Chapter 24 #2
She stares at me blankly. “I’m sorry, Katrina, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I’m about to tell her that the last time we talked, she mentioned that Leona had asked her to bring back opium. But I decide the best thing for me to do would be to just leave at this point.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “It’s best I go now. Thank you for the medicine. I’ll bring it back when I’ve taken some.”
“Keep the bottle, I have more,” she says to me as I exit her room and start walking down the hall. “Be careful,” she whispers.
I nod, giving her a quick smile, then hurry around the corner, through the mezzanine and down Crane’s wing. The hallway is quiet, and at first, I think perhaps they aren’t in his room at all, maybe they’re at the library, or went to the dining hall early.
But I knock on the door with bated breath and wait.
It opens slowly, Crane’s gray eye peering at me through the crack.
“Kat!” he exclaims once he sees me and throws the door open. “What are you doing here?”
He pokes his head out into the hall to make sure no one has seen me, then puts his arm around me and ushers me inside, locking the door behind him.
I have to admit, I’m surprised that the both of them are fully clothed, Brom just stepping out of the bathroom and rubbing a washcloth at the back of his neck.
“I’m sorry to just come over like this,” I tell them. “I know you have to keep our relationship a secret from the sisters, and this is risky.”
“Kat,” Crane says deeply, coming over to me and cupping my face in his large, warm hands. “I’m ever so glad that you’re here.” He looks down at the cloth in my hands. “Is this what Famke made for you?”
“Yes, I brought it for you,” I tell him. “But that’s not the real reason why I’m here.”
“What happened?” Brom asks, his brow creasing as he comes over to me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, really,” I assure him as Crane lets go of my face and steps back. He takes the bundle of pastries over to his desk and sets them down. “I just found something interesting. Including something I forgot to tell you before.”
“What is it?” Crane asks, biting into a pastry already. He closes his eyes and moans. “My goodness, this is tasty. Compliments to Famke.”
“Speaking of Famke,” I say, and then I begin to tell them everything.
I show them the necklace and the note, then I tell them about visiting Ms. Peek and everything she told me: that she looked sick, that she was adamant that Lotte slipped, that she was having bad nightmares, that she seemed to think the painting on the wall was watching her.
I finish by talking about Leona putting in orders for opium, orders that Ms. Peek suddenly doesn’t remember, then I take the bottle of laudanum out of my pocket and show it to them.
Both of their eyes go wide at the sight.
“May I?” Crane asks, delicately snatching the bottle from me before I have a chance to tell him anything. He turns it over in his palm. “This could come in handy.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to start using it like opium,” I say.
He gives me a steady look. “As much as I would love to get back on the pipe and smoke my problems away, right now I need to be as sharp as a knife.” He jerks his head over at Brom. “This man, however, could probably use some sedation from time to time.”
“Is this how it’s going to go from now on?” Brom glowers at him. “The chains weren’t enough, now you’re going to drug me?”
“With your consent, of course,” Crane says with a dashing smile, placing the bottle on the desk.
“What happened earlier, with the history teacher?” I ask. “Did you talk to her?”
Crane shakes his head, licking his fingers in such a way that I feel a flare of heat at my core. Not helpful given the circumstances. “No,” he says. “She’s nowhere to be found.” He eyes Brom. “I hope she’s not about to get in trouble for teaching you what she did.”
“Why would she?” Brom asks. “None of the sisters were there. Just the students.”
“Do you have any artwork on the walls of that classroom?” Crane asks. “I’m just thinking about the painting in Ms. Peek’s room. Is it entirely unreasonable to think that they can spy on people through the eyes of others?”
“I don’t want to think about that,” I say anxiously, sitting down on the bed. “There’s already too much happening, my brain can’t even take it all.”
Crane sits down next to me, then Brom sits on the other side. It feels nice to be sandwiched between them, even in a nonsexual way. It feels like we’re stronger like this, like a unit.
“One thing at a time, Kat,” Crane says to me, and I rest my head on his shoulder while Brom takes my hand in his and squeezes. I squeeze it back. “That’s all we can do. But there are three of us, so that means three things at a time, really.”
“All I know is that I’m going to that supper with my mother on the weekend,” I say.
“What?” Crane says stiffly. “You are not.”
“I am,” I tell him, lifting my head to meet his indignant eyes. “And Brom is coming with me.”
Those eyes widen. “He is not.”
“Crane,” Brom warns.
“He is,” I tell Crane. “I need to talk to Famke, now more than ever. And it’s supper. Three o’clock, she said. It’s early enough that we’ll get back before nightfall.”
“I’m going with you,” he huffs.
“No,” I tell him adamantly. “You’re not.
My mother said she’d shoot you, and I believe her and, despite my feelings about her, I don’t want you to get into some standoff.
You’re staying here. I’ll go with Brom. I’ll talk to Famke.
While we’re at supper I’ll try to get some information out of my mother, then we’ll come back.
Even if it means we have to leave abruptly, we will. ”
Crane leans over me to look at Brom. “That means I have to trust this fellow over here with your life. That means you’ll have to trust him with your life.”
“Are you saying you don’t trust me?” Brom counters darkly.
“To be honest, Brom, you’re making it a lot harder these days,” Crane says.
At that, Brom drops my hand and gets to his feet, staring down at us. “Why don’t you tell her what you really want to tell her, Crane? I know you’re waiting for the right time to throw me under the cart. Why don’t you tell Kat the truth? Both of our truths.”
My stomach twists and I hold my breath. “What truth?” I manage to say.
Crane gives Brom a look that could incinerate someone on the spot.
Then Crane looks away, running a hand through his hair, and lets out a heavy, despondent sigh that I feel in my bones.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Kat,” Crane says in a gravelly voice, towering over me as he gets to his feet. “Something I’ve been meaning to tell you but…it’s gotten away on me.”
“All right,” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking, wondering what awful thing this is going to be. “Do tell.”
“When your aunt Leona called me into her office, she warned me to stay away from you,” he says, pacing back and forth across the room, hands behind his back.
“As you know, idle threats don’t do much for me.
She said I would lose my job as a professor here at the school, but that didn’t seem worth holding on to if I couldn’t have you. ”
I’m touched at his devotion to me, but…
“I knew I could quit at any time, until she told me she had something on me that would prevent me from quitting. Something she’s always had on me. And I knew it too, I knew that she was aware of it, but I never thought she would throw it in my face.”
“Marie,” I say softly, my eyes going to the floor in thought. “She has something on you about Marie’s death.” I swallow and look up at him. “What does she have on you, Crane?”
What did you do?
His face pales, that downturned mouth twisting in grief. “She knew that I killed my wife.”
I feel the air knocked out of me. “Oh.”
Then Crane is dropping to his knees in front of me, holding on to my hand.
“You have to listen to me, Kat, you have to listen to me and believe me. Please.” He takes my hands and brings them to his lips, leaving a desperate kiss.
I so rarely see Crane in this sort of anguish, let alone on his knees in such a submissive way.
“Okay,” I say softly, feeling any resolve I may have had melt already.
“It was an accident,” he says, and with the way he says it, with his whole heart, I know it was. I know Crane isn’t a killer. “I had done so many wrong things that evening, but killing her was an accident.”
“What happened?” I ask, squeezing his hand, and even that gesture makes his expression crumble with relief.
“I suspected she was having an affair,” he says, clearing his throat, emotions swirling in his stormy eyes.
“For months, I suspected. There was no love left in our marriage at all, and I knew, I had a feeling. So I did something I shouldn’t have.
I read her memories while she was sleeping, without her permission.
And I discovered she was having an affair with our neighbor, Ray. So…”
He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, holding my hand against his forehead, as if in prayer. “So I paid Ray a visit. I didn’t know…I didn’t know when I went to see him how I would feel. I was so…disoriented and confused. I didn’t know if I should kill him or…fuck him.”
My eyes widen and even Brom inhales sharply from beside me.
“I chose to fuck him,” Crane says, lowering my hand to look at me, his jaw flexing.
“And in that moment, I chose to embrace who I was. Every dark, deviant part of me. There was no turning back. And while Ray and I were in the middle of it, the first I had ever been with a man, Marie walked into his house and saw us. I threatened to divorce her for her adultery, but my own adultery was thrown back in my face. She called me a sodomite, a heathen, and said that she would tell the school board, get me fired, tell the world. So I was angry, I was so angry, and I scared her and she…fell.”
He trails off, looking away, brows knitted together as if reliving the scene. “And she fell hard. Hit her head on the wood floor. Blood began to pool and I fell to my knees and I panicked. I panicked. I tried to bring her back to life…”
“Jesus, Crane,” Brom says.
“Jesus wasn’t listening,” Crane says in a faraway voice. “He was absent in that moment. Because she came back. Just for a moment. Just to let me know how awful I was, and that I had done something no one should ever do. Bring someone back to life. Then she died, again. For good.”
He closes his eyes, bringing my hand to his mouth and kissing it.
“Oh, and then my troubles really began,” he says against my skin.
“Ray had seen what I’d done. Called me a demon.
It was only because of his participation earlier that I was able to keep him from reporting me.
He knew I would turn him in too. Two men in a relationship, a dead woman.
It would be easy to spin it any way. In the end we had to pretend we were having an evening in, the three of us friends, and that she had slipped and fallen and that was that.
Naturally, I didn’t move on in a healthy way.
I quit my job. Moved across the country. Discovered opium.”
“Discovered me,” Brom says quietly.
“Discovered you,” Crane says, gazing up at him fiercely. Then he fixes his eyes on me. “And found you, Kat. The only things in this life that have kept me from total damnation.”
The room falls silent with the weight of his words.
“But,” I begin after a minute, sucking on my lip, “but if that’s what happened, then what does Leona have on you?”
He sighs tiredly. “She can plant false memories in my mind, for one. Make me believe that I did it on purpose. And she said she could falsify the original police report in some way. I have no idea how, she’d have to get out to San Francisco, I guess.
But I do believe her, I believe in her power.
And I do believe she’d stop at nothing to ensure I was out of the picture, so that you and Brom can fulfill your prophecy. ”
“We have to kill her,” Brom says suddenly, staring at nothing. His voice is so raw, so strange, that both Crane and I look at him in surprise.
“We what?” I ask.
He swings his dark eyes over to us. “We have to kill her. We have to kill all of them. That’s the only way we get out of this alive.”
“Brom,” I admonish him. “We don’t even truly know what’s happening here with my aunts, what the coven stands for, what our union even means. And even if we did know, we are not murderers. Crane may have killed his wife, but not on purpose, and you…”
His brows rise, his forehead lined. “And me? I’m a murderer, Daffy. I know you know that too.”
“You are not the horseman,” I tell him.
“I am the horseman,” he says simply, his eyes so black. “And he is me. And I killed Constable Kirkbride. I told the Hessian to do it, simply because I wanted him dead. What do you make of that now?”
My mouth feels like it’s stuffed with cotton balls. I can barely swallow, barely think.
“We are bad men, Kat,” Crane whispers, putting his hand on my head. “You deserve better than us.”
“No,” I tell them, shaking my head. “You’re my men. The rest doesn’t matter.”
“Morals don’t matter?” Crane asks, his eyes gleaming.
“My morals matter,” I say adamantly, feeling it burn in my chest. “And your morals matter. That’s all.
The three of us, we’ve been put on a raft and set adrift by the rest of the world.
We found each other, and we must cling to each other.
If that means we have to develop our own set of morals to survive, so be it.
I’m not sacrificing any of that, and I’m not sacrificing either of you to fit into someone else’s standards of what it means to be good.
” I pause, taking in a deep breath. “They can all fuck right off.”
Crane’s eyes go wide in shock, and Brom bursts out laughing, throwing his arm around me and holding me close.
“That’s a good girl,” Crane says, shaking his head through a smile, his eyes dancing with pride. “That’s our sweet witch.”
I smile right back.
But I meant what I said.