Laughter from the crowd.
“Art imitates life,” Banquo continued. “So what’s next for you, Bradley? Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He pretended to answer his cell phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay I’ll tell him. That was your agent, Bradley. They’ve got an audition for you: an understudy role playing sloppy seconds to Edmund Lambert in Psycho Meets the Egocentric Bitch!”
A chorus of “oohs” as the heads whipped around to see Cindy and Edmund’s reactions. Cox stepped across from his chair onto Banquo’s—pushed him off as he snatched up his Brown Bag and waved it over his head.
“Thass-right,” he shouted, smiling, slurring. “I ain’t got in yet, but word from her ex at Sigma Chi is that it ain’t worth shit anyway!”
Gasps, uncomfortable laughter, and all heads turned to Edmund and Cindy.
Then Edmund stepped forward.
“Come here, Bradley,” he said calmly.
The crowd grew silent.
“Edmund, don’t,” Cindy whispered, her hand on his arm. Edmund ignored her, just stood staring at Cox, motioning with his finger for him to come.
“Dude, relax,” said the guy playing Banquo. “It’s all in fun.”
“All of you then,” said Edmund. “All of you who wrote that stuff about Cindy can come over here and apologize to her.”
A murmuring in the crowd—some saying “Relax, dude,” and “Calm down” while others barked out, “Fuck him up, Lambert!”
“What’s your problem, man?” asked Banquo. “It’s just a joke.”
“Now’s your chance,” said Edmund. “If I have to come to you, then your chance to apologize is gone.”
“Dude—”
“No!” said Cox, stumbling off his chair. “Fuck him—fuck you, Lambert—you and your bitch there. Can’t take a joke, then you can go fuck yourself after you fuck her.”
Another gasp, and the students began backing away off the deck.
“Everybody just calm down,” said Banquo, but Edmund was already heading across the deck—calmly, methodically, the students parting before him like the Red Sea.
“That’s right, come on, you little bitch,” said Cox, stumbling drunkenly. “Six of us against one of you—gonna fuck you up good ’n tight, soldier boy.”
Although Cindy remained on the opposite end of the deck, she had no trouble seeing what happened next.
Banquo and another senior bailed immediately—jumped over the railing and ran before Edmund could reach them—and thus only three of Cox’s constituents backed him up in the end.
Edmund floored them with a flurry of punches and kicks as Cox stumbled past him with a wild haymaker. Cox had been the first to swing—Cindy saw that clearly—but it took him too long to recover from his missed punch; and by the time he turned back, Edmund met him square in the face with a head butt.
Cox howled in pain—the blood gushing from his nose and onto his T-shirt like water from a faucet. Cindy felt as if her stomach was filled with cement; and time seemed to slow down. Cheering and screams, someone shouting, “Call 911!” while someone else (Amy Pratt, Cindy thought) shouted, “Let them fight!”—the sounds, the people, the light from the tiki torches swirling all around her in a haze.
And then suddenly there was Bradley Cox—his bloody, sobbing face presented before her in a sleeper hold.
“Apologize to her, Bradley,” Edmund whispered in his ear.
“Fuck you,” Cox spat—whimpering, struggling. “I can’t fucking br—”
“Apologize,” Edmund said again, squeezing harder.
Cox squealed in pain.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m sorry, okay? Now let me go you fuck—”
Edmund’s grip tightened, and Cindy heard him whisper something in Cox’s ear that she could not make out—something that sounded like French—and then Cox dropped to the deck, semiconscious, babbling incoherently in spurts of spitting blood.
“He’s dead!” someone shouted, while another cried out, “Good night, Irene!”
But when Cox quickly came to—when he looked around, dazed, and asked for a beer—the crowd of students applauded.
“Serves you assholes right!” one girl yelled; “Woo-hoo!” and “Way to go, Lambert!” cheered some of the guys.
“Come on, Cindy,” Edmund said, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
Cindy followed him through the crowd—the smiling faces, the cheering and pats on their backs whizzing past her like a dream. She saw two of the boys Edmund had floored, both of them still on the deck holding their stomachs and moaning. But when a pretty girl Cindy didn’t know reached out and touched Edmund’s arm like he was a rock star, incredibly, Cindy felt a wave of jealousy.
Edmund led Cindy out through the gate and across the front lawn. Cindy thought she heard Amy Pratt call out from the house, “Don’t leave, Edmund!” but could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything anymore. And only when she found herself in the passenger seat of Edmund Lambert’s pickup, only when she realized that they’d come to a stop in the Harriot Theater parking lot, did the reality of what had just happened finally begin to sink in.
“I guess we gave them something to talk about,” Edmund said after a long silence—sincerely, without the slightest hint of irony. “I’m sorry if I ruined our date, but those guys shouldn’t talk that way about—”
Before she could second-guess herself, Cindy leaned in and kissed him.
The pickup’s cabin seemed to swirl around her as she melted into his arms—a voice in the back of her head whispering, Finally, Cindy. Finally.
Chapter 56
Markham sat in the cramped witness gallery staring not into the execution chamber, but at the back of his hand. A security guard had stamped it with ink that glowed under black light. “No glow, no go,” was all he’d said. Markham wasn’t even sure what the stamp read, could see no trace of it in the harshness of the fluorescent lights, and felt his throat tighten when he thought of the bizarre coincidence, of his connection with Randall Donovan.
I have returned, I have returned, I have returned.
They had taken his wallet, his keys, and his BlackBerry and gave him a yellow WITNESS badge to wear around his neck. They also ran a handheld metal detector up and down his body. “You can only take in your watch,” the security guard had said. “To mark the time, if you’d like.”
“To help with the sense of closure,” Markham knew his in-laws would say.
He had hardly spoken to them since his arrival in Connecticut late that afternoon. They had all gathered first at his childhood home in Waterford—Michelle’s parents, her brother, a cousin with whom she’d been close growing up—but even before they arrived Markham felt as if he didn’t belong there. His parents still kept his old bedroom as it had been when he was in high school, but the idea of grabbing a nap before Michelle’s family arrived had seemed inappropriate to him, as if he didn’t belong in there, either.
And so Markham had passed the time quietly with his mother and father in the den until the people started filtering in. They would all wait there, ludicrously snacking on “heavy hors d’oeuvres” as his mother called them and making small talk until the appointed time. Markham tried not to think about the Impaler; tried to play his part and convince himself as well as the others that somehow the death of Elmer Stokes would bring closure to his wife’s murder. But soon he found himself alone on the back porch, sipping a glass of red wine as the futility of it all grew heavier and heavier around him.
And now, in the witness gallery, there was only his hand and the invisible glow in the dark stamp that gave him permission to watch.
Permission, Markham said to himself over and over again. A stamp of approval from the gods that now is the time to bear witness to the sacrifice.
Markham and the others had arrived at the prison just after midnight. They waited in a holding area where the warden briefed them on procedure and protocol, and then were escorted into the narrow witness gallery.
“You’ve
all met with the prison psychologist,” the warden had said, “so you know you must remain seated on the risers at all times. No excessive or loud talking is permitted, and no emotional outbursts of any kind will be tolerated. Not even from immediate family members. Any such behavior will result in your being promptly removed from the witness gallery. After the execution is completed, we will wait ap- proximately thirty seconds for you to view the motionless remains.”
And now, staring at the back of his hand, Markham wondered if the Impaler would also see the connection between the invisible writing and Randall Donovan. He gazed from his hand through the one-way glass and into the execution chamber; could see from his vantage point the windows that connected the other three galleries surrounding it. Behind one of them, he knew, sat Elmer Stokes’s mother; behind another were the press and “official” state witnesses. Markham didn’t know who was behind the fourth window. The guards? he thought. You mean the GODS, a voice countered with a heavy New England accent. And then in his mind a blanket of stars, the universe, and an image of himself in the execution chamber looking out the window as if it was a porthole on a spaceship. Markham knew what was waiting for him out there in space: the SWAT teams keeping the crowds both for and against Stokes’s execution in line; and farther out, back in Raleigh, the crowds of faceless servicemen, one of whom he was sure was his man.
Elmer Stokes was escorted into the execution chamber at exactly 1 a.m. He had grown thinner since the last time Markham saw him—balder, too—but still wore his hair square in a buzz cut. Markham thought Stokes seemed genuinely at peace with it all; seemed happy to “finally pay back the lady’s parents,” as he had said in his final statement earlier that afternoon. Markham knew Stokes had requested steak for his final meal, and he had to force himself to stop searching for meaning in it—the hidden message encoded in the transposed letter “e” that made a steak into a stake.
Elmer begins with E! shouted a voice in his head, and Markham felt his brain squirm in his skull—his thoughts a jumbled mess of nonsense and fatigue. He closed his eyes; and mercifully, when he opened them again, he found Stokes being secured in the chair. His mind seemed to drain at once into the reality of the present, and he noted on his watch that it took nearly fifteen minutes to finish prepping the Neanderthal for his injection.
At first, Stokes was alert and awake. He spoke to the attendants and even seemed to chuckle at one point. Markham couldn’t hear what they were saying, but felt nothing as he cataloged the scene before him like a scientist. After a while, however, Stokes seemed to grow distant and sad, his head turning toward the window to his right. And when the drugs finally began to flow, Stokes mouthed the words “I love you” to that window—and his mother behind it, Markham assumed.
But still Markham felt nothing. He could hear his mother-in-law quietly weeping somewhere to his left, but felt not the slightest inclination to look at her. Instead, he found himself staring into the execution chamber, running through the formula for the lethal injection in his mind—Sodium Pentothal, pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride …
Then Stokes’s eyes closed, and Markham leaned forward, watching the big man’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall—at first slowly, then much faster as he went under. Markham didn’t mark the time or how long it took until everything stopped, but only stared ahead in silence for several minutes until the attendants drew the curtains.
Elmer Stokes, the Smiling Shanty Man, was pronounced dead at 1:34 a.m. It took almost eleven years for this day to arrive, Markham would realize afterward, but only thirty-four minutes for the whole thing to go down in the end.
It was over, but he felt no different.
He had expected that—the numb emptiness, the surreal charade—but what he hadn’t seen coming was the gnawing envy he suddenly felt for Elmer Stokes.
Sam Markham wanted to sleep, too. To sleep and not pull back the curtains until he was sure his wife was waiting for him on the other side.
Chapter 57
Cindy Smith reached out her arm and found nothing but air. Her head hurt and her throat was parched, and for a moment she had no idea where she was. She bolted upright and caught sight of the ghost light on the stage below—its single bulb casting shadows that ran across her body like prison bars. She sat there for a moment thinking—her memory, like a leaky faucet, coming back to her in drips.
She was on the second tier of the Macbeth set, behind the railing on the stage right side. That’s right. She and Edmund had come up here after kissing in the parking lot—but where was he? Cindy looked around and found her handbag beside her. She took out her cell phone. 3:42 a.m.
“Christ,” she sighed, closing her eyes.
It had been her idea, she remembered suddenly, guiltily—she who’d asked Edmund to open the theater so they could have some privacy in case any of the other students spotted them in the parking lot on the way home from the party.
The party, Cindy said to herself. There was a fight at the party.
But Cindy didn’t care about that, and instead fast- forwarded to the memory of Edmund leading her up the stairs—the outline of his muscular back through his shirt glowing an eerie blue in the shadows from the ghost light. Then they were together, pawing at each other in the dark-ness—her back against the hard platform, the warmth of his skin, the sour smell of stage paint all around her. She had been drunk, but that wasn’t why she wanted him. She understood this even now, but thought it strange that Edmund wouldn’t take off his shirt even as she felt his hardness probing between her thighs.
Suddenly, Edmund froze—whispered something in her ear that sounded like “arrest a gal”—and then slid off. Cindy felt a wave of embarrassment and shame as she remembered how she all but begged him to continue “Come on,” she’d said, “put it inside me.” But now she couldn’t remember exactly what Edmund said next—mumbled something about stars and not having permission.
“Permission?” Cindy had slurred. “You’re too much of a gentleman.” Then came the fuzzy memory of them dress-ing—of him dressing her—and the warmth of his embrace as they drifted off to sleep. But Edmund hadn’t slept. Cindy knew that now.
“Edmund?” she whispered—but only her voice echoed back from the black. And suddenly Cindy was not only angry but also very afraid.
She stood up and grabbed her handbag, dashed down the escape steps behind the set, and felt her way through the wings to the side entrance. Her head was throbbing, her sense of balance off, but she found the doorknob and burst out into the night.
The cool air felt good on Cindy’s face—sobered her up but did nothing for her anger. She quickly descended the outside stairs and ran into the parking lot. Edmund’s pickup was gone, but her piece-of-shit Pontiac was right where she had left it before the show.
“Asshole,” she muttered—but once she was inside her car, her anger left her at once. On the passenger seat was a white rose, taken from her dressing room while she was asleep, she knew. Lying across it was a folded piece of notebook paper. She flicked on the dome light and read the note.
Dear Cindy: Please forgive me for leaving, but I need to be sure things are what they seem before we go any further. I will see you after the show tonight. I hope you’re not angry with me. Edmund
Cindy sat there for a moment, confused, reading the note over and over again. Edmund had written it in pencil, but it appeared as if he’d written another name first, then erased it and wrote Cindy instead. What was it?
Looks like the name begins with E, Cindy thought, but she couldn’t make out the rest of it in the Pontiac’s dim dome light. But the note itself—what the hell was that about? And what kind of guy would leave a girl all alone in a darkened theater?
Cindy sat in the driver’s seat, playing over the night’s events in her mind until the windows of her Pontiac began to fog. Amy Pratt was right. There was something kind of creepy about Edmund Lambert. The note, the talk about things being what they seem—so strange, yes, but at the same time … well
…
Cindy sighed and closed her eyes; tried to block out the realization of just how much that strangeness intrigued her—how much it turned her on. Jesus Christ, she almost had sex with Edmund Lambert after only a single date! This from the girl who in high school made her boyfriend wait over a year to get in her pants—and that was only because she was drunk and it was the senior prom and he begged her.
But now, tonight, it was she who had begged Edmund Lambert. What the fuck was going on with her? And what was it about Edmund Lambert that made her act so unlike herself—made her throw herself at him just like that slut Amy Pratt would do?
Cindy opened her eyes and stared down at Edmund’s neat block-lettered print. She needed to get to bed and sleep off what had the potential to be a bitch of a hangover; she had to pull the lunch shift at Chili’s, too, before heading off to the show.
“He needs to be sure things are what they seem,” Cindy whispered, reading the note again. “Whatever the fuck that means.”
What things “seem” like, a voice said in her head, is that he ditched you in the theater. Didn’t wake you or stick around to walk to you to your car. That’s fucked up.
“But the note,” Cindy replied. “And the flower. It’s not like he just left me. Maybe he tried to wake me—”
Are you kidding? You’re gonna give him a pass on this?
“And the way he defended me at the party—”
Oh, my God! You’re truly one needy, pathetic bitch!
Cindy closed her eyes and told the voice in her head to fuck off. It was right: she should be furious with Edmund Lambert—but she wasn’t. And there was this odd feeling in the pit of her stomach: a dull sense of inevitability that at once both terrified and excited her—made her feel strangely liberated but at the same time like she was going bonkers inside a padded cell.
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