Much like I just had, Elizabeth had left Les Jumeaux on her boat and anchored off the coast, near the drop off and the cavern. She’d made the same dive many times in the past, the adventure of arriving through the mysterious depths beneath Les Jumeaux spiking the excitement of her illicit meetings with her father.
It seemed impossible that her lifeless body had landed in this little shallow indentation and stayed here for seven years without tipping over the ledge. Even in death, Elizabeth exerted her will. She’d stuck tenaciously, when she should have drifted into oblivion. Forgetfulness. Her lifeless body was her story.
And Elizabeth Madaster wanted that story told.
She still wore her dive suit and hood. I could see the shape of her slender, voluptuous body. She was remarkably well preserved, due to the tight suit and the cold, low-bacteria content of the Tahoe depths. I’d read about it once before, how divers lost in Tahoe could be remarkably preserved for more than a decade, due to the purity of the water and the protection of the suit.
Only her skull had fully decomposed.
I remained suspended in the black waters for I don’t know how long, looking into my mother’s face.
Chapter Thirty
Finally, I left her behind—we’ll be back for you, Elizabeth. You held on. Your long sleep in the dark, cold water will be over soon.
I rose to the shimmering pool above me and surfaced. I removed my mouthpiece and dive mask and looked around. It was a round, circular spring inside a granite tunnel.
The spring was natural, but the tunnel wasn’t. Surely the Cornish miners who had labored a century ago to build Les Jumeaux and the grounds had cut through the stone here, as well, with dynamite and pick axes. Some Madaster ancestor had paid the miners to keep the tunnel secret. He’d passed on the knowledge of the deep subterranean passage between the houses only to a child or two from the next generation, and that Madaster did the same to his child, and so on.
Madasters thrived on family secrets.
Family secrets like me.
Elizabeth had learned the power of secrets from the cradle, no doubt. She and I were both embodiments of the skeleton in the closet.
I pulled myself out of the water and removed my equipment. The tunnel was lit by a single bulb. This was the source of the inexplicable light I’d seen when I’d swum deep into the cavern. The LED bulb must have been burning constantly for over two years, to some time before Lorraine had pushed Madaster down the stairs and made her husband wheelchair-bound. He couldn’t afford to have an elevator built down to this level. It would entail letting strangers view his secret place. It would mean possibly exposing his crimes.
Instinctively, I knew that it ate at Noah, burned in him, his inability to access this tunnel, so prized by generations of Madasters for undertaking illicit activities. After Noah had murdered his rebellious daughter, he’d sacrificed her body to that vertical drop beneath the spring. He hadn’t realized that Elizabeth’s body had caught on the rock ledge just feet below the spring’s surface.
I imagined Madaster felt the closest to her when he visited this place, not realizing that she was literally nearby.
I used my dive light to help with illumination and made my way down the tunnel, the granite feeling like ice beneath my wet, bare feet. To the right of me, there was an indentation carved into the wall. It was a stone room, I realized, the shadows hanging thick where the LED light couldn’t reach. I shone my dive light around. I saw a bed with restraints at the four bedposts. It was an antique, wooden bed. How many generations of Madasters had used it?
There was a sensor cap and attached wires lying on the rumpled sheets.
Nausea struck me. But then a cold, hard anger chased it away. I shone the light into a corner. On a table, I saw bottles of pills and liquid, and syringes for IV drug use. At what age did Madaster start drugging his own daughter for the supposed purpose of his “research”?
(I was too young to remember the first time.)
Behind the table, someone had hung a long mirror with a wooden frame. The bed was in the reflection, a mirror for Madaster to witness his own depravity. I stepped up to the mirror and blocked the reflection. I removed my hood and studied my face. My damp hair fell in curls. Acting on some instinct, I shut off my dive light.
The image in the dim reflection was eerily familiar. My hair had always curled when it was shorter, but straightened out to waves when it was long. Now that I’d cut it, it sprang into ringlets, even damp. The tendrils just brushed my shoulders. I looked like my own nightmare standing there, my black wetsuit gleaming, my hair coiling into wet curls that my terror-filled, dreaming brain had interpreted as Medusa-like.
I knew that I looked exactly like Elizabeth at that moment. I recalled Madaster staring at me with hungry glee.
“So alike. And to think… you never even knew her. It’s all a matter of genes. Those amazing, perfect genes.”
I clicked on my dive light, and my image resolved into that of a young woman whose eyes looked bug-like in her pale face. Of course I was terrified. But it took my own image to hit it home.
What if I, too, had committed incest?
What if Madaster had been right? What if that depravity had been coiled into my genes somehow, a secret biological explosive waiting to detonate?
But… no. That’s not how life worked. That was Noah Madaster’s delusion. I was innocent. Evan and I had been ignorant. I may have the genes of the Madaster family, but I had the life of a Solas. I had the love, security, and respect of a family, something Elizabeth had never known.
(Yes. You are the light from darkness.)
In the way of dreams, or my activated unconscious mind, Elizabeth hadn’t just been telling m