Robin looked into his eyes, red-rimmed, as though he hadn’t slept for days.I thought I knew my husband better than anyone too.She didn’t say it, of course. But she understood him. She knew how he felt. “Thank you,” she said. And then she quoted Eric. “The truth will out.”
After she left the building, Robin quickly called her mother’s cell phone. “Oh hi, honey,” she said. “I can’t really talk. I’m on my way to the doctor.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Robin said, thinking of her mother’s home, her empty house. “I was just calling to see how the appointment went.”
“I’ll let you know,” Mom said, and before long Robin was pulling into her mother’s driveway, barreling up the walkway, through the front door and up the stairs and into her parents’ bedroom where she rooted once again through her mother’s sock drawer. She was slipping the box out of the back of the drawer, her mother’s secret box. And she was pulling out the seashells and plastic mementos and tiny pieces of costume jewelry until she found what she wanted:the souvenir penny pressed into an oval and embossed with a star, the wordCorsica. That had been the name of the movie theater on Quentin’s ticket stub. The Corsica.Easter Parade.6/24/76. On the movie stub, there had been an identical star logo.
“My God,” she whispered.
“Robin?”
She whirled around and saw her standing in the doorway. “Hi Nikki,” Robin said, calm as she could, the penny burning in her hand.
Thirty-Seven
June 20, 1976
11:00P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
We’re going to Death Valley. Elizabeth and me. Gabriel is in the back seat sleeping. But we’re not going to keep him around for long.
We are in Elizabeth’s car, driving to the Gideon compound, where there is no phone and no TV and no helicopter surveillance. No cops. If we make it all the way there, Elizabeth says, I will be free. Elizabeth and I look so much alike, we could be sisters. Twins, even. She says I’ll fit right in with the other Gideons because they’re all blond like us. She says they will give me a place to hide without asking questions. And she’ll like it better there, with another girl to hang out with. Elizabeth says the Gideons hate the government, and therefore they will love anyone who is on the run from the law.
Once we get to the Gideon compound, I will kill Gabriel and bury him in the desert.
Aurora Grace, I hope there never comes a time in your life when circumstances force you to escape your own body. When you feel so powerless that your soul acts on its ownand pushes out through your skin, just to get away from YOU. That was what happened to me at the Arco station. I told Elizabeth about it, and she understood. She said, “I have felt that exact thing.” But I think that in her case, it was for physical reasons.
My beautiful, sweet future daughter, I don’t want to tell you what happened at the Arco station. I can’t find words to put on this page that won’t start me shaking and crying and wanting to die. What I can tell you is this: Gabriel definitely killed Jenny. Before Arco, I had the tiniest spark of hope that I had been right about hearing Jenny’s breathing over the phone, that she really was out there somewhere with people taking care of her, that Gabriel had only told me he killed her because he wanted to hurt me. Before Arco, I thought,He wouldn’t do that. Gabriel LeRoy may be a lot of terrible things. But he would never kill a little child.I was wrong, though. He would. He did. He killed his own half sister. And now, I feel such strangling hate toward him, I will never be able to breathe again until I snuff him out like a match.
June 21, 1976
3:00A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
We are here, at last. Everyone is asleep, and I am using a lantern to see the page. There is no electricity. The water comes from a well, and the compound itself is just a few tents set up on the desert sand. It’s much smaller than I thought it would be, but just like Elizabeth said, there arellamas and chickens who live behind fences. They are so cute. I want to play with them all. It was cold when we got here, but Elizabeth and I built a fire in the pit. It warms my skin and smells like home is supposed to smell, and I may finally sleep for the first time in days. But not yet. I can’t sleep yet.
Aurora Grace, I need to tell you something, and it starts with Gabriel sleeping. He was sound asleep and snoring in the back seat when Elizabeth first pulled through the metal gate. When she parked the car, he woke and said, “Are we there yet, Baby Blue?” And, to be honest, my heart melted a little. I blame it on all the unhealthy things I’ve been doing for the past few days—the lack of sleep and the lack of food, the drags off Elizabeth’s cigarettes and the swigs from her vodka bottle and constantly worrying about cops and the awful things I’ve seen, the way those things have changed me. I think all that poison mixed up in my head like ingredients thrown into a blender, and my brain drank it all and turned to mush. So when I looked at that monster, that child-murderer, he just looked like a boy to me.
“We’re here,” I told him.
Gabriel got out of the car, and he looked around. “Where are we?” he said.
I told him Death Valley, and his eyes started darting around like he’d suddenly gone insane. I told him we’re at the Gideon compound, just like we talked about, and he got even crazier. “No, no, no, no. I never said we could come here.”
So I said, “What are you talking about? This is the only safe place there is.”
And he said it again. “I never said we could come here. I never gave you my permission to take us here.”
And I said, “I don’t need your fucking permission.”
He hit me. Again. Knocked me down, and it was like the ground came rushing up into the whole side of my body. My legs were all scraped up. My jaw ached from the punch. There was a ringing in my ear too, and when I put my hand up to it, it was wet from blood.
Elizabeth had been looking for firewood, but she came running back when she heard him slug me. You could HEAR it from far away—that’s how hard he’d hit. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she yelled. Gabriel started yelling back. I was surprised no one in the tents were waking up because even with my ear the way it was, I could hear them loud and clear.
Anyway, Gabriel’s gun was out of bullets, but Officer Nelligan’s was in the back seat of Elizabeth’s car, right next to where Gabriel had been lying. I crawled over to the car and threw open the door and grabbed that gun, and when Gabriel called Elizabeth the c-word, I shot him in the stomach. He fell to the ground. I pushed myself up to my feet and stood over him for a while, trying to figure out how I felt. He said something I could barely hear—my ear was still ringing. So I leaned in closer and he said it again: “Jenny is with my sister.”
