The Poisoned Rose (20 page)

“So you went into hiding.”

She nodded. “I cut all ties. I started going by different names, and not just so I’d be safe. I didn’t want anyone to know who I was. I was hoping that after a while I’d start to forget what my real name was.”

“What was it that Jean-Marc did, Marie?”

She stared at me for a long time before finally speaking. I could hear the buzz of the neon lights beyond her windows.

“I was fifteen. I was pretty mixed up, running around with a thirty-four-year-old man, a bartender from a club in Westhampton Beach I used to get into with a fake ID. Of course nobody in my family knew about it. You learn to keep secrets well in that house. He was my boyfriend, or so I thought. He used to sneak onto our property at night and I’d meet him down by the water and let him do things to me. Then one night while he and I were together, I realized that my brother was standing just a few feet from us. My boyfriend was on top of me, and I look over and there’s my brother with this angry look on his face. More anger than I’d ever seen. Time just stopped. The next thing I was aware of was a sound. It came up so sudden. It was the sound of a baseball bat slamming into my boyfriend’s skull. That started time going again. My boyfriend slumped over, then kind of rolled off. It was like he’d fallen asleep. Jean-Marc just kept hitting him. He hit him in the head maybe a dozen times. He just kept hitting him till there was no way he couldn’t be dead. He kept hitting him till the bat finally cracked. It was terrible. Jean-Marc was enraged. He was jealous. He dragged me back to the house by my hair and locked me in his room. He wouldn’t even let me get dressed. I was naked, covered with dirt and blood. Our father was gone for the weekend, the help had gone home, we were all alone. My brother nailed his door shut and then went away. Later on I heard something outside and went to the window. I saw him and another man down by the water. I knew who the other man was. I’d seem him around before, he was a family friend. Together they wrapped the body in a plastic sheet and dumped it into a row boat, then got in and rowed across the creek to the refuge. The other man rowed, my brother just sat there. They had shovels with them, flashlights. When they came back an hour later it was just the two of them. They had buried the body somewhere in the refuge. They dropped the shovels in the water. Then the other man left and my brother stood alone in the backyard, looking out over the water. Eventually he turned and looked up at me. After a few minutes he started toward the house. I heard him coming up the stairs. I could almost feel myself losing my mind, that’s how scared I was. I could almost feel my sanity begin to crack.”

She stopped there. I waited, then said, “Tell me the rest, Marie.”

“He kept me prisoner in his room for three days. No food, no water, nothing. I was covered in dirt and blood the whole time. He was outside the door nearly every minute, threatening me, swearing me to secrecy, working on me. It was like he was brainwashing me. Sometimes he’d eat something and tell me all about it, what he was eating and what it was like. But he wouldn’t ever give me any. Sometimes he’d pour water onto the floor so I could hear it, just to torment me. He hated me for being with someone else. He told me no one would ever touch me again. He let me out just before our father came home. He let me clean up, told me to look pretty for Father. I was exhausted. I couldn’t stop crying. It was about a week after that that I was hospitalized for the first time. My father had no idea what was wrong with me. But our mother had suffered bouts of depression, and her mother, too, so there it was, the family curse, manifesting itself in me. Jean-Marc visited me in the hospital two weeks later. He tipped an orderly to give us privacy for an hour. I knew when I saw the money exchange hands what he wanted. It was what he’d always wanted. Even when we were kids he would drop hints. I just ignored them.”

She stopped. I waited, saying nothing, thinking suddenly of Tina and all the hints I had ignored.

Marie said, “He told me I couldn’t say no. He said he would tell Father what I was doing with men if I didn’t let him do what he wanted.”

“He raped you.”

She shrugged. “That’s how it started. I stayed in that hospital for months. Jean-Marc visited every weekend. Every weekend he’d tip the same orderly to give us privacy.”

“And when you got out of the hospital?”

“He’d come to my room at home during the night. Once or twice a week. When I got into Yale, I thought it might be the end. But he came down from Harvard to visit me every other weekend. When I’d come home on vacations, he was there. He was there, his room right down the hall from mine, every summer during college. After I graduated, I met someone and told Jean-Marc we had to stop. Father was away on business. He’d be away for almost three months. That’s when the beatings started. My face was so broken, I didn’t dare leave the house. I was too ashamed. I stayed in my room. Jean-Marc took care of me till I healed. But even then I didn’t look right. He arranged for me to have plastic surgery so my father wouldn’t see what Jean-Marc had done to me. My father was so disappointed in me. I had looked like my mother, he had loved that about me. I didn’t look like her, or myself, anymore.”

“You told Carter about all of this?”

She nodded. “Tim was trying to use it to blackmail my brother. When I found out what he was up to, I left him. He was in over his head, it was only a matter of time before he turned up dead. I told him that.”

“But he didn’t listen.”

“He wanted a big score. He never understood why I didn’t want any of my father’s money. He was a boy, a child. He said he’d put up with anything for half of a hundred and fifty million dollars. He said that with Jean-Marc in prison, all the money would be mine. There was nothing I could say to set him straight. He didn’t know. He didn’t know Jean-Marc.”

“The man who helped your brother get rid of the body that night, who was he?”

“A family friend.”

“I know, you said that. But who was he?”

She looked at me. “I think you already know.”

“The Chief,” I said.

She nodded. “He’s Chief now, but he was just a cop then.”

“He helped your brother get rid of the body of a man your brother had murdered in cold blood.” I needed to get that clear.

“Yes,” she said. “Chief Miller was loyal to my family. My father helped him become chief. They met him when you and I met, actually. Do you remember that? The dog?”

“Of course.” I paused. “I dream about it sometimes.”

“Me, too.”

“Your family met the Chief then?”

She nodded. “He was the cop who shot and killed the dog. He saved your life.” She looked at my face. “You don’t remember that, do you? You don’t remember who shot the dog.”

“I didn’t till you said it just now.”

“I had them fix the scar on my leg, from where it bit me. You can still tell it’s there, though.” She paused. “I was scared that day, Mac. But I’m more scared now. You were beside me then, and here you are, beside me again. It’s no accident, if you ask me.”

Everything happens for a reason,
Augie had once told me.

“You should have let me know who you were, Marie. Back on Long Beach. You should have told me then.”

“I didn’t know if I could trust you. I didn’t know what the years had done to you, what kind of man that perfect boy had become.”

I felt my face flush. I waited a moment, then said, “Your brother isn’t going to stop looking for you, Marie. You know that.”

“I know.”

“He hired a man to find you. He hired him through the Chief, who’s obviously playing out his own agenda. It sounds to me like the Chief sent the man he sent on purpose, maybe to get rid of the lot of you.”

“His loyalty was to my father. He hates Jean-Marc. He knows that with my father gone, he’ll have to take orders from him. But worse than that, he knows there’d be no reason for me not to come forward with what I know. And he doesn’t want that.”

“But would he kill you?”

“You better than anyone, Mac, should know that when it comes down to it, we’re all pretty much capable of anything, if it means staying alive.”

“So what are you capable of, Marie? What are you willing to do?”

“I used to have dreams about killing my brother, about stabbing him in the heart. I used to tell myself that it was a vision. I used to think it was going to come true someday.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Neither of us spoke for a while.

“Maybe it is time for me to go. Maybe it’s time for me to leave the island.”

“It would be dangerous for you to stay. This place is too small for anyone to stay hidden for long.”

“I grew up out here, that’s the thing. I love this place—the air and water, all the extra sky. It soothes me. I’d rather not leave it if I can help it.”

“He’ll find you if you stay.”

“So you think I should leave.”

“I do, yeah.”

“How soon?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Scully took care of these kinds of things for me. I feel helpless without him.”

“I’ll get you out.”

“You sure?”

I nodded.

“Thanks, Mac,” she said. “For everything.”

“It’s too late to leave tonight. We should rest. And you don’t want to be on any of the roads during the daytime. I guess that leaves tomorrow night, after sundown. I’ll ride with you as far as the expressway to make sure you get off the East End okay. From there on you shouldn’t have any problems. Just follow the expressway to the bridge of your choice and you’re off.”

“How will you get back?”

“I’ll hitch a ride, catch a train, whatever. Don’t worry about me.”

She smiled then. With the exception of her angry smile moments ago, it was the first time she smiled since I saw her on Long Beach. “Why are you so willing to risk your life for me, Mac?” she teased. “Are you in love with me?”

I smiled at that. “Maybe I can save you the trouble I had to go through to get away from the people who raised me.”

“They were killed, weren’t they?” she said. “Your adoptive family.”

I nodded.

“A boating accident,” she said. “A fire. They went missing at sea.”

I nodded again.

“I was at Yale. I saw it in the papers.”

“It was the start of my senior year at the college.”

“Southampton, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I remember your adoptive brother. Always getting into fights with other kids, you always bailing him out, running to his side. You two were inseparable.”

“It was my job.”

“You cared about him, though. I could tell.”

I shrugged. “He was my brother.”

“So what happened?”

I didn’t answer.

“You can’t talk about it, can you?”

“There’s nothing to talk about. It was a long time ago.”

“I bet you at times it feels like it was yesterday, though, right?”

“Sometimes it feels like it’s tomorrow. Sometimes it feels like it’s tomorrow and I can’t do a thing to stop it.”

She nodded. “I know that feeling.”

“It’s late,” I said. “We should try to get some sleep.”

“Okay.”

We stayed dressed and lay side by side on her bed. The neon light outside made the room almost too bright to sleep in. I draped my forearm over my eyes, and that blocked much of the colored light. I could hear Marie breathing, I could feel her lying still beside me. We said nothing as time clicked away. I allowed myself to hope for a night of dreamless sleep, of unbroken unconsciousness. I allowed myself to hope, too, for a route out of town—a way of escape—that didn’t end badly for either of us.

Chapter Twelve

 

At dawn I awoke and stared at the ceiling. I listened to the occasional car passing below Marie’s windows. My thoughts raced, and I could feel a tangled nest of panic in my chest. I thought of Frank Gannon and the Chief. I thought of Jean-Marc Bishop and Searls. I thought of Tim Carter and Scully and their violent ends. There were still so many things I needed to know, so many ways that all this could fall in on us.

Eventually I got out of bed as carefully as I could and pulled on my boots. Marie was sound asleep. I slipped quietly out of her apartment and crept down the stairs to the outer door. I opened it and took a look around. There was a pay phone on the sidewalk across the street. Like last night, the village was quiet and empty. I exited Marie’s building and went straight to the pay phone, inserted two quarters and punched in Frank Gannon’s pager number. I hung up and waited for him to call back. I wasn’t really expecting him to, but I had to try.

It was a cool morning. The sky was clear, dark blue overhead but fainter along the horizon. There were still a few stars in the lighter patch of sky just above the trees, pins of silver light that always burned brightest in the minutes before they died.

Two minutes later the pay phone rang.

“Yeah,” Frank said.

“It’s me.”

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“The prefix is Montauk. What are you doing out there?”

“I don’t have much time. You’re a hard man to get hold of lately.”

“I’m just cautious. A lot of big players on the field. Don’t want to get crushed.”

“So you put me out front to take the hits.”

“What do you want, MacManus?”

“Answers.”

“What do you need to know?”

“I want you to tell me if anything happened in town last night.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“The animal that jumped Augie, Searls, he was on the loose, in case you didn’t know.”

“I heard.”

“Did you hear anything about the cops bringing him in last night?”

“No.”

“You’re sure.”

“I would have heard about that. I understand through the grapevine that Bishop gave you a gun and a forensics report and some fairy-tale story and called it the Deal of the Century.”

“You don’t miss much, do you?”

“I’m not next door to Village Hall for nothing. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing you’ve done.”

“Just add it to the list.”

“Sweep up your tracks and get out of there, MacManus. I’ll put some men on this, we’ll figure out what’s going on. I can protect you.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I need you to find out if Searls is still running wild. There’s a dead body in Montauk that tells me he is. If Searls hasn’t been brought in yet, I want you to warn Augie. I want you to do what you can for him and Tina. This isn’t a favor to me. Augie’s your friend and you’re going to make sure nothing happens to him. If something does, I’m going to hold you responsible. Are we clear?”

“You sound to me like a man about to leave town.”

“She wants to get free of him. I’m going to make sure she does.”

“You found the Bishop girl. I’d like to talk to her.”

“No.”

“We had a deal.”

“Sue me. I don’t care about the Chief anymore. I don’t care about anything. I’m going to make sure she gets away once and for all.”

“You don’t want to cross her insane brother, MacManus. Fucking me over is one thing, but fucking him over is something else.”

“Tell me the truth, Frank. For once. Did he really hire you?”

“I’m sorry, that’s confidential—”

“Did he hire you?”

“No.”

“So why tell me he did?”

“I needed someone to stir the shit.”

“Someone with no connection to you.”

“I had some unfinished business, MacManus. There were some things I needed to know. I did what I had to do. We’re alike in that way, don’t you think?”

“You used up your favor, Frank. That’s what you did. We’re even now.”

I hung up before he could say anything more. I looked around once, then headed back across the empty street to Marie’s apartment.

She was still asleep when I entered. I stretched out on her mattress without waking her. I lay there a while, thinking, and eventually fell into a shallow, turbulent sleep.

We were lying on our sides, facing each other, when we awoke around noon. We looked at each other for a moment, then finally got out of bed to begin her last day on the East End.

I was tired and moved slowly for the first hour after getting up. My back and joints were stiff and I was groggy. Marie, as far as I knew, had slept straight through the night. But she didn’t seem any better off than I was. I watched as she sat up in her bed and tilted two pills from the prescription bottle on the table into her palm. Then she tossed them into the back of her mouth and downed a long sip from the glass of water she kept next to the bottle.

Her back was to me as she did this. But she didn’t seem to be making any effort to hide what she was doing. When she was done, she returned the glass to the table, then looked over her shoulder at me for a moment before getting up and walking into the bathroom.

I heard the shower running. I wrote her a note on the back of a paper towel telling her that I was going out to get us something to eat. I went downstairs to the street and found a small market at the end of her block. I bought fresh bagels and apples and prepackaged slices of watermelon. It was getting warm out, but the air was still pleasant. A sea breeze coming from the east brushed my skin like a hand.

Back upstairs, I set out the food while Marie dressed in the bathroom. She came out in jeans and a mannish shirt. Her hair was wet and uncombed. She looked younger that way. We sat on the foot of her unmade bed and ate off paper plates but didn’t really talk. There was enough for both of us to think about, so that was what we did, we ate and thought and left each other be.

After breakfast Marie stood and gathered our plates. I caught a glimpse then of three long scars on the inside of her left arm, thick ones running from her wrist to her midforearm. She carried the plates into the kitchen area. I watched her but said nothing.

Later on, Marie packed while I stood by her window and watched the traffic below. I looked for Searls, for Jean-Marc, for the Montauk police. I wanted to believe we were safe, but I knew there was no harm in vigilance. The village was busy now. I felt suddenly drowsy, and my eyes ached. But I stood there, keeping a lookout.

Marie put together a single suitcase and set it by the door. That was it, she was ready to go. All we had to do was wait till sundown, then make our run through the villages—East Hampton, Bridgehampton, Water Mill, then Southampton. Every mile we traveled would only take us closer to the Chief’s domain. After Southampton, we’d pass Hampton Bays, then Westhampton. From there, it would only be a matter of miles till we reached Manorville and the wide open Long Island Expressway.

The day passed slowly. At times there was no motion in the apartment at all, and no sound. At times, as I stood there and looked out, I felt that Marie and I were missing something, though I wasn’t sure really what. We were both lucky to be alive, if unlucky to have lived. All that mattered was peace—peace for her, at least. For now, as we waited, silence and stillness would have to do.

A little before six I went back downstairs to buy us dinner. It would blow my budget, but I didn’t care. Marie offered to pay, but I knew she would need all the money she had with her to start over. I could miss a meal or two for that.

I brought back a pizza with feta cheese, sliced tomato, and black olives. We ate while sitting cross-legged on her floor, side by side, our backs to a wall. I did my best not to see the scars on her wrist again. When we were done, there were two slices left over. We wrapped them in aluminum foil for her to eat on the road later tonight, or for breakfast tomorrow. It was half-past six now, and we could feel night coming, could see it beginning to influence the sky and smell it in the air that flowed in over the low window sills.

By eight the change was more dramatic, and the same points of white light that had been the last to die this morning were the first to be reborn now. They weren’t stars, of course, but planets. Venus and Mars and Mercury, I think. Named for the Goddess of Love, the God of War, and the Messenger. I watched them grow sharper and sharper on the horizon, in a sky that seemed to drain of color by the minute.

It was twilight when I realized that Marie was standing at the window on the other side of her bed. She was watching the changing sky as well, but I could tell she was getting ready to say something. I waited. Darkness was beginning to fill the corners of her apartment, shadows spreading out around us. When she spoke, her voice was less hoarse than it had been last night. The day’s silence must have been good rest for it. The sound of her voice struck me as something new in an old world. It compelled me deeply for some reason. I could have sworn I’d heard it before, maybe even recently.

“I should have done this a long time ago,” she said. “I should have left this place far behind me and not clung onto it as desperately as I have. Maybe things would have turned out differently.” She thought about something for a moment, thought about it carefully. “My brother can have everything,” she said. “The house, the money, I don’t care about any of it. All I want is a job and a halfway decent apartment to be left alone in. I just want to find other people like me and take comfort in their presence.”

I looked at the darkening sky and said nothing.

“How did you do it, Mac?” Marie said then. She was looking at me.

“Do what?”

“How did you get away from your family?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“You said you wanted to save me from having to go through what you went through to get free. I was wondering what that was exactly.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“You’ve never told anyone.”

“No.”

“I want what you have now, Mac. I don’t want any more than that. I want to do what you did—turn my back on it all and just live my life. A life I’ve chosen. My life, for better and for worse. So I’d like to know what it was you went through. I want for you to be able to tell someone. Believe it or not, it’s good to share our secrets. It’s good to be able to tell a person anything and have that person still look you in the eyes afterward. Still care.”

I said nothing.

Marie smiled. “C’mon, I’ve told you mine. Now you have to tell me yours.”

“Are we playing doctor here?”

“In a way, I guess, yeah. I want you to tell me what you did to get free, Mac. I need to know. Please.”

“You already know. We were out sailing, the four of us. There was a fire, I made it, they didn’t.”

“That’s what happened. Now tell me what you did.”

“That was the thing, Marie. I didn’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Right after the fire broke out, there was an explosion in the stern. They were thrown overboard, the three of them. I wasn’t. I was at the bow. I froze.”

“You were scared.”

“No. I did nothing.”

“What could you have done?”

“I could have thrown them a line. I could have sent over the emergency raft. Their boat had every piece of radio equipment and safety gear there was. I knew what to do in an emergency. I probably could have made it aft and into the cabin, called the Coast Guard. But I just stood there. I chose to do nothing.”

“You just left them.”

“We were far out, you could barely see land. It was night. The boat was moving; we were under full sail when the fire started. And even on fire, even with the damage from the explosion, the boat was still moving.” I paused, looked at my hands, then shrugged and said, “The thing is, it didn’t take much. It took just seconds, really. Two, three tops. And then, just like that, it was too late for me to be able to do anything for them.”

Marie said nothing. She turned and looked out the window.

“You were a kid,” she said.

“I was twenty. Old enough to know what I was doing by not doing a thing.”

“You wanted to get me free of them. Remember, I knew them. I knew how they treated you. My father knew it, even Jean-Marc knew it. You deserved better. You wanted a life of your own. And they weren’t about to let you have that.”

“It doesn’t make it right.”

“Maybe not. But I remember when we were kids how you used to not want to go home. You used to linger in our yard, even after Father had called Jean-Marc and me in. There was an opening in one of our hedges, like a little cave. You used to hide in it. I used to look out the window and see you there.” She took a breath, let it out. “You know, my father once offered to take you in. He set up a meeting with Mr. Van Deusen and told him that he wanted you to come stay with us. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“He turned my father down flat, said he’d made a promise to your real father. But Father knew that wasn’t the truth. I pleaded with him to try again, I wanted you to live with us so bad, but he said there was nothing we could do, except make you feel welcome whenever you were here.”

I felt an overwhelming sense of regret suddenly. I couldn’t help but wonder how many lives would be different right now had I come to live at the Bishop house all those years ago.

“How’d you survive, by the way?”

I was confused by the question. “What?”

“The accident.”

“Oh. The boat took on water after a few miles and turned over. It was the middle of September, but the water was cold. I could see land by then, so I swam for it. “

“What did you do after that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t imagine you were in the will. What did you do?”

“I got a job and finished college. I didn’t have a place to live, so at night I’d sneak into the office of one of my professors and sleep on his couch. Then I met a woman and we lived together for a while. My father had been a cop, and I had a degree in criminology, so I applied to police academy. I got in but didn’t go.”