The Last Housewife (90)

“Fuck you,” I said, and he smiled.

“Awake, but no less stupid.” He wrestled me out of the van. Up close, the Hilltop was somehow larger than it had looked from the road. Its pale stone walls rose so high I had to lean back to see the top of them. There were flowers everywhere: neatly arranged in flower beds around the perimeter, in boxes hanging from the windows. Aster, verbena, and goldenrod, Clem’s favorite.

The Disciple grunted and heaved Nicole’s body over his shoulder.

“Why did you take my hood off?” I asked, feeling coldness wash through me. Why would they let me see the Hilltop?

The Lieutenant only smiled and shoved me forward. In we went.

The place was even more of a castle inside. The ceilings soared, stone walls punctuated with vast windows. The Lieutenant pushed me by the shoulders, making me move quickly, following the Disciple, Nicole’s waterfall of red hair hanging over his shoulder. I twisted my head in every direction, absorbing as much as I could, trying to commit the details to memory as much as look for clues.

Massive paintings framed in gold hung on the walls, dark scenes from old-world masters. I tried to pause to catch details, but the Lieutenant shoved me. “Keep moving,” he barked. “This isn’t a tour.”

Was this the home Don would’ve chosen if he’d managed to build an empire? It seemed like his taste, but I couldn’t be sure. We rounded a corner, passed a door to another vast room, and I stopped in my tracks, Lieutenant be damned.

Weapons hung on foreboding red walls: mounted swords, crossbows, sinister daggers, ancient toothed devices to torture infidels and witches. In the corner sat a cannon.

The Lieutenant seized my throat, growling, “I said no stopping.” But I didn’t care. A weight lifted from my shoulders, my chest filling with light.

Sometimes, you just know. Sometimes, when you have a feeling deep in your gut, you have to trust your instincts. No matter the red herrings, the people trying to dissuade you, life beating you down. I’d been right all along: this red room could only belong to Don Rockwell.

I let the Lieutenant swing open a door at the end of the hallway and shove me down a set of stairs, thinking all the while, It’s him.

We stepped into a dim, cavernous basement. I wasn’t surprised to see more weapons on the walls, and gardening equipment, shovels, trowels, a watering can scattered over a long, low table near a single door.

All of it so familiar.

The Disciple dumped Nicole’s body beside the long table, and the Lieutenant shoved me into a wooden chair so hard the chair and I tipped backward. He tugged the rope around my wrists, feeling its looseness. “Is this what had you feeling so chipper?”

He made quick work of retying the knot, until the rope dug into my wrists, but I didn’t care. My eyes were fixed on the stairs. “Is Rachel coming?”

The Lieutenant lumbered into the corner, next to the Disciple. “My advice is to shut up and enjoy these last moments. Say your prayers to God.”

“Don will come, too, right?” I remained glued to the stairs. “He has to.”

The Lieutenant said nothing, and in the silence, I heard it: creaking footsteps. She was coming. I sat up straighter, nerves sparking, breath shallow.

Rachel, after all this time.

There was a final creak, and Laurel Hargrove stepped out of the stairwell and into the light. My Laurel.

The world faded into the white noise of shock. The woman I’d loved and lost stood before me in vivid color, her blond hair long as ever, pale skin flushed pink, eyes the same rich, dark brown, wide and blinking. Improbably, time had frozen her. She was the same as I remembered that last time I’d turned over my shoulder to find her in her cap and gown, measuring each step I took away from her.

My body, bound in the chair, became immaterial, as if I’d taken her death from her, a trade we’d worked out in an instant. And I believed, for a moment, that in the ferocity of my longing, the depths of my obsession, I’d somehow willed her into being.

She stared back, frozen at the bottom of the stairs.

She was alive. I’d grieved her, dreamed of her, given up everything to find her, and she’d been alive this whole time.

“The name she gave us is Shay Deroy,” said the Lieutenant. “And it checked out. Chief says he’d know if she was law enforcement, but I don’t think we can trust his judgment anymore. The man lost his mind over one of the daughters—”

“A trailer park brat,” the Disciple interjected. “Two years out of high school. See for yourself; she’s lying right there.”

Laurel took a rough breath but didn’t avert her gaze.

How was she alive? How was she… My thoughts froze when I realized. She was wearing a conservative, high-necked dress, buttons down the chest. Her legs glimmered with the slight sheen of pantyhose. The daughter’s uniform.

“We told the Philosopher this was coming with the Chief,” said the Disciple. “Same with those idiots in the city. They’re liabilities. I’m telling you, they’re going to mess up, right before the big move. I know the Chief’s useful, but—”

“Leave.” Laurel’s voice was soft, the way it had been in college, but now there was an edge of steel.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the men exchange looks. “The girls were planning to run, and we stopped them,” the Disciple started. “The Philosopher will want to—”