“She’ll come with me,” Harper said. “And you’ll stay here.”
“Yes. I’ll have to. Father Storey will be too weak to look after camp alone. I expect that’s why I’m being summoned to his bedside. I’m being enlisted.” His mouth twisted in a sour frown.
“You wouldn’t leave anyway. You have to tend your private fire.”
“No one else would understand.”
“You should let her go out, and come away with me.” Harper found she could not look at him when she said this. She had to turn her face toward the ocean. The wind was spooning the foam off the tops of the waves and she could pretend the water on her face was spray. “It isn’t safe here. It hasn’t been safe for a long time. They’re going to find Camp Wyndham. The Marlboro Man and my husband, or men like them. Sooner or later.” She thought of the dreams, of Nelson Heinrich in a bloodstained candy-cane-print sweater, grinning out of a skinless face, and shuddered.
She didn’t believe in a fixed future, didn’t believe in precognition. Didn’t even believe in the Marlboro Man’s psychic radio station, although it seemed like awfully good luck, him turning up on the exact day she returned home. But she believed in the subconscious and she believed in paying attention when it started waving red flags. She had left Nelson alive—she was almost sure of it now—and that was bad news for all of them. And even if Nelson never recovered to lead the Seacoast Incinerators to camp, then it would be something else. You could hide a small village only for so long.
They drifted, had stopped rowing. After a moment, at some silent, unspoken signal between them, they took up the oars and began to move again.
“I’ll be taking Nick and Allie with me,” she told him. “No matter how things shake out with Carol. I love that little boy. I’m going to take him someplace safe—safer than here.”
“Good.”
“Sarah would want you to come with them, you know. She’d want you to look after them.”
“You know I can’t. The old man is going to need my help around here.”
“Then come as soon as he’s better.”
“We’ll see,” he said, in a way that meant no.
“John. Her life is over. Yours is not.”
“Her life isn’t—”
“It is. She told you so herself. You’ve been keeping her a prisoner. Trapped in a rusted can. You aren’t any different than Carol, keeping me locked up in the infirmary all winter.”
He turned on her suddenly, his face rippling with pain. “What pestilent, flyblown bullshit. I am nothing like—and how could Sarah tell me anything? She’s a creature of flame. She can’t tell me what she wants or feels. She lost her power of speech when she lost her body.”
“No she didn’t. I don’t know what’s worse, you lying to me or you lying to yourself. I heard you screaming at her. All the way back in the fall. She’s already asked you to let her go out.”
“And how—”
“Sign language. She’s at least as fluent as you.”
They had both stopped rowing, although the dock was in sight.
John Rookwood was trembling. “You little spy. Listening in on my—”
“Spare me your paranoid insinuations. You were drunk at the time. I could hear it in your voice. Anyone could’ve heard it in your voice, from half a mile off, the way you were shouting.”
Some terrible struggle was taking place in the muscles beneath his face. He kept tightening and untightening his jaw, and breathing strangely.
“It’s time to let that fire go out, John. Time to leave your island behind. Allie and Nick are still in this world and they need you. I do, too. I can never be her—I can never be what she meant to you—but I can still try to be worth your time.”
“Shh,” he said, looking away and blinking at his tears. “That’s an awful thing to say. Don’t you dare put yourself down. You think I don’t love you to pieces, Nurse Willowes? You and your ridiculous, pregnant belly and weird yen for Julie Andrews? I just hate—hate—the disloyalty of it. The sickening disloyalty of—of—”
“Being alive when she isn’t,” Harper said. “Of going on.”
“Yes. Exactly,” he said and lowered his chin to his chest. Tears dripped off the end of his nose. “Falling in love: what a horrible thing. For what it’s worth, I tried to have as little to do with you as possible. To see you as little as possible. Not just because I didn’t want to fall in love. I didn’t want you to fall in love, either. I was aware just how difficult it might be for you to resist my abundant charms.”
“You do grow on a girl,” Harper said. “Kind of like the spore.”
BOOK EIGHT
ALL FALL DOWN
1
When the rowboat clouted against the side of the dock, Harper scanned the shore, but Cargill was gone. He had left his rod on the rocks. He had taken his rifle.
Probably he had gone to tell Carol something was afoot. That was fine. She was going to know in a few minutes anyway.
It was hard work for a seriously pregnant woman to climb that steep hill, and she was breathing heavily by the time they reached the infirmary. She had a nasty sweat on her face and just as they reached the steps to the front door she was struck with a leg-buckling contraction. She bent, gripping her lower abdomen in one hand, and exhaled a harsh breath through clenched teeth.
“Are you all right?” John asked her.
She nodded and waved him on. She didn’t have the air to speak, although already the contraction was subsiding, leaving behind a dull ache and a feeling like she had swallowed a rock.
Harper followed him into the waiting room, which was empty, Michael presumably in the next room. The Fireman held open the moss-colored curtain and ducked into the ward, Harper right behind him.
“Father—” the Fireman said, and a rifle butt shot into the side of his neck with a dull, stomach-turning thud. He went down as if he had been cut in half.
Harper opened her mouth to scream, but Michael had already turned the gun around to point the barrel at Nick. The boy was asleep on his bed, his hands folded neatly across his stomach, his chin almost touching his chest. He frowned, thoughtfully, as if trying to remember something he felt he should know.
“Please, don’t. I wouldn’t like to have to shoot a kid,” Michael said.
Father Storey’s head was turned so he seemed to be staring at her, but whatever he was seeing now, it wasn’t in the room with them. His face had darkened to a hue that brought to mind summer storm clouds. The IV had toppled over. The needle had come out of his arm. Bright red spots showed on the white sheets.
Michael went on, in an almost apologetic tone, “Here in the next few hours it’s gonna come out you murdered Father Storey to keep him quiet. That you were gonna kill Carol and Ben to take over the camp. I got everything I need to make people believe it, but it would help if you’d say it’s true, ma’am. I know you don’t have any reason to trust me right now. But I swear, if you’ll do that for me—if you’ll admit you and Rookwood were out to finish Carol off—I swear I’ll keep Allie and Nick from dying with you. I’ll look after them.”
Harper bent down next to John, who had collapsed on his side. She took his pulse, found it steady and slow. She was trembling. At first she thought it was with grief, but when she spoke, she discovered it was rage.
“You and Carol had Harold Cross murdered.”