Chapter 25
Peter was not dead. But to say he had survived would be grossly overstating the matter.
At first, the doctors told her he was simply recovering from surgery and would wake up. But finally they had to acknowledge he was in a coma, and they couldn’t say when—or if—he would emerge from it.
They’d admitted her as well for severe dehydration. Doctors, nurses, police officers and, on one occasion, the FBI agent—Radcliffe—had come to ask her questions to which there were no answers she could give. What happened? What were you doing before you both took ill? Why were you in Washington?
“I don’t know,” she said over and over. And, “I don’t remember.” And, “It’s all a horrible blur.” Because dehydration and confusion went hand in hand, they seemed to accept that.
She sat with Peter every moment they let her, holding his hand, but he didn’t miraculously improve from the magic she tried to send him. Perhaps nothing was passing between them. Perhaps the CPR alone revived him, and that would not be enough to overcome what the weapon had done to his body.
She had heard that people in comas sometimes remained aware, and she’d hoped she would see him dreamside. But two nights had come and gone. No dreamside. No Peter. Nothing.
As for Ella, she was gone, her room cleared out. Whether she had also taken the transmitter was a question to which Beatrix feared the answer. Lydia went to look the day before, following her directions, and couldn’t find it.
Also missing: Garrett’s body.
Lydia communicated this to her in notes shared furtively and then burned in the bathroom, just as she herself had slipped Lydia notes explaining what had happened. Neither of them wanted to trust that they weren’t being watched.
As for the explosion in the New Mexico desert, she could find no news about it. She hoped that meant no one had died.
Now, as she sat with Peter, Rosemarie keeping her company on the other side of the bed because Lydia was back in class, she tried to push these considerations from her head.
But new anxieties kept popping up. Peter had no insurance.
How long would the money he’d socked away pay for his care?
She had no source of income now. How could she get a new job, with no one in town hiring and her car on the fritz?
She could teleport reliably, now that she understood the secret to knitting was treating dayside as if it were dreamside, but would it not be tempting fate and a jail sentence to travel that way all the time?
“Miss Harper?”
She looked up. Detective Tanner with the D.C. police, who’d questioned her twice before, stood in the doorway. “Could I have a word?”
Rosemarie got up from her seat.
“No, wait,” the detective said. “This is going to be a bit of a shock, Miss Harper—you may want someone here with you.”
Beatrix swallowed, holding Peter’s hand tighter. “Yes. Rosemarie, please stay.”
Tanner closed the door to the room, which Peter had to himself. The detective pulled up a chair, sat and let out a long sigh. He ran a hand through his dark crew cut. “Well. First off, both you and Wizard Blackwell were drugged.”
She stared at him, open-mouthed. How did they know?
“The hospital ran the usual tests, but then we asked for some less usual ones, given the lack of information about what happened to you. You both had a banned substance in your system that morning that produces confusion and extreme suggestibility.”
“Why—how—” she began, trying to think of what she would ask if this was the first she were hearing of it.
“When did Wizard Garrett propose marriage to you?”
The question hung in the room. None of the officers had asked her anything about Garrett until now. She licked dry lips. “In—in October.”
“And you declined.”
“Yes.”
“But he kept returning.”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“And on Monday, he convinced a Miss Sederey to pretend to injuries so Wizard Blackwell would come out to tend to her.”
“Yes,” she said, dread rising in her throat.
“What happened, Miss Harper? What did Wizard Garrett do?”
“He … he …”
“He broke into the omnimancer’s house,” Rosemarie said. “He’d found out that Beatrix had agreed to marry Wizard Blackwell, and he was angry. Omnimancer Blackwell, as you probably have heard, discovered the ruse and teleported back, worried for Beatrix’s safety.”
“Miss Harper?” Tanner looked at her for confirmation.
Beatrix bit her lip. Rosemarie had backed her into a corner. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Omnimancer Blackwell convinced Wizard Garrett to leave,” Rosemarie said. “Didn’t he, Beatrix?”
“Yes,” she said again, the word sounding all wrong in her ears, meaningless.
Tanner leaned in. “And then what happened, Miss Harper?”
“I … I …”
“She left for work the next morning,” Rosemarie said. “But what happened between then and when she and Omnimancer Blackwell were discovered in the park, we have no idea. Her memory is a blank. And now I think we know why.”
Tanner looked at her, head cocked, waiting for an affirmation.
She understood why Rosemarie was doing this. She grasped the stark utility of casting Garrett as the culprit. But for all his failings, he hadn’t done this, and he couldn’t defend himself because he’d been murdered by the actual perpetrator. It felt so utterly wrong.
She passed a hand over her eyes and nodded.
“Miss Harper,” Tanner said, “we believe Garrett dumped you at that godforsaken park and expected you would die there. No one visits except the beat cop doing a quick check, and only then in the evenings. If you hadn’t been singing, the officer who found you would never have come up.”
Rosemarie stared at her. “Singing?”
“To keep the time,” Beatrix said. “For the CPR.”
“Ah.”
“We don’t know what Garrett did to you both after drugging you, but it almost worked,” Tanner said. “The doctors tell me that if you’d gone much longer without medical attention, you could have died yourself.”
She gasped. That was the first she’d heard of it. Was it the result of using too much magic?
Stop—concentrate. She had to think about extraneous things like that later. Avoiding Rosemarie’s eye, she said to Tanner, “But why do you think Garrett is the one who did this?”
“Well—he’s skipped town, first off.”
So they hadn’t found his body. Where was it?
“Also,” Tanner said, “his colleagues at work were growing concerned about him. Two of them independently used ‘obsessed’ to describe his behavior relating to you.” He paused. “You don’t look surprised by this, Miss Harper.”
“No,” she murmured. “Not entirely.”
“One of his colleagues reported that Garrett, while intoxicated, said Sunday night that he would have you—that no one was going to stand in his way because he had a plan, which he refused to explain. The wizard was so concerned that when Garrett didn’t show up as expected on Tuesday, he called the police.
We searched his house, and we found these. ”
He reached into the bag he’d set down by his chair, pulled out a folder and opened it. Inside were photographs of her. Coming out of church. Walking up Main Street, arm-in-arm with Ella, laughing. Picture after picture of her in the forest, alone—except not. She shivered.
The detective cleared his throat. “That banned substance in your system? He had that in his house as well. And he’d obtained a marriage license for you both.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“Did you know about the license? Did you sign the application?”
“No!”
He nodded. “That’s what we suspected. He applied for it as a nonresident, so the application was mailed to him, and presumably he then forged your signature on it.”
She tried to follow this train of thought.
She’d figured Garrett had broken into Peter’s house to ensure he could spy on them unobserved and see for certain what they did behind closed doors.
Now she had to consider the possibility that Garrett wanted to lie in wait for Peter—either under the assumption that Peter would do something that could justify arrest if he thought he was alone, or …
She shuddered. Peter would have had no warning. And then what? Drugs, chapel, I do?
“Just to be clear,” she said, “you believe that he—that he—”
“Planned to exchange vows with you while you weren’t in your right mind, yes.
” The detective tapped his temple. “But I don’t think you were suggestible enough for that, Miss Harper.
You were performing CPR on your fiancé when you shouldn’t have been able to think straight.
You were pleading to stay with him when you should have gone docilely with the beat cop.
So Garrett couldn’t get you to marry him.
And if he couldn’t have you, no one would. ”
It was entirely possible, of course, that Garrett had ayayak root because he drugged people to force them to do what the magiocracy wanted—not that that was any better—and he’d gotten the marriage license with the idea that if he could change her mind, he would marry her on the spot.
But either way, she hadn’t taken seriously enough the threat he’d represented.
Those photos—they were chilling. That split second in the forest when she feared he might kill her—perhaps not an overreaction.
Seen from the clarifying perspective of hindsight, it was even unsettling that he’d proposed to her just a few weeks after they’d met.
He hadn’t understood her at all. It seemed she had not really understood him, either.
“We’re searching for him,” Tanner said. “Don’t worry, Miss Harper.”
That brought her back to the present difficulty. Garrett had died eighteen hours too early for Tanner’s neat scenario. If the police found him soon …
“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” the detective asked.
She sighed. “No,” she said, and that was the absolute truth. “No, I don’t.”
“Well, we’ll keep you informed,” Tanner said, and left.
Rosemarie raised her eyebrows. “You seem to have had quite a close call with that wizard.”
Beatrix nodded.
“I take it you were encouraging the man before having a change of heart?”