Praying for Sleep

33

He whispers, “You thought I’d never find out.”

Lis backs into a rosebush and senses a thorn easing into her thigh. She feels little pain, she hardly hears the rain pummeling the glass roof above them.

“How pathetic of you, Lis. How pathetic. Sneaking into hotels. Strolling on the beach…” He shook his head. “Don’t look so shocked. Of course I knew. Almost from the begi

Her throat clogs with fear and her eyes dip momentarily shut. “And that’s why you’re doing this? Because I had an affair? My God, you-”

“Whore!” He lunges forward and strikes her in the face. She falls to the ground. “My wife. My wife!”

“But you were seeing someone!”

“That gives you license to cheat? That’s not the law in any jurisdiction that I know of.”

Lightning flashes though it’s now in the east. The heart of the storm has passed over them.

“I fell in love with him,” she cries. “I didn’t plan on it. Why, you and I spent months talking about divorce.”

“Oh, of course,” he says in a snide voice, “that excuses you.”

“Robert loved me. You didn’t.”

“Robert was interested in anything in a skirt.”

“No!”

“He fucked half of the women in Ridgeton. A few of the men too probably-”

“That’s a lie! I loved him. I won’t have you…”

But through these protests another thought rises into her mind. She considers months and dates. She considers their reconciliation after Owen’s affair-just around the time Mrs. L’Auberget was diagnosed as terminally ill. She considers his resistance to buying the nursery. Her tears slow and she looks at him coldly. “It’s something else, isn’t it? It’s not just that I was seeing Robert.”

The estate. Of course. Her millions.

“You and Robert talked about getting married,” Owen says, “you talked about divorcing me, cutting me out of everything.”

“You talk like it’s money you earned. It was my father’s. And I’ve always been more than generous. I… Wait. How did you know Robert and I talked about getting married?”

“We knew.”

Stu

Owen wasn’t seeing a lawyer at all. Dorothy was his lover. Was and still is. Obedient Dorothy. They pla

“Who do you think called the day of the picnic to get me into work? That wasn’t my secretary. Oh, Lis, you were so blind.”

“You were at the park after all. I thought I saw you.”

“I stopped at the office and had my calls forwarded from there to the phone in the Acura. I was at the park fifteen minutes before you. I followed you to the beach.”

And he waited.

Dorothy forgot Lis’s copy of Hamlet intentionally, thinking that she’d go back to the truck alone for it. Owen would be waiting for her.

But it was Robert, not Lis, who went after the book, hoping to meet Portia. Robert must have wandered past Owen, who attacked him at the mouth of the cave. Bleeding badly, Robert had run inside and Owen had pursued him. Claire must have heard Robert’s calls for help and followed.

And it would have been Owen who found the knife Lis had dropped near Robert’s body.

“The mutilation! Why, you bastard!”

“Let the punishment fit the crime.”

“Michael never hurt Robert?”

“Hurt him? The son of a bitch tried to save him! He was crying, he was saying, ‘I’ll get that blood off your head, don’t worry, don’t worry.’ Some crap like that.”

“And you’ve been waiting for something like this…” She laughs, looking around her at the night. “You didn’t go out there to kill him at all. You went to bring him here! You were going to let him… let him finish the job tonight!”

“At first I thought that was why he escaped-to come after you. Then I tracked him to Cloverton. He-”

“That woman… Oh, Owen…”

“No, he didn’t hurt her. He just tied her up so she couldn’t reach the phone. I found her in the kitchen. He’d been muttering to her that he was on his way to Ridgeton to save someone named Lisbo

“You did it?” she whispers. “You killed her?”

“I didn’t plan it. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! I made it look as if he’d done it. I dumped her motorcycle in a river. The cops thought he was going to Boyleston but I knew he was headed this way.”

Of course he did. He knew all along that Michael had a motive for coming to Ridgeton-to find the woman who’d lied about him in court.

“And you shot Trenton. And the deputy outside!”

He grows eerily calm now. “It got out of hand. It started simple and it got out of hand.”

“Owen, please, listen to me. Listen.” She hears in her voice the same desperate but soothing tone with which she’d addressed Michael a half hour before. “If you want the money, for God’s sake, you can have it.”

But looking at his face, she knows that the money isn’t the point at all. She thinks of her conversation with Richard Kohler. Michael might be mad, yes, but at least his demented world is incorruptibly just.

It’s her husband who’s the psychopath; he’s the one immune to mercy.

Lis realizes now that he must have begun pla

“Oh, God,” she whispers.

Portia too.

She realizes that he must have intended to kill her as well.

“No!” Her wail fills the greenhouse. “No!”

And she does the very thing she’d left her basement hideout for, the very thing she prayed for strength to do but never believed herself capable of until this instant-she turns, picks up the kitchen knife from the table behind her and swings the blade at him with all her strength.

She’s aimed for his neck but instead hits his cheek. His head bounces back from the impact of the metal. The gun flies from his hand. He blinks in shock.

Blood appears instantly, sheets of blood covering his head like a crimson veil.

For an instant they stand motionless, staring at each other, their thoughts as frozen as their bodies. Neither breathes.

Then with the howl of a combat soldier Owen leaps for her. She falls to the ground, dropping the knife, holding her hands over her face to ward off his maniacal pummeling. She takes a stu

But he recovers quickly and renews the assault, his fury overpowering her. She’s no match for his strength or weight, even with the wound on his face and a damaged arm. Soon she’s on her back, her shoulders and neck lacerated by bits of gravel. His hand is on her throat, squeezing hard. The lights of the greenhouse, blue and green, dim lights all, grow dimmer as her lungs beg for oxygen they can’t have. Her hands flail toward his hugely bloody face. They strike only air then fall to the ground. A dust of blackness fills her eyes. She says something to him, words he ca

In her last moment of consciousness a small shadow forms at some distant focal point-part of her brain dying, she thinks. This shadow grows from a tiny mass to an encompassing darkness that hangs in the air, a wad of black storm cloud. Then the glass roof directly above the struggling couple disintegrates into a million shards, and bits of wood and glass envelop the hurtling shadow like bubbles of air following a high diver into water.