Carla reached out and, surprisingly gently, placed her hand on Irene’s wrist, closed her fingers around it, drawing Irene closer to her. “When was it,” she whispered, her expression suddenly earnest, almost hopeful, “when was it, do you think, that she knew?”
“Knew?”
“About him. What he’d done. What he was?”
Irene pulled her hand away, shaking her head as she did. No, Angela could not have known. It was too horrible to contemplate, the idea that she’d lived with that. No. In any case, there was nothing to know, was there? “It was a story,” Irene said. “He wrote a story, perhaps to try to process something he lived through when he was a little boy, and for some reason, he cast himself as the villain. Perhaps he felt guilty, perhaps he felt he should have been watching Ben, or perhaps it was an accident. . . . It might have been a mistake,” she said, aware that in part she was trying to convince herself. “It might have been a childish mistake; he was so little, he couldn’t possibly have understood the consequences. . . .”
Carla, listening to her, nodded her head. “I considered that. I considered all those things, Irene. I did. But consider this: he was a child, yes—then, he was a child, but what about later? Say you are right, say it was a childish mistake, or an accident, that doesn’t explain how he behaved later on. He knew that I blamed Angela for what happened, and he let me blame her. He allowed me to punish her, he allowed Theo to reject her, he watched her slowly crushed by the weight of her guilt and he did nothing. In fact”—Carla gave a quick shake of her head—“that’s not true. He didn’t do nothing. He did something—he made things worse. He told his psychologist that Ben’s death was Angela’s fault, he allowed me to believe that Angela was mistreating him, all of it, it was all . . . God, I don’t even know what it was. A game, perhaps? He was playing a game, with us, with all of us, manipulating us, for his enjoyment, I suppose. To give himself a sense of power.”
It was monstrous, unthinkable. What impossibly twisted sort of mind could think that way? Irene caught herself suspecting that perhaps it was Carla’s mind that was monstrously twisted—wasn’t her interpretation of events every bit as disturbing as the images in Daniel’s notebook? And yet when she thought back to Angela, railing against her son, wishing him out of existence, Carla’s version of events rang horribly true. Irene remembered the missed Christmas dinner, when Angela spoke of envying Irene her childlessness; she thought of her apology the next day. You’d see the world burn, she’d said, to see them happy.
Carla had turned away from Irene, and now she walked slowly up the stairs, turning to face her once she reached the top step. “So, you see, it was in part for her. It sounds so awful, doesn’t it, when you say it out loud? I killed her son for her. But it’s true, in a way. I did it for me, for my son, for Theo, but I did it for her, too. For the ruin he made of Angela’s life.”
* * *
As Irene let herself back into her own home next door she reflected on how, while it could be trying at times, at others it was fortunate that people like Carla looked at little old ladies like her and dismissed them as dim, distracted, forgetful, and foolish. It was, today at least, lucky that Carla saw her as waiting for death, not quite of this world, not up to speed with all its complicated ways, its technological developments, its gadgets, its smartphones, its voice-recording apps.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The weather had turned again, the freezing air of the past week suddenly banished by a blessed breath of warmth blowing up from the Mediterranean. Two days ago, Miriam had been huddling in front of her log burner with a coat and scarf on; now it was warm enough for her to sit out on her back deck, drinking her morning coffee and reading the newspaper.
What was in the newspaper might well have been the stuff of fiction: Theo Myerson had been released from police custody, although he still faced charges for wasting police time and for perverting the course of justice, while his wife was the one now facing murder charges after the police were furnished （by an unnamed source） with a dramatic recorded confession.
So, after all that, it turned out that the person Miriam had been trying to frame for the murder of Daniel Sutherland actually was the person who had murdered Daniel Sutherland. How about that? Didn’t say much for Miriam’s framing skills.
The stuff of fiction! Miriam couldn’t help but laugh: Would Myerson try to wrangle a novel out of this mess? Perhaps she, Miriam, should try to wrangle a novel out of it. How would that be for a worm turning? For Miriam to take his life story and use it as material, to twist it any way she liked, to rob him of his agency, of his words, his power.