in glossy paper on a home digital machine, were of Mia.
There were dozens of photos. Mia had abandoned herself to Robert’s camera like the top model she was. She knelt in corset and stockings, reclined in panties holding her breasts, lay face down with her hands between her legs. Her eyes were almost always looking at the camera, even when they were half closed; her lips were always parted. She was a lovely, sordid vision.
A whole series of photos showed her and Robert together. He must have set the automatic shutter and joined her, kissing her breasts, pawing her buttocks in hidden triumph over the nephew who despised him and gave him money.
No, Robert would not throw those away, just as he hadn’t destroyed photos of women he might not have seen in twenty years or more. He was too vain, and he might just be a sociopath — willing to kill someone to avoid the trouble she would bring him but unwilling to let go of the proof of her submission.
Lee had found what she needed. She efficiently put things back where they belonged, keeping two photos of Mia and Robert by sticking them in the pocket of her robe.
As the cabinet clicked into place, however, she knew that she wasn’t alone in the room.
Jumping out of the chair, she turned. Robert had a wooden bat, and it was already moving toward her. Lee felt the blow on the side of her head and had a fraction of a second to understand that it was strong enough to kill.
THIRTY-ONE
Murderers nursed their guilt during the hour of the wolf, consumed by the fear of being unmasked. Lee had forgotten that.
She remembered it in pain as she opened her eyes to a confined space and darkness. Lee was always alert when she woke up, even from a blow that might have brained her.
Robert had panicked, knocked her unconscious and he must have locked her up in a closet until he could think what to do.
But something was thrown at the door of the closet. If fell with a soft thud on the wood and was followed by another thud.
Lee understood several things at the same time: she wasn’t in a closet, and she wasn’t standing. She was lying down, there was wood above her and a vertical shaft of light. The thuds she heard came from earth being thrown.
She was in a box, and Robert was burying her.
Dirt seeped through, falling on her face, but she refrained from screaming. The light through the crack was the sky: it was becoming lighter. Robert had had to carry her out, put her in a box and dig a hole. That had probably taken a little time, and James was an early riser. He would realize that she wasn’t in the room and he might come out looking for her.
The noise of seagulls above told her that they were at the lighthouse. Robert must have put her into one of the long crates that had contained material for the site and was probably using Imogen’s soft flower bed to bury her, thinking that he could move her later.
There was no place where Robert could have hidden her from James, except under the ground.
Another clump of earth hit the crate and the crack went dark too. She ought to scream, kick the crate open and try to run, but she knew it was the wrong thing to do. It would make Robert desperate, and desperate people acted with violence. To be buried alive was one of the most feared deaths in the world, but Lee’s grave would be shallow. Robert had no time to dig a deep one, and that would be her salvation.
Her heart beat as solemnly as a funeral drum, and her throat narrowed. Lee told herself to breathe slowly so as not to waste the little oxygen there was in the crate.
Robert ran away to get back into the house, hide his dirty clothes and wash before anyone saw him. He had to put on a calm face and prepare a plausible story for James and Imogen when they found Lee missing.
But she wouldn’t die — not today! Lee gritted her teeth and kicked the bottom of the crate with all the strength of her naked feet. She was going to waste oxygen doing that, but it was her only chance.
She had been born in the dirt and mud, where stories of people being buried alive by mistake in shallow graves like this one were told almost with glee. Poor people knew how to kick and claw themselves out of a soft hole.
Lee kicked, and the wood broke. She could feel the splinters entering her feet, but she paid no heed. She pulled her legs back inside the tight crate so that the earth would fall to the bottom.
“Vivien!”
It was James, calling for her in the distance. The snappy little dogs were with him. They would smell her. Lee roared as loudly as she could. No, she was not going to die!
Her arms gave the top of the crate a mighty shove, and the earth above her was displaced toward her feet, falling through the hole and allowing her to move the little that was left on top of her. Her hand shot out, grasping the emptiness.
No, not the emptiness: another hand grasped hers and she was pulled out into the sun.
"Vivien!" James cradled her, looking desperately at her face. “Vivien, what the hell—?”
“Robert!” she cried, gulping the air.
It was clear that James understood nothing, but fury was quick to take over him. He picked her up and marched toward the house. Lee kept sucking air in through her mouth instead of speaking.
At the door of the terrace, Imogen stood in her dressing gown, her wan face full of surprise and horror when she saw Lee covered in dirt.
“What happened?” she asked.
James swept past her. Robert was in the hall of his ancestors, with their swords, axes and armors, but he didn’t seem willing or capable of grabbing a weapon to keep James at bay. He looked like he had reached the end of the line.
After depositing Lee on the sofa, James leapt at Robert and struck him down with a blow so hard it echoed from stone to stone. Robert did nothing to defend himself as James pummeled him.
“You fucking freak!”
Imogen shrieked. “You’ll kill him. James, please!”
Two women from the kitchen and the gardener appeared, but they stood without knowing what to do while the master of the house lay on the floor and his nephew beat him.
Running forward to grab James’ arm, Imogen cried, “Please!”
But in full beast mode, James pushed her aside. Lee took another deep breath and managed to tell poor, bewildered
Imogen, “Robert killed Mia.”
James’ fist froze in the air and he turned toward Lee.
“I found out, that’s why he tried to kill me,” she added.
Robert was not unconscious, although his face was a mess of blood and both his eyes were swollen shut. It was as if he were waiting, even hoping, to be beaten to death. James’ face changed from anger into something like madness, and Imogen saw it. “No, James. James, he didn’t kill Mia!”
She faced her nephew. The scene was like the tableau of a tragedy, Lee thought helplessly.
“My love, no,” Robert said from the ground, choking in his own blood. “Please, love, be quiet. I beg you.”
Imogen shook her head at her husband and repeated softly. “He didn’t kill Mia, James.”
She collapsed, sitting sideways on the ground.
“I did.”
THIRTY-TWO
When James awoke and Lee wasn’t there, he went downstairs looking for her and heard yapping inside a room. Robert was coming in from a walk, he said. It seemed strange that he had gone out and not taken the dogs. It seemed even stranger that his clothes should be full of dirt.
And then James saw Lee’s medal on the ground just outside the study.
Robert didn't want his nephew to open the door for the dogs, but James ignored him. The three little creatures ran out, angry to be imprisoned even for a moment. They ran toward the lighthouse, and James ran after them.
He didn’t put two and two together; he was just afraid that Lee might have met with an accident. He ran out looking for her and found her inside a hastily-dug grave.
It was still hard for him to understand any of it now, as they sat in the drawing room across from Imogen. The police had arrived, but they were still waiting for the officers who would make a formal arrest of the murderous couple. Paramedics had tended to Robert and left. His face was unrecognizable, a bloodied mess where the eyes had become mere horizontal lines. He didn’t speak.
James held Lee close to him, as if he were protecting her but also being shielded from what he was discovering. She still had dirt on her face, hair and in the folds of her clothes.
Imogen hadn’t stopped trembling. She looked at the floor, not at them, but she talked with the relief and even eagerness of a person who had held onto a poisonous secret for too long and could finally confess it.
“Robert is a handsome man. Women would throw themselves at him. I suppose at one point I let myself go, and I accepted the idea that affairs would happen sometimes, and that it was only sex. But Mia was too close to home — she was James’ wife. I would always have to see Mia and imagine them together.”
James didn’t speak. He looked at Imogen as if he were seeing her for the first time. The only warm-blooded person in the family. The woman who had been a mother to Caitlin.
“I had to confront Robert, and I did. I said Mia was his niece! I could see Robert was overwhelmed by her, but he swore to me that it would end.”
There was a whimper from Robert. He was crying, although the tears hardly managed to make their way out of his bloated eyes.
Imogen's gaze was lost as she went on, "The two of you are so young and beautiful, you don’t know what it’s like to lose a love that has been there for a long time. We may seem like two old people to you but look …” She gestured toward a large photo of them on the mantelpiece. “We were young once, and madly in love. We were just like you are now.”
As Imogen went on speaking, Lee’s eyes wandered over the images of them laughing, holding each other: those were the good scenes of their marriage. The ones Imogen had wanted to preserve.
"I suffered as I aged, yes,” she continued, “because a man can still remain attractive, even in his sixties, and past forty-five it seems to a woman that the world is full of beautiful and much younger rivals. They’re everywhere. You see your husband looking at girls with desire, though his arm may still be over your shoulder. He is going to care for you, because you’ve grown roots together. There is the memory of complete happiness, there is all the time that passed — but he doesn’t want you. He wants a world of youth.”
Guilt and misery emanated from Robert, although he made no sound.
“But, you see, I never thought that Robert would leave,” Imogen said. “I thought his life was with me, even if his desires were elsewhere. I thought he understood that once he made one of these girls his wife, she would lose her appeal, and he would have lost me, the person who really knew and loved him.
“For the first time, Robert was talking about another woman, telling me that he was torn. Mia seemed like a way for him to start life again. He was struggling, but there was the very great chance, the almost certain chance, that she would win.”
Neither James nor Lee broke the silence that followed, and Imogen gathered her courage and raised her eyes to them.
“I went to talk to her. Robert didn’t know, so he couldn’t have stopped me. It was a weekend, and I remembered that she liked to walk on the beach in the afternoon, or by the cliff, and I went straight there to see if I could avoid gossip by avoiding the staff. When she saw me, she understood that I knew. She was such a child, wasn’t she? It was like only she and her needs existed. She apologized and said that she loved Robert, and she needed to think about the baby.” Imogen scoffed, though her face showed immense pain. “I didn’t know about the baby, but I understood then that it was all over for me. Of course Robert would leave me, he was finally going to be a father.”
The silence now lasted a little longer. Lee glanced at James and saw that he would be unable to say anything until Imogen got to the end of her story.
“I told Mia that she didn’t love Robert, that she loved James.” Imogen suddenly looked angry, as she would have looked at the cliff with Mia. “She admitted it. She said she would always love James, but that it was better to be loved, and that Robert loved her, not me. I saw it then, that Robert was her revenge on you, James, for not loving her. She was taking my whole life away on a whim, just to hurt you.”
There was still no answer, not a movement or word from her audience. She stopped and sighed. “I lost my head, and I pushed her. That’s all.”
The lady of the house smoothed her dressing gown over her knees. She would need to change soon, before she was taken away by the police. But she was almost done. “I came home and said nothing — but you called us later to tell us what had happened, and Robert understood what I had done. He didn’t sit weeping for Mia, though. He just held me, and he begged my pardon. He said that he had driven me to murder, and that he would never let me go to prison.” She gave another small laugh through tears that had begun falling on her cheeks. “Mia was dead, and Robert was back. And he loved me so much that he would do anything for me not to be condemned.”
James had to swallow twice before managing to say, “Do you mean that the death of a young woman and a baby seemed all right to you, as long as you kept your precious Robert — a liar, a cheat, a cheap ladies’ man?”
Imogen’s eyes were sad, lined and faded as she nodded. “Yes, James. You see, this is what love is after a while, when the crazy passion goes. You pretend to believe each other’s lies, and then you help hide each other’s crimes.”
Her nephew’s disgust showed on his face. “That’s not love.”
Turning toward Lee, Imogen shook her head slightly. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have wanted anything to happen to you. I guess Robert was protecting me.”
She gave a small smile at the thought.
After the police took them away, Lee said, “I want to go home.”
She showered to get rid of the dirt as James threw their things into a bag, and they returned to Deerholt. He drove in silence, his face pale. Every now and again he would give a small shake of the head, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had seen and heard. His wife had been unfaithful and the baby she was carrying not even his; his uncle had betrayed him; the aunt he loved was a murderess. The woman who had brought up Caitlin was going
to jail, and he would have to tell his sister.
His hand searched for hers, and he held it firmly. She had ended up in a box, under the earth. He shook his head more decisively, as if to dispel the vision, but still said nothing.
What was there to say? It felt as if they were inhabiting a strange unreality; as if they had stepped into another dimension, where nothing was or ever would be the same.
In Deerholt, James washed her again in the bathtub, claiming there was still dirt in her hair.
At night, when Lee lay against his chest, he said, “I wouldn’t have put an affair past Mia, but I didn’t see that she was actually having one — much less with Robert. She used to talk about how old and ridiculous he was, but he had something she wanted, I guess. He gave her attention.” James was silent for a moment, before adding, “I thought Mia had killed herself because telling me about the baby hadn’t made me love her. What an idiotic egoist I am.”
Lee thought of Attie, who had seen Mia for the emotional blackmailer she was. James had known she was playing games, but he had felt too guilty to see all her machinations. Mia had told James about the child, and then she had told Robert — and for that she had been killed.
“Sometimes people are good at hiding who they are,” Lee replied. “If you’re not cut of the same cloth, you can’t possibly imagine certain things.”
She should know. He had paid attention to her. He had known she wasn’t telling him everything, but he had never suspected her of being a criminal.
“I’m not sure the truth is better,” he said. “It’s still my fault.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. Human feelings are the most powerful force on earth, and we should never play with them. Not if we can help it. Look at the chain reaction that was set, the moment I married Mia. A person and an unborn child dead and two ruined, including a woman I loved like a mother. If I had not been selfish, none of this would have happened.”
