I Know a Secret

  “I know.” Billy rises and regards Everett, who is immobile and utterly helpless. “And we have to deal with two of them. This makes it harder to stage.” He scans the room, and his eyes turn to the hearth, where flames barely flicker around a crumbling log. “Old houses,” he muses. “They go up in smoke so fast. What a shame your father forgot to change the battery in his smoke detector.” He drags a chair under the smoke detector, pulls down the unit, and removes the battery. Then he throws an armload of wood into the hearth.

  “I have a better idea,” says Susan. “They’re tired and they’re drunk, so where would they be? The bedroom.”

  “Let’s move him first,” Billy says.

  They drag away Everett, and as I hear his shoes scrape across the floor toward my father’s bedroom, I already know how the death scene will look when we are discovered. The tipsy young couple, their bodies charred on the bed. Just another tragic death due to fire and carelessness.

  The fresh armload of wood has made the flames roar back to life, and as I stare into the hellish glow, I can almost feel the heat singeing my hair, consuming my flesh. No, no, this is not the way I want to die! Panic sends a surge of adrenaline through my body, and I push myself up to my hands and knees. But even as I crawl toward the front door, I can already hear their footsteps returning from the bedroom.

  Hands wrench me backward, and my face slams against the edge of the raised hearth. I feel my cheek swell up in what will be an ugly bruise, but no one will ever see it; all will be cooked in the heat of the fire. I am too weak to resist as Billy drags me down the hall, into the bedroom.

  Together, he and Susan heave me onto the mattress, next to Everett.

  “Take off their clothes,” says Susan. “They wouldn’t go to bed with their clothes on.”

  They are an efficient team, working swiftly to remove my slacks and blouse and underwear. Mother and son, united in this sick striptease that leaves Everett and me naked on the bed. Susan tosses our discarded clothes over a chair, leaves our shoes scattered on the floor. Oh, yes, she has the scenario well thought out, of the young couple exhausted after sex. After a moment’s consideration, she leaves the room and comes back with two empty wine bottles, two goblets, and candles, everything wrapped in tea towels. No fingerprints. She arranges everything on the nightstand, as carefully as a set decorator prepping for a stage play. When the candles set fire to the curtains, Everett and I will be intoxicated and asleep. That’s why we aren’t roused by the smoke. We are naked and drunk, sated young lovers who have been careless with fire. The flames will consume all the evidence—fingerprints, hairs, and fibers, the traces of ketamine in our systems. Just as the flames consumed the evidence of Sarah’s murder. Like Sarah, like doomed Saint Joan of Arc, I will be reduced to ashes, and the truth will burn with me. The truth about what really happened to Lizzie DiPalma.

  I know, because I was there in the woods when it happened.

  It was a Saturday in October, the autumn leaves as brilliant as flames rippling in the trees above us. I remember how the twigs snapped like tiny bones under our shoes as we walked. I remember Billy, already strong at eleven, stamping the shovel into the earth as he dug the grave.

  Susan leaves the room again, and Billy sits down on the bed beside me. He fondles my bare breast, pinches my nipple.

  “Look at little Holly Devine, all grown up.”

  Repulsion makes my arm muscles tighten, but I don’t move. I don’t betray the fact that the ketamine is rapidly wearing off. He doesn’t know that I took only two sips of the whiskey that Susan poured into my glass; Everett was the one who finished my drink, who’s now bearing the brunt of the full dose. Everett’s eyes are open, and he’s moaning softly, but I know he’s helpless. I’m the only one capable of fighting back.

  “You were always special, Holly,” he says. His hand moves from my breast, strokes down to my belly. Can he feel me shudder? Can he see the disgust in my eyes? “Always game for everything. We would’ve made a great team.”

  “I’m not like you,” I whisper.

  “Yes, you are. Deep down, we are exactly the same. We both know what really matters in this world. What matters is us and nothing else. That’s why you haven’t told anyone all these years. That’s why you’ve kept the secret. Because you knew there’d be consequences. You don’t want your life ruined either, do you?”

  “I was only ten years old.”

  “Old enough to know what you were doing. Old enough to make your own choice. You hit her too, Holly. I gave you the rock and you did it. We killed her together.” He rests his palm on my thigh, and his touch is so repulsive I can barely remain still.

  “I can’t find any plastic bags,” says Susan from the doorway.

  He turns to his mother. “None in the kitchen?”

  “All I found are those flimsy grocery sacks.”

  “Let me look.”

  Billy and his mother leave the room. I have no idea why they want plastic bags; I only know that this is my last chance to save myself.

  I marshal all the strength I have left and roll over the edge of the mattress. I hit the floor with a thud, a noise so loud that they must be able to hear it in the kitchen. I have so little time now; they’ll return any minute. I reach blindly under the bed, feeling for my purse. With so many guests in the house this afternoon, I needed a safe place to stash it, because I know how people are. Even a house in mourning is not safe from the sticky fingers of an opportunist. I feel the leather strap and tug it closer. The purse is already unzipped, and I thrust my hand inside.

  “She’s managed to get off the bed,” says Susan. She looms above me, staring down with a look of annoyance. “If we leave her like this, she might crawl away.”

  “Then we have to finish it now. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way,” says Billy. He grabs a pillow off the bed and kneels down beside me. Everett moans, but they don’t even glance at him. They are both focused on me. On killing me. I will never feel the flames; by the time the fire engulfs this room, I’ll already be dead, smothered by linen and polyester.

  “It’s just the way it has to be, Holly Dolly,” says Billy. “I’m sure you understand. You could ruin everything for me, and I can’t let that happen.” He places the pillow over my face and presses down. Presses so hard that I can’t breathe, can’t move. I twist and thrash, kicking at air, but Susan throws her weight on top of me too, pinning my hips to the floor. I fight to suck in oxygen, but the pillow is plastered so tightly against my nose and mouth that all I inhale is wet linen.

  “Die, goddamn it. Die!” Billy orders.

  And I am dying. Already numbness is seeping into my limbs, stealing the last of my strength. The fight is over. I feel only heaviness weighing down on me, Billy pressing against my face, Susan against my hips. My right arm is still under the bed, my hand inside my purse.

  In my last seconds of consciousness, I realize what I am holding. I have carried it in my purse for weeks, ever since Detective Rizzoli told me my life was in danger, that Martin Stanek would try to kill me. How wrong we both were. All that time it was Billy who waited in the shadows. Billy, who staged his own death and after tonight would vanish forever.

  I can’t see where I am aiming. I only know that time has run out and this is my last chance before darkness falls. I drag out the gun, press it blindly against Susan’s body, and pull the trigger.

  The explosion makes Billy jerk away. Suddenly the pillow goes slack and I gasp in a desperate breath. Air fills my lungs and sweeps the fog out of my head.

  “Mother? Mother?” Billy screams.

  Susan is now a deadweight across my hips. Billy rolls her off me and I hear her thump onto the floor. I push the pillow away and glimpse Billy crouched over Susan’s body. There is blood streaming from her chest. He presses his hand to the bullet hole, trying to stem the flow, but surely he can see that her wound is mortal.

  Susan reaches up to touch his face. “Go, darling. Leave me,” she whispers.

  “Mother
, no…”

  Her hand slides away, leaving a smear of blood down his cheek.

  My arm is shaking, my aim so unsteady that the second bullet I fire hits the ceiling and knocks off a chunk of plaster.

  Billy wrenches the gun from my hand. His face is distorted with rage, his eyes as bright as hellfire. This is the face I saw that day in the woods, the day he picked up the rock and slammed it onto Lizzie DiPalma’s skull. For twenty years, I’ve said nothing. To protect myself, I’ve had to protect him, and this is my punishment. When you make a pact with the devil, the price you pay is your own soul.

  He grips the gun in both hands, and I see the barrel swing toward me like a pitiless eye.

  I flinch as the gunshots thunder—a series of explosions that come so rapidly I can’t count how many there are. When they finally stop, my eyes are closed and my ears are ringing, but there’s no pain. Why is there no pain?

  “Holly!” Hands grasp my shoulders and give me a hard shake. “Holly?”

  I open my eyes and see Detective Rizzoli staring down at me, frantically searching my face.

  “Are you hurt? Talk to me!”

  “Billy” is all I can whisper. I try to sit up, but I can’t. My muscles are still not working and I’ve forgotten I’m naked. I’ve forgotten everything except the fact that I’m alive, and I don’t understand how this is possible. Detective Frost drapes his jacket over my bare torso and I hug it to my breasts, shivering not from cold but from the aftershocks of what has happened. Everywhere I look in my father’s bedroom, I see blood. Susan lies beside me, her eyes glazed over, her jaw gaping open. One of her arms is stretched out in a last dying effort to reach her son. Their fingers don’t quite touch; instead, it is the pool of blood that connects them, Billy’s mingling with Susan’s.

  Mother and son, united in death.

  “THE CLUE WAS THERE ALL the time, in Cassandra Coyle’s movie,” said Jane. “The movie I didn’t get a chance to watch until last night.”

  “I’m still not sure what made you think the answer would be there,” said Maura, crouching beside the bodies of Susan Sullivan and her son. “I thought it was just a horror film.”

  Looking down at Maura’s bent head, Jane could see a few silver strands peeking out from that sleek black hair, and she thought: We’re growing old together. We’ve both seen too much death. When will we decide we’ve had enough?

  “It is just a horror film,” said Jane. “But the inspiration for the story came straight from Cassandra’s childhood. She was having flashbacks about what really happened when she was a kid. She told Bonnie Sandridge that the Staneks never did anything to her and she was ashamed that she’d helped send innocent people to prison. That shame kept her from talking about it with her friends and family. She shared the story in the one safe way she could: in a film script about a girl who goes missing. A girl like Lizzie DiPalma.”

  Maura glanced up. “That’s what Mr. Simian was about?”

  Jane nodded. “The group of teens don’t realize there’s a monster in their midst. And the monster is one of them. In Cassandra’s movie, the killer turns out to be a girl who wears a beaded cap, exactly like Lizzie’s. Cassandra was pointing us to Holly Devine, which turned out to be wrong. But she was right about one thing: The monster was one of them.”

  Maura frowned at the body of Billy Sullivan. “He staged his own disappearance.”

  “He had to disappear. Over the past few years, he’s stolen millions of dollars from his clients at Cornwell investments, money that he’s probably been socking away in the Caribbean. It’ll be months before federal investigators find out how much he actually took. They’d just shut down his office when Frost and I showed up that afternoon. We assumed Billy was another one of Stanek’s murder victims, buried in some unmarked grave. But it was Billy’s way of conveniently vanishing. He ran from his old identity—and from what he did to Lizzie DiPalma twenty years ago.”

  “He would only have been eleven years old when he did it.”

  “But he was already a mean little bastard, according to Lizzie’s mother. The reason the police never found her body was because they were searching in the wrong places.” Jane looked down at Billy and Susan. “Now we have a pretty good idea of where to hunt for her.”

  Maura rose to her feet. “You know the drill, Jane. We have another fatal police shooting, and this isn’t even Boston PD’s jurisdiction. It’s Brookline’s.”

  Jane glanced through the doorway at the Brookline PD detective who stood in the hallway, scowling as he talked into his cell phone. A turf battle was brewing, and Jane had some serious explaining to do.

  “Yeah, here comes the inquiry,” sighed Jane.

  “But if there’s such a thing as a good shooting, this was it. And you have a civilian witness who’ll testify that you saved her life.” Maura stripped off her gloves. “How is Holly?”

  “When the ambulance took her, she was still pretty shaky from the drug, but I’m sure she’ll be fine. I think that girl would survive just about anything. She’s full of surprises, that one.”

  Strange girl. According to Bonnie Sandridge, that’s what the other children had called Holly, and Holly Devine was strange. Jane thought of the girl’s eerie calmness in the face of threat and the coolly analytical way Holly looked at her, as if she were studying a different species. As if humans were alien to her.

  “Was she able to tell you what happened here tonight?” asked Maura.

  “I got the gist of it. I’ll find out the details tomorrow, when she’s recovered.” Jane gazed down at Susan and Billy again, lying in their mingled pools of blood. “But I think you can see the whole story right here. A nasty little monster of a son. A mother who let him get away with everything. Who even helped him cover up his crimes.”

  “You always tell me there’s no love as powerful as a mother’s, Jane.”

  “Yeah, and here’s the proof of how love can go off the rails.” She took a deep breath, inhaling the all-too-familiar scents of blood and violence. Tonight it was also the scent of finality, and it was deeply, disturbingly satisfying.

  —

  WHEN JANE WALKED INTO HOLLY’S hospital room the next morning, she found the young woman sitting up in bed, finishing her breakfast. Her right cheek was blue and swollen, and her arms were covered in bruises, the vivid evidence of the fierce battle she’d fought last night.

  “How are you feeling this morning?” Jane asked.

  “I’m sore all over. Do I look horrible?”

  “You look alive, which is what matters.” Jane glanced at the empty breakfast tray. “And I see you had no trouble cleaning your plate.”

  “The food here is really awful,” Holly said, and added with a wry shrug, “and there isn’t enough of it.”

  Laughing, Jane pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. “We need to talk about what happened.”

  “I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  “Last night you said that Billy admitted killing the others.”

  Holly nodded. “And I was his last target. I was the one he couldn’t find.”

  “You said he also confessed to killing Lizzie DiPalma.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how he did it? Where he did it?”

  Holly regarded her bruised arms and said softly, “You already know he’s the one who killed her. Do the details really matter now?”

  “Actually, they do, Holly. They matter to Lizzie’s mother. Mrs. DiPalma is desperate to find her daughter’s body. Did Billy give you any idea where he might have hidden it?”

  Holly said nothing, just kept staring down at her bruised arms. Jane studied her, wishing she could somehow see through that skull, to crack the mystery of Holly Devine, but when Holly looked up again, Jane could read nothing in the young woman’s gaze. It was like peering into a cat’s eyes, green and beautiful and utterly enigmatic.

  “I don’t remember,” Holly said. “The drug, it made everything a little hazy. I’m sorry.”
r />   “Maybe the details will come back to you later.”

  “Maybe. If I remember anything else, I’ll let you know. But right now…” Holly sighed. “I’m really tired. I’d like to sleep.”

  “Then we’ll talk later.” Jane stood up. “We still need a full statement from you when you feel up to it.”

  “Of course.” Holly wiped a hand across her eyes. “I can’t believe it’s finally over.”

  “It is. This time it really is.”

  For Holly anyway, thought Jane. If only there were an ending for Arlene DiPalma, but Billy Sullivan had taken the secret of Lizzie’s fate to the grave with him, and they might never find the girl’s body.

  Jane had one more stop to make in the hospital, and after she left Holly’s room, she continued down the hallway to look in on Everett Prescott. Last night, when he was loaded aboard the ambulance, he’d been too stupefied by ketamine to mumble more than a few words. This morning, she found him awake in bed and staring out the window.

  “Mr. Prescott? May I come in?”

  He blinked a few times, as if coming out of a daydream, and frowned at her.

  “You may not remember me. I’m Detective Rizzoli. I was there last night, after you and Ms. Devine—”

  “I remember you,” he said. And added quietly: “Thank you for saving my life.”

  “It was a very close call.” She pulled a chair to his bedside and sat down. “Tell me what you remember.”

  “Gunshots. Then you were standing over me. You and your partner. And the ambulance ride. I’ve never ridden in an ambulance before.”

  Jane smiled. “Let’s hope that’s your one and only time.”

  He didn’t share her smile; instead, his gaze drifted back to the window, to a dreary view of gray skies. For a man who’d almost died, he seemed more troubled than happy about this fortunate outcome.

  “I spoke to your doctor,” said Jane. “He said there shouldn’t be any long-term effects from a single dose of ketamine, but you might have flashbacks. And maybe you’ll feel a little unsteady for a day or two. But as long as you don’t use any more ketamine, the side effects will be temporary.”