Heroes are My Weakness (33 page)

The box was filled with photos of Theo and Regan as children. Annie unfolded an old beach towel and sat on the floor to look at them. Judging by the crooked composition, they’d taken many of them themselves. They were dressed in superhero costumes, playing in the snow, making faces at the camera. The images were so endearing that a lump grew in her throat.

She opened the clasp on a manila envelope and found it stuffed with more photos. The first was of Theo and Regan together. She recognized Regan’s
NO FEAR
T-shirt from the summer they’d all been together and vaguely remembered having taken the photo herself. As she gazed at Regan’s sweet smile, the way she leaned against her brother, she was once again struck by the tragedy of her loss. The tragedy of all the losses Theo had endured, beginning with his mother’s abandonment and ending with the death of a wife he must have once loved.

She took in the tousled hair falling over his forehead and the arm carelessly draped around his sister’s shoulders.
Regan, I wish you were here to explain your brother to me.

All the photos in the envelope seemed to have come from that summer. There were pictures of Theo and Regan in the pool, on the front porch, and aboard their boat—the same boat Regan had taken out the day she’d drowned. Annie was overcome with both nostalgia and pain.

And then . . . bewilderment.

She shuffled through the photos more quickly. Her pulse began to hammer. One by one, the photos drifted from her lap and scattered at her feet like dying leaves. She buried her face in her hands.

I’m sorry,
Leo whispered.
I didn’t know how to tell you.

A
N HOUR LATER
, A
NNIE STOOD
in the bitter wind next to the empty swimming pool. Long cracks fissured the concrete pool walls, and filthy piles of snow and muck littered the bottom. According to Lisa, Cynthia was planning to fill in the pool. Annie imagined her replacing it with the fake ruins of an English folly.

Theo didn’t see her as he emerged from the stable where he’d been grooming Dancer. He was her lover, this wildly seductive man she knew so well yet didn’t know at all. Gray snowflakes swirled like ashes in the gloomy air. A sensible book heroine wouldn’t have confronted him until she’d gathered her thoughts. But Annie wasn’t sensible. She was a mess. “Theo . . .”

He stopped walking and turned to find her. “What are you doing out here?” He didn’t wait for an answer but came toward her with that long-legged gait that had become so familiar. “Let’s call it a day and go down to the cottage together.” The smoky cast in his eyes told her what he had in mind for the two of them to do when they got there.

She huddled into her shoulders. “I’ve been in the attic.”

“Find what you needed?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.” She reached in her coat pocket. Her hand trembled slightly as she pulled out the photographs. Five of them, although she could have brought a dozen more.

He stepped up on the cracked pool deck to see what she held. And when he did . . . Pain contorted his face. He turned on his heel, abandoning her.

“Don’t you
dare
walk away from me,” she cried as he stalked across the yard. “Don’t you
dare
!”

He slowed, but didn’t stop. “Leave it alone, Annie.”

“Do not walk away.”
She spat out each word. Not moving a step. Staying right where she was.

He finally turned to face her, his words as flat as hers had been vehement. “It was a long time ago. I’m asking you to leave it alone.”

His expression was stony, foreboding, but she had to know the truth. “It wasn’t you. It was never you.”

He clenched his hands into fists at his sides. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a liar,” she retorted, not with anger, but as a statement. “That summer. All this time I thought it was you. But it wasn’t.”

He launched himself toward her, using attack as his defense. “You don’t know anything. That day you got dive-bombed by the birds . . . I was the one who sent you to that wreck.” He was on the pool deck, looming over her. “I put the dead fish in your bed. I insulted you, bullied you, excluded you. And I did it all on purpose.”

She nodded slowly. “I’m starting to understand why. But you’re not the one who shoved me into the dumbwaiter or pushed me into the marsh. You didn’t take those pups down to the cave or write the note that sent me to the beach.” She ran her thumb over the photos she held. “And you weren’t the one who wanted me to drown.”

“You’re wrong.” He met her eyes dead-on. “I told you. I had no conscience.”

“That isn’t true. You had too much.” Her throat tightened, making it hard to speak. “It was Regan all along. And you’re still trying to protect her.”

The proof lay in the photos she held. In each one, Annie had been cut out. Her face, her body—every jagged slash of the scissors a little murder.

Theo didn’t move—he stood as straight as ever—but even so, he seemed to fold in on himself, withdrawing to that place where no one could reach him. She expected him to walk away again, was astonished that he didn’t. She clung to that. “Jaycie’s in some of the photos,” she said. “All of her.”

She waited for him to stalk away, to explain, and when he did neither, she offered her own conclusion, the one he couldn’t seem to utter himself. “Because Jaycie wasn’t a threat to Regan. Jaycie didn’t try to steal your attention the way I did. You never singled her out.”

She could feel him waging an internal war. His twin had died more than a decade earlier, yet he still wanted to protect her from the evidence of the photos. But Annie wouldn’t let him. “Tell me.”

“You don’t want to hear this,” he said.

She gave a mirthless laugh. “Oh, but I do. You did those things to me to keep me safe from her.”

“You were an innocent party.”

She thought of the punishments he’d taken for his sister. “So were you.”

“I’m going inside,” he said flatly. He was shutting her out, sealing himself up as usual.

“Stay right here. I became a big part of this story, and I deserve to know all of it right now.”

“It’s an ugly story.”

“You think I don’t already understand that?”

He separated himself from her, walking to the end of the deck where the old diving board had once been mounted. “Our mother left us when we were five—you know that. Dad escaped by working, so it was Regan and me against the world.” Every word he uttered seemed to cause him pain. “All we had was each other. I loved her, and she would have done anything for me.”

Annie didn’t move. Theo nudged a rusted metal bolt with the toe of his riding boot. She didn’t think he’d say more, but he went on, his voice barely audible. “She’d always been possessive, but then so was I, and it wasn’t a problem until we were around fourteen, and I started paying attention to girls. She hated that. She’d horn in on my phone calls, tell me lies about any girl I showed an interest in. I thought she was just being a pest. And then things got more serious.” He crouched down on his heels to check out the mess at the bottom of the pool, but Annie doubted he was seeing anything except the past. He went on—coldly, without emotion. “She began starting rumors. She made an anonymous call to the parents of one girl telling them their daughter was on drugs. Another girl ended up with a broken shoulder after Regan tripped her at school. Everybody believed it was an accident because they all loved Regan.”

“You didn’t believe it was accidental.”

“I wanted to. But there were more incidents. A girl I’d only talked to a few times was on her bike when she had a rock thrown at her. She fell and was hit by a car. Fortunately she wasn’t badly hurt, but she could have been, and I confronted Regan. She admitted she’d done it, then cried and promised nothing like that would ever happen again. I wanted to believe her, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.” He stood back up. “I felt trapped.”

“So you gave up girls.”

He finally looked at her. “Not right away. I tried to keep Regan in the dark, but she always found out. Not long after she got her driver’s license, she tried to run down one of her best friends. After that happened, I couldn’t take any more chances.”

“You should have told your father.”

“I was afraid to. I’d spent hours in the library reading about mental illness, and I knew something was drastically wrong with her. I even came up with a diagnosis—relationship-based obsessive-compulsive disorder. I wasn’t that far from the mark. He’d have had her institutionalized.”

“And you couldn’t let that happen.”

“It would have been the best thing for her, but I was a kid, and I didn’t see it that way.”

“Because it was the two of you against the world.”

He didn’t acknowledge what she’d said, but she knew it was true. Saw the helpless boy he’d once been.

“I thought if I made sure she never felt as if anyone was coming between us, she’d be fine,” he said. “And I was right, up to a point. As long as she didn’t feel threatened, she behaved normally. But the most innocent remark could set her off. I kept hoping she’d get a boyfriend, and then it would stop. They all wanted to go out with her, but she had no interest in anyone except me.”

“Didn’t you start to hate her?”

“Our bond was too strong. You spent a summer with her. You know how sweet she could be. That sweetness was genuine. Right up to the moment the darkness took over.”

Annie pushed the photos into her coat pocket. “You burned her poetry notebook. You had to have hated her to do that.”

His mouth twisted. “There was no poetry in that notebook. It held all her most obsessive delusions, along with some venom-filled pages directed at you. I was afraid someone would look in it.”

“But what about her oboe? She loved it, and you destroyed it.”

His eyes held a weary sadness. “She burned it herself when I threatened to tell Dad what she’d been doing to you. She saw it as a kind of sacrifice to appease me.”

Of everything he’d told her, this seemed the saddest—that Regan’s twisted love had compelled her to destroy what had brought her so much pleasure.

“You wanted to protect her that summer,” she said, “but you also wanted to keep her from hurting me. You were in an impossible position.”

“I thought I had it under control. I’d turned myself into a regular teenage monk—not talking to girls, barely looking at them for fear of what Regan would do. And then there you were, living in the same house. I’d see you running around in your red shorts, hear your chatter, watch the way you played with your hair when you were reading a book. I couldn’t avoid you.”

“Jaycie was a lot prettier than me. Why not her?”

“She didn’t read the same books, didn’t listen to the music I liked. I couldn’t get comfortable with her. Not that I would have let myself. I trashed her to Regan. I tried that with you, too, but Regan could read my mind.”

“It was all about availability, wasn’t it? That’s what’s so ironic. If you’d met me in the city, you’d never have looked at me twice.” Theo belonged with beautiful women. He and she were lovers only because of proximity. She tucked her cold hands inside the front of her coat. “After everything you went through with your sister, how could you have fallen in love with Kenley?”

“She radiated independence and self-confidence.” He made a mockery of his own words. “Everything I was looking for in a woman. Everything Regan lacked. We hadn’t been together for six months when she pressed me to get married. I was crazy about her, so I ignored some misgivings and went along with it.”

“Which put you in virtually the same predicament you’d been in with Regan.”

“Except Kenley didn’t try to kill anyone but herself.”

“As a way of punishing you.”

He hunched his shoulders. “I’m getting cold. I’m going inside.”

The man who’d once stripped off his sweater and stood bare-chested in the snow was suddenly cold? “Not yet. Finish the story.”

“I already have.” He strode away from her and into the turret.

She pulled the photographs from her pocket. They burned her cold fingers. She gazed at them through the gray swirl of snow, then opened her hands. A gust of wind plucked at her palms and carried them away. One by one, they drifted into the muck at the bottom of the swimming pool.

A
S SOON AS
A
NNIE WENT
inside, Livia demanded her attention. Annie drew cartoons for her while her mind reeled from what she’d learned and brooded over what she still didn’t know. Predictably, Theo had only gone so far with his story. She’d have to pry the rest out of him. Maybe telling it would chip away at the icy wall he lived behind.

She planted a kiss on Livia’s head. “Why don’t you go do a puppet show for your stuffed animals?” She pretended not to notice Livia’s frown as she got up from the table.

Even before she entered the turret, she could hear rock music. She let herself into the living room. The music was coming from Theo’s office. She climbed the steps to the third floor and knocked but got no response.

The music was loud, but not so loud he couldn’t hear. She knocked again, and when he still didn’t respond, she tried the knob. She wasn’t surprised to find it locked. The message was clear. Theo had finished talking for the day.

She thought it over. The music switched from Arcade Fire to The White Stripes. Out of nowhere, the screech of a terrified cat ripped through the air, quickly followed by the kind of agonizing sound only an animal in the worst kind of peril could make.

The door flew open. Theo dashed out onto the landing looking for his cat. She slipped inside as he raced down the steps.

He had tossed his coat over the black leather ottoman that sat in front of his writing chair. His desk was neater than the last time she’d been here, but then he’d been doing most of his writing at the cottage. A few CD cases lay on the floor by the easy chair. The telescope stood in the window overlooking the cottage, but now she found the sight reassuring instead of menacing. Theo the protector. Trying to shield his mentally ill sister, rescue his crazy wife from herself, and keep Annie safe.

She heard his footsteps coming back up the stairs, moving with a slower, more purposeful tread. He appeared in the doorway. Stopped there. Gazed across the room at her. “You didn’t . . .”