Thanks for reading! Special thanks for the advice on revising the tone of this chapter to BelleBiter, LRK860, and CindyWindy1.
Meyer owns all.
Sorry, we're back to BPOV.
Chapter 21
'That is the picture of a wretched ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter-chest. The recital of them would be too horrible; it is enough to say, that in yon fatal apartment incest and unnatural murder were committed.' – Sir Walter Scott
BPOV
Last time in Gothic (well, the last time we were inside Bella's head), our heroine had just come across certain pictures inside our hero's desk.
Up was down and down was up. It was a topsy-turvy world and I was the spinning top.
There was no other way to explain the madness that had ensued after I opened that last drawer in Edward's desk.
He had the pictures from the gallery!
And then Edward…and then Edward himself was suddenly standing in the study before me, spewing nonsense and expecting me to believe it.
And then…
And then he had kissed me.
What the fuck was that?
Not to mention everything he'd said after that.
It was ludicrous. I had spent the several few days going over all of the reasons why the very thing which Edward was now suggesting was utterly inconceivable. If nothing else, the disaster at the gallery had proven that.
…except that he'd purchased the very pictures that lay at the heart of that disaster.
Was it possible that I'd misunderstood Edward's response in the gallery? Was his disgust born solely from the fact that the images were public?
The entire thing had the air of a teenaged farce. The prom king feigns attraction for the town freak in a ploy to humiliate her. What a juvenile plot.
It was mind-boggling. It was incongruous. There could never be anything between us.
So why did Edward look as if I'd ripped out his heart when I said as much?
Thank God Jasper and Alice had decided to make an appearance. I needed to get away from Edward before things escalated.
Escalated? Dear God, how much further could they have gone?
I sat in the backseat of Jasper's Mustang, remembering how Edward's lips had felt against my own.
It was confusing, yes. Exhilarating, yes. My skin hummed.
Hummed.
I didn't feel sick with revulsion, as I would have expected.
I felt alive.
I wasn't filled with the old desire to claw the skin from my body.
I felt giddy.
Not dead. Not numb—there was none of the chill lifelessness that had always been a counterpart to those feelings of revulsion in the past.
It was frightening, yes. But so what? Would I be subject to fear? Onto the breach and all that.
Except that Edward had all but admitted that he was acting out of guilt. He felt bad about what had happened during high school and he wanted to fix what he'd done—save me—because he could see that I was broken and believed that he had a hand in breaking me. It was pity that moved him. Pity and maybe the hope that, by redeeming me, he could redeem himself. Good works ensuring the salvation of a soul tainted by the suspicion of murder.
I couldn't let him use me like that. It would hurt too much when he decided that he was done paying his penance and tossed me aside. Besides, I couldn't even bring myself to picture the interim period of faux ardor. I might have felt things that I'd never felt before when Edward kissed me. But that didn't mean that I was capable of functioning in a relationship.
And the thought of that brought me up short. What was I doing even thinking about this? Did this mean that I wanted a relationship?
Alice interrupted my thoughts to bid me farewell. "I could come to the station with you, if you need me to," she said, looking at me hopefully over the back of the passenger's seat.
"I'll be fine," I told her, and I meant it. I couldn't deal with her right now on top of Edward. I couldn't afford to rely on either one of them. Not when I knew that they'd only fail me in the end.
I averted my eyes as Alice and Jasper shared a brief kiss, and then she was out the door and darting through the entrance of her boutique.
"Do you want to move up to the front?" Jasper asked awkwardly, gazing at me in the rearview mirror.
I wanted to stay where I was. I wanted to be left alone. Not talk to anyone.
But I knew that wouldn't work. So I moved up to the front and sat in awkward silence.
"Edward didn't look good this morning," Jasper said after a minute.
This was an excellent topic: The Idiosyncrasies of One Edward Cullen. Perhaps Jasper wasn't a complete idiot. I would pretend that Edward's demeanor had everything to do with his stress over a decade-old murder and nothing at all to do with me and a certain set of photos.
Surely Edward hadn't said anything to Jasper about me!
"He blames himself," I replied cautiously, though I was fairly certain that I felt far more responsible for Bree's death than Edward did. But Jasper's response took me by surprise.
"I almost want to be mad at you but that's not fair," Jasper said with a tone of resignation.
My eyes shot to his face in surprise but his gaze was on the road.
He glanced at me. "I don't mean it like that. I know Edward's the one who got you involved. I just want him to be done with this whole mess and get on with his life."
"It's not as if his life is exactly on hold," I replied after reflecting for a minute. After all, that was true, wasn't it? Had Edward really changed? Aside from in every way that is? I shook my head. He had changed. I couldn't deny that, as much as I wanted to, but I kept on trying to convince myself nonetheless. "Edward went to Dartmouth. He has a successful career."
Jasper snorted. "Before all of this happened with Tanya, Edward wanted to be a plastic surgeon. Big bucks and vacations in Aspen. A big fuck you to his parents because he couldn't go to Julliard."
"So you want him to be a plastic surgeon?" I asked, confused because if Edward's best friend thought that he had changed than he must have. And if Jasper really just wanted his wingman back, that didn't bode well for Alice.
"Do you realize how often he talks about Tanya? He doesn't have time for a game of basketball with his friends or dinner with his family, but he has time to talk to PIs about cases that he thinks the police have fucked up. Shit that's not even remotely related to Tanya's murder, but Edward's so desperate to make some headway with Tanya's killer that he makes up conspiracy theory crap that only Dan Brown would try to peddle."
I knew that Edward and Marcus were looking into other cases, but was it really as bad as Jasper was implying?
Jasper wasn't through. "When Edward does make time, because it's Thanksgiving or someone is getting married and he can't blow it off, all he wants to talk about is new forensic techniques and whether or not he can get the police to look into a new lead that he thinks he's found. I've barely seen the guy since we left for college, which I understand, we were in different states, but every time I did see him, it was like he was just getting worse and worse. I wanted to blame that asshole James, but even with him out of the picture, the situation deteriorated. I thought that with me moving to Seattle, with the two of us being in the same city, it would pull Edward out of this rut. But that happy hour that you organized was the first time that I was able to get Edward out to a bar. He only went because I told him that you were going to be there. I know for a fact that he's spent more time with you in the last two months than he has with me in the last two years."
I wasn't sure how to take all of this. Was Jasper jealous? Did he blame me for enabling Edward's obsession? "You want him to be more like his old self?" I asked. "The way he was in high school?" The thought sickened me. And I realized then that no matter what I said, Edward had changed. And I liked the new Edward, as much as it terrified me to admit it.
"I miss my friend. I'm not saying this to you because I blame you, despite what it probably sounds like. To tell you the truth, Edward has smiled more the few times that I've seen you together recently than I've seen him smile in the last ten years combined."
"Maybe he is happy because he thinks he's getting closer to solving the murder." I tried to be logical, ignoring the implications of Jasper's suggestion. Edward kissed you, I remembered. It must mean something.
Jasper spared me a glance as he paused at a stop sign. "I don't think that's the case."
"Well then maybe he just appreciates having you around more often. Now that you're both living in the same city."
Jasper laughed. "I don't think it's that either."
I was at a loss. If it was true—if what Jasper was saying was true—and if the kiss really meant something, then I didn't know what it meant for me, but what did it mean for Jasper? "Is it really so bad? Edward changing, I mean. I know that you're worried that he's become obsessive, but other than that, aren't we supposed to be different now? We've grown up. Alice says that you've changed too."
"Of course we've changed. You don't think that I'm the same guy you went to high school with, do you?"
I didn't answer.
Jasper grunted at my silence. "Well, I'm not. I was a prick then but Alice has forgiven me. I just wish that I'd seen then what I see now."
"What do you see now?"
"Alice."
What could I say to that? Alice's relationship with Jasper seemed utterly strange to me—too peculiar to fathom. It wasn't for me to pass judgment.
"You're not going to threaten me?" Jasper asked.
"Why would I threaten you?"
"You know, tell me that if I hurt her you'll rip off my balls or something."
"I'm not a very violent person." If he was going to hurt her, then there was nothing that I could do to stop it.
"I'm not going to. Hurt her, I mean."
"Oh. Okay." This was uncharted territory for me. Alice's boyfriends had never bothered seeking my approval before. "That's good."
"You don't seem very worried." Jasper sounded almost critical, as if my failure to threaten his genitalia demonstrated a failing on my part.
"Alice makes her own decisions," I told him. And I pick up the pieces, I thought to myself.
"You didn't try to warn her away from me?"
"I did."
"But I know that you're the one who told her to come to that first happy hour. You knew that I'd be there."
"I might not agree with her choices, but I support her in them." Which was a lie. I'd stopped giving a damn a long time ago. I'd make sure that she was alright physically, but beyond that—
"Unlike me. I don't support Edward."
I hadn't thought about it like that. "It's not for me to say."
"I know you've dealt with a lot from Alice over the years and I want you to know that I'll be there for her from now on. It's not the same thing with Edward. He chose this. Alice didn't choose her problems."
"Doesn't that make Edward's behavior all the more—" I struggled for a word—"noble?" It was a reach perhaps, but Edward's decision to take responsibility for finding Tanya's murderer did have a kind of nobility about it. A courage.
"It's psychosis."
"Then how is he different from Alice?" I asked, not because I looked down on Alice—I knew it was just her condition—but because I wanted Jasper to explain what he meant about Edward.
But Jasper just shook his head.
By then, we'd arrived at the police station and Jasper was parking.
"You should just go to the university," I started to tell him. "You don't have to—"
He stopped me. "Alice would kill me if I left you," he said. "If Edward didn't get to me first. It's not an imposition, I promise."
True to his word, Jasper escorted me inside and sat down on one of the benches near the entrance to wait.
Jacob was expecting me, and I was grateful to see him, as Detectives 1 and 2 were hardly my favorite people at this point. The detectives did insist on joining us, however, while I went over a file containing the inventory of items that had been found in my office, page after page of book titles and pamphlets and student-written essays.
Vathek
Lenore
The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey
Gaspard de la nuit
Horrid Mysteries
Justine
A Miss Carmichael's unoriginal exposition on Radcliffe's feminist rhetoric.
Vampyr
The Devil's Elixir
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Là-Bas
Coelina
The Necromancer
A Mr. Washington's enervating discourse on the eccentricities of the Brontes.
The Monk
The Sorrows of Satan
The Beetle
Melmoth the Wanderer
The Castle of Wolfenbach
A clutch of essays on The Cheese and the Worms.
Berenice
Nightmare Abbey
The Manuscript found in Saragossa
The Bliss of Madness
The Castle of Otranto
Wagner the Wehr-wolf
A Miss Stevenson's fascinating digression on the architectural fancies of M. R. James.
The Old English Baron
The Ghost-Seer
The Foundling
Unexpected Guests
Ludmilla
And so on and so forth.
It was a far cry from the time that I'd sat in Edward's apartment, going over the evidence he'd collected. There were no photos of blood-stained cabins or abandoned warehouses. No stills from the morgue or autopsy reports.
There was no reason for the sense of despair that was steadily overwhelming me as I read over the names of all of the books that had been destroyed. Victims of a cruel slayer.
And thus all her happyness doth wane.
I told myself that it was just because my nerves were shot. That the stress of finding those pictures and then Edward's behavior was too much.
But I could tell that the detectives wanted to tell me that they were just books.
And I couldn't deny that I was making a spectacle of myself, unable to restrain my quiet groans as I read over the list of violated tomes.
The list wasn't as awful, of course, as a girl lying dead of blood loss. I knew that. But it was, in its own way, grotesque.
Just books. Ha!
Just poetry and sensibility and reason and the outline of sublime sentiments not much appreciated in the waking world, where the sick absurdity of a murdered girl, too, could be made bearable perhaps, thanks to a line from Montaigne or a sonnet by Corelli.
I knew that there was no way to explain it, so I didn't bother trying.
"You have to understand that I just own so many books. And pamphlets and booklets." I sighed, ignoring the way Detective 2 rolled his eyes. "It's almost impossible for me to tell you whether or not something's missing. Especially as I haven't had a chance to check my books at home to see what I might have left there."
Detective 1 was understandably impatient for results. "Well we need you to do that ASAP."
"I have a class to teach this afternoon, but I can go home after that."
"You're not going alone, are you?" Jacob asked.
I knew that Edward wouldn't want me to go off on my own, but how long were we really going to carry on this Guarding Bella nonsense? I might have told Edward that we ought to consider leaving town, but I hadn't been entirely serious.
Indeed, I couldn't see how any of this was going to play out. The Lifetime movie that I'd pictured myself in when Edward proposed that I help him find Tanya's killer wasn't meant to turn out with me in the starring role. I was just a bit character relegated to the first act. Why did it seem like I was the only one who knew that?
"I'll take someone with me," I told Jacob.
"If you see anything suspicious, or you need an officer to accompany you, make sure that you call me," Jacob advised, as Detectives 1 and 2 were clearly not inclined to volunteer for babysitting.
I was just grateful that no one seemed to deem police protection warranted. I couldn't have born that kind of attention.
"Don't make me call Charlie," Jacob warned.
I was loath to involve my father. It had been all I could do to convince Charlie not to drive up to Seattle when I'd spoken to him on the phone from the backseat of Jasper's Mustang that morning.
Promising Jacob that I would stay well out of danger, I cast one last glance at the sad list of ruined books, and paused.
Hmmm.
Flipping through the inventory again, I made sure that I hadn't accidentally overlooked them.
No, they weren't there.
"The letters aren't here," I said.
"What letters?" Detective 2 asked, his interest finally piqued.
"About once a month for the last two years, I've received a letter through my publisher. I think that they're coming from the same person. I sometimes get other letters through my publisher, but the ones that I'm talking about are different. There's never a return address and they're always on the same kind of paper."
"That doesn't sound like—" Detective 2 started.
I cut him off. "It's a single sheet of paper with a typed line of text copied from a book—all of them books mentioned in my own book—with a pressed flower folded inside of the paper. I kept all of the letters together. They were sitting on one of the bookshelves in my office."
That seemed to shut Detective 2 up. With Detective 1 taking notes, I proceeded to tell them everything that I could remember about the letters. The date of receipt, the quality of the paper, and any distinguishing marks that I could recall about the typeset.
I began reciting the few quotations that I could remember from the letters and Detective 2 interrupted.
"Why would anyone want to read about that?" Detective 2 asked, the disgust plain in his tone.
Ignoring him, I continued, Googling the precise wording on my cell phone:
'Ask what you please, and I will tell you everything. But my story is simply one of bewilderment and darkness.' – Sheridan LeFanu
'The strangeness of the figure, and its being so close akin to his own nature, attracted him.' – Bram Stoker
'There is salvation for the repentant man, but none for me!' – George W. M. Reynolds
'Sensuous hopes trampled upon; visionary joys despised. There is no future gladness. Destiny works. What are we more than a handful of faded leaves tossed by the early winter wind?' – R. Murray Gilchrist
'When once sordid interest seizes upon the heart, it freezes up the source of every warm and liberal feeling; it is an enemy alike to virtue and to taste—this it perverts and that it annihilates.' – Ann Radcliffe
'To terror succeeded a languor and lassitude not without charm—passivity, acquiescence, indulgence—he felt, as it were, the strong caress of another will flowing over him like water and clothing him with invisible hands in an impalpable garment.' – Count Stenbock
'I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good.' – Robert Louis Stevenson
'I looked back on my bypast life with pain, as one looks back on a perilous journey, in which he has attained his end, without gaining any advantage either to himself, or others; and I looked forward, as on a darksome waste, full of repulsive and terrific shapes, pitfalls, and precipice.' – James Hogg
The detectives asked if I could hazard a guess as to why someone would be sending me these quotations in particular, and I had to admit that I could not.
Why hadn't I reported the letters before? they asked, and I could only say that I'd never taken the messages seriously, thinking that they were a prank or the work of a lonely dilettante scholar. It wasn't as if I'd ever felt threatened.
Didn't I think that they might be connected to the animals left on my doorstep? There had been no reason for me to see a link. The letters had been coming for two years. The animals had only just begun to appear.
Could there be a message behind the selection of quotations? I replied that the police must surely know more about modern methods of decipherment than me, but perhaps some traditional method of cryptography was in play. A common form of cipher, for instance, might have been used, with the letters directing the reader to the particular page numbers on which the quotations appeared in the volumes listed in my book, with the first letter of each page spelling out a message. But I had to check the volumes in question to be sure.
Had I ever told Edward about the letters? I'd only told Alice and Seth, as a joke. I hadn't even told Angela. Seth had congratulated me on having a fan.
Why did I think that the letters had been stolen? I shrugged my shoulders. Oh, I had some wild notions, but I didn't want to admit, for instance, that I found myself wondering if the sender was in fact stalking me, and had lashed out when he saw that I was associating with Edward. That scenario was too melodramatic, too arrogant, for me to voice. To think that anyone could care that much for me. Instead, I said that maybe the disappearance of the letters was completely unrelated, the vandal breaking into my office—no, I didn't know why anyone would want to do such a thing—and coming across the letters by accident, he had taken them away, either out of curiosity or intentionally hoping to create confusion while the police scrambled to find a nonexistent connection between the missives and Bree's murder.
I felt foolish in the extreme, voicing this theory aloud. Even this relatively mild suggestion was the stuff of lurid, Gothic trash, the very literature from which the letters quoted. Undoubtedly, the police could formulate far more probable explanations than I ever could.
An hour later, I was on my way back to the university with Jasper. I had given the detectives as many of the quotations as possible, but the list was by no means complete. I was racking my brain for the ones I had forgotten. Jasper did his best to help but stalled after suggesting Louisa May Alcott, the southern contingent being as far as it seemed he'd gotten in the type of literature involved.
Jasper urged me to cancel class, but I didn't think that would be fair to my students.
It turned out that I ought to have taken his advice. Bree had been enrolled in my other course, but word had obviously spread to many of my students and I quickly realized that there was no point in trying to get anyone to show interest in a lecture that I was hardly in the mood to deliver. I returned their quizzes and glanced down at my notes. Dear God.
"So," I started wearily, but determined. "What did you think of what the critics had to say? Is Frankenstein really as morbid as all that?"
Silence.
"Well, what do you think about what critics say about violence in video games and movies today? Do they encourage violence?"
Nothing.
"Really? No one here plays GTA?"
Crickets.
"Was your office really broken into?" a junior asked.
I sighed.
In the end, I decided to answer at least a few of their questions. I left out any mention of Tanya, of course, but admitted that my office had been broken into and that one of my students had been murdered, but said that I couldn't say anything about it because of the police investigation. Then, after securing their solemn vows to read ahead in the syllabus, I let the students go early.
Since I'd ended ahead of schedule, I had at least an hour before Jasper would be finished with his own lecture. My classroom was right next to the main office, so I decided to wait in the hallway, sitting on a well-aged sofa set against one wall. There was more than enough traffic in the hallway to ensure that I wouldn't fall prey to any foul play, even if I still couldn't bring myself to imagine just what form that foul play might take. I was by no means the stuff of White Chapel notoriety.
If nothing else, I reasoned, the escalation of events was providing the police with more evidence. Surely, they would catch the perpetrator soon enough. Because I couldn't picture going through day after day like this, being escorted from place to place, feeling so perfectly helpless.
Wanting to do something useful, I took out a pad of paper and began listing random authors, trying to jog my memory as to the sources of the rest of the quotations from the letters.
With a pang of regret, it occurred to me that if I'd bothered to invest more energy in the letters when they'd first arrived, following through on the temptation to seek out their underlying logic, I might have discovered something that would have led to Tanya's killer long before Bree's life was ever put in danger. Yet, I still had no real proof that there was a connection between the letters and Tanya or Bree. Just the mounting accumulation of coincidences.
I was halfway down the page when my cell rang. It was Edward.
I hesitated before answering, pausing just long enough to realize that I was being ridiculous. More important issues were at hand than my feelings, whatever those feelings might be, for Edward Cullen.
Despite, or perhaps because of, my trepidations, I was surprised to hear the anxiety in Edward's voice. He clearly wanted to see me, and I didn't have the slightest idea how I was meant to feel about that—for in spite of the darkness surrounding Bree's murder and everything else, I couldn't deny feeling a guilty twinge of joy at his eagerness, which didn't make any sense at all, because naturally I was uncertain as to how I was going to go about dealing with this new Edward, a man whom it seemed I didn't know at all, and one who, for all I knew, was eager to see me only because he blamed himself for my current predicament and had been worried about my safety—but I told him that I'd wait for him to pick me up.
I didn't have Jasper's number, but I assumed that Edward would send him a text telling him the change in plans.
I had a view of the parking lot from the bench where I was sitting, through a wide window in the far wall. So I watched the rain while I waited and worked on my list.
I managed to remember another quotation as I passed the time, and I decided that I would go through my books at home for more suggestions. The police had said that I could go home, though they didn't advise it. I would make Edward go with me, as it was clear that he wasn't leaving me alone any time soon. I would put him to work looking up quotations. Work. That was what we needed. Not this nonsensical confusion of overwrought emotions.
I would follow through on my suggestion regarding a possible cipher too. I was sure that the police were going to try their own hand at deciphering the missives, but naturally I needed to do whatever I could to help. Whatever books were lying broken and ruined in my office could probably be looked up on Gaslight or Project Gutenberg.
A short while later, I saw Edward's Porsche pull up at the curb outside. The rain was coming down pretty hard as I sprinted out of the building and towards the vehicle. I had my eyes on the ground, dodging puddles, and I barely glanced at Edward—his form obscured by a hoody—as I pulled the door open and quickly slipped inside. If anything, I was amused at the idle notion that I'd gotten something over on him by not letting him come around to open the door for me himself, a juvenile, selfish thought in the midst of the fucked up chicanery of the last few days, and perhaps he wouldn't have bothered in the rain after all.
It seemed that I wasn't alone, though, in my amusement on that point, for the childproof locks snapped on as soon as I was inside, as if in anticipation of making me wait for permission to exit.
Despite everything, I smiled at Edward's immaturity, and turned to him only to freeze.
"Who are you?"
AN:
Rec: You Were There by harperpitt Young and struggling actress Bella Swan has just moved from Seattle to NYC, where she meets hot doctor Edward Cullen, but it's not that easy, for both have some baggage to carry. AH/AU, canon couplings and rated M. Fluff, drama, and Edward in scrubs... Twilight - Rated: M - English - Romance/Hurt/Comfort - Chapters: 35 - Words: 146,894 - Reviews: 745 - Favs: 1,096 - Follows: 433 - Updated: Aug 30, 2011 - Published: Feb 27, 2011 - Bella, Edward - Complete