Perhaps he is protecting you, I heard Alex say.
I crawled to Alex and cradled his head. “Don’t look,” I whispered, my breath pluming in the icy air. Behind me, there was a smell of blood, the heavy scrabble of something on the terrace tiles, the sound of breath that I knew was hot and rancid, and very soon Robert stopped screaming.
? ? ?
I curled up against Alex in the silence that followed, pressing my body heat to his. He had begun to shiver.
“I have to go to the telephone,” I told him, not wanting to let him go. My own hands were shaking, and my stomach churned. I tried not to think of the dragging sounds I’d heard on the terrace. Robert was gone.
Alex found the strength to grip my waist with one bloodied hand. “I already did,” he said. “They’re coming.”
I stroked his temple and pressed my cheek to his. Alex, who solved problems even after he’d been shot. Alex, who had taken every risk in order to come home to me. Alex, who had done everything only because he loved me.
“Don’t leave me,” I said to him.
He gripped me harder, winding his hand in the fabric of my blouse as if holding on, and then he closed his eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY
In the end, my husband refused to die.
It was a close thing, so close that at my lowest moment I sagged against the wall of the hospital bathroom, where I had just dry-heaved the contents of my empty stomach, and sobbed without restraint. My stomach and chest were dark with bruises from where Robert had kicked me, and my knee was twisted in pain. I had worn the same dress for days. I stared at the bleach-scented tiles through burning eyes and told myself I simply couldn’t survive his death again. But afterward, I got up and went back to his bedside and held his hand through another night.
The world became disjointed, as if I were watching it from afar through broken glass. I no longer knew the timeline of my life. Men spoke to me—men I didn’t know, one after the other in a long line. Men in suits and uniforms and policemen’s caps, men with mustaches and beards. There was a doctor, telling me that the bullet had gone high, angled upward into Alex’s shoulder, and had missed his vital organs, but he had bled so much the situation was still grave. You must be strong, Mrs. Manders, for his sake. I thought, I am already strong. I was strong yesterday, and the day before that. But I did not know whether I spoke aloud.
Moments—or hours, or days—later, there were faces of policemen, asking me questions. What, exactly, did you see? Where is Robert Forsyth? Did he strike Mrs. Forsyth before or after he fired the gun at your husband? Are you sure? Are you certain the knife pierced his leg? What exactly did he say? Let us go through it again, Mrs. Manders. Are you quite certain? I answered them with a voice that seemed to come from someone else’s throat, the words forced and difficult, as if they had been swallowed inside me and would not come up again. The thought of Frances moved through my scattered mind, and I remembered that it was very important I not speak of her, that I not tell what her father had done to her, though I could not quite remember why.
I had memories of moving like a ghost through the corridors of the hospital, finding my way from the men’s ward to the women’s ward. Of Dottie lying in a hospital bed, bandages swathed around her head, her eyes sunk into dark pools of skin. Concussion, they had said. I sat by her bedside when I could tear myself from Alex’s, though I did not hold her hand. The first time she opened her eyes, she stared at me blearily without speaking, and we sat in silence, looking at each other like strangers.
“Where is he?” she asked me finally, her voice a rasp.
I searched my memory. “Gone,” I replied.
“Escaped?”
No. Wherever Robert Forsyth was, he had not escaped. “It was Princer,” I said.
Her face relaxed, and she looked away. “Good girl,” she said, and I knew she was not speaking of me.
I did not tell the police about Princer. I told them that Robert Forsyth had shot my husband, pistol-whipped his wife, and assaulted me. When I had stuck a knife in his leg, he had run through the doors to the terrace and vanished into the woods. I saw the rest of it every time I closed my eyes—the leaves, the thing coming from the woods, Frances raising one pale hand, the sound of the thing coming through the French doors behind me—but I didn’t speak it aloud. I sat by Alex’s bedside and watched the waxy pallor of his face and tried not to remember any of it at all.
I sat across from David Wilde, who was coaxing me to eat a bowl of soup. He was dressed in a suit of navy wool, with a gray necktie that set off the strands of silver in his hair. He held a cup of tea in his good hand. He, too, spoke to me, and as the soup revived me, I began to comprehend his meaning.