Page 41 of Sting of Sin

And he laughed, a soft, delighted, genuinely amused laugh, the worst sound in the whole room.

"Oh, Beatrice. No." He said it almost tenderly, like I'd done something charming. "I don't stand on hills. I don't pick up hammers and skulk in the weeds and let cameras hunt for my face. That's not what I am. That was a man I paid, a good one, careful, the kind who knows how to be no one, and I sent him to sit where your people would be sure to find him, so they'd point all their guns and all their cameras at a hill miles from their gate and feel like they were doing something." His eyes glittered. "You felt one of my men, and your body, that magnificent broken instrument of yours, screamed him, him, him, and it was right that there was danger, and wrong about where, and your people spent weeks staring at a decoy. I have never once had to be in the room, Beatrice. That's the whole of me. I am never in the room. I am the reason you're in it."

The fog was almost gone now. I could feel my whole right side, my arm, my leg, the cool of the bed rail under my fingers where my hand had drifted. I didn’t move it. I breathed slow and I let him think I was a thing on a table.

"I like to leave my projects alone with the hurt after I break them. But somehow your brother found you in the woods before I returned to bring you here," he said, and now there was the irritation, the only crack in all that calm, He shook his head, almost rueful. "Do you want to know the worst of it? The hospital. Those four years you spent there, thinking you were rotting, I was right there. I signed the paper that put you there. Did you know that? My signature. My recommendation. I wrote your cage myself, so that if I couldn't have you in my quiet place yet, at least no one else could have you either, and I could sit across from you in a room any time I liked and watch."

"The man watching from the door." My voice was steadier now. I made it small on purpose. "That was you.”

"Yes." Warm again, settling, a man getting to the part he loved. "Some nights I sat with you, just watching, planning on how to get you here, and that, Beatrice, was the most exquisite frustration of my life. Because your brother and the hospital kept you from me. Slowly, stupidly, with their groups and their pills and their kindness, they kept knitting you back together, and my work, my real work, needs you the other way. And then I saw you coming back alive when Eli started showing up and I knew I had to hurry."

He leaned forward, and the hunger was all the way out now, naked on that tired ordinary face. "Shall I tell you what I do? What I actually do, that no hospital and no club and no gentle word will ever be able to undo once it's done? I take a mind. I learn it the way you'd learn a piece of music. And then I heal it, just enough to be worth something, and I break it, precisely, in exactly the right place, and I heal it, and I break it again, a little deeper, and again, and each time I learn a little more about the one thing I've spent my whole life trying to find. The exact place a person stops. The precise point past which they do not come back." He was almost whispering now, reverent. "I have brought people very close to it. I have never, not once, been allowed to follow someone all the way there. They keep dying on me.”

He smiled at me, gentle as a bedside.

"But you won’t die on me, I can feel it. There's no hospital here. No gate. No brother. No lover. There's a great deal of time, and a very quiet road, and you, and me, and finally—finally—nothing in the world to stop us finding the bottom of you together."

Behind him, by the door, I heard Holly make a small sound, a wet broken catch of breath.

***

IT WAS LIKE he’d forgotten Holly. He was too deep in the pleasure of being heard. Four years he'd kept all of it locked behind that gentle tired face, and now it was pouring out of him, and a man pouring himself out doesn't watch the room.

Her hand went into her pocket, and she gave me a look that said without words she was getting help. I knew I had to keep him talking.

“People are going to look for me.”

"I have everything worked out," he said, because he wanted to tell me, because the cleverness of it was a thing he'd been dying to show someone. "It was almost insultingly easy. I am a respected man at Crestwood, Beatrice. Twenty years. My name on a paper makes that paper true; nobody there has ever once thought to check behind me. So I find you wondering around, confused, still not able to talk. I’ll continue the transfer—routine, well-documented, entirely mine. The trouble with a transfer is that it needs a destination, and a doctor on the other end to receive you, and I could hardly write my own name on the place where you were going to cease to exist."

"Sutter," I whispered.

His eyebrows lifted, delighted. "You remember the name. Good. Yes. Dr. Sutter." He said it like a man fond of his own joke. "A colleague. A weak, indebted little man at the place I was sending you, the kind every hospital keeps and none of them look at too closely. He owed me. Years back I made a very large problem of his quietly disappear, and men like that never do stop paying for a thing like that. So I called the debt in. I asked him to accept a transfer, to sign as the receiving physician, and to ask me nothing at all. And he did. He signed for a woman he never examined, never met, never once laid eyes on, because I told him to, and because he’s afraid of me, and because it’s astonishing, Beatrice, what a frightened man will put his name to as long as you let him keep his hands clean of the rest of it."

He smiled, and it was worse than any snarl. "That is the beauty of it. He knows nothing, so there is nothing in him to find. I don't build my walls out of lies, Beatrice. Lies crack. I build them out of real men with real reasons to keep their mouths shut. And then the plan itself was simple, and I was proud of it. I'd drive you north myself, three hours, a long quiet road. And somewhere along it, at some forgettable rest stop, a confused and fragile woman would wander away from her doctor into a thousand square miles of desert and never, ever be found. Beatrice Keene, lost. So sad. So predictable, given her history. And Dr. Sutter, three hours off in his clean little office, would be as baffled as the police, with nothing on this earth to tie the two of us together but one signature and a debt that lives in no ledger anywhere."

"But my brother and Eli ruined everything for you," I said.

And there it was again, the only crack in him, the irritation, real and ugly under all that silk.

“Only for a time,” he snapped. "I was one day from having you on that road. One day. And your animals came over a wall in the dark a second time and took you out from under me.” He drew a slow breath, smoothed it back down, became the gentle doctor again. "But waiting has never frightened me, Beatrice. It's the one thing I'm better at than anyone alive. I sent a man to keep your dogs barking at the gate. And I went looking, the way I always look, for the loneliest person standing nearest the door."

His eyes moved, at last, to Holly.

And Holly had stopped crying.

She was standing very straight now, her back against the wall by the door, and the horror that had been drowning her face for the last hour had finished its work and left something else behind, something I recognized, because I'd been growing the same thing in my own chest this whole time. She'd gone past fear into the cold clear country on the other side of it.

"You said you loved me," she said.

"I said a great many useful things." He didn't even turn fully toward her. "You were a door, Holly. A very good one. You should be proud. You're the reason she's here. None of the others could have walked her out. It took the one woman in that whole house who hated her enough to believe she was doing her a kindness." He smiled, mild. "I chose you very carefully. You were perfect. Try to take some comfort in that."

"Oh, you sick thing," Holly breathed. "You sick, sick thing. I brought her to you. I drugged her and drove her out that gate and I handed her to you thinking you were going to help her." Her voice cracked clean in half and then came back harder, fierce, shaking. "I already called them."

He went still.

"I called the clubhouse. The second you started, the second I heard what you really sound like." Tears were streaming down her face but her voice held like a wire pulled tight. "They're coming. They’re already coming, and they’re going to walk in that door and kill you, and I’m glad. You’re just like every other fucking bastard to cross my path. Do you hear me? Whatever you do to me now, I got one thing right at the end. I got her out.”

He picked up a syringe off the tray, and crossed the room faster than a man his age should be able to, and that it was quick, and quiet, the way everything about him was quiet. And that in the last second of it her eyes found mine across that clean terrible room, and there was no fear left in them at all, only that fierce wet relief, the look of a vain unhappy woman who hated me and saved me anyway, who got one true thing right when it counted and knew it as she went.