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A photo on the console table by the front door catches my eye and I let out a muffled scream when I realize it’s a picture of Emily with the Ravenwood boys.
Turning back to Dr. Thornton, I stare at him and he nods. “This is Emily’s old place,” he confirms.
There’s no light in here, and no heat so it’s cold and a shiver shoots down my spine. The place looks eerie, like Emily left for a while but she’s still coming back. A cozy blanket is still draped over the back of a gray chenille couch. A stack of books is still on the black wood and glass coffee table.
Dawning horror washes over me as I realize that Dr. Thornton is completely and totally insane. This man is nothing like the person I thought he was.
He forces me to sit down in a striped, overstuffed armchair and pulls the gag down, the musty smell of the place overpowering me.
“I suppose you want to know why I brought you here?” he asks, pushing his glasses up on his nose. He steps back, gun pointing towards me as he walks over to the TV stand, picking up another photo. This one is Dr. Thornton with younger versions of Bastian, Dominic, and Caleb.
“I thought it fitting for you to find out my story in the same place that Emily found out,” he says, setting the photo back down. “After all, she’s the center of it all, isn’t she? That’s why you kept digging.”
I stay silent, staring at him with wide eyes.
“Emily never fully trusted me,” he says, floorboards creaking under his feet as he paces. “She asked me all kinds of questions about my time with the boys and started digging around in my past. She looked into the financial records of the Haven Centerlike you did, but she didn’t stop there. She played detective and looked into my own financial records, realizing that I had bought the house at the same time that the Haven Center’s funding went missing.”
My heart races, breath hitching as I realize I was right. Dr. Thornton did have something to do with the missing money.
“Why?” I ask, my voice hoarse.
“She wanted to know the same thing,” Dr. Thornton says, scratching the back of his head with the gun. “So I told her the truth.”
He sighs and shakes his head, a bitter tinge to his voice as he continues, “The committee funding my research at the Haven Center had decided to pull my funding. They claimed my work was exploitative instead of helping the children.”
He clenches his hands into fists for a moment, then relaxes them. “My knowledge in psychology came in very helpful at that point,” he says, reaching down to bring my chin up with a finger. I jerk my head away and he chuckles. “I manipulated the senior staff at the center into giving me the information I needed to access the finances.”
He’s insane,I think to myself.
“It was surprisingly easy to get them to reveal enough about themselves to hack into the accounts. Over the course of six months, I funneled money from the Center to my own account, but I was very careful not to leave a trail pointing directly to me.”
“How could you?” I spit out. “How could you take money away from those kids?”
“How could they shut down my funding!” Dr. Thornton roars. “Years of research, down the tubes. All that time I spent working with those kids, gaining their trust to use for my research, it wasn’t fair! I deserved that money.”
Lorna was wrong about Rich. He didn’t fancy himself a savior to those kids, he thought of them as nothing more than lab rats. I curl my lip, my stomach churning in fear and disgust.
“Just before the police started investigating, I left, claiming that my uncle was sick. It wasn’t long before the police came but they ruled me out as a suspect since I wasn’t there.”
“The police couldn’t track the money trail?” I ask. “How?”
“I had the senior staff’s personal information. I used the things I knew about them to hack their own accounts and transferred the money to a shell corporation. The trail ended there because the shell corporation wasn’t connected to me in any way. They couldn’t figure out who it led to.”
“I just don’t understand why you went through all that trouble to steal money,” I say, my voice wavering. “You had everything. You had a family who cared about you. Don’t you care about those boys at all?”
Dr. Thornton sits across from me on the couch and clicks his tongue. For a fleeting moment, I catch a glimpse of something behind Dr. Thornton's eyes—a hint of insecurity, a shadow of doubt. It's gone in an instant, masked by his facade of control, but it lingers in the air like a ghost of his true self. “Oh, probably not,” he admits. “I don’t really feel anything for anybody, to be frank. You could probably diagnose me with psychopathy.”
The fact that he could so casually sit there and reveal that to me is bone-chilling. Anger floods me. All that time with the Ravenwood boys and they meant nothing to him? They thought of him as family, and he threw it all away for his own selfish gain?
I have to choke back the bile that rises in my throat.
“When Emily discovered the truth,” he continues. “I knew she had to go. There was no way I could let her take everything away after I worked so hard to get it. So, I came here and I killed her. Made it look like a suicide.”
Even though I’d already guessed the truth, my blood runs cold. How could I have been so blind? Anger simmers beneath the surface, but it's overshadowed by a profound sense of betrayal.
“And I’m going to do the same to you, sweetheart,” he adds, standing up and walking over to caress my cheek with the barrel of the gun. I yank my head away but he presses it to my cheek. “Won’t it be a poetic touch? Having you kill yourself in the same place that Emily did?”
“How are you going to make the boys believe that I killed myself?” I ask, adrenaline pumping through me as I try to keep him talking. I have to do whatever it takes to keep him talking. “They’d never believe that I wanted to die.”
