There Should Have Been Eight, page 34
Many would be discharged tomorrow.
Bea, however, had a room of her own. Must’ve been Ratene’s doing. So he could have a private space in which to talk to her. As it was, he hadn’t gotten his wish, with the doctors pronouncing her too drugged when she’d arrived—and then, he’d been busy with the scene at the estate. Later, it was Grace along with me who’d commanded his time.
“I haven’t, but that’s fine,” Ratene had said during one of our talks, when I’d asked him if he’d managed to speak with Bea yet. “Grace has admitted she kept Beatrice drugged the entire time Grace was at the estate, because Beatrice never agreed with her plans of revenge.
“I mostly need to talk to her about her unwilling detention at the facility, start the ball rolling on that investigation. But it’s not like I don’t have enough to do with business at the estate. The facility can wait.”
Bea was a victim.
As such, there was no cop outside her room.
I pushed inside the small space to find her bedside lamp on as she lay in bed with her eyes wide open. “Nae-nae. I was waiting for you.” She patted the sheet.
Toeing off my new sneakers, I managed to fit myself on the hospital bed, the two of us lying face-to-face, our breaths intermingling. She didn’t stop me when I touched my fingers to her cheek, reassuring myself that she was warm, that her blood flowed in her veins. “You’re alive.”
A smile that wasn’t quite right. “I’m not the same. I couldn’t always avoid the drugs there—and they didn’t give me the right ones until Grace got out and hacked the system, changing my assigned meds.”
The trick is to commit.
A year into her freedom and Grace had managed to create fraudulent paperwork good enough to convince Darcie that Bea really was dead. She’d gone to the extent of making a phone notification, the number spoofed to make it appear it came from the facility, and she’d sent invoices for a casket and a cremation.
Later she’d sent that official-looking death certificate.
Darcie had been horrified to see Bea standing there, alive and well. That part, at least, hadn’t been an act.
Darcie’s belief in Bea’s death—and the resulting destruction of Bea’s property on Darcie’s command—was also why Grace had stolen her phone. So that Darcie couldn’t even attempt to call the facility’s unlisted number, a number saved on her phone alone; she’d certainly never shared it with Ash.
“Grace,” I said to Bea, “told me you asked to stay inside when she could’ve got you out six months ago.” After making Darcie believe Bea was dead, Grace had taken over the fee payments and all communications with the facility—in Darcie’s name. However, even with all the skills she’d learned, it had taken her several more months to arrange for Bea’s release. Only for Bea to ask her to wait even longer.
“I wrote the release paperwork on the judge’s stationery,” Grace had said with a grin back in the car. “Same man who put her in now ordering that fucking prison to let her go. Seemed poetic.”
“My new regimen of drugs was working,” Bea whispered in the soft, almost dreamy light of her lamp. “But I wasn’t me yet. I had to wait.” She was the one who stroked my face now, the bandage around her right palm a searing white. “I’m still not me, Nae-nae. I don’t know if I ever will be again.”
“You’re alive. You breathe. That’s all I ever wanted.” My own breath caught. “Forgive me for not finding you.”
“How could you?” She touched her forehead to mine. “You trusted Darcie. So did I. I have no memory of being admitted to the facility—I went to sleep one night, and I woke up there. I don’t blame myself or you. Only Darcie.”
I stroked her wrist. “Let’s go for a walk.” I didn’t think this room was being monitored, but we couldn’t take the risk.
Bea’s eyes held a thousand secrets as she rose. Her hospital gown was loose, the slippers into which she slid her feet institutional. The police had taken the dress in which she’d come into the ER, and all her other stuff was at the estate.
“I’ll buy you some clothes,” I said as we padded out of the room. “Your favorite pink jeans and a sparkly unicorn T-shirt.”
Sudden laughter before she tucked her arm through mine. “I’ll have you know that was ironic high fashion at fourteen.”
We didn’t speak again until we were outside the ward, in the wide-open corridor with no one else around. As if even the staff had gone to sleep. A false silence, but in this moment, we walked alone. “Grace said it’s been a month since she got you discharged.” Me and Grace, we’d had time to speak in the Land Cruiser.
Bea nodded, her slippers making hush hush sounds on the hospital tile. “She picked me up, took me to the estate. Already had clothes and other supplies, even my favorite perfume. I wanted to get on a plane and come to you, but I was afraid, Nae-nae. When you’ve lived in a cage for so long, the outside world feels like it’ll crush you—and I didn’t know who you were anymore.”
Baby steps, Luna. One at a time.
Dr. Mehta, her wisdom infinite. “I understand. The estate was a safe place to heal, decide on your next steps.”
“Yes, and I had my secret room to hide in if the caretaker came by.”
“Cops don’t know about that room.”
“Even Darcie didn’t know where it was. I found it as a kid, used to hide there when she got annoying.” Bea looked up at me, a question in her expression.
“Far as cops are concerned, you stayed in one of the main bedrooms until we arrived, then hid in a remote part of the estate after our arrival—until Grace began to drug you so you were malleable and she could walk you to places she knew we wouldn’t or couldn’t look.” Blake Shepherd’s locked study, for example. “She’d then give you another dose so you’d lose consciousness.”
No one was going to test Grace on her stated ability to pick locks, not when they were dealing with murder and attempted murder. “Your secret room can stay a secret.” There might be nothing in there for the cops to find, but why take the risk?
“What about my things?”
“Grace’s told them you didn’t have much, that the bag will be around somewhere. She can’t quite recall the last place she shoved it. Ratene’s good, but cops have budgets. They can’t hunt endlessly for a victim’s belongings when they have the perpetrator and the necessary evidence to put her away.”
Reaching the end of the hallway, we turned right, continued on to another. A harried doctor passed us in a half jog, two nurses crossed ahead of us, then the world went quiet again.
“I didn’t know you were all coming to the estate until you arrived,” Bea said. “Grace hadn’t told me. I panicked, hid. But then I saw Darcie with Ash and I got so mad.”
“Creepy Bea.”
“It was the one thing she didn’t take from me. Said I could have the ugly monstrosity.” A sigh. “Does it make me evil that I enjoyed hearing her scream when she found it on her bed?”
“No. I’d have done worse.”
Elevator doors opened, disgorging two orderlies with a patient on a stretcher. “Evening, ladies,” one of them said, while the other smiled.
We smiled back at them before they headed off in the opposite direction, and we came to a stop at the glass wall at this end of the corridor. It looked down into a dark carpark, the lights of the nearest town glimmering in the background.
“Bea?” I untangled our arms so that they hung side by side and I could weave my fingers through hers. “You know the rest of what to say to the police?” I’d visited earlier, while Ratene was still at the estate, and we’d walked that time, too, our conversation more desperate.
Looking at me with those blue eyes that weren’t desiccated and burned but vividly alive, she said, “Grace drugged me when I realized what she was doing to Kaea, when I argued with her about her plans for vengeance. I didn’t want any of it—but she’d become obsessed with the idea of avenging me and wouldn’t stop.”
“Yes.” I squeezed her hand. “You somehow made it to the living room the night of the fight.”
“Grace was late in giving me the dose. It hadn’t quite kicked in when she left me alone.” Her fingers tightened on mine. “She really was late.”
“I know. Why do you have cuts on your hands?”
“I got in between Darcie and Grace in an effort to stop their fight.”
“What if anyone asks why you came in wearing Darcie’s dress?” We had to prepare for that on the off chance the police went to the trouble of tracing its provenance.
“Grace gave it to me. She must’ve stolen it to mess with Darcie.”
“Good. That’s all you know, all you remember, your memory is foggy.”
Rain in my mind again, a ferocious drumming on the roof of the Land Cruiser. A silent Darcie, her heart still beating but her body shutting down—and Bea in the back seat with the blood-soaked dress. “We need to get her out of that dress,” I’d said to Grace.
“I’ll help you.”
As it was, I’d managed to strip Bea on my own. But afterward, Grace, weak as she was, was able to help stand her in the rain behind the warmth of the car’s exhaust while I poured bottles of water over her as fast as humanly possible.
Bea, naked in the dark, runnels of what would’ve been pink in the sunlight racing down her lax body to become lost in the water that was the world as the skies continued to thunder down.
No more blood on her face, on her chest, under her nails. Her hair rinsed and rinsed again.
Then, putting her in Darcie’s dress and allowing that to get wet, too—but only after we’d smeared it with Darcie’s and Grace’s blood. No underwear, but she was a woman who’d been drugged and barely conscious of her actions.
Plausible deniability.
Rain, so much rain, a waterfall of sound in my ears as the world blurred.
Placing Bea back into the Land Cruiser, then using my belt to bind a seated Grace once more.
“No one will ever know,” she’d said again, and we’d both understood that she wasn’t talking about Darcie anymore.
“There’s a missing knife. It wasn’t beside Ash.”
A shake of her head, her words starting to slur as she said, “No. It’s in the kitchen drawer. I washed and bleached it.”
I hadn’t known what to do with the bloody dress or the tag from the one on Bea, had stared around me as I stood with the small bundle scrunched in my hand. I couldn’t just drop it in the ravine. Too high a chance it’d be seen.
“Bury it.” Grace’s weakening voice. “In among the trees. Ground’s wet.”
Easy to dig.
I’d turned and hiked up into the thick and tangled forest that loomed over us, while the rain erased my footprints from the mud behind me. I hadn’t been able to go far, not with my vision. I couldn’t risk becoming lost in the dark. But it hadn’t mattered. I’d found a fallen branch, used it to dig a hole near the roots of a forest giant. Afterward, I’d covered that area with leaf debris until it looked exactly like the rest of the rain-lashed area.
The rain had cleaned my hands and body of all evidence of dirt, but my boots had been muddy. No one cared. I’d hiked to the barn by my own admission, and I’d gotten out to check the bridge before we made it out. Jim, the first person to see us, hadn’t even questioned why three of us were wet when we turned up.
Such a stormy night, after all.
The perfect night to bury secrets.
“I was so angry at Ash,” Bea whispered. “But I remember holding him to me, rocking him. Then . . . I was in the living room, and I saw you.”
“Grace says she stabbed him.” It might even be the truth, Bea only stumbling onto the scene in the aftermath.
The bandage on her hand flashed white in the light as she stared at it.
She dropped it after a while, said, “I know what to say to the police.” A glance at me. “Grace . . .”
“For Nix,” I said softly. “She’s made her choice.”
“I never wanted him hurt. Or Kaea.”
I didn’t follow that thread, didn’t ask her who she had wanted hurt.
“Is that—” She pressed her face to the glass with startling suddenness, staring in the direction of an iconic fast food restaurant sign that glowed against the night.
I laughed. “You want a burger? A cop got me one, said it’s the only place around here open twenty-four hours.”
Eyes lighting up, she rose on her toes like a child. “You don’t mind?”
“For you? Never.”
First, however, I walked her back to her room. She yawned as she got under the blanket and lay down. “I’ll nap so we can talk again after you come back.”
Her eyes were already closing as I went to shut her door behind me. A faint smile curved her lips, my Bee-bee so dazzling and bright that she had the power to hold the world in the palm of her hand.
Shutting the door, I reached up to straighten the nameplate one of the staff had slid into the slot: Beatrice Clara Shepherd.
I ran my finger over her middle name. Had I known that? Yes. I frowned. But it had been way back in high school. She’d never used it, and I’d never once remembered while reading Clara’s hidden diary.
Tonight, the sight made me smile.
* * *
—
The outside air was cold and crisp with a slight bite to it. It surged into my lungs, snapped life into my cells. And made me think of a long-ago night when I’d drunk a bottle of champagne with Bea deep in the heart of a city park. She’d known my fear of the dark, had brought along candle-shaped lamps that we’d put all around.
We’d gone through her nude photos together in the faux candlelight, choosing the best ones for the final file. But I had all of them, every outtake, every blurred image where she’d moved too fast or begun to laugh while in motion.
Because I loved her best.
I shifted, began to walk. And though I could’ve stayed in the brightly lit environs of the pathway that led eventually from the hospital complex to the modest outdoor mall that held the fast food restaurant, I turned toward the sidewalk wrapped in darkness. It was inside me now, that darkness, a sinuous knowing of what I was capable.
Luna, please. Please, please. I’m so sorry. Please. Please Luna.
I was the whisper from under the bed, the monster hidden within the folds of the night.
Would you bury a body for me?
I’d do far worse for you, Bea.
My vision telescoping to a pinprick, I walked into oblivion.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh is passionate about writing. Though she’s traveled as far afield as the deserts of China, the temples of Japan, and the frozen landscapes of Antarctica, it is the journey of the imagination that fascinates her the most. She’s beyond delighted to be able to follow her dream as a writer. She is the author of the darkly beautiful Guild Hunter series, the much-loved Psy-Changeling novels, and stand-alone suspense novels.
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Nalini Singh, There Should Have Been Eight
