Chapter Thirty-Two
THIRTY-TWO
I send Gray ahead, while I pay for the bread and sweet buns. He wants to just put it back, but I’d never do that after we’ve handled it. I pay as quickly as I can and then dash out.
The shops here are connected, so I can’t just duck around the rear, where Kate must have exited.
I hurry along the sidewalk. For once, I only get a few suspicious glances.
Anytime I’m moving fast—and especially if I’m carrying goods from a store—people are going to look.
Wearing a nice dress only means they don’t leap into my path to stop me as I make off with presumably stolen bread.
I duck around the end of the building row and resist the urge to abandon the bread.
If I were in the Old Town, I could tell myself it’d go to good use, but here, it’d only attract rats.
Clutching the goods, I hurry along, counting rear doors until I find the bakery one.
Then I stand there, looking out. There’s no sign of Kate.
No sign of Gray either. The other direction is blocked, meaning they must have gone the way I’d come.
I retrace my steps. The alley ends here.
If it were me, I definitely wouldn’t have gone to the street the bakery fronted on.
Down the other one then. I reach the end and find myself near the gardens—private ones, owned by a cooperative of residents.
Gray has access to a different one, so when I see him inside, I arch my brows.
He walks to the gate and beckons me over.
“How did you get in there?” I ask.
Now he’s the one lifting his brows, as if this is a very silly question. “The fence is hardly unclimbable.”
“It is if you’re a woman in a dress,” I grumble. “So how do I get in?”
“I pick you up and heave you over.” A brief quirk of his lips. “I am joking. I will exit in a less conspicuous place. Unless you want me to lift you over. There is no one else in here today. It is very secluded.”
His smile sends heat rushing through me.
I glare at him. “We’re in pursuit of a suspect. You know I can’t say yes, so don’t tease.”
“So if we were not in pursuit, you would say yes?”
“Of course.”
“I will remember that the next time we pass a garden, whether I have the key or not. As for why I am in here, I saw Kate heading in this direction, but she had to circumvent the garden. I went through in hopes that would allow me to catch her. It did not. But when I realized I could not reach her in time, I watched where she went. North and then east. I was able to follow along east and confirm that she seemed to be continuing in that direction.”
“North and east…” I murmur. “Heading out of the New Town, but not in the direction of the Old Town, where she presumably has lodgings.” My head jerks up. “Home. Her village. That’s where she’s going.”
“I believe so.”
We debate following on foot versus hailing a hansom cab. As we discuss it, we’re already on the move, so we just stay that way. Gray saw the roads Kate took, and we follow.
Of course we could be wrong about her destination. If she’s fleeing, I’m not sure why she’d go home.
“To hide evidence?” Gray suggests.
“Maybe?”
“To silence someone who might give her away?”
I give him a hard look as we walk. “Have you been sneaking Isla’s detective novels?”
“I did not mean Kate would kill them. I meant she’d speak to them. Beg them not to turn her in.”
“All that only applies if she’s a suspect.”
He switches the bakery box under his other arm. “Is that not what you said? That we were in pursuit of a suspect?”
“I misspoke. I don’t know what we’re pursuing. A suspect. A witness. Or a young woman who just heard that two of her friends drowned and fears she’s the final girl.”
“The final girl?”
“From horror movies.”
“The moving pictures that people in the future watch for entertainment.”
“Right. The killer makes their way through their victims, usually young women, until they reach the one they can’t kill. The one who turns the tables and stops them. Or makes a valiant effort and escapes.”
“And it is always a girl?”
“A woman, usually, and also usually young. Mostly because the victims are, too, but even if it’s a mixed group of teenagers, it’s almost always a girl who survives. A very ordinary girl who finds her strength after seeing her friends butchered.”
“I appreciate that the hero is a young woman, but I question the fact that ‘seeing her friends butchered’ constitutes entertainment.”
“Says the guy who comes from a world where crime sells, the bloodier the better. Horror is about catharsis. The final girl survives, at least until the sequel.”
“But if you know the story will go that way, how is it entertaining?”
“If you watch Shakespeare, you know exactly how it goes, but it’s still entertaining, right?”
“I believe we have established that I am not particularly fond of Shakespeare.”
I pause on the corner until Gray directs us across the street. We’re nearing the city limits, and we’ll soon be on the road to Kate’s village.
“Well,” I say, “if this were a horror film, Kate would be the final girl, going back to where it all began. Putting an end to it before she’s killed.
And that may be what she’s thinking. That she’s next, and she’s running home.
But the fact that she ran from us—the people who wanted to talk to her about Mary and Nellie’s deaths—makes me think that’s not the situation. ”
“So she is a suspect?”
I consider as we walk. “Would you agree that she seemed genuinely shocked to hear about Nellie?”
“You are better at reading people, as you put it. But yes, as with Miss Sullivan, it seemed to be news to her.”
“So she didn’t kill Nellie.”
“It is about Mary then,” he says.
“Or the poem,” I mutter. “That damnable poem.”
As we near the village, I suggest a detour.
Purely a hunch. Or, maybe, my brain connecting the wrong wires.
I’d been talking about final girls, imagining Kate returning to the scene, which would absolutely be the setting for that movie showdown.
Our intrepid survivor tires of running and decides to confront the killer.
To do so, she returns to the place where her friends died at the killer’s hands. Bringing the story full circle.
But while Kate is the last friend standing, she’s not going to run pell-mell from the New Town to where her friends died and expect to find the killer waiting.
She wasn’t running to something; she was running away. From us. Which makes no …
Shit.
Before I can tell Gray my suspicion, we’re approaching the bog … and a figure stands on the bridge.
I grab Gray’s sleeve. We’re coming up from the rear, and Kate hasn’t spotted us.
“Even if she jumps,” he whispers, “it is too shallow for her to drown.”
“But high enough for her to hurt herself. And since she already bolted once, I don’t want her doing it again.” I look up and down the small river. “Would you head back to the other bridge and cross there?”
He strides off while I tuck into the trees. If Kate made a move to jump, I’d intervene, but she’s just standing there, looking down at the water.
I watch as Gray crosses the next bridge. He heads our way slowly, careful not to make any noise that might have Kate turning. Then I do the same from my side.
When Gray is close enough, I let stones crunch under my boots. Kate turns, spots me, and wheels, only to see Gray across the bridge.
“I will jump,” she calls.
“By the time you get your skirts up enough to clear the rail, we’ll be there to pull you back.” I motion for Gray to stay where he is as I approach. “Why did you run, Kate?”
“Because I know who you are.”
I exhale softly. Yes, that’s what I figured might have happened.
“The Mysterious Adventures of the Curious Undertaker?” I say.
She nods. “My landlady has them and lends them to me. When you came to the shop, something about you…” She glances at Gray and then shrugs. “There are not many people who look like you and Dr. Gray, traveling together, and then when you mentioned the deaths, I knew I was not mistaken.”
“Yes, we’re investigating Nellie’s death,” I say. “But I don’t think you had anything to do with that.”
I’m at the bridge now, and I start across it, stopping a few feet from Kate as Gray stays on the other side, close enough to listen.
“I did not,” she says. “I had no idea she was—” Kate swallows. “We have gone home every week on the same day so we can walk together. That would have been tomorrow.”
I give her a moment with her grief. Then I say, “If you had nothing to do with her death, then why run from us?”
Silence.
“Kate?” I say. “We only wanted to speak to you, but now that you’ve run—”
“It does not matter. You will find out. You will solve the crime, as you always do, and then I will hang.” Tears spring to her eyes. “I will hang for what I have done, and I did not mean it. I did not mean it at all.”
“All right,” I say softly, and repeat her words. “You didn’t mean it.”
“I only wanted to be their friend.”
“Mary and Nellie? But you were friends, were you not?”
“I was the third friend. The extra. The one they called on if the other was occupied. Sometimes it was the three of us, but mostly it was them, and I wanted…” Tears flow down her cheeks. “I wanted more. So I found something we could do together, the three of us.”
“You wrote the poem,” I murmur.
She nods, tears streaming. “See? You already know that. You were going to find out everything.”
“You wrote the poem and then … put it in Mary’s attic?”
“Her mother was always asking us to clean it, so I said we should do that for her mother’s birthday. Then I pretended to find the poem.”
“Which you’d written and put there.”