The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, page 20
“I guess,” he said.
“All I’m saying is this: if someone reinvents herself, like Lulu did in the film, isn’t it possible that the person she’s become is more honest . . . more truly herself . . . than the person she was born as? No one can choose the family he was born into. No one can choose his own name, or how he looks, or what kind of parents he has. But as we get older we get to choose, and we can become the person that we were meant to be.”
“You’re about to tell me your real name is Bob and you come from Canada?”
“No, but I also don’t feel at all related to my parents, or to Florida, where I come from. I might as well have changed my name. Do you know what I mean?”
“I understand. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I get what you’re saying.”
“What do you mean you don’t agree?”
“You make it sound as though human beings are free to change themselves entirely at a whim. It just doesn’t work that way. We may not like who we were born as, but that doesn’t change anything—it’s still who we are.”
“It has nothing to do with freedom to change. All I’m saying is that maybe the people we change into are the reality of who we are. Like in the movie—Lulu is truly who that character was. Even though she had made it all up.”
“But that wasn’t what the movie was saying. The movie was saying that we can’t escape our past.”
“I know. I’m telling you what I think.”
“There’s still something you’re saying that I don’t quite agree with.”
“You’re just arguing for the sake of arguing.”
“I’m not. I get what you’re saying. You’re saying that as we get older we have the opportunity to become the people we were meant to be. I just think, in general, that people who try to escape from their past, or try to divorce themselves from their parents, they’re kidding themselves. It doesn’t happen that way. Maybe on the outside, maybe in the way that others see them, but down deep everyone is the product of their past.”
“So you don’t think people can change?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that no one can ever completely shed his beginnings. Like it or not.” George flicked his cigarette over the edge of the building. Watching the orange sparks get whipped away by the wind made his stomach feel a little hollow. He had never liked heights.
“Blood will out,” Liana said. Her voice sounded resigned.
“Something like that.”
Liana was quiet, staring up through the skeletal frame of the building. George turned onto his side and stared at her profile, a black cutout against the distant lights of the parking lot.
“You’re just saying that because you like where you came from,” Liana said. “You like your parents and your hometown and New England. You chose to go to fucking college less than two hours from where you live. I don’t think you really understand what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your own family.”
“Okay. Granted. Calm down. I’m not really disagreeing with you about anything. I just think . . . that when you say . . . that when you say that the people we become later in life are more truthful than the people we were at the beginning of our lives, I don’t entirely agree with that. No, wait. Hear me out. I just think that there is truth in both aspects of a person. You can’t discount where we come from even if you’d like to. It’s still always there. It’s still the truth of who we are.”
Liana was quiet again. In retrospect, George recognized that she was defeated. The conversation ended, but over the years George had returned to it in his mind again and again. He’d long since realized that Liana Decter was asking for permission to become Audrey Beck permanently. She’d been this new person for less than three months, but she must have seen the genuine possibility that she could entirely shed her previous skin and start new.
They stayed in the half-finished building another hour, getting colder. They had turned onto their sides and wrapped their arms around each other for warmth. George remembered the pain in his hip and how Liana had started shaking with the cold before he did. They’d kissed, and George had been able to see a wet glint of light in one of Liana’s open eyes. They touched each other through their clothes. George asked if they should go back to one of their dorm rooms.
“No.”
George stayed on his side while she moved down the length of him, unzipped his jeans, and took him in her mouth. Liana had done this before, but it had always been a brief precursor to something else, with her not quite knowing what to do and George struggling not to come. That night George was relaxed enough to pay attention to the feeling. He let his head fall back onto the cold floor and stared into the night sky. After he had come, Liana kept him in her mouth while he softened. That act, like the conversation that led to it, had been keeping house in his memory banks ever since.
Liana had slid back up and kissed him. He had now begun to shake as well, but they stayed side by side for another fifteen minutes before admitting defeat.
And now, when George woke, nauseous and groggy from the tranquilizer, and found himself on his side, face-to-face with Liana, he thought initially that he was dreaming, or that he was dead and had been returned to the happiest moment of his life. But then Liana’s eyes opened, and he saw the fear in them and became aware of the rope-bite at his wrists and ankles and the hard surface that he was lying on that was bucking up and down. He smelled gasoline and heard the rhythmic whine of a motor and the slap of water. They were under a green tarp, translucent enough so that he could sense the daylight above them and make out the shadowy features of Liana’s face.
“Where are we?” he said in a grainy voice he barely recognized. The act of speaking unloosed something in his head, and the world, already lifting and falling, tilted even more precariously, as though he were tumbling unmoored through space. He heaved violently, his body straining against whatever was holding him in place. His wrists felt like they were being scored by razor-sharp glass.
After retching, he broke into a coughing fit, tears streaming from his shut eyes. When he finished coughing and his breathing returned to a sort of normalcy, he looked again at Liana. She had managed to slide a little ways away from him, and George realized that she was bound up like he was, immobile beneath the tarp.
“You okay?” she asked.
George’s throat and mouth felt coated in bile. Another wave of nausea passed through him, and he shut his eyes to fend it off.
“You were shot by a tranquilizer gun,” Liana said.
“I know,” he said and reopened his eyes. “Where are we?”
“We’re on Donnie’s boat. Or I guess you know his real name now.”
“Bernie.”
“That’s right. He’s going to kill us.”
The boat banked sharply, cresting a wave and slapping down hard on the water. George felt what seemed to be another body rolling up against his backside. He tried to turn his head, but all he could see was the tarp pressing down on them. “Who’s behind me?”
“Your friend. I don’t know who she is.”
“Karin Boyd. She’s Gerry MacLean’s niece. Jesus.”
“She’s dead, George.”
“How do you know?”
“I watched him drag all three of you onto the boat. Bernie told me she died from the tranquilizers. Not that it matters. He’s going to kill us all anyway.”
“The other body’s on this boat as well?”
“Katie Aller?”
“The woman who was living in that house?”
“Yeah, that’s Katie Aller. Bernie killed her last night.”
“Who is she?”
“It’s a long story and we don’t have time. I need you to try something. He tied your hands in front, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Before I got nabbed, I managed to grab a steak knife and slide it under my skirt. It’s in the band of my underwear. I’ve been trying, but I can’t get to it.”
“It’s in the front?”
“Uh-huh.”
George scooched forward as much as he could so that his knees and Liana’s knees were touching and their faces were side by side. The tarp moved with him but still covered them entirely. Even though he couldn’t see the system that Bernie had used to hog-tie him, he knew that his ankles were secured, as were his wrists. It also felt as though the rope had been wrapped around his waist and tied to his wrists so that his hands were pinned to where his belt buckle would be. His fingers were tingly and numb, but he could move them. He got close enough so that he could touch Liana’s fingers. He could also feel what felt like nylon rope tied tightly around her wrists, plus stickiness on her skin that was either sweat or blood. “You need to slide yourself lower down,” she said.
He did what she said. It was hard work. Bernie had tied the rope tight at every juncture, and he could feel the damage at both his ankles and wrists where the nylon was cutting into his skin. Once his hands were below Liana’s, she pulled herself in closer to him so that his fingers pressed against the tops of her thighs. He could feel the fabric of her skirt, the line of her underwear along one hip. He couldn’t feel a knife.
“To the right,” she said. He rolled forward enough so that his hands slid an inch toward her crotch, and suddenly he could feel the hard protuberance of what was probably the dull end of the knife.
“I’m going to have to pull up your skirt,” George said. “Can you get your hip off the ground?” George had bunched some of the fabric of Liana’s skirt in his fingers and was able to tug it toward him. Liana lifted her hip off the deck. He grabbed another handful of fabric and bunched it in his fingers. A jolt of the boat caused Liana’s hip to come down hard. She grunted. It took about three excruciating minutes, but they did it, Liana arching her body to get her hip off the deck, while George worked the fabric toward him a half inch at a time. His wrists were screaming, and his fingers were cramping, but he didn’t dare say anything to Liana. It was clearly extremely painful for her to lift herself off the deck. He listened to her breathing become pinched and ragged. Finally, when his fingers touched the hem of her skirt, he gave one last violent yank on the fabric, then slid his fingers past the hem. He was now touching Liana’s naked thighs. “Thank God,” she said, letting her body relax.
Her thighs were damp with sweat, and George walked his fingers up to the edge of her underwear. “This job has its benefits,” he said, and she emitted a single tired laugh.
George hooked a finger onto the edge of her cotton underwear, inching further up, feeling her prickly pubic hair through the fabric, then pulled himself closer to her and lifted his hands so that they found the knife, secured horizontally beneath the elastic band. He pulled down on her underwear till he could feel the exposed wooden handle, getting a thumb and forefinger securely on it. As he rolled back the knife came free, nearly snagging on her bunched-up skirt, but he held on, changing his grip so that he had it securely in the palm of his right hand.
“You got it?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“Can you cut through the rope?”
“Yours or mine?”
“Work on yours. It will be easier. My arms are completely numb.”
“Give me a moment.” George felt as though the boat had changed course and now the hard midday sun was directly hitting the green tarp that covered them. Sweat was running in steady rivulets from under his hairline. He could smell the fear in his own body odor, mixed with the brine of the ocean air and with something else—the smell of rot, the smell he remembered from the laundry room in the house on Captain Sawyer Lane. Katie Aller, in her shroud of plastic.
He maneuvered the knife so that he was holding its wooden grip in the four fingers of his right hand, its serrated edge pointing down. He rocked his wrist forward and felt the knife snag on the rope around his wrists. He did it several more times and the knife snagged a little less, sawed a little more.
“It’s working, I think,” he said to Liana.
“Thank God. If you can get your hands free, there’s a plastic tackle box that keeps sliding around and hitting the top of my head. I’m nearly positive there’s a gun in there. It’s a revolver.”
“You want me to shoot Bernie?” It seemed an obvious question, but even as George asked it he could feel a tremor of itchy fear in his stomach. He remembered how he’d felt standing in that hallway, waiting for Bernie to stroll toward him with his rifle, and he wondered how much bravery he had left.
“If you can get to the gun, point it at Bernie, tell him to dive out of the boat into the water. He won’t do it, but you’ll have given him a chance. He’s going to try and find a way to talk you into screwing up. Don’t give him the chance. Tell him to go in the water. If he hesitates or does anything different, then aim at his center and fire. It’s him or us, George. You know that. How’s that rope coming?”
“It’s coming.” The boat motor revved down to a mosquitoey whine, and George’s heart hammered at the thought that Bernie had found his dumping ground before he’d had a chance to saw through even a single knot, but then the motor picked up again. “What’s he waiting for?”
“My guess is there’re lots of boats out today. He’s looking for open ocean.”
“You want to tell me how we wound up here like this?”
Liana blew out a steady breath, her breath stale and warm. “I’m not proud of this, obviously.”
“This whole trip, your being here, was all a scam to get those diamonds from MacLean’s safe.” George didn’t ask it. He said it. If these are my last moments on earth, he thought, I have no interest in being lied to anymore by Liana.
“Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t know Bernie was going to kill anyone. I promise you that. He was just supposed to knock MacLean out, take the diamonds, and run.”
“How’d Bernie get into the house?”
“We knew that there would be gardeners on Sunday and timed it to coincide with their being there. I drove to a street where Bernie could walk through the woods and onto the property. He was dressed to look like a gardener, so if he got spotted coming in from the woods it wouldn’t look too suspicious. He’d scouted the house and knew that there was usually a half-open window above the back porch roof. He brought a short stepladder with him. It was easy. He would get into Gerry’s study on the second floor and wait for him. After he got the diamonds from the safe, he would just carry them back through the woods, where I would be waiting for him.”
“Why did you need me?”
“I really did not want to show up at MacLean’s house myself. What I told you about our relationship was true. His wife was dying, and he was probably unstable. It made much more sense to send a neutral party. Plus, if you went, that meant I could drive the car. Bernie didn’t want to leave a strange car on a street in some tony neighborhood in Newton for three hours. It would attract too much attention. How’s that rope coming?”
George was still sawing, but he had felt what Liana had probably felt: Bernie taking the boat in a wide circle, the motor revving down into an idle. Had he found his dumping spot?
“I feel like I’m cutting through rope but my hands haven’t loosened up any. Why did you come and meet me at the Kowloon? You didn’t need to.”
“I thought it made sense to check in on you one last time before Bernie and I made our getaway in the morning, but Bernie freaked out. I didn’t realize how convinced he was that you and I were in it together and were going to screw him over. That’s why he went and threatened your girlfriend and why he started killing witnesses. He snapped.”
George felt the nylon rope weakening. He yanked with his wrists, but they were still securely tied. He angled the knife differently and connected with another piece of nylon. He started to saw again.
“We can get out of this,” Liana said, but to George, her voice sounded less than sure.
“Keep telling me things. It helps.”
“Like what?”
“Where were you all yesterday?”
“In New Essex mostly. At the house you found. I was trying to reason with Bernie and get him to just leave town with me. He was convinced we left too many witnesses. You, of course. Katie Aller . . .”
“Who was she?”
“I met her down in the islands. She was a drug addict who was burning through her parents’ money. They’re dead, and that’s their land and property all up and down Captain Sawyer Lane. I got in touch with her when I knew that Bernie and I’d be coming up. She let us stay in her house—”
“And use her cottage.”
“—and use her cottage, yes, and—”
“And this must be her boat.”
“It is. Look, George, I could say this a thousand times, and I know it wouldn’t make a difference, so I’ll only say it once. I am so sorry for dragging you into this. I had no idea that there would be any danger involved. You have to believe me on that. I deserve to die today, but you don’t.”
George was beginning to sense a loosening in the rope. Blood was rushing back into his fingers, and he could swivel his right wrist at least forty-five degrees. The new freedom allowed him to change the angle of the knife and get better purchase. He made two strong cuts, and the rope popped loose, freeing his right hand. His left hand was still bound and held by the rope that was wrapped around his midriff.
“My hand’s free,” he said.
“Both of them?”
“Just my right hand, but I think—”
The boat made a thunking sound, as though something had bumped up along its side. “What was that?” he asked. Now that he had one hand free, his fear had ratcheted up a notch. Hopelessness had been replaced by a small amount of hope. A surge of adrenaline made his head swim. He squeezed his eyes shut to let the feeling pass.
