Speak of the Devil: A Psychological Thriller

by Britney King

  It’s useless, the flailing. There is no give. I am held under.

  I count. This is how I know whether I will live or die. At sixty-two, I am brought up. I am choking. I can’t breathe. No air will ever be enough.

  “Did you betray the church?”

  No.

  Back down into the water I go. My lungs seize. There is no oxygen left inside of me. Blood rushes to my head. I don’t think I can hang on, not when it would be easier to give up.

  “Are you telling the truth about the mark?”

  I say nothing. If I make him wait, it gives me time to suck in air.

  The question is repeated. It’s muffled. The lack of oxygen, probably. I only half hear the words. But I know what they want.

  “Are you telling the truth about the mark?”

  Yes.

  My head is forced underwater. I just want to sleep. I hope Matthew remembers me. I hope Sean doesn’t let him forget.

  The air hits my face. Or is it water? I can’t tell.

  “Why did the mission fail?”

  My face plunges toward the water with my eyes and mouth open. I don’t bother to count this time. It’s never been this bad before. All I see is Matthew’s face. I hope he knows how much I love him.

  “Why did the mission fail?”

  I am being pulled upward. Stuck halfway between life and death, I am choking. I am vomiting. I am choking on my vomit.

  “One last time—why did you fail to complete the mission?”

  I don’t know. I feel like I am screaming. I’m trying to scream. Maybe I am. And then I don’t remember anything anymore.

  I was the last to go. By the time I finally left, my parents had been plotting to marry me off for two full years. At nineteen, I was well past where I should be in the process, and the candidates had thinned to nearly nonexistent. Which was how I wanted it. It was an embarrassment, my refusal of each sequential suitor. I didn’t want to be married.

  Not that it was an option where I grew up. In our strict, religious household, which was set beneath the backdrop of a strict religious community, it was what you did. By the age of seventeen, you were matched up with a suitable candidate, and off you went to repeat the same life your parents had and their parents before them.

  By the time I met him, I’d gone through six potential husbands. Any one of whom would have been fine, I suppose. Not that I could see that then. I hated them all. I hated the first one the most. The third, I could have loved. All the others, I never got the chance to know. By that time, I’d built a steel cage around my heart. I was going to find a way out, no matter what it took.

  For any other girl in our community, it might have been easier. So few of them actually get a taste of the real world. But I was lucky. My parents owned a business. Not just any business—one of the few that had the privilege to work with those outside our church community. It was purchased in an auction, which my mother explained was where businesses go when no one wants them anymore. I realized then the same thing was happening to me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Elliot

  Everything is about context, my father often says. Why does a glass of wine taste better in say, Paris, than it does sitting on your living room couch? In terms of wine, the French call this terroir. That is, the nature of the drink's environment affects its quality and flavor. But the same concept applies to “surroundings” and “feelings” too. The association of one thing with another. It's why crab cakes taste better on the beach. It's why popcorn tastes better in the cinema, even when it’s stale. It's why top-rated restaurants spend so much time and energy on the “experience” as well as the food. It's all about context.

  He doesn’t mean to point this out in terms of my situation, of course, but I can take a hint.

  Being attacked and laid up in the hospital is certainly an inefficient use of my time. But viewed with the right perspective—if I look at the context of the situation, of what it might provide—it puts everything in context. The hospital contacted my next of kin. They called Emily, and now it’s just a matter of time before she gets in touch.

  My wife has never been able to refuse broken things; that’s how she ended up with that imbecile she’s dating. He played her, and she fell for it. People with good, kind hearts are easy prey for guys like him.

  Unfortunately for him, he misunderstood a few things and took something that wasn’t his to take.

  Payback is a dirty bitch. And he’s never met anyone like me.

  The nurse peers at me over the kind of glasses people wear when they’re ugly and are trying to hide their face. She isn’t entirely unattractive, so don’t ask me why she’s made such a terrible choice in eyewear. A sign of the times, I guess. And yet, she’s looking at me like I’m the crazy one. “Are you sure?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “All right,” she says breezily. “But if you change your mind, you know where the button is.”

  “I had some visitors earlier.”

  She checks my IV line, but she doesn’t respond.

  “Are visitors required to sign in?”

  “Normally, yes.”

  “Can I take a look at the sign in sheet?”

  Her brow furrows just slightly. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Just no more pain meds, okay?”

  She busies herself with my vitals. “Noted.”

  I offer a smile. My intention is to get out of here sooner rather than later, so I have to ration my obstinance. Being incompliant is the surest way to make them think my head injury is worse than it is. Not many people in my condition refuse something that will make them feel better. I have to be alert when I see my wife again. Officially see her, I mean. Plus, if my new friends come back, it’s imperative I’m on my toes. Something tells me this isn’t the kind of problem that goes away. And besides that, I’m not a Band-Aid kind of guy.

  I’ll get through this. No pain, no gain, as they say. I may not win immediately. But I never lose in the end. Soon, Emily will realize this too.

  I almost regret my decision about the pain meds when they wheel me back to my room from radiology. But then, it wasn’t my mother I was expecting to see standing at my bedside. Clearly, the hospital has made a mistake. Medical errors have been reported to be the third leading cause of death in the United States. Calling the wrong person—in this case, my mother—just might be the death of me.

  “Hello, mother.” She turns and drops her handbag when she sees me. Dramatic as ever, she doesn’t stop there. She gasps, covers her mouth with her hands and rushes to my side. If this were a movie, she’d win an Academy Award. Hands down. “Oh dear God, Elliot.” She takes my chin in her hands, causing me to wince.

  “Oh, sweetheart. Let me get a look at you…” She tilts my head to one side and then the other. “What have they done?”

  “They beat the shit out of me,” I say, because my mother requires a bit of heading off. If you aren’t blunt, she’ll steamroll you every time.

  Her brow knits together. “No one beats a Parker, darling. You know that.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” I say, gesturing to my injuries. “Particularly when the odds are five to one.”

  My mother opens her mouth to speak before closing again. Finally, she can’t help herself. “Why must you make me feel guilty all the time?” She squeezes my chin. “You know I came as fast as I could.”

  She’s dressed to the nines, so, obviously, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Not that I care. I would have been happy if she hadn’t come at all.

  “You have no idea how worried I’ve been…”

  “I bet I do.” Everything is about her, and it helps to keep it that way.

  “Oh, darling. Tell me they’re taking good care of you?”

  “Yes, but I’m being released today.”

  She perches herself on the edge of the hospital bed. “You’re going home?”

  I nod again. “That’s right.”

  “Is it safe? I mean, we don’t
even know who did this.”

  “It’s fine.”

  She shakes her head and then lifts her handbag from the floor. Hospitals are filthy places. I tell her to order a new one. On me. “I need to speak with your physicians,” she says, apprising me. “This is absurd. Back in my day, they didn’t just throw you out of the hospital the way they do now, like it’s some sort of drive-thru. That’s the problem with your generation, you know. They want everything instantaneous. Healing takes time.”

  “I’ll heal just fine in my own bed.”

  “But who will look after you?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  She tilts her head and then lowers her voice. “You haven’t told them who you are, have you?”

  “What?”

  “You’re a senator’s son, darling. That counts for something. We have pull you know…”

  “There’s no need for any of that, mother. Studies show patients heal faster at home.”

  “I…I,” she stammers. She can’t argue with science. “I’ll have to cancel bridge and lunch with my Tuesday group. You know how I hate to do that…”

  “You don’t have to,” I say. “Emily is coming.”

  Her eyes land heavily on mine. “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t think. I’m sure of it.”

  “Oh, Elliot,” she sighs. “Did they get a good scan of your head? Did those…those…criminals…did they hurt your precious brain?”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  She seems relieved at first. But then, true to her nature, she can’t help herself. “Well, if you think she’s coming, darling, you need me more than you know.”

  “How could this happen?” my mother demands for the umpteenth time since delivering me to my apartment. “It’s turned my whole life upside down.”

  “I’m pretty sure whoever attacked me didn’t do it with the intention of personally assaulting your schedule.”

  “Well, you never know. People are always trying to test this family. Speaking of which, we were supposed to have dinner with the Thompsons, and you know your father doesn’t handle things like that alone.” She pauses and looks up at me. “I need you to think, Elliot. You really have no idea who could have done this?”

  “I said I don’t.”

  “And the cops…what have they said? Useless as they are…”

  “I think they have more pressing matters than some guy getting beat up in a parking garage. Have you seen the news lately?”

  “I have, and quite frankly, I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously…”

  “What is it you expect me to do, mother?”

  “Well, I don’t know. But we can’t just sit around twiddling our thumbs. We have to do something. We have to speak up. Otherwise, these…these…criminals will start assuming they’ll get away with it and then what?”

  Assumptions are more often right than not.

  “They won’t get away with it. I assure you, someone knows something,” I reply. There’s a hard edge in my tone, one that she is not immune to.

  This is probably why she ignores me and continues to busy herself straightening my living room. It’s particularly painful to watch because there isn’t much to straighten, so she is basically doing the same thing over and over. I’m trying to be patient. My mother is difficult on a normal day, but any upheaval is prone to sending her into a tailspin. “You can’t imagine how hard your father is taking this. He’s just beside himself.”

  She likes to deflect. I sigh. “And yet he’s not here.”

  “Of course he’s not. You know he’s busy with the campaign.”

  In the kitchen, I fill a glass with water.

  “Maybe this is for the best,” she says. “We can swing it in our favor. Play the whole thing up for sympathy…point fingers at the incumbent…no one is safe…start an initiative to crack down on certain—”

  “We can’t blame anybody. There’s nothing to crack down on.” My glass of water overflows, and I scramble to locate a dishtowel. We’ve been here all of an hour, and she’s managed to rearrange half my kitchen. “We don’t know who’s responsible.”

  “Well, let’s leave that up to your father. He’ll know what’s best.”

  My family’s roots run deep—its connections deeper still. My father is a politician. His father was a politician. Old money. Stifling people.

  Which is why I’m not surprised that my mother has holed up in my apartment, hell-bent on babysitting me. My father needs this situation managed. He has promises to keep.

  Like him, I was supposed to go into politics straight out of college. But I had enjoyed flirting with science too much, have been able to skirt by pretending I’m saving the world with my inventions.

  I am not saving the world. I am using family connections to secure deals for drugs that have the potential to save lives. They have the equal potential to destroy them. Do you know what drug companies do with that kind of power? They use it to control. They use it to control everything.

  Even politicians. Especially politicians.

  I have zero inclinations to follow in my father’s footsteps.

  I am sitting at my dining room table, hunched over my laptop, when the light flicks on behind me. “Elliot, darling,” my mother whispers. “Are you okay? It’s 3:00 a.m.”

  Footsteps creep up. I’m too mesmerized by what’s in front of me to acknowledge them.

  Emily’s face fills the screen.

  “Elliot?” My mother leans over me and closes the laptop.

  I scoot my chair from beneath the table and fold my arms across my chest. I knew I should have gone downstairs to the bar instead.

  “Elliot,” she chides. “I thought this had stopped. You promised.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Something, son. I want you to say something.”

  “Fine. The heart has reasons the mind knows not of.”

  Her mouth hangs agape, so I add, “Pascal said that.”

  “I don’t care to hear what some philosopher said, Elliot. I want logic. I want reason. I want to understand why this is—why this is still happening.”

  “He was a physicist. An inventor.”

  My mother looks at me with tired eyes. “I don’t care if he was God himself. I want you to explain why you’re still…why you’re still obsessed with this girl after all these years.”

  “I’m not obsessed. I’m in love.”

  “Oh Elliot, please.” She slides out a chair and sits down. “How many times have we been over this? You can’t love someone who doesn’t love you back.”

  We met in college, in the lab, on the first day of my second semester. Emily liked me instantly. I hated her at first.

  Maybe it was her perpetual good mood or the fact that she was indifferent to my petulance. I don’t know. Whatever it was, I did everything I could to avoid her. There was a part of me who understood what a girl like that had the power to do—the power to turn your life upside down.

  And turn my life upside down she did. Our major required long hours and dedication, and the competition to win Emily’s affections was vast and wide, with the male to female ratio being 10:1.

  This meant I had to be extra diligent in my pursuit.

  And I was. I like a good challenge.

  We started dating, though not seriously; Emily wasn’t as ambitious about the whole thing as I was. Still, it’s tough not to blur lines when you’re forced to work that close with someone every day. At least it was for her. I realize now that distance is my problem.

  Emily thinks her security settings can stop me. I solved this problem last night by creating a fake profile, grabbing the headshot and bio of an old friend of a friend, and I sent her a friend request. With fifteen hundred friends, it’s doubtful she’ll check to see they’re already connected nor will she want to deny the request.

  Speaking of requests, no one wanted me to marry her. She didn’t come from a great family. She didn’t look—or for that matter
, act—like a senator’s son’s wife. My family demanded that much.

  But I didn’t care. The more my parents hated her, the fonder I became. She was smart, far smarter than me. She understood people in a way that I never could. That’s the thing, you see—I thought we could make it work. Emily never did.

  When I’ve had all I could take of my mother, I forced myself to dress and go into the office. It wasn’t easy; the pain in my ribs is unbearable. But so is she.

  I’ve refreshed Instalook at least a hundred times. It’s been four hours. Surely Emily has seen the friend request by now.

  When she still hasn’t accepted by 2:00 p.m., I call it a day. I can’t be here when I feel so much uncertainty. No one questions my cutting out early. Not only because I’m the boss—after the attack, no one expected me to be in, anyway.

  When I arrive back at the apartment, I realize that if I’d thought this day was mediocre before, I should remember things can always take a sharp turn for the worse.

  There is new furniture. Furniture that I didn’t buy.

  “What?” my mother asks, without batting an eye. “I couldn’t stand to see my son living like this. You live like a recluse, Elliot. You can’t have friends over if you don’t have furniture.”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  “Well,” she says eagerly, “That’s all about to change.”

  “Somehow, I think you’re mistaken.”

  “You’ll see.”

  I ball my fists, release them, and flex my fingers. I just want her to shut up.