Dulcy could only assume that Irina hadn’t mentioned Lewis because she wanted to protect him. Or maybe she had, and Victor was waiting to get to the point. “I was alone,” said Dulcy. “For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Victor. “If you lied about being dead, why would you tell the truth about any of it? And there’s the matter of this hat, dangling on your bedstead like a flag on an alp.” He held one of Lewis’s bowlers between two fingers. “A good hat, I must say. Not a drunk cowboy’s hat. Maybe the newspaperman, after all, but Henning thinks he’s found the right person.”
Now he twirled it on one finger. Dulcy watched it spin and shut her eyes.
“Let’s leave the scene of your lover’s triumph, why don’t we, and go downstairs.”
She climbed out of bed, tugging at a blanket. She did not show yet, but she was only wearing a shift. Victor’s eyes veered away and he jerked open her wardrobe, found a shawl and threw it at her. She wrapped it around her shoulders before she stopped. He wouldn’t touch her; he didn’t want to touch her. “Why must we go down? What are you going to do?”
“Because we have some things to do, before we get on a train together,” said Victor. “I want my pound of flesh. I mourned you, Dulcy. I sniveled like a baby for months. You were going to make everything better again, and instead you made it much, much worse.” He noticed the open green notebook, forgotten and finally dry by the window, and picked it up and threw it hard enough for flakes of plaster to pop out of the wall. He threw the book again as she ran for the stairs, so that it tumbled down into the kitchen in front of her, and he roared on: he’d had to get on a train to find her, to go to a new place, naked of protection; she knew he hated new places. She had run away, she had chosen to be away from him but not die, she had lied, she seemed perfectly content.
The wall of rage followed her to the bottom of the stairs. A man who looked like Henning stood by the kitchen door holding a mallet. He handed it over as Victor’s hand closed around her wrist, recoiled, took hold again and latched on to her skin in a way he’d never have been able to if the touch were tender. Victor jerked her out the door into the cold dark and dragged her toward the greenhouse, swinging the mallet in his other hand. She looked down at the paint already rubbing off her porch steps, felt the way the ground under the crisping grass was stiff with frost. She was moving too quickly to see anything ahead of them clearly, but as they lurched along she saw flashes of two men watching them approach, only Falks, no Durr, no Samuel, no Lewis.
“Where’s your brother?” said Victor.
“Looking for the man,” said one of the Falks. He looked young and miserable; Ansel, probably. It was one thing to piss in a man’s mouth, another to commit oneself to actual violence.
“There is no man,” screamed Dulcy. She thought the mallet would come around but the brothers watched and Victor froze with the thing in midair, looking like a bad actor.
“Hold her,” he said, but none of them moved. Victor cackled in rage and dragged her along while he smashed the panes of the greenhouse. He didn’t seem to notice that glass was flecking his arms, and her feet were too cold to feel it. When he’d broken every pane he could reach, he hurled the mallet up into the air and splintered the glass in the loft, then let go of her and stood and simply breathed.
It was too windy for anyone to hear up the street, and Brach was in Gerry’s jail. If she wasn’t deaf from blows, Brach’s wife probably thought this was a lover’s waltz.
“Did he build this for you? I’ll gut him with his own glass while you watch, and then I’ll burn him up.”
“I built it for myself,” said Dulcy.
Victor reached back down, his hand quivering again at the effort to take her arm. Back across the lawn; now she felt the glass in her feet, but she focused on the wrist bearing her along, and as they went through the door, she bit him. He pulled her off by her hair and pushed her—fingertips only—into a chair at the table. He looked in the icebox and the pantry and put a bottle of cider on the table, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with it and paced around, opening drawers. “I will have you pack your things. Henning’s finding your lover. He’ll put him in that greenhouse alive, and we’ll burn him to death.”
“I don’t have a lover,” said Dulcy. “I didn’t leave to have a lover.”
The skin tightened on Victor’s face. She ducked just as his arm came at her, so that he only clipped the side of her head. She rocked in the chair but didn’t fall. “That was a mistake,” he said. “Where’s your luggage?”
“No,” said Dulcy.
He hurled the remnant of the green book, and she heard the river pebbles finally break out of the spine, ricochet against the tile. Outside, someone called unhappily in Swedish. “This isn’t me anymore,” said Dulcy. “I’m someone else now. I’d heard you were, too. I’d heard you were getting married.”
“I’d rather not. She doesn’t understand, Dulcy. She isn’t good company, like you were.”
She kept her voice even. “I don’t have the money, and I don’t know what Dad did with it.”
“I’d rather think you ran away because you’d stolen the money than found me unbearable, but I’ll admit you don’t seem to have it. And so I’ll forgive you, and we will begin again. I will have found you, and it will be a love story.” He pulled out a chair and sat down next to her. “Go upstairs to pack. Henning and Carl will be back with the man, soon, and Ansel and Martin will keep watch.”
Henning’s army. In the glow from the kitchen light, Dulcy could see Ansel sitting on her porch swing. He looked nervous. She picked up the bottle of cider. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Of course I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to bring you home.”
“No.”
She swung the bottle of cider against his head and gouged at his face with the jagged stem as he rocked back. Have a scar, she thought. Feel it.
Then she ran in her head; in the real world, she made it two feet closer to the door before he slammed a fist into her skull. She lay on her back in a blurred world and listened to her own breathing and the putt of a car engine on the street. Victor bent over her, dripping blood onto her face. “Pack your things, or go without them.”
“No.” She slashed at his arm with the bottle’s broken neck.
Victor screamed and began to kick at her, howling to the men outside that he was bleeding to death. She curled up and felt cold air flood the kitchen as Henning surged into the room and knocked Victor to his knees, then flat.
“You fucking idiot.”
“I’m dying,” said Victor. He was glassy-eyed, terrified, staring down at his leaking arm; his blood ran across the floor toward Dulcy.
Henning found a rag on the counter and tied a tourniquet. “We’ll find a doctor to stitch you, and get you on the train.” He crouched down, peered at her face, waved his hand, seeing if she really saw him, then stood.
“Don’t speak to me that way,” said Victor.
Henning climbed to his feet, stepping around Victor’s blood. “How should I, then? You said you’d only talk. Why do you ruin yourself?”