“My mother did
not
have an affair with Mitch,” Marissa nearly screamed. “She loved my father!”
“Mitch loved me in a way. Did that stop
him
?”
“No! I do not believe you!” Marissa jumped up from the rocking chair, forgetting about Jean’s gun. “Mitch, tell her!”
He gurgled, coughed, gurgled again, and finally said, “No affair with Anne. Never, Jean.”
“And I am supposed to believe
you
?” Jean hissed.
The house phone began ringing, loud and insistent. Jean looked at the nearest one and shouted, “Shut up!” To Marissa, the phone seemed to ring at least twenty times, but she had time to draw a deep breath, to make her heart slow down, to cool her anger. You’re arguing with Jean as if what she’s saying might be true, Marissa thought. It isn’t. You
know
it isn’t. Don’t for one second betray Mom by even wondering if it’s true.
When the phone finally stopped ringing, Jean looked up at her. Marissa hadn’t realized she was still standing. “What’s the matter, dear, aren’t you proud to have Dillon for a brother? Or half brother. Only a half brother.”
“Who told him such a thing?” Marissa asked.
“I always said Dillon was smart. He listened to how Mitch’s voice changed when he talked about Annemarie. He saw you several times with Mitch and he could tell how much Mitch loved you. Mitch loved Catherine, too, because she looked so much like Annemarie. I was hoping she could be here this evening, but it’s not a great loss. You were the one Mitch especially loved.” Jean paused. “And so did Dillon. He’ll tell you when he comes back and he
will
come back when he hears his daddy is dead.”
“The picture in my mother’s grave. A picture of Dillon and me that said ‘Together Forever’ on the back. That was Dillon’s.”
“Yes, but Mitch kept it for him so Isaac wouldn’t find it. You tell her, Mitch.”
Marissa had been hearing Mitch’s breathing grow raspier by the minute. She was afraid he could no longer talk. She looked at his face and saw the agonizing effort he made to say a few words. “Couldn’t convince him…not sister. Made it all up in his head…because of the eyes.”
“Eyes?”
“Oh really, Marissa, I know you aren’t as smart as your sister, but I thought you were sharper than this. You and Dillon have eyes exactly the same color eyes. Not just blue. Sapphire. So blue sometimes people thought you were wearing colored contacts. That is inherited. You both inherited those blue-blue eyes from Mitch.”
It was hardly possible now to know how blue Mitch’s eyes had been when he was young, but Marissa knew Mitch and her father had the same grandmother. She’d been married to Bernard’s grandfather, and two years after his death she had married Mitch’s grandfather, both blue-eyed men.
“Dillon and I inherited this eye color from Dad and Mitch’s grandmother,” Marissa said slowly. “We have a few color photographs of her and I know Mitch does, too. Look at them—look at her eyes. The same as mine. The same as Betsy’s!”
“Don’t you talk about Betsy in the same breath with your vile brother!”
“He’s her brother, too.”
Infuriated, Jean swung at her, but Marissa dodged. Attacked by two women in the same day, she thought, a breath away from bursting into hysteria. Bea and Jean—women everyone thought were kind and harmless. But they weren’t. There was a difference, though—this one was cunning.
Terror rushed through Marissa. This woman was going to kill her. Then she looked at Eric. Even in the dim light, she could see his alarmingly pale face, the fluttering eyelids, the circle of blood under his leg—the circle growing larger and larger. He can’t lose much more blood and live, she thought, feeling as if an icy rapier were piercing her heart. He’s going to lie on this floor and die because I didn’t do enough to help him, because I wasn’t the fearless, ingenious Marissa Gray I’ve always believed I was.
No,
knew
I was, she thought suddenly, fiercely. Know I
am.
The real Marissa didn’t die when Eric broke our engagement or when Mom died. The real Marissa has just been drifting, letting life take her where it will. I used to control where I went and I will again. Jean is cunning, but I can be cunning, too. It’s time for that chest-pounding Eric mentioned just hours ago. I can be clever and I can be mean and I can be a surprise. If I just let go, Jean won’t see me coming and I can throw her so far off balance that maybe I can save both Eric and me. But especially Eric.
Marissa tried to calm her breathing, soften her voice. “So you knew nothing about all of this until Mitch got so bad you had to put him on morphine, and when he’d had a certain amount of morphine, he’d start babbling.”
“I told you that,” Jean said disdainfully.
“
Babbling,
Jean. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time. But you were determined to believe anything bad he said about himself, to find out as much as you could about Mitch Farrell. That’s why you didn’t take him to the hospital. You wanted to keep him here all to yourself and torture him by withholding morphine, giving him half doses, asking him a hundred questions. Maybe you are right about Dillon being his son—he committed adultery. But what have
you
been doing? You’ve been
killing
people!”
“The people Dillon managed to get in his power, just like Satan does.”
“You don’t believe in God, but you believe in Satan?”
“Don’t try to confuse me. I killed those people because they were as evil as Dillon. They did what he told them to do to protect
themselves.
If they hadn’t been like him, they would have stood up to him. They wouldn’t have injured and killed and let Dillon kill for them and kept their mouths shut. They would have told the police about what they’d done and about Dillon. Instead, there they all were, Dillon’s minions, basking in their fine lives like they’d never done a wrong thing. It was up to
me
to punish them for their evil!”
“Let’s talk about evil, Jean.” Marissa made her eyes flash and turned her voice to acid. “Do you know what I think? You were shocked when Mitch married you. Then you gave him nothing except your fawning love and your plain face and your bony body—no daughter, no son. He started working late all the time. You
had
to suspect there might be another woman. Almost any woman would suspect her husband in those circumstances.
“I also think you’ve suspected for a long time that Dillon was Mitch’s son. You’re too smart, too observant, not to notice how Mitch acted around the boy when Dillon was here. I think you hated Mitch for having an affair and you hated him even more for not being here when Betsy died! He was with another woman when you were peeling potatoes instead of watching your child as closely as you should. You let her
die
!”
Jean screeched at her, launched, and missed again. She held up the gun and tried to cock it, but her hands trembled while Marissa went on relentlessly: “You killed people you’d decided were evil.
You
decided. Is that your job?”
Jean looked at her with flaring nostrils and eyes more bloodshot than usual. “I don’t have to explain myself to you!”
“Then why have you been doing it all evening, Jean? Why have you been spinning out your sad tale about your horrible husband and your dead child? You want sympathy, and when you don’t get it you get mad, and that’s when you get dangerous.”
“I was never dangerous before Mitch started telling me all the awful things he’d done!”
“I see. You were a paragon until less than two weeks ago when you decided to start messing with your dying husband’s morphine dosages and got him talking. Then you became a killer, murdering people because they’d been involved with Dillon.” Marissa made herself laugh softly. “It’s ridiculous. People don’t change that quickly, Jean. Maybe you did have a psychotic break—my sister would know more about that than I do—but it didn’t come out of the blue. And if you’d had one, you wouldn’t have been so…organized about your killings. You never left one trace. You perfectly executed your little scare tactics—my christening dress and the picture of Dillon and me in the grave, the postcard to me signed with ‘D.A.’ the picture of Tonya and Andrew decorating their Christmas tree, also signed ‘D.A.’ Laying a few things around the Archer house, including my picture, to make it seem like Dillon was staying there. And maybe worst of all, putting the ring I’d given Gretchen, the ring Mitch had been keeping since her death, on her grave, all wrapped up like a present.
“Those were extremely clever acts. Sly. Not the work of a woman who’d just learned something horrible and went to pieces. I’m sure you started the rumor that Dillon had come home
before
you went on the vengeance spree you claim wasn’t wrong. If it wasn’t wrong, why did you intend to keep it a secret forever? You were never going to confess to your murders. You were never going to confess about calling poor Bea Pruitt, a woman who’s never hurt anyone and telling her a lie about me threatening to kill Buddy, a lie that will probably result in her spending years in a mental institution.
“You have mental problems, Jean, much worse than Bea, and I don’t mean problems caused solely by the loss of Betsy. You’ve probably had them since you were a girl working like a man on that farm of your father’s and you’ve ended up destroying more lives than Dillon has.”
Marissa went on, frantically reaching for anything she could say to enrage Jean. “I don’t think Dillon started believing I was his sister because we have the same color eyes. I think you dropped hints and he decided that was the truth. You took verbal shots at Mitch and at my mother. You envied her beauty and her charm and the love she had from
her
husband—that’s why you set fire to her rose garden. You’d helped plant it, but everyone thought of it as
Annemarie’s
rose garden. Now you’re trying to ruin her reputation and turn me into the result of an affair.”
“You
are
!”
“You thought Mitch had replaced Betsy with me and that’s why you tried to send me into the Orenda River in that wreck—because Betsy died in the Orenda River.”
“Yes. If
my
daughter died in the river, Mitch’s daughter would, too.”
“So you thought I’d die because I’m Mitch’s daughter, but it didn’t work, Jean. I’ve loved Mitch all my life, but I will never believe I’m his daughter, because I’m
not
!”
“You
are
Mitch’s daughter!”
“Then that would make me Betsy’s sister and Dillon her
brother
!”
“No!” Jean shrieked. “No!”
“You can’t have it all ways, Jean. You can’t have Dillon and me as Mitch’s children and
not
have us related to Betsy. It just isn’t possible.”
“You and Dillon are no relation to Betsy,” Jean’s guttural voice rolled.
“Jean, my morph…please.” Mitch’s voice was so low and scratchy, Marissa could barely hear it. “Such pain. Please.”
Jean didn’t even look at him, but Marissa did and saw that his gaze was fixed on her as his left hand barely tapped the bed. Was it uncontrollable movement? Marissa wondered.
“Aren’t you going to give him something for pain
now,
Jean? Haven’t you made him watch enough?”
Jean’s eyes narrowed. “No. Not quite.”
Marissa’s gaze flashed back to Mitch, whose left hand tapped harder on the bed. He was signaling her, she realized. But what did he want?
Jean stood on the right side of the bed, close to Eric, who wasn’t moving, whose eyes had closed. She still held the gun, but her hands shook and her eyes looked wild and unfocused.
“What do you think is going to happen to you after all of this, Jean?” Slowly Marissa took a small sideways step from the foot of the bed, hoping to inch her way up to Mitch’s tapping hand. “Do you think you’re going to just run away?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you have all of your papers in order? Birth certificate, driver’s license, credit card? Oh, wait, you couldn’t use any of those because they all have your name on them. Even your credit card. Have you been stockpiling cash?”
“Yes!” Jean answered triumphantly. “I have cash.”
“You must have been saving it for quite some time.” Marissa took another small step. “More than two weeks.”
“I was saving it for a rainy day. Some time when Mitch and I might need money in a hurry. I was thinking of me
and
Mitch.”
“Oh, I’m sure you were,” Marissa said sarcastically. “And what about your father’s land? Rather, your land. Everybody always wondered why you didn’t sell it. Even a chunk of it would have given you
and
Mitch the money to lead a more comfortable life, take some trips, buy a bigger house and a boat like my dad’s. Mitch loved going out on that boat.”
“I didn’t.”
“No. And you weren’t going to sell the land so you could buy some nice things because you were punishing him.” Another step. “You’ve been punishing Mitch for years. Long before Betsy died. Was it because you thought he only married you for the land? You wanted to see if he’d stay with you if you didn’t sell it? Or was it because you suspected he was with other women?”
“I was saving for our old age! I wanted us to be comfortable! To be able to live a nice life!”
One more step. “Comfortable doing what? Leaving Mitch to his woodworking while you tended your flower gardens? Oh, he’d probably be too old for the woodworking and you’d have arthritis in your knees and couldn’t stoop down to dig in the dirt.” She glanced down and saw the edge of something dark beneath a fold in the sheet. Mitch tapped at it once, then moved his hand. “I guess you two could have just stayed closed up in this house together. He wouldn’t be the handsome sheriff anymore. You’d finally have him all to yourself, completely under your control.”
“I never wanted to control him! I just wanted him to love me!”
“He did, Jean. Maybe not in that wild, passionate way we see in the movies, but he loved you, he cared about you, he stayed with you, he protected you. It’s just that he couldn’t make you his whole life. No man could.”