Page 97 of Haven't Killed in Years
“One night,” he continued, “she got the balls to ask me if I remembered that day, really pushed me on it. As soon as she asked if Iremembered you, it all came flooding back. It unlocked everything. So thank you for that, I guess.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, one snarky response cracking through my resolve. He grinned, and that was enough motivation not to let it happen again.
“So I went back to Oswald, this time knowing what question I really should be asking:What the hell happened to you?I was hoping he would tell me your new name, but he couldn’t remember. Can you imagine? That priceless bit of information and he just forgot it. I suppose the specifics didn’t matter much; it’s not like you’d tried to killhim.”
He waited for that jab to land, but it wasn’t hard for me to resist.
“He did tell me one useful thing. He mentioned that James Calhoun had been the one who’d gotten you out of town. He’d found some boarding school in Pennsylvania to dump you in. There are quite a few boarding schools in Pennsylvania, but not too many that take in ten-year-olds.”
He was so proud of himself, but I couldn’t handle it anymore. “Yeah, and you went there and broke into the storage units and stole my file. I got it.”
His animated posturing cracked enough for me to pick up on it. This part was important to him. He’d been waiting years to lay it all out on a platter for me—how smart he was, how stupid it made me. He’d probably practiced in the mirror. It was part of my punishment and he wasn’t wrong about that. Sitting in that van, listening to him go on and on, I knew it might end up being more torturous than any physical harm he had in store for me.
- - - - -
We were well offthe highway now, and I knew where we were headed. The old neighborhood. It was disturbing how tragic thiswas—all of it, but mostly that he had planned out this grand finale, taking me right back to the origin. I’m sure he’d dreamed about how poetic it would be. He was naive to think I had an attachment to that place, that killing me there would somehow be exponentially more upsetting. The truth was, it didn’t matter to me where he killed me. It only mattered that it would be over.
“Elyse is such a bleeding heart,” he continued. “She likes to act like she’s not, but once I told her who I was, she would have done anything for me, kept any secrets. Her sad, traumatized brother wanted to get to know her, he wanted to remember, and he wasn’t ready for the world to know who he was yet. I’d seen how people who knew who she was treated her. It was all so fresh for me. I wasn’t ready to be a freak yet. You can appreciate that, right?
“Honestly,” he went on, “I thought she would be more ruthless. Back when we would first talk about finding you, I knew she hated you. I knew she blamed you for everything. I thought we would do it all together. But she was all talk, no action, and I worried she wasn’t ready to do what really needed to be done. It’s not like I was just going to shoot you in the street and be done with it. So I decided to take care of everything for her. I knew it would be better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.”
“Does she know who I am?”
“Not yet.” His delivery was ominous, but I was relieved there was still a chance she would never find out—no matter how much that chance was shrinking.
“Does she know what you did?”
“Not yet,” he repeated, jaunty this time.
“And Dominic? He really knew nothing?”
“What did Dominic know…?” he pondered. “Pretty much whatever I wanted him to know. See, right from the beginning, once I remembered you, before I had even figured out your new name, Iused Elyse’s existence to pique Dominic’s interest in your father. Not that it was difficult.”
He waited for my reaction, at least an acknowledgment, but I was using all my willpower to paralyze the muscles in my face and avoid giving him any satisfaction.
“He was depressed after a breakup; he’s a serial monogamist, by the way, just like his mother. I told him that he was such a great writer and that he should channel his emotions into that. I suggested he write to Abel in prison.It would make such a great book. I thought there was a chance Abel knew where you were or what your name was. I thought there was a slimmer chance he might let something slip to Dominic.”
“Why didn’t you just write to him?” I asked. “Why even use Dominic?”
Jake raised an eyebrow. Pleased I was engaging again. “Well, you know Dominic. He just has that…I don’t know what to call it…nonthreatening bumbling-idiot aura. Plus, if Abel recognized me, that wouldn’t be ideal, now, would it? And not to pat myself on the back, but I did have some foresight about how the whole thing might play out, what I might need from that relationship with your father down the line.”
He wanted me to think using Dominic had been so calculated, but I suspected it was something simpler. Talking to my father was not for the faint of heart. Especially if he had murdered your loved ones in cold blood.
“Once I found you,” he continued, “I couldn’t just bump into you on the street. You would have been too suspicious of me. I needed a trail you could follow; I needed you to think you were making the decisions. I knew once I left you those arms, you would think your father was involved. You would look into it and that would lead youright to Dominic. I didn’t know you two would become Sherlock and Watson, but I thought you’d do some digging on him and figure out he knew Elyse. At that point, you wouldn’t be able to resist getting to know all of us.
“Itwashard to figure you out.” He smiled. “I wanted to take everything from you, but how could I do that when you had nothing to take?” He chuckled like he’d told a joke instead of an astute, depressing summarization of my existence. “A guy you went on a couple dates with? I probably would have been doing you a favor to kill that dud. You’re going to laugh…”
I was not.
“But I actually considered calling in a health code violation on that sandwich place you go to every day of your life. Absurd, I know, but I was still workshopping everything back then. It was a struggle to ascertain anything I could really use from just watching you in the shadows. Well,” he scoffed, “until I realized someone else was already watching you in the shadows.”
I could tell he loved delivering that turn of phrase and I hated him so much. He was the same little asshole he’d been when I’d bashed his skull in. Clearly, part of his master plan didn’t involve inspiring remorse in any way.
“That girl…” he continued. “She was nuts. I think she might have tried to poison me with soup at one point. I didn’t dare eat it—I could see there was a weird powder floating around in it—but I pretended it made me sick so she would feel bad…or happy, not exactly sure.”
“What did she even have to do with anything?” I asked, protective of Natalie, not caring for the way he was talking about her. “You didn’t have to involve her. She had no idea who you were or who I really was.”
“She was a curveball,” he admitted, “but she was exactly what I was looking for. Turns out you two went way back. Well, not as far back as me and you, but school chums!”
