Murder in a mill town (28 page)

“No, you listen to me. You need to understand why I’m doing this. You need to accept that it’s God’s will.”

“All right,” Will said softly. “All right, Adam. I’ll listen as long as you like, and I’ll understand and accept, and then you can do what you please—to me. But you must let Nell go.”

“Will...” Nell pulled at her ropes.

Adam barked with laughter. “Let her
go?
”

“She’s blameless, Adam. I’m the guilty one. I’ve been guilty all my life, of one thing or another. Ask anyone who knows me. Keep me here, punish me as you will, but let her leave.”

“A surprisingly gallant gesture, but I’m not quite that easily misled. If either one of you is more to blame, it’s her.” Pointing to Nell, his face a mask of contempt, he said, “Women like you, you snare men in your net just because you can. You snared Duncan, and now look at him. I went to see him at City Hall today. I saw what you did to him, what you turned him into. Are you proud of yourself? You took a harmless, good-natured man and destroyed him.”

“Harmless?” Nell said. “You told us yourself he gets what he wants through fear and coercion and violence. He threatened my life!”

“How much of what you told us about him is true?” Will asked.

Adam thought for a moment. “Virgil did roll his cigarettes.”

“Oh, dear God,” Nell whispered.

“He rushed at Nell with a gun!” Will said.

“He was rushing at
me
with that gun,” Adam replied, as if to a simpleton. “It was almost certainly a misguided attempt to protect Nell. I’d tried to explain things to him last week, after Nell visited him, in a way he could grasp. I tried to make him understand that Nell is unworthy of him, and that he’ll be free of her soon, but he...became agitated. And, of course, that night, he escaped. When I found out he was in Boston, and trying to keep me from carrying out God’s will, I had no choice but to try to discredit him in case he was caught.
”

Duncan did it for
her
, Nell realized. He escaped from prison and risked being caught to save her. She closed her eyes, as close to tears on his behalf now than she’d been after her trip to City Hall today.
Don’t fall apart now. Keep your wits about you.

Quietly Will said, “I think I understand now, Adam. I do. You’re right, adultery is a sin. By your definition—”

“It’s God’s definition.”

“By God’s definition, I’m an adulterer, because I’ve had relations with married women. But I beg you to believe me when I say that Nell wasn’t one of them.”

“Enough!” Adam whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket as strode toward Will, who thrashed furiously as it was stuffed in his mouth. Using the rest of his rope, Adam secured the gag. “I
told
you to stop lying to me.”

Adam, looking weary, dropped into a leather chair facing the fireplace. He gazed into the low flames for several minutes before speaking. “Twelve years ago, when I started breaking out in sores, and I realized what my wife had done, what she’d turned me into, I agonized over how to deal with it. I tried to forgive her. For four years I tried. I’d sit for hours at a time in that damned box, steeped in mercury, sweating and weeping while I imagined my wife, my sweet little Clarissa, moaning in the arms of another man. It became unendurable. I turned to the Bible, looking for answers, for a path—and I found it. Finally it became clear to me the course God wanted me to follow, and I’ve been following it ever since.”

“Your wife’s boating accident...” Nell said.

He turned to look at her. “God’s will. I was only his instrument.”

“And Bridie and Virgil...?”

“Yes, of course, and others in between—although I must confess, I almost weakened when it came to Virgil, but in the end I did what had to be done. My only regret was that I was naïve enough to think I could leave Harry’s fate in the hands of the commonwealth. Oh, how he needed to dangle at the end of a noose.”

He stood, sighed, walked over to the nightstand, lifted the bottle of morphine solution and shook it. “They’ll find you in bed, naked,” he told her, “with Will by your side, both of you dead from morphine overdoses. In case you were wondering.”

“Adam...” Nell began.

“Shh.” He held a finger to his mouth. “It’s pointless now.”

Nell met Will’s anguished gaze across the room as Adam uncorked the vial of morphine powder, emptied it into the solution and shook it, thus greatly augmenting its potency.

“It’s a fitting death,” Adam said as he screwed a needle onto the syringe and filled it from the bottle. “It will be clear to all that you were brought down by your own sin. And, given the dose, it should be relatively quick. Respiratory and cardiac failure, isn’t that right, Doctor?” he asked with a glance at Will. “Your lungs will simply shut down, then your heart, in short order. Not the best death, but not the worst. And then the world will know what you both are, which is only right and just.”

He laid the full syringe on the nightstand and turned to Nell. His gaze crawled down the length of her. “You need to get out of those things.”

She shrank back against the pillows as he sat on the edge of the bed, facing her. He pulled her pendant watch over her head and set it on the nightstand, then started unbuttoning the front of her dress. Across the room, Will writhed against his bindings, straining to get free.

Her dress undone, he spread it open to reveal her muslin corset cover. He paused, then retrieved a folding knife from inside his coat and opened it.

“Oh, God, don’t,” Nell pleaded as he sliced the left sleeve of her dress from shoulder to wrist, and then the right, scratching her in the process. He pulled off the dress, petticoat and crinoline in one unwieldy mass, then stood at the side of the bed looking down at her.

Despite her layers of underpinnings—shimmy, stays, corset cover, knee-length drawers, stockings and boots—she felt naked beneath his gaze. No man, except for Duncan and Dr. Greaves, had ever seen her in such a state of undress. And even they had never looked at her quite the way Adam was looking at her.

He sat down again, studying her as if trying to decide what to remove next. He fingered the ruffled frill at the hem of her drawers, stroked the lace that edged the neckline of her corset cover. Stilling, he rested a hand over her breast, holding her down with his other hand when she tried to wrench away.

Will thrashed frenziedly, his gag muffling his cries of rage and distress.

Nell squeezed her eyes shut.
God, help me to get out of this... Show me what to do...

“You like to do this to men, don’t you?” Adam said. “You like to incite their lust, make them forget themselves. Bridie was like that.”

Nell pictured those awful bruises they’d found on Bridie, and shivered.

Adam stood, shucked off his coat and vest, shrugged off his braces, his gaze never leaving her.

“You can never get enough, your kind. You’re always asking for it...begging for it. It’s in your eyes, the way you move, the depraved thoughts you make us think, the things you make us do...”

I know your kind,
Harry had said.
I know what you need.
She’d turned the tables on Harry. She could do the same to Adam. She could.
Think outside of yourself.
She just had to keep a grip, keep thinking...

“Not in front of Will—please,” she begged. “Can’t we go somewhere else?”

“You’d like that. You’re clever. You’d find a way to get free.” He shook his head as he popped open the top few buttons of his shirt. “We’re staying right where we are. Although, if you prefer,” he added with that dead smile of his, “I can dispatch Will now rather than later, so he doesn’t have to watch. You see? I can be reasonable.”

“How can you do this?” she asked, desperate to get through to him, to the good, rational man he must have been before syphilis and mercury poisoning ravaged his mind. “This is rape. You must know this is wrong.”

“It’s only rape if the woman doesn’t want it, but your kind always wants it.”

“No, Adam, you’re—“

“Liar!”
He slapped her across the face, reigniting the pain in her head. She cried out.

Will flailed and kicked, screaming through his gag.

“You lying bitch,” Adam growled, “don’t you dare try to play the innocent with me. And don’t bother struggling,” he said as he untucked his shirt, “because we both know what a farce that would be.”

“At least...at least let me undress myself,” Nell said, trying to dismiss the pain from her mind so that she could think. “You hurt me with that knife.” She looked at the scratches on her arms. “Untie me so I can—“

“Untie
you?” His laughter had a frantic edge. “Are you joking?”

“Just my hands, then, so I can get my clothes off.”

He nodded as if working something out in his mind. “If you like. And I’ll even close the bed curtains so Will doesn’t have to watch. But in return, you have to cooperate—completely. At the first sign of resistance, I’ll truss you up and open the curtains. And then, when it’s time for Will to get his dose, I’ll give him just enough to make it slow and agonizing. Otherwise it’ll be almost instantaneous. It’s your choice.”

She looked toward Will, his eyes bleak and desperate as he continued to wrestle with his bonds, the couch creaking from his efforts.

“Close the curtains,” she said.

Adam pulled the curtains shut, plunging them into semidarkness, released her hands, and sat on the bed to watch her undress. She plucked open the tiny shell buttons of her corset cover, thinking,
Be calm. Don’t let your hands shake. Remove your mind from what’s happening to you
.

She slipped off the corset cover, leaving her in her stays of quilted sateen over a cap-sleeved shimmy. The corset’s front busk was secured by means of a row of hooks and loops. Nell allowed her hands to tremble just slightly as she fumbled with the top hook, shaking her head in a display of exasperation. “I can’t... It’s my hands, they won’t...”

“Here.” Leaning over her to see the tiny hooks in the dim light, Adam pried open first one, and then another, as Nell reached toward the nightstand. Slowly, quietly, so he wouldn’t notice, she felt around until she came upon the syringe.

Adam popped open a third hook.

Nell grabbed the syringe with one hand, a fistful of his shirt with the other.

“Shit!” Adam seized her wrist just as she was about to jab the needle into his arm. “Bitch. You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

She cried out as he gave her wrist a sharp twist, causing the syringe to drop from her hand. He grabbed it and aimed it at her own arm.

“I’m losing my patience with you,” he said, his eyes like black buttons in the dark. “Perhaps what you need is a little of what’s in here,” he said with a nod at the syringe. “Just a little. Just enough to take the fight out of you.”

She reached up, took hold of his little finger—the easiest to break, if you used a sideways motion—and yanked as hard as she could.

Bone snapped. Adam howled.

The syringe dropped into the mound of pillows and disappeared. He aimed a fist at her face; she rolled aside to avoid it, felt a sting as the needle pricked her, rolled away.

She slammed the heel of her hand into his nose; he roared. They grappled furiously. She punched and kicked, cursing the rope around her neck, which hindered her enough for him to swiftly gain the upper hand. He pinioned her body with his own and wrapped his hands around her throat, his grip surprisingly strong despite his broken finger.

He squeezed, pressing his thumbs into her trachea, his fingernails biting into her flesh. Her lungs spasmed as she tried to draw a breath and found she couldn’t. She tugged at his hands, beat on them, clawed them. He pressed harder, quivering with the effort, his face blood-flushed, a vein snaking through the burn scar on his forehead. “Whore,” he rasped. “Adulteress. You asked for this.”

From beyond the curtain came Will’s stifled cries and the furious groaning and creaking of wood as she strove to free himself. Nell’s heart pounded; her head pounded; her vision grew murky.

“I can’t tell you how it excites me to see the panic in your eyes,” Adam panted, “to see you turn blue and
gasp for air...”

The trick is in transcending your body’s panic reflex, rising above it.

Rise above it...

It was like floating, like rising out of her body and hovering over the two of them, locked in a fight to the death within this curtained-off bower.

Something glinted in the dark, an almost imperceptible spark of light.

Was it real, or just a fancy of her oxygen-starved brain? Struggling to keep her wits as her lungs burned and heaved, she looked to where she’d seen the spark.

Nothing.

But there
was
something there, hidden among the pillows right in that spot. She knew it. She’d felt it only moments before.

Nell hooked a leg around Adam, grabbed him by the hair, and rolled him faceup onto the spot where the syringe was lodged between two pillows. He flinched and swore rawly as the needle pierced his back,
but he kept his grip on her neck.

Summoning all her strength, she pressed her hands to his chest and pushed as hard as she could to force the plunger in.