Jeffery Deaver: Praying for Sleep

Why, Owen? Why are you doing this? It’s as if he’s somehow caught a virus from Michael and is raging in a fever of madness.

Another crash, on the wall opposite, as he kicks in another door.

She hears his feet again.

The room’s dimensions are no more than six by four and the ceiling is only chest high. It reminds her of the cavern at Indian Leap, the black one, where Michael had whispered that he could smell her. Lis thinks too of the times as a girl when she huddled in this same space; then filled with coal, while Andrew L’Auberget was in the backyard stripping a willow branch. Then she’d hear his footsteps too as he came for his daughter. Lis read Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl a dozen times when she was young and although she understands the futility of concealment she always hid.

But Father found her.

Father hurt her doubly when she’d tried to escape from him.

Still, she made this castle keep as defensible as she might-stockpiling crackers and water and a knife and flinging all but one of the green brass keys to the ancient lock into the lake, hiding the remaining one on a nail inside, above the door.

But the mice got the crackers, the water evaporated, a cousin’s child found the knife and took it home with him.

And the key proved irrelevant for when Father said open the door she opened it.

Metal sounds on concrete and rings as it falls. Owen grunts as he retrieves the crowbar. Lis cries silently, and lowers her head. She finds in her hand the clipping-Michael’s macabre gift, spookier to her than the skull. As the blows begin, she clutches the newsprint desperately. She hears a grunt of effort, silence for the length of time it takes the metal to traverse the passageway outside then a resounding crash. The oak begins to shatter. Yet her room, so far, is inviolable. It’s the old boiler room next door that Owen is assaulting. Of course… That room has a head-high window. He’d be thinking that she would logically pick the room that offers an exit. But no-smart Lis, Lis the teacher, Lis the scholar after her father’s own heart, has cleverly chosen the room without an escape route.

Another crash, and another. A dozen more. The wood shrieks as nails are extracted. A huge crack. His footsteps recede. He’s looked inside and seen that she isn’t there and that the window is still covered with dusty plywood.

She hears nothing. Lis realizes that she can see again. A tiny shaft of light bleeds into the room around her through a crack in the thin wall shared with the boiler room. Her eyes grow accustomed to the illumination and she peers out, seeing nothing. She cannot hear her husband and she is left alone in this cell with the spirit of her father, a dozen pounds of ancient anthracite, and the clipping, which she now understand holds the explanation as to why she is about to die.

The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed to save POOR EVE

The paper is smeared and disintegrating. But she’s able to read most of Michael’s handwriting.

… heADs. i AM…

AD… AM

ADAM

These sentences, circled, are connected by lines resembling blood veins to the photo accompanying the article. The person they point to, however, is not Lis. They extend to the left of the photograph and converge upon the man who holds open the car door for her.

The BETRAYER hIdeS as the crusher of heADs. i AM to be sacrificed…

Michael’s inked lines encircle Owen.

The BETRAYER IS ADAM.

Is this the purpose of Michael’s journey tonight? Has he come here as an angel of warning, not of revenge? She opens the clipping fully. It is stamped, Library Marsden State Mental Health Facility.

Think now…

Michael saw the article in the hospital, perhaps long after the trial. Perhaps in September-just before he sent his note to her. She tried to recall his words… Eve of betrayal. Perhaps his message was not that she was the betrayer but rather the betrayed.

Perhaps…

Yes, yes! Michael’s role at Indian Leap was that of witness, not murderer.

“Lis,” Owen says calmly. “I know you’re down here somewhere. It’s useless, you know.”

She folds the clipping and sets it on the floor. Perhaps the police will find it in the investigation that will follow. Perhaps the owner of this house fifty years from now will notice the clipping and wonder about its meaning and the people depicted in the photo before tossing it out or giving it to his daughter for a scrapbook. More likely, Owen will comb the house and tidily dispose of it, like every other clue.

He is, after all, meticulous in his work.

No more prayers for dawn. The storm rages and the sky outside is as dark as the hole in which she hides. There are no whipsawing lines of colored lights filling the night. Owen’s grisly task will take only seconds: a bullet into her with Michael’s gun then one for the madman with his own… Owen would be found sobbing on the floor, clutching Lis’s body, raging at the same police who’d ignored him when he begged for protection of his wife.

She hears his footsteps on the gritty corridor outside.

And then, the same as with her father, Lisbonne rises to her feet and, dutifully and with a minimum of fuss, unlocks the door then pulls it gratingly aside.

“Here I am,” she says, just as she used to.

Ten feet away Owen holds the crowbar. He’s somewhat surprised to see her appear from this direction and he seems, if anything, disappointed that he was careless enough to let his enemy get behind him. She says to him softly, “Whatever you want, Owen. But not here. In the greenhouse.” And before he can speak, she has turned her back to him and started up the stairs.

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 beginning.”

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?”