“You’re wrong,” Matt argued, “dead wrong.”
“Even when the other boys would come here to swim,” she said, “you couldn’t bear to be in this place. You told me so yourself.”
“I was an idiot to trust you.”
“Karma,” Mrs. Riley said softly. “Justice at last. Sixty years ago you wanted nothing to do with me, Thomas, not when you realized you could have the Scarborough girls.”
Matt turned his back on her. “She’s crazy, Megan. Let’s get out of here.”
“No.” My tongue felt thick in my mouth, and I struggled to speak clearly. “Stay away.”
“She’s a liar, a troublemaker,” Matt said. “I told you that before. You can’t believe her.”
“I do.”
He took two steps toward me. One more and he’d trap me behind the barrels. I moved my hand slowly, then shoved a barrel at him and ran past his grasp.
He whirled around. I faced him, my back to the wall, inching sideways, feeling my way along the rough wood, trying to get to the steps that led down to the basement.
“Listen to me. You’re not yourself,” he said.
“I know who I am.” The words came out slurred. “And who I was. So do you.”
He looked at Mrs. Riley. “What have you done to her?”
“I told her about karma,” the woman replied. “She knows what you know.”
“Megan, come here.” He held out his hand. “Come here!”
I shook my head and continued inching sideways.
“You must trust me.”
“I trusted you before.” My mouth moved slowly, my thoughts and words getting jumbled. “I trusted you when you were Thomas.”
Matt’s eyes darted around the room. His hands flexed, then he sprang at me. I lurched sideways and scrambled free. But he caught my shirt, yanking me back. Then something hissed and snapped between us. Matt let go, quickly pulling back his hand, burned by the rope Mrs. Riley had brought down like a whip.
I rushed blindly ahead, crashing into a plank of wood, part of the open stairs rising to the next floor. I clung to it. I had to get up. Had to get away from him.
Matt pushed back Mrs. Riley and came after me. “If you won’t come, I’ll drag you out of here.”
I started to climb, but it felt as if the stair, the entire room, was tilting. I could barely hang on.
Matt stood at the bottom, studying me.
“No closer,” I said. I didn’t want either of us to die.
He put a foot on the bottom plank. “Something’s wrong with you, Megan.”
“No closer!”
I pulled myself up another step, then another. It was like moving in a dream, climbing in slow motion.
Matt started up the steps, but Mrs. Riley came after him like a cat. I saw something flash in her hand. Matt dropped backward. He turned and struggled with her, grabbing her wrists. A knife flew across the floor.
“What have you done to her, Lydia?” he demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Liar!” he shouted. “You’ve poisoned her.”
The woman fought to get free. He pinned her hands behind her, then turned his face up to me. “Don’t run from me, Megan.”
I took two more steps up.
“Can’t you understand? You need help, medical help.
Come down.”
There was a pipe propping open the trapdoor. If I could get through the door and close it, I could use my weight to keep it shut.
“Please,” Matt said, grasping the ladder with one hand, “don’t let Lydia do this to us.”
I reached up to pull myself through.
“April!” he cried. “Don’t leave me again!”
It was the name he had written on my heart. I turned to look down at him. My foot slipped. Reaching out wildly, I grabbed hold of the pipe that propped open the door. For a moment it held me, then I felt its cold iron slide through my fingers, felt myself falling backward. I heard a rushing sound in my ears and plunged into darkness.
seventeen
I opened my eyes in a white room with pale-striped drapes.
It smelled like raspberry bathroom cleaner.
“Where am I?”
“With me.”
I turned toward Matt’s voice.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
I lifted my head and glanced around. “Well, since I’m in a hospital, I can’t be feeling too well.”
He grinned. “You’re talking like yourself, and you’ve been acting like yourself. The nurse said if you pulled out your IV one more time, she’d staple it to you.”
“It’s out,” I observed.
“The doctor said that you’d come around soon enough, and then they’d irrigate you.”
“Oh, that sounds like fun.” I tried to sit up.
“Easy,” he said, and slid his arm behind me to help.
I rested back against him. “Thanks. You don’t want your arm back, do you?”
“Nah. Slide over.” He sat next to me on the bed. It felt good, the way he kept me close.
“Do you remember anything?”
“Yeah.” I took a deep breath. “If it was a dream, I’m crazy, and if it was real, some awful things have happened.”
“Some awful things have happened,” he said gently. “You may not want to talk about it yet.”
“The sooner the better,” I told him.
He leaned forward to study my face, then sat back again, convinced. “All right. You, Lydia, and I were at the mill, on the first floor. Do you remember our conversation?”
“You talked about who killed Avril, but it was confusing.
The sounds and images kept overlapping. Sometimes I was in the past, sometimes the present.”
“You were drugged.”
“Drugged? But I didn’t have anything to eat all day,” I protested. “Just tea at Mrs. Riley’s.”
Matt said nothing, waiting for me to figure it out. I felt as if I’d just been punched in the stomach. “She did it. She did to me what she did to Avril.”
He lay his cheek against my forehead. “I almost lost you a second time.”
“I remember that she tried to keep you away from me. I thought she was protecting me.”
“She didn’t want me to interfere before the poison took full effect,” he said.
I shivered. “She wanted to kill me, before I could kill her. I remember being at the top of the stairs. My foot slipped and I reached up for something. A pipe, but it gave way. I started falling. I don’t remember landing, just falling.”
One corner of Matt’s mouth turned up in that smirky smile of his, then I noticed the wrap on his left ankle. “Oh, no! Tell me I didn’t.”
“Okay. You didn’t come down like a ballerina,” he said, then laughed at me. “It’s just a sprain. But it’s the last time I’m catching you, so don’t try it again.”
“Thank you,” I said meekly. “How about Mrs. Riley-where is she? What has she told people?”
He didn’t answer right away. I felt his arms tighten around me. “Megan, Lydia has died. The pipe struck her.”
I went cold all over. “Oh, God!”
“It’s all right,” he said. “Everything’s all right now.”
“I did it,” I whispered.
“It was an accident.”
“But I did it!”
“You didn’t mean to. You know that.”
“Mrs. Riley said it would happen, intentional or not.
Karma.”
My eyes burned. Matt pulled my face against his and let my tears run down his cheeks.
Finally I reached for the tissue box.
“Okay?” he asked gently.
“For now.”
“I’ll be around later, too,” he said.
I looked up into his eyes. “When did you know about usabout us back then?”
“I dreamed about you, saw your face, from the time I was nine or ten. When I got to high school, I talked to Lydia and she told me about reincarna
tion. I thought she was nuts.
Then, when I described you, she said you looked like my great-aunt Avril. That’s all I needed to hear-l was out of there.
“I dated every girl who’d go out with me, but I couldn’t get interested in any of them. Finally-maybe it was sheer willpower-l stopped dreaming of you. A few months later Grandmother told me she had invited my cousin for a visit. I turned around and there you were.” He framed my face with his hands.
“You looked stunned,” I recalled.
“I was.”
“I still find it strange that Grandmother asked me here.”
“I know that she doesn’t believe in reincarnation,” Matt said. “Still, your resemblance to Avril unnerved her.
Grandmother’s a lot like you-she faces her fears-so she invited you. While we waited for you to come, she seemed so tormented, so obsessed with you, I disliked you before you arrived-at least I thought I did.”
I laid my head on Matt’s shoulder.
“Does Grandmother have any idea what’s going on now?” I asked.
“She knows that Lydia killed Avril, that she shifted her own motive for murdering Avril to Grandmother. Earlier today Sophie and Alex came to the house looking for you with information about redcreep. When I put together what they had learned with what Grandmother had told me the other night, I knew the timeline didn’t work out. Grandmother gave the dose too early-and gave too little. Someone else had a hand in it. We told Grandmother that and she called Lydia. Jamie said his mother had gone to collect some plants at the mill. Which is where you told Sophie and Alex you would be. Sophie was scared, said she had feared all day that something would happen there. I rushed to the mill.
Grandmother called 911.”
He buried his face in my hair. “I know I’ve been tough on you, Megan. I did whatever I could to keep distance between us. It was useless. At the party how do you think I knew you were watching out for Sophie?”
“I must have been pretty obvious.”
“And I was pretty busy watching you and Alex,” he said. “I was so jealous of him I thought I’d explode.”
I laughed, then covered my mouth.
He pulled away my hand and gazed at my mouth, as he had that night. “And then you tried to sell me on Sophie.”
“I didn’t know I had a chance.” I touched the curve of his lips with the tip of my finger.
“Megan, I love you. I will always love you.”
I swallowed hard.
“Scared?” he asked. “Yeah. How about you?”
“Even more than the first time,” he said. “I know what it feels like to lose you.”
Then he bent his head and kissed me.
Sometime after Matt left, Grandmother came in. I had dozed off and wasn’t aware of her until I felt her hand touch my hair, brushing it back from my face.
“You must get well,” she said, her voice shaking. “Megan, you must heal.”
I opened one eye. “Are you telling me what to do again?”
Grandmother stepped back quickly. I tried to catch her hand but couldn’t.
“Sorry. I was just being funny, just making a joke-trying to.”
I struggled to sit up. “You sounded so serious, Grandmother.”
“I was serious. You nearly died.”
We both looked away.
“Thanks for calling emergency,” I told her. “I owe you my life.”
“You owe me nothing.”
I frowned at her. “Because you don’t want me to?
Because that connects us somehow?”
A long uncomfortable silence followed.
I sighed. “It’s going to take a while for us to get used to each other, isn’t it?”
“I am who I am, Megan,” she replied. “I’m old. I can’t change now.”
“Change?” I repeated. “I wasn’t even going to try. Can’t we just stay as we are and get used to each other?”
I saw the small flicker of light in her eyes and the corners of her mouth turn up a little. “That,” she said, “may be feasible.”
eighteen
A spite what I said about staying the way we were, I changed. I, who have always believed in speaking my mind and made it my mission to uncover the truth, have found myself keeping secrets. Sometimes life is more complicated than the simple rules we make for it.
In the morning that followed my poisoning, Grandmother, Matt, and I agreed to keep silent. Jamie believed his mother had become mentally confused, unintentionally giving me something that made me ill. He came to the hospital to tell us that, even brought the teacup from which I had drunk, so it could be tested and the doctors would know how to treat me. But I had already been diagnosed with an overdose of redcreep. We threw the cup in the trash.
Sophie and Alex came to the hospital together that day. I saw the brightness in Sophie’s eyes, then the delicate chain around her neck.
“That pendant looks familiar,” I said.
She smiled. “Alex bought it for me.”
In the year since, they’ve become the best of friends again, and the best of sweethearts-again.
As for Grandmother, she, too, has changed, though I certainly wouldn’t point it out to her. I suppose it’s hard to keep your life the same when two extra grandsons, my rough-and-tumble brothers, come barreling through on holidays.
Matt’s at Chase College now on a lacrosse scholarship.
I’m applying to colleges in Maryland. And we’re keeping another secret, though maybe not as well as we thought.
Just the other day Jamie stopped me on High Street. “You know,” he said. “I make wedding cakes.”
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Legacy of Lies Page 13
