Page 39 of The Woman Who Couldn't Scream
Merida nodded again.
Susie shook out the tablecloth and brushed past Merida on her way to the parlor.
Merida stood where she was, the computer pressed to her chest, feeling suspicion crawl up her spine. For the first time since Nauplius had died, she felt… watched, as if someone knew more than she did and was spying on her.
The Cipres. Sean Weston. Susie. Everyone seemed corrupt. Even Phoebe’s exuberance rang false.
And Benedict. Most of all, Benedict… was he here because she had somehow betrayed herself? Had he tracked her not to use her for sex, as he had suggested, but to at last wipe her from the face of the earth? Because he knew… who she was. Because he remembered… what he had done. Because he was afraid of her… as he should be.
She glanced at the video camera she had set up, the one that looked like an antique mirror. She had placed something similar in every room she occupied. She would review the videos and see exactly what Susie had been doing, and if she was telling the truth.
Susie hustled back into the dining room. “There you go, miss. The parlor’s ready if you want to sit in there and wait for me to finish. I won’t be ten more minutes!”
Merida went into the parlor and sat. She opened her laptop and surveyed the screen. As it should be, it was blank, with no way in without a password.
She looked at the key click history.
Susie had been typing nonsense words. Code? Merida saw no pattern, but she knew the basics and no more, and computer science progressed at the speed of light. If Susie was secretly a hacker…
But what should Merida be looking for? Who would Susie be working for? Benedict? His aunt and uncle? Or for herself because she knew anyone who had the cash to take half this house for a year must be rich?
Merida had made a mistake. She knew that now. She’d lived with so much money for so long, she had thought only of privacy, not that she had placed herself as a target to be hit up for money.
She used her handprint to get into the password screen, then used her password to advance to the security viewer.
***
She had always wanted to fly. With a name like Merry Byrd, that had seemed a natural. She didn’t remember the mother who had given her the name and there was no father listed on her birth records, yet she confidently told the other children at the orphanage that Amelia Earhart was her aunt and on the day of her birth Aunt Amelia had taken her on a flight into the clouds. Merry told them she was fated to be a famous pilot.
That worked until one of the older kids scornfully informed her, and everyone else, that Amelia Earhart had been dead for about a hundred years and anyway she flew off course, crashed somewhere, disappeared forever and was a major loser.
To Merry Byrd, that made Aunt Amelia even more brave and romantic, and at night she made up stories about Amelia and how she had never meant to fly around the world at all. Instead she had deliberately landed on a remote tropical island and lived there forever with her foreign lover, and took him flying whenever he wanted.
Merry made the mistake of telling one of the other kids about that, too, and for that she was teased mercilessly. Then she stopped telling everyone about her destiny and began to quietly plan how to get what she wanted—to fly as far away from this place as possible and disappear forever.
Be careful what you wish for, Merry Byrd.
By the time she was eleven, she’d been working in the nursery as long as she could remember. Babies loved her because she sang them nonsense songs. Little kids loved her because she told them stories that took them far away to a mythical place where their parents lived. And she loved the little ones because they didn’t mock her dreams. Merry didn’t realize anyone had noticed, but when one of the men on the orphanage board heard that one of his rich friends was looking for someone to help his wife with his newborn triplets, he recommended Merry.
That was when her life really began.
Mr. and Mrs. Cole took her in as a foster child and treated her better than she could have ever imagined. She had a beautiful bedroom and a maid to pick up after her, and all she had to do was go to school—a private school!—and help with the babies. The babies grew into toddlers who adored her, and Mrs. Cole adored her, too. She gave her an allowance, more money than Merry had ever imagined, and told her friends about Merry and let Merry go babysit her friends’ children. Merry had a savings account. Mrs. Cole listened to Merry’s dreams and hopes, and promised Merry she would fund college and when Merry was old enough, she would pay for flying lessons.
Compared to the orphanage, it was heaven. Merry had a future.
At eleven, she was ugly, awkward and gangly, her ears and hands and feet too big for her too-skinny, too-tall, totally unformed body. Sometime in the next two years, she changed. She was too busy to notice—she’d been ugly, awkward and gangly her whole life, she never expected anything different—but boys started watching her in a different way.
She laughed and dismissed them.
Mr. Cole wasn’t so easy to dismiss. He was a banker. He was important. At first he hadn’t paid attention to her. She was hungry for a father’s love, so she liked it when he teased her, hugged her. Then she got uncomfortable and avoided him, hiding in the nursery with the little ones, or at her friend Kateri Kwinault’s house.
She knew about men like him. In the foster care system, they were legion.
Mr. and Mrs. Cole started fighting.
Kateri ran away to her home in Washington State and didn’t come back.
Mrs. Cole cried when she told Merry she had to return to the orphanage, but she gave her her savings account and a bonus and a letter of recommendation. Merry immediately secured another foster home with one of Mrs. Cole’s divorced friends who had two kids, and this time she negotiated a budget that paid for her school and a salary. She no longer called it an allowance.
