Kiss and Tell(31)

“Good girl.” Sam kept Tenley pinned against the wall as, with his free hand, he pushed a button on his remote. There was a whirring sound, and suddenly the full-length mirror next to the fireplace slid to the right, revealing a narrow doorway. Behind it was a windowless steel box of a room. “In,” Sam ordered.

Emerson’s eyes met Tenley’s. “You escape,” Tenley squeaked. The request made Sam smile wider, and Emerson had no doubt: He’d do it. He’d kill her.

She walked into the room.

Sam grabbed Tenley’s shoulders and threw her in behind Emerson. Tenley collided with the back wall, yelping out in pain. Emerson looked around wildly, but there was no escape. Just the narrow doorway, on which Sam now stood, the iron shovel resting in his palms.

“This is my panic room,” he told them. “Which means it’s time for you to panic.” He pushed his remote again, and the door slid shut in front of him, leaving only steel walls behind.

“You okay, Ten?” Emerson turned anxiously to her friend.

Tenley pushed herself off the wall with a grimace. “Yeah.” She turned in a slow circle, examining the room. Emerson did the same. The place was truly a steel box. Even the ceiling was steel, with high hat lights embedded in it. There was no furniture, no windows. Just two large vents in the walls and a single black speaker protruding from the ceiling. “What is this place?” Tenley whispered.

Static burst out of the speaker, making Emerson falter. “I’m glad you asked.” Sam Bauer’s voice flooded through the speaker. “As I said, this is my panic room. I had it specially designed. It has only two vents in it, as you can see. They’re computerized, which means that, with a touch of a button, I can suck all the air out of the room.”

“He wouldn’t.…” Tenley whispered, but Emerson knew she was wrong. Sam Bauer the dad might not and Sam Bauer the tech genius might not, but this changeling of a man, this monster-Sam, would. Fear coursed through her, making her feel faint. She looked up at the speaker, her thoughts reeling. This was all a game to Sam. Which meant they had to keep playing.

“Why did you do it?” she blurted out. It was their best hope: get him talking. Buy time, she mouthed to Tenley. “Why did you kidnap Caitlin?”

There was a pause, then Sam’s velvety voice filled the room. “You’re mixed up. I didn’t kidnap Caitlin. My wife did. All I did was clean up her mess.” His voice dropped a notch. “That’s all I ever did.”

So it had been a woman who kidnapped Caitlin. Emerson drew in a long breath. She didn’t think Sam had closed the vents yet, but already the air seemed to be thinning.

“Why?” Tenley jumped in. “Why not just turn your wife in?”

Sam’s scoff came through the speaker. “Because it would overshadow everything I’d ever worked for. After everything I’d accomplished, my legacy would be nothing more than that of a kidnapper’s husband.”

Phone? Emerson mouthed to Tenley. Her own was lying somewhere on the house’s entryway floor. Tenley pulled her phone out of her pocket and passed it to her. Still no service. Keep talking, Emerson mouthed. She clicked open the video recorder on Tenley’s phone. They might not be able to send anyone the recording while the house was in panic mode, but at least somewhere, proof would exist. She lifted the phone toward the speaker, her finger dangling over the recording button.

Tenley gave her a shaky nod. “Why did your wife kidnap Caitlin?” she asked loudly.

“She—you know what, that’s enough questions,” Sam declared.

“Don’t you want to talk about it, though?” Emerson burst out. If Sam kept talking, they were safe. If he stopped… “How long have you kept this all buried inside?” She fought to keep her voice steady. “Don’t you want to tell someone? Every secret you’ve ever had to hoard. How you did it? How you got away with it? So much brilliance, and no one could ever know about it.” She cringed but forced herself to keep going. “Before long, we’ll both be dead. We’re the perfect people to tell, because we’ll never be able to say a word.”

There was a long pause. Tenley moved closer, burying her head in Emerson’s arm. Neither of them moved as they waited for an answer. Emerson tried to breathe, enjoy the air while there still was some, but her body wouldn’t obey.

Sam broke the silence with a sigh. The sound streamed through the speaker. “It all goes back to Meryl.” Emerson’s finger landed on the record button. The red recording light lit up. “For so long Meryl was the perfect daughter. Our beautiful little girl. Then she met him.” His voice dipped on the last word. “The married man. The one who ruined her forever.”

Emerson flinched. He was talking about Matt. “When I found out about her affair, I could never look at her the same again. My baby girl was gone.” Emerson closed her eyes, her own parents’ words echoing in his. Her fingers tightened around the phone. If she died in here, the last conversation she had with her parents would be a fight.

“What does Meryl have to do with Caitlin?” she pressed, desperate to keep him talking.

“I’m getting to it,” Sam snapped. His voice faded out, and then grew louder. He was pacing. “Meryl died in that boating accident soon after I learned of her affair,” Sam continued. “It seemed like fate. She’d brought such shame on our family, and she paid the ultimate price for it.”

The words pricked at Emerson’s heart. She held the phone steady. She refused to miss any of this.

“If only my wife had seen it that way, too. Then we’d still be together today. But Meryl’s death broke her. She was devastated, barely able to get out of bed. I kept thinking time would heal her, but with each year she got worse. She seemed to forget she had a husband and son. She was wasting away, and I knew I had to do something to save her. When Nicole Mayor happened to die four years later, on the anniversary of Meryl’s death, my path became illuminated. It was the perfect coincidence. I could convince my wife that Meryl had died as part of something bigger than herself; I could memorialize Meryl, make sure her death was never forgotten.”

Tenley snapped her head up, her eyes wide as they met Emerson’s. “So I created the Lost Girl myth,” Sam went on. “I invented the curse. I started flashing two lights up on the cliffs and planted the seed that they were ghost lights. It was nothing short of genius. But there was a kink in my plan. I was too right; Meryl became too immortalized. Her memory, her story, her picture, they were everywhere. And instead of making my wife feel better, it just worsened her condition. The constant reminder of her daughter’s death was too much for her.”

Emerson’s own shock was reflected back at her on Tenley’s face. They’d been right. All these years, all these deaths… it was all connected. “What about Kyla?” she asked. “Was she part of it, too?”

Sam continued talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “Cassandra couldn’t take it,” he said. “Eventually she just broke. She kept saying she wanted a new daughter: a perfect, pure daughter. I said we could adopt, but she insisted that wasn’t fast enough. Then one day, I came home to find Caitlin Thomas in our basement, half-drugged out of her mind. ‘She can be our fresh start,’ Cassandra kept saying.”

“Caitlin replaced Meryl,” Emerson whispered. It was what Caitlin’s note had said in the shed, her reason for being dragged into the game: Replaced her.

“My wife was unstable,” Sam went on. “She didn’t know what she was doing. Even after I returned Caitlin to her home, I knew I couldn’t rely on Cassandra to keep it a secret.” For the first time, Emerson heard a note of remorse in Sam’s voice. “It wasn’t just my life I was worried about. If anyone found out what Cassandra did, she’d go to jail. And Cassandra wasn’t suited for that. It would break her even further. So I had no choice. Once again, I was forced to fix my family’s mistakes.”

“So you killed your wife, and pinned the kidnapping on Jack Hudson.” The statement came from Tenley. Emerson held the recorder up, waiting for Sam to confirm it.

“It was easier than I thought it would be,” Sam said. “I told them Cassandra drowned herself in the same spot Meryl died. The press ate it up. Everyone believed a grieving mom could be driven to end her own life. The ocean was deep enough there that no one ever questioned why her body wasn’t found. No one ever guessed that she was in my basement all along.”

“The body,” Tenley gasped. “It’s Cassandra.”

“Of course,” Sam replied smoothly. “It was the perfect solution.”

A strangled cry escaped Emerson. Black spots swam in her vision, and she grabbed Tenley’s hand to steady herself. Tenley’s skin was cold and clammy, but her grip was firm: a reminder she wasn’t alone. “Why Jack Hudson?” Emerson choked out. “Why frame him?”

Emerson could hear Sam sighing through the speakers. “Jack had dated Cassandra before she met me. He was always jealous we ended up together, and when he somehow found out about Meryl’s affair, he tried to use it to blackmail me. He knew what it would do to our family’s reputation. So, instead, I set him up to take the fall for my wife. Full circle, I like to think.”