Praying for Sleep

33

He whispers, “You thought I’d never find out.”

Lis backs into a rosebush and senses a thorn easing into her thigh. She feels little pain, she hardly hears the rain pummeling the glass roof above them.

“How pathetic of you, Lis. How pathetic. Sneaking into hotels. Strolling on the beach…” He shook his head. “Don’t look so shocked. Of course I knew. Almost from the beginning.”

Her throat clogs with fear and her eyes dip momentarily shut. “And that’s why you’re doing this? Because I had an affair? My God, you-”

“Whore!” He lunges forward and strikes her in the face. She falls to the ground. “My wife. My wife!”

“But you were seeing someone!”

“That gives you license to cheat? That’s not the law in any jurisdiction that I know of.”

Lightning flashes though it’s now in the east. The heart of the storm has passed over them.

“I fell in love with him,” she cries. “I didn’t plan on it. Why, you and I spent months talking about divorce.”

“Oh, of course,” he says in a snide voice, “that excuses you.”

“Robert loved me. You didn’t.”

“Robert was interested in anything in a skirt.”

“No!”

“He fucked half of the women in Ridgeton. A few of the men too probably-”

“That’s a lie! I loved him. I won’t have you…”

But through these protests another thought rises into her mind. She considers months and dates. She considers their reconciliation after Owen’s affair-just around the time Mrs. L’Auberget was diagnosed as terminally ill. She considers his resistance to buying the nursery. Her tears slow and she looks at him coldly. “It’s something else, isn’t it? It’s not just that I was seeing Robert.”

The estate. Of course. Her millions.

“You and Robert talked about getting married,” Owen says, “you talked about divorcing me, cutting me out of everything.”

“You talk like it’s money you earned. It was my father’s. And I’ve always been more than generous. I… Wait. How did you know Robert and I talked about getting married?”

“We knew.”

Stunned by a blow sharper than his palm a moment before, Lis understands. We knew. “Dorothy?”

Owen wasn’t seeing a lawyer at all. Dorothy was his lover. Was and still is. Obedient Dorothy. They planned Lis’s death all along. For Owen’s insane pride and for the money. Charming, careless Robert had perhaps left some evidence of the affair around the Gillespie household, or perhaps had simply not stopped talking when he should have.

“Who do you think called the day of the picnic to get me into work? That wasn’t my secretary. Oh, Lis, you were so blind.”

“You were at the park after all. I thought I saw you.”

“I stopped at the office and had my calls forwarded from there to the phone in the Acura. I was at the park fifteen minutes before you. I followed you to the beach.”

And he waited.

Dorothy forgot Lis’s copy of Hamlet intentionally, thinking that she’d go back to the truck alone for it. Owen would be waiting for her.

But it was Robert, not Lis, who went after the book, hoping to meet Portia. Robert must have wandered past Owen, who attacked him at the mouth of the cave. Bleeding badly, Robert had run inside and Owen had pursued him. Claire must have heard Robert’s calls for help and followed.

And it would have been Owen who found the knife Lis had dropped near Robert’s body.

“The mutilation! Why, you bastard!”

“Let the punishment fit the crime.”

“Michael never hurt Robert?”

“Hurt him? The son of a bitch tried to save him! He was crying, he was saying, ‘I’ll get that blood off your head, don’t worry, don’t worry.’ Some crap like that.”

“And you’ve been waiting for something like this…” She laughs, looking around her at the night. “You didn’t go out there to kill him at all. You went to bring him here! You were going to let him… let him finish the job tonight!”

“At first I thought that was why he escaped-to come after you. Then I tracked him to Cloverton. He-”

“That woman… Oh, Owen…”

“No, he didn’t hurt her. He just tied her up so she couldn’t reach the phone. I found her in the kitchen. He’d been muttering to her that he was on his way to Ridgeton to save someone named Lisbonne from her Adam.”

“You did it?” she whispers. “You killed her?”

“I didn’t plan it. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! I made it look as if he’d done it. I dumped her motorcycle in a river. The cops thought he was going to Boyleston but I knew he was headed this way.”

Of course he did. He knew all along that Michael had a motive for coming to Ridgeton-to find the woman who’d lied about him in court.

“And you shot Trenton. And the deputy outside!”

He grows eerily calm now. “It got out of hand. It started simple and it got out of hand.”

“Owen, please, listen to me. Listen.” She hears in her voice the same desperate but soothing tone with which she’d addressed Michael a half hour before. “If you want the money, for God’s sake, you can have it.”

But looking at his face, she knows that the money isn’t the point at all. She thinks of her conversation with Richard Kohler. Michael might be mad, yes, but at least his demented world is incorruptibly just.

It’s her husband who’s the psychopath; he’s the one immune to mercy.

Lis realizes now that he must have begun planning her death from the very beginning of the evening-when he first heard about Michael’s escape. Making a scene about the sheriff ’s putting men here, insisting she go to the Inn-they were just efforts to make him look innocent. Why, after he murdered Michael, he’d have rung up Lis at the Inn and told her to return. All’s safe, my love. Come home. But he’d be waiting for her. For her and…

“Oh, God,” she whispers.

Portia too.

She realizes that he must have intended to kill her as well.

“No!” Her wail fills the greenhouse. “No!”

And she does the very thing she’d left her basement hideout for, the very thing she prayed for strength to do but never believed herself capable of until this instant-she turns, picks up the kitchen knife from the table behind her and swings the blade at him with all her strength.

She’s aimed for his neck but instead hits his cheek. His head bounces back from the impact of the metal. The gun flies from his hand. He blinks in shock.

Blood appears instantly, sheets of blood covering his head like a crimson veil.

For an instant they stand motionless, staring at each other, their thoughts as frozen as their bodies. Neither breathes.

Then with the howl of a combat soldier Owen leaps for her. She falls to the ground, dropping the knife, holding her hands over her face to ward off his maniacal pummeling. She takes a stunning strike on her jaw. Her vision crinkles momentarily to black. She drives her fist into his left shoulder. His cries are like an animal’s as he leans away, clutching the tormented joint.

But he recovers quickly and renews the assault, his fury overpowering her. She’s no match for his strength or weight, even with the wound on his face and a damaged arm. Soon she’s on her back, her shoulders and neck lacerated by bits of gravel. His hand is on her throat, squeezing hard. The lights of the greenhouse, blue and green, dim lights all, grow dimmer as her lungs beg for oxygen they can’t have. Her hands flail toward his hugely bloody face. They strike only air then fall to the ground. A dust of blackness fills her eyes. She says something to him, words he cannot possibly hear, words she herself does not understand.

In her last moment of consciousness a small shadow forms at some distant focal point-part of her brain dying, she thinks. This shadow grows from a tiny mass to an encompassing darkness that hangs in the air, a wad of black storm cloud. Then the glass roof directly above the struggling couple disintegrates into a million shards, and bits of wood and glass envelop the hurtling shadow like bubbles of air following a high diver into water.

The massive body lands sideways, unbalanced, half on Owen, half on a tall Imperial rose tree, whose thorns dig deep parallel scratches like musical-staff lines along Michael’s cheek and arm. He sobs in panic from the twenty-foot leap-a terror that for anyone would be overwhelming and for him must be beyond comprehension.

A long boomerang of glass slits Lis’s neck. She rolls sideways away from the straggling men and huddles, covering the wound with a shaking hand.

Through the gaping hole in the glass roof a light mist falls and a few swirling leaves descend. Bulbs shatter under the cold moisture from the sky and the room is suddenly immersed in blue darkness. Then a sound fills the air, a sound that Lis believes at first is the rejuvenated storm. But, no, she realizes that it’s the howling of a human voice inflected with madness-though whether it’s Michael’s or Owen’s or perhaps even her own, Lis Atcheson will never know.

Here, in this storm-tossed yard, the vigilant and serious sheriff ’s deputies dispersed doggedly, combing the house and grounds.

Here the medics, directed first to pale Trenton Heck, took his vital signs and determined that he hadn’t lost a critical quantity of blood. Here the same medics stitched and dressed Lis’s own sliced neck, a dramatic but unserious wound, whose scar would be with her, she guessed, for the rest of her days.

And here Portia was flying into her sister’s arms. Embracing her hard, Lis smelled shampoo and sweat and felt one of the young woman’s silver hoop earrings tap against her lips. They hugged for a full minute and when Lis stepped away it was the younger of the two sisters who was crying.

A mud-spattered state-police car arrived, its rooftop speaker already turned to the receiving channel and stuttering with broadcasts, all of which were related to the cleanup efforts following the storm. A tall, gray-haired man stepped out of the car. Lis thought he resembled a cowboy.

“Mrs. Atcheson?” he called.

She caught his eye and he started for her but then paused halfway through the muddy yard to gaze with undisguised surprise, then concern, at Trenton Heck, lying on a gurney. He was barely conscious. The two men said a few words to each other before the medics carted the lanky tracker off to an ambulance.

Don Haversham approached her and asked if she felt like answering a few questions.

“I suppose.”

As they were talking, a doctor emerged from one of the ambulances and put a butterfly bandage on the cut on Lis’s arm then retreated, saying only, “Hardly a scratch. Wash it.”

“No stitches?”

“Nup. That bump on your head, that’ll go away in a day or two. Don’t worry.”

Unaware that she had a bump on her head she said she wasn’t worried. She turned back to Haversham and spoke with him for the better part of half an hour.

“Oh, listen,” she asked, after she’d finished her account, “could you get in touch with a Dr. Kohler at Marsden hospital?”

“Kohler?” Haversham squinted. “He’s disappeared. We were trying to find him.”

“Hey, would that be a Richard Kohler?” The Ridgeton sheriff had overheard them.

“That’s him,” Lis said.

“Well,” the sheriff responded, “fella of that name was found drunk an hour ago. At Klepperman’s Ford.”

“Drunk?”

“Sleeping off a bad one on the hood of a Mark IV Lincoln Continental. To top it off, had a raincoat laid over him like a blanket and this skull, looked like a badger or skunk or something, sitting on his chest. No, I’m not fooling. If that ain’t peculiar I don’t know what is.”

“Drunk?” Lis repeated.

“He’ll be okay. He was pretty groggy so we got him in a holding cell at the station. Lucky for him he was on the car and not driving it, or he could kiss that license goodbye.”

This hardly seemed like Kohler. But nothing would have surprised her tonight.

She led Haversham and another deputy into the house and coaxed Michael outside. Together they walked him to an ambulance.

“Looks like that’s a broken arm and ankle,” the astonished medic said. “And I’d throw in a couple cracked ribs too. But he don’t seem to feel a thing.”

The deputies stared at the patient with fear and awe, as if he were the mythical progeny of Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. Michael, upon Lis’s solemn promise that it was not poison, consented to a shot of sedative and allowed his own wounds to be cleaned though only after Lis asked the medic to dab antiseptic on her wrist to prove it was not acid. Michael sat in the back of the ambulance, hands together, staring down at the floor, and said not a word of farewell to anyone. He seemed to be humming as the doors closed.

Then Owen, battered but conscious, was taken away.

As was the horrible rag-doll body of the poor young deputy, his blood, all of it, lost in his squad car and in a bed of muddy zinnias.

The ambulances left, then the squad cars, and Lis stood next to Portia in the kitchen, the two sisters finally alone. She looked at the younger woman for a moment, examining the bewilderment on her face. Perhaps it was shock, Lis pondered, though more likely a virulent strain of curiosity, for Portia suddenly began asking questions. Although Lis was looking directly at her, she didn’t hear a single one of them.

Nor did she ask Portia to repeat herself. Instead, smiling ambiguously, she squeezed her sister’s arm and walked outside, alone, into the blue monotone of dawn, heading away from the house toward the lake. The bloodhound caught up with her and trotted alongside. When she stopped at the far edge of the patio, near the wall of sandbags the sisters had raised, the dog flopped onto the muddy ground. Lis herself sat on the levee and gazed at the gunmetal water of the lake.

The cold front was now upon Ridgeton and the trees creaked with incipient ice. A million jettisoned leaves covered the ground like the scales of a giant animal. They’d glisten later in the sun, brilliant and rare, if there was a sun. Lis gazed at broken branches and shattered windows and shingles of wood and of asphalt yanked from the house. The heavens had rampaged, true. But apart from a waterlogged car the damage was mostly superficial. This was the case with storms around here; they didn’t cause much harm beyond dousing lights, stripping trees, flooding lawns and making the good citizens feel temporarily humble. The greenhouse, for instance, had seen several howling tempests and had never been damaged until tonight-and even then it’d taken a huge madman to inflict the harm.

Lis sat for ten minutes, shivering, her breath floating from her lips like faint wraiths. Then she rose to her feet. The hound too stood and looked at her in anticipation, which, she supposed, meant he’d like something to eat. She scratched his head and walked to the house over the damp grass, and he followed.