Chapter 23 #2
“It was Mary Jane who led me to them. Led me to your precious Charlie. She thought she was so clever, sneaking off when I was working, while I was putting a roof over her head and food in her belly. But I saw the effort she made when she was going to meet him. The way she looked at herself in the mirror. So I followed her. I watched my woman link arms with another man and walk about as though she belonged to him. When they parted, it was not Mary Jane I followed. It was Charlie. I planned to kill him in a doorway, make it look like a robbery. But he led me to the very house I had been searching for. So I waited. I watched. I learned the pattern of comings and goings, the habits of all the foul beasts who lived there. I kidnapped the kitchen maid and forced her to tell me everything she knew before I slit her throat. And when Charlie’s guard was down, when he’d thought himself safe, I got him. ”
He took a half step toward Caroline.
“He cried, you know. Your brother. When I was standing over him with the knife, he cried like a child. Begged me not to do it. And it wasn’t your name he whimpered. It was hers.”
Bright, cutting anger flared through Caroline. Her knuckles were white on the knife handle; the blood sang in her ears. “After you killed my brother,” she said, nearly spitting out the words, “did you stick to hunting women because he put up too much of a fight?”
She wasn’t sure why she pushed him. Only that she was furious, only that she had no plan for when he stopped talking.
Sergeant Corbet held out his hands. His palms were clean, his fingers white. But there was blood on them. So much blood.
“Practice.” He took another step across the tile floor, his feet silent, his eyes like chips of ice.
He looked, in that moment, like the man in the daguerreotype.
Like his own father. “I did it on the full moon so someone would put it all together, start asking questions. I pretended each miserable, stinking bitch was Mary Jane. She left me for a monster. She would have borne his children. I killed those other whores so that when it was her turn, I could really, truly, enjoy it.”
The edge of the counter was hard against Caroline’s back. She had nowhere to go, nowhere but through him—
“You led me to her, you know. You told me she was in Miller’s Court.”
Caroline’s insides turned to ice.
“She was so surprised,” Sergeant Corbet continued, taking a step closer, “when I let myself into her miserable little flat. It couldn’t have been easier.
The windowpane was broken. I just reached through and unlocked the door.
You should have seen her face. I got to take my time with her.
There was no one about, no one to interrupt us. ”
It was her, Caroline’s, fault. Her fault that Mary Jane was dead, flayed, mutilated—
The policeman tutted. “Don’t be jealous,” he whispered.
“I’m going to enjoy killing you, too. I’m going to savor that moment when the light leaves your eyes.
Then I’ll put a piece of you in the box on my mantel with the ring your brother gave to Mary Jane.
And I’ll know that I’ve finally taken everything away from Charlie Foster. ”
They had reached the end.
Caroline felt it in her marrow, in the soles of her feet, in the crush of teeth in her mouth. His shoulders were bunched like a panther’s, ready to pounce. He was bigger than she, faster. A practiced killer.
She thought of her mother’s grave, of her dead sisters, whose names no one but she remembered. And Charlie.
Charlie, for whom she had come here, braved everything. Who this man had torn from the fabric of the world, snuffed like a flame, erased from her life with a flick of his knife.
Her fear thawed. Rage replaced it.
He would kill her. But for herself, for Charlie, for the Burmese villagers and Mary Jane and all the others, she would do her best to take him with her.
Channeling every character from every book whose hands had held a sword, Caroline lunged.
Sergeant Corbet did not expect the movement. He leapt backward just in time for the rusted blade to hit air instead of flesh.
“She has a pulse!” he crowed, eyes wide with surprise. “Oh, this will be fun. Mary Jane begged; the others were too drunk to do more than moan. But you, Miss Foster. You’re a wild thing, aren’t you?”
She thrust again. Again.
He dodged each, his smile broadening as her slices became sloppier, more desperate. And then she caught his hand with the dull edge.
“Damn you!” he cried, raising his bleeding fingers to his mouth. A deep gash ran across three fingers; blood spilled onto the tiles. A slick satisfaction curled the edges of Caroline’s mouth. It felt good to hurt him. Good to watch him bleed.
“That’s enough fun for one evening, I think,” Sergeant Corbet said, and lunged for her again.
But Caroline was ready. She waited until he was so close she could see the scribbles of green in his eyes. Then she thrust low, aiming for his belly.
It was as though he knew what she would do before she did. He feinted, sidestepped the blade, and caught Caroline’s wrist in such a tight grip that she cried out and dropped the knife.
“It’s done,” he whispered, bending her fingers backward until she shrieked with pain. “It’s over, Miss Foster.”
When she thought her wrist would snap like a wishbone, he released her. But before she had time to think, to sob, his hands had closed around her throat.
He had done this before. His grip was uncompromising, certain, even as the blood from the cut she had given him dripped down her neck and soaked the front of her gown.
His eyes were inches from hers, his breath hot and damp with every effortful exhale. He was watching her intently, waiting for her eyes to dull, her face to slacken. It was as intimate as an act of love.
The edges of her vision narrowed.
She would die. Here and now, she would die. He would wipe her from the earth like something on his shoe sole. No one would know she had ever been.
She had wanted nothing more than to live a life that left a mark.
A life that pressed its impression into the world so that when she was gone, others would know she had been.
And now she would be known only as his victim, like the other women he had killed.
Not as the mothers and wives and daughters they had been, not for the sunsets they had witnessed or children they had comforted or the brief, brilliant moments when they had tasted happiness.
Her head filled with smoke, thick and suffocating. It was over.
Through the darkness, on the other side of life, Charlie was waiting.
—
Caroline stood in the field. The air, the sky, glowed the same impossible blue as the flowers.
Charlie was waiting at the edge of the forest. He had been waiting for a long time, Caroline realized, and she was sorry for it.
But Charlie just smiled his same sad smile and held out his hand.
His fingernails were rimmed with black ink. Behind him stood the trees.
Caroline was not afraid. She knew, this time, that if she reached out, she would feel her brother’s cool skin, the delicate bones of his fingers beneath. This time, she would not wake up.
A huff of air behind her. The muffled thud of a heavy footfall.
The beast was just over her shoulder, its breath condensing into drops of saliva in her hair, on her neck. Charlie nodded, once, as she made up her mind. She could not follow him without first knowing what pursued her.
So, for the final time, Caroline turned to face it.
She heard her own intake of breath.
For it was not some monster that stalked her, some terrible creature with long teeth and yellow eyes.
The thing behind her, the creature that had stalked her nightmares, that had breathed the hot scent of death around her, was Caroline herself.
And in that moment, she understood.
With a strength that had never before belonged to her, Caroline opened her eyes onto Sergeant Corbet’s face.
His cheeks were red with the effort of killing her. A string of saliva trembled on his bottom lip. And in his blue gaze, only inches from her face, she swore she saw a flicker of fear.
She wanted to smile. She wanted to laugh. But instead, she reached her hand across the counter until she felt the hot belly of the teapot, the handle. She raised it and upended it over Sergeant Corbet’s head.
He screamed.
His hands slackened around her neck, and for a moment all she could do was suck blessed air through the ragged flesh of her throat.
When her vision returned, spotted and blurry, Sergeant Corbet was steaming, shrieking, scrubbing at his scalp like a dog covered in bees.
Through the pain and the boiling smell of skin and hair, the policeman’s eyes once more settled on Caroline. He lunged for her with scalded hands.
But she was still holding the teapot.
She brought it down on his skull with an ear-splitting crash. As he stumbled and slipped in the wet mess of the kitchen, she drew the penknife from her waistband and stabbed him through the eye.