The Prophet

45

ADAM WAS IN BED BUT AWAKE, Chelsea curled on his chest, when Penny Gootee called. The sound of the ring woke Chelsea, and she murmured unhappily and tried to burrow deeper in his chest, then grudgingly moved and opened her eyes when he reached for the phone, recognizing the number.

Shit, he thought, don’t call me to talk about it. We do not need to talk about it, ever. Just know that it is done, and take what comfort you can from that. But we cannot discuss it.

He thought about ignoring it, but he couldn’t do that, not to this woman, so he answered, sitting up in bed as Chelsea slid off him and rolled onto her side. He was trying to get away from her, this not being a conversation he needed anyone to overhear, but he thought he’d have time to get out of the room before they began to speak in earnest. He was not prepared for the scream.

“You told me he was dead! You told me he was dead!”

Even if he’d made it out of the room, Chelsea might have heard. It was that loud. As it was, she was at his side, and the words were clear. She grabbed his arm and spoke his name in a harsh, questioning tone. He pulled free and stumbled out of the bed and into the living room, banged into one of the snake shelves, heard an immediate strike against the plastic.

“Penny, you can’t do this. You can’t call me and say—”

“You told me you’d done it.” She was sobbing. Adam pulled up short in the dark living room, frightened now, wondering what in the hell had gone wrong.

“I did,” he said. He’d feared saying something so damning over the phone, but now, listening to the woman’s hysterical sobs, he no longer cared. He just needed to understand.

“No, you didn’t! That sick piece of shit is still alive, because he brought me pictures. He brought me pictures of my baby!”

No, Adam thought. No, he could not have done that. He’s in the morgue now. I left him in the rocks and the water and he was dead, Penny, I am sure of it, he was dead. I put a bullet through the man’s heart. He is dead.

“He must have sent them before,” he said. “That’s the only possibility.”

“He didn’t send anything. He left them in an envelope at my front door!”

This was not possible.

“Someone else did,” Adam said. “I’m sorry, Penny. I’m so sorry. But it was not him. Someone else—”

“I don’t believe you.” Her voice was choked with tears. “I don’t believe you did a damn thing. You lied to me, and what sort of evil are you that you would lie about that?”

“I did not lie.”

“Go to hell,” she said. “Just go to hell, you and him both, you belong together.”

She hung up and then he was alone in darkness and disbelief.

For a moment there was no sound but the soft rustling of the shifting snakes. Then Chelsea said, “Why did that woman think the man who killed her daughter was dead, Adam?”

He turned to her as the display light faded out on his phone and left him in blackness.

“Because he is,” Adam said. “He is. He was supposed to be, at least. I don’t understand, someone else had to do this for him because—”

“You know who it was?”

“I thought I did.” He could not lie to her, not now, he had no energy left for lies. Hardly had the energy to breathe. He had finished it, he had made good on every promise, but now Rachel Bond’s mother said that nothing was fixed, nothing was finished.

“How? Who told you?”

“Kent gave me the name. He gave it to the police, and to me.”

Kent saw him, he thought. Kent knew that it was true, he was certain.

Chelsea had slipped into a sweatshirt, and she approached him now and put her hands on the side of his face, holding him as if to prevent him from turning from her, though he had no desire to do so.

“What did you do, Adam?”

“I killed him.”

She took her hands away from his face. Whispered his name. That was it, just his name.

“He came to my brother’s house with a gun,” Adam said. “He threatened his family, and he talked about Rachel Bond’s death. He did it, Chelsea, he did it, so I don’t know who gave these photographs to Penny, but the man I killed was the right man.”

“You shot him? Murdered? Just went out and—”

“He had a gun, too,” Adam said.

“You murdered him,” she repeated.

“I did what I promised I was going to do. What needed to be done.”

She stepped away from him, then slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, her bare legs stretched out in front of her. She wasn’t looking at him anymore. Didn’t seem to be looking at anything.

“How did you even find him?”

“I was getting close by myself,” he said. “Then Kent took it home for me. He gave me the man’s name, and I’d already found his half brother. Rodney Bova.”

“You used his brother?” she said. “That’s how you found him? By putting a tracking device on his brother?”

“Yes.”

“Rodney Bova didn’t just happen to get arrested in time for this.” Her voice was soft and distant and impossibly sad.

“No.”

“So you… what did you do? Just call in a tip after you found out he had drugs on him?”

“I did a little more than that.”

“Adam.” She put her face in her hands.

“I intended to fix that at some point.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, Chelsea. But I will make that right. I always was going to. I just needed him. And it worked, damn it. He led me right to him. It worked.”

“You could have called the police. When you found him, you could have—”

“When Gideon Pearce killed my sister, the police had been looking—”

“This isn’t about your sister!” she screamed.

He didn’t answer. It was silent for a while, and then he sat down on the floor, too. Not close to her, though. Across the room, widening the distance, staring at her from the shadows.

“They’ll find out, Adam,” she said. “Someone will talk. Bova, Penny, someone.”

“They’ll be suspicious. They won’t be certain. There’s a difference.”

“To a guilty man, I guess there is.”

What could he say to that?

“Can they prove it?” she asked finally.

“That won’t be as easy for them as connecting it back to me was.”

“What will the tracking logs show them?”

“That Rodney Bova went to a house on Erie Avenue where Sipes was staying, and that I knew about it. It will be hard to prove anything beyond that. Possible, of course. But harder.”

Chelsea didn’t speak. Adam said, “He killed that girl, Chelsea. Murdered a child.”

“It sounds like maybe he didn’t.”

Adam couldn’t begin to wrap his head around that. He’d known it was true. He’d walked all the way down to the lake with Sipes and Sipes knew what he believed and he’d never said a word, never issued a denial. Why?

“He was a predator,” Adam said. “Even if somehow we were wrong, and I don’t know how we could be, he was still a threat. He’d stalked a woman for years and ended up in prison because of it, and as soon as he was back out, he began to stalk my brother and his family. He came to their home with a gun in his hands, Chelsea. He was a predator.”

“And so you decided to become one, too.”

“What do you want from me?” he said. “I’m asking honestly. Tell me what you think I should do, and I will do it. Do you want me to confess? I can call them now.”

“I want you to be with me,” she said. “And I want you to be right, Adam. To be the person you really are, not the person you’ve let yourself become.”

“I may need an alibi,” he said slowly. “If it comes down to that, if they push hard enough, I’m going to need to be able to say where I was.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Who else will, Adam? Who else?”

“My brother, maybe,” he said.