He came around his mother’s headstone and took a couple of steps toward Eve. In the light from the grounds’ lamps, he looked old, exhausted, handsome, and in pain. He didn’t know how much he’d changed since yesterday, wouldn’t believe her if she told him.
His finger wrapped around the trigger; she prayed he’d trip over the short lamppost and go sprawling, but he stepped smartly around it. She fought panic, made her mind take off to try to find words to fight with. Bunner would know what to say, but Eve had never taken psychology. It had been considered a nonsubject (like sociology) for people who liked multiple-choice tests. So she didn’t have knowledge but she did have sense. She was the end product of generations of a family who’d had the sense to turn sugar bootlegged in 1680 into a vast fortune, and she tried to use it.
In the vision of the first kitchen, he’d been a sweet, pretty, frightened little boy, who’d loved the older brother who’d gone oft and left him, and probably wanted to love the woman even though she terrified him; but by the second kitchen, here in Sawyerville, he’d turned into what he still thought he was, and couldn’t feel anything even when he thought she was going to castrate him, because... because... Eve pushed her mind so hard she got dizzy.
Because if he felt, what he felt would be rage, hate, and the will to murder. But he couldn’t let himself because she was his mother, and killing your mother was unthinkable, the worst crime. Worse than killing your kids. Medea killed her kids and the gods sent a chariot to take her away. Orestes killed his mother and the Furies pursued him for eternity.
But Barbara Fuller was not his mother.
She said it out loud. “She wasn’t your mother.”
“I know that. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” Eve cried. “You can hate her.”
“But I don’t hate her. I don’t feel anything about her. You haven’t been listening. It didn’t work.”
Eve tilted her head back the way her aunt would and said in her coolest, most arrogant Tilden voice, “That’s just silly. Of course you hate her, I hate her and she didn’t do anything to me, she did it to you. But she wasn’t your mother.”
He faltered and the gun moved off center.
“She was not your mother,” she kept on in that tone that sometimes made her want to slap her aunt’s face. “She was not your mother and of course you hate her. Of course you want to kill her, but it’s okay, because she’s already dead and she was not your mother.”
“I see what you’re trying to do,” he said, and moved the gun back to where it had been. “It won’t work.”
She’d give anything for a mirror to hold up to him so he could see how he looked.
“One thing is a shame,” he said. The gun was back on target, his finger wrapped around the trigger.
“What?” Eve was sure her voice would quaver, but it didn’t. “She never got what was coming to her.”
“Yes, she did.”
“No. She was killed in an accident; the troopers said she never knew what hit her.”
“They lied. Remember I said I saw something that happened years after your real mother died?”
He stared at her.
“Do you remember?” she asked haughtily.
“I remember.”
“I saw Barbara Fuller alive, awake, and aware for an hour while they tried to cut her out of that car. She had so much glass stuck in her she looked like crystal, and the door had smashed into one side of her and drove the jagged ends of her bones out the other. She screamed and screamed. It sounded like a slaughterhouse and one of the troopers went for his gun. The others wanted him to do it, because it was unbearable and they’d shoot an animal in that kind of pain. But the trooper couldn’t; the others couldn’t either because she wasn’t an animal and they didn’t have the nerve. They could see in the light of the flares around the car and the spotlights on their cruisers that she was as good as dead because her brain was exposed and pulsing through a crack in her skull, but they still couldn’t do it. She was awake when the ambulance got there, but the paramedic couldn’t get close enough to give her a shot. She was awake when they finally cut her free and awake when they got her on the stretcher—then she died.
“Oh, she got her comeuppance, Adam.” It was the first time she’d used his name. “It didn’t go on long enough, but it was horrible while it lasted, if that’s any consolation to you. And it can be, because she was not your mother.”
The town ended abruptly after a short strip of gas stations, fast food joints, and car dealerships, and the muddy fields surrounded them. They thought they’d missed the turn and Latovsky got ready to make a screeching U-turn, then saw a buckshot-pocked sign: pine ridge, with an arrow and a cross. He hit the brake and screeched into the turn. There was a faint glow from the lights behind them, nothing ahead but darkness, and one lone light that must be a farmhouse in the middle of a field. They topped a rise and saw more lights low to the ground. Spots lit pillars and an open iron gate with a sign over it that reminded Latovsky of iron letters on an iron strip: AUSCHWITZ, ARBEIT MACHT FREI. This Said PINE RIDGE PERFECT REST. He didn’t slow up going through the gates and missed a sharp curve at sixty. The Caprice climbed a rise, plowing ruts in the lawn, and headed for a large pale-gray monument with BIGGS on it.
He fought the wheel; the tires gouged more grass as the car swung around and slammed onto the road, throwing Lucci against the door. Pavement scraped the bumper, Latovsky fed gas, and they screamed around the curve and missed the turn-off marked North Ridge. He stood on the brake, the Caprice screeched to a stop, and the motor died. “Shit!” He smashed his fist against the wheel and restarted the motor. He raced it, then jammed the car into reverse. It screamed backward and Lucci yelled, “Just like gangbusters, Dave. Just like the old babe said not to—you’re gonna get her killed.”
He was right. Latovsky let the car lose momentum and took a second to collect himself. Then he made the turn quietly and eased up the North Ridge road for a quarter of a mile until the headlights hit the back of a light blue LTD, number H278MD. Latovsky killed the lights and motor and they coasted to a slow, silent stop behind Adam Fuller’s empty car. Latovsky turned out the ceiling light so it wouldn’t come on when they opened the doors, and they drew their guns and slipped out of the car.
Adam said, “God, you’re good, you really are. Almost had me going a little there, but not quite. I am not glad she suffered, Eve, I simply don’t care.”
“You do!” she said desperately. But he didn’t believe her and she had told her last tale and had nothing left to fight with. He knew it and she saw pity in his eyes. But the emotion must be so new, so alien, he didn’t even know he felt it.
He said, “It’ll be awful for you to just stand there while I pull the trigger. Much easier for you to run, I think.”
“Easier for you,” she cried with all the defiance she could muster.
“No. I don’t care either way. I’m not playing possum, Eve. I don’t care. But you do—you want to live. And maybe I’ll miss and keep missing until you’re safely out on the road, or the gun’ll misfire. It’s an old gun, you might get lucky.”
She saw his finger tense on the trigger. She couldn’t get more than a couple of feet before he pulled it, if that, but she had to try and she whirled around and ran for her life.
The grass was dewy. Her shoes slid on it and she couldn’t get up enough speed at first, then the soles gripped and she ran flat out, waiting to feel the bullet drill into her back like a dart and come out like a frisbee, taking her breastbone and most of her chest with it.