“She’s going to die anyway,” Tom said.
“Can I have a cookie?”
He opened the metal tin, and the air bloomed with spices. Gingersnaps, in the shape of Gertie’s autumn-leaf cookie cutter.
I took one. “Oh, right. Pumpkin Pageant.”
“Can’t believe you guys ran off and made me go alone. The food was pretty good, though.”
He leaned back in the chair, chewing slowly, staring up at the skylight. A raptor was wheeling overhead, a dark shape against the cloudless blue. Maybe a falcon. Maybe a rough-legged hawk.
The estate was so beautiful, it hurt my eyes sometimes.
He took another cookie. “Come back to us, Aunt Jessica. I miss you.”
I saw it then. He wasn’t like Grandmother—there was light behind his eyes, but it was the light of certainty. He hadn’t closed himself off from choice.
He’d simply chosen.
It took everything for me not to cry. I didn’t want Tom to see that. It still felt like weakness, like failure.Push it under your feet.
I took a bite of my gingersnap cookie.
“Did you bring a knife?”
The exit doorwasn’t locked.
I told Tom to stay where he was and went alone into the dark hallway. Peter’s old throwing knife felt alien in my hand, something from another life.
I’d known that Garrett had gone to Hiromi’s studio after she was dead. He’d sold the self-portrait and must have gathered up the rest of her work as well. But it had never occurred to me that he would rescue Ziggy.
Maybe he’d seen this moment coming.
Ziggy was battered by those long sessions with Hiromi’s robot arm, the blade loose, the bolster rattling. A blunt, unwieldy weapon. Like they wanted Mary’s death to be ugly.
Maybe they just wanted a fair fight.
I went softly in the dark. She’d be more dangerous this time, perhaps planning to spring out with an axe and give me forty whacks. And bring my head to Grandmother, like some mors curae of old.
Blooded at age ten.
She was waiting for me in the holding cell, in the same folding chair, even wearing the same purple raincoat as Mary, though it wasn’t raining outside. Her walker was beside her, aluminum shining in the gloom.
She looked up, immensely pleased to see me.
It wasBellamy.
Part 7
The LostGirlfriend
75
Returning to Helshire was easy.
My hallmates at Lavernick treated my absence as if it were nothing unusual—a family emergency, a broken leg on a ski trip. Aaliyah only once brought up that, on the night I’d disappeared, she’d received a mysterious text telling her to throw my laptop in the lake. She had, and I thanked her with the red-and-black sweater Elizabeth had knitted for me. We played poker, drank cocktails, and never mentioned my handsome, missing cousin by name.
I’d fallen behind in my classes, but the teachers at Helshire were used to legacies taking time off for special projects. My Econ thesis shifted from the vulnerabilities of electronic banking to something less exciting: the lack of jail time resulting from financial crimes.
