Tory heard the sound of a car outside. She turned off the radio, and set the teakettle and cups and tea bags on a tray to carry into her office.
Ellice was her only client of the day. She arrived still in uniform from her overnight shift. With the practiced air of routine, she unholstered her weapon and deposited it in the file drawer. She locked the drawer, then flipped the key neatly onto the desk blotter before she arranged her lanky form in the easy chair.
Tory pocketed the key before she sank into her own chair and regarded Ellice, who sat in a shaft of light that turned her pale eyelashes golden. Tory smiled, and opened her mouth to greet her.
It was at that moment that her fey, somnolent so long, hit her with all its force. The stab of knowing struck through her chest so powerfully she only just stopped herself from crying out. The suddenness of it shook her. Her smile died on her lips, and she felt the blood drain from her cheeks. She gazed in horror at Ellice Gordon.
She knew. Appalled and sickened, she knew.
It had been Ellice. It was Ellice’s fantasy. She didn’t need to ask how it had happened, or why, or what the order of events had been. She could see it, as clearly as if she had also been in that parking lot.
Ellice raised an eyebrow, and her pale eyes met Tory’s as directly as always.
Tory’s throat constricted. Anguish stole her voice and her breath, and the ache of her fey made her press a hand to her chest.
Ellice leaned back in the easy chair, crossing her long legs, her big hands relaxed on the arms. She said, with a wry intonation, “Good morning?”
Tory dropped her hand, and linked both hands together in her lap. She forced herself to draw a breath around the pain in her chest. She said slowly, “I don’t think it’s a good morning, Ellice. Quite the contrary.” The pressure in her chest eased a little, and she watched as Ellice’s eyebrows pulled together. Though her eyes didn’t flicker, they looked dull, as if a shutter had been pulled.
“Well,” Ellice responded. She was very still for a moment, and then her lips curled. “Do you want to talk about that?” She gave a brief, deprecatory laugh.
“You’ll need to be the one to talk,” Tory said. Her voice felt thin, fragile as the dry leaves falling past the window.
“What shall I talk about?” Ellice sat very still, only her eyes moving. She seemed not to blink, nor even to breathe.
“I think you know. No—” Tory leaned back in her chair, though her stomach crawled with tension. “No, Ellice, I know you know.”
Ten seconds passed before Ellice spoke again. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I do.”
“Tell me about it.”
Ellice glanced away, out into the sun-spangled woods. When she looked back at Tory again her face had changed. Her freckled cheeks flushed. Her eyes glittered, and she leaned forward so abruptly that Tory flinched.
“Why are you surprised?” she said in a gravelly voice. “I told you what I was thinking.”
“You told me it was a fantasy. Everyone has them.”
Ellice grinned, a fierce expression that made Tory’s stomach clench harder. “Everyone has them?” she asked. “Not like mine, they don’t.”
“Not exactly like yours, perhaps,” Tory said. “But everyone has fantasies. They don’t act on them.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I’m sure that acting on this particular fantasy was a tragic thing to do.”
Ellice’s grin faded. She braced her elbows on her knees and regarded Tory for a long time. The silence in the office grew heavy, and the song of the birds in the cedars seemed to fade. Tory thought, for the first time ever, that Kate and Chet’s house was too far away. She was alone on her hilltop with a woman who had done something unthinkable.
At last, Ellice straightened, and her gaze left Tory’s face to drift back to the grove beyond the windows. “I was right, you know,” she said in an offhand tone. “It was just as I thought it would be.”
“That surprises me.”
Ellice’s gaze didn’t waver from the trees. “Why? It didn’t surprise me at all.”
“I didn’t think you were capable of it.”
“You’re disappointed in me.”
Tory hesitated. Nothing in her experience or her training had prepared her for such a moment. “I’m—saddened,” she finally said. “I’m sad for you, sad for the man you killed. I’m terribly sad that I didn’t know this might happen.”
“Nothing you could have done to stop it,” Ellice said. Her fingers lifted and fell on the arms of her chair, a placid rhythm. “I did it, and I felt good afterward. That shocks you, I suppose.”
Tory let that go. “How do you feel now?”
Ellice lifted one shoulder, and let it drop. “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “And I can tell you it’s a fucking relief.”
“You’re saying that today you don’t feel angry.”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t feel any sense of responsibility?”
Ellice shook her head, gazing out through the glass. A bar of ruby light reflected from the hummingbird feeder to glisten on one freckled cheek. “I’m not stupid, Tory. If I was going to torment myself with guilt, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Did you have any excuse at all, Ellice? Any justification?”
“Sure.” Ellice shrugged, a negligent gesture. “If I needed it.”
“You don’t think you need it?”
Ellice turned her head, and Tory felt she was looking into the face of a stranger. She couldn’t recognize the client she had worked with most of the year, and that meant she had failed miserably to understand what was happening.
Ellice said in a lifeless tone, “I couldn’t help it.” She shrugged again. “It is what it is.”
“But, Ellice,” Tory said carefully, “surely you know I have to report this.”
Ellice blinked, a slow flutter of her pale lashes. “What are you talking about?”
“A therapist has to make a report if a client is a real danger to herself or to others.”
“I thought you had to keep everything between us confidential.”
“A man is dead. You’ve admitted your responsibility. That’s not confidential.”
Ellice straightened in the armchair. She gave the impression of growing taller, bulkier, even though she didn’t rise. “You’re my therapist,” she said. “I’m supposed to be able to tell you everything.”
Tory sat very still. “You’re also a police officer. You must know there are limits to confidentiality.”
Ellice’s hand moved, in an automatic way, toward her empty holster. “No,” she said. “I don’t know that.” She added, with a truculent thrust of her chin, “I trusted you, Tory.”
“And I trusted you, Ellice.”
“You won’t do it!” Ellice thrust herself abruptly out of the armchair, and stood over Tory, her fists on her hips. “You’re just trying to scare me.”
Tory rolled her chair back a bit, and rose. “I won’t have to if you’ll do it yourself,” she said. She wanted to put the chair between herself and Ellice, but she forced herself to stay where she was, the desk at her back, the chair pushed to the wall.
“Do it myself? What the hell does that mean?”
“Tell the sheriff what happened.” Tory’s skin had begun to crawl under Ellice’s hard gaze, and the key of the cabinet where the gun was locked began to grow heavy in her pocket. “I’ll speak for your state of mind, of course.”
Ellice barked a laugh that made goose bumps prickle on Tory’s neck. “State of mind? I’ll tell you my state of mind.” She spun to one side, and took up Jack’s graduation picture. She held it up, pointing to it. “I know all about you, Tory.” Ellice’s voice rose and thinned, reminding Tory of a crow’s caw, harsh and cutting. “I know about your son, and where he goes to school. I know which dorm he’s in, what floor, and what room. I know when he comes home, who he sees! I have power over you, Tory!”
Tory said, “I don’t beli
eve you would threaten Jack,” but her voice faltered.
Ellice took one swift step around the desk. “Don’t you?” Her hand flashed out, seizing Tory’s wrist in an iron grip, and a rush of anger suffused her face, staining her cheeks red and burning scarlet across her neck. “You don’t know me at all!” She yanked Tory close to her. “Report me, and Jack’s next,” she grated. “He’s the next one I shoot.”
And with that stabbing premonition, a sharp and unforgiving certainty, Tory knew it was true. Ellice would do just as she said.
She—Tory—was in real trouble.
Tory’s arm felt small and thin under those strong fingers, but she had her own wiry strength. She pulled back, ripping herself free with the suddenness of her gesture. Now she did roll the chair between them, putting herself within reach of the telephone on her desk. “Ellice, please sit down, and let’s—”
Before she could finish her thought, Ellice reached across the desk and ripped the telephone cord out of its jack. Tory jumped away from her, abandoning all pretense of calm, and dashed across the office toward the safety of the kitchen and the lock on its inside door. That lock was her protection. It was the escape route every therapist was supposed to have, but she saw now how paltry it was, how little defense it would give her. She was too late, and the door lock too little, but she tried anyway. She grasped the doorknob and pulled the door open.
Ellice came close behind, her long, strong arm stretching past Tory’s head to slam the open door hard against its stop on the outer wall. The bang of wood against rubber made Tory’s nerves jump. “Give me the key, Tory!” she commanded.
Tory crossed the kitchen, rounding the island, and pressed her back against the refrigerator. “You don’t want to do this,” she said.
“Just give me the goddamn key,” Ellice said. She reached Tory in two strides. Her arm went around Tory’s neck, pulling her off balance as she groped in her pocket with her other hand. Tory, with the strength of a woman used to wrestling cords of wood, wrenched herself free. She spun away from Ellice and dashed toward the garage door. There was no outer lock on it, but her Escalade was there, and if she could get in, lock the doors—but she wasn’t fast enough.
Ellice, with a motion so smooth and efficient it was as if she had planned it, snaked a knife from the pine block beside the sink, and came after her.
The whole scene was so humiliating that now, huddled beneath a boulder on the Oregon coast, Tory could hardly bear recalling it. Ellice had held the knife to her throat, then wrested the key from her jeans pocket through the sheer muscular force of her big hands and long arms. In the struggle, the knife had sliced Tory’s forearm, the blade cold as it cut through her flesh, but leaving a burning slash of pain behind it. Ellice, the knife in one hand and the key in the other, tried to drag her back into the office. Tory needed no intuition to know that if Ellice succeeded in getting the gun from the file drawer before she could get away, she would never survive.
Blood soaked the sleeve of her sweater as she dropped and twisted. With a groan of effort, she kicked herself free of Ellice’s grasp. The momentum sent her flying across the kitchen floor. She scrambled the rest of the way, leaping to her feet just as she reached the garage door. She blasted through it, jumped into the driver’s seat of the Escalade, and hit the electronic lock a heartbeat before Ellice caught up with her. Ellice stopped where she was, assessing the situation in a flash, then whirled to go back into the kitchen. It would take her only seconds to reach the office, unlock the file drawer, and retrieve her weapon.
Tory hardly breathed, waiting for the garage door to open, winding up on its pulley at what seemed an agonizingly slow pace. Before it was fully up, she gunned the motor. Her muscles trembled with adrenaline. Every second seemed to last a minute, every minute an hour as she backed out of the garage, tires spitting gravel every which way. Ellice’s patrol car blocked the driveway, and the trees on either side grew too closely for her to fit past. She cranked the wheel, and sped off in the other direction, around the side of the house, past the garden shed, out to the dirt lane used by plows and tractors. She meant to wheel around to the road from there, but before she could reach the lane, the patrol car caught her. It was more powerful even than the Escalade, and Ellice had no fear of using its weight and momentum. She drove the patrol car right up behind the Escalade, striking its bumper with hers. She forced Tory across the dirt lane and down the slope of the hill toward the Winooski River.
Tory tried to stop above the riverbank. She even set the emergency brake, but it did no good. The patrol car struck the back of the Escalade again, hard. It was terrifying, a blow neither measured nor restrained. It felt to Tory as if Ellice meant to go over with her, to careen both vehicles down the bank and into the river.
Time slowed down even further for Tory. Her car tilted, leaning forward in a dream motion, listing, sliding, falling. She barely heard the screech of metal on rock, of bursting glass, of her own harsh breathing. She saw the water rising toward her at a speed so stately she could distinguish the crevices in the boulders rising to catch her, appreciate the spray of water shining in the cool sunshine, pick out the colors of the gravel below the clear water where the hard surface of the riverbed waited to jolt her into unconsciousness. She had all the time she needed to slide to her right, to release the door lock. She had more than enough time—three seconds, five, which passed so slowly she could have divided them into milliseconds—to shove the door open with her foot. Without haste, she judged the moment when her car would hit the rocks, and at the perfect instant she threw herself out the side door and into the waist-deep water. She splashed through the water to hide herself behind the boulder.
At the touch of the frigid water of the river, time sped again to its normal pace, and she hunched down, wet to her hips, holding her arms above her head as if that would help protect her.
She heard the patrol car brake in the dirt and leaves above the bank, and she heard its door open and close. She couldn’t see Ellice, but she could feel her, her sluggish fey engaged at last, fully focused on someone who wanted to hurt her. Who meant to kill her.
Now, weeks later, she was huddled in the same position. Her knees were in sand instead of the icy water of the Winooski River. She was many, many miles away from the crashed Escalade.
But still hiding from Ellice Gordon. It was for Jack, of course, but she was still hiding.
Why did she think now of her dreams, and the black-eyed tormentor who dominated them? What was her fey trying to tell her?
11
Vengono a darmi aiuto?
Are they coming to help me?
—Minnie, La Fanciulla del West, Act Two
“Paulette?”
Tory startled from her reverie. She jumped up, knocking over her half-full coffee mug so that the chilled coffee soaked into the sand. The wind struck her face as she straightened, and she turned her back to it. “Iris?”
Her landlady, with strands of long gray hair whipping around her narrow face, was coming down the beach. She wore a red plaid parka, far too large for her lean form, and a dilapidated wool cap pulled down over her forehead. When she reached Tory, she smiled. “Bit chilly for meditating on the beach, isn’t it?”
Tory hadn’t noticed she was shivering. When she looked down to shake out the last of her wasted coffee, she saw that her knuckles were scarlet with cold. She gave a diffident laugh. “Yes, I guess it is. I just like the water at this time of day.”
“That shutter looks great, Paulette. And the gate, too. You’ve been busy.”
“Thanks,” Tory said. Her teeth began to chatter, and she clenched her jaw to stop them.
Iris encircled Tory with her arm. The familiar gesture made her stiffen, but there was a look of real concern on the older woman’s face. “Come on,” Iris said. “Let’s get you inside and warmed up.”
By the time they had trudged up the beach and gone into the cottage, Tory’s hands were so stiff she could barely unzip her coat. She went int
o the kitchen to fill the teakettle, rubbing her fingers to warm them. Iris, seeming perfectly at ease, took the stool on the other side of the short counter. “What are your plans, Paulette?” she said.
“Plans?”
“For today, I mean. For dinner.”
Tory frowned at her over the teakettle. “Dinner—?”
Iris clicked her tongue, and pulled off her battered cap. She twisted her gray hair back with both hands and contained it with a silver clip. “It’s Thanksgiving,” she said.
Tory put the kettle down slowly. Her fingers had begun to sting as they thawed. She looked past Iris, out to the tossing ocean beyond the picture window. “It can’t be,” she said, her voice cracking. Thanksgiving. She had been gone . . . nearly two months. Thanksgiving! Her heart cried, Oh, Jack.
“You didn’t realize,” Iris said.
Tory made herself breathe, made herself speak as normally as she could through her chilled lips. “No. No, I didn’t realize. Time just—just slipped away from me.”
“Well.” Iris smiled, but Tory could see she wasn’t going anywhere. She said, “I’ll wait while you bathe. You’re coming to my place.”
The refusal was on Tory’s lips, but somehow she couldn’t speak it. Iris looked across the counter at her, and though she grinned, her eyes pierced Tory’s as if they could see past eyelashes, through pupil and retina, right into her mind. “Come on,” she said, with what, for Iris, was a gentle tone. “Only four of us—including you. Don’t be alone today.”
The Glass Butterfly Page 13
