“I used to write that legislation, remember?” Mark said. “You don’t have to preach to me about the corporations running the country. I don’t trust CRO and I don’t trust you.”
Apparently Seethe had infected him with a special brand of paranoia. Forsyth still vividly recalled his own journey through hell after exposure to the drug. It had left him on his knees and praying for deliverance, certain he was in Satan’s grip. And he had a calling to inflict that hell on others.
“None of us can afford to let the word get out,” Forsyth said. “Especially your wife.”
Mark gripped his forehead as if fighting off a migraine or mild seizure. If Forsyth were a man of action, he would have taken the opportunity to dive for the gun. But Forsyth was sixty-five, and he trusted his brains more than his muscles.
“If you kill us, there will be a major investigation,” Forsyth said. “Your wife and I served on the president’s bioethics council together, and you and I are both connected to CRO. It wouldn’t take long for enough of the truth to come out. And you know what your wife did.”
“She didn’t kill anybody!” Mark’s outburst echoed through the empty house.
“Of course not,” Forsyth said. “But we know easily they can fabricate evidence.”
“And she isn’t developing Halcyon and Seethe for CRO. She’s not like Briggs.”
Forsyth had come to believe Briggs and Dr. Morgan were very much alike, because he understood the ambitions of each. But they both shared the moral weakness of serving science instead of the Lord, and so were destined to fail. But Satan’s work could inflict a lot of suffering before the final redemption.
The trick was in making the Archangel’s sword look like the devil’s tool.
“We want to protect her from CRO, Mark,” Forsyth said. “And we want to protect you from her.”
“I don’t need any protection.”
Scagnelli made a feeble attempt to rise, but Mark stabbed the gun toward him. “For the record, I don’t like cheese on my pizza.”
He stormed past Forsyth, bumping into his shoulder hard enough to hurt.
“They’re watching you, Mark,” Forsyth called after him. “We can help.”
After the front door slammed, Scagnelli lifted one hand, dangling the electrical cord he had worked free. “I could have jumped him and wrung his scrawny little neck,” Scagnelli said. “But I figured you need him alive.”
“For now,” Forsyth said. “Only for now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When Alexis found the house empty, her first realization was that she had nowhere to turn.
The wall of secrecy she’d built, and the fear of failure, had isolated her more than she’d let herself believe. She’d carried on with her regular research work and her teaching duties, but she’d become so obsessed with cracking Seethe and saving Mark that she’d created yet another Monkey House.
And it was the house in which she was standing, the one she shared with her husband. The relics of a past life that decorated the living room-degrees, awards, golfing trophies, photographs of happier times-served to mock her now. She couldn’t go to the police, she couldn’t trust the government, and she couldn’t even count on the one person she’d vowed to keep no secrets from.
Because their life together was a lie.
She didn’t bother trying his cell phone, because it was on the couch, the silent TV flickering with last night’s sports highlights. The BLET car he’d taken was still in the driveway, and she wondered if he’d been arrested for taking the college’s property.
No. Someone would have called.
Maybe the same person who threatened to kill me.
When her own cell launched into its “We Can Work It Out” ringtone, she fumbled it from her purse with held breath. The number was blocked, but that didn’t matter. “Mark?”
There was no answer for a moment, and Alexis paced the living room, ruminating on places Mark might have walked, or who might have picked him up. But she couldn’t imagine him leaving his phone while they were both under surveillance.
“Mark?” she repeated, going to the living room closet.
“Lex?”
She couldn’t place the voice at first, and images flickered through her mind-Sebastian looking down at the hole in his chest, Mark’s bloody sneer, Roland holding a gun-before her whisper seemed to fill the house. “Wendy?”
“We’re in trouble.”
Alexis opened the closet and felt along the top shelf. No gun. “I know,” she said, but she didn’t know how many people the “we” included.
“They’re listening.”
Of course they are. That’s what they do. It doesn’t matter if you e-mail, phone, or send by postal carrier, they get you whenever they want.
“They’ve got Mark,” Alexis said, not wanting to believe it but unwilling to imagine anything worse. Like suicide.
“You have to come now,” Wendy said.
“Where?”
“You’ll know. The summer of green dresses.”
Alexis was about to scream into the phone, tired of all the cryptic nonsense, but she couldn’t afford to surrender to rage. She had to be strong for her husband.
“Summer of green dresses,” Alexis repeated back.
“We have what you’re looking for,” Wendy said, her tone strangely flat, as if she’d rehearsed her lines and wanted to inject them with ambivalence.
“I’m looking for Mark.” Alexis noticed the assault weapon, that cruel, multi-chambered rifle she’d been afraid to touch, propped behind Mark’s dusty bag of golf clubs. She didn’t know if its presence was a good sign or not.
“What you’ve been looking for,” Wendy said. “Since the Monkey House.”
“Anita’s dead.”
“That’s…my God…it’s true. They’re after us.” There was no remorse. Wendy was a zombie, removed from it all, just the way she’d been that night The night that never happened.
But the images came again, of the rusty tool in her hand, the wet, slippery grip, the sickening but satisfying thunk as she drove the tip of it into Susan Sharpe’s face “It was part of the experiment,” Alexis said, pleading defense to an unleveled accusation. “We only pretended to kill. So Sebastian could measure our response.”
“Summer of green dresses.”
Then Alexis was holding the dead phone to her ear, staring past the walls of her house to a night that she could never fully remember yet never fully escape.
You didn’t kill Susan Sharpe eleven years ago. She died in a fall down the stairs. Everyone said so.
And last year…she couldn’t have killed again. She wasn’t a killer. Mark would never tolerate a killer.
She broke from the obsessive cycle by clinging to Wendy’s words. She’d only spoken to Wendy a few times since the Monkey House. Roland and Wendy had come over for dinner just before moving out of town, but they thought it was safest not to reveal their new location. Even back then, they were already sinking into mistrust and paranoia, with an unspoken agreement between the couples that they should distance themselves from one another.
Alexis had been one of the bridesmaids at Roland and Wendy’s wedding eight years before. Susan’s death had been far enough in the past that they could all ignore it, and the couple was determined to live happily ever after, even though Roland’s drinking had already become impossible to ignore.
The bridesmaids-Anita and Roland’s sister among them-had worn strapless dresses of emerald green. The ceremony had taken place on June 21, the solstice, and Roland had even joked that he was going to have to squeeze a lot of consummation into the shortest night of the year. He was well into the champagne before the wedding even began, and he didn’t slow down during the reception.
At one point he’d thrown his arms around Anita and Alexis, hugging them close together, swaying with his full weight on them. “Shummer of green dreshes,” he’d shouted in his slushy, drunken joy.
A lifetime ago. Frustration filled Alexis’s belly with heat. What did it mean?
Then she remembered. During their last dinner, she and Wendy had been going through old photos while the guys talked libertarian politics. One of the photos was of the bridal party. “Summer of green dresses,” Wendy had said with a mixture of embarrassment and nostalgia.