They stopped before Room 16. Without pause or ceremony, Becca lifted her hand and knocked on the door.
“Come in, Becca.”
Rachel wore a soft velour robe the color of dawn, closed high around her neck. She stood with her back to them, looking out a large oblong window, a patchwork of colorful stained glass. The room was large and well furnished. There were few personal belongings among the tasteful décor. Rachel traveled light.
She turned and smiled at Becca. In the brief time since the nurse placed the call, Rachel had brushed her hair and applied lipstick, but her posture was bowed and she looked ancient. All Jo could read on her worn face was fierce relief and genuine love.
“I knew you’d be all right. I knew it.”
“No, Rachel, you didn’t.” Becca closed the door behind them and stood close beside Jo.
Jo waited, and so did Rachel, but Becca seemed incapable of further speech. The look of loss and betrayal in her eyes was unbearable.
“She means your son could have killed us both last night.” Jo spoke to Rachel with great restraint. “And he could have killed us two days ago when he cut the brakes of my car.”
“Becca wasn’t supposed to be with you.” Rachel’s voice emerged as a sudden hiss and Jo almost recoiled. A wild denial crossed her withered face. “You were supposed to have breakfast with me that morning, Becca! You promised me you would!”
“Stop shouting at us. And sit down.” Jo took three steps and touched Rachel’s elbow with pragmatic detachment. She guided her to the side of the wide, raised bed and helped her sit. Becca stood frozen near the doorway.
Rachel brushed her finger across her lower lip, wiping away spittle with a wince of repugnance. Her face cleared, and she looked up at Jo calmly. “None of this had to come out, Joanne. We have you to thank for raising these old ghosts. And I don’t know whether to hate you for it or thank you. Both, perhaps.”
“I believe that.” Jo stepped back from the bed and crouched on her heels slowly, making herself as unthreatening as possible.
She did believe Rachel, and that amazed her. Rachel’s facial expressions had convinced Jo she wanted this study to succeed, for the truth to be known. Some part of her psyche had badly wanted confession, this very confrontation. And another part of her had arranged to have Becca burn to death last night. Both were Rachel’s absolute truths, and Jo found this amoral dichotomy incomprehensible.
“You were afraid Becca and I would learn the truth about what happened to her parents. So you asked your son to come back to Seattle.”
“I paid my son very well.” Rachel folded her veined hands in her lap, and Becca stared at them. “Loren has been in and out of prison these past years. I’ve had to cut him out of my heart. I’ve learned he’ll do anything to finance his habit. Anything at all.” She wouldn’t look at Becca.
“You paid him to break into my office,” Jo continued. “And into the Bentley. To put that doll on the front porch. And to set fire to the house last night.”
“Yes,” Rachel said.
“And to plant a bottle of Scotch in my bedroom.” Becca’s voice was soft, and Rachel looked at her at last. “Rachel?”
“Do you have any idea how much I loved her?” Rachel’s tone was equally tender. “Try to remember that, if you can. All of this tragedy was born in the purest love I’ve ever known. I would have given my life for her.”
Rachel looked back at the window, and the stained glass threw a lattice of distorted color across her features. “If it matters, and I doubt it matters, I was out of my mind on prescription pills at the time. I had been for years.” She smiled mirthlessly. “Like mother, like son, I suppose. Loren’s addictions consumed him, but I conquered mine, finally. Well enough to help you tackle yours, Becca, when you needed me. But I was crazy that night. I wanted Maddie to leave Scott and run away with me, immediately. I would have left my son, my practice, everything. She refused, of course. I had hidden my feelings for her well until then, and I believe she was shocked by my proposal. Even repelled.”
Rachel glanced at Becca. “Does any of this surprise you? It shouldn’t. I fell in love with your mother, but she rejected me entirely. She wouldn’t leave your father, wouldn’t even discuss it. Maddie was devoted to Scott, despite all his faults. Not to Mitch. Not to me. She never loved me.” She fell silent.
“So you returned to the house that night, after the birthday party.” Jo was seeing it unfold, hearing Madelyn Healy whisper in her mind, telling her what happened. “You confronted Becca’s mother in the kitchen. Scott Healy joined you there. You’d brought a gun with you?”
“In my delirium, I thought I would have to subdue Scott. When he interrupted Maddie and me in the kitchen, I raised the gun at him, and I fired. I didn’t see Maddie lunge in front of him before I pressed the trigger. I didn’t see her, Becca.” Rachel swallowed, and Jo heard the dry crackling in her throat. “I caught your mother as she fell, and I cradled her on the floor in my arms as she died.”
But then Rachel’s face changed, and Jo realized she was looking at something much more atavistic, more alien even than her own strange distance from the world. Rachel looked serene; cruel and content. “I had to shoot Scott to keep him away from us. He had no business with us in those last moments. That was my time with Maddie. Finally, Mitch’s infernal little brother was out of the picture. It was right, at last. I carry those moments in my heart, Becca.”
Becca resembled a chained prisoner who had just inhaled poison gas. She knelt beside Jo and looked up at Rachel like a child hearing a particularly dreadful bedtime story. “My parents died on my fifth birthday. They gave me a birthday party that day, in our backyard. I remember the grass, music, other kids around, my uncle and aunt. You were there, Rachel. You gave me a present.”
“Yes, I did. I gave you a doll.”
“The doll was bloody that night, as I held it in the living room. And it wasn’t my mother who handed it to me. Not at the party, and not that night. It was you.”
Rachel nodded. “I wanted so badly to comfort you, Becca. You were so little. You were weeping, afraid, you looked so bereft and alone. I have always loved you, so much. I picked up your doll and gave it to you on my way out.”
“There was blood on your hands,” Becca said. “And on one of the doll’s hands.”
“Yes.” Air seemed to leak out of Rachel slowly, and she sat slumped on the bed. Her eyes closed with a relief that struck Jo as entirely genuine.
“I can’t ask for your forgiveness, Becca. But in honor of our many long years of friendship — in honor of the healing I’ve given you — can you find it in your heart, please, to leave me in peace? Let the horrors of my conscience be punishment enough, for the little time I have left. I promise you, they are horror indeed.”
And again, Rachel was telling the absolute truth.
Becca sat motionless. “You paid Loren to kill me. To kill the woman I love.”
“Yes,” Rachel whispered.
Becca’s fingers were ice-cold as they closed around Jo’s, but her voice was low and steady. “You allowed the world to believe, for thirty years, that a woman you say you cherished was a murderer. You let her daughter believe it. I won’t save you from paying the price, Rachel.”
Becca rose to her feet, and rested her lips against the top of Rachel’s bent head. She turned and went to the door, and Jo followed her. Becca didn’t look back, but Jo did. Rachel was sitting quietly on the bed, watching a red flashing light turn through the colored panes.