I squeezed Samantha’s wrist, hard—our prearranged signal. I heard her coughing somewhere in the smoke beside me. I didn’t think she would have the strength to go.
But she did. She flitted from my grasp, darted through the smoke like a wraith. She flashed silently behind the Fat Woman’s back and out the door onto the lighted landing. From there, she dashed for the stairs, vanishing from my sight. Just like that.
I stumbled to my feet and went after her, fighting my way through the smoke that filled the room and filled my brain, that welded the room and my brain into one great churning barrier of confusion, battling my way through that confusion toward the light of the doorway.
But I didn’t go through. I didn’t follow Samantha out of the room onto the landing. Instead, when I reached the door, I stopped and grabbed hold of the doorknob.
The Fat Woman was still trying to fight the fire. She was maybe half a step in from the edge of the door. When I took hold of the doorknob, she heard me—or maybe just sensed me moving so close behind her. Her giant form whipped around with stunning swiftness. She looked down from her great height and saw me below her.
Her face was caught in the firelight. Its expression of wild surprise and rage was etched in red and black. Her eyes in their folds of pasty flesh burned and danced like a demon’s. When she caught sight of me, she made a noise—a wordless snarl of pure hatred that pierced me head to groin with terror.
With the speed of that terror, I started to pull the door shut. But she, with the devil’s own quickness, reached for it, grabbed the edge of it with her thick fingers. Pulled back against me.
I don’t know where I found the strength to fight her, but I did. I yanked the door with all my might and somehow jerked it almost shut, even with her holding on, even with her trying to hold it open. I pulled again and the door closed on her fingers. The Fat Woman gave one short cry of pain and snatched her hand away.
The next second, I slammed the door and drove the heavy bolt into its ring.
The cry of rage that reached me from the tower room seemed barely human. It was such a horrible sound that even then, hacking and coughing and half-dead from the smoke, I stood on the landing and stared at the door in a kind of dreadful wonder. I heard the Fat Woman’s heavy hands smack against the wood—once and then again. I heard her shrieking—horrible curses and threats—her voice broken and hoarse.
“Open this door, you little piece of shit! Open this door or so help me you will be punished like you can’t fucking imagine!”
She smacked the door again—so hard it shook on its hinges, so hard the floor seemed to shake beneath me. But now her voice became strained, and her curses were interspersed with coughing.
“You little . . . You little . . .”
But then there was only coughing.
For another long moment, I stared in horror and fascination at the door. Then my eyes were drawn down and I saw the black smoke curling out onto the landing over the sill. That seemed to bring me to my senses. I turned, still hacking and coughing myself, and stumbled away.
The prism of tears—tears streaming from my stinging eyes, coursing down my grimy cheeks—turned the light on the landing radiant and dazzling. I was half-blind as I reached the top of the winding stairs. Clutching the banister, I started down. I dropped from one riser to the next. Then my heel slid out from under me. I sat down hard, the edge of the stair jarring my butt. I grabbed the banister with both hands and hauled myself up again, coughing and weeping. I went on, descending the spiral, down and down and down.
I reached the second floor. Woozy, I looked around me. I was in a corridor. There were brass lanterns in sconces on the paisley wall, but their bulbs seemed dim to me, their glow swallowed by the flocking. I could barely see. The smoke was still in my brain. The furious, inhuman cry of the Fat Woman was still ringing in my ears.
Openmouthed and bewildered, I began to feel my way along a piece of raised paneling, working toward the next flight of stairs. I reached it. Grabbed the newel post. Clung to the newel post like a sailor clinging to a rail in a stormy sea. In fact, the floor did seem to be dipping and tilting and rising up under me. Some black-tasting bile gurgled up my throat as I curled around the post. I half-spit, half-vomited the stuff onto the stairs. Then I started thumping down.
I held fast to the banister. Descended clumsily, nearly falling stair to stair. Somewhere along the way, I caught a breath—fresh, cool air from the outdoors. I blinked and straightened as if I’d been slapped in the face. My head was suddenly clear, my vision suddenly clear. I dragged my sleeve across my eyes to wipe the tears away. I squinted and peered and saw the door. The front door to the house. It was open. Samantha. She must have gotten out. The night—freedom—lay just below me.
With elaborate caution—each step a stiff and deliberate thump—I made my way down the staircase to the foyer below. I staggered across a gold and purple rug. Gold and purple chairs lined the striped walls. They seemed to watch me as I lurched past them to the door.
Then I was out of the house, into the night. I coughed violently, fighting to suck down mouthfuls of the glorious cool air. I shuffled and stumbled down the front two steps, out onto the dark lawn, looking around me, blinking, dazed. I heard Samantha somewhere. She was coughing too. Where? Where was she?
Then I heard her gasp: “Danny!”
There she was. Kneeling on the lawn in the moonlit darkness. Bent over under a small maple tree. Convulsively grabbing handfuls of dirt and grass as she hacked and coughed and spat up black phlegm.
I took two wobbly steps toward her, then paused and turned and looked back and up, over my shoulder.
The tower was in flames. I could see the fire flickering at the high windows. I could see the smoke beginning to seep out through the walls, a coiling blackness staining the blue of night.
I turned and scanned the dark around me. Nothing but trees visible on every side of me. Trees and, down the road, the porch lamp of a house, its yellow glow obscured by leaves and branches.
I listened as I looked. Sirens—I heard sirens in the distance. Someone had seen the flames. The firemen were coming. The police—the police would be with them too.
I took the last few steps to Samantha’s side. Exhausted, I dropped to my knees beside her. Still coughing, she reached out for me blindly. I took her hand in both of mine. She seemed to follow my grip up to me, rising from the grass. She flung her arms around me.
“You did it, Danny! The police are coming! They’ll help us! You did it! We got away!”
The press of her body against me, her coughing whisper against my face, seemed to snap me back to full consciousness. This place, this night, the grass and dirt beneath my knees, the fire burning behind me, the smoke twining inside me—all of them suddenly became clear and real.
And Samantha herself—Samantha pressed against me, shaking, crying.
“We’ll be all right now, won’t we, Danny?”
I started crying too. I hated to. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to be a hero—for her. But I couldn’t help it. I held Samantha against me as she wept. I held her close so she wouldn’t see how hard I was sobbing.
As the sirens in the distance came closer, grew louder, we knelt together like that, hugging one another on the lawn beneath the tree, our figures lit by the moon and the flames that rose in the burning tower: two little children, crying in each other’s arms.
I took a step closer to the bathroom mirror. I looked at my reflection, my scarred face, my burning eyes. I could still smell the smoke. I could still hear the Fat Woman shrieking. I could still feel Samantha’s arms around me.
And I could still see Alexander’s forlorn figure. I could still hear his voice—that voice I had tried so hard to forget all these years, all my life.
Don’t let them take me.
I lifted my hand, the hand holding the gun.
You don’t know who you are.
I turned the Glock this way and that, studying it as if I were just seei
ng it for the first time.
I know, I thought. I know now.
She was still alive. The Fat Woman. She hadn’t died like the newspaper said she had. I had known that somehow. I had always known it. She was still out there, still in the wind. She and her pet murderer Stark.
I slipped the gun inside my jacket. I put it back into its holster. I was going to need it.
I know now, I thought. I know who I am.
I lifted my eyes to the mirror again and saw myself.
I am the executioner.
13
The Coroner’s Widow
A LONG TIME PASSED in darkness. I sat in an antique armchair in the foyer. A grandfather clock tick-tocked steadily against the wall. Every fifteen minutes, the clock chimed. At the hour, it tolled.
The house settled around me, strangely alive. It had a presence, I mean a personality: dignified and self-possessed and melancholy with time.
Or maybe that was just my imagination. Maybe it was just the drug. A lot of strange thoughts came to me, sitting there so long.
I could see the scene outside through the mullioned windows that flanked the front door. The cars went back and forth on the main thoroughfare, whizzing past the stand of birches across the way. After night fell, I could see their headlights, the glare spreading over the white trunks of the trees, then falling away. Finally, one pair of lights pulled to the curb and went dark. The antique armchair let out a stuttering creak underneath me as I sat up straight, waiting.
I heard the brisk clop of a woman’s heels on the front path. I heard her key in the latch and saw the door open, the movement dim and obscure in the evening shadows. She switched on the foyer light—a lamp of glass and iron hanging from the ceiling—but she still didn’t see me. She had turned away and was stripping off her spring overcoat as she took the step to the closet by the front door. I sat watching her fit the coat neatly to its hanger. I thought she must have been pretty once in that haughty, demanding way some women have, like they are standing on a hill above you, looking critically down. She still had a majestic face, worn and wizened as it was, her hair an uncompromising silver, her body lean and ramrod-straight.
When she did face forward, when she did notice me in the chair against the foyer wall, her reaction was restrained. She stiffened. Her wrinkled hand went briefly to the top of her cardigan. She drew in breath through her nose—I could hear it across the room. But that was all. Pretty good, I thought, considering I must’ve scared the old girl half to death.
Her hand came down unsteadily and clasped her other hand in front of her skirt. She regarded me sternly, her steel-gray eyes anxious but hard. She was afraid—she didn’t hide that, but she didn’t make a show of it either. I don’t think she considered it any of my damned business.
“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked calmly.
“No,” I said.
She drew another breath and nodded once. “And I suppose if you were going to kill me, you wouldn’t have made such a production of it.”
I smiled wearily. “Probably not. I’m a police inspector. Or I was. I want to ask you some questions about your husband and a woman named—”
“Sadie Trader. Yes, now I understand. You must be Detective Champion. Your . . . coming was foretold to me.”
Surprised, I was about to ask by whom, but the answer was obvious. I was working off Samantha’s notes, after all, following her footsteps. Of course, she’d already been here. Of course, she’d already found what I was looking for. That’s why the Fat Woman sent the Starks after her in the first place. “How did she know I’d . . . ?” I began to say. But the answer to that began to occur to me too and I didn’t finish.
The elegant old woman looked around the room as if searching for a polite response to my half-muttered questions. “Would you care for a cup of tea?” she said finally.
I was exhausted from the flood of memories, my mind hazy with the drug. “Would coffee be too much trouble?”
“Not at all.” The woman hesitated. “I would have to go into the kitchen, though.”
“Go anywhere you like. It’s your house.”
She started across the foyer—then pulled up short, wary, as I rose from my chair.
“I thought I would come in with you,” I told her. “So we can talk while you make coffee. You don’t have to be afraid of me. Really.”
“Of course not. Come this way.”
She started walking again, turning on lights as she went. I followed her down a hall into the kitchen. It was a broad, bright country kitchen: white walls, wooden floors, and a big gray granite-topped island in the center. I sat at one of the tall stools by the island. I watched her as she moved with womanly briskness and efficiency from cupboard to counter to sink. She was eighty if she was a day but there was a vitality and sureness to her movements you don’t see all that often, even in much younger people. I admired her. She was sort of like one of those antiques you look at and think, They don’t make them like that anymore.
“So ask your questions, Detective Champion,” she said—at the sink, running water into a china pitcher, her back to me.
“Inspector. You can call me Dan—although somehow I don’t think you will.”
She showed me just enough of her face to let me see her small answering smile.
“I’m sorry I had to break in, Mrs. Longstreet,” I said. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being followed. There are some bad people after me and I didn’t want them to see me talking to you.”
“Well, that was very thoughtful of you. Though really, I suppose, if they were going to bother me, they’d have done it a long time ago. They haven’t much reason to trouble themselves. I don’t really know very much—nothing that can hurt them anyway.” The pitcher full, she carried it across the counter. She poured some water into a coffeemaker and some more into an electric kettle, speaking as she did. “On the other hand, they seem to have given you quite a working over.”
I raised my bruised hand to touch the gash on my cheek. “We had some areas of disagreement.”
“Yes, I imagine you did.” She set the coffeemaker and the kettle working. Then she faced me, leaning her back against the counter. She fiddled with a little silver cross she wore on a plain steel chain around her neck. “In any case . . . your questions.”
“Thank you,” I said. “According to the archives of the local paper, your late husband, Adam Longstreet, was the coroner here thirty years ago.”
Mrs. Longstreet shuddered, glancing away. “I can’t bear to look at those old papers. I can’t bear to see his name in them.”
“He declared Sadie Trader dead. Said she died in the fire at her house.”
“Yes. Yes, he did.”
“But she didn’t die, did she?” I said.
“No,” said Mrs. Longstreet flatly. “She did not. As, of course, you know.”
She gave me a bland, patrician look. I didn’t think she was going to stonewall me. She had already spoken to Samantha. And anyway, I could see she had been raised in the old way, to respect the virtues, honesty among them. But she had been raised to dignity as well, and she didn’t want to feel she was being interrogated.
So I said, “You know, I remember him, I think. Your husband.” And when I saw her widen her eyes, properly startled, I went on, “It’s possible I just imagined it after the fact, but I really think I do. I think he showed up at the house while they were still fighting the fire. Samantha and I were still there on the front lawn and I think he showed up just as they were carrying the Fat Woman—Trader—out to the ambulance.”
“That would make sense,” she murmured, impressed. “He did go out to the scene that night. Well, of course, he was the only doctor in town.”
The kettle snapped off automatically, drawing her back to her work. She turned away from me, rooting briskly in the cupboards for coffee mugs and drawing a tea bag out of a glass jar.
“If it was him,” I said, “I overheard him talking to . . . the police chief, I guess it was.
”
She set the tea bag in its mug, poured the water, poured the coffee. “Yes, Bob Finch,” she said. “He died five years ago.”
I watched her hands as she worked. They were swift and expert but quavery with age—or maybe with grief, I don’t know. They were quavery with something.
“I remember your husband told the chief, ‘I want those children taken someplace safe. I’m going to check on it. This ends tonight.’”
She paused, the coffeepot in her hand. She seemed about to glance over her shoulder at me, but she didn’t. She kept her face turned away. “Did he really say that? ‘This ends tonight?’ You’re not just telling me that?”
“That’s the way I remember it.”
She sniffed and set the pot back in the coffeemaker. Paused thoughtfully and looked at it there a moment. “Well. That’s something, I suppose.” She came to the granite island, carrying the two mugs. Set one in front of me. Her eyes were not as guarded now. “Milk and sugar, Inspector?”
“No, thanks. I take it black.”
“Of course. What was I thinking? Tough-guy detectives don’t use milk or sugar.”
“It’s bad for business if it gets around.”
She smiled—kind of sweetly, I thought. Like her grandchild had said something cute. Then she perched herself on a stool across from me, warming her hands on her mug of tea, blowing on the surface of it.
“Poor Adam,” she said after a moment. “He wanted so much to be a good man. He really did. I think he would have been too, except for the alcohol. I’m not making any excuses for him, mind. Or for me. But drink does take the soul out of a person. Literally. It wraps itself around him like strangling vines and chokes the image of God right out of him. I believe that. I saw it happen with my own eyes.” She drank, looking over her mug at me. “You might want to remember that, by the way, the next time you take a dose of whatever it is you’re on.”
I gave a short laugh. “I took a drug to help me remember,” I said. She was the sort of woman who made you feel you ought to explain yourself. “Now that I do remember, I’ll get off it.”
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