“It must have fallen off her in the car.”
“Geoff’s car, yes.”
“Anne figured out what you’d done, you know,” I said. “She was coming here the night she died.”
He slid his hand up and down my arm. “A shame about Anne,” he said. “She might have had a few more good days in her.”
I felt a chill on my skin, felt our pasts intersect with a terrifying speed, a shining zeroing-in. He’d tried to dress Mary Rae, fumbling with her clothes, then wrapping her in a blanket, carrying her up the long set of steps to the car in the cold. This had been the thing connecting us from the beginning. The weight of David Pinney’s body as we dragged it across the grass, under the barbed wire, beneath the willow. The cold of his hand in mine, our frightened breath, Del’s refusal to pull him, to touch him, and my pleading with her: “You can! You have to!” But William had transported a living body—one he’d only thought was dead. Mary Rae’s pulse, slowed by the pills, must have been nearly indiscernible. Even if she’d taken the overdose herself, William was a murderer.
“You found the trailer for the two of you, like you found the cottage for me,” I said.
“I still love you.” He shook his head as if these feelings disappointed him. He threaded his fingers with mine. “Even if you did try to kill me. Even if you didn’t waste much time finding someone new.”
“You asked Mary Rae to marry you,” I said.
He squeezed my hand. “You don’t believe that I love you?”
I considered William’s eyes and the smooth curve of his shoulders beneath his shirt. You don’t ever know what someone is capable of. You can suppose, you can guess. Maybe he loved me once, or thought he did. I couldn’t tell anything from his face.
“Do you ever wonder if it would be easier to confess?” I said.
I felt his breath in my hair, along my neck.
“I just did,” he whispered.
Out on the water a bell sounded.
“The church in Aurora,” he said. “It’s evening services.”
“Bells used to be blessed,” I told him.
He slid his hand to my cheek, and I tried not to flinch.
“They were struck by lightning in the church spires. The bell ringers, too. The clergy believed that demons lived in the air and caused the storms, so the bells were blessed.”
“Always the lightning expert,” he said, softly.
And there was a moment, a slip of something fleeting and lovely, in which I imagined Del and my mother settling down in the old house, and another version of William and me, settling down in this place by the lake. I could imagine evenings during warm-lit sunset, watering the pot of sad flowers, the sound of the lake slapping the shore, the bugs pinging the screens.
“Could two people stay together knowing what we know about each other?” he said. “You never told me what you thought about the prints.”
I couldn’t erase the photo of Del, the fact of her pregnancy, her confusion about how it had happened.
“They’re beautiful,” I said, and it was the one, true, honest thing.
I felt him begin to gather me in his arms, and I let him lean in to kiss me before I shoved him away. He was unprepared and he lost his footing. I could have taken the iron doorstop and struck him. There were weapons at my disposal, a variety of ways I might have killed him, dumped his body into the lake, and let the currents sluice him into the northern marshes. I could have revenged Mary Rae’s murder, Del’s rape, the rapes of the other girls who had no idea he’d violated them in their sleep.
I could have taken the candlestick from the mantel.
But I had something better planned for him.