The One I Left Behind (42 page)

“Perfect,” he said, looking to Tara. “Don’t you agree, darling?”

She didn’t lift her head. He walked over, crouched down, and lifted it for her, peeled open her eyelids, making her look.

“Lobsters are incredible creatures,” he told her. “They’re able to regenerate appendages lost in battle.”

Tara kept her eyes blank and doll-like, but somewhere in there, Reggie was sure she saw a little spark of terror.

“They molt regularly, growing a new shell and eating the old one.” She seemed to twitch a little here. “They molt five or six times in the first season, and as adults once or twice a year.”

“The lobster,” he said, taking out his pocketknife, “is an expert at transformation.”

Tara looked right at Reggie and rolled her eyes.

He worked carefully, cutting the tape that bound her to the pipe. “Stand,” he commanded.

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a lobster fan,” she said.

“Move, bitch!” he said, grabbing hold of her arms and jerking her to her feet, where she staggered and swayed. He puppet-walked her over to the table, propping her up in the chair. He took out a roll of silver duct tape and used it to bind her ankles to the chair’s front legs.

“Tonight you dine like a lady,” he said. “Tonight you will be redeemed.”

“Thanks, but seriously, lobster’s not really my thing,” she told him. Her voice only trembled slightly.

He slapped her face hard, the skin against skin sound echoing through the warehouse. Her nose started to bleed.

“Eat,” he told her, leaning down to hiss in her ear, “start eating, or I’ll gut your little friend Regina
right now
.”

She picked up the fork, dug out a piece of white lobster meat, brought it to her mouth, and began to chew. Butter dripped down her chin. She chewed a long time. When she finally swallowed, she seemed to gag a bit.

“Good girl,” Neptune said. He was just Neptune now, not the George that Reggie had known her whole life, the George who was her father. “Now you enjoy your dinner while I tend to our new guest.”

He walked over to Reggie slowly, smiling, savoring every second of this. His hands were deep in his pockets, his eyes on Reggie’s face. Was he looking for a trace of himself there? Did he feel an ounce of regret at being about to cut the hand off his own daughter?

“Can I ask you something?” Reggie said.

He nodded. He was beside her now, still looking down at her. She knew at any minute, he’d turn his attention to the tray of tools and notice the missing scalpel. She could feel it tucked into her sleeve, cool against her wrist. She just needed to get him close enough, catch him off guard.

“Did she say she’d marry you? Were you the one she told everyone about?”

He turned away, his face twisted with disgust. “No. I’d asked her, yes. The first time was just after she told me she was pregnant. I took her out to dinner, her favorite place, Harry’s Steak House down by the shore. We ordered lobster, and I had the waiter bring a bottle of champagne.” His eyes had a wistful, faraway look. “I got down on one knee, offered her a ring. And do you know what she did?” He stared down at Reggie, fury replacing wistfulness. “She laughed. She actually laughed.”

Reggie shook her head. She remembered laughing at Len’s drunken idea that the two of them should move in together. Like mother, like daughter.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, suddenly understanding the scene before her.

Neptune turned away from her, watching Tara force down bites of lobster meat obediently. Tears streamed down Tara’s face, but she made no crying sounds.

“But I didn’t give up. I asked her for years, over and over again. Even when I was with Lorraine, I told Vera that the offer always stood. I could give her a good life. A nice home. Be a real father to you. Take care of you both. But she always said no.”

“But then she said yes to someone else?” Reggie guessed. She tried to sound a little disgusted, like she was on his side, she understood the pain and torment her mother must have put him through.

He turned back to face her, looking more like a broken-hearted lover than a malicious killer. “I never found out who it was,” he said. “But she was very excited. She was actually going to go through with it. Try and have the magical, normal life that had always eluded her. I tried to tell her. No one could love her like I did. I begged her to change her mind. To choose me instead.”

“It wasn’t fair,” Reggie said. “Her choosing him over you. You’d been there for her all those years. You’d given her so much.”

The corners of his mouth twitched, then stayed downturned. “Life isn’t fair, Reggie. I learned that a long time ago. You did too, didn’t you?”

Reggie understood, twisted as the whole thing was. George had loved Vera his whole life, done his best to win her over, suffered rejection year after year. Watched as this woman he loved threw her life away, drank and went out with one loser after another. And when she was in trouble, George was always there for her. Then, when she finally decided to marry and settle down, she chose someone else. It seemed so cruel. Something inside of him snapped then, when he heard the news. And he had to punish someone. But he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her—not yet.

“The other women—Candace, Andrea, Ann—they were all seeing men who’d dumped Mom.”

“Whores,” he said. “Unworthy whores. They deserved what they got.” The little vein on the side of his head bulged again.

He got down on his knees, stroked Reggie’s hair. “I wanted to save you from all of this. If she had only said yes, changed her mind, everything would have turned out differently.”

He was so close she could smell his breath—it was sour and tinged with menthol.

“But why not just kill them? Why cut off their hands first?”

“It didn’t seem fair, did it? Your mother’s beautiful hand being ruined like that, ugly with scars, while these other women, these tramps, had perfect hands. So I took them for Vera.” He was reaching for the saw now, his fingertips giving the handle a loving caress.

“Did you know,” he asked, “that the human hand has twenty-seven bones: fourteen phalanges, five metacarpals, eight carpals? Such perfect engineering.” He looked down at Reggie’s right hand. She held her breath, waiting. He took her hand, twisting it so that he could look down at her palm.

“The hand is a map. The Gypsies, Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians, Hebrews—they all knew it. They honored hands. Used them to diagnose and heal.

“The left hand is the hand you’re born with. The right hand is the hand you make. Remove the right hand and you erase the record of how badly these women lived, send them on to the next world with only their birth hand, their pure hand.”

His eyes glistened behind the wire-rimmed glasses.

“I helped them to transform,” George told her, voice firm but soothing. “To transcend.”

Reggie’s head swum as a wave of nausea overtook her. If she could just keep him talking, get him closer, she might have a chance.

“Why keep them alive after?”

He dropped her hand and hung his head. “Regardless of what you might think, I’m not a killer, Reggie. I don’t enjoy it.” He glared down at her, as if daring her to contradict him. “It doesn’t come easily for me. I waited, with all of them, to give Vera a chance to save them. If she came around, said yes to marrying me, I’d let them go.”

“But she didn’t,” Reggie said.

“I was nothing but a joke to her,” he said, eyes blazing. “The deaths of those women, they were her fault.”

“I see,” Reggie said, locking eyes with him as she reached for the scalpel in her left sleeve, touching it with the fingertips of her right hand. “It was her fault. All of it. But still, once you had her, you didn’t kill her. You kept her alive year after year. You threatened to come after me if she left you.”

“We all have our destinies, Reggie. Your mother’s was to be with me.”

“But you let her go.”

His body tensed. “A mistake. Clearly. I thought her mind was too far gone. All that drinking. Honestly, I’m surprised she even remembered who she was. And I thought the threat of coming after you was enough to keep her quiet about anything she did remember.”

“Did you mean it? That you would have come after me? Hunted me down and killed me?”

He smiled, shrugged his shoulders like a shy little boy. “Like I said, I’m no killer.”

“But you’re going to kill me now.” Her fingers wrapped around the handle of the scalpel.

Closer. She needed him to come closer.

He made a tsk-tsk sound. “Your fault, I’m afraid. If you hadn’t found that damn swan, seen the little clue I’d left for Vera, the little warning that was supposed to make her realize she had the power to stop the killings . . .”

Reggie lowered her voice to almost a whisper, closed her eyes. “There’s one thing I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

Reggie gave an incoherent mumble and George leaned forward so that his face was inches from hers.

She lunged up, swinging her arm in a perfect arc, slicing into his neck with the scalpel, feeling the impact, the pressure, then release as she pushed the blade as far in as it would go.

Chapter 46

June 24, 1985

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

“I
’M NOT SUPPOSED TO
talk to you,” Reggie said into the phone.

“I know,” Tara said. “Yogi told me the deal, too. Just one more time, though, okay? Meet me in the tree house in half an hour.”

“I don’t know. I —”

“I’ll see you then, Reg,” Tara said. Then she hung up before Reggie could respond.

Reggie rolled out of bed and walked downstairs. Her legs felt like they were made of lead. She ran her hand along the wall of stone, cold and damp against her fingertips.

Lorraine and George were in the kitchen, drinking tea, waiting for news. But there hadn’t been any word. And now it was after five.

Vera’s body still had not been found.

George had brought over a pot of turkey soup that was simmering on the stove, making the kitchen steamy and giving it a Thanksgiving dinner kind of smell that made Reggie’s mouth water. She hated herself for it. How could she be thinking of food when her mother was dead and Sid was lying in a hospital, brain damaged? How was she supposed to eat turkey soup when it was all her fault?

Reggie snuck out the front door and crossed the yard to the tree house. She climbed the swinging ladder, then sat back in a corner and waited. She peeked out at Monique’s Wish, saw her bedroom window. She could make out the outline of the bulletin board with her drawings, her bed with its Drunkard’s Path quilt, the edge of her closet. She squinted her eyes and thought she saw a shadow move across the room, a ghost version of herself. The Reggie she used to be. She wished so strongly then that she could go back in time, warn that girl what was to come: the killings, losing her mother, Sid’s accident.
The world is not the way you think it is,
she would tell herself.

“Hey,” Tara said, pushing open the trapdoor and scrambling up. She crawled over to Reggie and sat so that their sides were touching. “Want a cigarette?” Tara asked as she pulled out her pack.

“No.”

“How ’bout this?” Tara said, holding up the little silver box that held the razor blade.

Reggie shook her head, brought her knees up to her chest, and hugged them close. Part of her longed for it: to punish herself in some way, to feel something beyond the dark weight of guilt.

“Did you call Charlie, too?” she asked.

Tara picked at a hole in her jeans. “He didn’t pick up. I’ve been calling all day. I’m sure he’s home, but he’s not answering the phone.”

“If Stu finds out . . .”

Tara nodded. “He won’t. And I won’t try to talk to Charlie anymore. Maybe it’s for the best anyway.” She shook a cigarette out of the pack.

“So was there a reason you wanted me to meet you?” Reggie asked. If Tara was here to make her feel like shit, to remind her that all this was her fault, she might as well get it over with. Reggie braced herself as best she could and waited.

Tara lit her cigarette. “I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

“What for? I’m the one who fucked up and told Charlie about the cutting. I don’t even know why I did it. I guess I—”

Tara shook her head. “I don’t even care about that! Well, I do, but it doesn’t matter. Not compared to what I did to Sid.”

“We were all there, Tara. And what happened to Sid, it was an accident.”

“But I’m the one who said we should run. If we hadn’t . . .”

“And I’m the one who blurted out your biggest secret just because I was jealous. I’m the one who got Charlie so pissed off. If I’d kept my mouth shut, they wouldn’t have even started fighting. Sid wouldn’t have—”

“Do you know why I said to run?” Tara interrupted. “Because when I stood there, looking down at Sid, sure he was dead, all I thought was that I had to protect you. That you and Charlie couldn’t be caught there like that. And I knew you guys were too good to leave on your own. I made you.”

Reggie shook her head. “You weren’t dragging us along in chains, Tara. We chose to follow you.”

Tara exhaled more smoke, watched it drift up to the unfinished ceiling.

“It was always my choice, Tara. The cutting, going to the bars, leaving Sid like that. You didn’t make me do any of it.”

They were silent for a minute, listening to crickets, to a helicopter overhead droning like a giant insect.

Tara dropped her cigarette into an empty Coke bottle. “Still no word about your mom?”

“Nothing. Which is almost worse in a way. I just keep thinking her body’s out there somewhere, naked, undiscovered.”

Tara nodded.

“Then I keep thinking, what if she’s not dead?” Reggie said. “Which just seems so totally deluded. Having this little tease of hope . . . it’s just stupid. I almost wish they’d just find her body. Get it over with, you know?”

“You know that old saying,” Tara said. “Be careful what you wish for.”

“I know, but—”

“You know what I went to sleep wishing last night?” Tara asked. “That Sid wasn’t dead. I played a little game with myself, imagined going back to the parking lot, and there he was, sitting up, waiting with this stupid
I-sure-fooled-you
grin. Then this morning, old Yogi comes around telling me it’s true, Sid’s not dead. Then he tells me that he’s all fucked up, brain damaged, and you know what my first stupid thought was? That I’d made it happen by wishing he was alive.”