Young Writers Society

Viggo and Nyssa are on the run from Nyssa's fiancé, a cop who framed Viggo for murder. They just had a fight after Viggo brought a dog back home. Nyssa told him to watch the TV and left.

To know more, read Chapter 10.2.

The dog hated the vet on sight. It shook like a leaf all the time it spent on the metallic slab. The fifty-something-year-old examined it as gently as he could. It had neither tattoos nor chips. Nyssa was grateful for that. She liked how the poor thing’s undying devotion rattled Viggo – rather like her own. She declined the vet’s offer to put a tracking device in the animal. Too easy to track. Getting caught because of their furry friend wouldn’t be fun.

Not that it would matter, of course, if Peter Carlsen abandoned them.

Trying not to think too hard about that, she bought a leash, dry dog food and dishes after her visit to the vet. She stopped for fresh fruits on her way back, and vegetables, and even flowers. Her arms were loaded with those purchases when she came back home.

Home. She loved the sound of that. But how much of a home could it be without…? Oh, hell.

The house was quiet as a grave. Not a footstep, not a whisper. Her heart sank. She wished she hadn’t left the dog locked in the car. At least, she wouldn’t be alone. If Viggo had abandoned her, she was going to want something cuddly to hug to herself.

Nyssa, fingers trembling, found the kitchen exactly the way she had left it – breakfast, plates and all on the table. She dropped the brown paper bags on the counter and started putting the groceries away. So empty. So wrong. Her guts were tied in knots. She needed to know now.

Viggo wasn’t in the living room. The TV was on, sound off. The screen displayed her face. Underneath, a banner read, Remember Nyssa.

She sighed. Wherever she went, she saw her face plastered. All over. And those damn words: Remember Nyssa.

No, damn it, forget all about Nyssa!

Footage of Russ followed, interrupting her bemoaning. Her stomach twisted into knots. It hurt – just seeing him. She heard his cold voice, Good girl, and a shiver of loathing ran through her.

She hated it when he called her that! It was like a trigger, a damn code and bam! The doors to her personal hell opened again. The bitter smell of phantom sex overpowered her. She reeled. She could still feel his hands on her skin and the chilly, creepy, sticky feeling of being soiled.

She shook her head, focusing on the news flash. Russ was walking up the steps of an official-looking building, wearing creased clothes and his bad-day face. Fear filled her until she realized that she wouldn’t bear the consequences of his sour mood.

Det. Russel Pierce brought in for questioning.

Nyssa laughed. It left a bad taste in her mouth, but she laughed.

He looked like a man who had been thoroughly humiliated. Good. Time for him to get a taste of his own medicine. Hell, she might be a fierce advocate of forgiveness, but revenge sure was sweet. Sweet and bitter, just the way he had taught her to like it.

But even that honey wasn’t worth one more minute of not knowing whether Viggo had abandoned her. Nyssa turned away from the TV set. Her heart missed a beat at the sight of the hulking male shape in the doorway.

“What the hell did you do?!”

She stopped just short of jumping out of her skin. His roar was pure fury, enough to make her wish that she could just cower in fear. But, in the next five seconds, she realized that Viggo hadn’t left and she was so happy. He was standing there, his face the color of ashes. He looked more broken than angry. Listless. Purposeless. Sick with it. Still, he hadn’t left. He had stayed to have it out with her. They would make it. Somehow, they would. And she was so grateful.

“You’re here!” She jumped and threw her arms around his neck. “You didn’t leave!”

He wasn’t glad. He wasn’t grateful. He didn’t feel glad. His body was stiff, unyielding. It was like hugging a piece of wood. His hands closed on her shoulders, so tight they bruised and hurt.

He pushed her away. “What did you do?”

His voice was now low, calm – cold water, soft but no less lethal, flowing over smooth rock. His eyes blazed with murderous rage – aimed at her. But as much as his anger was terrible, it was also simple: pain and a sense of betrayal. No pleasure. No lust. No anticipation. She saw that, and she remained calm. Neither the anger nor the hurt he could possibly deal frightened her.

She even managed to smile. She licked her lips in anticipation of the words, “I framed Russ for my murder.”

It sounded so easy. It hadn’t been hard, and she had enjoyed it – lots of fun, of plotting, lots of nights spent listening to Russ’s breathing and hating the warmth of him, the noise of him.

She had only righted a revolting wrong. Russ, a dirty cop, the worst of the worst, a blackguard, had been free, had ruled over her, while Viggo, an innocent wrongly convicted, an honorable man, had been rotting away in the cold darkness of his concrete cage. It had been life backward. They unfairness of it had hurt her a little.

She still remembered a passage from Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff compared Hareton and Linton: “But there’s this difference; one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver.” In high-school, the romantic in her had thought you couldn’t do worse than ruining a child’s potential. Viggo was no child but he was no less ruined, and she had played a part in his downfall. She needed to make it right.

The deeper she had delved into the Defoe case, into Russ’s shady business dealings, the clearer the answer had become. If anyone deserved to be framed, it was Russ. His worst sin was framing Viggo, after all. His second worst sin was murder – deaths he wouldn’t ever pay for. His third worst sin was betraying his badge. He deserved to lose it, ten times over. His fourth worst sin was killing her innocence. She didn’t think he had any of his own to lose but she could make sure that the next woman would be forewarned.

Yes, it was fitting. Perfect, really.

“Why would you do such a thing?!” Viggo cried out.

“Why not?” she sneered. “I’m finally putting my degree in Criminal science and my experience as a crime scene tech to good use. Think about it. That’s got ‘professional frame-up artist’ written all over it. Hell, we can open up shop together and you’ll be my charming assistant.”

He wasn’t amused. He tried to scream something at her, but he was so pissed off that it came out as a sort of wordless gurgle. She struggled a little against his hold. It was so tight that she expected his fingers to leave permanent dents in her flesh.

“W…t…th…ell…”

She thrust her chin out. She hated being physically overpowered and, for once, she didn’t have to swallow back her resentment. Quite to the contrary, letting it flow was the healthy thing to do.

“I did an expert job for him too! Nothing crass like a perfectly clean lock of hair. The frame job isn’t so much in elements I added as it is in the things I took away.”

She let him see the flash of pride in her eyes. She knew it would infuriate him. He shoved her against the wall. Her back made a thumping sound, her breath made a whooshing sound. It hurt but she didn’t let him shut her up that easily, “Like the shower curtain. It went mysteriously missing.” She snapped her fingers. “Poof! I told Russ I had tripped and ripped it. Paid for it too,” she mumbled and grimaced. “They’re going to find one broken plastic ring in my trunk. With maybe a couple of hairs. Just enough that they’ll get my DNA off it.”

“Damn it,” he choked out.

“And of course, there is the small matter of the diary.”

He repeated broodingly, “The diary?”

“Didn’t you watch the news? I told you to.”

But somehow, she had betrayed how important the diary was and he latched onto that, “Damn it, Nyssa…Explain yourself!” She looked away, this time. There was too much pain there. Viggo took her silence as resistance and shook her a little. “Talk!”

“I kept records. From even before I first visited you in jail. I documented everything. I took pictures, I recorded videos and I taped some of our discussions too. And I wrote down. Everything. I wrote everything that happened! The investigation you helped me conduct, the things he did to me. How he scared me, how he threatened me, what I found out. I wrote about every demeaning thing he put me through.” His eyes gentled some. She breathed in and out deeply, steadying herself. “I kept everything in a safe. And I kept the key in my locker at work.”

He frowned. She read condemnation in those stormy blue eyes. And maybe she deserved it, because she had been quite mercenary, even in being a victim, those last few months. But she didn’t care about right and wrong. It had allowed her a small amount of power, of control over her own life.

“So, they started looking into you and…”

“The minute they figured out you had an accomplice, they started looking into your old acquaintances and visitors. I don’t know whether they identified me as your ‘lawyer’ yet. Doesn’t matter. I was sure to attract their attention anyway – if only because I had gone so completely incommunicado.”

“We always knew they would look your way,” he mumbled, his eyes thoughtful, maybe only now seeing that their plans had inevitably led there.

Killing Nyssa had been the only practicable way to untangle her from the manhunt launched after him.

“Yes. The only change I made to our plans was to use their suspicions as an opportunity to…die. They must have searched the house I shared with Russ. With its missing curtain. With my laptop – it contains several videos of me shoring up my courage and trying to find the right words to break up with him.”

Viggo muttered something. Nyssa didn’t know whether it was ‘lord’ or ‘fuck’ but she got the gist of it.

“They must have looked for my car and for my phone, which were in the ocean. They must have found the curtain ring in the car, along with my phone and the bag I supposedly packed to go to my mom’s, although she’s been dead for a while now.”

That part didn’t fit in quite as seamlessly as she would have wished. While engineering her death, she had tried to make the sham all the more believable because the overabundance of evidence was delivered in small, subtle increments. Only two points were far from subtle.

One was Russ’s belief that she was at her mom’s. It was such a stupid lie, really, so easily disproved. Why would he ever tell it? No, they would have to conclude that she had fooled him about her visits to her mother. She had told so many people about her mom and about her visits back home along the years. They would have to wonder why she had lied about something so innocent. They would have to wonder what else she had lied about.

The other problem was the timing of her death. It would have been better to ‘die’ a few months before Viggo ever got out of jail – years, ideally. But she’d had no choice. Plus, would Viggo have been willing to escape if Russ had already been behind bars?

She would just have to table on the investigators’ belief in coincidences. Hopefully, they would take what she had written of Viggo at face value – that she believed in his innocence, that he had boosted up her courage and that they had only ever lent each other moral support.

Maybe it would fly.

And maybe pigs would fly too.

“They must have combed through Russ’s phone records – since I supposedly called him after you escaped. All they’d have found is a call from a disposable cell, the number of which is recorded into his own phone under the heading ‘baby’. When they looked into it, they must have found that it’s not active anymore and that it’s only ever been used to call Russ – mostly calls in the middle of the night. Ain’t that strange? It fits nicely with all the cheating he does.”

His eyes widened. Well, she had never done things by halves.

“They must have searched my locker and desk at work and find the key. I arranged things so Levowsky could go into my safe. They probably asked him to. Considering how time-sensitive their investigation is, I mean. I bet he won’t forget my diary any time soon. It’ll teach him too!” she burst out. “Next time an employee tells him her boyfriend’s been knocking her around, maybe he’ll believe her.”

Nyssa hadn’t forgiven her paunchy supervisor for that yet. The heat of her resentment toward him still surprised her. He had never raised a hand against her, which only meant that she felt no fear to douse her anger. Maybe it was fueled by shame too – shame at everything that had gone on with him before.

While she had still been deep in alcoholic fumes, she had apparently…God, she couldn’t remember any of it. She couldn’t believe it either. It was so ludicrous, why would she email lewd propositions to all her professional contacts? She had never been thus inclined and she couldn’t imagine changing that much once booze freed her from her inhibitions.

Levowsky had probably saved her life by putting her through mandatory counseling but she couldn’t forgive him for it. She had a hard time forgiving anyone who had seen how low she had sunk.

“So, they’ve found my diary,” she went on, her voice shaky. “I included my mounting doubts about your guilt and the things I dug out in Russ’s past. It won’t be enough to get him indicted but it’ll throw a shadow. Especially the money. I may have withdrawn all of it, but it left a trail and I gave them all matters of clues to finding it.”

“Jesus, Nyssa,” he said again, dangerously calm.

He released her. As soon as his hands lifted off her shoulders, she started rubbing them gingerly. But she didn’t stop explaining. She didn’t want to, now that she had begun, “Looking through Russ’s things, as I expect that they’re doing right now, they’ll find his unregistered backup gun. They’ll find that it’s three bullets short. They’ll find a muddy shovel in his trunk. And maybe a drop or two of my blood.”

He snorted. She smiled, knowing what he was thinking.

“I know. He would never be so careless.”

They were silent confederates again for a moment. No, they both knew all too well that Russ would never have made such mistakes. Unfortunately, or fortunately, they were alone in that belief.

Finally, no less calmly, he asked, “They’ll convict him, you think?”

She frowned, thinking hard about that. It wasn’t an easy question and there was no easy answer.

“I don’t know. It’s always tricky to convict without a dead-body but the diary will weigh heavily against him.” She closed her eyes, breathed in and out again, trying to keep nausea at bay this time. “I wish I hadn’t left it, though.”

“Why?”

“It leaked.”

To know more about Nyssa's diary, read Chapter 11.2.