Page 149 of This is Why We Lied

Faith waited, but he still didn’t answer.

“What guilt did your father let Mercy carry?”

Again, he didn’t answer.

“Christopher.” Faith leaned forward, edging into his personal space. “You told me that you tried to protect Mercy the best way you knew how, and I believe that. I really do. But I don’t understand why on earth you would protect your father right now. Mercy was violently murdered. She was left to bleed out on your family’s land. Can’t you give her soul some peace?”

Christopher was silent a few seconds longer, then he took a quick breath and pushed out the words, “It was him.”

“It was who?”

“Papa.” Christopher glanced up before looking back down again. “He’s the one who killed Gabbie.”

Faith could feel Will’s tension behind her. She had to take her own quick breath before she could speak. “How did—”

“Gabbie was so beautiful. And kind. And sweet. I was in love with her.” Christopher was looking at Faith in the eye now, his voice strident. “People laughed at me, because I didn’t stand a chance, but I loved her so much. A pure kind of love. Nothing that could be tainted. That’s why I understood how Chuck felt about Mercy. He couldn’t help himself.”

Faith worked to keep her tone even. “What happened to Gabbie?”

“Papa happened.” The strident tone was gone. His voice had the familiar deadness to it. “He couldn’t stand the way Gabbie flitted around the world like a beautiful butterfly. She was always so happy. She had this lightness inside of her. She flirted with the guests. She laughed at their stupid jokes. She loved Mercy. She really did. And Mercy loved her. Everyone loved Gabbie. Everyone wanted her. So Papa raped her.”

Faith felt like her mouth had filled with sand. It was the matter-of-fact tone he’d used to describe something that was almost indescribable. “When did this happen?”

“The night of the so-called accident.”

Faith kept silent. She didn’t need to push him anymore. Christopher was finally ready to tell the story.

“I was out collecting nightcrawlers,” he said. “Papa raped Gabbie in my bed. He left her there for me to find. Papa told me he wasn’t going to let anybody have something that he didn’t have first.”

Faith tried to swallow the sand in her mouth.

“He didn’t just rape her. He beat her face. All of her beauty, her perfection, it was just gone.” Christopher took another sharp breath. “I went to get Mercy, but she was passed out on her bedroom floor with a needle in her arm. She had so much pain in her body. She was so desperate to get away. She and Gabbie were going to leave together at the end of summer, but …”

Faith didn’t need him to finish the sentence. She had heard about their plan from Penny Danvers. Gabbie and Mercy were going to move to Atlanta and get an apartment together and wait tables and make lots of money and live it up the way that only teenagers can.

And then Gabbie had died, and Mercy’s life was changed forever.

Christopher said, “Papa made—he made me carry Mercy to the car. He just threw her in the back seat like a sack of garbage. Then we put Gabbie in the front. She wasn’t even moving by then. I guess the shock or maybe being punched in the head so many times—I don’t know. Maybe Gabbie was already dead. I was glad she didn’t know what was going on.”

He’d started crying. Faith listened to his nose wheeze as he tried to control his breathing. She recalled another detail from Penny—that Christopher had been so inconsolable after Gabbie’s death that he had taken to his bed for weeks after.

“Papa told me to go back inside the house, so I did. I watched them drive away from my bedroom window. I fell asleep with my head on my arm.” Christopher gulped another quick breath. “Three hours later, I heard a car door slam. Sheriff Hartshorne was there. My mother came into my room. She was crying so hard she could barely talk. We all went down to the kitchen. Papa was there, too. The sheriff told us that Gabbie was dead and Mercy was in the hospital.”

“What did your father say?”

He gave a bitter laugh. “He said, ‘Goddammit, I knew Mercy would end up killing somebody.’”

His tone had a finality to it, but Faith wasn’t going to let him stop there. “Bitty didn’t hear anything the night before?”

“No, Papa had slipped her some Xanax. Nothing would wake her up.” He leaned down to wipe his nose on his arm. “All Mother knew was that Mercy had gotten high and ended up crashing her car and killing Gabbie. We never asked for the details. We didn’t want to know.”

Faith knew the official version from Penny. Mercy was the driver who’d been going down the rollercoaster hill that led to Devil’s Bend. The EMTs had told the town that Mercy had laughed like a hyena in the back of the ambulance. Mercy had insisted that they were parked in front of the lodge. Which made sense, because Mercy was in her bedroom when she’d nodded off with a needle in her arm. She had no memory of being carried to the car.

Now, Faith could only assume that Cecil McAlpine had put the gear in neutral and hoped that gravity would rid him of his daughter and the young woman he’d beaten and raped.

She told Christopher, “The car dropped twenty feet into a gorge. Mercy got thrown through the front window. That’s how her face was ripped off. Gabbie’s head was crushed, but that happened before the accident. Your father’s good friend Sheriff Hartshorne said that her feet were on the dashboard at impact. The coroner said that her skull was pulverized. They had to use dental records to identify her at the autopsy. It was like someone had taken a sledgehammer to her head.”

Christopher’s lips were trembling. He couldn’t look Faith in the eye, but she knew that Christopher couldn’t look a lot of people in the eye.