Lies That Bind Us

He hesitates and then slowly, inexorably, he pans the light toward me, creeping foot by foot along the railway line. If there is a speck of drying crimson there, he will spot it long before my useless eyes find it. The light is fifteen feet away. Ten. Five.

It stops and snaps abruptly back. It finds the drop he saw first, then begins to trace the tunnel in the opposite direction, the way I went first before doubling back when I felt the track descending.

My heart leaps. If my hand bled just enough for a few spatters before stopping, it might lead him the wrong way.

He begins to walk the line, his pace quickening, and I risk another look. In the darkness of the tunnel, with the tank on his back and his slow, careful movement, it’s like we’re underwater, not on the Daedalus reef but in some deeper, lightless place, like a wreck. He takes another step away from me. Apparently he has found the trail he was hunting, and I think wildly of Ariadne’s thread spooling out behind me. But he’s wrong. He’s going the wrong way, and I have to bite down a shout of defiance and triumph. He moves off farther, and I hear the wrenching of another heavy door.

This is not the way he had come in. When he first came down he appeared in the tunnel quite suddenly, not with the long lead-in I would have seen and heard if he had come from all the way down there, and that means that the stairs he used are close to the cell. One of the doors I had taken for another prison. It has to be.

I swallow, fighting my own indecision, knowing he might come back at any moment, knowing that he will soon realize the trail he is following has dried up, knowing that I have to go. Now.

I come up out of my wooden, joint-aching crouch and begin to pad quickly along the track till the curve straightens out, then I set my heels against it and take three long strides toward where I think the wall should be, right hand out in front of me, fingers splayed. When I hit solid stone, I take three strides back to the track, move a few feet farther down, and repeat the process, all the while straining to hear the sound of the man in the mask coming back.

On the third attempt I find the door. Fumblingly, my hand locates the latch and presses it. It gives with barely a sound, and the door pulls open. Beyond it, lit by a soft gray bleed from somewhere above, is a staircase.

It is the closest thing to light I have seen for hours, and it works like a beacon on my mind as I step into the stairwell and start to climb.

I’m getting out. I’m escaping. He’ll realize his mistake and come back, but it will be too late. I’ll be long gone . . .

But where will I be? I had thought I was under the villa where we had been staying, but this tunnel, the railway line doesn’t fit with that. I climb, reaching as I do so in my mind for the last thing I remember before waking up in the cell, and it comes with startling, horrifying clarity.

I see the body on the living room floor, the back of his head bloody, the blood I can still smell on my own ravaged hands.

I can’t remember hitting him. Just looking down at him.

And then I’m in a much older memory of darkness and blood, one touched also with gas and oil and with the scent of hot, friction-burned metal.

Mom? Gabby?

And now I know why I’ve been thinking about my sister so much. After all these years and in this, of all places. It’s not just because Gabby was where my lies began. It’s because I killed her.



Chapter Thirty

I stared at my phone, processing what I was reading. Manos Veranikis—Mel’s waiter boy—had been swimming off the stone outcrop just west of the Minos hotel’s private beach, where he sometimes took snorkelers. He was gathering sponges to sell, diving from the rocks. He was by himself, which he shouldn’t have been, so there was no one to raise the alarm when he apparently hit his head and lost consciousness. He drowned, and his body washed ashore later that evening.

Sponges. Jesus.

I saw again his mother’s face in the restaurant, the recognition of Melissa and the sudden, irrational fury. Maria blamed Melissa for her son’s death, and now I understood why. We had gone to the Diogenes on our last night, but he hadn’t been there. Mel was disappointed because he had promised us sponges. I saw him in my mind’s eye, miming the basketball-size one he had planned to bring her.

Was that how he died, trying to bring a souvenir for a tourist lady he had a crush on? Could it be that simple?

God, I thought. How awful. How utterly, pointlessly wretched.

That poor boy. And his mother. No wonder she hated us. No wonder she had been ready to flay Melissa’s skin from her face with her nails the moment she realized who we were. I felt suddenly stupid and worthless, a tourist who had gathered up those bits of the place and its people that seemed nice and fun and then left, knowing nothing, unaware that one of the people who actually lived there had died trying to make us happy.

I felt sick to my stomach and sat very still for a long minute, trying to decide if I was going to throw up. I replayed it all as best I could, both the recent visit to the Diogenes and the last one five years ago. The boy had been dead by then, but the restaurant was still doing business and we hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

They hadn’t known yet. How long after we left had the police arrived? How long before Maria—our comic, boisterous Greek servant and entertainer—had been made to identify the remains of her child?

God.

But then other thoughts came and I, tourist still, moved on. If this was the key to the mystery word Manos, as seemed likely, why was Gretchen so convinced we were in danger?

You most of all.

It didn’t make sense. Or rather, it made perfect sense up to a point but didn’t explain what had happened to Gretchen or why she had made her odd pronouncements. It explained Maria’s anger when she recognized Melissa, but it had nothing to do with Gretchen’s shredded underwear, and the simplest explanation was that the two things were, therefore, unconnected, that they were separate issues. One was an accident—tragic and perhaps influenced by Melissa’s flirtatious manipulations, but an accident nonetheless, though one that perhaps some local had seen fit to underscore by piling the leaves into the shape of the boy’s name.

It was a poor revenge, I thought, ashamed of myself. We hadn’t even known what the word meant. Maybe that had only been a beginning, and there was more—worse—to come. But if so, if someone blamed us for Manos’s death and meant to do something to us as a result, how did Gretchen know, and why would she think I was the one most in danger?

Thinking of Gretchen brought me back to the other matter. She hadn’t even been with us last time, so ravaging her clothes was either a mistake or was unrelated to the boy’s death. A mistake, though unlikely, wasn’t impossible. I thought of those big windows in the villa. If someone had seen her going to her room, they might have mistaken her for Melissa and targeted her by accident. She did look a lot like her.

But tearing up someone’s underwear to revenge a child’s death? No. It felt petty, wrong. I couldn’t believe it. Either that was an unrelated bit of spite from someone else, or Gretchen had done it herself in a melodramatic—and frankly psychotic—bid for attention.

My gut said that was it, and not just because I couldn’t think of who would hate her enough to do something so mean-spirited and creepy. I had believed her when she told me she knew it wasn’t me who had cut up her clothes. Maybe this was all just willful self-delusion, an extension of the bad dreams she told everyone about in which she had been interrogated by monsters, and that her warning to me about being in danger was just more amateur theatrics. Some people like being at the center of drama, even when it’s the drama of malice and intrigue.

Especially then.

There was no doubt the woman had issues, and I of all people should understand that. She was sad, lonely, overwhelmed by her more sophisticated and glamorous friends—myself, obviously, excluded—and she wanted the limelight. If she had grabbed it in a way that was preposterous and inconvenient for everybody, there was still no more point in attacking her for it than there was in indulging her fantasies. Leaving the bathroom and heading back to the car, I resolved to be Gretchen’s friend until she felt comfortable enough to tell me the truth. After all, if anyone should understand someone lying to make a shitty situation seem better, it should be me.

So I gave her a welcoming smile when Simon led her to the car. He was using his cell phone, talking, I assumed, to Melissa.

“I have her,” he said. “We’re on our way back.”