She nodded.
“I think you killed all the fish.”
She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes again, drawing in a defeated breath. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Someone saw us. There was a kid in a boat. He didn’t get close enough to see our license plate. At least, I don’t think he did.”
At this, Stella eyes popped open. “He was on the water?”
I nodded. “About halfway out. Pretty far off when it started, then he saw us and started toward shore.”
She turned toward me, the belt across her lap and chest holding her back. “But he was okay? He didn’t die?”
I realized then what was going through her head. If the fish were all dead, why not the boy? If he was on the water, too. “He wasn’tinthe water. The boat must have protected him somehow.”
Stella dropped back into her seat and sighed.
A slow-moving semi in the single westbound lane forced me to tap the brake and release the cruise control. Our speed dropped to sixty. “It helped, though, didn’t it? The fish?”
Stella raised one of her hands and held her palm out between us—no longer trembling.
“How long do you think…how long did it get you?”
She lowered her hand to her lap. “Perhaps a day, maybe two, but no more.”
“So we just do that again,” I told her. “When you have to, we find another lake or a cornfield or—”
But she was already shaking her head. “You learned of the cornfield in the press, right? If reporters aren’t already at that lake, they’ll be there soon. The story will make the local papers, maybe television. If we escape national news, the reprieve will only last until the next time. Dead lakes, dead fields, dead trees…somebody will connect everything and soon the press will create maps, each occurrence marked. Some scars can be hidden, Pip. Others are simply too large. If the press doesn’t find us, Oliver and the others surely will. I imagine they are watching for these exact moments. Ms. Oliver called it my ‘kiss of death.’ I imagine her map would have such a phrase printed in big, bold letters at the very top—Stella’s Kiss of Death—heading west. There would be no hiding then.”
They don’t always find the bodies, Pip.
“Then we find another bad person. Someone who deserves to die.”
“Nobody deserves to die.”
“A killer, a rapist, someone who hurts others…” I couldn’t believe how effortlessly my mind went there, but when I weighed the thought against possibly losing Stella, there really was no choice, not for me. “Maybe in LA. We’ll go to a park, like you’ve done in the past, and—”
“I won’t,” she said emphatically. “I will not kill again.”
“You do it just this one more time. That will buy us a year, right? A whole year to come up with something else, another way. Some kind of solution.”
“I won’t.”
“If the people in white find us—one of them—any one of them…”
“I won’t.”
“…they’re trying to hurt us. If anyone deserves—”
“Jack, please. Stop. I won’t. I don’t care what that means for me, what happens. I won’t kill again. I need you to promise me, if I’m feverish, if I no longer have my wits, and I try to make you stop like I did with the lake, you must promise me you won’t—”
“I’m not going to…”
“—and if at any point it seems I might hurt you, you need to stop me. We may need rope or handcuffs, or maybe both. I don’t know how bad it will get. I’ve never let it go so far, but I won’t hurt you. You can’t let me.” Her voice dropped low. “These gloves cannot come off. If they do, if I reach for you, you need to shoot me, Jack. You need to kill me.”
“That’s somethingIwon’t do,” I told her. “No way.”
She turned to her window and looked out over the barren landscape. “You’ll need to shoot me like a rabid dog, because at that point that is all I will be.”
