“Fair point,” I agree. “More than fair, actually. I assume that Ry Strauss was the man with the ski mask.”
“Yes.”
“He saw you once years later. Ian Cornwell, I mean. You were on The Today Show promoting the Abeona Shelter.”
“I had long hair when I was with him,” she says. “Dyed it blonde for those three months. After the robbery, I cut it and never let it grow back again.”
“Cornwell claims that he still wasn’t certain you were his Belinda — but even if he was, what could he prove?”
“Exactly.”
“And you didn’t tell Aldrich about the robbery?”
“No. By then, I knew Ryker was really Ry Strauss. He confided in me. We grew close. We even got the tattoos together.”
She turns to the side and pulls down on the back of her top, revealing a tattoo — the same Tisiphone abeona butterfly that I’d seen on the photographs of Ry Strauss’s corpse.
“What’s the significance of that butterfly?” I ask.
“Beats me. That was all Ry. He ranted about the goddess Abeona, of rescuing the young, I don’t know. Ry was always full of such passion. When you’re young, you don’t realize how thin the line is between colorful and crazy. But the planning and execution of the heist was” — her face breaks into a wide grin — “it was such a high, Win. Think about it. We got away with stealing two masterpieces. It was the best thing I’d ever done in my life.”
“Until,” I say, arching an eyebrow for effect, “it turned into the worst.”
“You’re such a drama queen sometimes, Win.”
“Again: Fair. When did you find the negatives?”
“Six, seven months later. I dropped the Picasso in the basement, believe it or not. The back of the frame broke. When I tried to fix it...”
“You found them,” I finish for her.
Patricia nods slowly.
When I ask my next question, I hear the catch in my throat. “Did you shoot Aldrich or did Aline?”
“I did,” she says. “My mother wasn’t home. That part was true. I sent her out. I wanted to confront him alone. I still hoped for an explanation. But he just snapped. I had never seen him like that. It was like... I had a friend with a really bad drinking problem. It wasn’t just that she would fly into a rage — it was that she would look straight at me and not know who I was.”
“And that’s what happened with your father?”
She nods, but her voice is oddly calm. “He slapped me across the face. He punched me in the nose and ribs. He grabbed the negatives and threw them in the fireplace.”
“The broken bones,” I say. “Those were the old injuries the police found on you.”
“I begged him to stop. But it was like he didn’t see me. He didn’t deny it. Said he did all this and worse. And I mean, those negatives, the images on them...”
“You now knew what he was capable of,” I say.
“I ran into his bedroom.” Her eyes are far away now. “He kept the gun in his night table drawer.”
She stops and looks at me. I help her out.
“You shot him.”
“I shot him,” she repeats. “I couldn’t move. I just stood over his body. I didn’t know what to do. I just felt, I don’t know, confused. Unmoored. I knew I couldn’t go to the police. They’d figure out I stole the paintings. They’d learn about Ry for sure — he would go to prison for life. The negatives were ashes in the fire, so where was my proof? I also thought — I know this will sound weird — but I worried about the family too. The Lockwood name, even after we’d been kicked to the curb. I guess it’s ingrained in us, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I agree. “You said my father came to see yours the night before he was murdered. That wasn’t true.”
“I was just trying to throw smoke at you. I’m sorry.”
“And the part about two assailants kidnapping you?”
“Made it up. Same with that story about the kidnappers giving me hope and letting me think I was being let go. Some of the rape and abuse stories I told came straight off those negatives, but none of that happened to me.”
“You just wanted to muddy the investigation.”
“Yes.”
I want to get her back to her story: “So you’d just shot your father and you felt confused. What happened next?”
“I was in shock, I guess. My mother came home. When she saw what happened, she totally freaked out too. Started ranting in Portuguese. She said the police would lock me away forever. She told me to run and hide somewhere, that she would call 911 and say she found my father dead. Blame it on intruders. I just reacted. I grabbed my suitcase — well, your suitcase — and I packed it and I ran.”
“I’m guessing,” I say, “that you ran to Ry Strauss?”
“I knew he lived at the Beresford. I was the only one he trusted with that, I think. I don’t know. But when I got there, Ry was in bad shape. Mentally, I mean. He was hoarding. He hadn’t shaved or even showered. The place was disgusting. I woke up the second night, and Ry had a knife against my throat. He thought some guy named Staunch had sent me.”
“You left.”
“In a hurry. I didn’t think twice about the suitcase.”
I can’t help but note that in both cases — the murder of my uncle and the theft of my family’s paintings — the investigators’ first instincts had been correct. With the art heist, they suspected some involvement on the part of Ian Cornwell. That was correct. In the case of Uncle Aldrich’s murder, one of the first theories was that Cousin Patricia had shot her own father, packed a suitcase, and then she’d run away.
That too had been correct.
“This is going to sound crazy,” she says, her voice barely a whisper, “but I was with my dad when he bought that shed at a hardware store. We drove up not far from the site, and he dropped it off.” She looks at me, and I feel the temperature in the room drop ten degrees. “I was in the car, Win. Think about that. I look back now, and I wonder if one of the girls was tied up in the trunk. How messed up is that?”
“Very,” I say.
“I don’t know what was on your negatives, but there were some outdoor shots, so I had some idea of where the shed might be. When I was ten or eleven, Dad used to take me camping up there.”
“How long did it take you to find it?”
“The shed? Nearly a month. That’s how well he hid it. I must have walked by it ten times.”
“Did you ever actually stay in the shed?”
“Just that last night. Before I faked my escape.”
“I see,” I say, because I don’t. Something isn’t adding up. “And you came up with this plan?”
Patricia’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”
“You’re eighteen years old. You shot and killed your own father. It was clearly traumatic. So traumatic, in fact, you still keep his photographs on the wall.” I point behind her. “You made your father a big part of your story. Aldrich was, you claim, what inspired your good works.”
“That’s not a lie,” she counters. “What I did... my dad... it haunted me. He was my father. He loved me, and I loved him. That’s the truth.” She moves close to me. “Win, I committed patricide. It shaped everything else in my life.”
“Which brings me back to my point.”
“Which is?”
“You, a confused eighteen-year-old girl, came up with the idea of pretending to be a victim. Because if that’s true, kudos. It was brilliant. I bought it completely. I never for a moment questioned it. You were able to bring closure to those girls’ families. You were able to ‘expose,’ if you will, the Hut of Horrors, but not your own father. You gained attention and used it to launch the Abeona Shelter. To do good. To try to make up for what your father had done. I’m amazed you thought of it on your own.”