Trait hated to concede anything, but the question was an important one. “Clock said Inkman would betray me.”
“Inkman betrayed his country for his ego. Now Gilchrist is his country.” The warden lowered his head, and the look he showed Trait was one of fatherly disappointment. “Why do you think it would be any different this time around?”
Chapter 23
The physical challenge of their expeditions no longer made any impression upon Rebecca. Only the daylight made this one different. They paired off and took turns pulling Polk’s toboggan. Her mind kept returning to the gas station in a perverse attempt to reconstruct the series of events leading to the convict’s death, forming only the fractured narrative of an interrupted dream.
The house Tom Duggan led them to was modest and crowded by trees. From the front door, just a sliver of street showed beyond a twist in the driveway, and only from the upstairs bedroom window could you see the nearest neighbor, a farmhouse and stable set well across the road. To Kells, the house was neatly hidden. To Rebecca, it was a remote, wooded cul-de-sac tempting to Grue.
Inside, snow fell in the living room. Ghostly flakes haunted her retina and no amount of blinking would clear them. Through a hall window she saw Tom Duggan’s dark figure standing alone in the side yard. The real snow falling outside was soothing to her vision, so she pulled her coat back on and went out.
Down the front steps and around a stack of snow-covered firewood, into a side yard bound by dark, leafless trees. Tom Duggan stood hat in hand over a smooth, broad, gravelike hump of snow. His eyes were down-turned and he stood rigid as though expecting a sudden gust of wind. Dull white stubble aged his angular face. She stood near and waited for him to speak.
He said, “This was my mother’s house.”
She had sensed this from his familiar manner as he entered the house and moved through the rooms.
“She wandered out here,” he said. “I found her curled up.”
Rebecca remembered her first impression of Tom Duggan, at the ceremony on the town common: a proud, reasonable man who had humbly saved his hometown from extinction.
“There was nothing you could have done,” she said, aiming for empathy but hitting only emptiness.
He replaced his hunting cap. He said, “It’s just not right.”
“I’m really sorry.”
He sunk his hands deep into his overcoat pockets. “Kells wants me to take him into town.”
“Just you?”
He nodded. “I want to go. I want to see it.”
She found Kells inside, boiling water in a black pan. The kitchen had been updated recently, with clean buttercup-yellow countertops, natural wood cabinets, and new appliances except for the thin, whirring avocado-colored refrigerator.
He emptied a packet of Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup into an “Irish Blessing” mug. His whiskers were coming in dark with gray hints, giving his chin more of a spadelike jut.
Rebecca said, “You’re going into town?”
“With the undertaker. To get a look at the setup.”
“How long?”
“Don’t worry about Grue. The guns will keep him away. You can handle yourself here. You’ve proved that.”
“I proved nothing. The gas station counter killed that man, not me. All it proved was that you can force me into situations I don’t want to be in.”
Kells looked at her probingly. “Why did you come here?” he asked.
“What do you mean? To this house?”
“To Gilchrist. To the prison. You came for something.”
“You know why. To interview Luther Trait.”
“And he represents what to you? Besides publicity and book sales.”
“I was doing research on a character.”
“No.” He shook his head. “What about fear?”
“You mean, was I afraid? Of course.”
“Trait was especially cruel to women. Maybe that’s why you came. You told him on the phone that you wouldn’t be his ‘prize’.”
She still resented him for that phone call. “Well, he was right about one thing. That I would align myself with a killer.”
“He meant that you would let a man do the killing for you. You know that the only way you can avoid being the prize is to participate, to do your own fighting.”
She didn’t like that. “I don’t know what he meant,” she protested.
“Look here, at Gilchrist. The government was oppressing the prisoners who finally reached their breaking point and revolted. Now they are in charge of the town — but here we come, fighting back. That’s the price of power. The history of the human race was built on insurrection. Now look at you. In a world run by men, you’ve won real independence — money, a position of some influence. You’ve beat the system. The problem now is that as you move into power, getting a taste of it, you find it’s a lot easier to tear down the establishment than to build one up. Trait is learning that now. So there’s trepidation. There’s a stall, a pullback. Before you cut the emperor’s throat, you think: Do I really want to do this? Do I want the responsibility this will bring? That moment of hesitation is when most people fail. You’ve got to move past that fear. You’ve got to kill that fear, however it manifests itself.”
She shook her head as though to clear it. “Are you talking about Gilchrist now, or a gender war?”
“You came here to meet Trait so that you could go back and tell the world, I looked the beast in the eye. I faced the Minotaur and here is what I learned. Trait is a butcher and a sadist, with a special brutality toward women, and you came here to take away his power to scare you. You want to capture him in your book and trap him there for good. For you, killing a man and writing about him are the same thing. You came here to kill Luther Trait.”
She must have been even wearier than she realized. His words almost made sense. Her thoughts were like doll furniture and he was reaching inside her head and rearranging it to his liking. His persuasion was both seductive and alarming. “Why are you doing this to me?” she said.
Dr. Rosen entered carrying Polk’s sopping red bandage to the trash. If he noticed them talking, he didn’t care. “Forget the soup,” he said, washing his hands in the sink. “He’s asleep now.”
“Later?” said Kells.
“Maybe.”
Kells turned off the boiling water. “How long?”
Dr. Rosen was washing his hands forcefully under the steaming water. “He’s losing too much blood,” he said, then stopped and turned off the faucet and shook his head. He returned to the sitting room.
Kells added water and stirred, pulling a small plastic bag from his pocket and crumbling some brown herbs into the broth.
Rebecca looked again. Kells was stirring small buds of marijuana into the soup.
“From Coe’s pack,” he said. “If he wakes up again, give this to him.”
The scent of the pot rose with the steam as Rebecca watched the buds spin in the middle of the mug. Instead of flakes falling before her eyes, it snowed behind them now, the drifts piling up inside her head.