Until the day he caught me, just as we were nearing the end of the story.
Leonard was on a trip to Hanford — as you know — so Jonah and I had gotten careless. He’d brought the typewriter over to the house, because his metal trailer was like a solar oven. He’d told me he’d be gone all morning, so I’d laid out some pages of typescript on the kitchen table, where the light was good, and I was shooting copies with my little Minox camera. I guess I’d forgotten to lock the door, because all of a sudden it opened, and there stood Jonah, the light pouring in around him, staring at me, staring at the pages on the table, staring at the tiny camera in my hands. We stood like that for what seemed like several minutes, just looking at each other, then he stepped inside, closed the door, and grabbed my wrist with his left hand. By the way, Bill, you’re right — his left arm and his grip were very strong. He bent my wrist back until I thought it would snap, and with his other hand he took the camera from me.
It was a hot day — early August, in a house with no air-conditioning. I wasn’t wearing much — just a short-sleeved shirt of Leonard’s, and it wasn’t even buttoned. When Jonah twisted my wrist back, the shirt came open, and Jonah looked down at my body. And even though he knew I was betraying him — knew I was betraying everything he was writing about — I saw that he still desired me, at least in that moment. When I saw the hunger, that’s when I knew I had a chance. Maybe he saw hunger in my eyes, too, mixed with my fear and desperation.
So we’re standing there, my wrist still bent back in his left hand, my shirt wide open, and Jonah takes the camera from me and sets it on the table, then he slides his hand down my throat and down my body. I’m trembling, and I can see that he likes that. He’s got his teeth clenched, and his nostrils are flaring, and his breath is getting ragged, and he’s starting to tremble, too, and then he starts fumbling with the buttons of the army coveralls he wore all the time.
“The bed,” I say. “Please. The bed.”
He picks me up and carries me into the bedroom and drops me onto the bed. He yanks down his coveralls, and he’s on top of me and pushing into me, biting my neck, clutching my hair. I can tell it isn’t going to take him long, so I arch my back and put my arms over my head and reach under the pillow for the pistol that I know Leonard keeps there. And just as Jonah groans, the gun fires, and then everything falls silent.
Leonard got home the next day. I met him at the door with a drink and told him something terrible had happened. Then I told him I’d been unfaithful — that wasn’t a surprise — and that Jonah had begged me to get a divorce so I could marry him. When I turned him down, Jonah had threatened me, I said. I pulled out the gun for protection, but Jonah grabbed it from me and shot himself.
I begged Leonard not to tell the MPs; it would ruin us both, I said, and that was true. “He’s probably already been reported AWOL,” I said. “What if he just stays AWOL?” He thought about it and agreed that might be best. That evening he wrapped up Jonah’s body and Jonah’s manuscript in an Army blanket and put the bundle in the trunk of his car.
He never told me where he went that night. He never came right out and challenged my story. But I knew, by the way he looked at me, that whatever odd affection we’d had was gone. Poisoned, the way the reactors at Hanford had been poisoned by boron. The difference was, there was no way to fix this.
A week later I realized I was pregnant. A month after that I had the abortion, and six months later I asked for a divorce. I didn’t need to say why, and he didn’t need to ask. We knew too many secrets about each other now, he and I. Enough to ruin each other. Our own domestic version of Mutual Assured Destruction. And like the superpowers, we somehow managed to tiptoe past Armageddon.
So, there you have it, Bill. No more cliffhangers; no happy ending, either. Just an old woman reaching the last chapter in her story.
CHAPTER 41
“And what did you think of that story?” her voice sounded far away. I looked around, halfway surprised to find myself sitting in a sunny living room on a bright winter morning with a silver-haired woman. In my mind, the gunshot was still echoing, the whispers of conspiracy still hanging in the heat of a long-ago August.
“I think it still has a few loose ends,” I said. “Did you kill Novak, too?”
“Christ, of course not. What makes you think I would?”
“Because he was about to spill your secret to the documentary guy?”
“I could spill his, too,” she said. “And I told him I would, if he breathed a word of mine. Mutual Assured Destruction, right up to the end. Leonard and I were good Oak Ridgers, in our different ways. He kept his secrets, I kept mine. Besides, where would an old bat like me get a lethal source of radiation?”
She had a point there. “Did you give the film of Jonah’s manuscript to the Soviets?” She nodded. “Why didn’t you go to Russia after the war? Surely you could have found a way to get there.”
“Russia? Why on earth would I want to live in Russia? I was a spy, not an idiot.” I had to laugh at that. “So what happens now?”
“We wait for Detective Emert or Agent Thornton to show up. I called them from the car when I got here to say I thought you’d killed Jamison. As soon as I told Emert, he said, ‘Then she was the spy, too.’ I didn’t believe it. I guess he’s smarter than I am.”
“Not smarter,” she said. “Less trusting.” She raised her glass to her lips — she’d left the drink untouched during her story — and drank deeply. She gave a slight shudder, then drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “You’re a good man, Bill. I’m going to miss you.”
“Oh, I’ll still come see you,” I said.
“Ah, but you can’t,” she said. She raised her glass in my direction, then drained it. “Not where I’m going.”
“Beatrice? What have you done?”
“I said there were many forms of prison, and many forms of death. Leonard died a hard death. I’ll die an easy one. Vodka and Nembutal, which I bought from an obliging veterinarian last time I was in Mexico. I hear the combination’s quick and painless.”
Nembutal was a barbiturate, I knew — a powerful sedative, used mainly to euthanize suffering animals. I groped in my pocket for my cell phone.
“Too late,” she murmured. “Far too late.”
Just as I flipped it open to dial 911, the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the terrazzo floor. In a voice that sounded sleepy and peaceful and somehow young, she murmured “Hold my hand, would you, dear? I do so hate to sleep alone.”
I knelt beside her and took her hand in both of mine. She clutched my hand with both of hers, and her grip tightened. Then it slackened, and she was gone. I felt for a pulse, and there was none. Still I knelt there, her fingers laced through mine, her head leaning against one wing of the chair back. Thornton found us that way when he arrived.
“She’s dead,” I said.
He looked at her closely, then studied me. “What’d you do, interrogate her to death? Squeeze her hand really, really hard?”
I hesitated, unsure whether to tell him about the Nembutal. Would there be any harm in not telling him? It wasn’t as if Beatrice had given away any secrets in the past half century. True, she’d murdered Jonah Jamison, but she had just executed herself. Why not leave her a bit of privacy and a shred of dignity?
Because, I realized. Because I remembered something Art Bohanan had said to me a year or so before, when he and I went to confront a man who had murdered a serial pedophile: If you cross the line once, it’s easier to cross a second time, and it gets steadily easier, until finally you lose sight of the line altogether. “She killed herself,” I said. “She drank vodka and Nembutal, and I had no clue until it was too late.” I caught his gaze and held it. “I thought about not telling you,” I said. “Seemed almost like a sleeping dog. But I couldn’t let it lie.”