Chapter Twenty-Five
Janesville, 1905
Four o’clock in the morning
“You don’t just heal your body. You heal your mind,” says Holt.
She stares at him, wordless for once.
“I mean, you clearly have some way, some magic, beyond what normal people have. To keep you going.”
The magician cocks her head. The half-brown eye blazes.
He goes on, the words drawn out by her silence. “A disaster like that fire, it stretches the mind beyond imagination. People aren’t the same afterward. They just give up.”
“I almost did,” she admits.
“But you kept going. You’re still going. Despite Ray, despite everything. And it’s like you draw your strength from disaster. You only get more determined the more of these horrors you endure.” Her story is so real to him now; he imagines he can almost smell the smoke and blood. The room around him is unchanged, but it feels darker somehow, as her story takes more and more sinister turns.
“I don’t know that it works like that,” she says. “And anyway, you’re wrong. My mind doesn’t heal like my body. I remember everything. Being able to go on, the kind of determination you seem to admire so much, it comes at a price.”
“Your soul?”
She laughs, but bitterly. “That’s just newspaper talk. The Devil and whatnot. I’m just a woman, a human woman.”
“Despite your magic.”
“Yes. That doesn’t mean I’m any more or less human than anyone else.”
“Doesn’t it?”
She rattles her hands in the cuffs. “You tell me.”
“Well, you cut a man’s throat,” he says, hoping to jar her. “Whatever he’d done to you, however horrible he was, he was human too. What did that feel like?”
Nothing changes in her posture or her manner. She only says, matter-of-factly, “I wished to God I could have taken it back. I tried to heal him. I tried my best. But the wish didn’t work.”
He can think of a dozen reasons her healing power might have failed her in that moment, but he doesn’t want to focus on that right away. He has another question for her first. “Why did you tell me that story? You must know it makes me more suspicious of you. To know you’ve killed before.”
She is slow in responding. When she does speak, her voice is still matter-of-fact. “I’m telling you the whole truth. The whole story. So why wouldn’t I tell you that part?”
“Because you’re trying to convince me to let you go?” He doubts she truly needs to be reminded. It’s life or death for both of them now; that kind of thing doesn’t slip a person’s mind.
“As I said. It’s the truth. I need you to believe me. I think the best way to do that is to tell you the whole story, warts and all.”
“Tell me this, then.” A dark question has been nagging at him, and as many questions as there are to ask her, he can’t help putting this one next. “Why did Ray do what he did to you? What makes a man like that?”
She shakes her head. “It’s impossible to know. I think the fever he survived as a child, the one that killed his sisters, left him touched in the head. Not that it made him stupid, but it changed him. Burned away some part of his brain. And made him think he was better than human. He thought he had some godlike healing power, and he thought I did too, and that gave him rights to me somehow. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about Ray anymore. Do we have to talk about him?”
“No,” says Holt. “We can talk about the murder instead.”
She’s staring up with those otherworldly eyes. He wants to ask her to close them. He wants her to look away. But if he told her that, she’d know she’s getting to him. And he feels so close to knowing the answer now.
She’s dangerous. She slashed a man’s throat open, let his life drain away. And she and this Clyde were in love, but they’d also fought each other. Disagreed. He sees clearly how she could be guilty. Almost every piece of the puzzle is in place.
He taps the folded razor on his wrist again. And realizes what he’s holding, all of a sudden. Almost involuntarily, he drops the razor, which clatters loudly on the floor.
“That’s it, isn’t it? His,” he says.
“Yes.”
“That’s awful.”
She swallows hard and says, “Yes, it is.”
“Why do you keep it?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she says. “I took it with me so I wouldn’t leave it there with him. It was just a reflex. And then—well, I’ll tell you that part in a bit.”
“Tell me now.”
“First, can you do something for me?”
“What?”
Looking up at him with the fairy eye, she says, “Take off another pair of handcuffs.”
“Why?”
The words pour out of her in a flood, unchecked. “Because I’m asking you to, Virgil. Because none of this matters, does it? The how and the why? I’ll end up dead whether I did it or not. We both know that. And I am so, so scared of dying. And my only hope is that you’ll show me mercy, but the longer we talk, the more I think maybe it’s already too late. Maybe at first the easier thing to do was to let me go, but the longer I’m in this chair, maybe the easier thing to do is to keep me. Maybe you’ve already made up your mind. And I’m not asking you to release me right this minute. I’m not asking for your answer. I’m just asking you…could you just make me a little more comfortable?”
He makes her wait while he pretends to consider it, although he already knows exactly what he’ll say and why. He bends down and picks up the fallen razor, which feels like it’s burning his fingers, now that he knows its history.
Then he walks around the desk, to the far side so it’s between them, and crouches behind it. He tucks the razor into the right drawer, the one he can get to fastest if he needs it because it doesn’t lock, but low enough that he knows she can’t see which one he’s using. He nears her again and stands facing her. He touches the key at his belt, as if absentmindedly, but really the furthest thing from it.
He watches her watching him, that unsettling gaze so flat and level, and stares hard and straight back at her until, at last, she blinks.
“Not until you do me a favor,” he says.
“What favor could I do for you?”
“I think you know,” he says.
She opens her mouth to speak, appears to think better of it, and closes it again.