Benji and Catherine lay in a heap of coats and blood. Flowers of blood spread petals around them. I didn’t know at first which one was wounded, so closely were they entwined, but when I knelt to feel them, Catherine was warm and Benji’s fingers were ice, his pulse a thread. He opened his eyes, said something in Arabic, and then, in English, added, “I seeing Granny before one week. She driving thing like tonight, thing not car, like tonight I seeing from window, she putting man in water.”
“Hush. I know you did. You hush now. Catherine, let go of him, I’m going to carry him downstairs and take him to the hospital.”
I pried her fingers from his cold side. “You bring the coats so we can keep him warm.”
I picked him up, a slight youth, a feather in my arms. “Hold on. You hold on to me, Benji.”
Catherine followed me, leaning against me so she could keep her good hand on Benji’s body. In the kitchen, I kicked Renee’s gun in front of me, tipping it into the snow on my way out. Before we reached the Rover, Benji was dead in my arms.
CHAPTER 54
Unnatural Sleep
I longed for sleep more than I had wanted anything my whole life. I wanted a bath and a bed and oblivion, but instead I had the Eagle River cops and the Vilas County sheriff, as they tried to make sense of the senseless.
When Catherine and I returned to the house with Benji’s body, I laid him on the dining room table, a catafalque of sorts, a laying out in state. Catherine refused to leave him, even though she was shivering so violently that her hand couldn’t stay in place on Benji’s head.
I went to the living room for the blankets we’d wrapped Geraldine in earlier. When I brought them back to the dining room, Catherine had climbed up on the table beside Benji. She was cradling his head in her lap. I swathed her in blankets, but her shivering wouldn’t stop.
I took my cell phone from my bag and looped the mike around my neck. While I tracked down the local emergency services, I folded my arms around Catherine, trying to rub some warmth into her. By the time I was finally connected to the county dispatcher, the worst of her shaking had eased, but the room was filled with the sickly sweet scent of her fear, and her urine.
A shadow in the living room made me let go of her and run to the arched doorway. It was Geraldine, not Renee, drawing on her own formidable will to hobble down the stairs on her wounded foot. She looked from
me to Catherine shivering in her blankets, then limped over and draped her sable coat across the girl’s shoulders. I tucked it around Catherine as best I could. She wouldn’t move or look at me, but stared straight ahead, Benji’s head in her lap.
I’d seen a set of wicker chairs in one corner of the living room. I brought two of them over to the arch connecting living and dining rooms, so we could sit but still keep an eye on Catherine. I pulled over a coffee table for Geraldine to prop her foot on. She’d lost the towels I’d tied around her wound; blood oozed onto the glass tabletop.
“That was a terrible deed, shooting the boy in front of her own granddaughter,” Geraldine said, adding in a conversational tone, “I wasn’t able to kill Renee. What are we going to do with her when she revives?”
“Try to get our story in first,” I said grimly. “The law will be here soon, and she’s going to be spinning her line about Benji as a terrorist kidnapper.” “Was he a terrorist?” Geraldine asked.
“I think he was an orphan boy far from home who got caught in a war he didn’t know was going on. All he wanted to do was make money to help his mother and his sisters.” Tears pricked the back of my lids. I shook them off angrily-I needed my wits, not my emotions, for whatever lay ahead.
Geraldine and I sat silent, both of us exhausted. At one point, she said, “How odd Darraugh and Edwards will find it, to know their mothers have been fighting.”
I grunted, but didn’t move or speak until I heard Renee stirring on the upper landing. I got up, gun out, as she staggered down the front stairs, disheveled but haughty.
She looked past me to Geraldine. “You have a knack for hovering around my family when you are least wanted, Geraldine. You may leave my granddaughter to me now”
I felt my temper rising. “Renee, I don’t know if you’re insane or just giving a good impersonation, but a high-handed act isn’t going to work tonight. Catherine is in shock because she saw you murder Benjamin Sadawi in cold blood. We will not leave you alone with her.”
Renee looked at me loftily. “I thought you and that terrorist had kidnapped her; I shot him in the belief I was protecting her.”
“I should have hit you harder, Renee,” Geraldine said in her flutey