I saw the Fat Woman step forward. Through the smoke, through my dizziness, she seemed far away from me, unreal, almost dreamlike. I watched her as she kicked furiously at the pile of burning sheets. It seemed as if it were happening somewhere else—on TV or in some other country. I saw the pile fall over. I saw the flames and sparks spill deeper into the room.
The Fat Woman came after them—another step. She grabbed a pillow off the heap of them.
I heard her voice, thick and slow, like a recording played back at the wrong speed:
“You cockroaches!”
Slow and distant, dim and smoky, she hammered the pillow down at the flames. The movement brought her another step into the room—and with that step, she cleared the edge of the door.
And from very far away, a small voice seemed to call to me from inside my own reeling mind:
Now. Now. Now or never.
I squeezed Samantha’s wrist, hard—our prearranged signal. I heard her coughing somewhere in the smoke beside me. I didn’t think she would have the strength to go.
But she did. She flitted from my grasp, darted through the smoke like a wraith. She flashed silently behind the Fat Woman’s back and out the door onto the lighted landing. From there, she dashed for the stairs, vanishing from my sight. Just like that.
I stumbled to my feet and went after her, fighting my way through the smoke that filled the room and filled my brain, that welded the room and my brain into one great churning barrier of confusion, battling my way through that confusion toward the light of the doorway.
But I didn’t go through. I didn’t follow Samantha out of the room onto the landing. Instead, when I reached the door, I stopped and grabbed hold of the doorknob.
The Fat Woman was still trying to fight the fire. She was maybe half a step in from the edge of the door. When I took hold of the doorknob, she heard me—or maybe just sensed me moving so close behind her. Her giant form whipped around with stunning swiftness. She looked down from her great height and saw me below her.
Her face was caught in the firelight. Its expression of wild surprise and rage was etched in red and black. Her eyes in their folds of pasty flesh burned and danced like a demon’s. When she caught sight of me, she made a noise—a wordless snarl of pure hatred that pierced me head to groin with terror.
With the speed of that terror, I started to pull the door shut. But she, with the devil’s own quickness, reached for it, grabbed the edge of it with her thick fingers. Pulled back against me.
I don’t know where I found the strength to fight her, but I did. I yanked the door with all my might and somehow jerked it almost shut, even with her holding on, even with her trying to hold it open. I pulled again and the door closed on her fingers. The Fat Woman gave one short cry of pain and snatched her hand away.
The next second, I slammed the door and drove the heavy bolt into its ring.
The cry of rage that reached me from the tower room seemed barely human. It was such a horrible sound that even then, hacking and coughing and half-dead from the smoke, I stood on the landing and stared at the door in a kind of dreadful wonder. I heard the Fat Woman’s heavy hands smack against the wood—once and then again. I heard her shrieking—horrible curses and threats—her voice broken and hoarse.
“Open this door, you little piece of shit! Open this door or so help me you will be punished like you can’t fucking imagine!”
She smacked the door again—so hard it shook on its hinges, so hard the floor seemed to shake beneath me. But now her voice became strained, and her curses were interspersed with coughing.
“You little
. . .
You little
. . .
”
But then there was only coughing.
For another long moment, I stared in horror and fascination at the door. Then my eyes were drawn down and I saw the black smoke curling out onto the landing over the sill. That seemed to bring me to my senses. I turned, still hacking and coughing myself, and stumbled away.
The prism of tears—tears streaming from my stinging eyes, coursing down my grimy cheeks—turned the light on the landing radiant and dazzling. I was half-blind as I reached the top of the winding stairs. Clutching the banister, I started down. I dropped from one riser to the next. Then my heel slid out from under me. I sat down hard, the edge of the stair jarring my butt. I grabbed the banister with both hands and hauled myself up again, coughing and weeping. I went on, descending the spiral, down and down and down.
I reached the second floor. Woozy, I looked around me. I was in a corridor. There were brass lanterns in sconces on the paisley wall, but their bulbs seemed dim to me, their glow swallowed by the flocking. I could barely see. The smoke was still in my brain. The furious, inhuman cry of the Fat Woman was still ringing in my ears.
Openmouthed and bewildered, I began to feel my way along a piece of raised paneling, working toward the next flight of stairs. I reached it. Grabbed the newel post. Clung to the newel post like a sailor clinging to a rail in a stormy sea. In fact, the floor did seem to be dipping and tilting and rising up under me. Some black-tasting bile gurgled up my throat as I curled around the post. I half-spit, half-vomited the stuff onto the stairs. Then I started thumping down.
I held fast to the banister. Descended clumsily, nearly falling stair to stair. Somewhere along the way, I caught a breath—fresh, cool air from the outdoors. I blinked and straightened as if I’d been slapped in the face. My head was suddenly clear, my vision suddenly clear. I dragged my sleeve across my eyes to wipe the tears away. I squinted and peered and saw the door. The front door to the house. It was open. Samantha. She must have gotten out. The night—freedom—lay just below me.
With elaborate caution—each step a stiff and deliberate thump—I made my way down the staircase to the foyer below. I staggered across a gold and purple rug. Gold and purple chairs lined the striped walls. They seemed to watch me as I lurched past them to the door.
Then I was out of the house, into the night. I coughed violently, fighting to suck down mouthfuls of the glorious cool air. I shuffled and stumbled down the front two steps, out onto the dark lawn, looking around me, blinking, dazed. I heard Samantha somewhere. She was coughing too. Where? Where was she?
Then I heard her gasp: “Danny!”
There she was. Kneeling on the lawn in the moonlit darkness. Bent over under a small maple tree. Convulsively grabbing handfuls of dirt and grass as she hacked and coughed and spat up black phlegm.
I took two wobbly steps toward her, then paused and turned and looked back and up, over my shoulder.
The tower was in flames. I could see the fire flickering at the high windows. I could see the smoke beginning to seep out through the walls, a coiling blackness staining the blue of night.
I turned and scanned the dark around me. Nothing but trees visible on every side of me. Trees and, down the road, the porch lamp of a house, its yellow glow obscured by leaves and branches.
I listened as I looked. Sirens—I heard sirens in the distance. Someone had seen the flames. The firemen were coming. The police—the police would be with them too.
I took the last few steps to Samantha’s side. Exhausted, I dropped to my knees beside her. Still coughing, she reached out for me blindly. I took her hand in both of mine. She seemed to follow my grip up to me, rising from the grass. She flung her arms around me.
“You did it, Danny! The police are coming! They’ll help us! You did it! We got away!”
The press of her body against me, her coughing whisper against my face, seemed to snap me back to full consciousness. This place, this night, the grass and dirt beneath my knees, the fire burning behind me, the smoke twining inside me—all of them suddenly became clear and real.
And Samantha herself—Samantha pressed against me, shaking, crying.
“We’ll be all right now, won’t we, Danny?”
I started crying too. I hated to. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to be a hero—for her. But I couldn’t help it. I held Samantha against me as she wept. I held her close so she wouldn’t see how hard I was sobbing.
As the sirens in the distance came closer, grew louder, we knelt together like that, hugging one another on the lawn beneath the tree, our figures lit by the moon and the flames that rose in the burning tower: two little children, crying in each other’s arms.
I took a step closer to the bathroom mirror. I looked at my reflection, my scarred face, my burning eyes. I could still smell the smoke. I could still hear the Fat Woman shrieking. I could still feel Samantha’s arms around me.
And I could still see Alexander’s forlorn figure. I could still hear his voice—that voice I had tried so hard to forget all these years, all my life.
Don’t let them take me.
I lifted my hand, the hand holding the gun.
You don’t know who you are.
I turned the Glock this way and that, studying it as if I were just seeing it for the first time.
I know,
I thought.
I know now
.
She was still alive. The Fat Woman. She hadn’t died like the newspaper said she had. I had known that somehow. I had always known it. She was still out there, still in the wind. She and her pet murderer Stark.
I slipped the gun inside my jacket. I put it back into its holster. I was going to need it.
I know now,
I thought.
I know who I am.
I lifted my eyes to the mirror again and saw myself.
I am the executioner
.
13
The Coroner’s Widow
A
LONG TIME PASSED
in darkness. I sat in an antique armchair in the foyer. A grandfather clock tick-tocked steadily against the wall. Every fifteen minutes, the clock chimed. At the hour, it tolled.
The house settled around me, strangely alive. It had a presence, I mean a personality: dignified and self-possessed and melancholy with time.
Or maybe that was just my imagination. Maybe it was just the drug. A lot of strange thoughts came to me, sitting there so long.
I could see the scene outside through the mullioned windows that flanked the front door. The cars went back and forth on the main thoroughfare, whizzing past the stand of birches across the way. After night fell, I could see their headlights, the glare spreading over the white trunks of the trees, then falling away. Finally, one pair of lights pulled to the curb and went dark. The antique armchair let out a stuttering creak underneath me as I sat up straight, waiting.
I heard the brisk clop of a woman’s heels on the front path. I heard her key in the latch and saw the door open, the movement dim and obscure in the evening shadows. She switched on the foyer light—a lamp of glass and iron hanging from the ceiling—but she still didn’t see me. She had turned away and was stripping off her spring overcoat as she took the step to the closet by the front door. I sat watching her fit the coat neatly to its hanger. I thought she must have been pretty once in that haughty, demanding way some women have, like they are standing on a hill above you, looking critically down. She still had a majestic face, worn and wizened as it was, her hair an uncompromising silver, her body lean and ramrod-straight.
When she did face forward, when she did notice me in the chair against the foyer wall, her reaction was restrained. She stiffened. Her wrinkled hand went briefly to the top of her cardigan. She drew in breath through her nose—I could hear it across the room. But that was all. Pretty good, I thought, considering I must’ve scared the old girl half to death.
Her hand came down unsteadily and clasped her other hand in front of her skirt. She regarded me sternly, her steel-gray eyes anxious but hard. She was afraid—she didn’t hide that, but she didn’t make a show of it either. I don’t think she considered it any of my damned business.
“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked calmly.
“No,” I said.
She drew another breath and nodded once. “And I suppose if you were going to kill me, you wouldn’t have made such a production of it.”
I smiled wearily. “Probably not. I’m a police inspector. Or I was. I want to ask you some questions about your husband and a woman named—”
“Sadie Trader. Yes, now I understand. You must be Detective Champion. Your . . . coming was foretold to me.”
Surprised, I was about to ask
by whom,
but the answer was obvious. I was working off Samantha’s notes, after all, following her footsteps. Of course, she’d already been here. Of course, she’d already found what I was looking for. That’s why the Fat Woman sent the Starks after her in the first place. “How did she know I’d . . . ?” I began to say. But the answer to that began to occur to me too and I didn’t finish.