Тесс Герритсен - I Know a Secret

“Or maybe Mexico. There are so many beautiful homes for sale, right on the water.” Susan turns to me, and her eyes are so bright they seem to glow in the firelight.

“A beach,” murmurs Everett, giving his head a shake. “Yes, I could use a beach right now. And maybe a nice, long nap...”

“Oh, dear, I’ve stayed too long. You’re both exhausted.” Susan rises to her feet. “I’ll be going.”

As she stands buttoning up her coat, the room suddenly feels warm, too warm, as if waves of heat are blasting from the fireplace. I look at the hearth, half-expecting a conflagration, but there is only the gentle flicker of flames. It’s so pretty I can’t stop staring. I don’t even notice when Susan leaves. I hear the front door close, and the flames give a shimmy as air puffs into the house.

“Feel... feel sorry for her,” mumbles Everett. “Awful, losing a son.”

“You didn’t know her son.” I keep staring at the flames, which seem to pulse in time with my heartbeat, as if the fire and I have some magical connection. I am the fire and the fire is me. No one really knew Billy. Not the way I did. I gaze down at my hands, where my fingertips are glowing. Bright threads emerge in gold meridians, arching toward the hearth. If I move my hands like a puppet master, I can make the flames dance. As wondrous as it all seems, I know this is wrong. This is all wrong.

I give my head a shake, trying to refocus, but the threads are still attached to my fingers and the filaments swirl in the shadows. The whiskey bottle catches the firelight’s reflection. I squint at the label, but the words are out of focus. I think of Everett, walking out of the kitchen, carrying two glasses of amber liquid. I never watched him pour it. I never thought to question the drink he placed in my hand or what he might have added to it. I don’t look at him, because I’m afraid he’ll see the doubt in my eyes. I keep staring at the hearth as I struggle against the thickening fog in my head and I think back to the night I met him. Both of us drinking coffee near Utica Street on the night Cassandra was found dead. He’d said he was meeting friends for dinner in the neighborhood, but what if that wasn’t true? What if our meeting was meant to happen, all of it leading up to this moment? I remember the bottle of wine he brought me, a bottle that still sits unopened in my kitchen. I think of how he has listened so attentively to every detail I shared about the homicide investigation.

What do I really know about Everett?

All this goes through my head as the fog thickens, as my limbs start to go numb. Now is the time to move, while I still have some measure of control over my legs. I stagger to my feet. Manage to take only two steps when my legs wobble out from beneath me. My head slams against the corner of the coffee table, and the pain cuts through the fog in a jolt that suddenly makes everything crystal clear. That’s when I hear the front door thud shut, and I feel cold air sweep in. Footsteps creak across the floor and come to a stop beside me.

“Little Holly Devine,” a voice says. “Still causing trouble.”

I squint up at the face staring down at me, a man who’s been stalking me for the last few years. A man who is supposed to be dead and buried in an unmarked grave. When the police told me that Martin Stanek killed Billy, I believed them, but I should have known better. Men like Billy can’t be killed; they keep springing back to life. Even though I’ve managed to hide from him all these years, even though I’ve changed my name and altered my appearance, he’s finally managed to track me down.

“How is the boyfriend?” asks a second voice, a voice that sends another shock through me.

“He’s unconscious. He’ll be no problem,” says Billy.

I struggle to focus on Susan, whose face has also come into view. They stand side by side, Billy and his mother, eyeing the results of her handiwork. I turn my head and look at Everett, who’s slumped on the sofa, even more helpless than I am. Not only did he drink his own glass of whiskey, he also drank mine. I took only a few sips, yet I can barely move.

“I see you’re still awake, Holly Dolly.” Billy crouches down to study me. He has the same brilliant-blue eyes, the same piercing stare that drew me to him when we were children. Even then I was enchanted by him and easily seduced into doing whatever he asked of me. So were the other kids.

Everyone except Lizzie, because she sensed who and what he was. The day he held a flame to the baby possum we’d found on the playground, Lizzie was the one who knocked the match out of his hand. And when he stole money from a classmate’s jacket, she was the one who called him a thief. That made him angry, which is something you don’t do to Billy Sullivan, because there are consequences. They’re not always immediate; perhaps it takes months or even years before he strikes back, but that’s the thing about Billy: He never forgets. He always strikes back.

Unless you make a deal with him.

“Why?” I manage to whisper.

“Because you’re the only one who remembers. The only one left who knows.”

“I promised I’d never tell anyone...”

“You think I’d risk that now? With that lady reporter and the fucking book she’s writing? She already talked to Cassandra. I can’t have her talking to you.”

“No one else was there. No one else knows.”

“But you do, and you might talk.” He leans in close and whispers into my ear, “You got my messages, didn’t you, little Livinus?”

Saint Livinus the martyr, who is celebrated on my birthday. The saint whose tongue was ripped from his mouth to silence him. While I managed to stay out of Billy’s reach, he knew how to send messages I couldn’t ignore. He knew the deaths of Sarah and Cassie and Tim would catch my attention and that I’d understand the clues he’d left for me: The palm leaf laid before the burned remains of Sarah’s house. The arrows in Tim’s chest. Cassandra’s gouged-out eyes.

I understood all too well what he was telling me: Tell no secrets, or you die like the others.

And I haven’t told. All these years, I have been silent about what happened that day in the woods with Lizzie, but my promised silence was not enough. Thanks to the journalist, the truth threatens to surface anyway, and here he is, to ensure that I stay as silent as Livinus with his tongue torn out.

Susan says, “This time it has to look like an accident, Bill. Nothing that will make anyone suspicious.”

“I know.” Billy rises and regards Everett, who is immobile and utterly helpless. “And we have to deal with two of them. This makes it harder to stage.” He scans the room, and his eyes turn to the hearth, where flames barely flicker around a crumbling log. “Old houses,” he muses. “They go up in smoke so fast. What a shame your father forgot to change the battery in his smoke detector.” He drags a chair under the smoke detector, pulls down the unit, and removes the battery. Then he throws an armload of wood into the hearth.

“I have a better idea,” says Susan. “They’re tired and they’re drunk, so where would they be? The bedroom.”

“Let’s move him first,” Billy says.

They drag away Everett, and as I hear his shoes scrape across the floor toward my father’s bedroom, I already know how the death scene will look when we are discovered. The tipsy young couple, their bodies charred on the bed. Just another tragic death due to fire and carelessness.

The fresh armload of wood has made the flames roar back to life, and as I stare into the hellish glow, I can almost feel the heat singeing my hair, consuming my flesh. No, no, this is not the way I want to die! Panic sends a surge of adrenaline through my body, and I push myself up to my hands and knees. But even as I crawl toward the front door, I can already hear their footsteps returning from the bedroom.