The Keepsake (28 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

Her daughter slept. Josephine’s hair would grow in again, and her bruises had already faded, but as Medea gazed down at her daughter in the soft light of the bedroom, she thought that Josephine looked as young and as vulnerable as a child. In some ways she had become a child again. She insisted that a light stay on all night in her room. She did not like to be left alone for more than a few hours. Medea knew this fear was temporary, that in time Josephine would once again find her courage. For now, the warrior woman inside her was in hibernation and healing, but she would be back. Medea knew her daughter, just as she knew herself, and inside that fragile-looking shell beat the heart of a lioness.

Medea turned to look at Nicholas Robinson, who stood watching them from the bedroom doorway. He had welcomed Josephine into his house, and Medea knew her daughter would be safe there. In the past week, she’d come to know this man and to trust him. He was unexciting, perhaps, and a touch too exacting and cerebral, yet in so many ways he was a good match for Josephine. And he was devoted. That’s all Medea asked of a man. She’d trusted few people over the years, and she saw in his eyes the same steadfast loyalty that she once saw in Gemma Hamerton’s eyes. Gemma died for Josephine.

She believed that Nicholas would, too.

As she walked out of his house, she heard him close the dead bolt behind her, and she felt assured that no matter what happened to her, Josephine would be in good hands. That was the one thing she could count on, and it gave her the courage to climb into her car and drive south, toward the town of Milton.

She had rented a house there, and it stood isolated on a large and weedy lot. It was infested with mice and she heard them at night as she lay in bed, listening for sounds far more ominous than rodent invaders. She didn’t relish returning there tonight, but she drove on anyway, and in her rearview mirror, she glimpsed a car’s headlights tailing her.

The lights followed her all the way to Milton.

When she let herself in the front door, she smelled the old-house smells of dust and tired carpets, with maybe a few mold spores thrown in. She’d read that mold could make you sick. It could cripple your lungs, turn your immune system against you, and eventually kill you. The last tenant who’d lived here was an eighty-seven-year-old woman who’d died in this house; maybe the mold had finished her off. She felt herself inhaling lethal specks of it as she walked through the house, checking, as she always did, that the windows were closed and locked, and she found some irony in the thought that her obsession with security sealed her inside with air that could poison her.

In the kitchen, she brewed strong coffee, the real stuff. What she truly wanted was a stiff vodka and tonic, and her craving was as ferocious as a junkie’s. Just a sip of alcohol would calm her nerves and dispel the sense of dread that seemed to pervade every corner of the house. But tonight was not the night for vodka, so she resisted the urge. Instead she drank the cup of coffee, just enough to sharpen her mind yet not make her jittery. She needed her nerves to be steady.

Before going to bed, she took a last peek out the front window. The street was quiet, so perhaps tonight was not the night. Perhaps she had been granted another reprieve. If so, it was only a temporary one, much like waking up every morning in a death row cell, not knowing if today was the day they would walk you to the scaffold. The uncertainty of one’s appointment with doom is what can drive a condemned prisoner insane.

She headed down the hallway to her bedroom, feeling like that condemned prisoner, wondering if tonight would pass as uneventfully as had the last ten nights before. Hoping that it would, yet knowing it would only postpone the inevitable. At the end of the hall, she looked back toward the foyer, one last glance before she switched off the hallway light. As the foyer fell into shadow, she glimpsed the flicker of passing headlights through the front window. The car moved slowly, as though the driver was taking a long, close look at the house.

She knew it, then. She felt the chill, like ice crystallizing in her veins.
It will happen tonight.

Suddenly she was shaking. She did not feel ready for this, and she was tempted to once again turn to the strategy that had kept her alive for nearly three decades: running. But she had made a promise to herself that this time she would stand and fight. This time it was not her daughter’s life on the line, only hers. She was willing to gamble her own life, if it meant she’d finally be free.

She walked into the darkness of the bedroom, where the curtains were far too filmy. If she turned on the lights, her silhouette could easily be seen in the window. If she couldn’t be seen, she couldn’t be hunted, so she kept the room dark. There was only a flimsy button-lock on the knob, and an intruder could get past it within a minute, but that was one precious minute she might need. She locked the door and turned toward the bed.

And heard a soft exhalation from the shadows.

The sound made every hair stand up on the back of her neck. While she’d been busy locking the doors, checking every window, the invader was already waiting inside her house. Inside her bedroom.

He said, calmly: “Move away from the door.”

She could barely make out his faceless form in the corner, sitting in a chair. She didn’t have to see it; she knew he was holding a gun. She obeyed.

“You’ve made a big mistake,” she said.

“You’re the one who made the mistake, Medea. Twelve years ago. How did it feel to shoot a defenseless boy in the back of the head? A boy who never hurt you.”

“He was in my house. He was in my daughter’s bedroom.”

“He didn’t hurt her.”

“He could have.”

“Bradley wasn’t violent. He was harmless.”

“The company he kept wasn’t harmless, and you knew it. You knew what kind of creature Jimmy was.”

“Jimmy didn’t kill my son.
You
did. At least Jimmy had the decency to call me the night it happened. To tell me Bradley was gone.”

“You call that
decency
? Jimmy used you, Kimball.”

“And I used him.”

“To find my daughter?”

“No, I found your daughter. I paid Simon to hire her, to keep her where I could watch her.”

“And you didn’t care what Jimmy did to her?” Despite the gun pointed at her, Medea’s voice rose in anger. “She’s your own
granddaughter
!”

“He would have let her live. That was my agreement with Jimmy. He was supposed to let her go after this was over. I only wanted
you
to die.”

“This doesn’t bring back Bradley.”

“But it closes the circle. You killed my son. You have to pay for it. I’m only sorry Jimmy couldn’t take care of it for me.”

“The police will know it’s you. You’d give up everything, just to have your revenge?”

“Yes. Because no one fucks with my family.”

“Your wife’s the one who’ll suffer.”

“My wife is dead,” he said, and his words dropped like cold stones in the darkness. “Cynthia died last night. All she wanted, all she dreamed about, was seeing our son again. You stole that possibility from her. Thank God she never knew the truth. That’s the one thing I could protect her from—knowing that our boy was murdered.” He took a deep breath and exhaled with calm inevitability. “Now this is all that’s left for me to do.”

Through the darkness she saw his arm come up, and she knew that his gun was pointed at her. She knew that what happened next was always meant to happen, that it was set in motion on a night twelve years before, the night Bradley died. This gunshot tonight would be only an echo of that earlier one, an echo twelve years delayed. It was a bizarre form of justice all its own, and she understood why this was about to happen, because she was a mother, and if anyone hurt her child she, too, would demand her revenge.

She did not blame Kimball Rose for what he was about to do.

She felt strangely prepared as he pulled the trigger, and the bullet slammed into her chest.

THIRTY-EIGHT

This is where it could all end, I think, as I lie on the floor. My chest is on fire with pain, and I am scarcely able to breathe. All Kimball has to do is take a few steps closer to me and fire the killing shot into my head. But footsteps are pounding up the hallway, and I know he hears them, too. He is trapped in this bedroom, with the woman he has just shot. They are kicking at the door—the door I so stupidly locked, thinking it would keep me safe from an intruder. I never anticipated that it would be my rescuers I was locking out, the police who have followed me home, who have watched over me this past week, waiting for this attack. We have all made mistakes tonight, perhaps fatal mistakes. We did not expect Kimball to slip into my house while I was gone; we did not expect he would already be waiting for me in my bedroom.

But Kimball has made the biggest mistake of all.

Wood splinters and the door crashes open. The police are like charging bulls. They rush in with shouts and pounding feet and the sharp smells of sweat and aggression. It sounds like a rampaging multitude, but then someone flicks on the light switch and I see that there are only four male detectives, their weapons all trained on Kimball.

“Drop it!” one of the detectives orders.

Kimball looks too stunned to respond. His eyes are grief-stricken hollows, his face lax with disbelief. He is a man accustomed to giving orders, not taking them, and he stands helplessly clutching his gun, as though it has grafted itself to his hand and he’s unable to release it even if he wants to.

“Just set the gun down, Mr. Rose,” says Jane Rizzoli. “And we can talk.”

I did not see her enter. The male detectives, so much bulkier than she is, blocked my view of her. But now she steps past them into the room, a small and fearless woman who moves with formidable confidence despite the cast on her right arm. She looks in my direction, but it’s only a quick glance, to confirm that my eyes are open and that I am
not
bleeding. Then she focuses again on Kimball.

“It will go easier if you just put the gun down.” Detective Rizzoli says it quietly, like a mother trying to soothe an agitated child. The other detectives radiate violence and testosterone, but Rizzoli appears utterly calm, even though she is the only one not holding a weapon.

“Too many people have already died,” she says. “Let’s end it right here.”

He shakes his head, not a gesture of resistance but of futility. “It doesn’t matter now,” he murmured. “Cynthia’s gone. She won’t have to suffer through this, too.”

“You kept Bradley’s death from her all these years?”

“When it happened, she was sick. So sick that I didn’t think she’d survive the month. I thought, Let her die without ever hearing the news.”

“But she lived.”

He gave a weary laugh. “She went into remission. It was one of those unexpected miracles that lasted twelve years. So I had to keep up the lie. I had to help Jimmy cover up the truth.”

“It was your wife’s cheek swab they used to identify the body. Your wife’s DNA, not Carrie Otto’s.”

“The police had to be convinced the body was Jimmy’s.”

“Jimmy Otto belonged in prison. You protected a murderer.”

“I was protecting
Cynthia
!”

He was sparing her from the harm he believes I caused their family twelve years ago. While I refuse to feel guilty of any sin except self-preservation, I do acknowledge that Bradley’s death destroyed more than one life. I see the destruction in Kimball’s tormented face. It’s not surprising that he wants vengeance, not surprising that he has continued to search for me these past twelve years, pursuing me as obsessively as Jimmy Otto did.

He has still not surrendered his gun despite the firing squad of detectives now facing him with their weapons aimed. What happens next cannot possibly surprise anyone in that room. I can see it in Kimball’s eyes as surely as Jane Rizzoli can. The acceptance. The resignation. Without any preamble, any hesitation, he shoves the gun barrel into his own mouth and pulls the trigger.

The explosion sends a scarlet spray of blood onto the wall. His legs buckle and his body drops like a sack of stones.

It is not the first time I’ve seen death. I should be immune to the view by now. But as I stare at his destroyed head, at blood that seeps from his shattered skull and pools on the bedroom floor, I suddenly feel as if I am choking. I tear open my blouse and claw at the Kevlar vest that Jane Rizzoli had insisted I wear. Though the vest stopped the bullet, I still smart from the impact. The bullet will almost certainly leave a bruise. I pull off the vest and toss it aside. I don’t care that the four men in the room can see my bra. I rip away the microphone and wires that are taped to my skin, a device that has saved my life tonight. Had I not been wired, had the police not been listening, they would not have heard my conversation with Kimball. They would not have known that he was already inside my house.

Outside, sirens are screaming closer.

I rebutton my blouse, rise to my feet, and try not to look at the body of Kimball Rose as I walk out of the room.

Outside, the warm night is alive with radio chatter and the flashing rack lights of police vehicles. I am clearly visible in that kaleidoscopic glare, but I do not shrink from the light. For the first time in a quarter of a century, I do not have to hide in the shadows.

“Are you okay?”

I turn and see Detective Rizzoli standing beside me. “I’m fine,” I say.

“I’m sorry about what happened in there. He should never have gotten so close to you.”

“But it’s over now.” I take a sweet breath of freedom. “That’s all that matters. It’s finally over.”

“You still face a number of questions from the San Diego PD. About Bradley’s death. About what happened that night.”

“I can deal with it.”

There’s a pause. “Yeah, you can,” she says. “I’m sure you can deal with anything.” I hear a quiet note of respect in her voice, the same respect I’ve learned to feel toward her.

“May I leave now?” I ask.

“As long as we always know where you are.”

“You know where to find me.”
It will be wherever my daughter is.
I sketch a small salute of farewell in the darkness and walk to my car.

Over the years I have fantasized about this moment, about a day when I would not have to look over my shoulder, when I can finally answer to my real name without fear of consequences. In my dreams, it is a moment of incandescent joy, when the clouds would part, the champagne would flow, and I would shout out my happiness to the sky. But this reality is not what I expected. What I feel instead of delirious, foot-stomping joy is more subdued. I feel relieved and weary and a little lost. All these years, fear has been my constant companion; now I must learn to live without it.

As I drive north, I feel the fear peel away like layers of timeworn linen that flutter away in streams and float off into the night. I let it go. I leave it all behind and drive north, toward a little house in Chelsea.

Toward my daughter.