Jamais Vu

Chapter 25

"Have you spend any time at sea, Dan?"

"No, James."

"Anchorage is important, more than people realise. If you don't set yourself up at night properly, you'll drift in the darkness and wake up in a completely different place, maybe somewhere dangerous you never intended to be.

"Nessa was my anchor. As long as I had her, had the hope of one day being with her, I was anchored. Yeah, I messed up with Jessinta and Callie, but I was under control mostly."

Neither of us moves much. James has a flow to his story and I can only sit in the stream and listen.

"After games night, when I told Nessa I loved her and she turned me down, I was broken. Not just heart-broken – my mind was ruined, my soul destroyed. My plan was to go home, write a note, go out on the cat and kill myself at sea."

If only the story had ended that way. Nessa would have felt guilty for a while, I would have comforted her, and our lives would have gone on. Instead, we're here.

James' face twitches into a tight smile. "But Lulu was there when I got back to my place, and I was just messed up enough to break down and tell her everything – the murders, Nesssa's rejection, my suicide plans. She listened, and instead of looking horrified, she grinned. 'You're just like me,' she said.

"She told me about how she forced her brother into bed with her when they were teens, how she ruined his life just because she could. We screwed right there on the floor, as if it was romantic, as if we'd been confessing undying love rather than murder and incest."

I want to swallow, but my throat is dry. "Lulu was just like you."

"I think that's why I avoided dating her for so long. Part of me knew that she was as corrupted as I was, that she would only bring out more of my degraded nature. While we were screwing, she told me in pants, 'I have a plan, to make sure they can never take you away from me.'" He shook his head, rue almost visibly scattering as he did. "I was so desperate for distraction from the pain of losing Nessa, I never stopped to think about how I was about to tie myself to Lulu in a pact more binding than any marriage contract.

"I went away for a conference, and Lulu called her brother, set up a meeting, then hid herself at my parents' house. You know some of it from there, how the cops suspected him, how I chased him down. I told everyone he got away, but I knocked him out and threw him in my trunk."

"What happened to Luke?" I don't want to know, but I can't not know either.

"I took him back to the mansion. Lulu kept him like a pet for a while, tormented him, then she shot him through the head."

Even five minutes earlier, I'd thought there was no way I could possibly feel more disgust, more sadness. I was wrong. My soul weeps for Luke, for a guy born into a family with a sociopath. He never had a chance.

Bitterness oozes from James as he says, "By that stage, I realized I was screwed. Now Lulu owned me – not only did she know all my secrets, my alibi relied on her disappearance. She told me she wanted to travel, insisted that we go away together. 'You and me, lovers on the run,' was how she put it, but there was no love between us – just lust, obsession and death.

"I had a fake ID created for her, then I left my firm and began to travel as a freelance consultant. We'd go off the grid for months at a time in far-off lands, Tonga, Greenland, Sri Lanka. Sometimes, it would actually be bearable; the sex was good, we had tons of money, and I'd forget how screwed up we both were."

Sadly, he shakes his head. "But every year or so, Lulu would get this look in her eyes. 'Let's find something bright and beautiful and crush it,' she'd whisper in my ear in bed. 'You know you want to.' And the worst part is... I did. I wanted that. I wanted to take all the pain and darkness I felt and let it out.