The Clairvoyants(98)

“You found the trailer for the two of you, like you found the cottage for me,” I said.

“I still love you.” He shook his head as if these feelings disappointed him. He threaded his fingers with mine. “Even if you did try to kill me. Even if you didn’t waste much time finding someone new.”

“You asked Mary Rae to marry you,” I said.

He squeezed my hand. “You don’t believe that I love you?”

I considered William’s eyes and the smooth curve of his shoulders beneath his shirt. You don’t ever know what someone is capable of. You can suppose, you can guess. Maybe he loved me once, or thought he did. I couldn’t tell anything from his face.

“Do you ever wonder if it would be easier to confess?” I said.

I felt his breath in my hair, along my neck.

“I just did,” he whispered.

Out on the water a bell sounded.

“The church in Aurora,” he said. “It’s evening services.”

“Bells used to be blessed,” I told him.

He slid his hand to my cheek, and I tried not to flinch.

“They were struck by lightning in the church spires. The bell ringers, too. The clergy believed that demons lived in the air and caused the storms, so the bells were blessed.”

“Always the lightning expert,” he said, softly.

And there was a moment, a slip of something fleeting and lovely, in which I imagined Del and my mother settling down in the old house, and another version of William and me, settling down in this place by the lake. I could imagine evenings during warm-lit sunset, watering the pot of sad flowers, the sound of the lake slapping the shore, the bugs pinging the screens.

“Could two people stay together knowing what we know about each other?” he said. “You never told me what you thought about the prints.”

I couldn’t erase the photo of Del, the fact of her pregnancy, her confusion about how it had happened.

“They’re beautiful,” I said, and it was the one, true, honest thing.

I felt him begin to gather me in his arms, and I let him lean in to kiss me before I shoved him away. He was unprepared and he lost his footing. I could have taken the iron doorstop and struck him. There were weapons at my disposal, a variety of ways I might have killed him, dumped his body into the lake, and let the currents sluice him into the northern marshes. I could have revenged Mary Rae’s murder, Del’s rape, the rapes of the other girls who had no idea he’d violated them in their sleep.

I could have taken the candlestick from the mantel.

But I had something better planned for him.

He stumbled back against the duck-carved chair, and I left the cottage and ran up the long set of steps to Geoff’s car. I felt my progress slowed by panic, a heaviness in my legs I experienced attempting escape in nightmares. I’d left the car door unlocked. (“Nothing to steal in there, eh?” Geoff had always said.) I tossed the little clock onto the seat and started the car. William’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, and as he stepped out into the road I pressed the gas, and he leapt out of the way of the car. I could have run him over. All of these things might have been deemed self-defense. They would have fit into the story I planned to tell Officer Paul.

I drove to my apartment first. I expected William to pursue me on his Triumph, to appear at any moment, but he did not, still confused, puzzling out his next move. He would call Geoff. But Geoff didn’t have his phone at work. The apartment was as vacant as I’d left it—my pallet on the floor holding my shape from the night before. I went to the closet and slid the cedar panel aside and slipped the portfolio and the journal out from their hiding spot. I got back into the car and noticed my phone had three missed calls from William. Rather than listen to his messages, I drove the long route into Milton, watching in my rearview mirror, my heart racing and jubilant. I arrived on Main Street not knowing where the police department was. I pulled into the Viking Lanes parking lot and clasped the wheel with my shaking hands. I wasn’t sure if I could do what I’d intended to do.

I scrambled through my bag and found the scrap of paper Del had given me with Alice’s phone number. I punched the buttons, clumsily, getting the wrong number at first, redialing twice before she answered. Alice met me in the parking lot and together we took Officer Paul the negatives, the necklace, the journal. The Milton precinct was across the street from the Shurfine market, and I sat in a molded plastic chair and watched through the front window as women pushed carts across the uneven tar lot, loaded bags of groceries into their trunks. When Officer Paul came out I told him my story. I felt like a child again in elementary school—reciting the correct responses, watching the teacher’s face beam with pride. Paul put a hand on my shoulder and patted it. He wrote down the address to the lake house and promised to let me know immediately when all was safe.

Alice and I went to her grandmother’s. It was late afternoon, and Alice’s mother, Erika, greeted us at the door in a bikini worn under a white linen shirt, looking like exotic evidence that, beyond the dark confines of Milton, bright oranges hung from glossy trees, and beaches stretched white and blinding—the water a rare green, like malachite. Erika grabbed each of us by the hand and ushered us into the house, through the living room to the kitchen. She mixed us gin and tonics, and we took them outside, where we sat in her lounge chairs in the backyard, telling our story until fireflies emerged, tiny, weightless embers bobbing over the place where Alice and Mary Rae had practiced their twirling.