Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lily
Dad and I drove in complete and utter silence for the last fifteen minutes of our journey. I was too nervous to ask any more questions about what the hell had been going on for the last six years, but I knew I’d have my answers soon when I saw my mother’s face after all this time. I settled back in my seat and stared out of the window, watching the rolling hills go by and observing the way the patchy green grass gave way to dark forest as we entered the true countryside of our state. Our house was in a semi-rural area, but at least we were within the city limits. This place was something else entirely—thick trees, unpaved roads with old signs, and barely any cell towers to speak of.
We made a turn off the road we’d been on for ten minutes and took a winding little track down to an old wooden fence, which looked like it was falling apart after too many years exposed to the elements.
“We’ll have to climb over that fence and walk the rest of the way,” Dad said, parking up on the edge of the little dirt road. “You remember this place, right? I wasn’t sure if you did when I mentioned it earlier. I used to come out here when I was a kid, y’know.”
I nodded. A group of us had come out here for a fun weekend for Dad’s 30th birthday years ago, when I was only eight or nine, and we’d had a great time. We had a campfire going the whole weekend, and we practically lived on S’mores and soda. I felt a twinge in my guts as I remembered that time, back before Mom did what she did and vanished. Back when my family was still intact and untouched by horror.
But now I was going to see her again.
Now I was finally going to get some answers.
“I remembered it,” I said to Dad, glancing at him. “I was just shocked when you told me earlier. I was still processing everything so I guess I didn’t react much.”
He nodded. “Fair enough.”
I squinted into the distance, where a clearing lay amongst the scattered trees. An old log cabin stood in the middle, and I pointed to it. “I remember that cabin. When we were camping here, we went and looked at it. It was abandoned and falling apart. How has Mom been staying there this whole time?”
“She didn’t at first. She slept at some of those cheap seedy motels along Route 23 for the first few weeks. The ones where they never ask for ID. She changed every couple of nights just in case, because obviously the cops had a manhunt going. While she was doing that, I was driving out here every morning to fix the cabin up. Figured it was a good place for her to hide. No one ever comes out here anymore, and this land is publicly-owned. So it’s not like there’s any private owners who might decide to check out their property one day and come across the cabin.”
“Oh. Right. But what if random people decided to camp here, just like we did for your thirtieth?”
He shrugged. “We had a plan for that if it happened. If people ever came out here, she’d tell them she was a camper as well, getting some time alone in the woods to do some yoga and whatever other Eat, Pray, Love bullshit women are into these days. But it never happened. Like I said, no one really comes out here anymore.”
“I guess she also looks different now,” I mused.
He nodded again as we trudged over the thick grass in the clearing. “Of course. She had to change her appearance just in case. She dyes her hair dark red and wears blue contacts now. And she’s lost a lot of weight. So even if people had come out here to camp and happened to see her, they wouldn’t have recognized her anyway.”
He came to a stop and turned to me, a hard look in his eyes. “Lily, a lot has changed in the last six years. Are you absolutely sure you’re ready to see your mom?”
I frowned. “Yes. Seriously, Dad, I’ve said that a hundred times now.”
He sighed and stretched his arm out in the direction of the cabin, which was only a few yards away now. “All right. She’s out the back,” he said.
I followed him around the back, my heart racing at a million miles an hour. Any second now, my mother’s face was going to come into view. What would I say first? What would I do first? Would I simply stand there frozen and speechless instead?
My knees felt like they were going to cave in any moment, and my stomach roiled with nervousness as Dad beckoned me around to the back of the cabin.
“Here she is,” he said.
I frowned and glanced around, then gave him a puzzled look. “Where?”
“I suppose I need to point her out more specifically,” he said, a small smile playing on his lips.
Dread rose within me at the strange tone in his voice, and I took a slow step back as Dad walked over to a raised patch of grass and knelt down. “This is where I buried her,” he said.
“Dad…what are you saying?” I asked, my voice trembling. But I already knew.
“I always hoped you wouldn’t remember, Lily,” he said calmly, rising back to his full height. “But I knew there was a chance you would begin to recall some things. Makes me sad, but I can’t do anything about it, can I?”
I took another step back, barely daring to breathe. I still had the gun with me; I just needed to remember that. I had the upper hand. “Tell me what happened, Dad.”
He let out a sharp bark of laughter. “I’m sure you can figure it out, honey.”
“You killed Mom, obviously,” I said in a soft voice, glancing at the raised bump in the grass again, where I now knew her bones lay buried. Tears sprang to my eyes at the thought, but I suppressed them. I would grieve for her later. “But I want to know the whole story. You promised me I’d get my answers today.”
He nodded slowly. “Fine. You’re right. But you already figured it out earlier, Lily. When you accused me of killing Jenna to get rid of my problem and then killing your mother to set her up for the murder…well, you were pretty close to the mark. I didn’t actually plan to do everything that way. But I suppose it just happened.”
“How?”
“Jenna refused to abort the child. I didn’t want it. Didn’t want her anymore. But the bitch refused. Kept saying she’d tell everyone if I didn’t support her and the baby. I couldn’t afford that so I kept refusing. Said I’d pay for the abortion and nothing else. Then she called me that day, told me she was giving Jackson some sort of letter that night if I didn’t come clean right away. So I sneaked out of the office for a while. Everyone was so busy they didn’t miss me. I went to see Jenna. Made her let me in by pretending I’d changed my mind about the baby.”
“Then you killed her.”
“I didn’t plan on doing that. I mean, I took the gun with me, but that was mostly to scare her. But she…she just got to me. I was so fucking angry. So I shot her. Then I shot her again. And again, and again. But turns out your mom followed me that day. She saw me heading over to Jackson and Jenna’s house from the back window of our house, and she came in hoping to get solid proof of our affair. She saw what I’d done.”
“And you saw an opportunity to frame her for everything.”
He nodded. “Everyone already thought she was nuts. Everyone already knew she despised Jenna, because she suspected our affair but no one believed her. She was the perfect scapegoat. So…I killed her too. Not with the gun, of course. Too messy, and the cops would’ve realized. I strangled her. And you know what? After all the shit she put me through over the years…I didn’t even feel bad about it. When I was done, I wiped the gun and put it in her hands to leave her prints on it. Then I put her in the back of my car, cleared out her bank accounts, packed some of her stuff, and got rid of her car in that landfill near our place. I drove her body out here, buried her, cleaned myself up, and went right back to work by four. And when a friend dropped by to visit Jenna later in the day, they found her dead, and the cops had a viable suspect very quickly—your mom.”
“You’re a psychopath,” I said, bile rising in my throat.
He shrugged. “It’s self-preservation. One day you might understand that.”
“Why did you say you thought I might start to remember one day?” I asked, clutching the gun tighter. “What was there for me to remember?”
He smiled. “I suppose I buried the lead a bit, didn’t I? I fucked up one thing that day, Lily. I forgot you were home sick with your stomach ache or whatever it was. You must’ve woken up when you heard Jenna screaming from across the field. You went into the house just after I was done putting your mom in the trunk. You saw Jenna lying there and picked up the gun. I thought I was fucked in that moment. Totally and utterly fucked.”
“So what did you do?”
“I remembered you were all zonked out on pain medication. I could see it in your eyes; you barely knew if you were awake or not. I really didn’t want to kill you. You were so young, so innocent. And it would’ve seemed suspicious if you went missing with your mother. So I played with you. Told you that you were the one who shot Jenna, and that it was a bad dream. I still remember your face. You were so scared. So shocked. You believed me; you thought it was all just one big nightmare. After that, I took you home, cleaned you up and gave you more of that pain medication, along with some sleeping pills I had in my bathroom cabinet. Then I told you everything would be okay and tucked you back into bed before returning to my task of dealing with your mom’s body and staging her disappearance. You really threw a spanner in the works, darling, but I made it out somehow.”
Shit. Dr. Steinberg was wrong—all the nightmares I had these last few months were mostly real memories returning to me. I really was at Jackson’s house that day. I really saw Jenna’s body, smelled the blood. I picked up the gun, and I really thought it was me who killed her, because my own father told me I did it.
“It was a gamble,” Dad continued. “I was terrified you’d still remember everything when you woke up the next day. If you did, I was fucked, but thank god…you didn’t. All you remembered was waking up and hearing some screaming from next door. I guess you heard Jenna screaming ‘Craig, don’t do this!’ before I shot her, but because you’d already been told that the cops thought your mom did it, you remembered it as something else. Something very similar. K instead of Craig. The power of suggestion is pretty strong, after all.”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t understand how you got away with this for so long. How did no one see you? How did the cops miss the fact that you left work for several hours that day?”
He chuckled. “Oh, Lily. You’re still so young and naïve. Why would they look into me? I was never a suspect, so there was never any reason to investigate my whereabouts that day. Everyone knew your Mom did it…or so they thought, anyway. No one else knew about the affair between me and Jenna, and that was the only thing that would’ve put suspicion on me.”
“What if they’d discovered she was pregnant when they autopsied her?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“Oh, I made sure they wouldn’t. Besides, even if they did, they would’ve just thought it was Jackson’s baby.”
I nodded. That made sense. He really had thought of everything, like the relentless sociopath he was.
“So everything you said earlier today was a lie, obviously. That letter I got….it really was you who wrote it, right?” I said.
“Of course. You came to me a few months ago to tell me about these nightmares you were having. I knew you were starting to remember, so I had to throw you off track by making you think they were just dreams and that your mother was still alive. So I practiced her handwriting for days and days. Still had plenty of old cards and letters around the house to do so. I was even able to trace entire words out of them. Wasn’t hard, in the end.”
I sighed at my own stupidity. Every suspicion I’d had earlier turned out to be correct….but I’d been so naïve and desperate to believe that Mom was still out there that I’d fallen hook, line and sinker for every lie my father fed me.
“Don’t feel bad, honey,” Dad said, advancing toward me. “You aren’t stupid. You’re just a sweet, innocent little girl. You never wanted to believe that your dear old dad could do anything so awful, just like deep down you never wanted to believe your mom did anything wrong.”
“I’m not so sweet,” I said, holding Jenna’s gun up. “I have this.”
He simply laughed, and within seconds he was charging at me. With one chop against my forearm with his right hand, the gun went flying, and he dived to grab it.
“Silly girl. Did you really think I was worried?” he asked as he waved the gun in the air. “Did you really think I believed you had any idea how to use this? And did you really think a guy like me couldn’t disarm you in seconds even if you did? You were never a threat, Lily. I just wanted you to think you were so you’d feel safe enough to come out here with me.”
Idiot, idiot, idiot! my mind screamed at me. I’d fucked everything up royally. If I’d just gone with my first idea earlier, which was to call the police after finding Jenna’s letter about my dad, none of this would’ve happened. I would be safe at home in Jackson’s arms right now.
God…Jackson.
I needed him now more than ever. He’d already saved my ass from trouble so many times over the last few months….but would he save me again? Would he even know I needed saving right now? Would he even be able to find me out here? I’d sneakily texted him earlier when Dad had his eyes on the road, so he vaguely knew where we were, but he’d only been here once eleven years ago. There was no way he’d remember how to get to an out-of-the-way place like this, at least not in time to save me from my father’s wrath.
I was screwed.
I shrank back as my father advanced on me again, pinning me up against the log cabin wall with his body. “I really didn’t want to do this to you, Lily. I really did love you. Still do,” he said softly as his free hand reached for my throat. “But you’ve given me no choice. You asked too many questions. Figured out too much.”
“Dad, please! No!” I screamed, trying to struggle my way out of his dangerous grip. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise!”
He grimaced, and with his next words I knew there was no hope anymore. “At least you’ll be with your mother now, sweetie.”