The camp stood back from them, spaced along the outer ring of the stone circle, staring in. In the shifting orange light of the flames, their faces were unfamiliar to her, pale smudges, eyes gleaming dark with fear. Harper looked for someone she knew and her gaze found eleven-year-old Emily Waterman. Harper tried to smile at her with her eyes and Emily cringed as if from the stare of a madwoman.
There was commotion at the back of the crowd, at the bottom of the wide steps leading up to the open doors of the chapel. Harper heard shouts, saw people shoving. Two boys drove Renée Gilmonton ahead of them with rifle butts, striking her in the small of the back and the shoulders. They weren’t clobbering her. It wasn’t a beating. They were moving her along that way, thudding her now and then to remind her they were there. Harper thought she walked with great dignity, her hands bound behind her back with hairy twine, the sort you might use to tie up a package in brown kraft paper. She was bleeding from a cut along her brow, blinking at the blood that dripped into her left eye, but otherwise her face was calm, her chin raised a little.
Allie was right behind her and she was shouting, her voice hoarse, shaking. “Get the fuck off me! Get your fucking hands off me!”
Her arms were tied behind her back, too, and Jamie Close had her by the elbow. Harper hadn’t been aware of Jamie leaving her side, but there she was, herding Allie along. Jamie had plenty of help: there was a boy on either side of Allie, gripping her shoulders, and two more boys crowding in from behind. Blood dripped from Allie’s mouth. Her teeth were red. She wore flannel pajama bottoms and a Boston Red Sox hoodie and her feet were bare and dirty.
“Get on your knees,” Jamie said as they reached the edge of the circle. “And close your fuckin’ trap.”
“We have a right to speak in our own defense,” Renée Gilmonton said, and a rifle butt shot out and clubbed her in the back of her left leg. Her legs folded and she dropped hard to her knees.
“You have a right to shut up!” a woman screamed. “You have a right to shut your lying mouth!”
Harper hadn’t seen Ben and Michael going off together, but she spotted them now, coming out of the cafeteria. They had Gilbert Cline and the Mazz with them.
Gil’s expression was the disinterested look of a seasoned poker player who might be holding a full house or might have a handful of nothing—you just couldn’t tell. The Mazz, however, was in a state of high ebullience. Although he was dressed in a denim coat over a stained Bad Company T-shirt, he was practically skipping as he came toward them, walking with the brisk confidence of a man in a tailored suit, on his way to his six-figure job in a Manhattan high-rise.
Gillian helped Carol up onto the stone bench located directly between Harper and the Fireman. Carol stood swaying, her eyes dazed and her face streaked with tears. She did not raise her hands for attention. She didn’t need to. The low, fevered murmuring, a mix of urgent whispers and soft sobbing, fell away. In a moment it was so quiet the only sound was the hiss and sputter of the torches.
“My father is dead,” Carol said, and a sobbing groan of dismay rose from the crowd of nearly 170. Carol spoke not a word until the silence returned, then continued: “The Fireman tried to kill him three months ago and failed. He tried again tonight and succeeded. He or the nurse injected an air bubble into his bloodstream and induced a fatal heart attack.”
“That is a complete fabrication,” Renée said, her voice clear and carrying.
One of the boys behind her struck her between the shoulder blades with his rifle butt and Renée fell forward onto her face.
“Leave her alone!” Allie screamed.
Jamie hunched down next to Allie and said, “You open that mouth one more time and I’ll slice your tongue out and nail it up on the doors of the church.” Jamie had a knife in one hand—an ordinary steak knife, it looked like, with a serrated edge—and she held it close to Allie’s cheek, turning it so it flashed in the firelight.
Allie cast a wild, furious, frightened look up at her aunt. Carol stared back with eyes that did not seem to recognize her.
“Child,” she said, “you may speak when you are called upon and not before. Do as I say or I cannot protect you.”
Harper was sure Allie would scream, would say something nasty, and Jamie really would cut her. Instead Allie stared at her aunt in bewilderment—as if she had been slapped—and then burst into tears, her shoulders racked with the force of her sobs.
Carol looked out upon the worshippers, turning her gaze from face to face. The air was damp and cool and smelled of salt. The moon was two-thirds full. The boy in the church tower—the eye in the steeple sees all the people—had his elbows on the railing and was bent forward to watch what was happening below.
Carol said, “I believe the Fireman also killed my sister, Sarah. I think she discovered he meant to murder my father, and he killed her before she could warn us. I can’t prove it, but that is what I believe.”
“You can’t prove any of this!” Renée cried out from the ground. She was still in the dirt, in a humiliating position, with her ass in the air and her hands bound behind the small of her back. She had a scrape on her chin where she had come down hard on the mud. “Not one word!”
Carol turned an icy, grieving look upon her. “I can. I can prove the most important parts. I can prove you and the nurse and the Fireman conspired to kill me and Ben Patchett and hoped to set yourselves above everyone else, make this place into a prison camp. I can prove we were next.”
She had it so backward, Harper felt light-headed and close to hysterical laughter. Not that she could’ve laughed.
“They took a vote!” Carol shouted. She held up a sheet of ruled yellow paper torn from a legal-sized notebook. “A fixed vote, maybe, but a vote nonetheless. Over twenty people in this camp voted for Nurse Willowes and the Fireman to do as they liked. Kill who they liked, hurt who they liked, lock up who they liked.” She lowered her voice, and then, softly, said, “My niece was among those who voted.”
A shuddering sound of misery went through the mass of people crowded around the edges of Memorial Park.
“It’s not true,” Allie screamed.
Jamie clamped her hand on Allie’s jaw, pulled her head back hard, held her knife to the side of Allie’s face, and looked up at Carol, waiting to be told what to do. Harper could see an artery thudding in Allie’s pale throat.
“I forgive you,” Carol said to her niece. “I don’t know what lies they told you about me, to turn you against me, but I forgive you entirely. I owe that much to your mother. You’re all I have left of her, you know. You and Nick. Maybe they made you think I had to die. I hope someday you’ll understand that I am ready to die for you, Allie. Any day.”
“How about today, you manipulative shithead?” Allie said. She said it in a whisper, but it carried throughout the park.
Jamie whickered the knife across Allie’s lips, cutting through both of them. Allie shouted and fell forward. She could not stanch the bleeding with her hands bound behind her and she writhed and kicked, smearing blood and dirt across her face.
Carol did not cry out in horror or protest. Instead she stared at her niece for a long, tragic moment, then turned her anguished gaze away, swept it across the crowd. The silence in the park was a fearful, apprehensive thing.
“You see what they did to her?” Carol said. “The Fireman and the nurse? How they twisted her? Turned her against us? Of course Allie is the Fireman’s lover, too. Has been for months.”
Allie shook her head and groaned, a sound of anger and frustration and denial, but did not speak, perhaps could not, her mouth slashed like it was.