Page 81 of Ruthless Riches
20
Nate
1 year later
I peereddown at Alexis as she braced herself against the chilly air. “Are you sure you’re ready to go back?”
She turned and stared out at the sea for a moment, eyes flickering with a mixture of emotions. Then she looked back at me and nodded, lips curved in a faint smile. “Yeah. Even if I wasn’t, I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
“I guess not,” I said softly. As I spoke, I took her hand and squeezed it, stroking my thumb over the side of her palm. She bit her bottom lip and moved closer to me, huddling against my chest for warmth as the wind picked up around us.
We were standing at the edge of the ferry terminal in Seattle. Our ferry—the Avalon Spirit—would be ready for boarding soon. It would take us up and out of Puget Sound before heading west on the Pacific to Avalon Island.
Neither of us had been to the island in eleven and a half months.
After all the shit that went down last December, Alexis wanted to get the hell away from the place for as long as possible. I couldn’t blame her for that. Considering everything we’d gone through, I wanted to escape the island and all the media attention for a while too.
After a brief discussion, we bit the bullet and did it. We put off the next two semesters of our college courses and traveled as far away as we possibly could, hoping the distance we put between ourselves and Avalon would make our problems from there seem distant as well.
We went everywhere we’d ever dreamed about going. We visited the shimmering salt pans of Namibia, wandered around the busy streets of Paris, Rome, and Berlin, backpacked around southwestern Australia, checked out the colorful stilt houses of southern Chiloé Island in Chile, and lay on the warm beaches of Phuket.
It was a wild adventure, and we made a lot of great memories, but no matter what we did—no matter how far we ran—we still felt like the most vital parts of us were tethered to Avalon. We knew it would eventually call us back, one way or another.
Now it was finally happening.
After eleven years, Peter Covington’s body had been found. Some campers had ventured into the national park up in the northwest of the island, and one of them made the grisly discovery while they were checking out a small cave near their campsite.
It turned out that I was right last year when I thought Peter might have survived his injuries for a while. The coroner determined that my uncle had cut his throat as he always claimed, but he’d done it in a sloppy way. It was still a life-threatening injury that no one could possibly survive without medical intervention, but it meant that death came slowly.
Peter managed to make it partway down the mountain pass after the attack, and then he crawled into the cave, presumably to seek warmth. He would have died only minutes after that, according to the coroner.
When I first heard the news, I had no idea how to break it to Alexis. She’d already suffered so much, so I figured the last thing she needed to hear about was her father’s slow, awful demise. She took it surprisingly well, though. She’d already spent more than half her life working through the emotional aspects of his disappearance and presumed death, so she was prepared for the truth, no matter how dark and dismal it was.
The main issues for her in regard to his death had always been the lack of body and lack of justice. Now she had both. The people responsible for Peter’s murder were rotting in prison, and Alexis and the rest of her family finally had a body to bury. That meant they could finally grieve properly and try their best to move on from the bleak limbo state they used to exist in.
The funeral service was going to be held in Thunder Bay two days from now—a small, private event for family and close friends only.
Sascha would be standing among those mourners. She’d been granted a compassionate leave of absence from the facility she resided in nowadays in order to attend the service.
It turned out I was right about her too. She’d experienced a severe break with reality last year because of the regular scopolamine doses she’d received courtesy of her sociopathic grandfather, and the murders she’d planned and committed had all occurred during that protracted period of psychosis.
She managed to hide her mental state so well because she knew something was happening to her but was too ashamed to get help. That shame about seeking help for mental issues stemmed from the anguish she felt in her childhood when she heard people referring to her father as ‘that crazy psychopathic killer’ or ‘that psychotic freak who murdered thirteen people’. She was so ashamed of being related to him and so paranoid about being labeled in the same way that she didn’t want to admit she had any problems. The only time she ever tried to get help in the past—after having her erratic behavior noted by her friends—she didn’t even use her own name, just in case anyone ever happened to dig through her medical records. She was that determined to avoid being labeled like her father was so many years ago, because her fear and shame over it outweighed everything else in her life.
After Alexis and I turned her in for her crimes, she was deemed unfit to stand trial and wound up in a psychiatric hospital in Seattle for an indeterminate period of time. She could be there for ten years, or she could be there for twenty. She might even be there for the rest of her life. It all depended on how her treatment went and how the state felt about letting her out in the future.
Over the last year, Alexis and I had visited her in the hospital whenever we were in-between travel locations. She behaved in a quiet and subdued manner during every visit, and she wasn’t angry at us for what we’d done to her. Now that she was medicated and mostly back to her old self, she was grateful that we’d stopped her from hurting any more people. She was riddled with shame and remorse, too, to the point where she couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, and she told us she felt as if she didn’t deserve our visits at all.
I understood why she felt that way. She was Alexis’s beloved sister, but she was also an infamous serial killer who’d torn away the lives of four innocent people in a brutal, ruthless manner. It was hard to reconcile those two things, and I knew Alexis had spent many sleepless nights fretting over it.
She knew no one would blame her if she never saw or spoke to Sascha again after what she’d done to those people. In the end, though, she couldn’t abandon her. She’d made a promise to help and support her down in those tunnels, and she intended to keep that promise.
So did I.
Being with Alexis for the last year and a half had taught me that the circumstances surrounding killers and their crimes weren’t always black and white. Not like I thought they were in the past.
Some killers out there were coldhearted, remorseless assholes, like Edward, Greg, and my mother. None of them were even remotely sorry for what they’d done in the past. They were only sorry that they got caught and sorry that huge amounts of their fortunes had been lost to court-ordered fines that went toward reparations for their victim’s families.
I hated people like that with every inch of my being.
