Susan was filled with terror—terror of Gretchen, terror that she would never see Archie again.
She grabbed her purse from inside the door and sprinted after him. “I’m going with you,” she said. “I’ve been inside. I know the house.” She took him by the elbow, letting him lean on her. “I’m not going to let you face her alone.”
C H A P T E R 62
Gretchen is already there, clad in blue inmate denim and manacled at the table, when Archie walks into the concrete-block interrogation room at the Oregon State Penitentiary.
A month in a medically induced coma, a month of physical therapy, and he still can’t walk across a room upright.
Gretchen smiles when she sees him and the oxygen rushes out of the room as if she’d swallowed it.
Archie can’t look at her. He glances away—at the one-way glass Henry waits behind—but sees only the two of them reflected back at him.
The thick metal door closes behind Archie and locks. It’s an electronic lock, controlled by a set of buzzers near the door and a master board in the adjacent observation room. Two guards stand armed in the hallway outside. But inside, in that room, it’s just the two of them. Those were her terms.
“I’ve missed you, darling,” she says.
The smell of the room reminds Archie of the basement she kept him in, concrete and cleaning solvents. “What do you miss exactly?” he asks, his voice still hoarse from the poison she’d fed him. “The smell of my blood?”
She folds her hands on the table. “I’ve hurt your feelings,” she says.
Archie looks at her, flustered. He has no idea how to respond. “You fed me drain cleaner and cut out my spleen,” he says.
Her look of concern seems unsettlingly genuine. “How are the scars healing?” she asks.
She was still beautiful. Even in these surroundings, in the shapeless prison garb, no makeup, his body still responds to her. He hates himself for it.
“You’re high,” she says.
“I’m on painkillers,” he says. She had fed him pills in the basement, rewarding him with them when he’d choke down the drain cleaner, dropping them down his throat when he could no longer sit up to swallow them.
He doesn’t take them for the pain anymore.
She lifts her cuffed hands and gestures to the chair across the table from her. “Do you want to sit down?”
His broken ribs are still healing, making sitting difficult. The cotton of his shirt chafes his raw scars. The heart-shaped scar on his chest still bleeds sometimes. “I think I’ll stand,” he says.
She nods in understanding. “Of course,” she says.
It’s warm in there, and Archie pulls at the collar of his shirt. He is there for the victims. This is what he’s told himself, what he’s told Henry, Debbie. No one expected him to give in to her crazy demands to meet with him. She’d nearly killed him. But he’s dragged himself there to help with the identification project, for the victims.
The victims.
It wasn’t the whole truth.
It has been two months since her arrest, and he’s gotten tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. She hasn’t told anyone about
their relationship. He is prepared to deny it. He can explain the time they had spent together in the context of the case. But wondering why she has remained quiet is killing him.
“What do you want from me?” he asks Gretchen.
“You’ve read the plea agreement,” she says. “I’m going to confess. I’m going to tell you everything, every person I murdered. You can close all the cases.”
“Just like that.”
“You’ll earn it,” she says, and Archie feels the promise of that statement heavy in the room.
“Why did you do it?” he asks her. He doesn’t mean the murders. He means the affair.
“For fun,” she says. But he’s not sure which question she’s answering.
He leans back against the door, feeling weak.
“Sit down,” she says again. “Please.”
He does this time, making his way to the table and lowering himself painfully onto the chair.
“Don’t be sad,” she says. “You caught me. You’re a hero. You got exactly what you wanted.”
A hero. He’s been manipulated from the start. Amativeness. He wonders if it is even a real thing.
“Name a case you want to close, a case that’s important to you.”
Archie rolls his head back and looks at the ceiling. His scalp tingles from the Vicodin. He just wants to go home. To beg for forgiveness. It’s all right, she had said when he was dying in her arms. And he’d believed her. He lifts his head and glances over at the one-way glass. Something good might as well come out of all this.
“Isabel Reynolds,” he says.
Something changes in Gretchen’s face—a tiny lift of her eyebrows, a minuscule furrow between them. Her mouth tightens almost imperceptibly.
“She’s special,” Gretchen says. “She will be a prize. I’ll tell you about her, darling. When you’re ready.”