He stood three feet away from her. There was no doubt at all that he was her inquisitor. He wished it did not have to be this way but there was no choice. Not any longer.
He said, "You did a good job when you ran away from the trailer, Susan. Just enough plastic surgery that nobody back home would recognize you. Not right off, anyway. But you didn't count on the Sanderson brothers and you didn't count on your own daughter."
Susan looked up finally. Her face was ruined in the way a stroke victim's face is sometimes ruined. A look carved into the face forever. She said, "She's crazy, you know." She was starting to choke and cry.
"They helped you, didn't they-Ken Norris and Kevin Anderson-they helped you burn down the trailer, didn't they?"
She nodded, continued crying.
"They came to a small town to make a movie and you were dazzled-only your young husband was a very jealous man and wouldn't let you go when they made you promises about Hollywood-and so the only way out you could see was to burn down the trailer. Along with your husband and your daughter-and start all over again as Susan Richards."
He got up and she came at him and he could see now she was just as crazy as she'd accused her daughter of being.
He slapped her across the mouth once, with something like expertise, and pushed her on the bed.
He stood over her and said, "That's how you got your start in Hollywood, wasn't it? You were sleeping with them and they helped you burn down the trailer and so you were all locked in together. They had to help you succeed. Did they know your daughter was in the trailer that night?"
"No," she said softly. "I told them she and her father were out of town. They just thought they were helping me get a new start-burning down the trailer and sneaking out in the middle of the night. I was… crazy. All I could think of was getting rid of my daughter and husband and-" She rolled over on her stomach and put her head down and the sobs were so hard that the entire bed bounced.
He wanted to go over and slide his arm around her-he could not imagine how you could hold in your mind the fact that you had tried to kill your own child-and offer her whatever mixture of hatred and pity he felt for her.
But instead he said, "Jere Farris was a part of this, too, wasn't he? The other night Joanna tried to tell me she'd slipped a love letter under his door-but it was a Xerox of her baby picture, the one she left with Norris and Anderson before she killed them. She killed Sanderson and Iris Graves because they'd figured out who she was too. She didn't have any choice."
There was a knock.
Tobin kept his eyes on her as he went to get the door. When he opened it, the room was filled with the scent of the ocean. The steward stood there. "The captain asked me to check with you after ten minutes. To see if everything was all right." The steward carried a formidable walkie-talkie.
"Tell him everything's fine."
The steward nodded and closed the door.
When Tobin turned back, she was gone. He went over and sat in the easy chair and listened to her pee in the toilet.
When she came out she said, "Can you imagine her life, Tobin? Can you imagine how I've destroyed it? Her own mother trying to kill her."
"I know." Suddenly he was tired of her self-pity. It was her daughter who should be pitied.
"I want you to tell her that I don't expect her to forgive me. But that I do ask her to understand that I was very young and that her father was very cruel."
"She was your daughter."
"Just tell her that, Tobin. Just tell her that."
He got up and put his hands in his pockets and began to pace.
He turned abruptly for the door.
"Where are you going, Tobin?" she said.
"Where the hell else?" he said. "To find your daughter."
47
"Where's Jere?"
"Went for a walk," Alicia Farris said at her cabin door. "What the hell do you want with him?”
She was drunk.
He ran the length of the deck and found no sight of Jere Farris. He found a phone in a lounge and called the captain. He explained as concisely as he could who Joanna Howard really was. "Find her before she kills Farris," he said.
He was back on the deck, headed for Cindy's cabin when he sensed rather than saw someone step from the shadows behind him. He'd been aware of a presence ever since leaving the lounge a few minutes ago.
She put the gun into his ribs, jamming it hard, and said, "I want you to help me get in to see my mother."
"I can't do that. She's under guard."
"I overheard your conversation with the captain. All you need to do is give the word."
"They're looking for you."
"I just want you to get me inside her room."
He saw her face finally, there in the moonlight. For the first time he saw a resemblance between the two women. Surgery had altered Susan Richards's face. What they shared was their insanity.
She prodded him with the gun.
The steward glanced up. "You going in again?"
"Yes."
He started to say something as he stood there in front of the door, officious in his whites, his walkie-talkie impressive, but Joanna spoiled all that by catching him a hard clean blow with the butt of her gun on the side of his head.
He went down in a heap.
She grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door inward. Then she said, "Get him in here so nobody sees him."
Tobin dragged the man inside.
"Tie him up and gag him," Joanna said, once the door was locked behind them.
Then she turned and looked at the woman on the bed. Tobin saw for the first time pieces of blood and flesh on Joanna's long-sleeved white blouse. Jere Farris's blood and flesh. She had gotten them all now. All except the one who mattered most.
Susan Richards was barely conscious. Next to her on the bed was a prescription bottle of sleeping pills. This time her suicide attempt had been for real. He said, panicked, "She's dying."
"From what?"
Tobin was still trying to adjust to the contrast between the shy, self-spoken Joanna and this harsh, singular young woman. "Sleeping pills and alcohol."
In two steps Joanna was at her mother's bedside. She leaned over and pulled the semiconscious woman up by the collar of her blouse.
"You killed my father, you bitch!" Joanna cried, and then began shaking her in a frenzy. "You killed my father, do you understand?"
She pushed her back down on the bed.
"I want a drink, Tobin."
There was the fifth of scotch from which Susan Richards had been drinking. Tobin went over and got them both drinks.
She took hers and said, "Sit in that chair over there where I can see you."
"What are you going to do?"
"We, Tobin, you and I. We're going to sit here and watch her die."
"I can't let you do it, Joanna."
She waved the gun at him. "You can stop me?"
He sighed and went over and sat in the armchair facing hers.
On the bed Susan Richards moaned and babbled. She sounded as if she were coming out of deep anesthesia.
People passed by talking. There were parties going on all over the boat. Tobin and Joanna sat in their chairs and watched a woman die.
"For what it's worth, Ken Norris and the others didn't know you were in that trailer that night," Tobin said.
"Don't talk."
He watched her then. She just stared at the woman on the bed. Her face, pretty if plain, was without expression. The. 45 in her lap looked ludicrous until you noticed what he assumed was Jere Farris's blood.
Susan Richards began convulsing a few minutes later.
Tobin started to get up. Joanna leveled the gun at him, waved him back down.
They sat and watched some more.
At one point Susan wet her pants. Then she began crying. She wasn't conscious at all now.