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“Marie,” I say softly, my eyes going to the floor in thought. “She has something on you about Marie’s death.” I swallow and look up at him. “What does she have on you, Crane?”
What did you do?
His face pales, that downturned mouth twisting in grief. “She knew that I killed my wife.”
I feel the air knocked out of me. “Oh.”
Then Crane is dropping to his knees in front of me, holding onto my hand. “You have to listen to me, Kat, you have to listen to me and believe me. Please.” He takes my hands and brings them to his lips, leaving a desperate kiss. I so rarely see Crane in this sort of anguish, let alone on his knees in such a submissive way.
“Okay,” I say softly, feeling any resolve I may have had melt already.
“It was an accident,” he says, and with the way he says it, with his whole heart, I know it was. I know Crane isn’t a killer. “I had done so many wrong things that evening, but killing her was an accident.”
“What happened?” I ask, squeezing his hand and even that gesture makes his expression crumble with relief.
“I suspected she was having an affair,” he says, clearing his throat, emotions swirling in his stormy eyes. “For months, I suspected. There was no love left in our marriage at all, and I knew, I had a feeling. So I did something I shouldn’t have. I read her memories while she was sleeping, without her permission. And I discovered she was having an affair with our neighbor, Ray. So…”
He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, holding my hand against his forehead, as if in prayer. “So I paid Ray a visit. I didn’t know…I didn’t know when I went to see him how I would feel. I was so…disoriented and confused. I didn’t know if I should kill him or…fuck him.”
My eyes widen and even Brom inhales sharply from beside me.
“I chose to fuck him,” Crane says, lowering my hand to look at me, his jaw flexing. “And in that moment, I chose to embrace who I was. Every dark, deviant part of me. There was no turning back. And while Ray and I were in the middle of it, the first I had ever been with a man, Marie walked into his house and saw us. I threatened to divorce her for her adultery, but my own adultery was thrown back in my face. She called me a sodomite, a heathen, and said that she would tell the school board, get me fired, tell the world. So I was angry, I was so angry, and I pushed her and she…fell.”
He trails off, looking away, brows knitted together as if reliving the scene. “And she fell hard. Hit her head on the wood floor. Blood began to pool and I fell to my knees and I panicked. I panicked. I tried to bring her back to life…”
“Jesus, Crane,” Brom says.
“Jesus wasn’t listening,” Crane says in a faraway voice. “He was absent in that moment. Because she came back. Just for a moment. Just to let me know how awful I was, and that I had done something no one should ever do. Bring someone back to life. Then she died, again. For good.”
He closes his eyes, bringing my hand to his mouth and kissing it. “Oh, and then my troubles really began,” he says against my skin. “Ray had seen what I’d done. Called me a demon. It was only because of his participation earlier that I was able to keep him from reporting me. He knew I would turn him in too. Two men in a relationship, a dead woman. It would be easy to spin it any way. In the end we had to pretend we were having an evening in, the three of us friends, and that she had slipped and fallen and that was that. Naturally, I didn’t move on in a healthy way. I quit my job. Moved across the country. Discovered opium.”
“Discovered me,” Brom says quietly.
“Discovered you,” Crane says, gazing up at him fiercely. Then he fixes his eyes on me. “And found you, Kat. The only things in this life that have kept me from total damnation.”
The room falls silent with the weight of his words.
“But,” I begin after a minute, sucking on my lip, “but if that’s what happened, then what does Leona have on you?”
He sighs tiredly. “She can plant false memories in my mind, for one. Make me believe that I did it. And she said she could falsify the original police report in some way. I have no idea how, she’d have to get out to San Francisco, I guess. But I do believe her, I believe in her power. And I do believe she’d stop at nothing to ensure I was out of the picture, so that you and Brom can fulfill your prophecy.”
