He grabbed her by the hair and pulled. “Get up.”
He put the gun to her temple. “Okay, we’re going.”
He marched her out of the room and through the corridor, out of the closed wing and into the hospital proper. It was brighter here; the place Skip had found so depressing on her previous visit seemed cheerful by contrast. A nurse was striding toward them; another was talking to a man in a suit, probably a patient’s son or husband. All three saw the gun and began to run. Cole fired at the ceiling. “Let us through. Don’t try to stop us.”
He kept walking.
They turned a corner, nearly bumping into a nurse helping an old man on a walker. “Out of our way.” Cole swept them away with his gun hand, the other still holding tightly to Skip. The old man fell, which made Skip furious.
She tried frantically to think what to do, but people were starting to litter the halls, some of them old, a great many of them sick. Instead of fleeing at the sound of the gunshot, the shouting, the clatter of the old man falling, they’d come out to rubberneck.
Anything she did would endanger them.
The good news was, she heard sirens. Cole heard too, and panicked. He shot once again at the ceiling. “Let us through.”
People scattered, but it was no good. Others took their places.
Still, he kept walking. The stairs were open, not in a closed stairwell, so that they were able to descend without the risk of surprise at the bottom; first one floor, then another, the gun tight against Skip’s scalp.
She was not even slightly frightened; seeing the old, the sick, the innocent so vulnerable in those halls, knowing what this man was capable of, she was nearly blind with fury.
They were almost at the door. Her tongue was tight against her teeth, every muscle tensed, in her own body’s absurd effort to make sure no one got hurt.
Someone opened the door, and Skip got a glimpse of what was outside—police cars, a dozen at least. And it looked like more coming. Cole stopped dead. “I need a nurse. Now!”
There was scurrying behind them, and Lirette, the nurse from Kit’s floor, approached warily.
“I want you to step outside,” said Cole, “and tell them to send in an unarmed man.”
The nurse disappeared. Skip stood in the middle of the corridor, the gun snug against her temple, every muscle tight against every other one. She ached to flay the son of a bitch alive. She was surprised at the hatred in her. She had never felt so much fury at a suspect.
An officer came in, but not the man Cole had asked for. “I’m Sergeant Sylvia Cappello.”
Cappello’s hands were up. Skip felt her throat tighten; she’d never seen Cappello helpless.
“Sergeant Cappello, you let us out of here or Officer Langdon’s dead. You send those cops home, and those police cars home; but you stay. And you let us walk out of here quietly, peacefully, with no fuss.”
“We can talk about that. Just let Officer Langdon go and we’ll talk about whatever you want.” Even at fifty paces, Skip could see the distress in Cappello’s brown eyes; she’d never seen Skip helpless either.
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Nothing is impossible. You just need to let Officer Langdon go and we can talk.”
Skip wondered if officers were pouring in other doors. She imagined they were, but maybe not. It didn’t seem like such a hot idea in a hospital.
Cole, apparently deciding he’d get nowhere with Cappello, looked around, rotating his head quickly; nervously, Skip thought. His cool might be starting to crack.
“See that elevator over there? Let’s go.” He walked her over. “Push the Up button.”
Skip wished she could catch Cappello’s eye—this was her chance to break away, with another officer to help her. Almost as if Cole had caught her thought, he spun her around, pulled up on her arm so that she nearly gasped with the pain, and pushed her out to arm’s length, so she couldn’t get a kick in. He was staring Cappello straight in the eye. “Don’t either of you move.”
He was smarter than she’d thought, and that bothered her.
When the elevator came, it was empty.
“’Bye, Sergeant.” If he’d lost his cool, he’d now regained it.
Still holding Skip in a death grip, he took her to the fifth floor and they walked from there to the roof, not easy the way he was holding on to her arm.
He took her to the edge and stared over. The hospital was surrounded by police. Someone with a megaphone was preparing to shout up at him.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “Do you think a helicopter could land here?’
“What do you want, Cole? Do you really think you can get out of this one?”
“Well now, that depends, doesn’t it? On how much your fellow officers want to save your neck.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Don’t you?”
She smiled to herself. It wasn’t about to come to that. She was either going to be long dead before, or he was. It was the first time in her life she’d ever really wanted to kill someone.
This was no place to start a fight—right on the edge of a roof, but he wouldn’t move away, not with an audience down there. She had to do it now. Her foot came up sharp to his groin just as her free elbow whammed him in the kidneys.
She heard the breath go out of him, but he tightened his grip on her. She relaxed for a moment, knowing he couldn’t hold her. The pain would be too much. She whacked him again and twisted away, grabbing his gun hand. He went down on his knees.
She had both hands on his forearm, trying to get him to drop the gun. With his free hand, he grabbed her hair and pulled.
“Pull it out, you bastard!” She slammed his arm against the low railing of the roof, but still he held the gun.
He let go of her hair and punched her face. Furious, she tried to throw him off the roof. It was easy; she simply twisted more, and his weight shifted toward the railing. His back bent over it, but his arms pushed against her.
“Die, you bastard. Go off the roof. I don’t care if I kill you.”
His fingers opened. The gun fell.
And her anger started to dissipate. She kicked him. “Get up.”
He came up swinging, but she swung back, both arms together, and landed a blow to his left cheek that sent him reeling. He was three steps from her now; she couldn’t reach him, and she had no weapon.
It occurred to her that he might hurl himself from the roof, and that was unacceptable. She was aware that she’d just tried to throw him off it, but it was only a dim cognizance, like a childhood memory of a person she used to be. Her whole being focused now on stopping him.
She dived for him, and though the distance was greater this time, she’d judged it better. She brought him down just as a phalanx of cops burst through the door from the fifth floor.
She heard his head hit the concrete and bounce, exactly as Geoff’s must have done.
IT WAS ENDING now, and it was all right. He’d done what he had to do. Looking at things in reverse order, Cole honestly couldn’t think of a thing he’d have done differently, given what his motivations were, and the events that came before.
He’d had to kill Lenore after she made that stupid post about the diary. (Of course in the end, the book hadn’t had a single incriminating word in it, but how was he to know that? It was her fault for saying it did.)
He’d done it rather elegantly, if he did say so. Writing the fake suicide note was brilliant, though perhaps the concrete block wasn’t. It did get the job done, and he thought it had a nice Virginia Woolf-ish quality, but he could see now that it might not be the sort of thing one might have done to oneself. It might have made the cops suspicious.
Nonetheless, he had had to kill her. That wasn’t in dispute.
Geoff was another matter. He’d loved Geoff.
Well, actually, he hadn’t. He loved Marguerite and Neetsie. He knew exactly what love was.
He had affection for Geoff, but not all that much. Besides, he’d always known something might happen, that somehow Geoff would remember something, say something, and he couldn’t be allowed to do that, because Marguerite had to be protected.
Marguerite
.
It was worth it.
She
was worth it.
He hadn’t really been able to tell the cop about it because Kit was there, but it was like a fire, that first time he saw her. He touched her arm and his fingers got singed.
What he felt for her was so different from what he felt for Kit, with whom he’d really made a marriage of convenience, it seemed in retrospect. He hadn’t thought that he was in love with her. Always nagging to have a baby, get a job, do this or that or the other thing.
He was deeply, deeply in love with Marguerite, and yet it never once occurred to him he could be with her. He didn’t know what he thought; he guessed simply that he was married and that was that.
After Leighton died, it didn’t occur to him that he could leave Kit now. That she had served her purpose and Marguerite was free. But then they’d moved away and eventually she had left him. He couldn’t believe it—she had left
him
.
For the first time he realized he could marry Marguerite.
But she was already remarried.
And then years later, it turned out he had an opportunity to move back to New Orleans, and she wasn’t married.
She’d responded when he sent her the ring from the faked burglary (as he knew she would), and they picked up the courtship again. They’d been blissfully happy until Kit stuck her nose in.
The whole damn state of affairs had been caused by Kit. He’d just learned that last night. When he got Geoff’s diary.
What it said was that Kit, who knew hypnosis, had offered to help Geoff with his memories. The blackmail notes would have started soon, Cole was pretty sure of that. He hadn’t asked her how successful they’d been with the hypnosis, but he knew the slightest little snippet would be enough for Kit. She probably suspected all along anyway; probably made the offer hoping to find out after all these years.
You had to be careful with her, and he and Marguerite had been. He hadn’t lied when he said they’d never been back to the Terry apartment.
But once they had made love at Marguerite and Leighton’s. Just once, because Marguerite really wanted to. She liked the danger, but that wasn’t what she said when she phoned.
“Cole, come over, I’m desperate to see you.”
“I’m on my way.” He wasn’t, of course. It was a game they played when they couldn’t see each other.
“No, I mean it, I’m serious. There’s no reason why not. Geoff’s asleep and Leighton won’t be home for hours and hours.”
“I can already feel you against me, your hair tickling my chest…” He was playing their game.
Her voice exploded in his ear. “Don’t, I can’t stand it!”
“Ouch.”
“Come.”
“I can’t come into your house. You’re crazy.”
“Come and I’ll do things you never even heard of; I’ll lick every part of your body and then I’ll do it again.”
He didn’t answer.
“I need you, Cole. My skin heats up when I think of you, and I’ve been thinking of you for hours. I’m burning alive. I have to have you. I’m going to light all the candles in the house and think about you till I feel you next to me. I’ll leave the key under the mat.”
When he slipped into bed with her, on Leighton’s side, at first he thought her skin felt rough. But she was wearing lace, black lace, and black mesh stockings, with three-inch heels, in bed. She’d actually worn her shoes to bed.
She had done what she said; she had lit all the candles and she had taken them into the bedroom.
She was on top of him, the candlelight playing on her face, her hair cascading down her back, her body lithe and white under the black lace, when they heard the unmistakable sound of a door opening.
The rest was a blur, the last real memory he had being Marguerite jumping off him. He remembered so well because it hurt so much. She had twisted her body, forgetting he was inside her, and had swung a leg over his chest, sitting on him rather than straddling, a lot of weight at once.
She had screamed and thrown her hands up, he didn’t know why. And then he saw Leighton with the gun, looming over the bed, practically on them. But not quite.
Marguerite ran at him, threw her body at him, and they fought. Cole got out of bed, ran at both of them, but it was too late; the gun went off, he wasn’t sure how, and Leighton was dead by the time he got there.
He and Marguerite figured out what to do: make it look like a burglary and leave. It was only about ten o’clock; Marguerite could come home and find the body by eleven-thirty or so.
They left Leighton where he was.
All they had to do, really, was make up the bed as if nothing had happened. And remove the candles, of course.
Then ransack the room a little.
Marguerite had kept a surprisingly stiff upper lip throughout the whole thing, had been almost chipper.
A good woman in a crisis
, he had thought at the time.
As they were leaving, she gave him the gun to dispose of and an heirloom ring, something flashy but not valuable. So she could find something missing.
They’d kept the door closed, in case Geoff woke up, and when they opened it, he was in the hall. Marguerite knelt and gathered him to her, saying, “Oh, my poor baby,” or something of the sort, and for the first time gave way to tears.
He patted her shoulder. “It’s all right, Mommy.”
“Sweetheart, how long have you been here?”
He looked at the floor. “I don’t know. What was that big noise?”
“You must have been dreaming, honey. I didn’t hear anything.”
Cole made up Geoff’s bed and put away his pajamas while Marguerite got him dressed to go to his grandmother’s.
When he thought about it now, Cole was glad Geoff was dead, that he never had to find out his mother had killed his father.
* * *
“Mom, are you all right?”
It was the last thing Neetsie had said before they stuffed Marguerite into the back of a police car, as if she were the one who was guilty. Now she was hunched down, making herself as small as she could. She wasn’t sure why she was sitting that way, but it was the way her life was.