Page 89 of Heartbreak Bay

I lift a shaking hand to my mouth to stop another scream, or a wild, mad laugh.That would be cruel.He’s insane. He’s utterly, batshit crazy.

“I left you the gun,” he says then. “There’s one bullet. You decide what to do with it.”

“Why are youdoing this?”

“I gave Sheryl choices,” he says. “She was good at killing people, but you already know that. An old lady here, a husband there. But I needed to know how far she’dreallygo. Not every killer is worthy of my time. I told her about the lottery win. I told her I’d marry her, no prenup agreements. That I’d fly her to Paris in my private plane. But I wasn’t going to do any of that if she wasn’t free. That’s all I said. I didn’t tell her what to do. I gave her choices.”

I feel the floor falling out from under me, and I have to brace myself against that clean, clean wall. “You ... you ...”

“I told her to meet me,” he says. “When I got there, she was standing there, alone. No car. No children. She made her choice, Gina.” He soundsdisappointed. “And she kept on making them. I suggested that there might be video of us in the house you visited, and that would be a problem. She took a gun and ... corrected it. I suggested that Prester might be able to track us down. You know what happened; she was actually disappointed that he had a heart attack before she could killhim. I didn’t tell her to do it; she made her choices. Everybody does. And now it’s your turn.”

“You’re a fucking monster,” I whisper. “No.No.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll let you think about it.”

He stops talking. So do I.

I sit down against the door again, staring dry-mouthed, dry-eyed at Sheryl. At a woman who, if I believe that smooth, calm voice on the speaker, deliberately chose to drown her two little girls so she could run away with someone who could make all her greedy dreams come true.

Some people deserve death. I know that. I believe that. Melvin did.

But not even Melvin deservedthis.

I put the gun down. The weight of it doesn’t comfort me anymore. I put my hands over my face like a hiding child.

But there’s no hiding. Not from this.

I have to make a binary choice. Let her die horribly, in agony, screaming, or end her suffering quickly.

I let my hands fall away, limp, to my knees, and raise my face toward the ceiling. I can’t see the sky. I don’t know if God is up there. But I pray.

And then I say, “What happens if I kill her, Jonathan?”

He doesn’t answer. Maybe he doesn’t do anything at all. Maybe he leaves me locked in here with her rotting corpse to make even more horrible choices. Maybe I can hang myself with that electrical cord, at the last. Or maybe he wants me to believe something even worse: that he’ll let me out to live with it.

The speaker finally says, “My dad always used to say that crisis reveals character. You’re Gina Royal. You helped murder defenseless young women.”

“I didn’t,” I whisper. I feel so tired. So very tired. “I didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Crisis reveals character,” he says. “So we’ll see.”

When I call his name, he doesn’t answer anymore. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. Who I am. What he wants.

I just weep and desperately, desperately wish that I’d told Sam I loved him one more time, that I’d kissed my kids and told them that they are my reason for living through the hell of my past. I want to tell Kezia that I’m so, sosorry.

Just do it,I think, but the voice in my head isn’t right. It isn’t mine. And I know that the voice, just a whisper, is Melvin’s. A cool, calculating part of my mind that Jonathan wants to access and put in control. It’s trying to tell me that shooting her is a mercy, and I don’t know, maybe it would be. Or maybe it’s just the action of a killer. Melvin wants me to do it.

That’s exactly why I can’t.

Jonathan lost something huge when his skull was crushed. I don’t know what it was—what precise brain function should be there and isn’t—but what’s left is an emotionlessly logical decision-making process. He wins because he’s taken emotion out of the equation. Because he’s got the unique ability toendure.

I take a deep breath, and when I stand up, I waver for a second. The gun is such an easy choice. So easy. It would spare her. It would spare me, too, in a sense.

I sit down next to Sheryl, looking down at her. I put my hand on her cheek and I say, “I’m here, Penny Carlson. I see you. I’m right here. Everything is okay. I know you hurt. I know you’re confused. But I’m right here with you.”

This is so cruel. So cruel I can barely look at what I’m doing. But her blood supply is low, almost gone, and so is her bag of pain medication. I sit and talk to her. She answers me in low, disjointed sentences, and then she starts to make sense as the meds lose effectiveness. We talk about her folks. She cries. We talk about being out in the sunlight and flowers and grass, and how the wind moves through the trees. I sing to her, low and quiet. Toward the end, when the bag is almost dry, shelooks at me and her eyes focus and she says, “Are you here to kill me? ’Cause I did that to my kids?” Her eyes fill with tears. “I did. I did that. Why did he make me do that?”

He didn’t.I know that, not because he told me but because he prides himself on control. He makes other people do terrible things. He baits them with whatever they want. What’s the old saying? You can’t cheat an honest man. But all of us, to some level or other, are dishonest.

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