I felt the familiar curl in my stomach. That delicious tightening I felt every time I laid eyes on him.
Cecelia sat on the sofa; her feet were tucked up under her, and a lock of blonde hair fell across her face. She was knitting—a big, nubby, ivory thing fanned out over her legs. An afghan, maybe. Or a circus tent, who knew. I wondered if she and the doctor were still playing their twisted game of push-and-pull, ripping each other’s clothes off in the observation room and using Heath as their pawn.
Cecelia sent Heath a reproving look, then dropped her knitting. “Sit, my dear. Read or work on the birdhouse. Something.”
“Fuck the birdhouses.”
“Heathcliff.”
“Don’t call me that.”
She cleared her throat carefully. “Sam. There’s schoolwork to be done. Reading.”
“I finished.”
“All of it?”
He tromped to the window, and she resumed her work.
“What happened at the end?” she asked lightly.
“Everyone interesting died,” he snapped. “And the ones who didn’t, got married.”
She laughed, but then shook her head and sighed. He dropped down beside her and let his head fall on her shoulder. She shrugged it off immediately, but the needles in her hands stopped moving. There was a moment when neither of them moved. Then Heath scooted down to the far end of the sofa, stretched out, and gingerly laid his head on her lap.
“Heathcliff,” she whispered. And then laid her hand on his hair and began to stroke it.
As she worked her fingers through his hair, his eyelids fluttered closed, and I could see hers lower too, as she watched him. Then, without warning, her hand stilled.
“We shouldn’t,” she said. Her voice sounded tired.
“You said he went into town.”
“I know, I know, but he’ll look at the tape later. And he’ll be angry.”
“I like it when he gets angry. It’s funny.”
“It’s not funny. I hate the way he treats you.”
“I don’t mind it. It’s worth it.”
She was silent.
His voice rose. “I just want you to touch my hair, okay? Just touch my goddamn hair. Is that too much to ask?”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“You can,” he said. “He doesn’t fucking own you. Or does he? Does that lunatic get to tell you how to spend every minute of every day, like he does me?”
She spoke calmly. “I’m not your mother, Sam. I don’t do the things a mother would do. And besides, it feels like it’s . . .” She faltered.
“Feels like it’s what?”
Her hand went to her chest.
“What?”
“Like maybe . . . it’s inappropriate.”
He stared at her, openmouthed. “What are you talking about?”
She shook her head, but kept playing with the buttons on her blouse. He straightened and shook his head.
“Oh, God. My God.” He laughed, but it was a sharp, harsh sound. “You think I want to . . .” He laughed again, this time a deep eruption from the depths of his belly. “Oh my God. No. You nitwit. You sad, desperate, lonely, dried-up old woman.” He moved closer to her, leaned into her face, and her eyes widened. “You want to know what I want? You want to know what I dream about?”
She didn’t move. It looked like she’d stopped breathing.
His voice was a whisper. “I dream of velvet skin. Of long, silky hair. A perfect face and full, soft lips. Green eyes, blue eyes, brown—I don’t care. I picture them closed when I touch firm tits, flat stomach. A tight, wet—”
She slapped him, hard, across the cheek.
He recoiled, then charged into the adjacent room, the classroom/kitchen combo. Underneath the mirror, there was a long cherry buffet where he stopped. Gripping it with both hands, he reared back his head and banged it against the edge of the wood.
I gasped.
He lifted his head and did it again. Then a third, fourth, fifth excruciating time. When he lifted his head, blood was pouring down his face from the gash on his forehead, dripping, separating, forking in the shape of a tree’s branches down his face and neck. He blinked as the blood coated his eye. I clapped my hand over my mouth when he smiled. His teeth were entirely red, a demon’s fangs behind his lips.
In the next room, Cecelia screamed. She ran to him, just as his knees buckled. She caught him, and he reached up to touch the split skin on his head.
“No, don’t touch it.” She pushed his hand away. “Oh, my dear, what have you done?”
His teeth glistened, one wild, white eye fastened on her.
“I have no pity,” he mumbled. “That’s what Heathcliff says in the book, isn’t it? I have no pity, because I’m not normal, but you are. I’ve hurt myself, and you feel pity. So now you want to touch me.”
She gathered him into her arms. “Yes, yes, my darling. My dearest dear.”
He pressed his face against her shoulder, smearing blood across the sleeve of her blouse. She touched his hair, raking her fingers through it over and over, then pressed a kiss on his head. She rested her cheek against him.
He reached up and took her hand. Worked the ring from her fourth finger, over her knuckle and off. She watched him slide it onto his pinky and study it intently.
I looked down at my left hand, still bare. The ring I’d misplaced—supposedly Heath’s grandmother’s ring—it had actually been Cecelia’s.
On the tape Heath spoke. “This is what people who love each other do. They give each other rings.” He looked back up at her. “Don’t let him tell you I can’t love. Don’t let him tell you that.”
She sobbed and rocked him for a little while longer. When they finally stood, they were locked into each other’s orbit. Like there was nothing and no one else in the universe but them. A chill ran up my back, all the way to the top of my head.
Cecelia sniffed and smoothed her hair. Cupped his face with her hands. “I’ve left the keys to the Nissan under your pillow, Sam. Take it. Take it now.”
For a minute it was as if she hadn’t said a word. Or he didn’t understand.
“Go,” she said faintly. Then Heath tore away, bolting out of the camera’s frame. I heard a scuffling sound, a slamming door, and a keening wail from Cecelia as she sank to the floor.
A loud thud in the observation room shook me from the iPad. The wall separating me from the dining room shuddered, and I found myself staring into the bulging eyes of a grotesquely contorted face. It was a deep purple, the smashed skin, and the veins along the temples pulsed. Even the veins in the eyes were visible, like tiny red starbursts against the glass. Cerny’s eyelid twitched against the mirror—an attempt to blink.
The iPad bobbled in my hands and clattered to the floor. I backpedaled, propelling the chair back against the far wall. Cerny, still pressed against the mirror, was beating his fists on it, clawing at the glass for purchase. I fisted both hands and pressed them to my mouth. Now I could see behind Cerny. Heath was holding him fast by the neck with the doctor’s own brown silk tie. He worked the tie, twisting it, cinching it tighter and tighter.
I screamed.
Cerny clawed at his neck, but it was useless. The tie had cut into his skin and blood was seeping into it. Changing the brown silk to black.
I leapt up from the chair and yanked at the door, but it still wouldn’t budge.
I turned back to the mirror, just in time to see Heath pull Cerny back by the tie, then slam his head into the mirror again. It cracked—on their side, not mine—and the doctor’s cheek split open. Heath jerked the doctor around by the tie and smashed the other side of his head against the mirror. Again and again, he bashed Cerny’s head against the glass until I heard a sickening crunch—either the layers of thick glass or the man’s skull—and Heath finally released him. Cerny hit the sideboard, then slid to the floor with a thud.
Heath backed up a few steps, panting and looking down. I couldn’t see the doctor, but I knew he wa
s dead. There was no way he wasn’t after that beating. Heath lifted his blood-speckled face, and although I knew it was impossible, it seemed like his eyes were looking directly into mine. And then he calmly walked into the next room.
I took a couple of steps back. I hit the wall—no, it was the door—and, like a needle finding the groove on a vinyl record, my mind switched into flight mode. Maybe the mirror was weakened enough that I could break it out with the chair. Or maybe the table would do the trick. If that didn’t work, there might be an air vent—
The door slammed open and I screamed. Heath was still breathing hard, and blood was spattered across his shirt. I moved away, the repelling pole of a magnet. My breathing had shallowed, matching his. My heart was beating so hard it hurt.
“No,” I said. “Stay away from me.”
Heath held out a hand. “Please.”
I heard a low groaning sound—half crying, half protest—and realized it was me. “You killed the birds. You killed the doctor. And Glenys.”
“Please, Daphne,” he said. “Please don’t be afraid of me. I can’t take it if you’re afraid of me.”
I couldn’t say anything—there were no words to reassure him—and I couldn’t stop myself from making the strange wailing sound. I was shattered. Broken into a million pieces.
“I had to do it,” he said. “Don’t you understand? To be free.”
I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking and pressed them to my face. It was wet with tears. I didn’t even know I’d been crying.
“He kept me prisoner here, for twelve years. He abused me emotionally, mentally, even physically. It was torture. Real, honest-to-God torture. I can’t—” His voice broke, and he swiped at his eyes with one bloodstained sleeve. “I didn’t kill Cecelia. He did. He lured her back here. He let us see each other again because he knew how to twist the knife—and then he killed her.” I noticed he was crying too. Tears had tracked through the blood.
Do psychopaths cry?
“So it was all about Baskens, then—the nightmares? That was why you came here? Because you wanted to kill Cerny?”
“The nightmares were about more than just this place. They were about other things—thoughts I couldn’t stop, thoughts I couldn’t make sense of.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“You know,” he said. “You know.”
“No, I don’t!” I shouted.
“I loved Cecelia,” he said. His voice was calm now. Level. “She was the only mother I ever really knew. I could never hurt her, just like I would never hurt you. She and Cerny had some kind of sick obsession with each other. In addition to the obsession they had with me.”
He moved to the chair and sat, his arms resting on his knees. For one crazy second, I imagined I had inadvertently been swept up in an elaborate stage play. Now it was over, time for the curtain call and the bows. Time for us to get in our car and drive home and get back to real life.
“I may be a psychopath,” he said tiredly. “But it takes one to know one. Cerny was antisocial too. He was a warped man who manipulated us so he could inflict his abusive fantasies on us. Science may say I have a disorder—they may call me antisocial or oppositional—but that doesn’t make me any less deserving of love. I didn’t deserve to live in this torture chamber.”
“No. You didn’t,” I said.
“He told me, when I turned eighteen, he would publish his brilliant paper. He would be the first to achieve the impossible—identifying, treating, and curing a psychopath. He would be showered with awards. And I would too.” He shook his head. Laughed. “But you can’t grow empathy in someone, like a kidney in a petri dish. If he was any kind of doctor, he would’ve known that. Matthew Cerny never wanted me to get well. He wanted to entertain himself.”
My throat constricted. “So—”
He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “You know what you want to say. Say it.”
“You weren’t cured.” The words fell out of my mouth like broken glass all around me. And now I couldn’t step without slicing myself open.
“I told myself I was. I wanted to be. I ran away. Even though I did everything to forget. This place—his existence—was a thorn in my side that I could never dig out. That just festered and infected everything. The nightmares. The fantasies. I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to face it.”
I felt a weight in my chest, hot and crushing. It was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. “You could’ve reported him to the authorities.”
“But they would’ve blamed Cecelia too. Maybe put her away forever. I couldn’t do that to her. She was as much a victim as me.”
Heath stood and limped toward me. I let him get close enough that the air between us fairly hummed with electricity. More than just my hands were trembling now. He took a lock of my hair and wound it around his fingers. Brought it to his nose and inhaled. His eyes shuttered closed, and his face lowered to mine. His skin was rough. Slicked with blood.
“Please say you understand why I had to do what I did,” he whispered into my ear. “Please say you won’t leave me.”
I pictured Cerny’s blood smearing from Heath’s skin onto mine. He took hold of my arms, his touch sending a series of shocks zinging through me.
“Everything you told me about Chantal and Mr. Al and Omega—it meant so much to me.”
He was holding me so tightly now, I couldn’t move.
“When you told me, I knew that finally there was someone who understood what I’d been through. What I had to do. We’re the same, Daphne, and it helps me so much to know you’re with me now. That we’re together.”
He wrapped his arms around me, and I closed my eyes. Inhaled his scent—woody, animal scent and copper tang of blood. A brief moment passed, images flashing in my head: Heath whispering in my ear at the photo shoot. His lips on mine. Us at home, in bed, sunlight slanting in from the blinds. The light catching on my ring, the diamond band that he’d taken from Cecelia’s finger, casting rainbows on the wall.
In the frozen moment, my senses telescoped to a mere pinpoint, my brain slowing.
This is your fate, it said, where your life has been leading all along.
You are both damaged. Both beyond repair. But together, you make something whole.
And then, Heath’s arm encircled my back, and he lowered his face and kissed me. Like with every kiss before, I felt the softness of his lips, tasted him, breathed him in. Then, just like it always happened in fairy tales, when the handsome prince’s kiss breaks the spell, my heart woke up.
Friday, October 19
Night
“It wasn’t that she was beautiful—or plain or ugly. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember what she looked like. That wasn’t the point.”
“What was the point, Heath?”
“Connection, I suppose.”
“But that isn’t possible for you, Heath. Isn’t that what this is all about?”
“I’ve found a way, I think. I just don’t believe it’s sustainable. I need you to help me adapt it.”
“So you’re telling me that you are, indeed, able to connect with another person?”
“If it’s the right person, yes. If I think there’s something more beneath the hair and the makeup and the clothes. But I can only truly know if I’m able to get to that place—”
“What place?”
“The place beyond the hurt. When the hurt finally opens the door—I only know then whether a true connection is possible—”
Something on the TV across the room catches my eye. A local news alert. MISSING, in a red banner, crawls across the bottom of the screen. HOLLY ELAINE IDLEWINE, it reads. Along with a picture.
It’s the picture that stops my heart.
She is dressed for a night of club hopping in a tight black dress. She has long honey-colored, flat-ironed hair, beige lipstick on her pursed lips, and a fringe of blue around her eyes.
Blue eyelash extensions.
At that exact moment, there’s a fla
sh just outside the door of the police station. A green Toyota Tacoma truck driving past with Luca at the wheel.
Chapter Thirty
Friday, October 19
Afternoon
I stopped in the doorway of the dining room. Cerny lay on the floor, one arm flung behind him, legs splayed. A lake of blood pooled under him, already congealing into the cracks of the floorboards and around the slivers of glass from the broken mirror. The side of his head was a caved-in mess of blood and white bone. I even thought I could see his brain.
But I didn’t have time to get sick or panic. I had to figure out how to get away from the man who had his hand resting protectively at my waist like he owned me. I could feel him monitoring my reaction. And the truth was, I knew I should be reacting—just standing here had to look suspicious, so I buried my face in my hands. My eyes were dry, though, and my mind raced.
What was I going to do? Stab Heath with a kitchen knife and make a run for it? The idea of it was ridiculous. He was taller than me, stronger and faster as well. I’d never overpower him. Never outrun him.
Stay calm. The answer will come.
Heath cleared his throat. “It’s terrible, I know.”
I nodded. He reached out for me, and I let him catch my hand.
“We have to go back,” I finally said. “To the woods where Cecelia is. We should be there when the police arrive.”
He didn’t answer, and then I knew.
“You didn’t call, did you? The police aren’t coming?”
“No.”
I thought fast. “Well, they will, eventually. Two people are dead. Luca’s going to come back and find them. Or maybe Reggie Teague.”
“We need to make a plan,” he said. “Figure out how we’re going to explain what happened here and why we left.”
“We could throw them off the mountain,” I said.
He blinked at me. “What?”
“No one would find them for months, if ever.”
I had the sensation that time was speeding up. Like I’d jumped off a cliff, into a rushing river that was sucking me down, pulling me toward a destination I couldn’t see, but that was inevitable.
Every Single Secret Page 25
