Chapter 84
rose
She picks up the tumbler and swirls it beneath her nose, the way Quinn told her to do.
The movement brings out more of the distinctive scent of dark caramel, toasted banana, candied ginger, cinnamon, liquorice and brown sugar.
Quinn was right: once you know what to look for, it’s easy to distinguish the different elements.
She takes a deep swallow.
She and Quinn have kept in touch over the last eight months; not frequently, but now and again.
Quinn sent her the bottle of bourbon when she turned eighteen last month.
Where I come from, the accompanying note had said, if you’re old enough to die for your country, you’re old enough to do it with a hangover.
She probably shouldn’t take life lessons from a recovering alcoholic, but she and Quinn have formed an odd bond. Rose wouldn’t call it friendship; recognition, perhaps. A shared willingness to look into the face of evil without flinching. To do what’s necessary to put things right.
She can tell Quinn things she’d never share with her mother.
She puts the tumbler down on the bar, next to the small bottle she got out of the fridge earlier.
Quinn doesn’t know what Rose is going to do tonight – plausible deniability – but she has no doubt the journalist would approve.
As Quinn once told her: you can’t always be a passive witness to evil.
Sometimes you have to take action and stamp it out.
Rose picks up the vial and inverts it, so that the air bubbles rise to the bottom.
It’s time to finish what she and Dad started.
Eight months ago, she found her father sobbing alone in his study after he and Mom had come back from Aunt Amy’s house. He’d told Rose everything, utterly broken by the knowledge that his sister-in-law had let his son drown; that Finn could’ve been saved.
Rose wasn’t broken by the knowledge.
Rose was blisteringly, lethally angry.
Dad had taken some persuading. He was a good man; he’d been led astray by Colt Smith, but he was decent, really, not the sort of person to start trouble. Not the kind of man who hurt people.
But Rose had made him see he had to get justice for Finn. For Nicky, and Maggie, and Raylan, and everyone else who’d died on the Lady that night.
For Mom, whose life had been over the moment they brought Finn’s body ashore.
It was Rose who’d decided the punishment should fit the crime; Rose who’d sent the text from her mother’s phone to lure her aunt to Colt Smith’s house. Her dad had been the one to grab them and take them out on the lake and scuttle the Chris-Craft; but it had all been Rose’s idea.
Rose hears footsteps overhead and freezes, the small vial still in her hand.
After Dad’s funeral, when she and Mom moved to West Virginia with Uncle Mac and Aunt Amy and her grandmother, Rose had decided to do her best to start over: to wipe the slate clean, as Mom put it.
Mom and Aunt Amy had made up, and Rose had done her best to move on, too.
She hadn’t made a big song and dance when they’d all moved into this big house together, like they were living in some sort of commune.
She hadn’t complained when she’d been forced to see out her final year of education at a local high school where everyone had known each other since they were five and she was the out-of-town freak.
But she can’t forgive or forget.
Her anger has cooled and coalesced, and grown harder and stronger.
Today is the second anniversary of the accident.
Uncle Mac is away for work – he has a new job, now, sailing boats from one end of the Eastern Seaboard to the other for rich assholes who can’t be bothered to do it themselves – so it’s the perfect time to finally put things right, practically and poetically.
Rose hears a toilet flush overhead, and footsteps as her mom returns to bed. She waits another fifteen minutes, just to be sure she’s gone back to sleep, and then picks up the syringe from the breakfast bar, and fills it from the vial containing her grandmother’s insulin.
Thanks to Helen’s diabetes, Rose is very familiar with the properties of insulin. She knows it’s a naturally occurring hormone, one that forensic toxicologists rarely test for. She knows, too, that excess amounts are fatal, and almost impossible to determine post-mortem.
The grandfather clock in the hall chimes three – the witching hour.
Rose moves silently towards the back bedroom.
The bitch is lying on her back, snoring. She doesn’t wake as Rose enters: she takes three sleeping pills every night. As if she deserves to sleep like an innocent.
Rose watches her chest rise and fall for a few minutes.
And then she kneels quietly beside her and injects the insulin into her upper arm.
She doesn’t even stir.
It won’t take long for the surge in insulin to kill her. It’s a kinder death than she deserves: her brain will become starved of glucose, and she’ll go into a coma without even waking up. Then her breathing and heart will stop.
No one will ever know why.
Rose returns to the kitchen, and puts her grandmother’s vial of insulin back in the fridge. She disposes of the empty syringe in Helen’s plastic sharps container, and then pours herself another shot of Quinn’s bourbon and sits drinking it in the dark.
She jumps when she hears footfalls on the stairs.
‘Rose,’ her mother says, coming into the dimly lit kitchen. ‘I thought I heard you up. Can’t sleep?’
‘Not tonight,’ Rose says.
‘Me either,’ her mom says.
Her mother takes the stool next to her, and they both sit in silence for a few minutes. Finn’s presence in the room is so strong, Rose can almost feel his breath on her neck.
Her mom finally gets up with a soft sigh. ‘Warm milk would be better than bourbon,’ she says, opening the fridge, but she tempers the reproof with a smile. ‘I’m going to make myself some. Would you like any?’
‘I think I’ll go upstairs and try to get some sleep,’ Rose says.
‘Rose,’ her mom says. ‘I know you haven’t always felt she deserves it, but be kind to Aunt Amy today.’
Rose turns and rinses her bourbon glass at the sink, so she doesn’t have to look at her mom.
She hopes Mom isn’t going to be too upset by what she’s done. Rose didn’t want to hurt her, but she had no choice. She owed it to Finn and Nicky and Maggie – to her dad – to finish things once and for all.
It was the conversation with Kate Walker at her dad’s funeral that’d settled things. Until then, she’d had no idea Kate had been at the marina the night Dad died, or that she’d gone out on the lake, chasing Iris on the WaveRunner.
Kate had seen her mom and Aunt Amy clinging to the wreckage of Dad’s Chris-Craft, doing everything they could to keep each other alive.
And she’d realised then, Kate said, in one of those rare, life-changing moments of clarity, that if Iris could forgive Amy for letting poor Finn drown, then Kate could forgive her, too.
She’d been so consumed by rage, Kate said, she’d had no room for anything else. She’d realised she had to let go of her hatred, so she could remember what it felt like to love again.
Rose didn’t agree. She’d nursed her hatred like a sick bird, feeding it scraps of resentment, nourishing it with her grief.
She puts her bourbon glass onto the draining board, and kisses her mother before going back upstairs to bed.
On the landing, she passes the open door to Mac and Amy’s room. Her aunt mumbles softly in her sleep, and turns over, her arm outstretched to Mac’s empty side of the mattress.
Kate was right: Amy deserved a second chance. You could tell a lot about a person from the character of those who loved you. If her mom and Kate could forgive Aunt Amy, then Rose could, too.
Her grandmother was a different matter.
Kate had told her at the funeral that Colt had had an affair with her grandmother for years.
A woman who could love and defend a despicable human being like Colt Smith, who could take his side against her own daughter, deserved the same fate – and Aunt Amy had finally confided to them all what he’d done to her when she was just thirteen, what kind of slimeball he really was.
Since Helen wanted Colt so much, Rose was happy to send her to him.
Her grandmother often sleeps in. No one will go in to check on her until at least mid-morning. It’ll be far too late by then.
Rose gets into bed and closes her eyes, feeling at peace for the first time in two years. She hopes Aunt Amy makes the most of the chance Rose has given her.
If not, she’ll be waiting.
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