Chapter Eleven
Janesville, 1905
Two o’clock in the morning
When she falls silent, he speaks into the silence, softly. “And did you grow up to marry this young man?”
She cocks her head and says, “Was your wife your first love, officer? We love more people than we marry, most of us.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Her even, logical tone makes him angry. It’s a tone for discussing a tedious sermon, not danger or love or murder.
“I’m going to ask another question. And this time, I want you to answer. Do you understand?”
“Officer.” She sighs. “I don’t want to talk about the murder.”
“I know. That’s not what I’m going to ask about. I want to ask about your magic.”
“My magic?” She says it with a slight laugh.
“Yes,” he says, “your magic,” and reaches out to touch her throat, holding aside the edges of her lace collar to see it clearly. He was right; the bruise there is completely gone. The whole of her neck is pale and unblemished.
His fingers still on her throat, he looks into her face and says boldly, “The magic that helps you heal. You mentioned it. You realized, at Biltmore, that you were making it happen, that you were healing yourself. With a wish.”
She eyes him out of the half-brown eye with something resembling respect. Perhaps she thought he’d forget, given the length of the night and her story. Then again, she must know the claim is extraordinary. “I suppose we could dance around it, but what’s the point?” she says.
A different air altogether has come over her. There’s a new tilt to her chin, a different angle in her carriage. She’s proud of what she can do. As well she should be, he thinks.
“So,” he says, thinking of her neck, her wrist. “Bruises. Cuts. What else?”
“Bruises disappear. Cuts seal themselves up. Broken bones become whole again. As simple as that.”
“How long does it take?”
“Small things, just a matter of hours. Longer for something more serious. As I’m sure you’ve figured out from what I told you.”
He remembers the story of the leg broken in her fall, the fingers crushed by a horse’s hoof. How quickly she healed afterward in both cases. The story she’s telling him may or may not turn out to be the story of the murder, but it has very useful information in it all the same. Information that could, he’s now realizing, change everything. He doesn’t just have to decide what to do. He has to decide what to believe.
“So Ray was right.”
She flinches, hard. He immediately regrets saying it.
“He was wrong about himself,” she says, her mouth tight. “He couldn’t heal. But me, yes. I can.”
“It’s served you well.”
“It’s helped me survive,” she says.
“Where do you think it comes from?”
“How could anyone know that?”
“You must have ideas. Ray thought he—”
“For God’s sake,” she says sharply, “don’t talk about him. I’ll tell you what you want, all right?”
“All right.”
“It might have something to do with my father, whoever he was. That was one possibility, that he had some kind of power and so I inherited it from him. Or it could have something to do with the fairy eye.” She points to her half-brown, half-blue eye, the dim light glinting in its depths. “But I’m telling you, I don’t know. I only know what I can do. And now you know it too.”
“I know what you claim,” he says, suddenly skeptical. This whole story, he has only her word to believe. He knows what he thought he saw. A bruise that was there and then wasn’t. But he doesn’t truly know what her powers are, if that’s where her magic starts and ends. He needs another way to investigate.
Then a dark shape on the floor catches his attention. He can’t believe he’s forgotten it until now. He’d been in such a hurry to get her into the chair that he’d thrown these things aside. He reaches down, shakes the cloak away, and puts his hands on what the cloak has been hiding. A little charge of excitement runs through him, toes to fingers. People can resist questions and bend the truth until it breaks. Objects can’t.
“Where did you get that?” she shouts when he lifts the valise up onto his desk to open it. The wooden chair legs clatter against the ground, almost like a horse’s hooves.
“When I brought you here. I brought this too.”
“Don’t open it. You hear me?” She rattles her cuffs. “I said don’t open it. Those things are private.”
“If you want privacy, you should probably not kill people,” he says, opening the bag up and shaking its contents out across the wooden desk top.
He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Several changes of clothes, perhaps, and money. Things a fleeing murderer would need. Yet the only objects that tumble onto the desk are a brown fur muff, a folded men’s razor, and a small leather-bound book. Holt opens the book to its first page, and finds that he’s holding a copy of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
“Can you explain these?” he asks.
“I suppose I could. You don’t give me much of a reason.”
He tries to soften his voice. “It would be a nice gesture. I’m not your enemy.”
“What a funny way you have of showing it.”
The razor has a polished bone handle, worn to a gloss with long use. He opens it up and looks at the square-tipped blade. No blood. It doesn’t mean anything, unfortunately. She’s not a fool. She’d be smart enough to wipe a blade clean.
He sets down the razor and picks up the book, idly flipping its pages, pretending to be casual. In truth, he wants to rattle her. If these things are hers, if she treasures them, he will put his fingers on them all. He wants her to get upset. She’s an emotional creature. Other than the handcuffs, it may be the only advantage he has on her.
“Officer,” she says softly.
“Yes?”
“I’m not a monster.” But there is no force in her voice. It is barely a declaration. There are more questions than answers underneath it.
“Yes, all right.”
“Don’t you see it matters to me? That you know that?”
“I don’t see why,” he says.
“Because I know what monsters are,” she says. “And I can’t be in that company.”
“So tell me what you are, then. If not a monster.”
“A fool,” she says.