“Come on, Thea! You don’t have to live with it, for the few minutes you have left to live! He didn’t kill her. I killed her. I killed my little girl.”
With a guttural cry, Stefan ducked down and lunged for Jill, grabbing her around the knees but impossibly, she was too quick, stumbling back but never losing her footing. It was Stefan who went down hard. Fueled by some malevolent syrup, she kicked Stefan in the chest, knocking him backward, off balance, so that he had to reach for the bench to try to get up.
Haltingly, as if his voice were an instrument that needed tuning, Stefan began, “You...evil, you...” and then went on, “You let me think that I killed Belinda when I didn’t? You knew all along, and you let me go to prison?”
“Who cares about you? You belong in prison, you sick piece of trash. You were out of it. I put your hand on the golf club. Then Emily dragged it away and dragged me out of there.”
“How did you convince Emily to lie?” I asked her. She held the gun in both hands, leveled at Stefan’s chest, so I fought down my desire to shout.
“Her name’s not Emily, by the way, Thea. Convince her? She was a pervert. She couldn’t wait to do all the stuff I wanted her to do. She knew I would take her down too. If Belinda never went to Black Creek, she would be an accomplished woman of grace. Look what Emily did for her. The first sin is hard, the next one is easy. Why should I go to prison? After everything I’ve already lost? At least I had something to give. What did she have to give? What did he have to give? Nothing.”
“Jill, stop. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I won’t stop, Thea. Or maybe, okay, I won’t kill you. Maybe I’ll do what I planned. I’ll shoot Stefan right in front of you and let you go on living, like I had to do.” She began to cry and her hands shook. “Who cares what happens to you? Who cares what happens to me?”
She stood up straight then and put the barrel of the gun under her own chin.
This, I had never rehearsed this in my mind. This wasn’t something I ever imagined my way into doing. I took a step forward and slugged Jill in the side of the face. She fell to one knee and the gun went off with a crack so loud that I saw lights flip on in several of those distant houses. I felt the thud of the discharge in my side, as if I’d been holding an M-80 under my arm when it went off. I stood back and pulled the whistle out of my pocket and blew the whistle, over and over. More lights went on. Stefan scrambled for the gun, pushing Jill down and kneeling on her so that she couldn’t move. “What do we do?” he said to me. “We can’t tie her up or anything. What do we do?”
“Use her sweater to tie her up. Tie her hands behind her and tie her to the bench.”
I called the police and reported someone threatening people with a gun. It was clear that we would have to be the ones to guard Jill with the gun. I’d never used a gun in my life; I didn’t know if Stefan had. But they had to be pretty self-explanatory. Stefan handed me the gun, while holding on to Jill’s arm, trying to get her sweater over her head and round her wrists. She thrashed and kicked and leaned over to bite his hand. “You nutcase!” he yelled, and pulled both her arms behind her. Jill jerked her head back and hit Stefan in the mouth. “That does it,” he said. He kneed Jill in the back hard enough to knock the breath out of her and jerked her arms up over her head, tying the sweater around her hands. Then he pulled off his own shirt and tied it around her feet.
We saw flashlights approaching and I realized I hadn’t even noticed it was full dark. We could have been lying here, like Esme said, all alone. As three officers arrived, their own guns drawn, I thought of Esme then, saying, You don’t know her like I do... How right she was. And how wrong. How pitiless. She had known everything, all along, far more than I realized.
“Okay, ma’am,” the officer said to me. “Put the gun down. Now. Step away. Slowly.”
I said, “Gladly. It’s not my gun. I mean, I wasn’t the one with the gun, she was, although yes, technically now I have the gun...” I set the gun on the ground.
“Now turn and face the bench.”
“What? Why me?”
Stefan said, “Mom. He’ll figure it out.” The officer spoke into his radio. “Yes, send him up. We’re just getting started here. Can somebody get some lights?”
Twenty minutes later, Pete Sunday arrived at the grave site, explaining all our roles to the other police in a few sentences.
“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” I told him.
“I couldn’t agree with you more. Although I think that if I was faced with the same facts again, I’d make the same mistake again.” He rubbed his hands together. “She was very convincing.”
“She thought she was on the side of the angels.”
“I just don’t get the motivation. Your kid is dead. You know it was an accident, you didn’t mean to hurt anyone, the worst thing has already happened, no horrible consequences for you, but instead of fessing up, you decide to hurt someone else’s kid, and you wait until years later?”
Someone flipped on a spotlight, and Pete Sunday’s face gaped in horror. “Get an ambulance!” he yelled, whipping off his really great trench coat and pressing it to my left arm. “You didn’t tell me she shot you!”
I looked down. My arm was swollen, purpling and covered with blood, and for the first time, I experienced a hot ache, just above my elbow. Stefan was sitting on the bench and I glanced down at the whorl of his dark hair and then suddenly I was looking down on my own dirt-smeared face, my tangled hair, as if from a perch on a tree limb. I knew all about hypotensive shock and the blessings it confers on mortally injured creatures, but along with the surcease of pain came a pleasing sense of rightness and goodness, as if currents from the earth were joining currents in my veins, linking me to all the plants and grasses and even the people under this quiet ground. The new universe winked at me.
Stefan yelled, “She’s hurt, this way, help us!”
Her hands cuffed behind her, Jill was being hustled away. She glanced back over her shoulder and said, “Oh, Thea! I’m sorry.”
It was the last thing I heard. I remember waking up next to wonder how really sick people even managed to survive ambulance rides, much less their injuries, because the one I was in was bouncing like a carnival ride. The young paramedic on his haunches next to my shoulder said, “Well you can stop bleeding anytime you want, ma’am. You’re giving us a little too much drama here.”
I said, “Don’t put in one of those tubes. I’m even afraid of blood tests. It hurts too much.” He gently held up my hand for me to see.
“Already did it. I’m the hero of all IVs. Got one in an eighty-four-year-old gentleman the other day. My crew bet me three days of breakfasts I couldn’t do it.”
Then it was too much work to talk. At the ER door where I’d been so recently when Rebecca had her baby. I was deftly wheeled through the secret swinging doors and into a cubicle bristling with gloved and gowned people. “Not every day we get a GSW,” said someone. “Since this isn’t the Wild West, we’d probably better get that hunk of lead out of your arm, Mrs....?”
“Demetriou.”
“Okay, let’s just get an X-ray in here...”
I heard Jep before I saw him, where is she? Is she being operated on? When he was ushered past the curtain, I watched his face as he engaged in a titanic struggle not to say, didn’t I tell you so?
“Let’s just have a little bit of...ten milligrams diazepam, get you all comfortable while the numbing medicine takes effect.”
Jep took my other hand and said, “You’re the only person I’ve ever known who’s been shot.”
I said, “I’m the only person I’ve ever known who’s been shot. Sheltered lives we’ve led.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.” He went on, “Stefan told me everything. This changes our whole life. But I confess I’m having a hell of a time wrapping my head around it. Why would she do this? How could she do this? Do you think she’s making it up?”
That hadn’t even crossed my mind. I considered it briefly.