“Why don’t you go back to the house, and we’ll forget this ever happened? I won’t even report it.”
“That right? You won’t?” Jonathan’s words were beginning to broaden, southern twang showing up between each carefully spoken consonant. Dorian had called him South Carolina, Lily remembered, in an early morning that already seemed like years ago. She stared, transfixed, at the gun barrel pressed against the back of Greg’s skull.
“Come on, Johnny. You know me.”
Jonathan grinned wide, a rictus that showed all of his white teeth. “Yes, indeed, Mr. Mayhew. We have boys like you where I come from. Three of them took my sister for a ride once.”
He turned to Lily. “Go inside, Mrs. M.”
“No.”
“You don’t need to see this.”
“Of course I do.”
“Johnny, put the gun away. Remember who you work for.”
Jonathan began to laugh, but it was hollow laughter, and his dark eyes blazed. “Oh, I do. And I’ll tell you a secret, Mayhew. The man I work for wouldn’t even think twice.”
He shot Greg in the back of the head.
Lily couldn’t stop a small shriek as Greg’s body fell forward to land at her feet. Jonathan leaned down, planted the gun at Greg’s temple and fired another shot. The reverberation was very loud, bouncing off the backyard walls. Security would come now, Lily thought, whether they had found the Mercedes yet or not.
Jonathan wiped the gun barrel on his dark pants and put it away. At Lily’s feet, half of Greg’s head was blown away, leaking steadily into the bright green perfection of the lawn. Lily looked down and found herself covered with gore, but most of the blood was hers, from the cuts on her arms.
“You need a doctor,” Jonathan told her.
“I have bigger problems now,” Lily replied, then reached out and grasped his shoulder. “Thank you.” The words were not enough, but she could think of nothing better, and now she heard the first siren, still distant, somewhere downtown. Someone must have called Security when Lily went through the glass doors. “They’re coming. You should go.”
“No.” Jonathan’s face was resigned. “We take responsibility.”
“You can’t stay here!”
“Sure I can.”
“Jonathan. They’ll never listen. Even if I told them everything, they wouldn’t listen. They’ll kill you.”
“Probably. But I had to do it.”
Lily nodded, trying to think. Even now, at the strangest of all times, the better world was in her head, crowding out all else, every other consideration. It was the river that held her, she saw now, the river with its deep blue water. She had failed in Boston, but here was another chance.
“Give me the gun.”
“What?”
“Give me the gun and get out of here.”
Jonathan shook his head.
“Listen to me. They’ll be coming for me anyway, sooner or later. I can tell the same story, and I have better evidence. Look at me; I’m a mess.”
“You won’t do any better, Mrs. M.; Security is Frewell’s organization, right down to its bones. They’ll look at your face and arms, believe every word you say, and find you guilty, all the same.”
“He won’t let me go, Jonathan. On the ship. I asked and he said no.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But you have to go.” Lily looked down at Greg’s corpse, wishing she were as brave as the rest of them, but she knew she was not, and she needed Jonathan to leave, now, before she lost her nerve. “We take care of each other, yes? You did this for me. Now I want you to go.”
“They execute wives who kill their husbands.”
“I’m dead anyway,” Lily retorted, taking a shot in the dark. “On September first, right?”
Jonathan swallowed.
“Isn’t that what’s going to happen?”
“Mrs. M.—”
She reached out and grasped the barrel of the gun. Jonathan resisted for a moment, then let it slide bonelessly from his fingers. The sirens were louder now, leaving downtown and entering the quiet maze of streets that had made up Lily’s adult life.
“Go. Think about him, not me. Help him.”
Jonathan’s dark face had gone pale. “They’ll check your hands. For powder. Fire a shot into the ground.”
“I will. Go.”
He hesitated a moment longer, then headed for the wall and climbed it, in almost the exact spot where Dorian had fallen down. Even in the midst of her terror, this symmetry pleased Lily; she felt that she had now come full circle, completed the journey from the woman she had been pretending to be to the woman she really was. At the top of the wall, Jonathan turned and gave Lily a last reluctant look, but she waved him away with the gun, relieved when he dropped soundlessly into the Williamses’ yard, out of sight.
Lily planted herself, aiming the gun at the ground several feet away. She knew that guns recoiled, but she was still unprepared for the force of the shot, which sent her sprawling backward. The gunshot echoed around the garden, and as it faded, Lily heard the squeal of tires turning onto her street.
I killed my husband. He was beating on me and I shot him.
How did you get the gun?
I took it from Jonathan the last time he drove me downtown. Tuesday.
Bullshit. He would’ve noticed it was gone.
That was true. Lily tried again. What if I tell them it was Greg’s gun?
The gun’s tagged. They’ll only need to scan it to know it was Jonathan’s.
She couldn’t think of a response. Jonathan was right; the story was too flimsy, no matter who did the telling. Greg was dead, shot by two bullets from Jonathan’s gun. Last night, Lily had gone outside the wall alone and come back with Jonathan. They would either think that Jonathan had killed him, or that she and Jonathan had done it together. No one would care about Lily’s black eye, the cuts on her face and arms. It was all over now; she was a woman who had killed her husband. She thought of the executions that played regularly on the giant screen in the living room: men and women turning pale as the poison hit their veins, drowning them in their own lung fluid. Their agonized gasping always seemed to go on forever before they finally succumbed, and Greg would laugh at Lily when she tried to cover her ears. They died with bulging, pleading eyes, like fish in the bottom of a boat.
Lily dropped the gun and closed her eyes. When Security burst into the backyard, she was standing on a high brown hill, miles of grain all around her, staring down at the deep blue river that ribboned the land below. She didn’t hear them speak to her, didn’t understand their questions. She was caught by the world around her, Tear’s world, Tear’s creation, the sights and sounds of the land, even the smelclass="underline" freshly turned earth and a tang of salt that reminded her of childhood trips to the Maine shore. Lily didn’t feel them pin her arms behind her back and march her toward the front door. She didn’t feel anything at all, not even when they pushed her into the back of the truck.
FOR THE FIRST time, Kelsea opened her eyes and found herself not in her library, but in the arms room.
“There you are, Lady.”
She blinked and found Pen on one side, Elston on the other.
“What am I doing here?”
“You wandered in.” Pen released her. “You’ve been all over the Queen’s Wing.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
Less than two hours gone. Lily’s life was moving faster now. Kelsea blinked and saw, as if through a thin veil, the dark tin box of the Security truck, its armored inner walls. It was night again; flashes of street lighting spilled intermittently through the small slats near the ceiling, fleeing over her hands and legs before it disappeared. Lily was right there, not centuries away, not over the borders of unconsciousness, as she had once been, but right there inside Kelsea’s mind. If she wanted to, Kelsea could reach out and touch her, make Lily scratch her forearm or close her eyes. They were bound.