Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
Icome back in pieces.
The storm reaches me first. Rain is hammering the roof, far away and then right over me, like the house is being torn open.
Pain comes next, a white line down the side of my head, so wide I can't find the edges of it.
Then I taste copper in my mouth and smell something burnt underneath it.
A hand touches my face and turns me gently toward a voice.
"Mallory. Hey. Open your eyes."
I open them. The study is dark and tilting.
A flashlight is propped on the desk somewhere above me, throwing its light up onto the ceiling.
In the edge of it, Henry's face hangs close over mine.
His hair is wet, and blood runs from his temple down into his collar.
He has a wet folded cloth pressed to the side of my head.
He lifts it to look, and it comes away dark with blood.
"There you are," he says, very soft. "Don't move fast. You hit your head, hard."
None of it makes sense. I don't know why Henry is in my house, in the dark, holding my head together with his hand. The last thing I remember is the desk coming up at me. Before that, the gun. Before that, David.
I turn my head, which is a mistake. The pain rolls through me, sudden and sickening, and I see him.
He is on the floor by the desk, on his back, one arm thrown wide, his face turned a little away. There is a darkness spread out under him that the light doesn't reach into. I watch his chest for the lift of a breath. It doesn't come.
"David." It comes out barely louder than breath. "David."
"Mallory." Henry's hand closes on my shoulder. "Look at me. Not at him. At me."
But I’m already going to David, dragging myself over the boards, and Henry doesn't stop me. He comes with me, a hand under my arm, taking my weight when my arms fold. I reach him. I put my palm on his chest. He’s still warm.
Nothing moves under my hand. There is a hole in his shirt, high on the left, and blood is coming out of it slowly.
I understand but I refuse to accept it in the same breath.
“No,” I say.
"He's gone," Henry says behind me. "I'm sorry. There was nothing I could do."
Tears roll down my face.
I turn on him. "What did you do?"
He doesn't flinch. He lets me look at him. He’s kneeling in David's blood, his coat soaked through from the rain. There’s a gash at his temple and blood on his hands.
"He was going to kill you," Henry says. "He had the gun and you were down, and he wasn't going to stop."
"Why are you here?”
His eyes move to David, then back to me. "Because I was worried about you."
The words land softer than they should.
"Since Julia disappeared," he says, "I've been watching him. I didn't want to say anything without proof. But I saw enough to know he wasn't telling you the truth. I saw him come back here tonight, and I knew something was wrong."
His voice stays level, but only just. I can hear the strain at the edges.
"I came in through the back. You were down.
He had the gun in his hands, and it was pointed toward you.
I said his name. He swung around on me, and I went for it.
I got it away from him, but he kept coming, Mallory.
He kept coming. I fired because I thought he was going to kill us. I didn't have another choice."
Henry sighs, running a hand over his head.
He looks at David, closes his eyes, then opens them.
"Julia." It comes up through the fog all at once, Julia on the cold floor of the wing. I try to stand but can't. "Julia's in the renovation area, she's—"
"I know. I found her." Henry is already nodding, already ahead of me. "We're going to get help for her."
A knot in me loosens at that. I hate that it loosens, and I let it anyway, because I need it to be true more than I need anything.
Then the other thing surfaces, the thing David said again and again in the dark hall.
"He said it was you." I’m looking up at Henry and the words come out slow. "David. He kept saying it was you. That you set all of it up."
I watch the accusation land. He doesn't argue. He doesn't rush to defend himself. He only looks tired, older than he is, sad even. He nods a little, as if it is the answer he expected and prayed he wouldn't hear.
"Of course he did," Henry says. Quiet. "He needed you looking at me. As long as you were frightened of the man next door, you weren't frightened of the man in your bed." He says it gently, and then he lets it lie.
He doesn't press it. He turns away from it, back to the room and the chaos of it, as though David's last accusation is a small sad thing already behind us.
"Mallory. Listen to me. We don't have long.
" He takes my face in both his hands and makes me hold his eyes.
"When the police come through that door, they are going to see a dead man and his wife alive beside him, with his blood on the floor and her head bleeding.
They are going to test everything in this room.
The gun. Your hands. Your clothes. They are not going to start with what happened.
They are going to start with what they can prove. "
"But you're the one who shot him," I say.
"I am. And I'll tell them so. I'll tell Rodriguez.
I'll tell anyone you want." He doesn't look away from me.
"But not to the first patrol officer who walks in cold, in the dark, when Julia can't speak and you were unconscious on the floor when I found you.
That officer won't know the case. Won't know David.
Won't know what's been happening here. The room can tell them a gun was fired.
It can't tell them why, or what happened while you were unconscious. "
"I didn't do anything."
"I know that." His voice softens. "But you can't tell them what happened after you hit your head. Julia can't tell them anything right now. Do you see? There is no one in this house who can back me up. No one who can tell them I fired because he was going to kill us.”
I feel the case settling around me. A hole where tonight should be. A friend who can't speak.
“I need to help Julia,” I say.
He looks toward the black mouth of the wing.
"I already tried to call for help. The landline isn't working.
I couldn't get a signal out, not in this storm, not from here." He shows me his phone. He’s right. There’s no signal.
His thumb moves once against my cheek. "Mallory, no ambulance is coming until someone reaches a working line.
So we drive until the phone catches, and we send them straight back to her. "
“No, we take her with us."
"We can't." He says it before I've finished.
"I don't know what he gave her. I don't know how much. She’s in no state to move.
If we move her wrong, if we fold her into a car and she stops breathing halfway down the road, there's nothing I can do for her.
How would that look? She needs an ambulance.
She needs people who know how to keep her alive. "
Some part of me thinks we could get her to those people, faster than any ambulance could.
But the thought is already sliding away, out through the crack in my skull, and in its place is the picture he has put there for me.
Julia's head lolling in the back seat, her breath disappearing under the rain and the engine, no one hearing the moment her breathing stops.
I can't hold both thoughts at once.
So I hold the one he gives me.
Under all of it, small and out of reach, there is still a splinter I can't get my hand around.
Something is too clean. Too set. Some part of me knows the feel of a room that has been arranged.
But my husband is dead a foot away, my skull feels full of broken glass, and the man holding me up is the only thing in the room that feels like help.
I can't turn the splinter into anything else.
So I let it go.
Henry gets an arm around my back and lifts. The room slides, then holds still. We begin moving. Out of the study. Into the hall. Toward the black mouth of the wing where Julia is.
I stop. "I'm not leaving her, Henry. I can't leave her in there."
"You're not leaving her." His voice is low at my ear, and he moves me forward the whole time. "The best thing we can do for Julia is get a signal and send help."
We are almost past the wing when I remember.
"My phone."
Henry stops. "What?"
"My phone. It was knocked out of my hand."
His eyes move to the plastic, then back to me. "Where is it?”
"In there. With Julia."
For a second I think he will tell me to leave it. Instead he guides me back against the wall, keeping one hand on my arm until he is sure I’m steady.
"Wait here."
He disappears through the plastic. The seconds stretch. I hear the storm. I hear my breathing. I think of Julia lying a few feet away in the dark, and I try to move, but the wall tilts hard and I have to close my eyes.
Then Henry returns, the plastic whispering behind him, my phone in his hand. I take it from him and look at the screen.
Shit. No bars.
Whatever the storm has done, he wasn't lying about that.
I put it in my pocket. Henry doesn't try to take it.
Then he gets his arm around me again. I take a step, then another, past the plastic and away from her. It is the worst thing I have ever done in my life, but I do it.
At the front door, the wind takes my breath and the rain comes in sideways. His car is near the end of the drive, dark, its lights off, waiting.
"Where," I say. "Where are we going?"
"Across the water." He’s walking me down into the rain, his arm all the way around me, and I am letting him.
"Cell service is better once we're off the Point. Once we have a signal, we’ll call for Julia, and then get you seen.
After that, a lawyer. Then Rodriguez. In that order.
You don't say a word to anyone until someone is standing beside you who knows what this really is. "
I stop one last time. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the last of David in me, his voice still saying the thing he wouldn’t let go.
I look back at the dark house and its open door. My feet won’t carry me the rest of the way. I can’t bring myself to get into Henry’s car. He feels me stop, my body going rigid against his arm.
He doesn't pull at me. He just says it, very gently. "There's nothing more you can do for her standing here, Mallory."
And it’s true. I already left her. I left her when I ran, when I chose that study and my life over the friend on the floor behind me.
Standing at his car changes none of it.
The fight goes out of me.
I get in.