the next afternoon, and I was busy enough procuring the drugs from the chemistry lab and getting the cabin ready.”
“The cabin in the woods,” I mutter.
Ted smiles. “They used it in a movie once, you know. This was a few years later. I took you to see it, tried to trigger a response, and you were certainly petrified—but no memories surfaced. It was so… disappointing.”
His eyes go distant.
“Anyway,” he says. “Finding someone to take was simple. I just drove around Foster! And three streets from the bookstore, right around the time Brennan would be leaving it, I saw this girl with flaming red hair. Astrid, as you know—though I didn’t have a clue who she was at the time. Just that she was all alone. Walking down the road.” He laughs. “She never even saw me coming! And I figured, once I had her in the cabin, I would hammer out the rest of it—how to get the police to look at Brennan and all that. But then I saw the marvelous opportunity I’d created, and the plan had to change.”
He stops, in the middle of the story, and from the glimmer in his eyes, I see that he’s doing it on purpose. He wants me to ask the questions. To be the person in the interviewer’s chair. His favorite part of his work was always when he revealed the Experiment. When he recalibrated our sense of reality. When he grinned and guffawed, giddy with his own brilliance. He’s had to wait two decades for this moment, and he’s relishing it now. He wants to make it last as long as it can.
“Changed how?” I ask—because he’s taught me, so well, to make him happy.
“I was going about it all wrong! Brennan had pushed my buttons, and I’d gotten caught up in destroying him, but once it was just me and the girl, I saw things clearly. What I’d actually done was create a marvelous Experiment. A way to observe acute fear over a prolonged period of time. So instead of breaking Brennan, I decided I would beat him. Because in beating him, see, I would break him, too.”
My hands tremble in my lap. “But what did you think you were going to do with your research? Write a book about terrorizing someone in a basement? Who would publish that? How did you think you’d even get someone to read it without calling the cops?”
“Oh, come on. These are your questions? Obviously, I wouldn’t write it in a way that would implicate myself in the abduction. I’d frame it as information I gathered through interviews. Change the girl’s name and claim I was keeping the victim anonymous. People love that kind of thing. A secret identity. A person in a mask.”
“So why me then?” I blurt—because I am trying, so hard, not to picture the welder’s mask. Not to imagine him opening the window in it and showing me his face.
Ted stretches out his legs. Crosses one ankle over the other. “I didn’t plan to put you in the basement, but— Well, you read the memoir, you know she stopped eating. And clearly I wasn’t out to kill her or anything, so I had to do something. I couldn’t give up and return her either. Not when I’d already invested two weeks in studying her. So it was an act of desperation, really, bringing you down there with her. You were supposed to provide a bit of company, a bit of comfort. I assumed you’d be a calming and soothing presence to the girl. Only…”
He stops. Scratches. “You weren’t calm at all. You were terrified.”
“Because I’d been kidnapped.”
“But I thought you would know that the danger wasn’t real, that the man behind the mask was me. How could you not? We’d been doing Experiments together your entire life! And now here was someone scaring you so thoroughly you couldn’t even speak, and yet you carried on as if you had no idea it was me. Really, Fern, it’s almost insulting.”
He shakes his head, apparently embarrassed by my ignorance. And on top of everything else, I’m embarrassed by it, too. Never mind that his Experiments relied on me not figuring it out. Never mind that he lived for his own confessions. I should have caught whiffs of the truth as soon as I started to remember, as soon as he leaned in, so hungry to know how much I recalled.
Thirty-two years as Ted’s daughter, and I haven’t learned anything at all.