The Other Side of Midnight (28 page)

“Who are the Dubbses?” James asked.

“Agents, of course,” was the reply. “We use a man and a woman, we give them a cover story that keeps them frequently in London, and we have them come and go from time to time so the neighborhood and the few live-out servants we hire don’t get suspicious. The location gives us the utmost secrecy without appearing out of place. The cover doesn’t hold up well under expert investigation, which was part of the reason I read Inspector Merriken’s reports so closely. He missed it at first glance, probably because there were so many other potential suspects to sift through. But I think he would have figured it out rather rapidly, even if Miss Winter hadn’t prompted him, and then I would have had to decide how to keep him under control.”

“He wouldn’t have liked that,” I observed.

“He wouldn’t have had a choice. In any case, I thought Gloria would be safe if she came here. The agents were to collect her from the train station, and I’d arrive myself, and then Gloria would have no choice but to talk to me. I’d persuade her to help, to become one of us—after she’d come under our protection, of course. If my wild hunch was anywhere close to being correct, I did not want her to go home.” He shook his head. “That was when everything went wrong. My motorcar broke down, and I was delayed. At the train station, my agents discovered that Fitzroy Todd and that odious fortune-teller had decided to tag along and wouldn’t leave. All of them were drinking, and Gloria was in an uncontrollable mood. Before my agents could handle the situation, Gloria was dead.”

James’s hands were clenched into fists at his sides. My own bewilderment was turning to anger, swift and heated. “You knew from the very beginning,” I said to George. “You knew who killed her, and you knew why. Why in the world did you recruit me and bring me into this? Why did you set him on me?”

“Miss Winter, I’m telling you, I didn’t
know.
Even after she was killed, I had only a paper-thin theory. I’d had to improvise the entire meeting, because my superiors would have had none of it. I’d have been locked up in Bedlam. I told them I wanted to interview Gloria as a potential recruit because of her client list—nothing about the Black Dog at all. It was an incredible risk. And when it all went wrong, I still didn’t know. Fitzroy Todd could have killed her, or that drug addict he brought along, or someone else entirely—a lover or a customer. I needed you, Miss Winter, to go where I couldn’t go, and ask questions. To find out if my gamble was correct.”

“And if Colin came after her next, so much the better.” James’s voice was rough, furious.

“What do you want me to say?” George’s composure cracked finally, and he let loose a flare of pure anger. “It was a possibility. I met with Miss Winter in the middle of Trafalgar Square so that if Colin
was watching, he could easily see us without being seen. Then I had one of my men tail her everywhere she went.”

“Oh, my God.” My headache throbbed again. It had all been a lie, even that meeting in London. “And I lost your man right before I stumbled on Colin murdering Ramona.”

“We could have had him then.” George’s voice still simmered with anger. “We were that close. My methods may not meet with your approval, but they work. I don’t know if Colin knew how close he came, not then. I’d lay my bets that he knows now.”

Something twigged at me, something not quite right. James’s paper had listed my powers as unproven, and the newspaper article, obsessed with Gloria, had not mentioned me at all. Why would Colin pursue me if he thought my powers were fake? What interest could I possibly be to him? I opened my mouth to ask the question, but I never got the chance.

Far off to the west, past the pond and the trees, a single shot sounded.

I flinched, but James only turned. “That’s a rifle,” he said.

Two more shots followed, echoing in quick succession.

“And that’s a handgun,” James said. “Merriken.”

Twilight had fallen now, the line of trees like charcoal in the darkness, and a breeze came off the pond, bringing a smell of green dampness.
Gloria, is that you?
I thought wildly before I turned to see James shouldering his rifle.

“Stay here,” he said to me.

“Wait.”

It was George. He came closer, and I could see the urgency in his face. “Don’t do it,” he said to James. “It’s what he wants—for you to come to him, so he can pick the vantage point. Make him come to you—he will, if you have what he wants. Pick your ground, Mr. Hawley. What is the best place to meet the enemy?”

“The house,” I said.

George raised his eyebrows at me. “And what if he throws a
bomb through the window, or a grenade, or a stick of dynamite? Colin is very well armed.”

The motorcycle sidecar, I thought. And the glimmer I’d traced through Colin’s mind:
No reason to look in the sidecar. None at all.

James glanced around. “The trees,” he said finally. “They provide the best cover, if I know which way he’s coming.” He glanced at me, and my heart broke by a sliver. James’s eyes were dead, his emotions gone. This was the officer who had led his men into those woods in France, watched them die in the space of a moment. The man who had lain next to Fenton’s ripped-apart body, smelling the blood, listening to the agony.
Some days I wonder if I’m going to wake from a dream and find myself in the trenches again
.

I swallowed. I could not touch this man before me, could not reach him. There was no way, but I had to try. “What about Inspector Merriken?” I asked. “What if he’s shot, injured?”

“Merriken is a soldier,” said James. “He’ll understand.” He turned to George. “The shots came from the east, but there’s no guarantee he’ll come that way.”

“I wouldn’t if I were him,” George replied, his words fast and clipped. “The ground is wet between there and here—it became waterlogged when they put in the pond. He’ll have to skirt it, and the best way that doesn’t lead him blind is from the south.”

Over the treetops came two more shots, a fast staccato.

“This way.” James took my wrist, his grip icy, and pulled me toward the trees. He still wore his jacket, though he had left his hat in the house, and as I followed I could see the bulk of his shoulders beneath the fabric, the strong, graceful line of his body as he pulled me. I could not have removed myself from his grip if I had tried; I could do nothing but stumble along behind him on my sore, exhausted legs, trying to keep stride in my low heels. I thought of James sprawled on his sofa only this morning, laughing.
I don’t intend to go around shooting people
, he had said.

Behind me, I could hear George’s footsteps following us. “James, please,” I said.

“Ellie, be quiet. This is the only way.”

He stopped us at the bottom of a rise, motioned us to silence, and climbed it slowly in the darkness, peering through the trees. My head was throbbing. I blinked soddenly, panicked and terrified. Someone was going to be shot, killed, if Inspector Merriken wasn’t dead already. It wasn’t the only way; it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
Darling,
came a voice in my head, and I caught a whiff of perfume.

There was one thing I could do, and suddenly I knew how to do it.

I turned to George Sutter, who stood nearby watching James and waiting. He saw me turn and raised his eyebrows.

“I’d apologize for this,” I whispered to him, “but I don’t think you’ve earned it.”

He frowned. “Apologize for what, Miss Winter?”

I reached out, grasped his bare hand, and held it between mine. “Hang on,” I said into the darkness.

C
old and wet. Darkness. She wondered whether she looked beautiful, suspended in the murky water, whether her hair flowed and her skirt pressed against her thighs like a siren of the sea.
I’m finally a mermaid,
she thought,
though I have no tail.

It had been wrong from the beginning, and she’d known it. She should never have come, except that she didn’t care anymore, aside from a hardened, cynical curiosity. She told herself she’d said yes for the money, but almost from the first she’d known there was something wrong. Fitz had been sweating, his handsome face almost gray, and he was in deep with that drug-addled girlfriend of his. Besides, when had she ever trusted Fitz?

The headaches were explosive, like shells landing in her brain, and she’d begun to wake in the night, her hands on her scalp, moaning. Gin killed them only for an hour or so. The sessions, which had always come so easily, came harder and harder. She’d spent months under waves of anger and euphoria and denial and an abject terror
that held her in a grip so hard she could barely breathe, but deep down she’d known it was almost over and the shade was being pulled down over the window. She got sentimental, which she never did, and she wanted to see her brothers one last time.

What a humiliation to discover that she couldn’t summon them by herself, that she needed that fool Octavia to help her. After Ellie was gone—Ellie, with her blond hair and innocent-wise eyes, who missed nothing, who asked questions of everything, whose emotions played across her face so easily—Octavia had seemed like a replacement, but she’d been nothing except a disappointment. You couldn’t replace Ellie with a girl like that. It turned out you couldn’t replace Ellie with anyone.

But she’d swallowed it and called Octavia, squeezing money from her at the same time—it was ridiculously easy—and at first the session hadn’t worked. She’d faced the possibility that that was it, she would never see her brothers again, and then—and then she saw Tommy. He was just
there
, not some shambling semblance of him but the real man, wearing his army uniform with his hair cut short and combed down, so unlike his usual unruly self. He’d seen her, and she’d felt a swell of pain in her head that was unlike anything she’d ever felt before, and then Harry was there, making it worth it. Harry was in uniform, too, and she heard a rasping cough (
gas—my brother was gassed before they patched him up and sent him back to the front
), but she’d been able to inhale him in, his handsomeness and sweetness and confidence. Seeing them was worth everything. Octavia had been saying something shrill, and through the fog she had summoned Colin, looking for his serious face.

She saw Colin all right, but he wasn’t in the room. He was standing outside across Harriet Walk, watching the windows of Octavia’s apartments with an intent look on his face, as if he could see through the drawn blinds. Colin and yet not Colin, not really, because his near-comical seriousness had turned to cold and hatred. He moved
away and disappeared, vanishing into the streets of London, and Gloria remembered George sending her a telegram—a bloody
telegram
—telling her to be careful, that he wanted to speak to her. And suddenly she understood. Colin wasn’t even dead. They’d all been fooled, all these years—even all-knowing George.

She said good-bye to her darling brothers and found she was crying. She remembered nothing about the next few minutes, about getting rid of Octavia and leaving the house; all she remembered was standing on the sidewalk, looking for a figure that had already disappeared, and thinking,
I might be in danger.
Octavia’s father had pulled up in his Alvis, sitting in the seat behind the driver, and given her a disapproving look. She had no time for snobbery, not much time left at all, so she simply walked up to the motorcar and leaned in.
Get her out of England as soon as you can,
she’d said to his surprised face.
If you love her at all.
Then she’d walked away. Either he’d take her advice or he wouldn’t; it was out of her hands.

She’d gone home and gotten into bed fully dressed and drank until the headache faded. Lying there with her dress wrinkling and her makeup smearing onto the pillow, she could no longer see Colin’s strange new face. Davies had knocked, but she hadn’t answered, and eventually Davies had gone away. She’d stared at the wall and thought about what she could do, who she could call on. George knew something about this, but as always he wanted to play games, games in which she was the loser. But there were games she could play, too.

The next morning she rummaged through her things until she found an old handkerchief of George’s. It took nearly half an hour—sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing only a man’s shirt she’d found under the bed and a pair of drawers, the handkerchief clutched in her lap—before the information came, but finally she picked it out of her throbbing brain. Davies knocked on the door again, the sound like gunshots in her skull, but she ignored it. Then she wrote a note and got dressed.

A little sleight of hand trick, leaving the note at George’s hotel. She could simply have sent the note to Ellie, but Ellie might not have opened it, or she might have read it and thrown it away. It was always difficult to predict what Ellie would do.

No, she had given the note to George instead. George would be furious that she’d pulled such a trick after turning down his offer to talk, and he would go to Ellie and push her into action. That would be one good thing—Ellie in action. Besides, it amused her to imagine Ellie and George having a conversation.

But most of all, no matter what happened, eventually Ellie would come. And that made the rest of it almost bearable.

*   *   *

I
opened my eyes to the smell of smoke.

George Sutter pulled away from me, staggering, his mouth open, his face sagging in shock. “What was that?” he hissed. “What did you do?”

“I found Gloria,” I said, part of me wild with sharp, triumphant joy. “I called her. That’s what you hired me for, isn’t it?”

“My God,” he said. “I saw things—heard things—”

A rifle shot cracked through the trees, and then another. Above us on the rise, James fired his own rifle, then lowered it and scrambled down. “Something’s burning,” he said.

He was right. Through the pulsing in my head—slick and powerful, out of my control, the way it had been at Ramona’s séance—I could feel the pungent sting of smoke in my nose, though I couldn’t see any flames.

George tried to pull himself together, looking from me to James. “Colin,” he said. “Instead of coming for us, he’s burning us out.”

“This way,” said James.

More gunshots sounded through the trees. Was Inspector Merriken still alive? Or were the men he had called for reinforcements shooting? There were shouts, but I couldn’t tell what direction they
came from. I followed behind James and George, moving as fast as I could as they led me through the still, quiet woods.

“Not the house,” I heard George say. “He’ll burn that, too.”

“I know,” James replied. He was barely out of breath while I was staggering, the smoke growing stronger in my throat. “Do you smell that? Petrol. He’s using accelerant.”

They said something else, their words moving back and forth in sharp measures, but I no longer heard. We changed direction and I followed, watching James’s bent form ahead of me, George’s tall frame loping easily. I started to lag, caught up, lagged again.

We crested a rise and at last I saw the flames. An entire section of the woods was on fire now, the flames sweeping beneath the trees, their light swirling into the darkened sky. The clouds of smoke were thick, and I could feel a wall of heat. We had come the wrong way.

“Goddamn it,” I heard James say. “He’s started it here, too. He’s too bloody fast!”

George said something; then more shots came through the trees. And in a single instant I turned and found that I was alone.

“James!” I cried.

There was no answer, no sound but the crackling of the oncoming fire.

Darling,
Gloria said.

I limped back the way I had come, trying to remember the path we’d taken, lost almost instantly. I had a few moments of hideous panic, gasping for breath, before I caught myself and used the tattered remains of my logic. Not the house; George was right about that. But where to go in a fire? To the water. If I could find my way to the pond, I could stay safe from the fire.

I followed the direction I’d heard Gloria’s voice come from. The wound on my knee opened and fresh blood trickled down my shin, but still I kept moving. I saw shapes in the shadows, someone taking even strides, but when I cried out I heard no answer. It wasn’t until
one of the shapes passed near me—and I saw he was dressed in full army uniform—that I realized why.

“No,” I said as Harry Sutter walked past me, his handsome face intent on something I couldn’t see. “Gloria, what did you do?”

There were more shouts, alarmed now, more gunshots, and in my ear a sharp bark of laughter. I hadn’t summoned these shapes; Gloria had. I’d summoned her and she’d summoned the ghosts, her power mixed with mine, using it, amplifying it, opening the door to the other side. Someone else walked through the trees—a woman. Davies? Ramona? Who else had she called? I ran and ran, hoping beyond logic that I was going in the right direction as I choked on the smoke and felt the heat rise at my back.

I broke from the line of the trees and found myself in the clearing by the pond. I was at the other side of the water now, staring into the cattails and the tall grass, opposite where James and I had stood earlier. Somehow I had gone all the way around, probably a quarter mile, without knowing it. The woods to my left were ablaze, the flames licking up into the sky, like a nightmare I’d never dreamed could happen, inescapable and obscene.

“Ellie!” came a voice from the woods.

“James!” I cried, my throat tearing, my voice barely audible to my own ears. My eyes watered from the smoke and I could hardly breathe. “I’m here! By the water!”

“I’m coming for you—,” he said, and then he was silent. I screamed his name again, but my voice was no more than a whisper. I started through the high reeds into the water, the shocking cold of it rising to my ankles, the mud pulling at my shoes.

I had gone only a few feet when I sensed someone behind me.

I turned and saw a figure emerge from the woods. A man wearing farmer’s clothes and heavy boots, his cloth cap gone from his dark head. Coming toward me, walking, taking his time, inexorable. In his hands he held a long, thin wire. A living man. Colin Sutter. Coming for me.

“Stop,” I tried to say, but nothing came from my mouth anymore. I sloshed backward in the water, the reeds tangling around my legs and ankles, my hands up as if I could stop him, thinking,
This is it—he started the fire to separate me from the others and he succeeded. I was a fool ever to think I could get away. Of course he’d find me—of course.
And still he came toward me, not a single word on his lips, because that was how he killed—fast and silent, without a good-bye.

Footsteps sloshed in the water behind me, and Colin stopped.

Something moved to my left, and there was a horrible smell. Another shape moved to my right, coming from deep in the water, making a rhythmic
slosh slosh slosh
sound. Colin’s face froze in a sort of horror, the shadows of the flames flickering over his features. He gazed behind me in disbelief.

I turned. Harry Sutter stood next to me, tall and still in his uniform, looking at his brother. On my other side Ramona emerged from the water, the drops vanishing off her like air. Her face was sick and intent, her eyes like holes in her skull. Behind her, coming up from the depths, came the man in the houndstooth jacket.

I froze where I was. None of them seemed to see me; all were intent on Colin, who still stood at the edge of the water, the wire drooping in his hands. “It can’t be you,” he said, the first words I’d heard him speak; his voice was raspy with smoke, but beneath that it was deep and melodious. I did not know who he was talking to, as Tommy Sutter had come out of the water now, too, his face so much like his brothers’ but different, wider, with its own kind of handsomeness. Like the others, he made no noise.

I turned back to Colin. I wanted to say something, but suddenly nothing would come. Because there was another shape approaching Colin from behind.

She looked nothing like she had been—and everything like it. I would have known her anywhere, even across the divide of life and death, the divide that she and I had been able to travel, that we now
traveled together. She was in the shadows, but still I knew. My mind was sure, and my heart—all of me was certain.

Colin became aware of her as she stood at his back. He stiffened, his expression rigid with new alarm. The ghosts in the water with me stood and watched as a flawless white arm reached out and around Colin’s neck, draped like a lover’s. Another arm came from the other side, the pale hand with its long, perfect fingers touching the side of his cheek, tilting his head. Colin gave a low groan of helpless terror.