“On the contrary, I learn too much.”
Kathleen stood. “You expect me to accept such shabby hospitality? I’ll see you in hell.”
Sean nodded. “’Tis certain you know that terrain well.” He looked at Max. “You’re the super-agent man. Guard yourself well this night.”
Sean led Kathleen inside, but Deirdre stayed to catch Max by the sweater-clad arm. “You’ll not make the same mistake again with her. No shenanigans?”
“Not in a thousand years.”
Kathleen was quiet, even lamb-like, her shawl clutched around her, going upstairs. At the bedroom door she turned to look up at him, the spitting image of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. “How noble of you to have sacrificed yourself again.”
“Inside,” he told her. “I know about the steak knife.” He tested the pocket of her silk blazer and pulled out the suspected plum.
He stuck his head into the hall before anyone disappeared for the night. “Deirdre, a lost lamb from the tableware for your dishwasher.” He flourished the knife.
“That’d be the chef’s,” Sean said. “You’re crazy, man.”
“Yup. But I enjoy a challenge. Do you mind taking custody of Kathleen’s traveling bag for the night?”
He handed it out and locked the door.
Kathleen spread her arms wide, the shawl serving as wings. “Do you need to search me for a nail file? A dangerous hangnail?”
“As tempting as ever. No. We’ll sleep in shifts. You in the bed first. I on the chair.”
“You don’t intend to sleep at all.”
“No. Do you?”
“No.”
“Luckily, it’s nearly midnight and this bedroom is on the east side of the cottage,” Max said. “The sun will bathe us in spotlights in no time.”
“Luckily for you.”
He took the chair and nudged the ottoman nearer with his foot. “Really, Kathleen? Can you never separate sex and homicide? You should be a cop.”
“I’m not a murderer. At least, not directly.”
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I suppose you could argue that you never intended your hired doubles to die for you. What you do excel at is seducing other people to do your dirty work. I understand why you have so little faith in humanity.”
“Oh, shut up. You ‘understand’. I’m sick in the head, and you’re a long-suffering hero.”
“I do like the sound of that, but I’m giving up the martyr thing. Can you give up the psychopath thing?”
She sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off her shoes. “I didn’t think.”
“About what? And when”
“At the pub. Who’d get blown up, who wouldn’t…other than that it wouldn’t be me, and, thanks to me, you. I knew Deirdre would take care of Sean. She’d been making cow’s eyes at him for an hour, but all he could see was me.”
“You were a sight to behold.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“No. I can’t mean that.”
She stared at him, seeking truth. “Your memory’s untrustworthy.”
“Yes. But…I can see what I might have thought.”
“And that was?”
“That was what those who’d worst abused you thought. That you had the passionate spirit of an innocent child bracketed in beauty. It inspired them to envy, and to commit torment and destruction. It must have inspired me with a need to capture it, but the only word the world knows for that is lust. Pity. I know why you had to become them to escape memories of the abuse, but it’s a goddamn shame.”
Kathleen leaned against the headboard, arms crossed, and shrugged.
“Did you know about Sean surviving right after the bombing, or find out later?” he asked.
“No. I left soon after you vanished. They’d been wanting me to go to the Americas to solicit money for the resistance, and it was better I lay low after having been at the pub before the explosion. In fact, I was listed as among the lost.”
“Is that when you started using the name Rebecca sometimes?” Max asked. “And why Rebecca?”
“Because she was a bad girl,” Kathleen said with sudden vehemence.
“In a book.”
“I see Miss Temple Barr has been refining your literary tastes to potboilers.”
“She mentioned the book, so I looked up a movie review. Rebecca was dead, but her selfish, manipulative spirit haunted everyone who’d been in her life. I suppose she was your role model? That’s why you used the name?”
Kathleen crouched like a cat at the edge of the bed, while her lips spelled out the answer. “‘Rebecca’ was the name the nuns assigned me in the asylum.”
“They didn’t use your given name?”
“They always changed the inmates’ names to show them what they had been and who they were meant to be…was nothing anymore. It also kept us hidden and unable to find even each other afterwards. I found the novel, though. The so-called heroine was a sheep.”
“But you were born there, to an…inmate. She couldn’t even name you?”
“My mother’s name was Kathleen, but they called her Dolores because her beauty brought her so much sorrow. I took her birth name back after I escaped.”
Max was confounded again by the endless cruelties piled on these young girls, innocents preyed upon by boys and men, some even in their own homes, all of them surrendered by their families with shame and rejection, and with no other place to go.
“Most of the records have been destroyed, the Church says,” Max mused. “Changing given names would further confuse any oral history. Clever and cruel.”
“The Church lies.”
“Doubtless. So does the government. Those severe, strict Old World attitudes of punishing women for their sexuality live on in the third world and even in the U.S., all in the name of religion.” Max paused. “Maybe not in Canada. Canada seems more civilized than most.” The dry comment put her off guard. “I’ve tracked you. The records say you and your daughter died.”
“They couldn’t admit I was able to run away with her.” Kathleen’s smile was radiant. “I was always a bad girl.”
“You were a formidable girl. And admitting you’d escaped might have caused an investigation into the pedophile priest who raped you.” He paused. “Why did you name your daughter Iris?”
“You’ve found her every secret. Not mine.” She smiled smugly. “Those I chose to take her to were atheists. I wouldn’t burden my child with a saint’s name or any variety the unBlessed Virgin’s name. The flowers have no denomination.”
“Well…Iris is the Greek goddess of the rainbow. You can’t escape religion in world history.”
“Do you say so? I didn’t get much education in Greek, although I learned Spanish and Portuguese in my travels.”
“Rebecca,” Max repeated, returning to Kathleen’s Magdalene name.
And then…he understood something more about her, something deep and devilish and unutterably sad. His feet pushed the ottoman away as he leaped up.
“Now I see it. Rebecca, the book and movie. That’s why you burned down my house! The housekeeper who was insanely devoted to dead Rebecca burned down the manor house, Manderley, so Rebecca’s husband and new wife would never have a place to call home. Maxim de Winter was her husband, and murderer. That’s why you torched Garry’s and my house. You wanted to destroy my memories of someone, anyone who loved me.”
“You’re mad.” Kathleen’s laugh was forced. “I don’t live my life by a book. You humiliated me there, in that house, for the first time since the Magdalene asylum. All of you people and even a pack of cats, as if one of you were a witch or warlock.” Her fingertips smoothed the fading quartet of slashes on her cheek.
“You had the satisfaction of inflicting some damage and humiliation yourself that night.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Did I knock some memory back into you?” She was sitting on the edge of the bed now, swinging her stocking-clad feet, which didn’t reach the floor, like a child. She was only a couple inches taller than Temple, Max reminded himself.