“Lies are harder than the truth,” she says. “They have a way of falling apart. So tell me. Have I contradicted myself yet? Slipped up? Have you caught me in a lie?”
“Not yet.”
She raises her chin. “You remain hopeful. I can tell.”
“Well,” he says, deciding to tell the truth. “Your story is awful. You were abused and attacked, terribly. And it all ends in murder. So yes. I hope it’s not true.”
She seems to smile a little at that, in the midst of her sadness. “I wish it weren’t. But this is life, and when bad things come to us, there isn’t much choice. You survive them or you don’t.”
“And you hope to survive this one.”
“Dear God, yes,” she says intently, “I do. I do.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that. When he doesn’t reassure her, she seems disappointed. But it would be hypocritical, given his role. Hours ago, she asked if he would be her executioner. He denied it, but she was right. If he turns her in, he might as well use his own two hands to fashion the noose. Don a black hood and be done with it.
He wants to know the truth. He needs to know.
He circles around behind her. She doesn’t even lift her head to look. The night has been long. And whatever happens, one way or another, it’s almost over.
He inspects her hands and says, “You’re not wearing the ring.”
“No.”
“There was no ring, was there? Just one of your many inventions. You haven’t been able to prove a single lick of your story all night, and this is no different.”
She says, “In the valise. The muff. Put your hands in it.”
He feels both foolish and excited as he does what she says. He retrieves the muff, which appears to be rabbit fur on the outside and silk on the inside, and positions it on the desk. Of course, he’s never placed his hands in something like this before and is surprised to find it isn’t just a hollow tube but has a shaped lining that draws tight around each hand. The fingertips of his left hand strike something round and cool.
Gingerly he draws out the object. A ring. Exactly as she described it. A beautiful blue stone with a brown flaw. Eerily like her eye.
The feeling that floods him is overwhelming. If her story is true, if the man she loved was neither her husband nor her victim, that gives him something to hope for. He doesn’t want her story to just be the old sad tale of a man and woman whose love turned to poison. He wants something better, something more.
“Arden,” he says. “Please. If you’ll finish the story, we can settle this, and I can go home to my wife, who you’re so curious about.”
“To Iris.”
“Yes, to Iris.” That’s all he wants. To go home to Iris, as soon as this is over. To be done with this and return to his life, however much of it is left to him. He needs to be home. As soon as the sun comes up. He’s been away too long. He’s spent too much time chasing an impossible dream of erasing what’s happened to him, when what he needs to do is accept it and move forward.
“Well, I’m truly sorry to keep you from her. But I have my limits. I won’t admit what I didn’t do.”
“But now you’re getting into the right part of the story. How you got a husband. Tell me how you came to hate him. And then, how you planned and decided on murder. Was he unfaithful? Were you in a rage? How did it happen?” He doesn’t add now that I know it matters. Most of the night, he’s been planning, hoping, thinking he knew how this would all end: healing, and release. Now everything has changed. Now he needs to be a police officer again. Not the Virgil Holt who’s terrified of death coming upon him without warning; instead, a man of the law following the rules, searching for the truth.
“The answer is the same,” she says. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Then tell me that, if it’s true, but tell me the whole of it,” he says, softening his voice. “Maybe you didn’t swing the ax, but you were there. Maybe you only saw it. Were you there when he was murdered? Did you watch your husband die?”
“Clyde was with me every night until he wasn’t,” she said. “And that’s when it happened.”
“The murder?”
“No,” she says. “Worse.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
1905
Resurrections
Three weeks before the end of the circuit, it was time for Clyde to go back to New York for a few days to work with the new kid he’d hired for the practical work and get everything settled up right. I had three nights in a row booked in Savannah, challenging but hardly outlandish. I had gotten so used to having Clyde around. I missed him too much now that he was gone again. I wasn’t sleeping well—I was restless, constantly waking up over and over to find only minutes gone by—but a couple of fingers of brandy helped with that.
On the third night in Savannah, I was looking forward to my brandy. I was exhausted from the demanding routine and from the lack of good sleep, and I wrapped my linen robe tightly around my tired body and poured myself a good heavy glass, and all was well until I heard knuckles rap against the door, which I hadn’t yet locked for the night.
“Yes?”
I expected Doreen, who had stepped into a certain role as my proxy most nights, accepting bouquets of flowers and sending away unwelcome visitors, but it was not her voice that answered. No voice answered. Instead the handle turned, and someone stepped up into the car and swiftly closed the door behind him, and quickly it was already too late.
The lamplight glinted off his pale hair. He looked almost angelic, with the light hitting him like this, at this angle. But he was earthbound enough, a sandy-haired man in a suit slightly rumpled from travel, with a grin that would have looked cheerful and welcome on any other face. He paused with his back pressed against the door and waited. Perhaps he was waiting for me to panic, to scream. Instead I only stared.
It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t. It wasn’t.
It was.
“Ada,” he said in a new voice, one with a hoarse scratch to it, where there had been none before.
The shock of seeing Ray alive and well and here froze my blood, and I was helpless.
“So,” I said, but no other words would come. I remained at the table and sipped at the brandy to wet my dry mouth, still somehow hoping that this wasn’t happening to me.
“So,” he echoed me. “Offer your cousin a drink?”
“No,” I said and didn’t dispute him on semantics. I took another sip instead.
It was impossible. He couldn’t be here. It could be a look-alike, or a brother, or a bad dream. I had seen enough illusions to know things weren’t always as they seemed. But it was perfectly him, his hair longer than it had been in Chicago, the face just a little more worn. And I saw the mark on his throat, a sharp straight line. I knew I was awake by the spiraling dread in my belly, too insistent for the dream world.
I had killed him, hadn’t I? There had been so much blood. I remembered how it gushed, how my hands were slick with it, how neither pressure nor magic would keep it from flowing. How I wished so hard to save him but was certain I’d failed. Yet here he was. Not a facsimile, not a look-alike, not a dream. Ray, in the flesh.
There was only one possible explanation. I hadn’t killed him after all. The wound had been deep and terrible, but no matter how close he’d come to death, he hadn’t crossed over. His heart hadn’t stopped. His body hadn’t gone cold. Of all the bodies that covered the floor of the storeroom next to the Iroquois, left for dead, one had risen.
In some small way, that should have made me glad, I supposed, not to be the murderer I’d thought myself for more than a year. But I couldn’t rejoice at seeing him walking and talking, not in the least. If I hadn’t taken his life, it seemed certain he would take mine. It couldn’t end any other way. The railcar was a prison now, just another box from which there was no escape. I had never wished more that I could be Houdini.
I desperately needed to think of something to say. If I could keep him talking, maybe he wouldn’t touch me. If he touched me, I would fall apart.
He stared at me, seemingly waiting for more words. I didn’t have any. I didn’t have anything. I had my brandy, which I drank, and that was all. I remained in the chair as if welded to it.
While I drank, Ray finally stepped away from the door, though we both knew he was still close enough to lunge back in an instant. He reached over to the sink where the straight razor sat—Clyde had forgotten it there, and I hadn’t wanted to touch it—and placed it on the table between us. I knew how strong he was. He didn’t need the razor at all. Alone in the private train car where no one could hear me scream, all it would take was his bare hands.
“You don’t scare me,” I said, which was a bald lie. He terrified me. He always had.