Page 37 of Ringer
She couldn’t shake the idea that death had come, now, to settle the score.
When the door opened and instead she saw Pete Rogers, bloodless and exhausted-looking and definitely alive, she almost cried out. He was sitting at a table wedged between the metal shelving, which had been cleared of everything but a few cardboard boxes—or maybe that was all the evidence of crime in this part of Lancaster County. He was gripping a Styrofoam cup of what smelled like hot chocolate, and he had a blanket draped around his shoulders. The room was cold and extremelybleak, with a cement floor and exposed wire-encased lightbulbs.
“It’s the only room that locks besides the drunk tank,” Agrawal said, as if he knew what Kristina was thinking. “I wanted to be sure he had privacy.”
“Pete.” Kristina’s relief lasted only a second—fear grew almost immediately again inside her, a hard, cold metal thing that stuck in her throat. The night before, she’d gone instinctively for the Klonopin in her purse, only to find that suddenly her throat wouldn’t work to swallow. She literally could not get the pill down.
She hadn’t been this sober in years. She hadn’t been this afraid, either.
“Pete.” She went to him and knelt, taking his hands, which were cold, noting the bruised color of his eyelids and the capillaries broken across his cheeks and forehead. “Pete.”
He showed no sign of having heard her.
“He’s in shock,” Geoff said, as though it weren’t obvious.
“One of the troopers picked him up right on the shoulder of the turnpike a quarter of an hour ago, near the intersection of Route 72,” Agrawal said. “My guy nearly plowed him.”
“He needs a hospital,” Kristina said. She had a memory of seeing Pete, April, and Gemma laughing together at her birthday party, playing bocce barefoot on the lawn.Pete’s pants were rolled to the knees and Gemma had several paper cocktail umbrellas tucked behind her ear. She was laughing. Could that really have been only four days ago?
“We’ve got a team from Lancaster General on their way now,” Agrawal said. “I wanted to bring you in first. In case...” Kristina didn’t miss the look Captain Agrawal gave her husband.
“Gemma’s still out there.” Pete’s voice was so raw it hurt just to hear. It was as if he was speaking through a mouth full of thorns. He started to stand up, lost his balance, and sat down again. “I lost her. We have to find her.”
“Shhh.” She put a hand on his forehead, which was clammy with sweat. She smoothed back his hair. She had met his mother once—a cheerful, round-faced woman who’d arrived with paint still smudged on one cheek. She was a kindergarten teacher, she’d explained, and Kristina had immediately envied her warm, chaotic friendliness. “It’s okay. Just tell me what happened.”
He was grabbing the table as though he still worried he might fall down, even though he was sitting. “It was Calliope,” he said, his voice cracking over every syllable. “She must have had the whole thing planned from the start. Gemma tried to warn me and I didn’t listen. I didn’t believe her.” He was shaking. Kristina reached out andput a hand on his back, trying to rub some warmth into him. “There was so much blood....”
Immediately, it was as if the cold had flowed into her body as well. “What—what do you mean?” Memories swept suddenly through her head, brightly awful, like dead leaves: Gemma’s veins threaded with tubes and needles, like some kind of alien plant; Gemma’s mouth leaking blood the first time she’d lost a tooth; the thick Y-shaped scar across her chest, so similar to the incision that morticians made after death.
“There were three of them,” Pete said. “One of them was just a kid.”
“What are you talking about?” Kristina’s voice sounded loud in the little room. “What’s he talking about?”
“He means those homicides off Hemlock,” Agrawal said quietly, avoiding Kristina’s eyes. She knew that something terrible had happened to one of the Amish families in the area, but she had deliberately tried not to listen. She had enough tragedy of her own. She couldn’t handle anyone else’s. “He was on the scene.” But Kristina had the feeling that there was more, that there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“I told Gemma to run,” Pete said. He wouldn’t look at her. He was staring at his fists, balled now in his lap. “They were coming after her. There was no other choice.”
The cold made Kristina’s fingers and lungs tingle.“Whowas coming after her?”
Pete shook his head. It was as if he’d forgotten anyone else was in the room. “They thought she was Calliope,” he said. “That was the whole point. That was what Calliope wanted.”
Kristina imagined herself freezing, like a pane of glass webbed with frost, filling with tiny cracks. “Who’s Calliope?”
Pete met her eyes, finally. “Calliope’s one of Gemma’s replicas,” he said.
“One of... ?” Kristina tried to take a step backward and knocked one of the shelving units behind her. There was nowhere to go, no space at all. She couldn’t breathe.
“All right, that’s enough.” Geoff came forward and tried to put a hand on Kristina’s shoulder, but she jerked away. “The kid is in shock, Kristina. He needs to go the hospital, like you said.”
“Numbers six through ten,” Pete said, as if he hadn’t heard. Now that he was looking at Kristina, she wished that he would look away. “Five in all. But Calliope wanted to be human.”
“He’s confused.” Geoff’s voice seemed to reach her from a distance, as if she really were hearing him through a thick layer of ice. The air had frozen in her lungs. She couldn’t speak. She had the sense that she and Pete were alone at the bottom of a lake, that everyoneelse, the whole world, was held at bay by thousands of tons of water.
“That’s why Calliope did it,” Pete said, in a whisper. “She wanted to switch places.”
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 22 of Lyra’s story.
TWENTY-THREE
