CHAPTER 68 - Molly

CHAPTER 68MollyIDRAIN THE WATER BOTTLE BUT LEAVE THE COOKIES. THE WATER sloshes in my stomach, making me feel slightly seasick. My head still throbs, but anger keeps me focused.I won’t pee myself like I had to when I was six years old, so I use the ancient toilet. It doesn’t flush, so I remove the tank lid and peer inside. There’s a tangle of metal parts, but it doesn’t look as though any of it works. Doesn’t really matter if my urine sits in the bowl. Who cares? At least I’m dry.I’ve been digging my fingers into the wall along the pipe all day, looking for a weak spot. Luckily, the concrete is old and crumbly. There’s a loose fitting on the pipe, and if I can pull it far enough away from the wall, I might be able to work it free and slip the chain off. My fingertips throb, and my nails have broken off at the quick; blood trickles down my left hand, and I have to keep wiping it on my jeans. But at least my fingers are going numb, and the pain is subsiding.Then I hear a door from somewhere up above and the creak of floorboards overhead. My heart hammers. He’s back. I sit and slide over so that my back rests against the spot I’ve been digging, and wait.The ladder scrapes from above, and he’s climbing down.“Melinda?” he calls, although with less gusto than before. Maybe he’s getting tired. I hope so. Somehow, I’ve got to get the upper hand. It’s just Cal, I say to myself, trying to pump up my courage.He makes his way across the basement floor. “How’s my girl?” He sits against the wall, a little farther from me than before, as if he’s afraid I’ll punch him again. “I brought you more to drink.” I hear him chuckle in the darkness. He rolls a bottle toward me. It thunks against my leg. “Go on, take a sip. You’ve got to be thirsty.”I grab the plastic bottle, twist the cap and suck eagerly on the contents, but turn my head and spit. Orange soda. Bile rises in my throat, and Cal laughs.“Oh, come on, Melinda. You know you like it.”“What’s the point?” I ask, my throat scratchy with dried tears.“Just a little joke between friends.” He rubs his hands over his face, and his voice changes timbre, angry now. “Just be fucking grateful I brought you anything, okay? Drink. There’s nothing in it. No sleeping pills. I’ve already got you down here. I didn’t have to resort to anything so prosaic. I’m better than he was.”“Is that the point, Cal? Be better than my last captor?”“I’ve always been better. Smarter, that’s for sure.”“So how did Jay figure out you killed Annalise Robb?”“He found the necklace. I told you that. But, well, I got the feeling last year that Jay was uncomfortable around me. Like he was analyzing me. After I got diagnosed last spring, all that rage that I’d kept locked away came back. It was all that fucking bitch’s fault.”“Whose?”“My lovely mother. She tormented me for years because she was unhappy. Her first husband left her. My brother was gone. My dad apparently cheated on her, and it was all my fault. But then I got away from her. Went to college. Got married. Had a family, career. Everything’s great. Then bam!”I jump as he smacks the floor with his palm. “Her fucking genes get me.” He tips his head back against the wall and laughs. “She got me in the end. Just like she said she would. Well, Jay noticed I’d changed. He kept asking me if I wanted a referral—you know, after I found out I was going blind. He said it might help to talk to somebody.” He laughs again. “Like a goddamn therapist was going to stop me from losing my sight.” He’s quiet, head down, looking at his hands. “They didn’t help you, did they, Melinda? All those eager therapists prodding you to give up your secrets.”I shiver and inch farther away from him.“But I know all about what happened in that cellar.”“No. You don’t,” I whisper. I don’t even know what happened, not all of it. I’ve blocked it out, Jay said. I was so little and drugged besides. Keith had stolen his aunt’s sleeping pills, crushed them, and put them in our orange soda.“You killed little India, didn’t you?” Cal says quietly. “Smothered her when she wouldn’t stop crying.”My breath flies from my chest, as though it’s being sucked out by a demon. “No. That’s a lie,” I mumble, barely able to form words.“Is it?”How does he know that Keith tried to blame me? Only the police and our lawyers knew about the accusation when Keith’s lawyer tried to get him out of the murder charge. Thankfully, it didn’t work, and no one ever leaked it to the press, so Corrine told me years later when I heard my parents whispering about it at the kitchen table. But I worried. What if? I was bigger. I was scared. That has been the most hideous monster always lurking in the back of my mind, all these years, all this time.I choke on my tears. “Who told you that?”“I have my sources.”“Did he tell you? Have you spoken to him?”“Yeah. I have actually.”My skin crawls, and I wrap my untethered arm around my stomach. “You wrote the letter. The letter to Jay that was supposed to be from him.”“I did.”Tears start to run down my cheeks. “You hate me that much, Cal?”He huffs out a breath. “It’s not about you. Why do you think the world revolves around little Melinda? So high and mighty, Molly. You thought you could outrun your past. But you can’t. Nobody can. What’s done is done.” He leans over, so close I can smell the alcohol on his breath. His lips are near my ear, and I shudder. “I’ll be back, sweet Melinda.” He scrambles to his feet.“Where are you going?”“To see my cheating bitch of a wife,” he says nonchalantly, as though they’re meeting for coffee. His hand reaches behind his back, and he pulls out something that glints in a stray beam of the streetlight. A gun. He tilts it back and forth—to be sure, I guess, that I see it. “Unfortunately, I might need this. Laken’s not a tiny little thing like my mother or the others. She might actually be able to put up a fight.”He walks to the ladder, turns to face me. “After I see Laken, I’ll come back here to the cellar. This is where it will all end. It’s only appropriate to end this where it started.” He plants one foot on the ladder. “Too bad Jay’s dead. I’d get star billing in his book, don’t you think?”