Torn - Cynthia Eden Page 0,77
She gave him a sad smile. “He took me back home.”
Hell, no. “You didn’t have anyone you could turn to?”
“There was no other family, and my friends—they’d pulled away during the trial. Not that I had a whole lot of them to begin with. I was always the quiet girl. The shy one.” Her gaze hardened. “But I wasn’t going to be the dead one. Right after that cop left, my father smiled.”
“Smiled? Why—”
“He really was a brilliant man, you see. And I’d just played right into his hands by running away. By letting a cop find me. Now there was proof that I was a runaway. So if I vanished again . . .”
Sonofabitch.
“Everyone would be more likely to buy his story. He . . . thanked me, for being so helpful.”
Talk about a twisted bastard.
“So that evening, I wanted to thank him, too. I made him dinner. Used my mother’s favorite flower.”
Okay, now he was lost.
“She loved oleanders, you see,” Victoria said, a brief smile curving her lips. “She always thought they were so beautiful, and even though she’d been gone for years, the oleanders still grew in our backyard. Gorgeous, white flowers, but quite poisonous.”
He could only shake his head.
“He didn’t even know that he was being poisoned. He thought he was having a heart attack. I heard him, later that day, yelling for me. I found him on the floor, trying to crawl toward the phone. He was holding his chest, saying I had to get help.” Her gaze held his. “He didn’t get any help for my mother, did he? He killed her, just as he was going to kill me. So I closed his office door and went up to my room. I covered my ears, and I cried and I cried, and I didn’t go down the stairs again until the next morning.”
Wade couldn’t move.
“I am a killer. I poisoned him, and even when I had the chance to change my mind, to save him, I didn’t.” Victoria shook her head. “I went down the next morning, and when I found his body, I called the police then. Then. No one even tested his blood. It looked like a heart attack, so that’s how it went down. I . . . I asked them to cremate his body. That way—”
“No one would ever be able to prove what you’d done.”
“Not without a confession.” Her smile was heart-breaking. “But I just confessed to you. You know my darkest secret now. You know that I’m one of the monsters out there. He was always right when he talked about it . . . I am just like my father.”
He didn’t know what in the hell he was supposed to say to her. “You were defending yourself.”
“You know that doesn’t fly. He wasn’t coming at me with a knife when I gave him that poison—”
“But he said . . . he was going to kill you. If you hadn’t stopped him . . .”
“Then I would have vanished.” She nodded. “I absolutely believe that. But that doesn’t make what I did right. I took a life. My own father’s life, and when he was gone, I just felt free. I could live my life then, and I did—I went off to college. I got my M.D. I thought I could help people, could make a difference. But . . .” Her gaze fell. “The guilt would come back to me. Sliding in late at night. I couldn’t escape what I’d done. What I was.”
“That’s when you turned to the dead.”
She nodded. “I was spending all my time studying anyway, so I just piled on more courses. I started wondering if I could have just proved his guilt. If I’d studied my mother’s body, if the M.E. had just found more clues . . . and suddenly I found myself being called in as an expert on different cases. I’d find small details that others had overlooked.” She laughed, a hollow sound. “I was even working with the FBI. I was absolutely terrified the first time I worked with an agent. I thought . . . what if he finds out? He’s working with a killer, and he doesn’t even know it. But he didn’t find out. And I helped him. I identified the remains. I gave him a cause of death, and for a little while the guilt I felt . . . it eased.”
“That’s why you joined LOST.”
“I didn’t vanish,” she said quietly. “So I