"What do you want?" He chose a pose of intimidation, chest out, one bent arm high on the doorframe, fingers dangling.
"May I come in?"
He stared at her a moment, then dropped his arm and backed up to let her pass. "Have you heard anything about Gillian?" he asked, his tone warring between resentment of Mary and desire for news of her sister.
Mary sat down on the couch. His house was clean and tidy, very different from the last time she'd been there.
He remained standing. "What do you want?"
"You love Gillian, don't you?" she asked, trying to establish a foundation for the questions that would follow.
"That's no big secret."
"And you'd like us to find her, wouldn't you?"
"Of course I would." He became animated, angry at the implication that he might not want Gillian to be found. "I'm going crazy here. If I find out who did this to her, I'll kill him." He began to pace. "I don't care if I go to prison for the rest of my life." He jabbed a finger in her direction. "I want that son of a bitch dead. If I find out he did anything to hurt Gillian—" He stopped, and his voice cracked. Emotions and energy spent, he collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his hands. When he looked up, his eyes were red. "She has to be okay," he said hoarsely. "She has to be okay."
Mary had never before seen a lack of sympathy as a handicap, but she wasn't sure anymore. "If you can't feel what they feel, how can you begin to understand them and what they might do next?" Anthony had once argued when she'd accused him of giving criminals too much soul.
"Gavin—I have to know if you had anything to do with the recent murders."
He frowned in concentration, and she could see the confusion on his face. "I have epilepsy, you know," he told her. "Sometimes I have fits and pass out, and when I wake up I can't remember what happened."
"Do you have any memory of any of the girls? Of ever seeing them? Talking to them?"
He thought about it, then slowly shook his head. "No. Nothing."
"But you said you murdered them." Her voice was low, conversational, inquisitive. "You confessed. Why would you confess to something you have no memory of?"
"There was that Cammie chick, who said I raped her. And I remember having a knife in my hand. I remember thinkin' about killing her."
"Thinking and doing are two different things."
"I know, I know." He picked up a plastic red lighter from the table and began nervously fiddling with it. Flicking it on and off, staring at the flame. "But then there was Gillian."
"Gillian?"
"Looking at me the way she was. Like I made her sick. Like I was some kind of monster. So I thought I must have killed them."
"Now what do you think?"
"I don't know." He tossed down the lighter. "My head is a mess. I can't even remember raping that college girl, but I must have done that too. I mean, I tied her up."
"Did she ask to be tied to the bed?"
"Oh, Christ." He looked at the ceiling, then rubbed his face again, clearly uncomfortable. "I think maybe she was passed out when I did it."
Mary was convinced he was in no way connected to the murders and Gillian's abduction. She didn't know about the rape. That would be for the court to decide. But now his innocence in the recent homicides brought up the other question, the main question, the question that had informed part of her life. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Gavin, I have to know if you killed Fiona Portman." Her voice took on a softer, pleading quality. "You can tell the truth," she reasoned. "You've already served your time."
"You'd like for me to say yes, wouldn't you? Because then it would be over. You could quit thinking about it. But the truth is, it will never be over. Not for you. Not for me. Because I don't know if I killed her." Gavin rarely made eye contact, but he regarded her steadily as he said, "You maybe didn't know this, but Fiona used to meet me in the woods behind her house for sex."
A few weeks ago, Mary wouldn't have believed what he was saying. She sat up a little straighter, bracing herself. "No, I didn't know that."
"She didn't want you to. She wanted you to think of her as the sweet neighbor kid."
Fiona was electric and charismatic. She drew people to her, and in a way, she cast spells on them.
"She told me not to tell anybody about us," Gavin said. "She didn't want anybody to know that she was hangin' around with me. If I saw her in the hallway at school, I was supposed to act like I hardly knew her. I could say hi—something like that, because if I acted like she wasn't there that would have seemed weird."
"Didn't that bother you?"
He shrugged and pursed his lips. "I didn't think about it too much. I was just glad she wanted something to do with me at all. And the sex." He spread his arms. "How could a guy turn down sex?"
"How did you plan your meetings?" she asked.
"I didn't have a phone, so sometimes I'd call her from a pay phone, and if her mom answered, I'd pretend I had the wrong number. But usually she'd write me notes and hand them to me, saying they were from somebody else so nobody would know she was writing to me. The notes were always the same, telling me to meet her in the tree house in the woods behind her house."
Mary remembered the strange feeling of déjà vu she'd had at the high school in Canary Falls. In it, Fiona had been passing a note to Gavin. Now it made sense.
"Here I was, fucking the smartest, hottest, most popular girl in school, and nobody knew about it. I kind of got off on it being a secret. It made it seem dangerous in a cool way. Something nobody else in the world knew about." He frowned. "Until her mother caught us."
"Abigail Portman caught you with Fiona?"
"Yeah," he said vaguely, as if struggling to remember. "We were in the tree house goin' at it, and her mother just pops in."
"Then what happened?"
"I pulled up my pants and got the hell out of there."
"Gavin, do you remember if that was the night Fiona died?"
He concentrated, trying to pull up the memory, then shook his head. "Everything's a jumble. Whenever I have fits, things get mixed up. Time gets weird. It's hard to separate my thoughts from reality."
Had Gavin Hitchcock killed Fiona, or had he been a convenient scapegoat? A victim of circumstance? Had Gillian been right about him all along? "Try to remember. Did you have a fit the night Abigail Portman caught you with Fiona?"
"Was it the same day?" he asked himself, perplexed. He finally had to give up and let it go. He couldn't remember. "All I know is that the day she died, I woke up in the woods a few feet from her. At first I thought she was asleep. Then I saw all the blood and knew she was dead. So I ran. I ran like hell. People saw me, saw the blood, and called the police. When they showed up to arrest me, I wasn't surprised. I still had Fiona's blood on me, and I thought maybe I did do it. I used to get weird ideas. I used to imagine killing people, and cutting them up. I fantasized about it, and drew sick pictures of guys with their arms cut off. Explosions with body parts flying through the air. Stuff like that. So I figured I probably did kill her.
But Gillian never thought so, and finally I began to wonder too. And now I don't know. Sometimes I think I didn't do it. But if I didn't do it, who did?"
Who did? His question echoed in her mind. And if Gavin was innocent, that meant someone had gone free while he served time for a crime he didn't commit. . . .
"I have to go," she said, getting to her feet. "Thanks for talking to me."
He stood, nervously rubbing his palms against his jeans. "Will you call me?" He swallowed, fear in his eyes. "When you find her?" No matter how you find her? were the unspoken words neither of them wanted to hear.
"Yes." Mary held out her hand.
He stared, puzzled and suspicious before finally shaking with a surprisingly firm grip. "Don't forget to call."
"I won't."
Outside, Mary was sliding into the car when her phone rang. It was Anthony. "Research just got back to us with a list of rose propagators," he told her.
"I'll be right there."
Chapter 30
The light above Gillian's head came on. She squinted against the blinding glare.
She'd spent the first three hours of solitary confinement standing with her back to the door. When her legs couldn't hold her up any longer, she'd felt around in the darkness to gingerly settle on the edge of the mattress, where she'd been ever since. She heard the rattle of metal; then the wooden door opened, shimmying against the cement threshold. She got to her feet in preparation for Mason's arrival.
In the short time she'd been with him, her old life had taken on a hazy, unreal quality. She remembered Blythe and Mary and Gavin, but they didn't seem as solid and substantial as Mason and this house.
In the back of her mind, she reasoned that the distance was brought about by drugs, lack of food, and fear, but that knowledge didn't make her other life seem any more real.
She searched Mason's face, looking for signs of his earlier impatience and lack of interest. His expression was blank, unreadable.
"I'm glad you're back," she said cautiously.
"Have you been good?"
"Very good."
"You didn't eat?" He picked up the sandwich from the mattress. "You didn't drink the water?"
"I forgot."
His lips curled. "Don't lie to me. I hate lies."
"Okay, I didn't forget," she said, quickly changing her story. Why had she said something that was so obviously untrue? She had to be more careful. "I was afraid you may have put something in it that would make me go to sleep, and I didn't want to lie down on the mattress. I was afraid to go to sleep here in the dark."
He tossed the sandwich to the floor. Then he took her by the arm and pulled her behind him, out of the room, through the winding basement, and up the stairs to the kitchen. He told her she could use the bathroom, and she hurried down the hall, shutting the door behind her.
In the bathroom by herself, she tried to gauge what his mood had been. Not much better than this morning. She was going to have to do something, come up with something that might impress him. Be somebody he wanted to keep. Because if he didn't want to keep her . . .
She splashed water on her face and was shocked by her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She looked like a junkie.
He was waiting for her outside the door. "Come on."
He led her into the kitchen, where he began frying pork chops in a skillet on the stove. "Can I help with something?" she asked, forcing herself to become a part of the surreal domestic scene. She had to act as if nothing odd was going on.
"Cut the potatoes for potato salad." He motioned toward the sink, where she found a pan of boiled potatoes along with a knife.
She picked up a peeled potato. By allowing her to use the knife he demonstrated the control he felt he had over her. It would be foolish to try to stab him. Odds were against her, and an attack would infuriate him—possibly enough to kill her.
"I love potato salad." She began cutting the potato into small squares, trying desperately to come up with harmless conversation. "Potato salad and baked beans. They just go together, don't you think?" Nothing intellectual, but it was all she could produce at the moment.
"I guess so."
Engage him. Make him answer questions. "What about apple pie? Do you like apple pie?"
"Yeah."
"Made with Jonathan apples. Maybe a few Golden Delicious thrown in, but mostly Jonathans."
"My sister used to bake pies." Upon mention of his sister, his voice suddenly became infused with life.
Small talk. Small talk was good. "Really? What kind?"
"Cherry. We have a cherry tree in the backyard. She was always baking cherry pies. And blackberry, when they were in season. She made a lot of apple pies too."
"I'd like to bake an apple pie for you," she ventured. "Would you let me do that?"
"No." The flash of elevated mood drained from him. "It wouldn't be right."
That had been careless of her. He apparently revered his sister. He wouldn't want Gillian trying to take her place. "How about a cake? Is your birthday anytime soon? I could bake you a cake."
He turned and stared. He had the strange eyes that murderers sometimes had—flat, dark, opaque.
Had she said something wrong?
"My sister is coming home soon."
Home? Does home mean what I think it means? Her heart began to hammer. "She's coming here?" Stay calm, she told herself. Don't let him see your interest.
"Tomorrow."
Tomorrow! She could hold out one more day. Of course she could hold out one more day. His sister would make him release her, maybe even make him go to the police. "We should have a party," Gillian said. "With cake and ice cream."
He smiled. He actually smiled.
Relief washed through her, and her muscles relaxed.
"You could put her name on the cake." Before her eyes, he transformed again, suddenly turning timid and shy.