Douglas Preston - Two Graves

Now, in his mind, he opened his eyes again. Five hours had passed. And Helen Esterhazy Pendergast was sitting in the window seat across from him. Of all the rooms in the Dakota apartment, this had been Helen’s favorite. She had not been especially fond of New York, and this tiny den—cozy with books and the smell of polished wood, the view of Central Park spread out before it—had been her particular retreat.

Of course, Helen was not there in the literal sense; but in every other way she existed: everything in Pendergast’s mind that touched on her, every memory, every tiny detail, was part of that mental construct, so much so that she could be said to have assumed a quasi-autonomous existence.

Such was the beauty and power of Chongg Ran.

Helen’s hands were folded in her lap, and she was wearing a dress he well remembered—black satin, with pale coral-colored stitching traced along the low neckline. She was younger—about the age she had been at the time of the hunting accident.

Accident . The irony of it was that it had been an accident—only not in the way he’d believed these many years.

“Helen,” he said.

Her eyes rose to meet his briefly. She smiled and then looked down again. The smile caused him to flinch in pain and grief; and the scene wavered and almost flew apart. He waited until it stabilized, until his heart slowed back down.

“There is a serial killer loose in the city,” he said. He could hear the quaver in his own voice, along with a formal tone uncharacteristic of his usual exchanges with his wife. “He has killed three times. Each time, he left a message. The second message was Happy Birthday .”

There was a silence.

“This second killing took place on my birthday. Because of that—and certain other elements of the murders—I began to suspect they were the work of my brother, Diogenes. This seemed to be confirmed when I compared my DNA with that of the killer and learned that we were, in fact, closely related. Close enough to be brother-to-brother.”

He stopped, checking to see the impact these words were having on his wife. But she continued to look down at the hands clasped in her lap.

“But now I’ve had a look at the mtDNA results as well. And they’ve shown me something else. The killer isn’t related to me alone. He’s also related to you .”

Helen looked up. She either could not, or would not, speak.

“Do you remember that trip you made to Brazil? It was about a year before we were married, and you were away a long time—almost five months. At the time, you told me you were on a mission for Doctors With Wings. But that was a lie—wasn’t it? The truth was that… that you went to Brazil in order to secretly bear a child. Our child.”

The words hung in the air. Helen returned his gaze, a stricken look on her face.

“I think I even know when the child was conceived. It was on that first moonrise we shared—two weeks after we met. Wasn’t it? And now… now you’ve left me to come to terms with the fact that I have not only a son I do not know, a son I’ve never met—but a son who is also a serial killer.”

Helen dropped her eyes once again.

“I’ve also seen documents that indicate your family—and, in fact, yourself and your brother, Judson—were involved in eugenics experiments that date back to the Nazi regime. Brazil; John James Audubon; Mengele and Wolfgang Faust; Longitude Pharmaceuticals; the Covenant, Der Bund —it’s a long, ugly story that I’m only beginning to piece together. Judson explained a piece of it to me once, not long before he died. He said: What I’ve become was what I was born to be. It’s what I was born into— and it’s something beyond my control. If you only knew the horror that Helen and I have been subjected to, you’d understand .”

He paused, swallowed.

“But the truth is that I don’t understand. Why did you hide so much from me, Helen? Your pregnancy, our child, your family’s past, the horrors Judson spoke of—why didn’t you let me help you? Why did you keep our child apart from me all these years—and in so doing perhaps allow him to become… what he has now become? As you surely knew, those tendencies are a dark strain in my family going back generations. The truth is, you never, ever mentioned him until your own dying words to me: He’s coming .”

Helen refused to look at him. She was clenching and unclenching the hands that lay in her lap.

“I’d like to believe you weren’t complicit—or, at least, merely tangentially complicit—in your sister’s death. I’d also like to believe Emma Grolier, as she was known, was already dead, mercifully euthanized, when you learned of the plan. I certainly hope that was the case. It would certainly have made the whole arrangement easier to swallow for you.

“But why did she have to die for you in the first place? I have been thinking about that for a long time now, and I believe I understand what happened. After learning about the Doane family tragedy, and the cruel way they were used, you must have threatened Charles Slade and Longitude—and by extension Der Bund —with exposure over the Audubon drug. So the decision was made, in turn, to kill you in order to keep you silent. Correct?”

Now Helen’s hands were trembling.

“Judson, your own brother, was tasked with the job. But he couldn’t do it—and the very assignment was, no doubt, what made him secretly break with the Covenant. Instead he devised a way, an elaborate way, to keep you alive. He knew that your damaged twin sister had a terminal illness—I’ve just today been able to glean that much of her medical history from the public record. So he arranged for that hunting accident with the Red Lion—planning to substitute your twin sister’s body for yourself. He told his minders about the blank cartridges in your gun; told them you’d be taking lead on the hunt. Der Bund was satisfied by that. He’d found a lion that would drag you away without harming you, but would also maul your sister’s body on command. And Judson kept the plan from you until the night before—didn’t he? That’s why you seemed out of sorts that final evening in Africa—he was there near the camp, along with the lion’s handlers and Emma’s recently deceased corpse. He called you out and explained the whole scheme. Only it didn’t go quite as expected; the lion didn’t exactly stick to the plan, and you lost a hand as it dragged you away. Good thing your sister’s body was, right afterward, sufficiently devoured as to allow Judson to leave your own hand—and the ring—behind as even more evidence proving your death. My word—the presence of mind he must have had.”

Pendergast shook his head bitterly. “What a fiendishly complex arrangement—but it had to be complex, to keep from arousing my suspicions. If what happened had not seemed absolutely, utterly an act of nature, I would not have rested until learning the truth—just as I am not resting now.”

A moment of terrible silence.

“But again—why didn’t you simply come to me, that night in the hunting camp? Why didn’t you let me help you? Why, why did you shut me out?”

He paused. “And there’s something else—something I have to know. Do you love me, Helen? Did you ever love me? I always felt in my heart that you did. But now, learning all this—now I can’t be certain. I’d like to believe you first met me simply for access to the Audubon records, but that you then, unexpectedly, fell in love with me. I’d like to believe that your pregnancy was a mistake. But am I wrong in so thinking? Was our marriage just a contrivance? Was I an unwitting pawn in some grand design I don’t yet understand the full extent of? Helen, please tell me. It is… it is a kind of agony for me, not knowing.”