Bleeding Heart (34 page)

I stared at him, appalled. He appeared to have no regrets about killing Mackenzie. He’d kept the truth from me for months, but now, having shared his horrifying secret, he was not only unrepentant but actually thought I would approve of what he’d done. He’d murdered a man. But he was able to dismiss it as
this thing
and then blithely propose that we pin it on Mara. On top of that, he seemed to think that nothing had changed between us.
We’ll start life together with a clean slate
. He obviously assumed that I loved and admired him just as much as he did himself. And this was the man I had planned to sleep with just a few short hours ago! I felt sick with loathing. And I was alone with him in the middle of the night, acres from my nearest neighbor.

“Well, of course,” I said weakly, stalling for time. I knew I had to get away from him somehow. But at the same time, I knew I had to be careful not to let him see how I really felt about him—or what I was planning. I swiveled in my chair ever so slightly—toward the door. “But didn’t you say you thought Erlander would be able to find Mara? That it wasn’t so easy to disappear these days?” He’d walked to the far end of the room and was staring through the interior windows into the storage area—his back to me. I slid my chair a few feet closer to the door.

“So? Maybe he does track her down,” Tom said, turning around suddenly. He cocked his head to one side as he took me in with that down-turning smile I’d once found so charming. It
disgusted me now. “That would be okay with you, wouldn’t it? I mean, if they brought her back to the Berkshires and indicted her. If she had to stand trial? You could live with that, couldn’t you?”

“Of course,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I could just make out my reflected image and that of the front door behind me in the interior window. But how far was I from the door exactly? If I used the chair to slide across the room, would I be able to make it before Tom reached me? My heart was beating so loudly I was sure he could hear it.

“What’s the matter, Alice?”

“Nothing!” I said, but it came out a strangled cry. This was it, I realized as Tom’s expression changed. He started toward me as I spun around in the chair, pushed off, and slid across the room. I tore at the door handle just as Tom reached me, grabbing the back of the chair. I jumped up, releasing the suddenly empty chair, which sent him reeling backward into the office. Then I threw open the door and ran into the blinding darkness.

I
kept running. The sky had cleared, but the wind was picking up. Stars swirled above me in the moonless night. I slipped on a patch of damp leaves that littered the path—and cried out—but managed to regain my footing. I stumbled on. I heard the office door slam. Tom was coming after me. I had to get up to the house first, I told myself. Lock the doors. Call 911. But Tom could still find a way to break in, I realized. Smash a window. Track me down to the basement or attic, wherever I tried to hide. He knew my house. And he knew me. He’d be able to sense my panic. He’d be able to hear my ragged breathing, my heart thumping like a fist inside my chest. No, better to try to make it to my car. I’d keep running toward the house to throw him off, but then circle back to where I’d parked on the drive near the barn.

Thank God it was so dark. When I got to the kitchen I pulled open the screen door, slammed it twice, and then slipped into the woods behind the house, following the old overgrown cart path that led up to the haying field. I moved as stealthily as I could. The wind, whipping at the branches and gusting through the leaves,
gave me cover. Then a light flashed across the lawn and through the trees. The back porch light. Tom must have turned on the outdoor switch. Good. It would illuminate the immediate area around the kitchen door but throw everything else into deeper shadow. I left the cart path and zigzagged through the woods to the drive.

I was more in the open now, but I could make out the pale gleam of my windshield down the road. It was only then—with the car in sight, my escape within reach—that I realized I’d left my car keys in my shoulder bag. Which was in the house. My heart sank. I slowed down. A shadow crossed the lawn, and I started to run again. But I heard something coming up behind me. I panicked. I swerved back toward the house. But Tom was right there. He grabbed my arms from behind and pulled me against him.

“Alice?” he whispered in my ear. “Where do you think you’re going?” His voice was so gentle and concerned that for a brief, euphoric moment I thought that I must be waking from a nightmare. I’d misheard. Misunderstood. This was
Tom
, after all. Not twenty yards from where we now stood, my daughter Franny had told me:
Well, I’ve got to say, I like the sound of him. Plus he grows his own tomatoes. That’s hard to beat.

“It’s too bad,” Tom was saying. His tone was sympathetic, but his grip was like iron. “I thought we understood each other. I thought we had a future together. And I was willing to overlook so much about you, Alice. I was willing to forgive.”

“What?” I asked weakly. “What did you have to forgive me for?” But instead of responding, he suddenly twisted my wrists and yanked them behind me.

“That hurts!” I cried.

“And what about
me
?” he said, pushing me forward. “Do you have any idea how
I
felt when I heard you were working for Mackenzie?
You!
Of all people! I’d had my eye on you for months, Alice.
And—admit it—you were thinking about me, too.” With my arms pinned at the small of my back, he started to force me down the driveway toward the main road. The back porch light soon faded from view and darkness closed around us. I tripped and nearly fell at one point, and Tom had to haul me back to my feet. After that, I kept stumbling and letting my knees buckle, hoping to slow him down—and throw him off.

“You’re right,” I said when nothing I tried seemed to work. He just dragged me bodily along beside him. “I did have my eye on you. Then you blew up at me after the hearing and I thought it was over. But you found a way to forgive me, Tom. Are you hoping I’ll forgive you, too?”

“I don’t need your forgiveness,” Tom said. “But I did expect a little appreciation. I thought you were made of stronger stuff, Alice. After what you went through with your husband, I thought we saw the world the same way. Weak or strong. I thought you understood that we have a choice. That you’d learned—and evolved—like me. I was a weakling for a long time—too long—before I realized that I had the power to change. I had the power to make a real difference in this world.”

We’d come around a bend in the road, and I saw Tom’s pickup truck parked under the trees at the end of my driveway.

“When did you discover this—this power?” I said, thinking my best hope was to keep him talking. It didn’t matter what I asked, so long as it directed his attention away from me. All I needed was for his mind to wander for a second or two—just long enough for me to make a move. A narrow but deep gully ran along that section of the drive and I thought that if I could somehow push or trip him into it, I might have a chance.

Concentrating on how I might escape, I missed the beginning of Tom’s explanation, but began to focus again when I heard him
say, “. . . so I remortgaged the house to pay for the drug treatment. But it wasn’t working. She was down to seventy-five pounds, just skin and bones.” His voice was so monotone and matter-of-fact, it took me a moment to realize he was talking about his wife, Beth. “She was in pain all the time. And the kids were so damned tired of it all. One night she woke up screaming, begging for more medication. She’d gotten addicted to the morphine. And it made her nasty and paranoid. She looked at me and said, ‘I know what you want to do. So do it. Put us both out of this misery.’”

We’d reached the pickup. He pulled some rope out of the back of the truck and started to wrap it around my wrists, tugging hard after each rough turn. It burned, but I almost didn’t feel it. My heart had gone cold.

“What did you want to do?” I asked, although I thought I already knew the answer.

“It was what
she
wanted,” Tom said as he wound the rope down my legs and around my ankles. “What she begged me to do. What we both knew was the right thing. That’s when I realized that I had the power to do it if I dared. It was all in my hands. I’d just never realized it before.”

“You killed your wife,” I said, the fight going out of me.

“No,” Tom told me. “I set her free.”

I’d been frightened before, but now I was truly terrified. Mackenzie’s wasn’t the first life that Tom had taken. I thought back to the times that he had hinted at this. How he might even have been trying to tell me.
Everyone thought I was such a saint. Dealing with the kids. Caring for Beth at home. But the truth is . . . I was so deeply angry most of the time! At Beth. At how that damned disease was taking everything away from her . . . and how it was totally taking over my life. The anger was kind of like my own disease, you know? Eating away at me from the inside.

He let down the tailgate. I felt so helpless, barely able to move, the ropes cutting into my wrists and ankles. But when Tom tried to lift me up and push me into the bed of the truck, I struggled anyway. I twisted and turned away from him and screamed.

Almost as if in answer, twin beams of light brushed through the woods across the way. A car was approaching from the south on Heron River Road. The headlights swept over us. The car slowed. I heard Tom whisper
“Goddamn it!”
under his breath.
We were caught in the glare: a bizarre tableau vivant of human conflict. I cried out again, this time: “Help me, help me!” before Tom pushed me down behind the truck and out of sight. I heard the car braking.
They’re stopping!
I thought.
Thank God, they’re stopping!
I could make out the sound of rubber on gravel. The tick-tick of an idling engine. And then, with a wave of nauseated disbelief, I heard the tires screech as the car pulled away again and continued down the road. I was too stunned to resist when Tom hauled me to my feet, bundled me into the back of his truck, and slammed the tailgate shut.

As a child, I used to sit outside on summer nights and stargaze with my father, who fancied himself something of an amateur astronomer. He had invested in a high-powered telescope, which he’d set up at the top of the haying meadow, where he would spend endless minutes adjusting and readjusting the lenses.

“Hurry, come look!” he’d cry when he finally got one or another celestial object in his sights. But usually by the time I managed to focus on his find, all I’d see was a hazy blur of light or the far left arc of some planet. I didn’t really want to see the universe up close anyway. Instead, I loved to lie on my back looking at the brilliant, unfathomable vastness—all those enormous dying suns and swirling solar systems—and think about how marvelously far away it all was. Light-years away. Millions and millions of miles from us.

My father and those summer evenings returned to me as I was jolted along in the back of Tom’s accelerating pickup—cold, frightened, and more alone than I’d ever been in my life. How I longed for the security that had seemed my right as a child! The deep pleasure of my father’s company. The sense of connection with something magical and mysterious as we stood together looking up at the heavens.
I see the moon and the moon sees me.
The same night sky that had filled me with such wonder then filled with me anguish now. And regret. The stars, glimpsed between a fleeting jumble of branches and telephone wires, looked down with blind indifference as I thought of all the things I hadn’t done. All the mistakes I’d made. Including this last and very possibly fatal one.

Tom.

Where was he heading? What was he planning to do with me? He’d already killed two people and gotten away with it. Though those had been flukes, surely. The first easily overlooked in the confusion of terminal illness and family tragedy. The second complicated by Mara’s involvement and Mackenzie’s ill health. How did Tom imagine he’d get away with disposing of me? And where? Because I had no doubt now that he intended to do just that. I’d become a serious threat to him. Not just because I could link him to the murders, but because I’d challenged and rejected his whole grandiose and grossly distorted sense of self—
I had the power to do it if I dared!
If he really believed that we shared the same worldview, then he must have been deeply angered by my reaction to what he’d told me. The fear and disgust in my eyes. The fact that I’d run from him. When he’d obviously been expecting me to fall gratefully into his arms.

But I didn’t intend to die. I wasn’t ready to die. I had a grandchild to welcome into the world in a few months’ time. Daughters
to look after and love. Friends I cherished. A business I was proud of. Gardens I hoped to build. So many places I wanted to visit. And along with all this, I still had one overwhelming question I needed to find an answer to, a puzzle that, despite the many years I’d devoted to it, all the numerous false starts and attempts at closure, I realized now I was as far away from solving as ever. Because, as I faced the very real possibility of my death, it was the prospect of never seeing Richard again—his smile, his touch, the voice that would finally explain to me why,
why
he’d done what he had—that was the most difficult to accept.

No!
I thought.
I won’t let this happen!
I rolled over on my side and started to inch my way painfully around the floor of the truck, searching for anything that might help me break free. I came up against something that felt like a tarp. A roll of what was probably duct tape. And then, just as I was beginning to lose strength and hope, my hands brushed against something cool and dry and coarse. I ran my fingers up and down the side of the thing. Cinder block. Holding it in place with the crook of my knees, I started rubbing my bound wrists up and down one of its rough corner edges. Back and forth, up and down, back and forth.

I’m sure I heard it before Tom did. At first I thought it was just the wind scything through the trees, but then the sound became more distinct. A siren. Maybe more than one. From somewhere behind us. Or was it ahead? Then Tom must have heard it, too, because the truck started to pick up speed. Things happened quickly after that. The siren gaining on us. Red lights circling through the darkness. Sirens all around us now. More flashing lights. Tom going faster. My hands suddenly slipping free. A disembodied voice on a bullhorn. “Slow down. Pull over to the side of the road immediately.” Tom accelerating. The world in a sickening spin. Screeching
brakes. The pickup swerving off the road. Careening into the woods. Impact. Metal shrieking. Me in the air. And then nothing but the brilliant, black, unfathomable vastness.