In the Blood
Page 28
It’s all right, Dad, I told him. I failed her, too.
He tried to argue with me, but he was just too physically weak. We made peace, I think. We are bound by blood, but we are strangers of circumstance. We are so far apart that we cannot come together now. If I could feel more, I imagine I’d feel deeply sad about that.
I had one request for him, and he was happy to comply. A couple of weeks later, the paperwork came in the mail from Sky. It has been signed by all parties.
They always have Luke and me meet in this comfortable, sunny room. They call it “The Morning Room.” There’s a fireplace and some plush couches. Fresh flowers in plastic vases are placed artfully on end tables, books are arranged carefully on shelves. It is a soft and comforting place, pretty even. Except for the armed guard that sits just outside the door.
Today, Luke is sitting by the window when I arrive. His twelfth birthday has just passed, and it’s interesting how he seems to change every time I visit. He is growing up, getting bigger. It fills me with dread.
Usually, we just sit. I talk about innocuous things—the weather, events in The Hollows. I avoid anything loaded. I don’t talk about our father, or his mother. I don’t talk about Beck. I talk about television shows, movies, and video games. He stares blankly out the window. He hasn’t uttered a word since the night he was admitted.
But today, there’s an electricity in the air, something palpable that I can feel. When the door closes behind me, the hair on my arms stands on end, and someone walks over my grave.
I take my usual seat as far away from Luke as the room will allow.
“Hey, Luke,” I say. “How are you feeling?”
How can you live with it? Sitting there and talking to him after what he did to you? To me? Beck asked me this morning, tears in her eyes.
“It’s still pretty warm out,” I go on. “But a cold front is moving in.”
He’s a monster.
“Did you hear the news?” he says.
I practically jump out of my skin. I haven’t heard his voice in over a year. It sounds strange, a crackly high and low to it. I try not to show my surprise.
“What news?”
“The nutty professor bit it.” He is still looking out the window.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I know people,” he says. “People tell me things. I think you know what I mean.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” I say. But I do. I know exactly what he means. He means that he is manipulating the staff.
“And it sounds like dear old Dad’s not far behind.” He has a young boy’s voice, but an old man’s cadence and phrasing. Very unsettling.
“He’s not well, no,” I say.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” he says. “You can take the man out of death row …” He lets his voice trail off.
“I have a friend here,” he says when I remain silent. “A nurse. She’s a sad person. She lost a son about my age a couple years back. I don’t think she’s over it.”
What is he trying to tell me? I feel myself go very still. The air in the room grows thick and overwarm. Again, I think silence might be the best answer.
Eventually, he turns to look at me. His eyes are glassy, probably from the medications they are giving him. I know the list, since I consult with his doctor every week. I disagree with his being medicated. There is no medication for someone like Luke. He is a psychopath, a ruthless, calculating machine with no empathy or feeling for other people. Whatever window might have existed to teach him something that approached empathy, as Dr. Chang insists is possible, has closed. Luke is a tiger cub in a cage. He will only grow and become a stronger, more efficient predator. He will never be anything other than what he is. He can only be managed.
He shifts in his seat, keeps his eyes on me as if waiting for me to speak. He wants me to ask the questions he knows I have. But I don’t say anything. I want him to start, know he will.
Then, “You know they lied to me? My mother and Hewes—they tried to trick me. But I knew right away who you were.”
“How?”
He wrinkles his nose at me. “I recognized you. Ever heard of Google?”
I think of the searches I have seen on his computer. There are no secrets anymore, not really—not even from an eleven-year-old.
“And I made sure he knew I figured it out during our private sessions.”
“Your private sessions?” The thought of that is creepy on so many different levels. I can just imagine the two of them, each of them running a separate agenda, manipulating and using each other. Who was the predator and who was the prey?
“Once I figured it out, he told me that he’d been talking to our father, that he wanted to help us reunite as brothers. But I knew he was in love with you—which is sick. And weird. I mean who could love you?”
I smile a little at that. He can’t hurt me but he still wants to.
“So you talked about me? In your private sessions?”
Luke shifts again, as if physically uncomfortable. He is growing more agitated, more restless.
“He never cared about me at all,” he says. “He never wanted to help me get better.”
He seems upset about it, which takes me aback. Does Luke know that there is something wrong with him? Has he hoped to get better? I keep reminding myself that he is just a child. I had been no less ill at his age. We aren’t the same, of course. I’m not a sociopath. I have problems, but I can feel, love, have empathy. I don’t see others as pieces in a game I play. That’s why therapy and guidance and medication help me. Can he be helped? I don’t know.
I still keep silent. There is so much I want to know, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of asking.
“I followed you; I was always following you. Do you know that?”
I shrug. I’d guessed as much, thinking back on the dirt on his tires. The form I saw in the woods that night at the graveyard.
“And that night I saw you go into the woods; I could tell you were upset and then that girl followed you. I called Hewes on my mom’s cell phone, which I’d lifted, and we went together. We saw you. We saw you with her. It was gross.”
“Why did you follow?”
“Why not? It was an opportunity. He wanted to know you. I wanted to hurt you. We both got what we wanted. Only, he didn’t get what he expected. And he went a little crazy after that. I wanted to kill her. He wanted to wait until the anniversary of the night your mother died. Which I had to admit was pretty good.”
The crazy leading the crazy. Wow. It is amazing any of us has survived. But because I’m not as crazy I still have to ask.
“So what was it all about?” I ask finally. “What was the point?”
It is part of the reason I keep coming here week after week, not to take care of him, or to let him know he isn’t alone. I know one day he is going to have to crack and tell me all the things he must be dying to tell me. The corners of his mouth turn up in an ugly facsimile of a smile.
“Langdon, the scavenger hunt, kidnapping Beck,” I say, just for clarification.
“The point?” he says. He seems annoyed. “I thought you knew.”
“Enlighten me.”
“The point was to win.” His lips are dry, chapped white. His skin has an unhealthy gray pallor. But he undeniably looks like me, except he will be much bigger than I am when he finishes growing.
“It was a game,” I say, just to clarify.
“You know it was,” he says. “You agreed to play. You wanted to play.”
I almost laugh. “And who won?”
“I did, of course.”
I sweep my arm around the room. “How do you figure?”
“I exposed your secrets,” he says. “That was the first thing. You were a liar and a poser and I wanted the whole world to know it.”
He looks at me, waiting for a reaction like any little boy. I don’t give him one. “P.S.,” he adds. “I think you looked better as a girl.”
I offer him a wan smile, whic
h he doesn’t seem to like. He shifts uncomfortably and leans forward in his seat.
“Langdon is dead,” he goes on. “He’ll never be able to tell anyone how I used and manipulated him, teased him into helping me. Not that anyone would have believed him. No one ever believes a pedophile.”
“Was he that?”
“He was if I say he was,” Luke snaps. He is getting wobbly, not enjoying my flat affect. Rachel was emotional; she’d admitted as much. She responded to Luke, gave him a lot of energy when he acted out. He liked that, because it fueled him. But he will get nothing from me.
Maybe Langdon had been a pedophile. He was obsessed with me, that was clear. I was a girlish boy, or a boyish man—in either case, pretty much a freak. So maybe that’s what he liked—not men, not women exactly. Or maybe he was trying to help me at first. But he was unstable, and Luke pushed him over the edge. Now that Langdon was dead, there was no way to know. Okay, Luke, you won that one.
“He got me the key to the caretaker’s building, by the way,” he says. “The Hollows Historical Society has an office on your campus. It was nothing for him to take the key.”
He is true to his word: I’ll give him that. He’d promised to tell me everything when the game was done.
“My mother is in prison,” he says, ticking off another win. “So I’m out from under her.”
Here, I smile a little. I can’t help it.
“And soon our father will be dead.”
“So?”
“So, I’ll be an orphan more or less,” he says. “A filthy-rich orphan. And our good friend Sky Lawrence will make all the arrangements for me to be well cared for. Once I’m well, of course. And I have been feeling better.”
Of course, Rachel and Luke knew Sky. He managed my father’s money and Luke was one of the beneficiaries of his will.
“So all of this was about the money?” I say, playing dumb.
“No, stupid,” he says. His voice goes up an octave. “This was about me being able to do whatever I want. Kids never ever get to do what they want. I told you that already. Weren’t you listening to me? I’m free. I’m rich. I get to do anything I want to do from now on.” He is actually gritting his teeth, sticking his jaw out at me. It isn’t pretty.
I stand up from my chair and put on my coat.
“Well,” I say, “congrats, kiddo. You win again. I’m not a sore loser and you played a good game. The long con, right? Nice one.”
I move toward the door, and I can feel the daggers of his gaze on my back. I rest my hand on the handle and turn around.
“There’s just one thing,” I say. “I went down to Florida to see our father. Man, it’s hot down there. I don’t know how people do it.”
His face goes slack.
“He signed over your guardianship to me,” I say. I love the feel of those words on my tongue. “Your mom? She knows she’s not going to be in a position to care for you for a while. So she signed, too. I’m your primary guardian. And the guardian of your trust.”
His whole body goes rigid, and what little color he has drains from his face.
“You’ll be a legal adult at the age of eighteen,” I say. “But I’ll control the money until you’re thirty. And there are lots of conditions built into the trust, which we will discuss when you’re feeling better. Nothing big—do well in school, stay out of trouble, community service, therapy—stuff like that.”
He makes a move toward me, but I hold up a hand and he freezes. “Before you get any ideas,” I go on. “If anything suspicious happens to me, to your mother, to Beck, or to anyone or anything I care about—all of that money will be divided equally between Fieldcrest and Dr. Chang’s school in Florida. You won’t get a dime.”
He is a quivering statue of rage, his mouth hanging open in a silent scream.
“Do you understand me, brother?” I ask.
He comes racing toward me then, issuing a kind of strangled warrior’s cry, but I am already out the door and close it quickly behind me. He crashes against the glass, his face a red mask of fury. The guard, who had been dozing, rises quickly to his feet.
Our faces, mine and Luke’s, are inches from each other, separated by thick glass. I look him right in the eyes and mouth the word I have been dying to say since our first afternoon together.
“Checkmate.”
acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to:
My husband Jeffrey and daughter Ocean Rae for their tireless enthusiasm and support and abiding love. Words are never enough, but hopefully I show you every day.
My brilliant editor Sally Kim for knowing that I needed to write this book even before I did and for helping me make it everything it needed to be.
My amazing agent Elaine Markson has been a guiding hand, a loving and supportive friend, and the champion of my career. I’d be lost without her.
The stellar team at Touchstone, including: Carolyn Reidy, Susan Moldow, Michael Selleck, Liz Perl, Louise Burke, Stacy Creamer, David Falk, Brian Belfiglio, Cherlynne Li, Wendy Sheanin, Paula Amendolara, Tracy Nelson, Colin Shields, Chrissy Festa, Charlotte Gill, Gary Urda, Gregory Hruska, Louise Burke, Michelle Fadlalla, Bryony Weiss, Teresa Brumm, Meredith Vilarello, Ana Paula De Lima, Paul O’Halloran, Alanna Ramirez, and Allegra Ben-Amotz. All of these people have made me feel welcome in my new home and bring their own particular style and talent to the table. And I can never heap enough praise on the sales team, out there on the front lines in this super-competitive business, getting books into as many hands as possible. It’s everything; thank you.
My amazing network of family and friends who cheer me through the good days and carry me through the challenging ones. My parents, Joseph and Virginia Miscione, my brother Joe, and his wife Tara are my unflagging supporters. It means so much. Heather Mikesell and Shaye Areheart are two dear, dear friends and early readers whose advice and input I rely on too heavily. Marion Chartoff and Tara Popick, my two oldest friends, have been with me every step of the way.
JEFF UNGER
LISA UNGER is an award-winning New York Times and internationally bestselling author. Her novels have sold more than 1.5 million copies and have been translated into twenty-six languages. She lives in Florida.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Unger
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First Touchstone hardcover edition January 2014
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Designed by Akasha Archer
Jacket Design by Christopher Lin
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Unger, Lisa, 1970–
In the blood / Lisa Unger.
pages cm
“A Touchstone Book.”
1. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3621.N486I58 2014
813’.6—dc23
2013014802
ISBN 978-1-4516-9117-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-9119-1 (ebook)
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part 2
Chapter 27
Chapter 28