He said “arrange” the way someone might say “decommission,” but Helen didn’t care about the car. She only cared about Adair and getting into the limousine before Adair changed her mind.
Helen had ridden in limousines before. There was always a lingering smell of prom, as though someone had quickly wiped up the cheap liquor. Adair’s limousine, like her house, was amazing. The leather seats were as smooth as butter and blacker than night. Adair had rolled her window up, and once Helen closed the door on her side, daylight disappeared behind the silky black windows. Adair sat in a pool of light from an overhead lamp, recessed cleverly in the ceiling. The whole interior was dark, except for Adair’s face.
“I’m so sorry,” Helen said.
Adair turned away.
Helen did not hear the engine but the limo was moving again. An opaque window separated the passengers from the driver.
“I love you,” Helen tried again. “I didn’t know what to think. I saw Marshal every day, in his office, on campus, in meetings. If I had just had a second longer to think… It was just that Marshal was so dull. He was so stiff and sad. I couldn’t imagine how he could do those things.”
“Did you think I did them?” Adair asked without turning.
“No.”
Maybe. She hadn’t thought that Adair killed the women in Pittock. It was just that Adair was so rare, so wonderful. If someone was capable of ending the world or creating it, of opening up a fissure in the fabric of the universe – for good or evil – it was Adair, not stuffy Marshal Drummond.
“My sister always hallucinated,” Helen said, “ever since she was a child, and by the time she was sixteen or seventeen it terrified her. But I remember, when she was little, she’d occasionally see something she called ‘Alma’ or ‘The Friend.’ She’d look up, as though someone had come in the door and just beam. It was the only time she smiled.”
Adair turned, reached across the seat and took Helen’s hand.
“When I saw you in the asylum…” Helen clutched Adair’s hand. “Part of me was thinking, what if she’s not real?”
“Come here,” Adair said, gesturing for Helen to slide across the seat.
Outside, the trees passed in a blur.
Helen moved across the seat, and Adair drew her into a kiss. Helen wanted to squeeze her with the strength of her passion, grief and guilt. But she remembered the broken ribs and touched Adair with trembling hands. Only her lips and tongue conveyed the intensity of her feelings. They kissed for a long time. Helen only stopped when she felt tears on Adair’s cheek.
She drew back, touching Adair’s face tenderly. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay? You shouldn’t even be out, should you?”
“I feel like hell.” Adair whipped her eyes with the heels of her hands. “But I’ll live. That’s not it. I just…” She took a shaky breath. “Don’t leave me again. Don’t go away. Or, at least, if you’re leaving, tell me now. It’s the hope that kills me. Patrick says I’m a fool. I always think it’s going to work.” She laughed sadly. “But he’s got his husband and his happy life. What does he know?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Helen said.
She put her arm around Adair and drew her close. It felt wonderful to hold her, to smell a hint of her cologne, to feel Adair relax into their embrace. She kissed the top of Adair’s head.
“But…” Helen added. She felt Adair stiffen and held her closer to comfort her. “Just out of curiosity, where are we going?”
Adair sat up a little and Helen kissed her gently. “Not that it matters. I’ll go with you.”
“I thought we could go somewhere. New York. Provincetown.” Adair said, “We have a few houses up in Kennebunkport. No one could expect us to go back to work after what we’ve been through.”
“No one would expect you to work after seeing your family’s house,” Helen said, cupping the back of Adair’s head in her hand. “Yes. Any of those.”
Adair touched a button in the wall of the limo. “Ubol, please take us to the airstrip.”
The voice of the driver came through a crystal clear sound system. “Yes ma’am. Destination?”
Adair looked at Helen. Helen shrugged.
“How about the Cape?”
“Yes ma’am.”
****
That night, they ate dinner in Provincetown. The season was changing and the patio restaurant had put out heat lamps to warm the diners, but the planters around the restaurant were still full of late-blooming flowers. The narrow streets were still full of tourists. Music poured from a few waterfront dancehalls. Beyond, the ocean was calm. For the first time in months, Helen felt genuinely hungry.
Over dinner, they discussed everything that had happened at Pittock, putting the pieces together one by one. The clues. Their guesses. Their first uncertainties.
“When they first discovered the legs,” Helen said. “Marshal said he was glad the media wasn’t tying it to other events. I didn’t follow up on what he meant. I should have.”
“You shouldn’t have to ask. You trust people will tell you things like that, and when I did, I came at you too hard. I should have made an appointment, like Patrick said. Gone through proper channels.”
“No. You were right. Do you remember when you said, ‘there is no procedure for this’? Of course there’s not.”
They spoke in low voices, leaning toward each other. Helen’s mind still reeled. She was trying to find a place for everything that had happened, a way to understand it and still have faith in the world. At the same time, she felt a strange giddiness that was not tinged with anxiety. Adair was right there. When she touched Adair’s hand, Adair smiled.
After dinner, they strolled down to a bar overlooking the water and ordered a bottle of wine. There, as if by silent agreement, they did not resume their conversation about Pittock and Marshal Drummond. Instead, they talked about Adair’s family, what it was like to grow up in a house ruled by men and money. Adair talked about how her brothers had protected her over the years. Their willingness to support her. The good they did in their community. And how hard it was to make friends when she came from such extravagant wealth.
Helen told Adair about Eliza, about the hard times and the sacrifices. Eliza’s wild flights of fancy and inappropriate behavior.
When the bottle was empty, Adair led Helen back to a bed and breakfast at the end of the main drag, set above the other buildings on a slight promontory. One of the Wilsons’ assistants had made the arrangements. It was clearly the grandest accommodation in Provincetown.
“Don’t turn on the lights,” Adair said, when they entered. She crossed the dark room and opened the curtains.
Beyond the window, the ocean spread to the horizon without a single distraction. Helen knew there were buildings below them, but the height of the room hid these. Helen followed Adair and put her arms around her. Adair leaned into her embrace and wrapped her arms across Helen’s as they both looked out the window. The water was very still and the moon hung, almost full, near the horizon.
“I wanted you from the first moment I saw you on campus,” Adair said. “So stern. So upright. But it was when I saw you at the crime scene…you cared. You were the only person there who showed any…grief.”
Helen swallowed. “And I thought I was holding it together.”
“You were. That’s not what I meant.”
Helen kissed the side of Adair’s neck where her neck curved into her shoulder. Then she turned Adair toward her and began to unbutton her shirt.
“Wait.” Adair stopped her hand.
Helen froze.
“I…” Adair began. Then she quickly unbuttoned the shirt and dropped it to the floor, her eyes closed, as though awaiting criticism.
A dark bruise covered Adair’s left side. It started below her collar bone then traveled over her breast and across her ribs.
“I’m so sorry.” Tears pushed at the back of Helen’s eyes. She blinked them away, trying to speak with a steady voice. “He could have killed
you.”
Adair nodded.
Helen reached out to touch Adair, then pulled back her hand. “I don’t have the right, do I? This is all my fault.”
Helen looked up, meeting Adair’s pale eyes. Adair looked uncertain, shy even.
“I’m just asking you to be gentle,” Adair said.
Helen began to cry and kissed Adair through her tears.
They did not draw the curtains as they shed the remainder of their clothes. Instead, Helen led Adair, naked in the moonlight, to the four-poster bed. She pulled back the cover and nestled Adair in the sheets. Then she kissed her, starting with her eyelids and moving down her throat, along her undamaged side, across her belly, and down the silky skin of her thighs. When desire tightened Adair’s muscles and Helen heard a plea in her ragged breath, she gently parted Adair’s legs and licked the moisture from her body. Finally, when she worried that the tension of waiting to orgasm would hurt Adair’s fragile ribs, she pressed her kiss to Adair’s swollen clit.
When Adair came, her cry was as wild and open as the seagull’s cry above the ocean. Helen pressed her kiss to Adair’s body until the tremors subsided. When she looked at Adair again, Helen thought she saw the whole ocean in Adair’s eyes.
“I love you,” Helen whispered.
Adair ran her hand through Helen’s hair, drawing her up.
“I’ve always loved you.” Adair spoke into their kiss. “I’ve always been looking for you.”
Adair rolled Helen onto her side, her hand gliding down Helen’s belly.
“You don’t have to,” Helen said.
The bruises on Adair’s chest cast her perpetually in shadow although the moonlight was bright enough to read by.
“Shh,” Adair said, propping herself up on her good side and slipping her fingers between Helen’s legs.
All thought of protest left Helen’s mind as Adair gently stroked the folds of her sex.
“When I’m better, I’ll make love to you properly.” There was a wink in Adair’s voice, perhaps because Helen was already straining against Adair’s hand, already feeling her world distill down to the orbit of Adair’s fingertips and to her own imminent release.
When they were spent, they lay in each other’s arms, the moonlight washing over them.
“What happens after this?” Helen asked.
“My brothers want me to go back to the estate to recuperate for a few weeks. They insist. And then I want to come back to Pittock, to you…if you want me.”
Adair hesitated as though she could imagine a world in which Helen did not want her.
“Of course I want you.” It was so simple. All those years that Helen had thought love was impossible, they had melted away like snow thawing. She smiled. “We could get a little cottage on the edge of town and plant dahlias.”
Adair chuckled. “If you want.”
Helen closed her eyes, dreaming of the dahlias Adair might plant: ruby-crusted petals, plate-sized blooms so luscious the neighbors would turn away blushing. It was hard to imagine a normal life with a woman like Adair, but it was not hard to imagine love.
Epilogue
Marshal woke in the medical ward of the state psychiatric hospital. His arms were cuffed to the rails of his bed. Pain, unlike anything he had experienced, screamed in his right leg, as though it was being pulverized and burned.
“Oxycodone,” he gasped. “Morphine.”
The guard, who had been reading a magazine by the door, glanced up. “I’m not your nurse.”
“Get me some fucking drugs!”
“Hmm,” the guard said, and turned back to his reading.
Marshal shook his restraints, rolling from side to side against the bed rails. The pain writhed in his leg, not just a sensation but an entity. “Help me!”
Finally, a man in a white coat walked in and stood over his bed.
“My leg,” Marshal said through gritted teeth. “Give me something.”
“A bullet exploded in your leg,” the doctor said. “It shattered the bone, the muscle. I could give you a sleeping pill.” The doctor looked at his chart. “Marshal.”
“I don’t need a sleeping pill.” They were torturing him. Dumb mules! They didn’t understand. “I’m the provost of Pittock College. The provost! This is all a mistake. Get me some drugs, and get me out of here.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen, Mr. Provost,” the doctor said. He wasn’t much more than a boy, probably a medical student.
“I’ll have your license,” Marshal screamed.
“Threats aren’t going to get you anywhere.” The doctor turned to go.
The pain shot up through Marshal’s leg and into his eyes. He gagged. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Just give me something.”
“We’ll see what we can do. I don’t think we’ll be able to give you much relief, though. That’s the problem with phantom pain. It’s a memory, not a nerve impulse. Your body remembers the pain of trauma, but we can’t go back in time and take that memory away. And we can’t numb the nerve impulse for a limb that’s not there.”
For the first time, Marshal looked down at his right leg…at the flat white sheet below his knee, the hideous lump where his thigh ended.
“No!” he screamed. He tried to kick his leg, but there was no joint. He was helpless. He couldn’t move. Even if they released his hands, how would he walk? The pain was excruciating.
“You’re an educated man, Mr. Provost,” the doctor said, clearly enjoying himself. “You can appreciate the irony.” He glanced at his watch. “Ah. My shift is over. It seems like yours has just begun. Looks like it will be a long one.”
The doctor was right. It felt like a lifetime. For days, maybe weeks, Marshal lay in sweating agony, drifting in and out of consciousness, but never escaping the pain. Then, in the middle of one night, he woke and his mind was clear. Father had always said prison was for the poor; madness was for the weak. He would escape. Somehow. And the pain in his phantom leg would be the torch that lit his way back to Helen Ivers.
About the author
Karelia Stetz-Waters is an English professor by day and writer by night (and early morning). Her work includes the thriller, The Admirer, and a YA novel, Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before (coming Fall 2014). She lives with her beloved wife, Fay, her pug dog, Lord Byron, and her cat, Cyrus the Disemboweler. Her interests include large snakes, conjoined twins, corn mazes, lesbians, popular science books on neurology, and any roadside attraction that purports to have the world’s largest ball of twine. She would love to hear from her readers.
More at
Home page: www.kareliastetzwaters.com
http://kareliastetzwatersauthor.wordpress.com
The Purveyor:
Beatific conjoined twins Charity and Prudence Kimball have refused a scholarship that, if they accept, could prove lucrative to Pittock College. College President Helen Ivers sends Professor Adair Wilson to speak to them, but what begins as a routine college recruiting mission turns deadly when the twins are abducted. Convinced their abduction is her fault, Adair sets out to find the twins, embarking on a mission that pits her against a ruthless human trafficker known as the Purveyor.
To learn more about the author or the sequel, visit
www.kareliastetzwaters.com
or
http://kareliastetzwatersauthor.wordpress.com/
The Admirer Page 28
