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Chapter 11

'"I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil."

"Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?"'

Jane Austen

BPOV

Last time in Gothic, Edward Cullen was conveying Ms. Swan to the family manse when the subject of one James Hunter was raised in conversation.

"You got James arrested?" I asked.

"Well, you know we went to college together," Edward started to explain, his tone suddenly harsh.

"No I didn't know."

"We did. Except I guess that James couldn't really afford the tuition." Edward hit the steering wheel. His sudden display of anger was taking me by surprise. "Which doesn't make sense because he had a scholarship and if that had fallen through then he could have just taken out loans. But junior year of college, I realize that one of my best friends is dealing drugs."

I didn't know what to say.

"And not just marijuana, either," Edward continued. "Hardcore shit. And then it turns out that he's keeping some of that stuff in our apartment. Our apartment."

I felt a surge of speed as Edward pressed on the gas.

"He was always having these wild parties and his girlfriend, Maria, was there all of the time. Bitch had fucking followed us from Forks. I told him he needed to get his shit together. We were in school, for Christ's sake. If he hadn't been partying all of the time, he wouldn't have lost his scholarship in the first place. So anyway, when the campus cops bust him, do you know what he does?"

I had never seen Edward this agitated.

"He tries to pin that shit on me and he gets away with it. Fortunately, they just give me a slap on the wrist because they haven't got any real evidence. So I ask James what the fuck he thinks he's doing, and he tells me that I got off once so why not again. Can you believe that?"

Yes. I believed it. James was a monster to me in high school.

Edward snorted. "He is using our apartment to deal drugs and thinks that I'm going to take the fall for him. You're damn right I turned him in. His bitch girlfriend even attacked me. I could have pressed charges but I didn't. And yet I'm the asshole. James got out of jail after a while, but went right back in less than a month later for the same thing. They must have had other stuff on him, though, because he still hasn't gotten out."

We were doing almost twenty over the speed limit.

"Please slow down," I begged, gripping my seatbelt.

"What?"

"Slow down."

"Oh." Edward eased up off the gas. "Sorry."

"Do you still talk to James?" I asked uncertainly, wary of upsetting him further.

"That would be a No."

"He never apologized?"

"According to him, he did nothing wrong. I'm the one who let him down."

"What a dick," I commiserated, one eye on the speedometer. It seemed strange to me that I was comforting Edward for the treatment that he'd received at the hands of James, when I was the one who used to be on the receiving end of their bullshit. I didn't understand quite what that meant, if anything at all. So I decided to ignore the implications and proceed. Onto the breech and all that.

"Yep."

Edward seemed to have gained control of his temper, so I hazarded a question. "James did have a grudge against you then. If you knew that, why didn't you suspect him for Tanya's murder?"

"He has a grudge now. We were best friends when Tanya died."

"And you think this two-faced shit just showed up over night?" I was surprised at Edward's gullibility.

"It took him three years. And he was a drug dealer by then. He changed."

"People don't really change that much."

"Yes they do. I've changed."

I chose not to comment on that.

"And Alice and Jasper have changed," he added.

My head whipped in his direction. "Alice hasn't changed," I told him with a note of warning in my voice.

He glanced at me, a cautious expression on his face. "Well Jasper has."

I hmmphed.

"You don't think he's changed?" Edward asked.

"He seems the same to me."

"You don't like him."

"Should I?"

"There's no gun to your head."

"He's dating Alice, not me."

"He has some positive qualities."

"If you say so."

"He's got that southern gentleman thing going for him. I thought all women went crazy for that."

"Do I look like a sheep? Running with the herd?" Southern gentleman my ass. But of course I had no intention of admitting the real problem with Jasper, so as per usual, I deflected. "Actually, do you know who looks like a sheep? Jasper. His hair is poofy."

Edward laughed. "What is it with you and Texan hair? You said the same thing about Lauren."

"Did I?" I did.

"I think you're jealous."

"Jealous?"

"Because you live somewhere rainy. You can't get big hair."

"I like flat hair."

Edward laughed some more. "You're prejudiced against southerners."

"I'm equally prejudiced against northerners. I hate everyone equally."

"You live in the north and you don't hate flat-haired people."

"I hate flat-haired people who don't wash their hair. And of course I live in the north. Do you know how sunny it is in the south? How warm? There're places where it hardly ever rains and there's just the big open country with no trees to hide you."

"Hide you?"

"You know, from people and things. I don't like to be seen by just anyone."

Edward just shook his head, wisely deciding to drop the subject.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Edward offered me a "snack" when we got to his house, like we were there to work on an afterschool group project. I had to confess that I wasn't hungry, and he kindly refrained from pointing out the evidence of my earlier deception.

He gave me a tour. I kept my hands clasped together and was careful to stand at least two feet away from the walls.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I don't want a guard to come out and yell at me for touching the art work."

He rolled his eyes and showed me the library, the sight of which, I had to confess to myself, was more than a little unexpected. Fuck rich people.

"You like it," he observed.

"I love it," I admitted, my envy overshadowed for the moment by my appreciation for the sheer pageantry of it. I waved my fingers in front of the gleaming green and red bindings, my skin tingling with the desire to touch. A ladder on runners provided access to the volumes at the top. I imagined holding on to the rails of the ladder and flying around the stacks. What dizzying heights.

Edward chuckled. "I can see that."

"You know, they say that a woman gets ravished but that she is also ravishing, like it's her fault," I said wistfully.

"What?"

"There are just so many. A person could hardly be blamed. She'd just say that she couldn't help herself. She had to ravish them because they were so ravishing."

"I'm pretty sure that my parents will let you borrow any book that you want to read."

Foolish boy. "I don't want to read them, I want to marry them." I spun around, taking it all in. Whoever married Edward would have a right to this library. It wasn't fair.

"I'd ask if you want me to leave you alone, but you're actually kind of scaring me right now."

"They're all medical books, right? Or post-1950 Americana. Tell me that they're all boring and not in the least bit desirable. All about flower arranging or toy train design."

"I think it's a little bit of everything, actually. Do you want to take a closer look?"

I forced myself to exercise some restraint. "No. It would be too much. I should go." I started towards the door, my head turned over my shoulder to keep the books in view for as long as possible. Edward followed me. I shut the door behind him.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm fine." I was okay now that the pretty pretty pretty books were locked away where I couldn't see them. I would just pretend that it was a dream. A nice little dream where I lived in a library and sat in a window seat reading books all day.

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Esme and Carlisle Cullen were two of the nicest people I had ever met. Esme was so courteous that, were it not for the fiery locks that graced the scalps of mother and son alike, I would never have believed her capable of producing the creature who'd once made my life so miserable. And while Edward didn't have his father's blond hair, he certainly had his jaw, so one couldn't even take refuge in speculating the interference of some demonic spirit a la Rosemary's Baby.

I considered the possibility that the Cullens' exquisite deportment might be a sham, and that every sabbat they indeed danced naked in the graveyard after sacrificing virgins to the great god Pan, but I could see no evidence of it myself, unless such perfection of form and manner was in and of itself suspect. That was probably explanation enough: The gratuitous accumulation of beauty and accomplishments mounting until the point of perversion. Thus, Edward.

"You're so sweet," I said to Esme.

"Nonsense," she replied. "I'm just happy to see that Edward's making time for friends now. He is always so busy working. Never comes home any more. I keep telling him that he needs to find a wife and settle down." She cocked an eyebrow at me.

Cue the awkward.

"What about you Bella," Esme continued, "seeing anyone?"

"Mom, enough already," Edward complained.

"No, not really," I answered lightly, because I had long since learned that carefree ambiguity was much better than a heartfelt no, not going to happen, not ever. For the latter always sparked too many questions, like Why not? and Don't you know that the right guy is out there waiting for you? and my personal favorite Don't you want to have children? Because for some reason, no one thinks it's rude to remind a woman of all of the ways in which society considers her a failure.

"Have you seen the library?" Carlisle generously changed the subject.

"Yes," I smiled, sitting up straighter.

Edward laughed. "Be careful. I think she wants to move in."

Could I move in? No. It would be so decadent. I wasn't a hedonist.

"You're the only people I know who own more books than me," I complimented them.

"We try," Esme smirked. "But some of those were passed down."

I sighed. I might not want to live in the eighteenth century, but I would take its books any day.

Dinner was delicious. I had told Edward not to bother his mother with preparing something vegetarian. I would just eat sides. He'd ignored me, annoying me again with a bullshit show of concern for my wellbeing, and Esme served pumpkin gnocci and squash soup, which was basically food porn to me. It was also surprisingly easy to chitchat with her about recipes, and while I didn't know anything about the interior design that seemed to occupy most of her time, a mutual love of seventeenth and eighteenth century art provided enough fodder to keep us occupied while Edward and his father entertained themselves with hospital gossip and the like.

I had expected dinner with Edward's parents to be such an onerous ordeal. It only made sense that guy who'd made high school a living hell would have assholes for parents. Maybe they were just so oblivious that they never realized what kind of man their son was. They didn't even bat an eye when Edward introduced me, which was odd considering that I was the reason that their son wasn't prosecuted for murder. It occurred to me that Edward might have warned them to play nice, but I still thought it was a little strange. What did they think was going on? That we'd accidentally met in Seattle and were now buddy-buddy? Didn't they realize how crazy that sounded? A social reject and the Homecoming King didn't just become best friends over night.

I was probably overthinking this. No doubt they had rules, too, and acknowledging the peculiarity of the situation would give it a credence that they didn't want it to have.

Regardless, they'd been so nice, and the conversation so easy, that I felt like a tool for raising the issue of the murder. I'd no choice though. I wasn't here as Edward's friend. I was here to ask them questions about Tanya.

And that's when I realized that the problem wasn't the disparity between my station and theirs, it was their unwillingness to acknowledge the decade-old incident that had linked their son to me.

"I just don't see why you can't let this go," Esme complained to Edward when I ventured to ask them if they had any lingering suspicions about who might have done it.

"It's not him, it's me," I lied, as I knew Edward hoped I would. "People still look at me with suspicion in their eyes. And I can't help feeling uncomfortable whenever I come back to Forks or go to Port Angeles, wondering if the killer's still there, watching me."

"I'm sorry, but I don't see what we can do to help," Carlisle said.

I shared a glance with Edward. "We were wondering if maybe someone had a grudge against you." I felt like a jerk. "Or against Edward. I mean, whoever did this clearly hated him. He was set up. But they had to know him too. How else could they have arranged everything?"

Carlisle shook his head. "They got the right car and the right hair color. How well did they have to know Edward for that?"

"They had to know him well enough to be really angry at him."

"I thought all of this was over," Esme sighed. "Now you've just dragged Isabella into this all over again."

"I promise, if I don't get anywhere this time, it's over. I promise," Edward replied.

"Do you really mean it?" Carlisle demanded.

"I do." Edward nodded.

Esme and Carlisle gazed at him for a moment. Seemingly convinced, they resigned themselves to the situation.

"So what do you want from us?" Esme asked.

"Can you think of anyone who had a grudge against your family?" I inquired.

"Who would want to hurt us like that?" Carlisle demanded.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe someone in your past. Before Edward was even born."

"That's crazy. Who would wait that long to get revenge? And revenge? This isn't Dallas."

I shrugged. It sounded ridiculous to me too. "If you can't think of anyone then at least we'll know that we covered all of our bases. Was there ever anyone in your life who seemed violent or a little off? They say serial killers always seem so nice."

Of course, by that standard, Sue Clearwater was putting arsenic in her cookies.

I looked at Carlisle. "You had to have had a few patients that were a trifle unique."

"If I did, I certainly couldn't say anything to you about it."

I supposed that was true.

Esme shook her head. "I'm sorry. I want to help. But there's really nothing to tell."

I wasn't willing to give up so easily. "Maybe an old boyfriend?" I guessed, remembering Edward's theory about the waitress' brother. "Someone who was angry that you married Carlisle?" I could see it now—a declaration of undying passion and a vow of revenge flung just as the newly married pair fled the church.

"You're not serious."

"Someone with a temper? I mean, maybe he never hit you, but you thought he could."

Esme glanced at Carlisle, who had crossed his arms. Clucking her tongue, she looked back at Edward. "Do you promise that this is the last time we are going to hear about this?"

"I promise."

She turned towards me. "My first fiancé—"

"You don't have to do this," Carlisle tried to stop her.

"It's worth it if he promises to stop this," Esme explained, her voice pleading. She started again, "My first fiancé's name was Charles. He was violent sometimes. I was stupid and young. I didn't realize just what kind of a man he was until my sister—I never told you about her Edward, I didn't like to talk about it. But you look so much like her that it still hurts sometimes to look at you. Elizabeth confessed to me that she'd had an affair with Charles. I was so brokenhearted. I couldn't believe that the two of them could betray me like that." Esme closed her eyes and shuddered. "In any case, I—got away. I moved to Seattle and didn't hear from my sister after that. I'd cut ties with Charles completely of course, but she was still family. The only family I had left at that point. Our parents had died in a car accident when I was just eighteen and Elizabeth was nineteen. About a year after I left, the police contacted me. They'd found my address on a letter in Elizabeth's purse. She had died giving birth to a daughter. I asked about the baby but she was already gone. Charles had taken her and vanished. I paid for Elizabeth's funeral but I couldn't afford to do anything more about it then. When I married Carlisle, we hired a private investigator to look for the girl. I would have fought Charles for her. I had hospital records to prove to the court what kind of man he was. I would have taken Elizabeth's daughter in and raised her as my own. But the detective didn't have any success. Charles was a horrible man. He hasn't any right to bear a grudge against me. I didn't do anything to him except leave. Unfortunately, that would be enough for a man like him."

Carlisle had moved next to Esme and was holding her hand.

"I have a dead aunt I never knew about? And a cousin? Mom, why didn't you tell me about this before?" Edward asked.

"There was nothing to tell. All that was in the past. It's not part of my life now. And it hurt too much to remember."

Carlisle interjected. "And anyhow, Charles didn't kill Tanya."

"How do you know?" Edward demanded.

"Because he wouldn't have stopped there. He would have kept on going until our lives were completely destroyed."

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Edward had agreed that we would take turns driving for the trip back to Seattle, but refused to hand over the keys when it was my turn. Dinner with his parents had agitated him more than I'd realized at first. I wasn't sure if it was the stress of hearing his mother's confession or just being back in Forks or the culmination of everything.

"Driving helps calm my nerves," he said.

"Slow down then," I ordered.

He slowed down.

I was wary to say anything that might upset Edward, but I didn't like the silence. "So what do you think?"

"I think that I'm going to get my detective to find that piece of shit who fucked with my mother."

I thought about that. It seemed to me that Carlisle was right. Charles Masen wouldn't have stopped with just killing Tanya.

Yet I didn't think that Edward would be open to that line of reasoning right at present.

"Maybe it was a serial killer," I speculated. "Don't they say that stuff like this takes practice? If this was really someone's first murder, wouldn't it have been messier?"

"I've seen the autopsy results. An amateur could very easily have done it."

"Still, exsanguination isn't exactly the normal way you'd expect someone to kill a person. That kind of murder suggests a real pathology," I said, talking out of my ass. When had I gotten a psych degree?

But it seemed to make sense. Crazy as I was, not even I would want to bleed someone to death. I'd just kill them. Finish it quick.

The thought filled me with revulsion. I never wanted to hate someone that much.

I explained myself. "You would think that they would feel a compulsion to repeat themselves."

"They could be killing animals. They could have started out with animals, too, and gone back to animals after Tanya. As long as they're getting rid of the bodies, no one would know."

Grisly as that sounded, I supposed it was true. The possibilities really were endless.

I said, "Maybe they went to Canada or the Philippines," naming countries at random, "and they're killing people there but no one's connected it back to Port Angeles yet."

"Well if we track down any suspects who went out of the country, we can contact the authorities there."

"Contact the authorities there?"

"Yeah." Edward glanced at me, his face dim in the dashboard lights. "What?"

"It just sounds so official. So serious."

"It is serious."

I didn't respond. I wondered if Edward was telling his mother the truth when he promised to give the case up if we didn't make any progress.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Three hours later, I was pulling out of Edward's parking lot in my truck, driving home.

The last two days had been surreal, to say the least: I slept in Edward Cullen's bed, babbled like a fucking idiot to him about my fucked up childhood and my mother's fucked up paranormal delusions, visited a cabin in the woods that looked like it was the setting for several of my nightmares, interrogated a no-nonsense restaurant manager, learned that my father might have once suspected me of colluding with a murderer, went through my father's creepy dead files, misrepresented myself to Sue in a way that was both shameful and unfair, perhaps bonded with Leah, was reminded of my social place in the class of '04 hierarchy by an ex-classmate, was sexually harassed by a knife salesman/ex-classmate, fell in lust with someone else's library, and witnessed a personal and no doubt embarrassing confession made by a woman whose son had once made my life a living hell.

I was feeling sorry for Edward, and I had no idea what to do with that.

We had agreed as to the next steps. Or rather, Edward had informed me as to what we were expected to do now. He was going to contact his detective with all of the new lines of investigation that he thought we'd devised. I was supposed to ruminate on the case. We were going to touch base in several days.

I didn't hold out much hope for my so-called rumination. To be honest, I hadn't much inclination to ruminate at all. For some reason, the further I drove away from Edward, the more agitated I became.

It was probably just a delayed reaction to stress. I wasn't used to so much excitement. I liked my solitude and was usually careful to arrange long breaks between any taxing social engagements.

And feeling guilty for feeling sorry for someone I hated was certainly taxing.

As long as Edward was around, though, I could shift the focus onto him. Not have to think about how I felt. This was his problem, his project. It had nothing to do with me.

Alone, driving home, I had only myself to worry about. I wanted to go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and forget all about cabins in the woods and old grudges and the awful things that people could do to one another.

In the past, whenever faced with adversity, I had always had my books to fall back on. No matter how bad things got, they had been there for me. Shut everyone else out and hole up on my own, for as long as it took for me to convince myself to come out of hiding. I had been telling Edward the truth when I'd said that horror was an escape—the dread and thrill of terror like the pain and release a person addicted to cutting might feel. There was no real danger. Nothing so appalling that it might follow me back into the waking world from the pages of a book.

I wanted to believe that my usual tactics would work—going home and pulling out my Gilchrist or Stoker, and spending all of Sunday buried in research—except that I was afraid that when I got home and tried to go to sleep, I'd close my eyes and see blood pooling on the floor of a cabin and morgue photos and Edward's grinning face from ten years ago morphing into the more somber countenance he seemed to bear these days and then morphing back again, my discomfort with having to confront so many memories being bound up with a bundle of repressed anxiety and hostility, fueled also by a sense of disgust that was probably some primal distaste for death. So irrational. So inescapable.

I needed to get a grip. The last two days hadn't been non-stop nightmares and demons. I was letting my imagination get the better of me. It wasn't as if we were any closer to finding out who killed Tanya, so there certainly wasn't a monster lurking in the shadows, waiting to spring for fear that I might disclose his identity.

I needed something to settle my nerves. Not my standard reading, that wouldn't do. Not Gilchrist nor Stoker nor any of the others.

Pausing at a stop sign, I was struck suddenly by the memory of Collin's Betteredge taking out his copy of Robinson Crusoe whenever he felt troubled. The Moonstone, I thought, pulling onto my street. Mr. Betteredge and his calm certainty that there was no problem that couldn't be solved with his trusty Crusoe. I would go to bed with Wilkie Collins that night.

This plan was so comforting that I was smiling as I climbed out of my truck and walked up to my door.

It wasn't until I'd reached the step that I saw the dead animal lying in front of the threshold.

AN:

Rec: Always a Bridesmaid by Missus T How long can you lust after your best friend's brother before you give up hope? How do you reconcile an attraction for someone you've thought of as a little sister? How long can two people dance around their feelings before they dance together? E/B AH Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance - Chapters: 19 - Words: 85,675 - Reviews: 671 - Favs: 900 - Follows: 547 - Updated: Nov 23, 2011 - Published: Jul 20, 2011 - Bella, Edward - Complete