Though he really hadn’t needed to give her a watch at all, had he, since he wore one?
“Dr. Daggett,” Kincaid called from the other side of the door. “Is everything all right?”
“No!” Everything was horribly wrong, and she had to buy herself more time. “Please, I can’t come out yet.”
His answer was delayed just long enough to convey disappointment. “You must let me know if I can help.”
She stared at the watch, trying to reevaluate—again—all she thought was true.
Hartgrave had been prickly to a fault at first, there could be no denying it. Still ... perhaps that was more in his favor than not. He’d seen right away what she was.Why wouldn’t he immediately have grasped the possibilities? The fact that he hadn’t tried to ingratiate himself from the start—didn’t that suggest something other than calculated seduction?
Other counter-evidence occurred to her in a jumbled rush. Hartgrave had said he didn’t want her involved at all—wouldn’t he have known by then that she would gladly charge in without being pressed into it by reverse psychology? He’d offered her a chance that very day to bow out—could that simply have been manipulation? He’d spent hours with the autodidact in Baltimore—why would he need so much time if his intention was to murder rather than help?
She shivered. Perhaps he liked torture. Kincaidhadcalled him a psychopath. Or maybe Hartgrave tried to talk autodidacts into quitting by telling them a tale about killer wizards. Those who believed—like Bernie—would go on living, while those who didn’t ...
That gave a sinister cast to Hartgrave, on the subject of the Baltimore woman, saying he “eventually convinced her.”
She exhaled, pressing shaking hands to her eyes. How was she supposed to determine the truth with no ability to gather more evidence? Which principle of fantasy adventures applied here, that the orphan was by definition the hero or that you couldn’t go wrong paying heed to the wise old wizard?
She needed to stop comparing her life to novels, that was what.
Hartgrave had, at best, knowingly allowed her to draw wildly incorrect conclusions about his past. That was a fact. She had no proof Kincaid was lying to her.
However ...
What if Kincaid’s sarcastic summation of what he thought Hartgrave had told her was actually true? What if Hartgrave, after joining the Organization and inventing the tracking system,haddiscovered with horror its true purpose?
He would feel partially at fault—guilty. She could imagine a scenario in which he might try to hide his role, even as he bristled at the idea that his attempt to fix the resulting disaster was praiseworthy.
Oh yes, she could easily imagine that. She knocked the back of her head into the wall in disgust. Imagination had put her in this situation. Anything was possible, but only one possibility was real, and if she made the wrong choice, she would doom herself and future autodidacts. One person had already died today, and who was to blame for that?
Unless ... unless that death had been a clever illusion.
This was dreadful. She simply didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. But no way around it: She had to pick a side, either with the man she wanted to believe or the man she feared was right.
She looked between the watch in one hand and Kincaid’s handkerchief in the other.
“Dr. Daggett?”
Time up.
She got to her feet, stuffing the watch and handkerchief deep into her pockets, and opened the door.
19
Leading and Misleading
Kincaid peered at her with what looked to be genuine concern. “You’re white as death. Come sit down.”
Her legs shook and the room gave a funny sort of lurch around her. She grabbed the doorframe to keep herself upright because she wasnotgoing to faint—
No, wait. That was the answer, the way to gather more evidence.
She closed her eyes and let her body crumple to the floor in what she hoped was a convincing manner.
“Dr. Daggett?”
She heard the rustling of fabric—Kincaid leaning in—and tried to focus on breathing. Nice and slow. Oh God, surely an unconscious person’s heart wouldn’t be beating this fast.
