Page 80 of The Gallagher Place
“I know I shouldn’t still be angry at her,” Nate said. “But I am.”
“What did you do?” Marlowe asked.
“I told Henry to stay calm and not tell anyone, I was going to help him. And then I told Dad,” Nate said. “I took the train into the city and went to his office and told him everything I knew. And he just sat there and listened. He told me not to do a single thing.Not to change my plans, and not to say a word. He told me he would take care of it. And that’s what I did.
“It sounds so bad now, after what happened, but I swear, I didn’t think it would go this way. You know Dad. I thought he would find a rational solution. And I think he really could have, if things hadn’t gone wrong.”
If Marlowe hadn’t thought the same thing, she would have chided her brother for being so delusional. If anyone could come up with a reasonable, airtight plan, it would be their father. So why hadn’t he?
“You could have talked to her,” Marlowe said. “She might have listened to you.”
“I thought maybe I should, but I was young too, and I was scared for Henry,” Nate said. “I didn’t have any experience with a girl until I was a senior in high school. And I felt I had already failed by not telling him what he needed to know.”
Nate paused, running over those strange twists of logic. He and Henry had been riddled with anxiety, Nora had been hoarding secrets, and the whole time, Marlowe had thought it was the start of another summer, just like all the ones that had come before.
“When she didn’t come back that night, I thought maybe she had been driven away by someone, off to a clinic or something.” Nate shrugged. “I found out later that Enzo had tried talking to her the week before, and it went badly. That must have been when he touched her bracelet. He confronted her again in June. It got physical, and she fell, hit her head. There was nothing he could do.”
With sudden clarity, Marlowe recalled a conversation with Enzo when an injured bear had been roaming the woods. He’d said it himself: Animals backed into a corner fight with everything they have. There must have been a major struggle. Nate was being generous to call it a fall.
“Did he hide her in the loft?” Marlowe asked. “I remember you climbed up there.”
“It was dark and I was panicked. Henry was too. We were both out of our minds. That’s why Enzo took him away—to calm him down.
“It was hours later, after we had searched and the Millers had called the police, when Enzo told me I could never say a word about it. He told me there had been an accident, but he’d taken care of it. And that Nora was gone.”
Both Marlowe and Nate instinctively glanced at the wall.
“Dad repeated the details later, vaguely, but he never told where she was,” Nate said. “Enzo must have moved the body out here just before dawn. When we were all in the house, and we thought he was resting in the basement. He must have worked like a madman, pulling the stones off and then replacing them.”
It was a strange thing to consider, how hard Enzo must have labored.
“Henry never knew anything,” Nate said. “I’m sure he suspected, but he never knew anything concrete. I made sure of that. He believed what happened between them was unrelated to her disappearance.”
“Because Enzo told him some nonsense about a stranger in the woods,” Marlowe said. “So Henry could believe whatever gave him comfort.”
“Doesn’t he deserve that?” Nate asked. “He didn’t do anything wrong. You two are the only innocent ones here. Don’t think I don’t know that.”
Marlowe didn’t feel innocent. She felt stupid and angry and hurt and ruined. But not innocent.
“Why now?” Marlowe asked. “Why tell me all this now?”
Nate looked at her as if the answer was obvious. He nodded at the tarp. “You know where the body is. You could turn that in, andwe’ll all be guilty. I figured you should at least know the truth before you decide.”
“You could move it.”
Nate scoffed. “I’m not touching it. And if anyone asks, I’ll say I knew nothing about it.”
“And if they run DNA tests on it? And she was pregnant?” Marlowe didn’t know what could be recovered from a body in this condition. “Won’t they be able to see who the father was?”
Nate shook his head. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think she was ever pregnant. I think she was playing a dangerous game.”
“You just tell yourself that to make it a little less painful.”
Nate was telling the version of the story that made sense to him. He was giving the details that painted Henry as a victim and Nora as greedy and manipulative and grasping. She may have wanted to control Henry, and she may have made rash decisions, but that didn’t make her a criminal.
“I don’t think I ever realized how hard it must have been for her to leave the Gray House after the weekend was over,” Marlowe said.
“She loved it,” Nate said. “Too much, I think.”
