Swim Deep - Page 121

“That Elizabeth had a child that spring twenty-four years ago, after she went away to school at sixteen, in San Francisco,” I finished for Wes. I looked at Noah. “Elizabeth was always slim. At Christmas that year, she was able to keep the truth hidden before she went away to school again. She knew she couldn’t keep the child.”

(Light from my darkness. I sent you away for your own good. But I never forgot you.)

“You don’t know everything,” Madaster said. He was breathing heavily, his nostrils flaring and pinching tight. “She did tell me she was pregnant. She told me that she’d had an abortion. And that afterward, she wasn’t able to have children anymore.”

“You taught her how to lie even before she could walk. Evan told me that he believed Elizabeth couldn’t have children, as well. Maybe she couldn’t, after she gave birth to me. Maybe something went wrong. Or perhaps she had a hysterectomy afterward. I don’t know. All I know is, she gave me up for adoption because she wanted her child raised somewhere safe. Somewhere clean. She couldn’t bear the idea of that child being exposed to you.”

“That’s a lie. Elizabeth loved me,” Madaster wheezed.

“She hated you with a white hot passion. You convinced her, with your cursed machine, that feeling was love. That’s one of your cruelest, sickest sins, Noah. When Evan and the doctors started to help Elizabeth to name her feelings for what they were, she couldn’t wait to cut you out of her life. But you couldn’t allow that, could you?”

“It was Evan’s fault. He turned her against me. She started spouting the foulest things that night, in the tunnel. I had to make her stop… ” He faded off, panting. He’d slumped in his wheelchair.

I suddenly saw it in my mind’s eye: the things Elizabeth was saying against him, these lies they’d put in her head, the hatred and revulsion he saw in her eyes.

He had to stop it at all costs.

I saw his hands at her throat, choking off this new reality that threatened to snap his narrow, narcissistically driven world.

“You strangled her to death,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to,” Noah panted.

“Anna, I think he’s—”

“Maybe you did mean to. Maybe you didn’t. But you had to make her stop talking,” I said, cutting off Wes. “You couldn’t take it. You were too fragile to hear the truth. It killed you, knowing how much Elizabeth had come to despise you. The blindfold you’d put on her from the day she was born had been removed. She saw you, that night down in the tunnel. That’s why you had Wes lie to me about my paternity. You wanted me to think I’d slept with my own father. You did it because you relished the idea of me looking at Evan the way Elizabeth looked at you the night you murdered her: with utter revulsion and hatred.”

Madaster shouted and lurched forward in his chair, nearly spilling from the seat. Suddenly, Wes was there, pushing him back into a sitting position. I saw Madaster convulse. I watched the scene as if through a long, narrow tunnel.

“Anna, call 911,” Wes said, two of his fingers at Noah’s throat. “He’s having a heart attack.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Wes sat across from me in the waiting room at the hospital. He’d just given me the news. He’d said that Noah Madaster had died of a massive coronary only minutes after he’d arrived at the emergency room.

I experienced neither remorse nor triumph at the revelation.

It struck me that we both looked like human husks, Wes and I, sitting there in that sterile, unfeeling room.

“Anna, I want you to know… I never knew all the details about what Noah had done to Elizabeth. I only knew that he murdered her,” he said after a long, numb pause.

“Because you helped him move her boat away from the vicinity of Les Jumeaux?”

“Yes.”

I swallowed and sat forward, forcing myself to focus on this shell of a man.

“If you tell the police what you did that night, how you helped Madaster, I won’t tell them about what else you did. The landslide. The sauna.”

His anxious gaze bounced off me.

“How did you do it? How did you keep me in that room?” I asked, unable to suppress my curiosity despite my zombie state. “Wes?” I prompted when he didn’t immediately reply.

“Noah owns a traveler’s door lock. It’s

a portable lock that will hold a door fast.”

“You almost killed me, you know.”

Tags: Beth Kery Romance
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