Page 91 of The Chain House

“And?”

“He didn’t want to send it elsewhere. He wanted Emily Hawthorne as his editor.”

“Why?”

“Because she was perfect,” he said. “He’d been researching her for weeks. She checked all the boxes. Her manuscript wish list. This should have been everything she’d dreamed of, and she rejected it. And by then he’d long day-dreamed about their partnership and perhaps even more because she was very easy on the eyes. His words, not mine.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Sal was in New York, awaiting her response, and it came, quickly, as he’d assumed, because he was quite proud of the work, but it came quickly for the wrong reason, Doctor. As you can imagine, he was crushed. Beyond crushed, because he knew what he had … and look at it now … the world of Oliver Crown … who was wrong and who was right?”

Beth spoke quietly. “What did you do to her?”

“Sal followed her to a quaint little café, where Beth and Emily Hawthorne sat outside eating yogurt and muffins and drinking hot coffee with swirls of foam, and Sal took the table right behind them, ordering a coffee but bypassing the food menu, because he wasn’t there to eat!” He stomped his foot at the word eat, as if to punctuate it. “He was there to listen. And listen he did, as Emily told you about a manuscript she’d just read by an unsolicited author that had come to her through the slush pile. She couldn’t even remember his name. But it was so far-fetched, she barely got through it. And she said the writing was so masculine it bordered on sexist.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and only then did she realize how long his fingers were, hanging lazily down toward the floor. “So he asked me to take care of her. To kill her and bury her body and bury with it the only copy he had of the book he called The Breakout.”

Beth was shaking all over, which made the chains connected to her start rattling on the floor, trembling on her wrist and ankle. She wanted to rip his eyes out. She wanted to open that scar on his face good and wide and scream right into his head. But she forced herself to calm, calm, calm, and then said, “Where is she? Where did you bury her?”

He grinned. “What if I never did? What if I kept the book,” he said, gesturing toward the hundreds of Mallard Malone book covers fastened to the walls, “and became so infatuated with the world, and waited so patiently for it to all come out just as it did, that I set all this in motion for Oliver Crown to rise from the real ashes?”

“You’re not sane.”

“Not what a good doctor should say to a former patient, Beth,” he said with a wry smile. “But what if I took care of her instead? And what if I’ve been taking care of her for twenty-three years now?”

Beth’s eyes grew large, and her throat constricted to the point where her next words came out as a mere whisper. “She’s alive?”

He gathered his mask from the floor, placed it over his damaged face, and stood from the chair.

From the neighboring room, where Billy had been, Beth heard a door open and multiple footsteps shuffling across the floorboards.

Beth panicked. “What’s going on?”

“You heard the sound of a typewriter earlier.” He gestured toward the hole in the wall and the chain running through it. That chain moved with a distinct tug against her ankle, and she knew now that she was connected again to another person. “So I figured I’d bring it closer to you.”

She heard what sounded like furniture being positioned in the neighboring room, maybe a table or a desk, and then seconds later a chair was placed.

He said, “Wait for it.” Beth waited. The sound of pecking keys resonated through the hole in the wall, and he smiled.

He lifted the chain from the metal post in the floor across the room, gave her a few more links of slack, and then reattached the chain to the post, allowing her to get closer to the wall.

CHAPTER46

“YOU COMING?” JENNIFER asked Carl.

“Should I?”

“I’ve left you in the truck enough today,” Jennifer said, with a nod toward her childhood home. “Come on, meet my parents.”

Once inside, Jennifer was not surprised that Carl acted like the perfect gentleman, shaking her father’s hand and calling her mother ma’am, before following Jennifer into her childhood bedroom.

She turned on the light, saw that it was exactly as it had been when she’d moved out years ago. She’d always had an irrational fear her parents would turn her room into something else as soon as she’d gone off to college, but here it was, down to the posters and pillows and stuffed animals, exactly as she’d left it. She took a beeline toward her old bookcase at the foot of the bed. She knelt, reached for the bottom shelf, and moved her row of Harry Potter books aside to get to where she’d hidden the copy of The Lord of the Flies. She still didn’t know why she’d felt the need to hide it years ago, or to keep it hidden still, as an adult, other than being superstitious about moving it.

“One Direction?” Carl said. “Really?”

“Shut up,” she said, with a glance toward Carl, who was looking at her posters. She pulled the book from the shelf and replaced the Harry Potter books.

Carl said, “I do like that ‘Watermelon Sugar’ song.”

“That was Harry Styles,” she said, standing so quickly it made her dizzy and reminded her that she’d hardly eaten anything all day. And even though she’d told her mother they were fine and that they couldn’t stay long enough to eat, Jennifer could hear her in the kitchen preparing them something to go. And by the smell of what was warming in the microwave, she guessed it was lasagna, which she’d gladly take with her.