The Girls She Left Behind (18 page)

I took a deep breath. “I was just trying to help.”

She smiled nastily. “Yeah, right.” Brushing past me to the hall, she went on waspishly.

“You're a fool, Jane. You think that being dull and stupid hides your bad side, but you're wrong. It just makes you even less attractive, if that's possible.”

Behind her the neat, spare room with its white curtains and narrow bed looked suddenly as if no one had ever slept in it. She pulled on her coat; I stopped myself from helping her with it.

“Cam, please. You can't just leave me like this. After all I've done…”

My voice trailed off; I could see her thinking of something else she wanted to say and deciding not to.

“Look,” she began finally. “Maybe you really didn't mean any harm.”

The words burst out of me. “When have I meant you harm? I've done everything and never wanted anything in return because I—”

But then I stopped. She was looking at me with an odd expression. Or…not
at
me.
Past
me, at her bedside table where dozens of Valium tablets were piled in a little heap.

I used to crush them but after a while I'd stopped bothering; she'd always swallowed what I gave her without question. But now I saw that she must've hidden them, then spit them out.

That she'd been doing it all along. “I went to the court hearing because I thought,” I said through the sudden tightness in my throat, “that I could find out about your baby.”

She stared incredulously. “Where it was sent to,” I went on, “and who has it. Her, I mean,” I added desperately.

Cam was eyeing me as if I were some strange zoo animal. “And if we found her, then we could bring her home,” I rushed on. “We could be a…”

“A family,” she finished for me, and it was her tone that did me in, finally: incredulous, like everything I'd said just made it all worse.

“You left me with him. Left me for dead,” Cam said icily. “You were so fucking scared somebody would find out what happened to you, you forgot about what was happening to me.”

“Cam…”

“Or no. You didn't forget. You didn't care. I should have been the one who had a life, you know, I'd have known what to do with it. Not sitting all alone in a dinky house, dumb job, no friends, not even a man to keep you company…you didn't even need Henry Gemerle to make you a prisoner,” she ranted viciously. “You did it to yourself!”

“Cam,” I tried again hopelessly, and then I saw my laptop sitting open in the living room with an email on the screen. To Finny Brill; a
sent
email.

Horror pierced me. “Cam, what've you done?” I rushed to the device, but of course there was no way to take it back.

Since the delays surrounding Cam's surgery, Finny had been getting increasingly impatient to move forward with what he called “our creative project.” Now…

Finny,
the email read.
It's time. Tell him Cam is coming to be with him the way we planned. Ask him where he wants to go and let me know ASAP. Then—do it.

Below that was Finny's near-instantaneous reply:
Bearkill, Maine.

Finny had said he could get Gemerle out of the forensic hospital practically as soon as they sent him back there from the courtroom, and we'd had no time to—

“Cam, we're not prepared,” I protested. She must have sent the message as soon as she saw me on TV. “Why would you get this all started now when we're not—”

But then I understood. She was ready; I didn't need to be. Our plan had been to punish Gemerle, but she was doing something else. Then I understood, as the import of her email finally struck me. It wasn't a punishment she had planned at all.

Not for him, anyway.

“I have to go now,” she said flatly.

I swallowed a painful sob. “I was never going along, was I?”

She shook her head at me almost kindly. “No. You weren't.”

Now I got it: that she'd been using me, playing the helpless invalid to keep me devotedly caring for her, all the while getting stronger and more determined to leave me.

And now she was strong enough. I'd forced her hand, but she'd been meaning to do this anyway.

“But he hurt you.” I pointed to where the purplish marks of surgical staples still showed through her short fluff of returning hair; her eyes darkened defensively.

“He didn't mean it. He never did. He just lost his temper, he was always sorry for it later. And he only took the baby so she could have a better life.”

Remembering, she looked away from me. “The other girls were glad he liked me the best. It meant he paid less attention to them. Then when the police came and arrested him, I promised I'd get him out, that we'd be together again. But I didn't know how.”

She turned to me again. “And then you came along. Like,” she added, and her sarcasm nearly killed me, “an answered prayer.”

A sound outside sent her rushing to the living-room window, which looked out over the sidewalk. “What were you
thinking
?” she spat furiously at me again as she peeked between the drapes.

I looked, too. There was a man down there, and after a moment I recognized him. It was the reporter I'd given the interview to when Cam first got released from the hospital, the guy from the independent newspaper. He must have recognized me at the courthouse. Now he was pressing the bell, wanting to be buzzed in.

“He'll go away,” I said helplessly; her answering glance was scathing. She snapped the curtains shut.

“I'm sorry,” I said miserably again. Then: “But how will you get anywhere?” I'd never even seen her call a cab.

“I bought a car. What, you thought you were the only one who could do it?”

I must've stared. She had money; I'd never made her pay for anything, and a victims' fund sent her a check each month. But—

“And I got a driver's license,” she added matter-of-factly. “What did you think, that I just sat around doing nothing while you were at work all day?”

Actually, it's what I had thought. I'd dosed her well enough every morning to keep her muddled and unambitious for hours.

Or so I'd believed. Her bag stood by the door. By now it was afternoon, the winter sun already beginning to fall toward the horizon. In a few hours it would be dark. Eager to go, she peeked out the window again and sighed in annoyance.

“This is ridiculous. He won't give up, why should he? And it's your fault. I don't care how sick I was, I should've known better than to get involved with a fool like you.”

Her words felt like punches I couldn't fight back against, her gaze like an ice pick stabbing me. But even then I wanted to help her somehow.

I could have told her how to get out of the building unseen. From the basement there was a service exit to an alley behind the buildings, over to the next street.

But she never gave me the chance. “But what am I afraid of, anyway? He can't hurt me. I can just walk right out past him,” she said angrily, and turned sharply away from me.

Fool, fool,
I heard my own voice howling at me in my head. With the doomlike thudding of my heart pounding in my ears, I followed her down the hall.

Halfway to the apartment door we'd set up a telephone table with a landline phone dating from the 1960s, with a pink plastic receiver on a metal base encased in matching pink plastic.

A princess phone, it was called, and as she stomped past it she ripped the cord out and smashed the base against the wall so hard that broken parts flew everywhere.

That's when I knew how furious she must have been with me all along—how vengeful and full of hate. She'd loved that phone. Crouching, I picked what was left of the heavy base off the floor as she spun and faced me.

“You just couldn't stand it, could you?” she accused. “You wanted some of that oh-so-special victim-sympathy that the other girls had. So you toddled on down to the courtroom to get some.”

Her lips twisted. “It wasn't enough to be Saint Jane.
Oh, I take care of her every need, I'm so goody-GOOD!
” she mocked.

“Cam, it wasn't like that. I only wanted what was—”

“Never mind.” She picked up her duffel bag. “I'm going to join Henry. Our daughter is already there, it's why he picked the place. That's where he must have sent her, don't you see?”

Her eyes glowed with the certainty of delusion. “He loves me. I was special to him. So now we'll be a family, the three of us.”

The three of us…
her, Gemerle, and the baby, who by now would be a young teenager. “Cam, how can you believe that?”

But of course she could. In a part of my heart, in fact, I understood her behavior completely: She'd started out young and feisty, convinced she'd get out of there.

Convinced, probably, that I'd send help. Only I hadn't, and over the years she'd been so broken and stripped of all hope that she'd believe anything just to avoid another session of his abuse.

She'd even come to believe he loved her. Which I understood, too, I supposed; there's only so much fear a person can live with. She'd eased hers in the only way she could.

Now, though, when I'd done so much for her and we'd made
plans…
She spoke harshly again. “It wouldn't have worked anyway, you know. That dumb scheme of yours.”

She made an ugly face.
“Oh, I'm going to get revenge,”
she mocked. “Sure, only not after your stupid stunt today. He saw you in the courtroom, you know. And he recognized you, I could tell.

“And he won't trust you. Not that you'll really try, you're such a coward. And even if you do, you'll never get near him. I'll make
sure
you don't.”

Now I was the angry one. After all I'd done for her, that she should
spit
on me this way…as the immensity of her betrayal struck me and she reached for the door to go, I rose up behind her as smoothly and silently as I'd ever done anything.

Then I hit her very hard on the back of her shaved head with the heavy base of the broken princess phone.

“Unh,”
she said as the weight of the thing struck something solid; bone, I supposed. Then her knees buckled and I caught her under her shoulders and lowered her the rest of the way down.

Blood spread across the hardwood. She was still breathing, but no one bled that much and lived, I was certain.

Which meant it was only a matter of time until I went to prison. Meanwhile Gemerle was free now, and he was the cause of all this, not me.

It just wasn't fair. But if no one ever found out what I'd done, then maybe things still could be put right.

I dragged Cam back into her room and laid her on her bed. I put a thick mat of towels under her head to absorb the bleeding, and spread plastic trash bags to keep it from soaking the mattress. Then I cleaned the rest up as best I could, which was not very well; the blood had splashed everywhere.

Until finally it was nearly midnight.

From the bedroom, Cam took another loud, hitching breath, her death seeming to take forever. That was his fault, too, I thought resentfully. And what else might he do now that he was loose?

To Cam's teenage daughter, for instance, whose whereabouts I now believed I knew. Probably he'd want the girl with him as a way of controlling Cam, I thought; by threatening the girl, he could make the mother do anything. Though Cam had already proved her willingness to do anything for Gemerle.

The more I thought about it, in fact, the more sure I became. Why else would he make such a remote place—Bearkill, Maine, had a current population of only eleven hundred according to its Wikipedia entry—the meeting spot?

I slapped the laptop shut. That's why he'd picked Bearkill, of course: because of the girl.

Which meant that to trap him, all I had to do was get to her first.

“C
ontact lenses?” Dylan looked incredulous. “Come on, Lizzie, you mean you can really do that? Change your eye color well enough so that no one will realize it, just by…”

“Yup.” Area 51's Thursday-afternoon interior was empty except for the two of them, the bartender sitting at a table in the back doing a crossword puzzle.

“Buy 'em online, get any kind you want,” she said. “Cat's eyes, reptile eyes, black, red, yellow…”

Peg's were a shade called Blondie Blue.

“Especially if you don't need any vision correction,” Lizzie added.

She finished her Coke and slid off the barstool; when she'd found him here Dylan had been about to order lunch, but the way she felt right now, any minute she'd be drinking her own.

“Hey, don't feel too bad,” Dylan said. “I've looked right at her, too, you know, and I didn't tumble to it, either.”

“I guess,” Lizzie replied. She glanced at the bottles lined up behind the bar, reminded herself just how lousy a daytime drink would make her feel, and headed for the door.

Outside, the air smelled like burning weeds. “Meanwhile I get that she's lying,” Dylan went on as he followed her out. “I'm just not sure the reason is to hide that Tara is Gemerle's kid.”

In the Blazer he turned earnestly to Lizzie. “Who cares who her father is? I mean, if all we're trying to do is get her back?”

But to that Lizzie had no answer. They drove across town in silence, and when they got out to her house the air smelled like soapy bleach from all the chemicals the firefighters were dropping from helicopters, half a mile away.

So far, though, no mandatory evacuations had been ordered, and until they were, Lizzie didn't intend to join the people who were leaving ahead of any official announcement. Chevrier would tell her when it was time, she figured.

Inside, she got out the eggs, bread, and butter. “So did you talk to the DeWildes last night?”

Rascal had burst through the opened front door to gallop around the yard a few times; now he returned, pleased and panting.