About an hour later, she was cleaning out her old bedroom, piling things aside that she wanted to bring back with her to Brooklyn, including the musty braided area rug, when the doorbell rang.
She grabbed her favorite cloth mask hanging on the nearby wall pegs. The pegs used to be for keys, hats, umbrellas, and the like. Now they were filled with various masks she’d ordered online, ninety percent of which were too uncomfortable or itchy to be worn for long periods.
At the door was the lead detective on her case, Detective Jarrod Bourbeau. Even behind his black mask, he appeared young enough to have graduated from the police academy in the past week or so.
The district attorney had not yet made a decision as to whether Romy would face criminal charges for what she’d done as a juvenile. Many factors would be taken into consideration, including Misty’s parents’ wishes.
But Romy’s lawyer believed prison time was highly unlikely; at most, she would receive community service and probation.
But there was always the chance that Misty’s family could bring a civil case against her. Because of this, Romy’s lawyer insisted that she not try to speak with Misty’s parents herself, though it was the thing she wanted to do most.
Her lawyer had also informed her that Misty’s parents had long been aware of the possibility that Heath may not have been the father of Misty’s child. Heath’s timeline of when the pair began having sex and the coroner’s estimation of the fetus’s age did not match up.
But, at the time, Misty’s parents had assumed Heath was lying about the couple’s date of first copulation to avoid admitting that Misty had cheated on Patrick, junior prom king and star quarterback.
As Heath was never charged with a crime, the business of Misty’s remains was solely the purview of her parents. They had chosen, for whatever reason, not to share this tidbit with Heath. Perhaps, grieving as they were, and given the press’s preoccupation with their daughter’s death, they didn’t want to open up the possibility of the press then becoming obsessed with the question of Misty’s sex life.
Now that Misty’s parents knew the truth of the baby’s paternity, Romy’s lawyer said they were gunning for Avery Sands, and may even be willing to work with Romy in order to get him the maximum in his attempted murder case.
“Hi, detective,” Romy said.
“Sorry to bother you. Mind if I come in for a few?”
“Sure thing.” She opened the door and let him in. He was so tall that his head, like Heath’s, nearly grazed the popcorn ceiling.
“I wanted to show you something we managed to get,” he said.
Romy indicated he should sit on the couch and she sat next to him. He had a leather case hooked to his belt and he unsnapped it, then took out a mini-tablet.
“I wanted to ascertain again how you believe you got out of the pool,” he said.
“Well, I don’t remember much of it. I kept kicking, and I suppose I managed to float to the top.”
“Miss Renskler, we believe the ten-pound weight found in the pool was hooked to the rope around your hands.”
She didn’t know why he was pressing her on this. She’d been asked all kinds of questions, but the majority of them had to do with what Avery had said and done inside of her home, and what he’d said and done as he’d marched her through the woods and down to the pool.
Detective Bourbeau had numerous times returned to how Avery had been able to tie her hands, and she’d said he had a gun and she’d thought it best not to test whether or not he’d use it. So she’d put her wrists together and allowed him to bind them.
But she couldn’t bury the feeling that the young officer suspected that Avery had had help that night, and for whatever reason, Romy wasn’t revealing this to him.
“The weight must have come off,” she told him. Then, a bit exasperated, “All I could think about was I was going to die. I don’t know how I got to the surface.”
She certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth—that Misty’s spirit had saved her.
“I understand,” he said. “I know this is difficult for you, we’re just trying to figure out what happened.”
Bourbeau tapped around his tablet, and Romy’s heart beat faster as she realized there was every chance that the pool’s surveillance camera—which he’d earlier confirmed had been turned off—had been turned on after all and the camera had caught all three of them: Romy, Avery, and Katya.
She still hoped to keep Katya out of everything—didn’t want to be responsible for the young woman being sent back to whatever she was trying to avoid in her home country.
It’s not that she forgave Katya for helping Avery, or even how she’d run off after changing her mind about being a co-murderer but that Romy knew how it felt to be under Avery’s spell. Knew how good he was at weaving it, and that Katya, given her impoverished background, had had even less chance of not falling under it than either Romy or Misty had.
Add in that Avery wielded Katya’s real fear of deportation as a way to control her, and Romy felt Katya must have been practically brainwashed.
“Turns out the club had another camera, and it was turned on,” Bourbeau said. “They forgot about it.”
“Oh!” was all she could say as her heart rate ticked upward.
“They installed it a few years ago—inside of the pool.”
“In—inside? The pool area?”
“No, inside the pool itself.”
Romy was clawing at her leg but couldn’t stop. “Okay,” she said.
“We believe what the camera caught is very important,” he said. “But I don’t know how you feel about seeing yourself. Seeing yourself... in the position you’re in.”
There was an enormous, stone-hard lump in her throat. She could hardly take in what he was saying. “You mean it… sees me? Under the water?”
“Yes.” He nodded soberly, sympathy in his eyes over his mask. “I do believe you should see what’s on here, Miss Renskler. But I want you to be prepared for it. Would you prefer to view it with your lawyer present? Or a social worker? A friend or parent?”
What a sly thing he was. He must have known that by showing up with no warning, bringing the tablet and having it sitting mere inches away was going to be too tempting for her to delay the viewing until she could find emotional support.
“No,” she said, gnawing on her thumb knuckle through her cloth mask. “I should see it.”
He made another tap on the tablet, then shifted it towards her. She saw the square box of a video; it was dark and blurry.
“You’re ready?” he asked. “If at any time you prefer to stop, say so. Just say ‘stop.’”
She nodded and he pressed the cursor button.
The video was very dark, with only a shaft of wide, diffused light slicing through the middle of the screen, what she imagined must be moonlight.
When something hit the water, all she saw were millions of tiny bubbles. When those cleared, she could see herself, or the silhouette of herself, fanned-out hair obscuring her face, her bound hands floating ahead of her, slightly weighed down by her chest, her legs akimbo.
She happened to be wearing light pants that night—loose cotton pants, as the temperature had risen, and she’d wanted a comfortable drive back into the city. The pants ballooned out from her splayed legs.
She looked utterly helpless, like a fetus in a womb. Then she watched as she began to twist and impotently kick her legs like a beetle flipped on its back.
Everything in her dropped to the pit of her stomach, watching herself like that, and remembering the torturous feeling of being completely powerless and doomed, with her brain racing downwards to its final forever quiet.
Bourbeau’s finger was on the screen.
“This is what we’re looking at, here,” he said, as a stream of bubbles cascaded into the left corner of the screen.
Romy’s mouth hung half-open as she realized that what had saved her—what she was absolutely certain was Misty’s spirit—was going to appear in some form on the video.
The thick funnel of bubbles started to break apart and fly away upwards to the top of the screen.
Through the shadowy gloom came the silhouette of an arm, and another arm, and two hands, looking so graceful, like an underwater ballerina.
The two hands went around Romy’s bound wrists and a small dark circle—the ten-pound weight—fell away and sank out of camera range. One hand stayed on Romy’s wrists, the other arm floated upward, and slight legs and balletic-pointed feet began to kick. The two silhouettes started to ascend.
As Romy’s floating hair fanned and thinned out, a large split appeared, and in that space, something else appeared. The detective stopped the video. He put his finger directly over the space created by Romy’s freeze-framed swaying tendrils.
It took her a long moment to process what appeared inside of the tendrils was a face. The face was blurry and shadowy, but the more Romy stared at it, the more it began to crystallize into an image she dimly knew.
“This,” the detective said. “Someone jumped in and brought you out. Do you know this person?”
Romy sat staring, staring, for this wasn’t what she’d expected. This wasn’t what she’d heard or experienced.
“I don’t,” she said, shaking her head.
“You’re sure? It appears this person removed the weight. Saved your life.”
She made a quick calculation. Bourbeau seemed like a nice young gentleman. Should she be straight with him? Tell him what she feared?
She couldn’t, because she herself didn’t know exactly why she was doing what she was doing. She’d gone so many years protecting her own secret, and now she had no secrets but she’d become the protector of not one, not two, but three people with secrets of their own. Bill, Heath, and now…
Yes, “this person” had saved Romy’s life. Therefore, Romy must protect her, must save her back.
“I don’t remember,” she said, looking away from the screen, towards the window, in which she half-expected to see Katya, grinning with that strange, otherworldly mouth, staring with those luminous, aquamarine orbs.
Katya, the woman who’d found the strength to defy the man she’d thought was her chance at a new life to come back and rescue the life of a woman she didn’t know.
Romy had not been wrong about her. On the trail in the woods, she’d sworn she’d seen compassion flickering in Katya’s mesmerizing but hardened eyes. This made Romy turn her efforts from trying to sway Avery back to humanity and using instead what little time she had left to sway Katya.
She’d chosen correctly.
While in that dark, sealed, watery tomb, Romy had not heard, seen, or felt Katya. She’d heard, seen, and felt Misty. Perhaps her brain, sputtering to its demise from lack of oxygen, had made a last-ditch effort to absolve herself from her guilt and conjured the form of Misty for her absolution.
She’d believed while in her terror in the woods, when her soul had begged for a guardian angel, Misty had responded.
But it had been Katya. Katya was her guardian angel.
“Miss Renskler?” the detective asked. “Look closely.”
“Sorry,” she told him, defiantly folding her arms and flopping back on the couch. “I don’t know her.”
In a way, this was the truth. Whoever Katya truly was, whatever or whomever she was running from, Romy didn’t know. Would probably never know.
For the rest of her life, when she’d think of Katya, as she often did, Romy would see her as she looked with that thin, underdeveloped body, that pale, almost glowing-white skin, and those extraordinarily blue-blue eyes.
She would see her as she stood outside Romy’s window, looking just like a little girl.
For more thrillers by C.G. Twiles, please keep reading.
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