10:44 P.M.
Kate Wallis shot Martin Harris at 10:23 in the evening. It was a warm and beautiful summer night, but Kate was unaware of that. In the basement at 325 Huntington Road, it was always cold. Here the sounds of kids playing and birds singing did not penetrate, only the occasional sounds of a passing siren on the way to rescue someone else, but never her. Here, time stood still except for the shifting of dull, muted light through the barred basement windows and the sound of Martin creeping down the stairs with food she did not want.
The light had gone quickly from his eyes. They were still open, staring in disbelief. Annabelle lay on the floor beside the spreading bloodstain that welled from beneath him. Kate twitched, reaching for the gun to wipe her fingerprints from it. Martin's family heirloom, the gun that had killed Martin's father. Who had held it that day? Her hand floated toward it, then fell away. What difference did it make now? There would be gunshot residue all over her hands, if they cared to test them. She had probably only exchanged one prison for another now.
Her mind wandered back to the last family hunting trip. Martin had been their guest, flirting shamelessly with her when no one was looking or listening, dropping loaded little hints about how much he wanted her. No one else had even noticed. He had been the perfect guest as far as her family and friends were concerned; a little quiet, reserved, polite. Approved. Mama had given him the side eye repeatedly, strutting and acting the fool like she was the prize forever out of his reach. Rod Wallis' trophy. Bellowing everytime she fired and shattered a clay pigeon. Kate stared at the gun on the floor, gleaming in the pale light. "How do you like your Katie-Cat now, mama?" she mumbled, the sound barely audible in the quiet hum of her despair.
She loved him. She loathed him. Her haven had become her jailer, her lover her tormentor. She was free to go upstairs now, to call the police, to bolt through the front door and suck in the summer air and the sounds of life that had gone on without her, oblivious as she crouched near the stairwell, humming songs from the life that had once been hers, or maybe she had only imagined it and she had lived all her days down here and that other life was just some fragment of a dream she could no longer remember.
She was so tired. She lay down next to Martin, whose body was cool already, cool and still and peaceful. She would be gone by now if he had pulled the trigger on himself, which he had tried to do but failed. Martin's whole life was a series of failures, and Kate was the last of them, his ultimate fall from grace, the albatross around his neck, the girl who would expose who he had really been, if only she could climb those stairs.
She couldn't remember the name of the song she was humming, or where she had first heard it. She began to sing. Her voice sounded dry, disused, as if she had forgotten human speech and was only just now starting to remember. The words came in fits and stuttered starts.
With all the other boys I never knew
what it took to make a choice
When he's mine I'm gonna stop
all my changin' around now
Between the two of us there'll be
enough goin' on that's serious
I can't wait 'til I can stop
all my lookin' around now…
12:22 P.M.
The soft sound of her own snoring woke her. That old adage about taking secrets to the grave bounced around her head. Martin had kept another girl captive at an abandoned poultry farm outside Widow Falls. Kate imagined the smell there, the heat, the creaky silence, the dust. Her remains were out there somewhere. The police would find them. If things had gone differently tonight, Kate might well be joining the other girl, whose name had been Miranda, in a lonely grave of her own under the rot of the forgotten farm. Martin hadn't known she knew. She had discovered his scrapbook one day while he was at work and she was trying to find anything to pass the boredom-filled afternoon. It was in a plastic storage container, buried under Christmas ornaments. Articles about the girl's disappearance. A lock of her hair taped next to one of her pictures. A cassette tape of the girl screaming, begging for her life, her cries growing fainter at the end until they lapsed and there was only the click click of the recorder. Kate could tell the police right where to find all of it.
She still had not moved toward the stairs. Maybe Jeanette Turner would choose tonight to break in again and save Kate the trouble, lending credibility to why Kate had not left. Poor Kate Wallis, frozen in fear, she hadn't realized she was free and sat beside her dead captor singing and talking to him and raging at the walls that were covered with a thin, invisible veneer of her fear and despair and regret. Walls that would surround her long after she left this place. Doors that would remain locked, for they had no lock and no key and no knob and they led nowhere. "Come on," she whimpered. "Get up. Get out. It's over."
She snorted at her last words. Her stepfather would spring for expensive therapy once she was home. Ashley would shower her with disdainful sympathy, and mama would cry her crocodile tears and her histrionics would become part of the family legend, the mental scrapbook of lies and half-truths and frauds that hung over all of them like a net. Only daddy would remain hopeful that who she had been could somehow be recovered.
She would try to sleep in a room that now belonged to someone she didn't know or recognize anymore, and the only person who could truly understand that was lying dead beside her.
The gun lay there, daring her. There was another bullet chambered. Skylin would talk about it for decades; the two star-crossed lovers who couldn't bear to be parted, the traumatized girl who couldn't face returning to life on the outside of Harris' carefully constructed fantasy world. Kate Wallis, whose life had been co-opted by Jeanette Turner and buried in a shallow grave by Jamie Henson and made into a golden calf by her mother. She wondered if daddy had found out yet that mama was cheating on him.
The bloodstain beneath Martin had stopped spreading and was turning black now. It was too late to try and close his eyes; his eyelids were stiff already. Kate's feet were growing numb beneath her.
Maybe there were other girls. Survivors, like her, who would come forward and tell their stories and make her feel less weak, and ashamed, ashamed that she had loved him and let him love her, ashamed for the way her back arched to meet him in bed, guilt-ridden at the intimate daily pleasures they had shared like an old married couple. Doing the dishes, folding the laundry. Experimenting in the kitchen and ending up in bed while the dinner burned and ordering pizza instead. How could she have been so gullible, so needy, when she had a boyfriend who had given her a promise ring and a promise. But he had forgotten both for the pursuit of Jeanette Turner, remade, reborn, repurposed Jeanette, virgin territory that Jamie couldn't pass up. How easily he had shoved aside the thought of her buried in the woods somewhere to go sniffing after Jeanette, and Jeanette had been only too happy to comfort poor grief-stricken Jamie, Jeanette the voyeur who specialized in breaking into other people's lives. Jeanette who had probably given the snow globe she had stolen during her last trespass as a Christmas gift to someone. Her mother, maybe, or Vincent Fuller, who refused to see who Jeanette really was.
Hey
Wait
I got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice…
Her voice had gotten a little stronger. Kate knew where all the bodies were buried, including Scott Jones. Maybe when the police got here, she'd spill it all, make it a two-for-one kind of day for them. Then she and mama could be cellies in Woodman. One big happy family again.
"We're both freaks," she said to Martin. "I'm leaving now." But she didn't.
3:09 A.M.
"Why am I so angry at Jeanette?" Kate asked Martin. "It was probably Jeanette who sent the police here yesterday. I should be thanking her. If it had been her who went missing, my life wouldn't have stopped, or even slowed down. I wouldn't have missed a beat. It should be Jamie I hate, not her. Jamie, and you." She was hungry, and thirsty, and unmoved.
"I should go upstairs, take your valuables, and leave town. Clean out your bank account and start over somewhere new as someone new. But freedom really is an illusion, isn't it, Martin? Just because you can't see the cancer, doesn't mean it isn't there, eating you alive. If I never see these walls again, they will always be there. I've told these walls more than any person, any friend or family member, any loved one. These walls know me, the real me. And now I have to leave them. Leave you. Why didn't you just let me go? I'm leaving now. You can't stop me."
He still did.
5:05 A.M.
"When I leave, I'm going to dance in the street in front of your house. The house that felt like mine for a long time. A lifetime. I loved being the stay at home housewife for awhile, cleaning and watching soap operas and eating when I wanted and imagining what we'd do in bed that night. It was the polar opposite of everything I've ever known. I'd never hung out with myself before. I was so busy playing the part, maintaining the social act, I had no idea how to just be with myself. I'm sure my therapist will have a field day with that, unless I blow town. All those places we talked about going, and I'm thinking Oklahoma. Crazy, huh? It doesn't really matter where I go, does it, Martin? You made sure of that. You were somebody's son, somebody's brother. Somebody's killer. You've stolen all the time from me I'm going to allow. I'm going to call the police now, and I will probably just be exchanging one prison for another, once they test the gun and find my fingerprints on it. It really doesn't matter which prison we choose, does it?"
She rose on wobbly legs and padded away. The ascent up the stairs was like climbing a mountain, and she squinted at the morning sunlight flooding in through the windows. Whatever happened next, she was standing in the light again, and it felt good.