“Not like my daddy. He was scared of me, he followed me everywhere, wouldn’t leave me alone, but he’d never do for me what you did for your kids.”
“He loved you, Cass, you know that.” His voice was shaking a little.
Keep your eyes on Cassie.
Detective Rhimes was advancing ever so slowly.
“You were so scared that night. I could see it from where I was standing, in the woods. I could hear it. The way you told him, ‘Freeze,’ and, ‘One more step, and I shoot!’” She shook her head. “I don’t know what they told you about him, but I can just imagine. Schizophrenic, right? You thought he was the one who killed your dog. You didn’t know he was just trying to hand you a note saying he was innocent, right? You thought he was pulling out a gun. So you did the right thing, the brave thing. You protected your family. You protected your kids. You squeezed the trigger and you shot him down, and you did what a dad should do. You protected your family.”
Oh, Christ. I took her father away from her and she knew it all along. Before we met, she knew it.
I took her family, and now she’s going to take mine.
A terrible chill ran through his body.
She nodded, raised her left hand, the lighter hand, and Nick flinched, but she only rubbed her left forearm against her nose, sniffling. “Yeah, I was there that night, Nick. I was there first. He was following me, always following me. He knew I was paying another visit to your house. I saw you, Nick.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Detective Rhimes inch ahead, closer, closer, but he didn’t dare shift his eyes even a millimeter.
“He just kept coming at you and coming at you, didn’t he? And no matter how much you told him to stop he kept coming because he really didn’t understand.” Her voice deepened, in an eerie imitation of her father’s voice: “Never-safe! Never-safe!” She shook her head. “I’ll never forget the look on your face afterward. I’ve never seen a man look so frightened. And so sad.”
“Cassie, I-God, I’m so, so sorry, I don’t know what else to say. I’m going to face up to what I’ve done. I’m going to answer for it.”
“Sorry? Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not mad. Don’t apologize. It was beautiful, what you did. You were protecting your family.”
“Cassie, please…”
“Of course you had to do it. Oh, don’t I know it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful. It was a liberation, you know. It freed me. My daddy was in a prison of his own mind, but I was a prisoner, too, until you freed me. And then I met you and I saw what a strong man you were. A good man, I thought. You needed a wife, and your kids needed a mommy, and we could all be a family.”
“We can still be a family.”
She shook her head, knife dangling at one side, toying with the lighter in the other. A rueful smile. “No, Nick. I know how these things work. I’ve been through it time and time again, and I just”-her voice cracked, her face got small and wrinkled, and she began to really cry now-“I just can’t go through it again. I’m tired. I can’t do it again. Once the door slams shut you can’t open it again. It’s never the same. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Nick said, moving closer, wearing an expression of gentle empathy.
“Stop, Nick,” she said, holding up the lighter warningly as she stepped back. “No closer.”
“Things can change, Cassie. In a good way.”
Tears were streaming down her face now from her smudged eyes. “No,” she said. “It’s time,” and Nick could hear the rasp of her thumb on the flint wheel.
109
Audrey listened closely as she advanced toward the kitchen. She could hear everything the two said, and it was strange how insignificant, all of a sudden, it was to have Nicholas Conover’s guilt confirmed from his own mouth.
She thought of that passage from Matthew, the parable of the unmerciful servant. She thought of the sign taped to her computer monitor that said, “Remember: We work for God.”
She understood what she had to do about Nicholas Conover. The weapon that had killed Andrew Stadler had been stolen years earlier by Eddie Rinaldi, who now lay dead on the lawn.
You can’t convict a dead man.
Things would be sorted out later.
But for now she had to stop Cassie Stadler.
The problem was that this situation fit no pattern she had ever trained for. She slid along the wall, felt it cold against her cheek. Gripped the smooth paint of the doorframe molding.
Did Conover know she was there?
She thought he did.
She could hear the steady high-pitched tone, and she saw where it was coming from. It was a combustible gas detector, which measured the concentration of gas in the air. The steady tone meant that the gas in the air had reached optimal combustibility-she forgot the exact percentages, but she knew it was a range on either side of ten percent. Cassie Stadler was waiting until the air up here had reached the most dangerous concentration of propane gas, no less and no more.
You must always think several steps ahead, she told herself. What if, as she stole up on Cassie, relying on the element of surprise to take her down barehanded, she startled the woman, causing her to strike the lighter?
That had to be avoided at all costs.
She slid past the hall table, careful not to jar it and thus knock the alabaster lamp to the floor. Finally, she entered the room, and she didn’t know what she was going to do next.
She listened hard, and she thought.
The flint didn’t spark on her first try. Cassie frowned, tears coursing down her cheeks.
The gas detector shrilled, and meanwhile she sang softly in her lovely, lilting voice: “Oh, the rock cried out, I’m burning too-I want to go to Heaven the same as you.”
“Cassie, don’t do it.”
“This was your decision. You made this happen.”
“I made a mistake.”
She looked above Nick’s shoulder, saw something. “Luke?” she said.
“Cassie,” Lucas said, walking across the kitchen straight toward her.
“Luke,” Nick said. “Get out of here.”
“What are you doing here, Luke?” Cassie said. “I told you and Julia to stay in the basement.”
Audrey Rhimes had somehow gotten into the house through the back door; that was the alert tone sounding, she knew to unlock the basement, let the kids out. But where was Julia?
Lucas must have taken the back corridor around, through the family room to the kitchen’s other entrance.
“You locked us in,” Lucas said, coming right up to her, standing to one side of her. “I know you didn’t mean to. But I found the spare key.”
What the hell was he doing? “Luke, please,” Nick said.
But Lucas was ignoring his father. “Cassie,” he said, touching her shoulder, “remember that poem you helped me with-that guy Robert Frost?” He smiled, warm and winning and appealing. “‘Hired Hand’ or ‘Hired Man’ or whatever it was called.”
Cassie didn’t move Lucas’s hand off her shoulder, Nick noticed. She turned to look at him, her expression seeming to soften just a bit, he thought.
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” Cassie said, her voice hollow.
Lucas nodded.
His eyes slid toward Nick’s for just a fraction of a second.
Nick saw it.
Lucas wasn’t ignoring him at all. He was signaling to his father.
“Remember what you told me?” Lucas said. His luminous blue eyes held hers. “There’s nothing more important than family. You said that’s what it’s all about, finally, in the end. That’s what makes us human.”
“Lucas,” Cassie said, and there was a slight shift in her tone, and at that instant Nick dove at her to knock her to the ground-