“I didn’t shoot him. Ben Patchett did,” Michael said. “I was gonna shoot him, then figured it might look better if Ben took the shot. So I handed him the rifle. Besides. The last couple months he was here, I kinda got to liking Harold a little. He was teaching me how to play chess. I got sentimental feelings like anyone else. I didn’t really want to be the one who gunned him down.”
“You were the one who slipped him out of the infirmary,” Harper said. “But in his notebook he called you—” JR, she remembered. Harold wrote everything in capitals, like a shout, and so she had naturally assumed those letters stood for John Rookwood. And then she knew why Michael reminded her of her nephew. It had been her subconscious, waving another flag, trying to alert her to the one thing Michael had in common with sweet, innocent-eyed Connor Willowes—“Junior.”
“Yep. That was what Harold called me most times: Michael Lindqvist Junior. My daddy never gave me nothing except his name, you want to know the truth. His name and occasionally the back of his hand.”
“No one is going to believe I kept Father Storey alive for three months just to kill him now,” she said.
“Yes they will. You’ve tried to kill him on the sly a few times already, sticking him with insulin to bring on seizures. Right between his toes. But then you couldn’t do it anymore, ’cause Nick was here, and he had an eye on you all the time. And you were scared, you lost your nerve.” He was holding the rifle one-handed, the barrel pointed across the room at Nick. He reached out with his free hand, grabbed her short blond hair, and gave her head a hard snap. “That’s important. That part of it. Don’t forget. You stuck him with insulin. You were hoping he’d die in a way that would look natural. You screwed up the brain surgery, too, stuck the drill in his brain. You did everything you could to finish him off, but he was protected from you.”
“Protected how?” Harper asked.
“Protected by the Bright,” Michael said, a calm simplicity in his voice. “His mind and soul aren’t just in his body anymore. They’re in the Dragonscale on his skin. They’re stored in the Bright forever and ever, just like files backed up to an external hard drive. He wrote a note, talking about how the Bright kept him safe all these months. I made him write it before I kilt him. I could’ve written it myself, but I thought it would look better in his handwriting. It’s under his pillow. I’ll let Carol find it.” He reached to the side counter, found a syringe, and held it out to her. “Stick yourself now. Not in your wrist or your neck. Right in your big round ass. I want them to see I snuck up on you.”
“I won’t.”
“Then I guess you fought me for the gun and Nick got shot in the struggle,” Mike told her. “You could’ve saved me a lot of trouble, you know, if you just got killed a few months back, like you were supposed to. I called the Seacoast Incinerators on you that time you went home looking for medical supplies. I don’t know why they didn’t find you. I called ’em again the night you went to raid the ambulance. Beats me how you got away from ’em both times.”
“How did you call them? I thought Ben took all the phones.”
“Who do you think he sent around to collect ’em up? I kept a couple back for myself.”
It amazed and appalled her that she had ever for a moment imagined the Marlboro Man really did, perhaps, have some gift for prophecy, some unnatural access to secret knowledge. She felt even the children she had treated as an elementary-school nurse would not have been pulled in by such an absurd notion.
“Enough fucking around,” Michael said. “Stick yourself already.”
She took the syringe and looked at the clear fluid inside. “What is this?”
“Versed? Is that a good one? You had it in with the other heavy-duty drugs. I don’t know much about sedatives. I tranqed Allie once . . . the day we got rid of Harold. I needed to give fatboy a chance to slip out of camp and she was on watch. But back then I had some Lunesta my own mama used to keep in the medicine cabinet, and I knew what I was doing when I slipped some into her decaf.”
“Michael, please. I’m eight months pregnant. I don’t know what Versed would do to the baby. I don’t have any idea.”
“It doesn’t matter what it will do to the baby. We’ll love him even if he’s a retard or a cripple. Carol will look after him, make sure he’s brought up right. The whole camp will. And don’t you worry. I know my beloved. Carol will have the baby cut out of you before we execute you. She’ll have the baby yanked out and love it just like it was her own. I found a medical book in the camp library that sort of tells you how to do a C-section. It doesn’t seem that hard. I bet me and Don Lewiston can man age it. Don will be lookin’ for some way to keep from being slaughtered along with you and the Fireman. Come on now. Stick that needle in. I’m not in the talking business. I’m in the doing business.”
“If you try a C-section without any medical training, you will murder me and you will murder my baby.”
“Nah. Besides. We’n keep you awake. You can talk us through the procedure. Can’t you?”
“Jesus,” Harper said, the first tear falling hot down her cheek. “How can you do this to Allie? Kill her grandfather. Threaten her brother. She loves you. I thought you loved her.”
“I guess I do, sort of. She ain’t no Carol, though. Carol is still a virgin. Thirty years old and she still hasn’t bled. She wants me to be the one. She says she’s been waiting for me her whole life.”
He looked like one inspired, his eyes shining strangely. Harper remembered Ben saying he had seen Michael and Allie making out frantically behind the chapel, the same night Father Storey got his head caved in. But of course in the dark it was easy to mistake the niece for the aunt. They almost could’ve been played by the same actress in the movie version.
“Tom told me his daughter would never hurt him. I can’t believe he was so wrong about that,” Harper said.
Harper was surprised to see blotches of color break out on Michael’s cheeks. He touched a finger to his lips, almost as if he were shushing her. “Oh, I kinda done that on my own. Carol told me Father Storey knew about how we took care of Harold, but she thought when he had time to think about it, he’d accept it had to be done. Only then I met up with all of you to go rescue the convicts. And on the walk to the water, Father Storey pulled me aside and warned me we were going to have to lock Mama Carol up when we got back. Lock her up and send her into exile. He was pretty upset. I figured maybe it would just be easiest if he died for the camp. Tell you what. That son of a gun had a hell of a hard head, though. I hit him with my nightstick hard enough to smash a watermelon into slush and he didn’t even go down for almost ten seconds. Just stood there swaying, lookin at me with a puzzled kinda smile on his face.”
“When Carol finds out what you did to her father, she’ll have you killed. She’ll kill you herself.”
“She won’t find out.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“It’ll be a lie. Everything you say will be a lie. And I’ll make sure Nick and Allie die with you. Or die later. Whatever. Your only chance to protect those kids is to throw yourself on your sword.”
“You can’t—”
“Done talkin’,” Michael said, and looked at Nick. “One more word out of you, one more, and I swear to God, I will spray the little deaf boy’s empty head all over his fuckin’ pillow. Stick yourself. Do it.”
Harper stuck herself.
2
Someone slapped her, turned her head halfway around.
“I’n slurry,” Harper said, trying to apologize, sure she had done something wrong but unable to remember what it was.
Jamie Close slapped her again. “You aren’t yet, but you’re going to be. Stand the fuck up. I’m not carrying your fat ass, bitch.”
There was someone on either side of her, pulling her to her feet by her arms, but every time they let go, her legs went boneless and folded under her and they’d have to grab her again.