“Stop!”
He doesn’t. He slips inside and shuts the car door. Maggie runs toward him, but it’s too late. The car starts moving. The gate slides closed. Maggie bangs on the chain-link as the vehicle vanishes into the woods.
He’s gone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
When the gate finally reopens, Maggie starts down the path. She finds Porkchop and his motorcycle in the clearing.
“How long have you been waiting here?”
Porkchop makes a production of checking the watch on his wrist even though he’s not wearing one. “Since I dropped you off.”
“That’s twelve hours ago.”
He shrugs. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not right now.”
“Hop on.”
Porkchop hands her a helmet. They drive back in silence — it’s too exhausting to talk/shout on a motorcycle even if there was something to say. The wind in her face feels sublime. Maggie closes her eyes and lets it cool her. Porkchop plays no music. As always. It’s just the bike and the road. Forget massages. Forget aromatherapy or hydrotherapy or saunas or body wraps or hot tubs. This is peace and isolation and freedom. The only place she loves more... Well, with Marc gone, there’s only one now.
The operating room.
Her church, her sanctuary.
God, how she misses it.
As they pull in, Guillaume and Élodie wave from a big farmer’s table covered in various wines and cheeses.
“Do you want to eat something?” Porkchop asks.
She shakes her head. “My social skills are out of order at the moment.”
“Understood.”
“You go. I’ll walk down to the guesthouse.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I need time to decompress.”
He nods, turns the bike off, heads toward the table. Maggie takes the path down through the vineyards. She heads into the guesthouse. She goes into Porkchop’s bedroom and opens the side pocket of his satchel bag. When she’s finished, she heads back outside. The golden haze is back. It touches everything. Colors are colors, but in a vineyard touched by this golden haze, colors are never stagnant; they become a living, breathing thing.
She stops at a quiet stretch near the guesthouse and leans against a tree. She stares out and soaks in the stillness. It’s over now. She gets that. You don’t get all the answers. That’s part of life. Soon she will go back home to...
...to what?
No Marc. No surgery.
That’s when she feels the cold steel press against the back of her skull.
A voice says, “You killed him.”
Maggie’s eyes close.
Nadia.
“I rechecked Trace’s phone records,” Nadia says through gritted teeth. She keeps the muzzle of the gun right up against Maggie’s head. Maggie doesn’t dare move, her eyes still on the golden haze and the pale blue sky. “You called him on your mobile phone the day before he left. You called him and told him something and suddenly he packed and flew to you.”
Nadia circles so that she is now in front of Maggie. Her eyes are wide.
“If you lie to me, I’m going to pull the trigger.”
Maggie doesn’t speak.
“Did you call Trace? Yes or no.”
“Yes,” Maggie says.
The women are face-to-face now. Nadia aims the gun at Maggie’s heart. “What did you say to him?”
A tear falls from Maggie’s eye.
Nadia’s voice is a snarl now. “What did you say to him?”
“I told him I visited the TriPoint refugee camp,” Maggie says. Her voice is tinny in her own ears, as though she’s speaking from very far away. “Or what was left of it. Most of the refugees had been relocated. I followed them. I found every survivor I could. They all told me that the militants who slaughtered them left the medical team alone. One woman named Aisha — she lost one arm and one leg. Chopped off with a machete. She’d been left in the sand to bleed out and die. But she didn’t. She used her one arm and her teeth to rip her clothes and create tourniquets. She said she saw Trace come back to camp. Marc was alive when he did. She was sure of it.”
Maggie looks into Nadia’s eyes and waits.
“So you thought—” Nadia begins.
“I didn’t think anything. I told Trace I needed to see him. That there were discrepancies in what I was told happened to Marc. I said we needed to talk. In person. Eye to eye. Like this.”
“And when he arrived?”
Maggie shakes her head.
“You killed him,” Nadia says.
“No.”
“Then—”
“Trace never showed. He ran instead.”
Nadia lifts the gun. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying. Trace was supposed to come. I waited for him. But instead, I don’t know, he stole that device from Apollo Longevity and ran.”
She shakes her head. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“Nadia, we both know he did. You heard Steve.”
“And then what? Where is he now?”
Maggie shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.” Nadia pushes the gun toward Maggie’s face. “You killed him.”
And then Maggie hears another voice, a familiar voice, from behind her:
“She’s not lying. She didn’t kill Trace.”
She turns to see Porkchop.
“I did.”
Porkchop has a gun too. He tells Nadia to drop hers. She does. He tells her to kick it away. She does. Then Porkchop turns to Maggie. He doesn’t so much as glance at Nadia anymore. It’s as though she’s not even there.
It’s Maggie. It’s Porkchop.
The rest of the world fades away.
Maggie feels her extremities go cold. She doesn’t know what to do. She stands there, shaking her head.
“We didn’t know,” Maggie says to him.
“We did.”
“Not for sure,” she insists. “There were some discrepancies—”
“Not discrepancies,” Porkchop says. “You didn’t want to see the truth.”
“So you...” Maggie shakes her head again.
“Trace flew into Dulles. Just like Nadia told you. When he arrived, Pinky was at the airport. He followed him. Trace bought a gun from someone on the street. Can you guess why?”
Maggie just shakes her head.
“When we grabbed him, Trace had phenobarbital and clonazepam along with that gun on him. We, uh, interrogated him. He planned to drug you. He planned to find out everything you knew — and then kill you. Stage your death to look like a suicide. You were depressed over Marc. Everyone knew that. He would tell the authorities that you called him, as the phone records would back up. You sounded suicidal and depressed. He caught the first plane over and came to your house and...” Porkchop shrugs away the rest of it.
Maggie can’t speak.
It’s Nadia who says, “So you just killed him?”
“Yes.” Porkchop’s voice is even, clear. There is no hesitation, no wavering. It’s the most obvious thing in the world. He turns and faces Nadia. “And you knew he killed my son. When Maggie called Trace — and then he vanished — most people wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that Maggie did something to him. But you did. Because you knew Maggie had motive. You knew what Trace had done to her husband.”
Nadia says nothing.
Porkchop raises the gun and points it at her.
Maggie says, “Porkchop.”
He ignores her. “Did you help Trace kill my son?”
“No,” Nadia says. “I thought I saved him.”
That slows him down. He keeps the gun up. “Explain,” he says.