The ocean and the distant sound of cars rushing over the freeway are faint, but are the only sounds to be heard. The stench of the dumpster just feet from Nora, and the other five lining the back of the nearby buildings make the air foul. A single light shines in the distance from a pole, beaming down on the entrance to a parking garage, but the only light here is from the moon, making Nora’s dark figure appear like a shadow, except for her blonde hair that blankets her back and shoulders like a disheveled mess of white straw.
I look at her for a long time, almost feeling like I should force her to face me, because if I’m going to execute her I should have the courage to look her in the eyes. But I don’t. I’m not brave enough to look someone in the eyes and then take their life from them—not like this. An unarmed woman. On her knees. Behind a building. Beside a stinking dumpster. It would haunt me forever.
Time passes and I don’t realize how much until Nora begins to turn her head at an angle to get a glimpse of me behind her.
“Something tells me you’re not afraid to kill me,” she says, “so, what’s the holdup?”
I pause and say, “I wanted to ask you something first.”
She laughs lightly.
“Oh sure,” she says sarcastically with the shrug of her shoulders, “because I’m so inclined to answer your questions before you blow my brains out.” She looks back once with a smile and turns to face the wall again. “Go ahead and ask whatever you want, but you can expect only one kind of answer from me.”
“What kind would that be?”
“The truthful kind,” she says.
“That’s the only kind I want.”
“Then by all means”—she twirls the hand with the marred pinky finger in the air beside her—“ask away.”
Hesitating for a long, tense moment, I think about my question and what her truthful answer could mean.
“Do you think a man like Victor Faust can ever truly be in love?”
Nora is very quiet, as if my question has stripped the sarcasm from her and replaced it with intrigue. Then she turns her head to the side again, allowing me to see the outline of her nose and cheek in the moonlit darkness that shrouds her.
“That’s a bold question,” she says. “And one that I think you already know the answer to.”
“Maybe so, but I want to know yours.”
“You mean,” she says as if to correct me, “you want to know the reason behind my answer.”
“Whatever—just tell me.”
I sense her smiling, but I don’t see it on her face, and I don’t get any spiteful or pleasurable feelings from her—just honesty.
She looks back at the wall in front of her again.
“Anyone can be in love, Izabel,” she says in an even voice, “and I can tell by the look in that man’s eyes that he is in love with you”—(I want to be pleased with that answer, but I’m not because I know that’s not all of it)—“but a man like Victor Faust,” she goes on, “can’t stay in love forever. Like Fredrik’s type can’t live without love, Victor’s type can’t live with it. And the more that it gets in the way of his duties, and the more human you make him become, the closer you push him to his breaking point.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” My gun hand is trembling. “Are you saying that no matter what, he’s going to put an end to us?”
“No,” she says, “but if you want to keep him and what you have with him in-tact, you need to lose what’s left of your personal life, your humanity. Your love for Dina Gregory. Your school-girl jealousy. Your conscience. It’s enough that he loves you and has to protect you, but he won’t—he can’t—continue to protect and take into consideration everything you drag in with you from the outside.”
“What makes you think he can’t?” Tears sting the backs of my eyes, but I don’t let them fall.
Nora turns her head to look at me again.
“Because he’s just like me,” she says not with malice, but with truth. “And one way or another, he’ll instinctively do whatever it takes to restore the balance to the only life he’s ever known.”
I shake my head repeatedly, not wanting to believe her, wanting to go ahead and shoot her just for saying these things to me. But I can’t. Not yet.
A hard knot moves down the center of my throat.
“But you loved Claire,” I point out, grasping for anything I can that might turn the truth on its head. “You would’ve done anything for her.”
“Yes,” she admits, “I would have…and that’s why every day she was alive I contemplated killing her.”
My heart stops beating as if she’d just pulled the plug from me.
“I loved my sister so much,” she begins, “that I knew I couldn’t leave her alive because I’d always worry about her and it was making me weak.”