A Rush to Violence (21 page)

“The blood has congealed, Emma. Some of it is starting to dry. I’ll never be able to get it clean. You can give me all the hot soapy water you’ve got, but it’s not going to come clean.”

“Yes, it will.”

“No, it won’t. We dragged his body to the end of the house. You can see the trail of blood from here. We put him in the kitchen pantry. Do you understand how far away that is? Do you have any idea what kind of a job this is? This house is massive. And look at the walls. The chair, the desk and the curtains. How do you expect me to get
them
clean? They’re covered with him. I can’t do it by myself.”

“But you are going to do it by yourself.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is that all of you have my grandfather’s blood on your hands. Now you’re going to know what it takes to get them clean.”

“I did nothing to my father.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I never would have killed him. I loved him. How dare you say such a thing.”

“How dare you think you can lie to me when you haven’t even spilled one tear for your dead brother. Explain that.”

“I’m in shock.”

“Oh, please. Do you even watch the news? Do you know what shock and grief look like? And by the way, you say you loved your father, but your father didn’t love you. He said so in the letter he attached to his will. I was there when it was read. We all heard it. I can’t imagine how much that pissed you off.” She stopped herself. “Actually, that’s not true. Since you helped to murder him, I know exactly how much that pissed you off.”

“We had nothing to do with his death. There was no evidence of foul play. He tripped over his dog. I don’t know where this is coming from.”

Her eyes were fixed on Emma’s. They never once wavered. Was she telling the truth? She remembered back to that day when they contested the will and the look Grace and Sophia shot at her. It wasn’t just a look of evil. It was an arrogant look of confidence that they were going to win their share of her grandfather’s fortune.

All of them are manipulative. They always have been.

She wasn’t sure how to respond, so she just shrugged.

“I’m telling you that none of this is going to come clean.”

“Grace, that’s not even the point. I want to see you squirm. Then we’re going to make a few phone calls and make other people squirm. Take the bucket and do as I asked.”

She got up from where she was sitting and pointed the gun at her aunt. “Come on. Let’s go. You’ll fill the bucket, I’ll watch to make sure you don’t try something stupid and then we’ll come back here and you’ll go through the motions of what cleaning looks like to you. But before we do that, I need something I’m sure my uncle has tucked away somewhere in this joint.”

“What’s that?”

“A laptop,” Emma said. “And I need it now.”

* * *

They found one in his office on the third floor. It was a MacBook Pro, which was perfect because Emma had one herself back at the hotel. Once she got Grace set up with a fresh pail of hot soapy water, she sat down in a chair that faced her aunt, kept her gun in her lap so she could snatch it in case Grace was overcome by a rush of heroics and started the machine.

There were two things she wanted to know.

First, Rotterdam. She wanted to read about the orphanage her mother presumably set on fire that cost dozens of children their lives. She wanted to see if her mother was implicated in any of the stories, or if any of it was even true. She still wasn’t sure if Grace was pulling something out of her ass in an effort to throw her off and make her question her current actions.

Second, she wanted to do a search on the characteristics of lying. Was it just the eyes that gave someone away or was there some other kind of body language she was missing?

The screen flashed and Emma was faced with the computer’s desktop wallpaper. It was a photograph of her uncle Scott in his youth. He was sitting high on a white horse, his left brow was arched and he was smirking at the camera. Poised at his lips was one of his pink Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes. Then, his hair had been black, but here it was light brown and even less becoming. She thought he looked just as ugly back then as he did when she arrived here tonight. Only a younger version of ugly, which she supposed was somehow worse. Who wants to be ugly in their youth? Especially in their youth?

Others were with him—Sophia, Grace, Michael, Tyler. No sign of Laura. All were on horses and sporting proper riding attire, because that’s how her aunts and uncles rolled. Another man and woman were with them, but Emma didn’t recognize them. They were friends, she supposed, each of whom were giving off a similar air of affluence. She thought they looked like an impossible, haughty bunch of snobs.

She wondered who they were.

She looked up and saw that Grace was watching her while she dragged the mop back and forth over the floor. About fifteen feet separated them. The front door was too far away for her to reach without Emma getting to her first. She was confident of that. And she wasn’t worried about the fifteen feet between them. The ridiculous heels Grace had shoehorned her feet into might as well be stilts. If she charged at her, Emma would have time to shoot her dead.

She turned the computer screen around so it faced her aunt.

“Who are these two people?” she asked.

Grace squinted at the screen. “Which two?”

“These two,” she said, pointing at the two strangers. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’re with them.”

“They could be anyone. That photo must be fifteen years old. If not older.”

“But they must be someone you know. That’s you there. Uncle Scott used it as his desktop wallpaper not just for any old reason, but because it meant something to him. Who are they?”

“Emma, I can barely even see them from here.”

She gripped the gun. “Then come over and look.”

Her aunt put the mop in the pail and click, click, clicked closer. She looked down at the gun, then at the screen. “I think they were Scott’s friends. We were on holiday in England.” She scratched her nose with the back of her hand and tucked her hair behind her ears. “I don’t remember their names.”

“Try to remember.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I think you do.”

“Emma, they were Scott’s friends, not mine. And why is it even important who they are? Do you want me to make up some names? Because I can do that if it’ll shut—if it’ll satisfy you. The truth is that I can’t remember. They were there. We went riding. We had dinner. The end. It was years ago, for God’s sake. Why are you grilling me like this?”

Because I’ll catch you in a lie at some point. Or maybe this is how you lie. Either way, I’ll figure it out.

But she didn’t have long to do so.

She dismissed her aunt with a wave of the gun. “I was just curious, Grace. Go on, now. Back to the blood.”

* * *

While her aunt mopped, Emma Googled “Rotterdam orphanage fire” and was presented with pages of information of an event that took place twenty years ago.

There were photos of the orphanage’s brick building before the fire, during the fire and the rubble left in its wake after the fire. There was video of the orphanage engulfed in flames and there was video of it after the flames succeeded in taking the four-story building down. She didn’t have time to read all of the articles, so she narrowed her search by adding “New York Times” in the search field.

A story from the
Times
appeared at the top of the screen. She clicked on it and read.

Forty-three children died in the fire, along with a man the locals knew as Jacobus de Kooning, who had owned the orphanage for twenty-four years and who was revered in the community because of his commitment to the children he helped and because of his advocacy efforts on their behalf.

Before the event, he was known as a man who had sacrificed much of his life to make certain his charges had food, shelter, home-schooled educations, love and perhaps a future with a new family, though placement at the orphanage was historically low. Many considered the children too emotionally damaged to adopt. They didn’t present well. It was a harsh reality to face, but many couples didn’t want to leave the orphanage with the burden of their new child’s emotional baggage. The fact that de Kooning stood by them knowing this only galvanized his position in the community. Some considered him a saint.

But as Emma read deeper into the story, details grew darker as the weight of de Kooning’s lies and deceptions were revealed.

The man’s real name was Willem Lassooy. He was a fifty-six-year-old predator who employed his young charges in the black market sex trade. His orphanage was a front for that sideline, which had made him a rich man. He was involved in the production of underground sex tapes, prostitution, private parties. Whatever it took to increase his wealth. No one knew who started the fire, but after an investigation, the authorities declared it was an act of arson.

Did her mother have anything to do with this? Why would Grace be so quick to point it out if she hadn’t? She obviously believed it was true. Otherwise, given the pressure she was under now, there was no way she could have just randomly selected some orphanage in Rotterdam that was leveled by fire decades in the past and attribute her mother to it.

Emma sank into thought. Twenty years ago her mother was doing just this sort of work. So, the timing was right and Lassooy fit the profile of the kind of man her mother’s group would have targeted, but nothing here hinted that she was involved. She scanned the story again and saw no sign of her mother’s name. No sign of a man named “Sam.” Not even an anonymous group that had come forward to take ownership of the act, which the
Times
considered unusual given the nature of Lassooy’s crimes.

Rotterdam police speculated that perhaps someone who once lived at the orphanage and experienced its horrors exacted their revenge on Lassooy. A psychologist was quoted as saying that perhaps that person, now an adult, was still living through their own private hell given how Lassooy’s perversions had affected them. Maybe they were so psychologically damaged, they decided to burn down the building thinking that a better end for all inside was the ultimate end. Death.

The rationale made sense. Death for Lassooy because the perpetrator wanted him dead for the shame and hell he put that person through. Death to the children because whoever set the fire knew first-hand the pain they were enduring and the hell that would haunt them for the rest of their lives if it didn’t end. The psychologist questioned by the
Times
thought the person may have considered death for those children an act of mercy and not one of murder. “He or she would have correlated their deaths with freedom and release,” the psychologist said. “They would have viewed the act as a kind of mercy, a way to protect them from the nightmare they were living because of Lassooy.”

But would her mother see it as an act of mercy? Would her mother knowingly kill forty-three children just to get to the man who tortured them? Killing Lassooy made sense given the way her mother once viewed the world. But the children? Emma knew her mother loved children. It wasn’t just reflected in the way Emma was raised, but also in how her mother treated even a stranger’s child—with warmth. A genuine sense of interest and kindness.

In an effort to raise her daughter properly, her mother left her former life behind. She gave it up for her unborn child, which spoke volumes for how she felt about children. As such, Emma couldn’t imagine her mother doing such a thing. At least knowingly, and how could she not know that Lassooy was in that building with those orphans? Of course, she would have known. If she had wanted Lassooy dead, she would have found another way that didn’t involve killing children.

The more Emma thought of it, the more she didn’t buy Grace’s claims. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to question her mother about it. Grace brought up the event quickly, instinctively. There was a reason for that. If her mother was involved, had something gone wrong?

What am I missing?

She wasn’t sure. Right now, she needed to focus on something that would inform the rest of the evening. She returned to Google and typed a question that had the potential to end several lives: “How can I tell if someone is lying to me?”

She read through some of the results.

It turns out the eyes were indeed a revealing indicator of whether someone was lying to you, but there were other factors, most of which were so specific, Emma had no idea until now that many had been presented to her this evening by her aunt and uncle.

She closed the laptop and looked over at Grace, who was peering at her while she smeared her brother’s blood around the floor. She’d been lying to her from the start. Physically, she’d given herself away without even knowing it. The way she touched her nose when she made a point about not knowing who the two people were in the photo was a giveaway that she was lying. The stiff way she gesticulated when she said she had nothing to do with her father’s death was another. The unwavering way her eyes
didn’t
move when she swore she had nothing to do with his death was another nail in her coffin.

Emma tried to control her rage and her grief, but it was difficult. She put the laptop on the table next to her and thought of everything these people had taken away from her, how she’d never see her grandfather again because of them. She was so angry and so sad, it hurt.

When she stood, she raised the gun at Grace. Her hand was trembling, not out of fear, but out of what she knew was coming.

“Put down the mop.”

“Lower the gun and I will.”

“I said, put it down.”

“I’m tired of your orders, Emma.”

“
Put down the mop!
”

“I’m not doing this anymore. I won’t let you—”

The laser flashed across the room and struck Grace in the left eye. Whether it was from shock, pain or a mix of both, she reeled away from it, stumbled backward, slipped on the soapy, bloody floor and went down hard on her side. Her head struck the floor with a THWACK and she just laid there, still.