He closed his eyes. A tear ran over the purplish pouch beneath his eye, then down his sunken cheek.
“I’m trying to understand, Larry. We were lovers then. How could you have planned such a thing and me not know?”
He kept his eyes closed. “You saw what you wanted to,” he said. “You believed I was a hero.”
“I thought I knew you. You proclaimed to the world that murder wasn’t the answer. Was that a cover story?”
He wet his lips with his tongue. “I didn’t want to tell you. I knew you’d never accept killing. I didn’t want to fall off the white horse you put me on.”
But he had fallen. Far and hard.
“What changed you?” she asked, her voice hushed inside her sawdust brain.
“She did.”
Diana felt a stab. So many years later, and she was still jealous of her.
“Gertrude had such intensity,” he said. “She persuaded me that the only way to get the world’s attention was to do something devastating.”
“So you came up with the plan to blow up the library and kill hundreds of students.”
He pulled in several labored breaths. He was talking too much. Wearing himself out. “I was caught up in her vison,” he said finally. “She was always the one with the true convictions. Not me.”
Lawrence of Columbia. He had been nothing more than an actor playing a part.
“When I asked you to come with me to the FBI to stop the plan, you were reluctant at first, then you agreed.”
“I was relieved you’d discovered the plan,” he said. “I hadn’t wanted to go through with the bombing, but I didn’t know how to stop it once it was in motion.”
“Except you didn’t want anyone to learn the truth about you. That it had been your plan.”
He lay there, dead still.
She needed to get it out. All of it.
“Instead of going to the bar to tell the others that we had negotiated for their immunity, you snuck down to the brownstone basement. You decided to silence the people who knew the plan to blow up Low Library was your brainchild.” She stopped to take a breath. “And that’s what you did, didn’t you? You silenced them. Michael Shernovsky, Gary Cohen, and Gertrude Morgenstern. And a five-year-old boy named Martin Smith, who happened to be riding his red tricycle that day.”
He moved his head back and forth against the pillow, but she sensed it wasn’t in denial, but rather some inner hell he was trying to block out.
“You were the one who blew up the brownstone on April Fool.”
He let out a noise like he’d been kicked in the gut.
“Except you had expected Gertrude to be in the basement, but she wasn’t. She was upstairs, where she’d been talking to me at the front door.” The beeping of his monitor seemed to merge with the ringing in her head. “So what happened, Larry? Did you see her running from the building and stop her at the stoop where I saw the two of you? What promises did you make after convincing her you’d known she hadn’t been in the basement when you threw the bomb? Did you tell her to plant her body parts and clothes to make it look like she had died in the explosion?”
“I panicked.” His voice came out in a whisper. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Did you reassure her that the two of you would run away and hide in Mexico? Maybe Puerto Vallarta or Cabo?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said.
Larry had been Gertrude’s shining knight, too. That’s what she’d called him. Her knight. It had been Larry who had made Gertrude promises, not Jonathan. It was all so clear now. So obvious.
“You had a relationship with Gertrude when I believed it was just you and me.” The idea no longer hurt her. She was finally past that girlish pain.
“That’s why Gertrude believed you. You two had already been planning to go off to Mexico.” La cucaracha. La cucaracha.
The ringing in her head was too loud. She willed it to stop. “But you never replied to her messages after she went into hiding, did you? You discarded her.”
“I was in love with you, Di. Never with Gertrude.”
“Not until she came back as Star. Although you didn’t know it was Gertrude, or that she had come back to get even with you and with me.” She paused, a lump rising in her throat. “And with Jonathan.”
Because of Larry, the man she loved was dead.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a fraud.”
Diana leaned back against the wheelchair, the sickly smell of flowers surrounding her, the ringing in her head finally quieting down. Jonathan’s remains would be cremated, as he had wanted. There would be a memorial, but it wouldn’t be enough. Not nearly enough.
“The sins of the fathers,” Larry was saying. “I’ve brought terrible pain upon my children. Upon you.” He met her eyes. “I’m sorry, Diana. I wish I knew what more I could say or do.”
She turned away from the eyes that had once captured her heart.
“Will you tell the FBI?” he asked. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
“No,” she said.
“And the children? Are you going to tell Aubrey and Kevin what I did?” He wet his cracked lips with his tongue. “It would kill me if they knew, Di.”
He had once been her hero, her white knight on a snowy stallion. The man she had sipped wine with on the shore of the bay. He was the father of her children.
“No. I won’t tell anyone.”
She rolled her wheelchair away from him, toward the door. “Enough have already suffered and died because of you.”
CHAPTER 55
There was dried blood on his neck. Aubrey dampened a washcloth in the bathroom and cleaned it off as her father slept on the raised hospital bed. The blood turned the washcloth a brownish red and left a metallic smell that overpowered the sweet scent of wildflowers in the basket the Simmers had brought when they’d come by the day before.
Prudence had hugged Aubrey so tightly it took her breath away. Aubrey had saved her grandson. She had become the family hero, a designation she had never sought.