The Monster In Us

29- vera knowS

"Why don't you have a lake house?" Coleman asks me as he's unhinging the window that goes into the basement.

"This is the only lake around and I don't think having a house on the same lake as the Berardi's is an awesome idea," I explain to him.

"There's Lake Mead."

"Lake Mead is a reservoir, I don't think that'd work," I inform him. "Are you in?"

He gets the last part of the window unhooked as if right on queue and he pulls it out of its place to get us into the basement of the lake house. From the car, I had crashed their security system so that their cameras aren't working but I kept up static footage so that it looks like the system is still going from wherever there's a person watching this feed.

"We're in," He confirms, letting me slide through the small window first, landing on my feet on the concrete below. He hands the flashlights and guns before he follows me into the dark basement and I hand him one flashlight and one gun before tucking the other gun into my waistband.

Flipping on my flashlight, I turn toward the empty basement and make a bee line for the board that I had found last time. "This is that board that I showed you the picture of. I'm going to go check out the desk," I tell Coleman as he follows me to the large board in the middle of the room. I pass the board and head to the desk. I want to get pictures of all of these letters and I want to see what else is in the desk.

"This is all really fucked up," Coleman mumbles as he examines the entire board for himself.

"I know."

Coleman goes the other direction in the basement to see what's over there, I go through the desk. The shoebox of letters is still there and so I take them out and then look through the rest of the drawers. There's a bottle of half-full whiskey, a gun, and that's it. The rest of the drawers are completely empty.

I focus on opening all of the letters but I'm not reading them, I'm just carefully opening them, taking a picture, and then folding them back up and putting them away in the order that they were in when I pulled them out so that Giovanni doesn't realize that I was here.

"So how are things with the Berardi?" He asks me as we're both looking around the dark basement. It's even darker this time than the last time I was here because the little bulb above the board isn't even on, we only have our flashlights.

"I'm giving you the finger right now," I mumble.

"I'm serious," He assures me. "I don't approve of it but that doesn't matter to you, so how's it going?"

"It's fine," I say to him, not really wanting to talk about how things are going with Dante because it all sounds too pathetic that just saying any of it out loud makes me want to vomit.

"Just fine?" Coleman wonders suspiciously. "You're risking everything for something that's just fine?"

"That's not what I meant, it's just weird talking about it," I try to explain to him, continuing to go through the letters and taking pictures that are legible so that I can read them later. "But it's good, I guess. The only damn good thing that's happened in this entire situation."

"That's good."

"I've been thinking about what you said, what would happen if it was me or him. I'd let him kill me," I inform Coleman.

"You can't be serious."

"As a heart attack," I confirm. "I don't want to die but I'd rather him not die than me."

"Vera, I'm going to sound extremely selfish when I say this but you've got to stay alive, for me at least. I can't do all of this without you," Coleman tells me from the other side of the room.