“Yes, but who cares about all those other people? They weren’t my problem, just you. I only regret that the sanitarium will be closed down. It was such a perfect place for you. Out of the way for good. It all fell into place once I met Jackie. I already knew Doctor Beadermeyer and all about that little racket of his. Nearly seven months ago, it all came together.
“I got you out of the way-with Scott’s help, of course. He was such a miserable little fool, afraid he’d get caught, but I’ll tell you, he sure liked the money he got from helping me. And, you see, I knew all about his lover. At least I made sure you didn’t get AIDS. I threatened Scott that if he made love to you-if he could force himself to do the deed-then he had to use a condom. Doctor Beadermeyer checked your blood. Thanks to me, you’re well. But Scott did play his part. Once he was free of you, he spent his money and dallied openly with his lover. He was a good pawn. Where was I? Oh, yes, then Jackie went under the knife, and I finalized my plans. But you had to butt in, didn’t you, Sally? I had you all locked away and still you got out. Still you had to try to ruin my plans. Well, no more.”
“Do you hate me so much just because I tried to protect my mother from your fists?”
“Actually not. It was natural that I wouldn’t like you very much.”
“It’s because you believed that I’d learned about your illegal arms sales?”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“My dealings with other governments had nothing to do with it. Scott was afraid you’d seen something, but I knew you would have acted in a flash if you had. No, that didn’t concern me. Fact of the matter is, you’re not my daughter. You’re a fucking little bastard. And that, my dear Sally, is why Noelle never left me. She tried once, when you were just a baby. She didn’t believe me when I told her she was in this for life. Perhaps she thought she’d test me. She ran back to her rich, snotty parents in Philadelphia, and they acted true to form just as I knew they would. They told her to get back to her husband and stop making up lies about me. After all, I’d saved her bacon. How could she say such things about me, a wonderful man who’d married her when she was pregnant with another man’s child?”
He laughed, a long, deep laugh that made her skin crawl. She kept lightly tugging on the ropes. Surely they were a little bit looser now, but she wasn’t really thinking about those ropes. She was trying to understand him, to really take in what he was saying. But it was so hard.
He continued, his voice meditative, “When I think about it now, I realize that Noelle really hadn’t believed me. She hadn’t believed that my price to marry her, other than the five hundred thousand dollars I got from her parents, was that she stay with me forever, or until I didn’t want her anymore. When she came dragging back with you-a screaming little brat-I took you away from her and held you over a big fire in the fireplace. The fire was blowing really good. It singed off the little hair you had and your eyebrows. Oh, how she screamed. I told her if she ever tried anything like that again, I’d kill you.
“I meant it, you know. I bet you wonder who your father was.”
She felt as though she’d had a ton of drugs pumped into her body. She couldn’t grasp what he was saying. She understood his words-he wasn’t her father-but she couldn’t seem to get it to the core of herself.
“You’re not my father,” she repeated, staring beyond his left shoulder toward the open door. She wanted to cheer. She didn’t have any of this monster’s blood. “You kept Noelle with you by threatening to kill me, her only child.”
“Yes. My dear wife finally believed me. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gave me to beat that rich little bitch. And she had to take it. She had no choice.