Chapter 52 #2
“It’s my full apology to you,” I say. “To Leon. The public was correct in naming you. You’re the Confession Artist. It works.”
I figure a little flattery might go over well.
“What you’ve accomplished is powerful,” I say. “The people close to the victims can begin to heal.”
Allison doesn’t buy it. Or hasn’t heard a word.
“Allison.” I shake my head. “I feel so guilty for how I handled things with Railes, but you, sketching people? Really? Standing here now in the woods beside my sister’s house, and Sam? Bringing him into this?”
Sam—my nephew. The irony isn’t lost on me. I dip my head to the barrel. “Think of how this will affect Jess.”
“I can’t think about that,” she says.
“But killing people?”
“Railes did it. And you helped him get away with it. Why should you care what other scumbags I’ve also taken care of?”
“I wish with every fiber of my being that I told the investigator Coleman didn’t have a knife, especially after I found out what happened to Leon. I had no idea he’d take . . .”
Again, I can’t say it out loud. The weight of what I did is too much for me to bear.
A part of me feels this is what I deserve.
That Allison, standing here with her bleach-blond hair luminescent in the dawn, is an angel sent to make me pay.
There’s almost something I crave in it, like drinking bitter lemon water.
I feel as though I’m outside of myself, something bigger than me pushing my body right toward it all.
I wonder if this is what Randal Askens and Vonda Loman felt, too.
The woods press in around me. The trees, the air, the dirt under my feet, the sky above, the mountains rearing up rock solid in the distance—none of it cares about me.
About Allison. About her state of mind. About my cowardice.
The universe doesn’t care whether we live or die. Whether I live or die.
So why do I?
Jess. Sam. It all swings back to them, the only family I have. They’re my anchor.
I can’t just lie down out here for her and let her kill me.
A new surge of adrenaline jolts through me.
I don’t want to die like Randal and Vonda.
I want to fight for my life. I want to dart off through the woods.
But she’s a good shot, and she knows I’m wearing Kevlar from my interaction with Sam earlier.
I force myself to stay still, my heart a mallet against my chest.
“Even Jess got me a card months later when she heard about my loss,” she says.
At the mention of my sister’s name, acid coats the back of my throat.
I had no idea Jess even knew that Allison lost the nephew she was raising. I was so preoccupied with what I had done, with Jess and the rape, with looking out for Sam. And later, no one, including Jess, ever mentioned that Allison lost Leon.
But yes, when I think back to it—to that nightmarish whirlwind of a week—I was mired in my own dishonesty and shame, my own shock at what went down with Railes.
It barely registered that Allison was away the week Railes shot Coleman, but I vaguely remember she was on vacation, because I had wanted to talk to her—the one person who might provide some comfort even if I would never have come clean to her—but she wasn’t there.
I was so preoccupied, I didn’t bother to reach out to her when she returned because I had quit while she was away. From then on, I put my head down, kept to myself, let week after week, month after month, slip by without contacting any friends at all. I didn’t reach out to her until much later.
But Jess . . . ? The information I found on Jess’s desk about Ryan Petronis and his sister, Vivian . . . ?
And there’s all the time Allison has spent with Jess for the past four to five months. Had Allison planned this since then? Just used Jess to get closer to both of us?
“Jess didn’t know what you were doing?” I hate that there’s even a question at all.
“No,” she says firmly.
If I didn’t have a gun pointed at me, the relief of it would drop me to my quaking knees. “The others? How did you know about Ryan Petronis?”
Allison glances around the woods. Where is Sam? Is he alone? Has Greene found him? I ache all over, inside and out. Pray that Greene has him or that he’s somehow made it back to the house, to Jess. Or, at the very least, is safely hidden behind a tree somewhere.
“His mom. At the rehab facility in Arlee. Jesus, you didn’t know I went there for rehab, did you? And Jess didn’t think it was important enough to mention?”
I’m stunned. I guess not. I guess Jess was trying to keep me out of her personal business in a lot of ways over the past year. I stay quiet but keep connecting the dots.
Allison drunk at the fundraiser, one of the only times I saw her.
The packed, Teflon-colored suitcase Vivian and Ryan’s mom posted on Facebook. She was headed to rehab.
“Poor Ryan,” she says like she’s read my mind. “My heart breaks for him and his family.”
“And the woman in Santa Monica? Vonda Loman?”
“That bitch,” Allison mumbles. “Poor Gus. Losing Somer like that. And Lauren losing her daughter.” I don’t know who she’s talking about, but I’m sure they’re somehow connected to people hurt by Loman and Mooney.
Her voice is distant and low. She doesn’t sound like the Allison I know. The idea that she’s separating from herself to shoot me out here is terrifying.
“Gus who? Lauren who?”
“Enough,” Allison says. Her eyes flicker in all directions, looking for Greene or Sam. No twigs have snapped.
“It’s everywhere, and it’s getting worse.
All the fucking enabling. All the delusions.
It’s a goddamn crisis.” She practically spits it.
“An epidemic of heartlessness. And you, you’ve followed right along.
You were something in our department—a breath of fresh air—but I find you’re as corrupt as all the assholes. ”
The ground I’m standing on is crumbling.
Firm soil turns to mud. I’m falling away.
I’m about to tumble down a deep, endless black pit.
Without planning to, I lower my hands and take a tiny step closer, toward the barrel of her gun, like I’m asking for it, despite my terror.
I want to pressure her a little, make her nervous enough to maybe make a mistake.
“You don’t think I live with this every day of my life?”
“Stop!” she barks. Her voice pierces the quiet woods. “I mean it. Hands back up.”
Her gun is far from steady. She’s not cocksure of the plan.
The light between the pines is brightening.
I get a better view of her face. It’s puffy and her eyes have a frantic, electric glow.
Her face flushes an angry red, and her hair is stringy and haywire.
She looks on the brink. I’ve seen the look in people who’ve departed from reality before, who’ve entered some alternate sense of their own making.
She doesn’t remotely resemble the Allison I know.
There’s no logic in this, no calculus explaining her need to hurt others the way she’s been hurt by Leon’s departure from her life because of what Railes did. What I did.
“Allison, listen,” I say forcefully. “I know you’re devastated. I know you’re grieving, but there’s help for—”
“Stop!” Her eyes burn. “There’s not. It’s all bullshit. All of it. He’s gone. Everyone tells you so much crap. He’s in a better place.”
She’s slipped into a cloying, higher-pitched tone, her face twitching.
“He’s an angel looking over you. He’s living on through your memories.
God wanted him by his side because he was so special.
It’s all bullshit! People need to pay. Don’t you see?
People need to wake up. They need to do the right thing.
You, you needed to do the right thing.” Her voice has now gone tinny and desperate. But also determined.
I’m losing her. I need to do something.
“And,” I press. “Allison, listen to me, this is important, it explains how after Coleman was killed, it didn’t help. I thought Jess’s nightmares would go away, but they didn’t. I thought I’d feel relieved he was gone, but I don’t.”
“No!”
Her voice slices the chilled air like a chain saw through an old cottonwood. I force myself to stand still. Be calm.
“You do not get to say these things to me after my boy is gone,” she snarls.
“Besides, you’re wrong. It does feel good.
Askens was the first. He was going to be the only one.
But afterward”—a broad smile consumes her face in a frankly awful way—“I had a purpose. I found purpose. Isn’t that what you wanted, Crosbie Mitchell?
Why you became a cop? Purpose? And I got relief, too.
There was such huge relief in it, so don’t tell me it doesn’t help.
It took the pain away. I kept thinking about how good it must have felt for you to watch Coleman go down, and I wanted that, too. ”
Her chest rises and falls. Her eyes soften, as if remembering how firing two bullets into Askens’s head after shooting him in the back was an injection of pure bliss.
I’d imagined doing something exactly like it to Coleman many times myself before Billy Railes took my place.
But now, the thought makes the acidic taste at the back of my throat bite harder.
“Allison,” I say. I feel short on oxygen. My pulse beats faster in my throat. The trees and the clearing we’re in spin like a merry-go-round being pushed and flung by an angry bully. “Allison, Allison, listen to me, what about you?” I try turning the lens on her, trying to throw her off guard.
“What about me?”
“This is about public reckonings, right?”
She lifts her chin, her nostrils flaring.
“And if it’s about that, then don’t you have something to say to the world? Shouldn’t you confess what you’ve done to Askens, to Loman?”
Allison’s face crinkles like a child about to cry, but she straightens out in the next second. “Enough of this,” she says with a steely voice. She shakes her head like a dog repelling water. “You.” She lifts her gun higher. “You need to get down on your knees.”