I tried to speak. No words came out. It was as if I had suddenly lost the power of speech. Just as well. I didn’t know what to say anyway.
“Your turn,” Cilia said, indicating the chessboard.
I moved my remaining rook three spaces.
Cilia brought her queen out.
“You want me to tell you about it, don’t you?” she said.
I reached for my iced gin-tea, hesitated.
Cilia chuckled.
“The drink is fine, Mr. McKenzie,” she said. “Really it is.”
I left the glass undisturbed just the same.
Cilia continued her story.
“My father came home after a night of carousing. He was visibly drunk. I knew he would be. I waited for him by the pool. I was dressed in the skimpiest bikini. I invited him to join me for a drink. Do you believe, Mr. McKenzie, that the sight of me in a bikini would make a man such as my father pause?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I placed two grams of my analog into my father’s drink. He fell unconscious in twenty minutes. I rolled him into the swimming pool, clothes and all. The shock of water awakened him, but by then he was suffering from acute loss of muscle control. He thrashed about ineffectually and drowned. I went to bed—after first tidying up, of course. His body was discovered by a maid the next morning. An autopsy was performed, and that worried me. I was concerned that Father had died before his system could absorb the drug. However, while multiple toxicology screens of blood and bile samples revealed that my father’s blood alcohol level was enormously high, there was no trace of my analog. Perhaps, if the medical examiner had looked closer—but why would he? My father had a history of alcohol abuse; there had been many witnesses to his abuse the previous evening. His death was ruled an accident. I inherited everything.”
“Do you realize what you’re saying?” I asked.
“My father abused my mother, our maids, and God knows who else. He raped me for two years. Yet in the end, it was I who fucked him.”
“That’s murder.”
“I prefer to think of it as irony.”
The corners of Cilia’s thin lips curled upward in a slight smile, yet her voice contained no trace of emotion.
“Should we continue our game?” she asked. “I think I’m winning.”
I moved a bishop into a middle square, slamming it down on the board harder than I should have. Cilia’s hand hovered above her knight. She wanted to move it but realized that I had pinned her. If she moved the piece now, I would attack her king.
“Very nice,” she said, bringing a rook up to protect the knight.
I continued the assault, pressuring Cilia’s queen with my own rook. Cilia surprised me by taking the rook with her other knight.
“What happened next?” she said. “Oh, yes. Robert. Several months passed, yet Robert did not change a bit. In many ways he became more and more like Father. I was somewhat disingenuous earlier when I suggested that I did not know about Merodie until after my brother’s funeral. Of course I knew about her. My brother took particular delight in listing the sex acts he forced her to perform—acts that would make a hard-core porn star retch. He was proud of himself, proud that he could corrupt a child.
“Eventually, Merodie became pregnant,” Cilia said. “She informed my brother, and my brother rejected her. He claimed he wasn’t the father and called her a whore—he acted exactly the way you’d expect an egocentric child to act. In the past, Robert was able to run to Daddy, who would throw money at the girl and make the problem go away. Unfortunately—for him—Robert was forced to come to me for the money necessary to pay off Merodie. I refused to give it to him. He threatened to sue me for his share of our father’s estate. I told him that was his prerogative.
“As was typical with my brother, instead of securing an attorney, he went that same evening to a bar and became drunk. Later, he called me from the bar and requested a ride home. It had begun to snow heavily. By the time I arrived, several inches had already fallen. It was the first stage of a massive blizzard. You might remember it. Seventeen inches of snow fell in about five and a half hours. While at the bar, I slipped a couple of grams of my analog into Robert’s drink, then hustled him out to his car before the drug could take effect.