We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(71)

64


June screams at me when she finds out.

This is her partner.

This is her child’s father.

Kingsley is a private man, I’m an interloper, none of this is my business.

I’m an entitled nobody upstart, wedging my way into her home, into her family, unsettling everyone.

Kingsley’s death is my fault, I put him at risk, I was messing with a situation I know nothing about.

I tell her he’s my father. I tell her we need help right now. I tell her she can be as mad at me as she wants. I never meant any harm and he shouldn’t have been locked up. You can hate institutions all you want, but sometimes you need them.

Her demeanor changes when the police arrive. They come slowly up the driveway with their red lights flashing soundlessly. Three blue-and-white cars cluster on the stone driveway in front of the garage, blocking the Mercedes in. The officers trudge past the castle, barely looking at the buildings, intent on the location of the body.

June speaks to them on the pool house deck without a hint of the fury from a couple minutes ago. She appears mournful and weak, appealing to their authority to help her in her time of need. Her hair has loosened from its braids. She looks tiny and afraid, but she stands up tall.

I am angry at her, just like she’s angry at me.

She lied to me and locked my father up and didn’t get him medical help he needed. She didn’t let me meet him, when she knew he was painting me. It was written in that oil paint that he wanted to see me—and she kept us apart. I have a thousand grudges, a thousand furious things to say to her, a thousand suspicions.

Maybe June pushed Kingsley into the pool.

She might have sedated him, then led him stumbling and dim-witted to the edge and pushed him in.

She might have stood there, watching as he flailed.

She might have gotten in and made sure his face was well submerged and his pulse was fully stopped.

Or maybe she chased him, trying to stop him and save him, until they stood by the pool arguing, his reflexes growing slower and his thoughts fogging. Until, debilitated as he was, he tried to choke her, or twist her arm, throw her down, and in self-defense she pushed him in, able to overpower him with the chemical help of the tranquilizer.

Planned or unplanned, murder or self-defense, it could have happened either way.

Or she could be as innocent as salt and sand.

None of us will ever know. Clearly, the police are not starting an investigation. Two of them know June from the crafts market. They are taking care of a longtime neighbor and community member, a damsel in distress, a widow who needs their help, a grieving queen.

I don’t say anything. Because Meer has lost his father. And I have lost mine. Nothing will change that.

In the dark, standing on the lawn and tapping things into their phones and writing things into their notebooks, the officers ask us questions.

We tell them what we know: Kingsley became violent. June gave him a sedative. He ran outside and passed out in the pool.

He was dead when she found him.

I hear her ask them to keep it out of the papers how he died.

The ambulance arrives.

They take my father’s body away.

Kingsley Cello escaped the golden shackles of the Sinclair family. He made a life’s work of that escape, and in his final moments, he escaped again.

June accepts a ride to the funeral home near the center of the island.

As the sun rises, the rest of us return to the castle.





Part Eight


    Now and Forever





65


I sleep in my clothes next to Tatum, in my bed in the Iron Room.

We cry together, and our tears are guilty (for different reasons) and full of loss (for different reasons).

Our hands knit together. Our sock feet touch.

The daylight breaks through the curtains and we fade in and out of sleep. Each time I come into consciousness, the loss of Kingsley floods me, the horror of his body in the water, the terrible things he said to me. When I shut my eyes, the paintings he made of me swim in my vision.

Brock knocks on the door at midday. We stumble around, brushing teeth and changing clothes. Tatum wakes Meer when he goes back to his room and when everyone is ready, the four of us take the Mercedes and Glum to the North Road Café.

Meer sits in the back with me. When we’re halfway there, he takes off his seat belt and scooches over to lean his head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I’m such a ginormous liar.”

“S’okay,” I tell him.

“I brought you here under false pretenses.”

I reach my hand up to his face. “That was a rotten thing to do,” I say. “But I’m glad to have you as my brother. To know you.”

“I just wanted to meet you so bad,” he says. “And I tried a bunch of normal stuff and then it turned out the one stupid-idiot-awful thing I tried was the thing that worked. And I kept telling myself that things generally turn out fine. Like if I just didn’t tell you any stuff that might upset you, somehow it would still end up okay.”

“You were in a very weird situation.”

“I was,” says Meer. “We all were.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, Pookie.”

“Pookie? Since when am I Pookie?”