Her eyes fluttered and opened just a bit. Could she see him? Could she hear him? Miraculously, she lifted one bloodied hand from the terrible wound in her chest and held it out to him. He took it in both of his.
“Elizabeth, I’m sorry, so very sorry. I never meant to judge you. I don’t judge you. You did what you had to do. I’m sorry I was angry. It was just because I love you so much and I . . .” His voice broke and he had to blink away the tears. He could cry later, after she was gone.
“You . . . really . . . love me?” she asked in a broken whisper.
“Of course I do! I love you more than life itself. I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life making sure no one ever hurts you again.”
She smiled at that, a sad, bloody smile that broke his heart into a million pieces, because they both knew the rest of her life was only minutes now. How would he ever live without her?
“Oh dear,” Anna said. She sounded annoyed.
Annoyed? At some point she’d stopped screaming, and he’d forgotten all about her in his concern for Elizabeth. He glanced up to see her furtively peering out the front window. She must be insane. What else could explain all this?
“Mrs. Bates just got home,” Anna reported. “Thornton is taking her taxicab.”
“Gideon?” Elizabeth whispered, drawing him back, reminding him they had only minutes left. “Did you . . . say . . . marry me?”
“Yes!” he assured her. “I was going to propose as soon as you broke your engagement to David.”
“Even though . . . I’m a liar . . . ?”
“I love you, Elizabeth. I love you for everything you are, and if you lie, well, everyone lies.”
“You don’t.”
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters now. I just want you to know how very much I love you. Always remember that.”
“They’re gone,” Anna reported from her post at the window.
To Gideon’s amazement, Elizabeth smiled, and while it was still bloody, it was no longer sad. In fact, it was positively wicked. And then she sat up.
What the . . . ?
“It worked,” Anna cried, clapping her hands in delight. “It was even better than the way we practiced!”
“You were marvelous, Anna,” Elizabeth said in her normal voice, the one she used when she hadn’t suffered a fatal gunshot wound.
Gideon looked from her face to the bloody spot in the middle of her chest and back to her face again. “You’re shot,” he said stupidly.
“Not really. Anna used blanks.” She touched the bloody mess on her chest. “This is chicken blood.” She pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her shirtwaist and wiped her bloody face. Then she removed something black from her mouth and wrapped it in the handkerchief.
“You aren’t dead.”
She smiled again, and this time she looked a little embarrassed. “Not yet at least.”
“What on earth is going on here?” his mother demanded from the parlor doorway. “Oscar Thornton practically dragged me out of my cab and threw my bags on the sidewalk, and, Gideon, what are you doing on the floor and—”
Gideon scrambled to his feet and helped Elizabeth up as well, and then his mother saw the blood and nearly fainted.
“I’m all right,” Elizabeth assured her over and over as they got her seated. “I’m not even hurt. It’s all fake.”
“But why? And what was Oscar Thornton doing here?”
“It is,” Gideon said, “a very long story.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Telling the story this time was almost a relief, because this time she didn’t have to lie, at least not very much. Anna and Gideon already knew most of it, even if Anna didn’t know the worst of it. She couldn’t bring herself to meet Mrs. Bates’s eye, though, not when she knew what the good woman would think of her now. How could she bear seeing the disappointment and downright disgust Mrs. Bates would surely feel when she knew the truth?
“But what made you think of having Anna pretend to shoot you?” Gideon asked when she had come to the end of her tale.
They were all sitting in the parlor. Gideon had taken a seat beside Elizabeth on the sofa, and Mrs. Bates and Anna sat across from them.
“It’s something grifters do when a touch comes hot . . .” She drew a breath, remembering they didn’t know what any of that meant. “If a mark figures out that he’s been swindled, he usually wants to go to the police or at least get his money back, so one of the grifters pretends to shoot the other one, and the mark does just what Thornton did, runs away so he won’t be involved in a murder. The mark never comes back looking for the grifters, either.”
“But where did all the blood come from?” Mrs. Bates asked. She hadn’t spoken a single word until now.
“That’s the clever part,” Anna said, still so excited that their plan had worked that she could hardly sit still. “We put the blood in a rubber bladder and stuffed it inside Elizabeth’s bodice. When I shot her, she clutched at her shirtwaist and popped it open. She had a smaller one in her mouth, too.”
“I’ll never forgive you for that,” Gideon said, although the gleam in his eyes said differently. “You took ten years off my life.”
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” Elizabeth said in exasperation. “It was just supposed to be Thornton and maybe his two goons, but no one else. I even gave the servants the afternoon off so they wouldn’t interfere.” She turned to Mrs. Bates. “And you certainly weren’t supposed to come home just then.”
“And if I hadn’t, would I ever have known any of this?” she asked.
Suddenly, Elizabeth wanted to weep, which was getting to be a very familiar feeling. And why shouldn’t she? She’d forever lost the respect of the woman she admired most in the world, and she’d never be able to win it back. Now that Mrs. Bates knew the truth, Elizabeth would be lucky if she let her spend even one more night in her house. But she didn’t have the right to weep, at least not in front of Mrs. Bates. She’d do her mourning in private. “I hoped you’d never have to know what I am, Mrs. Bates. I was planning to just pretend I was going home to South Dakota and then you’d never hear from me again.”
“Oh, Elizabeth, I’ve always known exactly what you are. Oh, not the details,” Mrs. Bates added quickly when Elizabeth’s mouth dropped open. “Not what made you, but I did know what you’re made of. You’re one of the strongest, bravest young women I know, and I know a few. The way you took charge when we were in the workhouse—”
“I didn’t take charge!”
“Yes, you did,” Anna said. “You knew just what we should do and how we should act and you weren’t afraid to talk to the other inmates or stand up to the warden and the matron—”
“And the way you looked after Anna during the hunger strike was so practical,” Mrs. Bates said. “It was obvious to me that your background was very different from . . . well, from anyone I’d ever known.”
Elizabeth shook her head in silent denial. She’d been so careful not to show how much she knew about being in jail. They couldn’t possibly have suspected anything.