"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." —
Stephen King
"Poor girl, you don't know how much I pitied you every time you came here, thinking she was your friend," he said, still looking at me.
"Almost from the moment you arrived, she did everything she could to get you out. I used to shake my head as she encouraged you to continue to receive that one," he beckoned at Ibrahim with his chin, "in your bed, deceiving you that it was the only way to have some footing in the house, though she knew full well that the more accepting you were of his son, the more it angered Omar and pushed you away from him. She thought he would have sent you away years ago and didn't anticipate you staying for as long as you have."
"But the minister had so many other women. Amanda, Clara, Lauralee, Clementina…just to name a few," I say, my head still spinning. "I was the least of her problems."
"You were the one he called his wife. You were her only problem," Lucian answered. "Until recently."
"Where was your daughter in all of this?" kamsir asked, speaking for the first time. "When he used to come here to sleep with Maria, was it also in the presence of your daughter?"
"When Catherine was about 8 or 9 years old, her mother stopped her from sleeping here with us, and moved her to the servants' quarters upstairs," he answered before turning to look at me again. "It was just about the time you arrived."
I nodded, remembering when I had asked madam Maria why her young daughter didn't sleep in their quarters and only came there for her meals, and how her reply had been something about shielding her from seeing the full impact of her father's debilitating condition.
"But she knew. The girl knew," Lucian continues. "Before her mother moved her away, she saw enough to understand what was happening. And as she grew, she knew the man's early morning visits were not innocent."
"You said the minister's wife was her only problem until only recently," the officer markinterjects. "What changed?"
Lucian smiles. "About two years ago, Omar stopped coming here completely. I would overhear her calling him on the phone early in the morning, begging him to come back to her, but he never returned to her bed again. It became clear that someone else had replaced her, but she had no idea who that person was. Until recently," he starts to laugh, a malicious and vindictive laughter that shows he is glad to finally be exposing the woman who has hurt him for so long. "Where does a woman start when her competition is her own child?"
"Allahadulihi!" kamsir exclaims, putting his hands on his chest , just as Ibrahim starts laughing.
Officer mark brings out a handkerchief to clean his face, while Yusuf looks at lucian with his mouth agape.
But I am not surprised.
I think on some subconscious level, I knew.
"She found out a few days before Omar died.
Every evening after that, she wept like a wounded animal. I couldn't even tell what hurt her the most; that Omar was ravaging her daughter, or that she had been replaced by her." He paused, almost as if reliving what happened. "The night before he died, she didn't get any sleep. She was just sitting on that chair, crying, and mixing that poison. The next day, from the many trips she made upstairs, she administered it to him more than once. At one point, she even came and poured it directly into a jug of water."
I remember when she brought water to the Minister after his altercation with Ibrahim, and my blood ran cold.
"She was on edge the whole day, waiting for the poison to consume him. But Omar was a strong man, even at that age," Lucian continued. "At about 3 AM, we heard noises coming from upstairs. We heard Omar shouting at somebody, we heard a struggle, someone screaming, and then after a while…we heard nothing. At that point, she got up and left the room, only to return about thirty minutes later, trembling from head to toe. Her nightwear was disheveled, almost like she had been in some sort of fight. My guess is that she went upstairs to see what happened, probably went upstairs to check on Omar, maybe to see if he was dead or alive, got into a fight with him, and then killed him."
The room is pin drop silent for several minutes. Even Ibrahim is no longer laughing.
We are all stomped by the realization, the confirmation that madam maria, good natured and maternal Maria i, is the Minister's murderer.
"Where is Catherine now?" officer Mark asks.
"She was in the house this morning," kamsir says. "She even helped get Zeynep ready for the day.
"
"When she came back home after the murder, from the tearful discussions I saw the two of them having, I think her mother confessed what she had done," he answers. "And when she came back here this morning after assisting Omar's wife, and realised her mother had run away, she grabbed her own bags and left." He shakes his head, but this time, can't use laughter to hide the pain he feels. "There were three people in this world who knew that the girl was conceived several weeks after my accident. Three of us who knew she wasn't born months early, as her mother tried to make everyone believe. Three of us who knew the truth behind Catherine's paternity; Omar, Omar, and I."
There is pin drop silence in the room.
"He was sleeping with…with his own daughter?" Yusuf bleats, breaking the silence.
"oh, great heaven I didn't learn English for this!" officer mark exclaims, unable to maintain his composure. "Sir, I have heard enough. I just need to find your wife. If you can give me an idea how to locate her, it will be much appreciated."
"I don't know about Maria, but I have an idea where you can locate Catherine," he answers.
"In New York ?" I ask. "She told me she has an apartment there."
"If it's dad's hideout in New-York, I locked up that place the day after he died," Ibrahim says. "He has always had a small flat there where he entertains his women. I went there to change the locks, so that none of those girls would get any funny ideas. I saw what I thought were a woman's belongings, but I threw them in the garbage without even thinking twice about it."
I nodded. It all made sense to me now.
"Daluchi isn't in New-York. She's here in Boston," Lucian says. "Maybe she'll be able to tell you how to locate her mother."
He gives us an address in town, which I recognize as madam Maria's older sister's house, one I have accompanied her to several times.
"Thank you for everything sir. You have been really helpful," officer Mark says, before looking around. "Isn't there someone here to assist you? Someone to change you?" It was a polite way of referencing the very obvious smell of stale feaces in the room.
Lucian shakes his head. "My wife stopped my caregiver from coming a few years ago. She said it had become too expensive, but I know Omar was still paying for it. Sometimes, she would clean me, and sometimes she wouldn't. I am used to stewing in my waste. It is the insects on my back that cause me discomfort."
Braving it, officer Mark walks closer and flips the man over, and we all scream at the sight of maggots crawling on the old man's skin. I see a dirty plate on the floor, and from the dried remains, it is clear he hasn't been fed anytime recently.
He has been left to literally waste away.
In less than an hour, Lucian has been cleaned and ferried off to a hospital in New-York, while the rest of us prepare to go in search of Catherine.
Kamsir opts not to follow us, drained from all the revelations of the day, and I can't blame him. I always knew the minister's life was messy, and sleeping with mother and daughter is not something he has not done before. But sleeping with a girl he fathered is on a whole new level of mess.
We rode with the officer, this time, not in the police van but Ibrahim's car.
The last thing we want is to scare Catherine off before we get to her, and the police van will most surely announce our arrival long before we are ready to.
We are soon at the modest one-storey house, and I make sure I am walking in the lead. I want to be the first person she sees, not the police.
"Zeynep," comes her voice, even before I see her.
I look up, and there she is, cowering by the door.
Her eyes widen in fright at the sight of the men with me, and I can't tell who she looks more frightened of, the officers or Ibrahim.
"Catherine," I answered, giving her a reassuring smile. "Why did you leave the house?"
"My father told you," she states, not asking.
Realising she isn't aware that her true father is the man whose bed she has been warming, I nod.