Page 4 of Atlas
“How did you know about the book? Have you been in here before?” I asked her with some confusion.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I can’t remember.”
Maximum pushed past me and walked in, with Nathan and me right behind him. A day bed and two leather chairs were on the floor, but it was the walls that made my blood freeze to ice.
“What the fuck is this?” Nathan scanned the walls with his face scrunched up. “Do you recognize any of them?”
I studied the photos pinned to the wall. Everything in Conor’s life had been well organized, but these photos were placed in random order, some on top of each other. “Maybe Conor didn’t know this room existed. Maybe these are from a previous owner.”
“No, I recognize this girl.” Maximum reached for a photo and took it down. “Remember Heather? She was my age and lived here with her mom for about a year.” He handed me the picture of a girl who sat naked against a wall, looking away. She couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve.
“Hmmm.” I gave him the photo back and walked around, looking at the girls and young women on the walls. Several I recognized, but in most of the images, the girls had their back to the camera, making it impossible to identify them.
On a low shelf, a combined TV and video stood, and underneath it, at least fifty videotapes were lined up.
My hands tore through my hair. “Conor was a psychopathic killer who lied and deceived people, but he wasn’t a sexual child molester. We would know if he was. We were children living in his house.”
Maximum looked around. “I don’t know. It’s all females. Just because he never touched you and me doesn’t mean he didn’t touch others.”
I spun around to face Lumi. “Did Conor ever touch you?”
She shook her head. “Not that I remember.”
“River, did Conor ever touch you inappropriately?”
River had never entered the room and still stood in the office looking in. “Do you see any photos of me?”
“I can’t tell.” Using my phone, I documented what we’d found while Maximum began taking down the photos.
“Stop, what are you doing?”
He kept going. “We need to find the children. This isn’t right, and they need to know about it.”
“Maximum, stop!” I raised my voice.
He already had five of the pictures in his hands when he stopped and listened to me.
“None of these girls are children anymore. It’s been eleven years, which means every girl in those pictures is an adult now. Why would you tell them? What if they blocked it from their memory and are now living healthy lives? We don’t know what really happened, but even if there are worse things on those videos, we can’t just show up with proof that they were molested. It might start a chain reaction, and they could end up worse than before we told them.”
“What can be worse than not knowing?” Maximum argued.
I shifted my balance. “Taking an overdose or drinking yourself to death to forget is worse. Look, it's not like we can put our dad in jail. The man is already dead.”
“But what if they have all sorts of issues but don’t remember why? This is a piece of a puzzle. They deserve to know.”
My hands were shaking. “Do any of you want to go through another round of publicity? You know the press would be all over this, and then what?” I gave Maximum a direct stare. “You and I are the sons of a mass murderer, and now you want to tell the world that he was a pedophile too?”
Pain crossed Maximum’s face before he looked away.
“With dad gone, who do you think the press is going to come for?”
My brother didn’t answer. While I’d been shipped to the US after it happened and few at college had known about my background, Maximum had been younger and stayed here in Ireland. For him, school had been a nightmare with all the bullying and exclusion from people who judged him as the son of Conor O’Brien.
Lumi’s voice sounded from behind us. “I say we burn it all. This room is a shrine to misery and evil, and nothing in here deserves to be spread or seen by anyone.”
“Yes. Let’s take all the photos down and burn them. The tapes too,” Nathan agreed.
“No, I need to document this and see what’s on the tapes,” I objected and stuffed four flash drives from the pile of videotapes into my pockets.
