Page 41 of Atonement

“You murdered my best friend,” I growled.

“Wasn’t…” she gagged, trying desperately to breathe.

“I could smell your fucking perfume in the car, you cunt!” I had been too far out of my mind to register it at the time. I thought it was just leftover from another time she’d been in there. But I hadn’t noticed it earlier, with Maddie, or when Shawn and I were in there together. If she caught him off guard and braced herself against the back of the car, she would have been able to leverage herself against the seat. How she snuck into the car, I’d never know. And I didn’t much fucking care.

“You’re going down for this. Not him.”

But she didn’t hear me. She was out, completely limp. I held the pressure a few more seconds to make sure, then dragged her into my bathroom and tied her to the towel bar in the bathroom. I’d installed the thing myself, drilled right into the studs. She wasn’t getting off of it. Even so, I barricaded the door with my dresser.

Back in the hallway, I picked up the gun and flipped out the barrel to find the firing pin had been filed down to nothing.

“FUCK!” I screamed as I threw the revolver down the hallway. Of course Conrad would know I had a gun and would take steps to neutralize it. His tampering had just saved my life, but now I had nothing to defend myself with when I went into the house. I glared at the dent left in the wall in the shape of Anita’s body. “This is your fucking fault.”

“Meyer?”

I rolled my eyes at my sister’s weak voice coming through the bathroom door, and went down the hall toward the stairs, scooping up the useless gun as I did. As far as Conrad knew, I had no idea it had been tampered with. I stuck it in the waistband of my pants, and stepped outside.

It was completely dark outside, and my breath fogged in the air as I exhaled. Through the sparse foliage that usually separated Conrad’s house from mine I could see the lights of his house. He’d have finished eating by now. They’d be in the office. Maybe. It was just as likely they’d be in the bedroom.

I took one last breath to steel myself before I started walking, and before I knew it, I’d left the refuge of my house and was swallowed up by the darkness.

*

Conrad never kept adequate lighting, or cameras, on the outside of his house. He said they gave him headaches, and he didn’t want to pay someone to sit around watching surveillance monitors when what he really wanted was to confront anyone who had the balls to come at him head on. There weren’t guns lying around the house, of course; he could never risk letting me or Eva get our hands on them. But he did have multiple safes, accessible only by a key he kept around his neck. It was the only copy. He lost it, once. After he beat me senseless to confirm I hadn’t stolen it, he had to call a locksmith to drill open every last one of them.

Even though it may have been difficult to find a weapon in my childhood home, I knew exactly how to get in and out of the building without being noticed. Eva wasn’t the only one who learned to move around unseen. I hadn’t returned to this entrance for years, hoping I would no longer have need of it, but as far as I knew Conrad never found out about it. I had no choice but to hope that was true. I crept past the back patio and around to the chimney stretching from the ground to the roof. Fifty feet to the north was an ancient door, used long ago for staff to load grocery deliveries directly into the pantry. It had been boarded up before I was born, but I discovered it one day hiding behind boxes of wine when Conrad was on a rampage. A slow excavation ensued, done in covertly to ensure I wasn’t found out, and in a few weeks I had a secret passage no one else in the house knew about. Even Eva was ignorant to its existence.

Ivy and weeds had grown thick around the door in the years since I’d used it, but I yanked away as much as I could and pulled at the door until it opened—which it did with a loud yowl. I winced and ducked inside, listening intently for movement in the kitchen. Nothing. I started to pull it shut again, then thought better of it and simply moved a few stacked boxes of wine to better shield the entrance. No one should be coming in here again tonight, and the draft from outside would go unnoticed. I hoped.

I waited with my ear against the inside of the pantry door for another few minutes, but there was nothing to indicate another person waited on the other side. I reached for my gun, cursed softly when I remembered it didn’t work, and returned to the boxes of wine to grab a bottle as my weapon, swearing to figure out something more intimidating once I got into the main house. Unlike the door to the outside, the pantry door swung open noiselessly on well-oiled hinges. The kitchen was dark; the only sound was the quietly humming refrigerator. All the knives were kept behind locked cabinet doors. Even the heavy cast-iron pans had been stowed safely where no desperate slave or fed-up child could get their hands on them.

Growing up afraid of my own shadow, I’d learned to navigate the house in the dark without ever worrying about so much as stubbing my toe. On days where Conrad saw fit to send me to bed without dinner for some imagined slight, I’d sneak downstairs to try and steal some food from the pantry only to find it locked.

“Don’t worry,” Eva would whisper as she placed her hand on my shoulder, startling me out of my half-starved daze. “I was on my way down here myself.” Then she’d produce a bobby pin and pop open the lock. Once I gained more control over my fingers, she taught me to do the same.

I crept through the house without another noise, initially heading for the room where I suspected Maddie had been kept when she was brought here. The room Eva and I lived in for the first year of her captivity. Pulling open the door, I braced myself for Conrad to come rushing at me from within, but there was no one in the room. I stepped inside briefly, picking up the worn yellow baby blanket sitting on the thin cot. I picked it up and rubbed the soft fabric between my fingers. It didn’t raise any memories for me; in fact, it looked much newer than any blanket I would have had as a child. I dropped it back on the cot and left the room, shutting the door silently behind me.

She wasn’t here, which meant I would have to go back to Conrad’s rooms. That was the only other place she would be. My heart heavy, I made my way back to the first floor and the back stairwell.

The door was unlocked—he likely didn’t think anyone would be sneaking up here anytime soon. He probably sent away all the staff for at least a week.

The lights at the top of the stairs were already on, but there was no sign of life except for a strange sound emanating from the bedroom. I raised the wine bottle, preparing to swing, and started down the hallway. It sounded like crying. But I couldn’t hear Conrad. If he wasn’t in the bedroom, where was he? I had to get Eva someplace safe before I could confront Conrad. There would be no leaving him alive, not after I ran off with both Madeline and her mother. He’d spend every last dollar he had to hunt us down, and we’d all pay when he found us. Because he would, eventually, no matter how hard we tried to hide.

The door cracked open and I froze in place, cocking my arm back to swing in case the wrong person stumbled through the door, but nothing could have compared me to the sight of Eva, nearly naked except for a torn robe, once a light shade of pink but now as red as the dawn.

“Meyer,” she whispered, blood running down her neck and chest. “Help.”

Meyer

I had to leap forward to catch her as she stumbled, gasping, into my arms.

“Mom, what happened?”

“I…” She swallowed to still her trembling voice. Her eyes couldn’t seem to land on any one spot, shifting around the entire hall. “I got a knife.” Her eyes finally focused on her hand, and I looked down to see a short paring knife clutched in her bloody palm. She was clutching it so hard her fingers were white, even through the blood covering her skin.

“Let it go,” I whispered, placing my hand over hers and trying to pry her fingers loose. “It’s okay now. You can let it go.”

With some more coaxing, I finally tore free her fingers from the handle of the knife. It fell to the carpeted floor with a light thud. Without the burden of the weapon, she inhaled deeply.

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