Chapter 40
I slipped through the dark—swift and unseen—following the hand-painted signposts to Cabin Sixteen.
The Aston Martin sat outside the cabin, the porch light casting long shadows through the trees. For a moment I stood there alone, humming with adrenaline. Then Arabella slipped from the shadows, a black duffel bag over her shoulder.
“Is it clean?” she asked.
“It’s perfect. Make the call.”
“The police are on their way.” She walked around me, inspecting my torn clothes, my scratched face and hands. “Upper Falls has great confidence in you, Aunt Jessica.”
She pulled towels and a spray bottle from the duffel bag, and started to wipe me down.
Aunt Jessica.
I was blooded now—not in some furtive ceremony in Peter’s old room, but for the whole family to see. Red at funerals, a vote on cullings, the last of my name. The first of my decimated generation.
Arabella scraped away the dried blood, the fresh. She spritzed the towels with rubbing alcohol that stung my scratches. No blood on the seats of Orrin’s ragtop.
“Where’s your car?” I asked.
“Down the hill.”
“We should go. They’ll seal off the resort.”
“There are back roads.” She stepped back to regard her work. “But yes, get in.”
The back roads were bumpy. Every lurch of the car made my senses flicker and buzz.
The valets hadn’t put up the convertible’s top. The night flowed like cool water over my freshly cleaned face, the marks of thorns and brambles. Trees rushed past overhead, showing glimpses of the ecstatic stars.
As we came off the mountain, the second-guessing hit, the feeling that I’d left something behind in that room. But nothing remained of me there—just a few useless fingerprints and strands of DNA.
And my knife, wiped clean, carefully arranged.
I closed my eyes and repeated Veronica’s mantra. “Coronary, carotid, vertebral, iliac, femoral, subclavian…”
Everything in its place.
Orrin and Cyrus were waiting for us at Arabella’s car. They’d driven down from the estate in an old Cadillac land yacht, its trunk full of more duffel bags, stuffed with tools and strategies.
But on this flawless night, most of those tools weren’t needed. I stood there and emptied Cyrus’s water bottle while they divvied up what remained to be done.
Orrin would take the Aston Martin somewhere far away and hide it. The cops would be looking for a vintage convertible, so it needed a paint job, a new top and license plates.
Arabella was headed back to the city. Along the way she’d burn the bloody towels, my family phone, my party clothes. Cyrus had brought jeans and a T-shirt from my closet at Upper Falls, an old sweater of Veronica’s.
Cyrus was driving me to the estate. Back in Manhattan, Garrett would be firing up the basement incinerator, reducing everything of Jessica Anderson’s to dust. Her clothes, her credit cards, her collection of bones.
And something of mine too—a crow’s skull. Or maybe that necklace had belonged to some third person, the cover story of a cover story. Someone irrelevant.
I was all Morton again.
Orrin clapped me on the shoulder, his smile stiff with scars. “Aunt Jessica.”
“Orrin,” I replied, conscious of the missing honorific.
He headed to the little ragtop, laughing at the sound of his unadorned name. With him inside, it looked like a toy. We watched as he drove away, the top still down, his hair flailing in the wind.
Arabella kissed me on the forehead. “Till next time, Aunt Jessica.”
That left me and Cyrus, and the Cadillac in which Veronica had driven us to Albany seven years ago. Gertie between me and Sebastian in the back, the three of us arguing over who’d worn the best surveillance outfit. Tom and Peter in the front, playing with the radio.
Cyrus reached into his duffel bag and handed me a sports drink. When I opened it, the artificial fruit smell made me flinch. Cheap candy.
“Drink, Jessica. You need electrolytes.”
“There was food at the party,” I said, handing the bottle back.
He reached into the bag again. “Okay, but take some aspirin to make those bruises fade.”
“Right,” I said. There could be no blemishes on this night.
Driving north, Cyrus asked me one question.
“Was it easier, this time?”
“Harder.” Peter had been trusting, ready to fall. Tonight had been a thousand pieces of clockwork scattered on the floor. But my hands had moved of their own volition, cutting, stabbing, quelling sound, arranging evidence. Twenty years of training, of excelling, and here I was, a true Morton.
Cyrus only nodded, staring straight ahead into the dark.
As his silence drew out, the long night—injuries, adrenaline, elation—began to catch up with me. The Cadillac drifting from lane to lane felt like the oscillations of a giant pendulum.
It came over me again, the sense of completion I’d felt after Peter’s fall, but vaster, more perfect. A sudden freedom, like letting an arrow loose into the open sky. No more hiding my red. No more smug advice from Arabella.
Killing Peter had been a guilty secret. Everyone who’d found out about it—Sebastian, Bianca, Gertie—had made it their own.
But this was mine. This was me.
“That seat goes back,” Cyrus said.
“I’m fine.”
“Sleep. After improvised kills, they debrief you for hours.”
He was right. “Thank you, Uncle Cyrus.”
“You don’t have to call me that anymore.”
But you’re my father’s brother, supplied my exhausted brain. My months in New York had me thinking like an ordinary.
My hand found the lever beside my leg, and the seat reclined at a stately pace. I gave myself over to the rhythm of the tires, my joy fading into contentment, then sleep.
What happened ninety minutes later—the bright light, the cries of rubber, the tangle of metal and oil—was eventually explained to me.
As I’d stripped my clothes off, Cyrus had tossed the unused flash grenade into a duffel bag, where it jostled with masks and coveralls, weapons and climbing gear, bottles of bleach and solvent, one of which had sprung a slow leak.
Enough acid to dissolve the barrier between oxidizer and fuel in the grenade, resulting in an imperfect, but fully unexpected, explosion.
Cyrus lost control, and the Cadillac spun from the road into an old oak tree, upon whose branches an earlier Dwight had, in 1894, impaled himself the day before his mors curae, leaving a rabbit named Excelsior happy and free in a nearby field.
Five miles from home.