I don’t believe the accusations against Remy and anyone who knows him wouldn’t either. He was always willing to go out of his way for people, from getting soaked helping staff put up a tent after a rainstorm threatened to torpedo a party in the Hamptons, to lying down on the filthy sidewalk to retrieve a stranger’s purse that had fallen through a grate. I will never forget sneaking out of the Central Park Conservatory’s luncheon to walk through the park with him. That’s the Edmund I choose to remember.
Maybe I’m a bad person, but I’m glad he’s dead. I wish he’d died before he could have taken the life of an innocent girl with him. It’s disgusting that anyone would defend him, no less “choose to remember” him as anything but what he was—a sociopath.
Charlie heard her sister put something in the sink and knew she had only a few more moments before she was going to have to talk to Posey. But there was one more thing she wanted to do. She put the name Lionel Salt into Google, something she hadn’t done in years.
There was a profile on his estate in West Springfield, apparently bought for $8.9 million in 2001, along with some links to his name associated with ongoing legal cases. As soon as she saw a photograph of the house, Charlie’s palms started to sweat.
It looked just like the palace she remembered.
14
A SWARM OF BLACK FLIES
Posey was slurping up ramen doctored with a ton of chili garlic sauce when Charlie emerged from the bedroom.
Dressed in leggings and an oversized shirt, Posey had pulled her brown hair into a single braid. Normal, except she was also wearing eyeliner, lip gloss, and calf-high zip-up boots. She was planning on going somewhere. Charlie just hoped it wasn’t a lab.
“Okay, so you wanted to talk to me without Vince around,” Charlie said, forcing herself to concentrate on this conversation and not everything she’d learned. “What for?”
Posey poked at her bowl. “You’re not going to tell me why you trashed your bedroom?”
Maybe she should get a tarot reading, like saps everywhere. Maybe she needed to hear someone else say it: He’s no good. “You go ahead with your thing first.”
“Fine. So last night, I was talking to this guy…”
Charlie abruptly wished she’d said a lot less the night before. “You told me you wouldn’t.”
“I stopped arguing with you,” Posey said. “I never actually agreed to do what you said.”
With one stupid phone call, Charlie had almost gotten herself killed. What would happen if Salt somehow heard Posey’s story and linked it to Hermes?
“I was careful,” Posey insisted.
“Take it down. Whatever you put out there—take it down.” Charlie looked around for Posey’s laptop as though she could toss it into Nashawannuck Pond and somehow that would remove what she’d posted from the internet.
“It wasn’t online,” Posey insisted. “It was an encrypted chat that deletes everything after it’s read.”
Charlie sat down at the table. Her head was throbbing. The events of the last twenty-four hours were too much. She wanted to curl up in a dark hole and maybe engage in some screaming therapy.
“Forget about all that for a minute,” Posey said. “Because that’s not the part I want to talk to you about.”
“Fuck,” Charlie said, lacking any more coherent response.
“There’s a graduate student over at UMass. Madurai Malhar Iyer. He’s been working on a doctoral dissertation on quickening shadows. The guy who told me about him had been trying to get Malhar to talk to him for ages, but Malhar kept blowing him off.”
Charlie had a feeling she knew what was coming next, and that she was going to hate it.
“I knew you weren’t going to agree to meet him, so I wrote to him and said all that stuff that happened to you happened to me. Only…”
Charlie stared at her unhelpfully.
“Only I can’t go alone,” Posey finished.
“Why not?”
“Because it didn’t happen to me,” Posey said, as though that should be obvious.
Charlie stuck a fork into her sister’s ramen and let the hot chili sear her mouth as she ate it. “That sounds like a big problem for you.”
“I told him we could meet him at the UMass library tonight to talk,” Posey finished, voice lilting up in the manner of someone who wants to ask something without asking it. “Tonight.”
“No—no,” Charlie said, holding up her hands. “No way am I going. That’s not happening.”