Brock shakes his head at me. “It’s not a crisis now,” he says. “I like this about you, Matilda, but you always want to act. You want to crash through with weapons, solve puzzles, get to another level, whatever.”
“I don’t see why we’re waiting for June to decide how to handle this,” I say. “We’re always doing things her way. It’s time to stop waiting.”
“It’s terrible,” puts in Tatum, reaching out to touch my hand. “But Brock is right. This whole summer has been a sustained, massive crisis. Tonight is actually the end of it. We can take time to think.”
“Okay,” I say, my fingers interlacing with Tatum’s.
“Don’t tell me you two are athingnow, in the middle of this horror show,” says Brock, his eyes on our hands.
“Maybe,” I say.
“Yes,” says Tatum, firmly.
“Okay, fine. Yay. Took you long enough. I love you both. But let me explain the thing I didn’t want to say in front of June. She didn’t go with Meer to the garage,” explains Brock as he puts the kettleon the stove. “While I was searching by the vegetable garden and you two were at the beach, she went back through the house and found Kingsley in Oyster Office. He had the keys, so he went there to look for his phone to take with him. But of course he couldn’t find it.”
“It’s not there,” Tatum explains to me. “June confiscated his phone back in the spring, even though we told her we didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“We thought Kingsleyshouldhave his phone if he got out,” says Brock, “because then we could track him. But June thought he was less likely to leave if he couldn’t take a phone with him. Anyway, she was right that he got stalled, taking apart the office looking for it. When she found him in there, though, he got violent with her. He pushed her up against the wall, apparently, and was yelling at her and calling her a witch, but she managed to inject him with this—well, you’ve had it,” Brock says to me.
“The sedative.”
Brock pours boiling water into three mugs. Tatum squeezes tinctures from eyedroppers into each cup, then adds a squeeze of lemon and a big spoonful of honey. “So then what?” asks Tatum.
“The drug works pretty fast—it could like, tranquilize a horse, I think—but as soon as June jabbed him, Kingsley pushed her to the floor and ran out the front door,” says Brock. “June thought he’d gone down the driveway, but he actually doubled back toward the pool house. I don’t know why. Maybe he was thinking he wouldn’t be found in there. Or maybe he was going to go past it into the woods.”
“He asked me about the poultry,” I say. “He’s the one who opened the door and let them out. So maybe he was going back to check.”
“In any case, the sedative hit him and he passed out as he stumbled into the pool. We think.”
“We have to call the police,” I repeat. “We should have done it already.”
“June doesn’t want us to,” says Tatum.
“She’s never wanted anyone involved,” adds Brock.
“June hasn’t been thinking right for a long time,” I argue. “She shouldn’t be stabbing nonconsenting people with sedatives or keeping Kingsley locked in a tower or keeping the three of you here to help her, even.”
“We’ve been choosing to stay,” says Tatum, gently.
I pull out my phone and call thepolice.
64
June screams atme when she finds out.
This isherpartner.
This isherchild’s father.
Kingsley is a private man, I’m an interloper, none of this is my business.
I’m an entitled nobody upstart, wedging my way into her home, into her family, unsettling everyone.
Kingsley’s death is my fault, I put him at risk, I was messing with a situation I know nothing about.
I tell her he’s my father. I tell her we need help right now. I tell her she can be as mad at me as she wants. I never meant any harm and he shouldn’t have been locked up. You can hate institutions all you want, but sometimes you need them.
Her demeanor changes when the police arrive. They come slowly up the driveway with their red lights flashing soundlessly. Three blue-and-white cars cluster on the stone driveway in front of the garage, blocking the Mercedes in. The officers trudge past the castle, barely looking at the buildings, intent on the location of the body.
