“That’s something nobody can decide for you,” John said.
“If I don’t do the paintings ...”
“Then he’ll still be out there, waiting. He will always be a piece of unfinished business. The only way you can be free of him is to stand up to him.”
“And if I do ...”
“You will have to be sure that you’re stronger than him.”
“I don’t want to be like him,” Isabelle said.
“I didn’t say as ruthless—I said stronger.”
“But—”
“Rushkin has put a piece of himself inside you,” John told her. “That’s the hold he has over you.
What you have to do is find that piece and exorcise it. That’s what will make you stronger than him. Not force. Not matching his ruthlessness with a ferocity of your own.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then I would think very carefully upon what you’re about to do.”
“Will you help me?” Isabelle asked.
“I am helping you. But you’re the one who invited him into your life. Only you can best him.”
When he started to turn away, Isabelle called him back a second time.
“I never meant for any of this to happen,” she said. “I never meant to drive you away or for anyone to be hurt.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you come back to me?”
“I’ve already told you, Izzy.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest that she was about to make.
“If you can’t think of me as real,” he said, “why would you want me to come back to you? Would you love me for myself, or for what you thought you’d made me to be?”
It was Kathy’s story all over again, Isabelle realized. Secret lives that weren’t really secret at all.
They only seemed like a secret when you weren’t paying any attention to them. When you couldn’t accept the difference between who you thought someone was and who they really were. You could hang onto your misperceptions all you wanted, but that didn’t make them real.
John wasn’t who she or anybody else decided he was. That wasn’t the way the story went, whether Kathy wrote it or it took place in the real world. John was who he was. It was as simple, as basic as that, and she knew it. In her mind, in her heart. So why was it so hard for her to accept that he was as real as she?
“Think about it,” John said.
She nodded.
“I always know where you are,” he said. “I always know when you want me. That hasn’t changed.
That will never change.”
“Then why has it taken you so long to come and see me?” Isabelle asked. “God knows I’ve wanted to see you, if only to apologize for the mess I went and made of everything.”
John shook his head. “We could have this conversation forever, Izzy, but it all boils down to one thing: first you have to change the way you think of me. Until you manage to do that, each time we try to talk to each other we’re doomed to an endless replay of what happened that night in the park.”
He turned away once more, but this time she didn’t call him back.
V
As soon as they reached the Crowsea Precinct, the two detectives hustled Alan into their lieutenant’s office, leaving Marisa out in the hall. Waiting inside the office were the lieutenant—Peter Kent, according to the name plate on his desk—and a woman introduced as Sharon Hooper, who proved to be an assistant DA. Neither of them stood up when Alan was brought in. By the grim looks on their faces, Alan realized that whatever the detectives had told him in his apartment, he hadn’t been brought in to answer some routine questions.
Kent had the look of a man who rarely smiled anyway—and considering all he would have seen after his years on the force, that didn’t particularly surprise Alan. He appeared to be in his late forties, a lean dark-haired man, greying at the temples. Obviously a career officer. The ADA was another matter. From the laugh lines around her eyes, Alan assumed Hooper was normally a cheerful woman. The grim set to her features seemed more out of place and only served to increase the nervousness that had begun when the two detectives showed up at his door.
A tape recorder was produced and turned on. After he waived his right to counsel at this point, the interrogation began.
Two hours later, they were still at it. At one point the larger of the two detectives left the room to speak with Marisa. He returned, confirming that Marisa could corroborate his story. Then they made him go through it all again. Finally, Lieutenant Kent sighed. He looked resigned, if no less grim.
Hooper pushed her blonde hair back from her temples before leaning across the lieutenant’s desk to hit the Off button on the tape recorder.
“That ... is that it?” Alan asked.
“You’re free to go, Mr. Grant,” Kent told him. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
They were letting him go, Alan realized, but they didn’t believe him. The only reason he could walk out that door behind him was that they couldn’t prove anything against him. At least not yet—that message was plain from the tense atmosphere in the office. He could go, but they weren’t finished with him. They’d be watching him, pushing and prodding, waiting for him to make a mistake. But he didn’t have any mistakes to make. He hadn’t done anything.
“Why won’t you believe me?” he asked.
“No one said anything about not believing you,” the ADA replied. “But you don’t.”
“We have to keep our options open,” the lieutenant said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Grant, but going on all the information we have to date, you’re the only one with a plausible motive.”
“I ... I understand. It’s just, I’ve never been in any kind of trouble like this before and I ...”
His voice trailed off. Why was he even bothering to explain? The only person in this office who cared about what he was going through was himself. He had no allies here.
The lieutenant leaned forward, a brief look of sympathy crossing his features. “We’re certainly taking that into consideration, Mr. Grant. But look at it from our point of view. If you didn’t kill her, then who did?”
Not me, Alan thought as he finally stepped out of the Crowsea Precinct with Marisa holding his arm.
He was surprised to find it was still daylight outside. It felt as though he’d been in that office the whole day, but it was still early afternoon. He blinked in the bright September sunshine. It was a perfect autumn day, the air crisp, the sky a startling blue. Up and down the street, the maples and oaks were bright with color. None of it really registered for Alan.
“What did they want?” Marisa asked.
She’d asked him that same question when he joined her outside the lieutenant’s office, but he’d shaken his head, a wordless “not yet, wait until we’re outside.” No one offered to drive them back to his apartment. No one had apologized for what they’d put him through.
“Margaret Mully was killed last night,” he told Marisa now as they stood there on the precinct steps.
“They think I did it.”
Marisa’s eyes widened with shock. “No.” She gripped his arm. “How can they even think that?”
“I’m the only one they’ve got with a motive,” Alan said.
“But they let you go, so they’re not accusing you anymore, are they?”
“They just haven’t got anything to hold me on.”
“But—”
Alan turned to her. “I won’t say I’m sorry that she’s dead, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her, Marisa.”
“I know that, Alan. I would never believe that of you.”
He put his arm around her and held her too tightly, but Marisa didn’t flinch. “The way things are shaping up at the moment,” he said, “you’re the only one.”
Alan thought he’d gotten through the worst, back there in the lieutenant’s office. But then he saw them, gathered there at the bottom of the precinct’s steps like a pack of vultures. The reporters. More tape recorders. Photographers. Live feeds back to the studio.