“Now, Jack, would you do us the honor of marking these two bullets so that we can identify them later?”
There is a pause while Jack scores the bullets’ casings with the knife.
“Now, Sally, I want you to take a good look at these as you’re going to see them later.” Leo hands her one bullet and waits, giving her time to examine it.
“Happy? Good.”
Christos takes the second bullet from Jack, repeating the ritual. Leo watches, pleased with Chris’s sleight of hand. After Sally’s inspection, they’ve both swapped the bullets, replacing them with fake ones on the trays.
Leo hates this part. The feel of the real bullet that he’s palmed and hidden in his mouth. The taste of metal filings that cling to the case.
“Now, Jack, we’re going to ask you to load one bullet into each gun.”
Jack the shill obliges, putting the fakes into the gun barrels.
Here it comes. Leo and Christos stand back to back like duellists at dawn. There’s a drum roll. They each count fifteen paces. They’ve been drilled by Rollo until their timing’s perfect. He’s even done target practice with the brothers.
They turn. Leo takes aim. Both of them have been careful to consider angles.
Leo squeezes the trigger. The sound deafens him temporarily. Something’s wrong. Christos looks at him, bewildered. There’s a slow trickle of blood from the hole in Christos’s forehead. It gathers in his eyebrow and falls in heavy drops. He staggers and then pitches backward.
Someone, maybe Sally, screams.
“How did you know?” Rebecca’s in the lounge. Henry stands in the doorway.
“A hunch. I remembered that you always called your dog by the name of Sam. It got me thinking.”
“How astute.” It doesn’t sound like praise.
“I saw you and Leo burn.”
“You were there?”
“Yes. I was only eighteen. You should be dead.”
“Come and sit down so we can talk.” Rebecca’s voice softens.
“Is Leo alive too?” Anything’s possible.
“No, Leo’s dead. You saw it yourself.”
“I saw them take your body away.” A charred corpse laid on the tarpaulin.
“Why have you pursued this?”
He can’t verbalize it. “I came to see you as often as I could.”
Rebecca’s look is both amusement and bemusement.
“You’ve fallen in love with your own fantasy. That’s about you, not me.”
“I need to know what happened.”
“You weren’t part of it. You were just a spectator.”
It rankles that he has no claim to her tale.
“I’m a witness.”
“You’re a pompous ass.”
She isn’t the sweet girl of his imagination. She has no truck with romance. He wants to shock her into revealing the truth.
“Your husband was murdered by his own brother and I think you burnt him to death to get revenge.”
“It was an accident.”
“It was a live bullet. It’s all in the book.”
“I didn’t read your book and I don’t believe it. Leonides would’ve cut off his own arm before he hurt Christos.”
“The bullet they found at his autopsy was real.”
“What possible reason would Leo have?” She stares at him.
“He found out Christos was robbing him.”
“Christos wasn’t a thief. And Leo wasn’t a murderer. Who told you that?”
“Rollo.”
She rocks back and forth, roaring with laughter that dies in her throat as fast as it starts.
“I might have known that he’d do for all of us in the end. He was the one with the light fingers.”
“What do you mean?” This rapid revisionism makes Henry weak. “Leo trusted Rollo. He was going to make him a partner.”
“Leo was going to make Rollo and Christos partners. It was a mark of the man that he overlooked Rollo’s thieving and treated him like a brother. Where did you get the information for your book? Rollo? He was an inveterate liar and crook.” Her derision’s on her face. “You should’ve known better, professor.”
“I don’t understand. The bullet was fired from the gun they found on the floor.”
“Did you know there was a second set of guns?” Rebecca doesn’t give him time to digest this. “Rollo was backstage. He could have fired his gun in time with Leo and then swapped it in the confusion.”
“Rollo?”
Rollo. He thinks of the interviews.
Leo and I were both crack shots.
Rollo. With his insinuations about the Saunders brothers. That one was a thief and the other a lecher and a murderer. And Henry’s believed Rollo, who’s always on the make, always touching him for money, because there was no other way to get close to Rebecca.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Did Rollo buy you a dog?”
“No,” she looks perplexed. “Leo did.”
She’s telling the truth. She has no reason to lie to him; she doesn’t care one iota for what he thinks. Henry can feel the mocking weight of his book in his pocket. He’s not recorded history. Not even memory. He’s been a scribe for lies. Rollo’s not just a liar. He’s a killer.
“He’s still alive, isn’t he?”
Henry can’t meet Rebecca’s eyes.
“How are you still alive?”
“I’ll show you.”
He follows her into the hall. There’s a door beneath the stairs.
“Stay,” she wags a finger at Sam. Then to Henry, “Shut the door behind you. I don’t want Sam down here. He’ll get upset.”
A bare bulb lights their descent. The basement’s bare. She turns to face him.
“That’s quite a birthmark to carry around.”
Rebecca’s direct. The statement carries expectation. She expects something in return for what she’s about to show him.
“When I was a child my father took me to a specialist about my face. I remember how Dad looked when the doctor told him that nothing could be done.” Henry’s surprised that of all his memories this is the one he’s seized upon. It’s been just beneath the surface all this time. “The only time he ever touched it was when one of his friends made a wisecrack. Dad took me home and scrubbed my face as though it was an ink stain that could come off.”
The words rush out of him. “When my daughter was born and I held her in my arms, I was so overwhelmed by her that I couldn’t imagine anything that would make her seem less than perfect to me.”
After the divorce, things between them had become difficult. Henry can’t recall the last time he spoke to his daughter. He wishes he’d tried harder.
“The first time I saw you, Rebecca, you reached out and touched it.” He puts his fingertips on the stained side of his face, recalling the moment.
“I don’t remember. You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you should be. I’ve not brought many people luck.” She snaps her fingers and a single flame appears. “I’ve never talked to anyone like this. Not even Chris or Leo. I wish I had.”
Her whole fist’s burning. She lifts it like a torch. The light reflects in her eyes. “Fire’s a funny thing. People think we’ve tamed it but they have no idea. It turns on you when you least expect it. When I saw Christos lying there, it got out. I was so shocked that I couldn’t stop it. Leo must’ve thought something had gone wrong.”
“What are you?”
Small flames gutter around her like a cloak.
“I don’t know. The first time, I burnt up my lover in a fit of lust. When I woke up I was entwined with his corpse. I had to crack my charred skin off the new flesh beneath. Every time I allow myself to fully burn up, I’m a woman of twenty again. I’ve survived cancer and two heart attacks this way. And being fireproof saved me at Salem. I was the corpse that wouldn’t burn down to bone. I clawed my way out of a mass grave.”