We sat there for a while, sharing a hug that meant more than any embrace I could remember, and then Betsy said she was cold, so I picked her up and carried her inside.
“You’re taller than my daddy,” she said as we went up the steps, and I closed my eyes and didn’t respond.
They got what things they had left in the cottage, and I put them in the back of the truck. Then I stopped Julie in the drive.
“Put Betsy in the truck, and then I’d like a moment alone with you.”
She stared at me for a few seconds, then nodded and went up the steps. I watched her hips move as she went. Tomorrow. She was going to leave tomorrow.
I walked down to the pond and tossed rocks out onto the ice. They bounced across the surface without breaking the ice near the shore, but when I started lobbing them out into deeper water, they found pockets of broken ice and sank. The effort made the aches Krashakov had left behind flare up anew, but I ignored them.
A few minutes later, Julie walked out and joined me. She stood next to me and watched me throw the rocks. I didn’t stop throwing them until she spoke.
“Betsy’s in the backseat of your truck,” she said. “We’re ready whenever you are.”
“Okay.” I tossed a few more rocks out at the pond.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Julie said.
I dropped the rock that was in my hand. “I know.”
“You can’t come with us.”
I shook my head. “No. I can’t.”
She sighed. “But I can’t stay here anymore, Lincoln. I can’t raise my daughter here.”
“No. You can’t.”
She moved to stand in front of me, then slipped her arms under mine and wrapped them around my back. She stepped in close and pressed her body against me, and I looked down into her beautiful face and beautiful eyes and for a moment I think I forgot to breathe. She squeezed me tightly, then leaned back, still holding me, and looked up at my face and smiled.
“Were you standing this close to your husband when you shot him?” I asked.
Originally it had been one of many possibilities in an unknown situation. Then it had been an idea dismissed as absurd. It had crawled back as a nagging doubt, developed into an always-present question, and then swelled into a strong suspicion. Now, as I looked down into her face, it became the truth.
“No,” she said, and her voice was a hoarse whisper. “I wasn’t quite this close.”
She let go of me and stepped away. At least she hadn’t tried to deny it. It shouldn’t have meant much to me, but it was something.
“When did you decide that was what happened?” she asked.
“I’d wondered about it for a while. Wayne was a professional, and I had trouble believing he would have let someone get in a position to kill him with his own gun and make it look like suicide. Certainly he wouldn’t have let any of the Russians pull it off. And for a while I bought your story about Hubbard, probably because I wanted to. But that one was weak, too, because you told me you had plenty of Hubbard’s money to fund your disappearance. And if there’s one thing near and dear to Jeremiah Hubbard’s heart, it’s his money. If he was planning to kill Wayne or have him killed, he wouldn’t have paid him off first. Then when I stopped to think about how determined you are to take Betsy and leave the country, it made me even more curious.”
“I see.”
“I saw another side of you the night in the hot tub, and it didn’t make sense,” I said. “It wasn’t easy for me to put my ego away, but when I did, I began to question whether I was really attractive enough to make a grieving widow shed her clothes in the middle ofa hotel courtyard.”
She gave me cold eyes. “You think that was an act? Some attempt to distract you, keep your mind away from Wayne?”
I shrugged.
“Believe what you want,” she said. “But that wasn’t the case.”
“You settled it last night,” I said.
“I did? How?”
“When you asked me about Amy. You told me I let my guard down when I was with her and Joe, and that it was the first time you’d seen me do that. I got to thinking about it, and I realized that was probably true. You’d never seen me let my guard down before, and I wondered why not. I wondered why I kept it up when I was with you. That’s when I started coming up with the reasons. There was a pretty long list of them, things that you said that didn’t quite make sense, and…” I sighed and shook my head, then looked back out at the frozen pond.
“And what?” she asked. Her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes focused on the ground.
“And I saw it in your eyes the night we left South Carolina,” I said. “When you stopped me in the hotel and asked me if I could kill to protect your daughter. There was something about the way you said it.” I shook my head again. “I tried to tell myself you’d asked Wayne the same question and you’d been disappointed, because he’d only died for her. But that wasn’t it. You’d been willing to kill for her, and you were trying to tell me that without saying it. You were testing me to see if I could match that dedication.”
She stepped closer to me and put her hands on my arms. “And you did kill to protect her,” she said. “Just like I did.”
“No,” I said, pulling away from her, “I didn’t. I’d like to say that I did, because it’s a hell of a lot more noble. But truthfully, when that man swung the gun in my direction, I pulled the trigger to save myself. Neither you nor your daughter passed through my mind, Julie. It was a self-preservation instinct.”
She walked away and stood near the shore with her back to me. I followed her down and stood beside her again.
“Tell me how it happened.”
She kept staring out at the water. “I hadn’t planned on it. You don’t have to believe that, but it’s the truth. I was so scared, Lincoln. We were running, fleeing our own home in the middle of the night because people were going to try to kill us. Betsy was in the rental car, and I walked back inside with Wayne. He gestured around the living room and told me to take a good look because I was never going to see it again. When he said that, I stopped being scared and started being angry. I was never going to see it again. My own home.” She shuddered, recoiling against the memory as if it were a frightening, physical thing.
“Then he put the gun in my hand. He told me he wanted me to take it with us in the car, in case anything happened. I might need it to protect Betsy, he said. That’s what my life had come to, Lincoln-a life where my husband gave me a gun to protect my daughter as we fled in the night. Why? Because the bastard was so damn greedy. And he’d never even told me, Lincoln. He’d never told me what he did. We lived our happy, ignorant life, and he put us in danger. He put my baby in danger.”
She looked up at me. “He showed me how to take the safety off, and then he put the gun in my hand. And I put it to his temple and shot him.”
For a long time there was nothing but the sound of the wind in the pines and the ice in the pond creaking and groaning as it melted and shifted. The sun was hidden behind the clouds, but the temperature was in the low forties, warm enough to melt the ice. I stared out at it without seeing anything. Minutes passed, and then I turned and walked back to the truck.
Julie followed. “You’re going to tell the police, aren’t you?”
I stopped and looked at her. “I don’t work for the police, Julie. I was hired by your father-in-law to find out what happened to his son. I have done that now. I will go to him, and I will tell him what I have found.”
I got in the truck and started the engine. Betsy was in the backseat. She gave me a bright smile.
“Your car is tall,” she said. “Mommy had to lift me inside.”
“I like them tall,” I said. “You wanna drive?” When I asked her, my voice broke, and then I didn’t say anything else. Julie climbed into the passenger seat and fastened her seat belt. On the drive back into the city, I did not speak. Not a word. Betsy and Julie talked. I drove.