Protection detail, in this case, means Archer is going to stay with me during the day, Sterling is going to stay at the house each night, and everyone is going to pray that Section Chief Ward doesn’t find out. It’s technically off the books—a personal favor—which is its own can of worms. If anything does happen, the agents could face hell for it. We move in a little over a week but it feels like forever, especially with that rotation in place. Mum arranges a rendezvous time with Sterling, because we’re probably safe enough at her office, and the agents head out.
I settle into a corner of Mum’s rather sterile office with my laptop. I should do homework—she gave me the network key—but instead I pull up the photos from Gunny and Hannah’s church. It was a lovely afternoon with them, and interesting windows were a definite bonus. The scenes were painted onto clear panes, rather than being a mosaic of stained glass, and even with the semi-translucent paint, it changed the way the light filtered through.
Beneath a portrait of the women and the empty tomb, Gunny ran his gnarled fingers over a tiny brass plaque with his wife’s name on it.
The church secretary was even older than Gunny, and she knew the history of each window and who had sponsored it. When I mentioned my love of windows, she gave me an info card for a small chapel about an hour away. “Some say God gave us the ability to create art so we could glorify Him,” she said with a smile. “The windows at Shiloh Chapel make that easy to believe.”
I very much doubt I’ll get to find out.
I snap the laptop shut with a frustrated sigh. I’d hoped looking at the pictures would cheer me up, but they just depressed me. Reaching down into my bag, I pull out the envelope that was sitting in our mailbox, Inara’s neat handwriting across the front.
Dear Priya,
Desmond MacIntosh is dead, has been dead almost a month now, and I’m still not sure how to feel about it. Everyone expects me to be sad, because we were “star-crossed lovers” or whatever bullshit gets spouted by people with insufficient understanding of what star-crossed actually means. Or they think I should be happy, because hey, look, one of my tormentors killed himself, as if seeing suicide among the girls should make me glad to see it in him.
Mostly, though, I’m just relieved, and what the hell kind of reaction is that?
I’m relieved that I don’t have to see him across the courtroom, that I don’t have to feel his eyes on me as I testify against him and his father. I’m relieved that I won’t have to spend hours upon hours seeing his kicked-puppy expression. I’m relieved that his fate is resolved, so I don’t have to stress about it anymore.
I’ve always known I was a generally terrible person, but this drives it home in a way I didn’t expect.
Especially when I consider this: I would be so grateful if the Gardener would get his shit together and die of his injuries, or something of that nature. I don’t feel the need to kill him, or even for him to kill himself. I just really want him to be dead.
The trial probably won’t start until the fall, and while I’m not pessimistic enough to think he’ll be found innocent, there are still a lot of suboptimal outcomes. I don’t want him taken care of in a psychiatric hospital or nursing home. I want him caged, stripped to nothing like we were and forcibly remade into something horribly fragile.
But even more than that, I just want him dead. The cage is appealing, but he still has enough money to make it comfortable, or as comfortable as it can be given his injuries. I don’t want him comfortable.
I want him dead, but people keep looking at me like I should be better than that, like I should rise above, and goddamn it, I don’t want to rise above. He hasn’t earned that kind of grace.
If you ever get the chance, Priya, just kill him if you can. Self-defense, and then it’s done.
Well.
Now I’m all kinds of cheered up, thank you, Inara.
As long as I’m going to wallow, though, I might as well do it right, so I open my computer back up. All of my bastard’s victims have memorial Facebook pages, even the ones who didn’t have Facebook when they were alive. They’re most active in the spring, people posting memories or prayers as the anniversaries roll around, though birthday messages pop up too. The various mods are pretty quick to remove comments by assholes.
I start with Julie McCarthy and work backward, reading the new stories. There are new photos, too, put up by friends and family and classmates reminiscing. I skip Chavi’s.
I’ve never looked at Chavi’s since she died. I don’t begrudge the people who post there, many of them genuinely her friends. Josephine moderates it, so I know it’s respectful. If it helps them mourn and move on, more blessings to them. I just don’t want to let other people’s memories of Chavi intrude on my own.
When I get to Darla Jean’s—the first victim—there’s a post from her mother, Eudora Carmichael, dated on this year’s anniversary of Darla Jean’s death. Eudora talks about missing her daughter’s light and laughter, how Darla Jean was all the joy in the family. She talks about missing her son, who never got over his sister’s death. After a prayer for justice, she concludes with a picture, a family portrait from that last Easter.
Darla Jean is all blonde prettiness in white lace, and beside her, Eudora is plump and pleasant with the kind eyes she gave to her daughter. Her son stands behind them, and holy shit, seventeen years later I know that face.
I know that face.
“Mum!” I croak.
She looks up sharply from her computer. “Priya? Are you okay?”
“Come look at this.”
“Priya?”
“Mum, please. Come look at this.”
She slowly gets up and crosses the room, sitting next to me on the rock-hard couch. She glances from me to the screen. “Your face says this is important, but I don’t follow.”
I pull up one of the folders of pictures I’ve taken this spring, clicking through until I find the one I want. I crop the window so I can place it next to the picture of the Carmichaels.
She stares at the picture for a moment, a muscle jumping in her jaw. This is him, she knows it, too, this is the man who killed Chavi, almost certainly the one who’s been leaving me gifts.
She swallows hard, blinking away the sheen of unshed tears, then looks back at me. “You don’t have your phone in hand. Are you just in shock, or are you hesitating?”
My mother knows me entirely too well. “I’m hesitating.”
“Why?” She sounds curious, not accusing. She’s also not reaching for a phone to report it herself.
I hand her Inara’s letter and watch her eyes scan back and forth over the page.
“I think I might like Inara,” she notes when she’s done.
“I think you’ve just described Eddison’s personal hell.”
“This is Inara’s view, though; what’s yours?”
I take a deep breath, give myself the time to truly think it through. There are moments I realize just how unconventional my relationship with Mum is. Moments I have to admit that she probably has sociopathic tendencies and simply chooses not to use her powers for excessive evil.
And I am my mother’s daughter.
“How much proof do you suppose there is?” I ask eventually. “Seventeen years without getting caught, he’s clearly not an idiot. We give this name to the FBI, how much do you think they’ll find that isn’t circumstantial? If he had any interest in confessing, he’d have done it years ago.”
“You think if there’s enough to go to trial, there won’t be enough to convict.”
“If they try him for it and he gets acquitted, that’s it. They can’t try him for the same murders again. No justice for Darla Jean straight through Julie McCarthy. No justice for Chavi.”
“Landon,” she murmurs thoughtfully.
“Landon was a pedophile; I’m not interested in justice for Landon.”
Her lips twitch in a proud smile.
“What stops him from following us to France?” I ask.
“So you want to what? Trap him into confessing his past sins so you can record it? Make a conviction more likely?”
“No.”
It takes a moment for it to sink in. I’ve never really been the savage one. “You’re serious,” she says.
“I want this done,” I tell her softly, little more than a whisper. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder or wondering who else he’s killed. I don’t want to move with this still hanging over us. I just want all of this to be over.”