A Killer in the Wind (36 page)

“Where the hell did you get that thing?” I asked her.

“A store . . . where I got the sleeping bag,” she murmured, sniffling. “If they come after me again, I’ll kill them with it, so help me. I’ll slit their throats.”

I shook my head. I admired the idea, but I hated to think what would happen to her, going up against Stark and his people. I lifted my eyes and peered past her into the shadows of the corridor. I wondered where the killer was—how close he was, how fast he was approaching as we stood here quarreling through our reunion. I could feel the time closing in on us like a hard hand. I could feel Stark and his men closing in on us like the time . . .

When I looked down, I saw Samantha slide the knife back into place. She swiped at her tears again. Then she began to thread the belt through the loops of her jeans.

“Have you seen them?” she asked grimly. “There are two of them. They look, so help me God, just like skeletons. Like Death and his twin brother.”

“The Starks. I’ve seen them. And there’s only one of them now.”

“What?”

“They came after me. I killed one.”

She stared at me. “Did you? Seriously?”

“Under the circumstances, it seemed like a good idea.”

She stared at me another second, then bowed her head so I couldn’t see her face. She gave a lot of attention to buckling her belt. After a while, she made a noise—and I realized she was stifling a laugh.

“You think that’s funny?” I said.

She shook her head, trying not to laugh again, laughing again anyway. “Sort of. I mean, it’s just what you would have done. You know? I mean . . . you’re still Danny. You’re still just like you were.”

I couldn’t help smiling a little too at that. “Unfortunately,” I said, “the other one’s still alive and the whole killing-his-brother thing has sort of soured relations between us. While we’re sitting around here chatting, he’s doing everything he can to track us down.”

Samantha gave a slow nod, let out a slow breath. For a moment, I thought she might listen to reason and let me take her away from here.

But she simply said, “Listen then. I’ll tell you the whole thing quickly.”

“I never wanted any of this,” she said.

We were back in her room. Away from the window, out of the cold. With all the hospital darkness hunkered around outside us like a threat. Samantha was on the bed, hugging her knees, curled in a grim little ball of self-defense. I was slouched in the wooden armchair across from her, my legs splayed out in front of me.

And yes, I knew we should run. Sure I knew. Whether she wanted to or not, I knew I should grab her and put her into the car and drive her to some hidden nowhere as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I didn’t have the strength. A weird heaviness had settled over me and I didn’t have the will to fight with her or to withstand her anger. It was the drug, of course. The hazy lethargy of withdrawal creeping through me so subtly I didn’t even notice it at first.

And so I didn’t run, and I didn’t make her run. I just sat there in the chair. Feverish. Watching her. Listening.

She spoke quickly, quietly. Her face was ravaged: with crying, but not just with crying—with anger too and hurt and fear, and I don’t know what, maybe just living with the whole damn thing all this time. It was painful to look at. My eyes kept wandering away as she spoke. I kept gazing at the scarred and broken linoleum floor or at the walls or at nothing, at anything except her.

“I mean, I just wanted to leave it alone already. I’d been over it and over it, you know. Not just Trader—what happened to us in that house. That was only the start of it for me. Then there were all the foster fathers, all the . . . It was all such a mess. I’d tried every kind of therapy there was. Remembering. Forgetting. Drugs. Alcohol. Sex.”

She glanced at me on
sex
to check my reaction. I didn’t react much. “Just tell me,” I said.

“But I thought at least Trader was dead. I thought at least there was that, at least you’d killed her. And then . . . that man . . . the dead children . . . The ‘House of Evil,’ they called it.”

“Martin Emory,” I said.

“I couldn’t stop watching the stories on TV. They had it on 24/7. The graves in the forest. The children’s faces. And then that picture. That photograph: the man, Martin Emory, sitting in a car . . . And right next to him, there she was . . .”

“The Fat Woman. Our old friend Aunt Jane.”

“Our old friend . . .”

I forced myself to look at her. She was gazing past her clenched fist, lost in her own ferocity. And I was lost too—lost in her story, lost in the sight of her, lost in my own hurt at what she had become. I couldn’t help but think of how she was when I dreamed about her. Serene and sweet, womanly and kind—grown-up, but still the way she’d been as a little girl: like the princess in her own stories. All that time, these last three years, I’d been so swept away by that dream of her, I couldn’t really care for anyone else. Not for Bethany, not for anyone. Because in my mind, it was always Samantha. Now here she was, the same face I dreamed, the same woman, but not the same, her mouth twisted and her eyes sour and her whole aspect poisoned with terror and betrayal and a whole childhood of abuse.

“I drove to New York,” she said. “The second I saw that photograph. I just turned off the TV, walked out of my apartment, and got in my car . . . I drove without stopping. I went to the first police station I could find. No idea what I was doing, what I was looking for or what to tell them. I mean, it’s not like I knew the woman’s real name or where that horrible house had been, or where the orphanage was or anything. I asked the sergeant at the front desk if I could talk to the detectives on the case, but she said it was an undercover operation and their identities were confidential. But then I overheard two patrolmen talking about a cop who’d been wounded in the house, who was in a hospital in Westchester. So I just . . . I got back in my car . . . ”

I grunted, as if I’d been struck. Suddenly I understood. She had been to the hospital in Westchester. Of course. I must have seen her there. That must have been it. I remembered how I had blacked out as I was leaving the place. I must have walked right by her and somehow recognized her and shut the recognition out of my mind. Until later. Until I was sick with withdrawal—just as I was sick again now. Then I dreamed about her coming to take care of me. The adult Samantha.

“Danny? Danny, are you all right?”

I started to answer but the words died on my lips and no—no, I was not all right. A new and denser fog had engulfed me. I grew wildly dizzy sitting there. Dazed, I stared at her through fever and confusion and I thought I was seeing her now as I must have seen her then, at the hospital in Westchester, seeing her in a strangely bright and visionary way. I felt beads of sweat breaking out on my forehead. And I thought:
Of course I recognized her
. I would always recognize her. I would know her anywhere, everywhere—forever. Right this minute, I could see her not only as she was. I could also see the face of the six-year-old child she had been, just as clearly as if no time had passed at all. Not only that—I could see what had happened to her afterward, every incident of cruelty and violation. I could see her memories—I could
remember
her memories—I could see the whole miserable life she must have lived, the life I think I knew in my heart she
would
live when they tore her, sobbing, away from me, when they dragged us out of each other’s clinging arms, mouthing their grown-up lies about how we could write to each other and visit each other, because they didn’t understand, they were grown-ups and they
couldn’t
understand, that it was violence to separate us, because we were one thing, meant to be together.

“Danny? Are you sick?”

I lifted a trembling hand to my face. My skin was cold and slick with sweat. “Samantha, we . . .”

Our eyes met—and her eyes went wide, and I knew she understood as well. She saw what I saw: that we were one thing. She saw that she could never hide from me, that she was naked to my eyes, all her secrets and the humiliations and violations of her childhood exposed.

Her face contorted. She uncoiled herself quickly. She stepped away from the bed. “I need another smoke,” she said.

I wanted to go to her, needed to go to her, but I couldn’t. I sat where I was, sprawled in my chair, heavy and feverish. “Got to . . . got to . . .” I murmured, my mind drifting.

The afternoon was wearing on. The room was growing darker. By the time I managed to work myself to my feet, the air around me was hazy and gray. I moved out into the common room. Saw her there on the balcony again behind the billowing white curtains. The curtains fluttered and danced, covering her, revealing her, making her seem like a phantom one moment and real the next.

I pushed through them, went out onto the balcony, glad to get a breath of the cold evening air. She was out there, bowing her head, lowering a fresh cigarette to a fresh match, a fresh flame. I wiped the sweat off my face. Squeezed my eyes shut, opened them, trying to clear my head.

“Samantha . . .” I started.

“Just let me finish, Danny. For God’s sake, just let me tell you the rest of it and get out of here.”

She stood with her back to me, smoking in curt, jerky, angry motions, looking out over the railing as the gold went out of the daylight and the evening came.

“It took me three years,” she said. “Weekends. Vacations. Looking for the places. Looking for all of it. Three years.”

I nodded. Those were the three years I had spent in Tyler County, working for the Sheriff’s Department, recovering from the Emory case.

“I didn’t want to do it. It was like an addiction. I kept telling myself to stop. I kept
trying
to stop. But I couldn’t. And slowly, bit by bit, I dug it up. The missing-person reports on Alexander. The old orphanage where we lived. And you—the detective who turned out to be you. And finally, Washington Falls. And Sarah Longstreet. And her.”

She drew in smoke and I drew in the air, fighting off the fever and the withdrawal haze that kept threatening to close in on me. The curtains blew up around me and I saw her through them, standing against the dusk, backlit by a rising moon.

“Her,” I said thickly.

“Our old friend. Aunt Jane.”

Right. That had to have been it. She had found the Fat Woman. She had done what I couldn’t do. Because she remembered who she was and I didn’t.

She said, “Once I found Sarah Longstreet, once I understood what happened, it didn’t take me long to locate one of the doctors from here, St. Mary’s. Dr. White, his name was. He was part of the team who treated . . . our old friend . . . after the fire . . . At first, he went all confidential on me, but when I told him my story, he went back to his records, found her name . . .”

Despite the cool air, despite darkness falling and even colder air starting to blow in off the trees, I felt the fever sweat break out on my forehead again. I clenched my fists. “What was it?” I said. “What was her name?”

Samantha’s face was bathed in red as she pulled on the cigarette again and it glowed. And as she blew out the breath of smoke, she said: “Bobbi-Ray. Bobbi-Ray Jagger.”

The wind swirled and the curtains swirled and my mind swirled as the withdrawal vertigo rose in me again.

“Bobbi-Ray Jagger,” I said. It came out of my throat in a hoarse growl.

“Once I had her name, I used my library’s research tools and found her address,” Samantha said. “It wasn’t hard. She wasn’t far. Just about four hundred miles away from here.” She told me the address. I was losing focus and had to work hard to lock it in my mind. “I called the police, the NYPD, to tell them what I knew . . . And that’s when they came for me. The brothers. What did you call them?”

“The Starks.”

“The Starks. That’s why I couldn’t trust the cops anymore. You see? They said they’d have a detective call me back. And then, that night, as I was coming home from work . . . I saw them.” She turned and faced me, her eyes flashing with anger. The curtains were blowing all around me, all around us both, so that we only caught clear glimpses of each other off and on. In my fever, the effect was dreamlike.

Samantha tossed her cigarette away and immediately worked the pack out of her pocket to get a fresh one. She struck a match like it had struck her first. Lit up. Tugged hard. Hissed out smoke.

“They were in my apartment,” she said flatly. “I saw them through the window, going through the place. I didn’t know how they’d found me or why. I thought maybe it was because I called the police, maybe the Fat Woman had connections with the NYPD . . . I’ve never been so scared in my life.” She made a miserable noise deep in her throat. “Except I have. As we know.”

Weak, fading, I moved to the railing and leaned against it. I tried to keep focusing but she seemed very far away, her voice small and distant.

“I ran. I got my car. There was only one place I could think of to go. To you, Danny. I drove—and I thought I’d lost them. I kept checking my rearview. I used every back road I could. But then, in the middle of nowhere, on an empty stretch of highway—suddenly these headlights . . .” She took a breath, biting back her rage and bitterness. “They ran me off the road. I managed to get into some high grass. They came hunting for me . . . God, Danny! God! They kept moving through the grass, making these threats, telling me what they were going to do to me. These evil, evil things they were going to do . . .” She threw away this cigarette too. She shook her head angrily. “I made it to the river. It was the only way I could hide from them. But the water was so cold . . . and the current . . .”