He handed her the photograph as he took the bottle of water.
It was of a blond girl, maybe eleven or twelve, with a wide chin, big eyes, and an uncertain smile, her arm slung around a brown-haired boy, a couple years younger, with Ned’s small lips and wide nose, the boy’s smile bigger and more confident than his sister’s.
“Those are my kids.”
Brian looked over. “Put that fucking thing away.”
Ned held Rachel’s eyes, went on like Brian hadn’t spoken. “Caylee, that’s my girl, she’s real smart, you know? She’s founded the Big Buddies program in her school. That’s where—”
“Stop,” Rachel said.
“—where the older kids, like her, they mentor the first and second graders, you know, buddy up with them so they’re not scared. It was Caylee’s idea. She’s got a huge heart.”
“Stop,” Rachel said again.
Ned gulped some water. “And, uh, Jacob, that’s my boy, he—”
Brian pointed the shotgun at Ned. “Shut the fuck up!”
“Okay!” Ned spilled a bunch of water on his lap. He’d thought Brian was going to pull the trigger. “Okay, okay.”
She watched him tremble as he drank more water and she tried willing her heart to calcify and shrivel but she failed.
Ned drank a bit more water and licked his lips several times. “Thank you, Rachel.”
Suddenly she didn’t want to meet his eyes.
“My name,” he said to her, “is—”
“Don’t you do it,” she whispered. “Don’t.”
Now she met his eyes and he met hers and he looked at her a long time, long enough for her to see both the little boy and the terrible man inside him. Then he flicked his eyelids in acquiescence.
Brian walked to the edge of the hill, cocked his arm, and threw Ned’s cell phone in a high arc that ended when it splashed into the river. He spoke with his back to them. “What’re we going to do with you, man?”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
Brian turned. “I bet you have.”
“You’re not killers.”
Brian tilted his head toward Lars. “Your road dog there might debate that point.”
“He had a gun on your wife. He was an immediate threat. You did what you had to do. That’s different than executing someone. So, so different.”
“What would you do if you were us?” Rachel asked.
“Oh, you’d already be dead,” Ned said. “But I forked over my soul a long time ago, Rachel. You still have yours.” Ned adjusted himself on the stairs again. “Whether you kill me or you tie me up, it’ll add up to the same thing. The company’s going to send a second team, if they haven’t already. They don’t give a shit about me. I’m just a fucking coolie. If they find me alive or they find me dead, the story is still the same—they continue to hunt you. They might get me to a doctor or not, but they will continue pursuit of you. My point is, you leave me alive, the end result is the same as it would be if you kill me. Except if you kill me in cold blood, you’ve got to look in the mirror every night.”
Brian and Rachel considered that, considered each other.
Ned stood slowly, using the column to the right of the broken railing to do so.
“Hey,” Brian said.
“If I’m going to die, I’d rather be standing.”
Brian looked wildly at Rachel and she looked wildly back. Ned was right—shooting him and Lars had been easy when there’d been no time to think about it. But now . . .
Upstairs the baby howled. It was shriller this time, more frenzied.
Brian said, “That doesn’t sound right. You want to check on her?”
Rachel didn’t know shit about checking on a baby. She’d never even babysat. And the thought of being up there, trapped, if something went wrong down here was more terrifying than standing guard.
“I’ll stay with him.”
Brian nodded. “He moves, you fucking shoot him.”
Easy for you to say.
“You bet,” she said.
Brian went up the steps and put the shotgun barrel under Ned’s chin. “Don’t fuck with her.”
Ned said nothing, just kept his eyes on something in the general vicinity of the blown-out mills.
Brian entered the house.
The moment he was gone she felt half as strong and twice as weak.
Ned wavered in place against the post. He dropped the water bottle and looked about to keel over but kept his balance by slapping his wrist into it at the last second.
“You’re losing too much blood,” Rachel said.
“I’m losing too much blood,” Ned agreed. “Could I ask you for the water?”
She went to pick up the water but stopped. She caught him watching her, and for the briefest of seconds, he looked far less helpless. He looked hungry and ready to pounce.
“The water,” he said.
“Get it yourself.”
He let out a groan and reached for the bottle, his fingers pawing at the wood riser just above it.
A window opened above them, and several things happened in the same two- or three-second span:
Brian called, “They killed Haya!”
Ned surged off the porch and rammed the top of his head into her chest.
Ned reached for her gun.
Rachel jerked her gun hand free.
Ned drove his good shoulder into Rachel’s chin.
Brian called, “Shoot him!”
Rachel pulled the trigger and fell to the ground.
Ned came off her body and she heard him grunt and she fired the pistol again. The first time she fired at nothing—it was purely defense. The next shot, as she rolled, she aimed in the direction of Ned’s legs as they scrabbled away from her. She fired the final shot as she came to her knees, fired in the direction of his ass as he reached the top of the incline.
He dove over the hill and she may or may not have heard him make a sound when she’d fired that third shot, a yelp possibly. Or she’d imagined it.
She got to her feet and ran to the edge of the hill and she saw him down at the bottom on his knees. She jumped into the brush and the high grass and the weeds and the bottles and old burger wrappers and came down the hill with the gun held high by her right ear.
Ned was on his feet now, staggering toward the first brick building. By the time she reached the bottom of the hill he was holding a hand to his belly and lurching as he walked and he made it to an old office chair with rusted legs and a rusted metal frame. Someone had slashed a horizontal line across the seat and the foam that spilled out was brown. Ned sat in it and watched her come.
Her phone vibrated. She put it to her ear.
“You okay?” Brian asked.
“Yeah.”
She looked back up the hill at him standing on the back porch, the baby to his shoulder, the shotgun in his other hand.
“You need me?”
“No,” she said. “I got this.”
“They shot her in the head.” Brian’s voice was thick. “In the room with the baby.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay, Brian. I’ll be right back.”
“Hurry,” he said.
“Why’d you have to kill her?” she asked Ned when she reached him.
He pressed a hand to the exit wound. One of her bullets—she had no idea which one—had entered his body somewhere in the back and come out by his right hip.
“Performance bonus,” he said.
What came out of her mouth sounded like a laugh. “What did you say?”
He nodded. “Our hourly rate is for shit. We’re incentive-based.” His head lolled as he looked around at the husk of the mill. “My old man worked in a place like this up in Lowell.”
“Cotter-McCann could turn this into an apartment complex or a mall,” she said. “A casino, for Christ’s sake. Make their seventy million back in a year.”
He gave that a weary raise of the eyebrows. “Land is probably poisoned.”
“What do they care?” She was hoping if she kept talking he would just fucking bleed out in front of her. “By the time people start getting sick they’ll have pulled their money back out and be long gone.”
He gave that some thought and half nodded, half shrugged.
“She didn’t know anything. She barely spoke English.”
“Police have translators,” he said. “And she spoke English just fine in her last few minutes. Believe it.” He was turning gray, but the hand he pressed to the wound still looked firm and strong. He gave her puppy-dog eyes full of apology. “I don’t make the rules, Rachel. I don’t control anything. I just do a job to put food on my family’s table and I sit up some nights just like every other parent hoping my kids’ lives will be better than mine was. That they’ll have more options than I did.”
She followed his gaze around the mill. “You think they will?”
“No.” He shook his head. He looked down at the blood soaking into his lap and his voice cracked. “I think those days are over.”
“Funny,” Rachel said. “I’m starting to wonder if they ever existed at all.”
Ned heard something in her voice that made him look up. The last thing he said was “Hold on.”
She aimed at his chest from three feet away, but her arm was shaking so badly when she pulled the trigger that the bullet entered his neck. He went rigid against the back of the chair for a moment and panted like a parched dog and blinked at the sky. His lips moved but no sound came out; the blood pooled in the hollow of his throat and dripped into the crevices between the chair frame and the cushions.
He stopped blinking. His lips stopped moving.
Rachel walked back up the hill.
Brian stood with Annabelle to his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. She was sleeping.
“You want to have kids?” she asked him.
“What?”
“Simple question.”
“Yes,” Brian said to her, “I want to have kids.”
“Beyond this one?” she said. “Because I think she’s ours now, Brian.”
“Ours?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have a passport.”
“No, you don’t. But you have our kid. Do you want another?”
“If I live?”
“If you live,” she conceded.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you want to have kids with me?” Rachel asked.
“Well, who else?” Brian said.
“Say the words.”
“I want to have kids with you,” Brian said. “No one else.”
“Why no one else?”
“Because I don’t love anyone else, Rachel. Never have.”
“Oh.”
“I want a few actually.” Brian nodded. “Kids.”
“A few?”
“A few.”
“You going to birth them?”
“Already playing the violin for herself,” he said to the child on his shoulder. “Get a load of her.”
She looked at the house. “I’m going to say good-bye to Haya.”
“You don’t have to go in there.”
“Yes, I do. I have to pay my respects.”
“They blew her head off, Rachel.”
She winced. Haya had pursued a desire to be anyone but what the world had fated her to be with such fierce resolve that Rachel, having only met the “real” Haya a few hours before, didn’t want see her with half her face turned to pulp, lying in a gout of black blood. But if she didn’t look, then Haya was just another of the disappeared in Rachel’s rearview. Soon it would grow too easy to pretend she’d never been real.
If it’s ever within your power to do so, she considered saying aloud to Brian (but didn’t), you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into the energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.
Instead, what she said to Brian was “Just because it’s unpleasant doesn’t mean I get to avoid it.”
He didn’t like it but all he said was “And then we gotta go.”
“How?”
He gestured toward the river. “I got a boat down there.”
“A boat?”
“Big boat. Get us to Halifax. You two will be out of the country in two days.”
“What’ll you do?”
“Hide in plain sight.” He placed his palm to the crown of the baby’s head and kissed the top of her ear. “You might have noticed I’ve got a knack for it.”
She nodded. “Maybe too much of one.”
He gave that a sad tilt of his head and said nothing.
“If we don’t make good time on the water?” she asked. “Or if one of us gets injured, breaks an ankle or something?”
“There’s a backup plan for that.”
“How many backup plans do you have?”
He thought about it. “Quite a few.”
“What about me?”
“Hmm?”
“You got a backup plan for me?”
He stood across from her with the baby asleep on his shoulder and he let the shotgun fall to the ground and he touched a strand of her hair with his thumb and index finger. “There’s no backup plan for you.”
Eventually she looked at the house behind him. “I’m gonna go pay my respects.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
She left him and walked into the house. With all but one shade drawn, it was cool and dark in there. She paused at the base of the stairs. She pictured Haya’s corpse and her resolve wavered. She almost turned back. But then she pictured the Haya she’d seen in the bedroom this morning, the true person staring back at her for the first time through eyes as rich and black as the first night or the last. She marveled at her will—the resolve, the balls it took to become someone else so completely that the battle for dominance between the captive self and the captor self couldn’t become anything but unwinnable. Each would surely subsume the other in a forever war. And, no matter how it ended up, neither could ever return home.
So it had been with Brian Alden, she realized, since the moment he’d donned the purloined coat of Brian Delacroix. And so it had been with Elizabeth Childs and Jeremy James and even Lee Grayson. At times in their lives they’d been one version and then they’d been other versions and some of those versions had brushed up against Rachel and altered Rachel’s life or even given life to her. But then they’d gone on to be still other versions. And other people beyond that. Then Elizabeth and Lee had gone even further, into the place where Haya now found herself. Transformed yet again.
And what of Rachel herself? What was she, if not forever in transit? Forever en route. As adaptable as any of them to a journey, but never to an end.
She climbed the stairs. As she did, she could feel his passport tucked behind her own in the front pocket of her jeans. And she felt the dark deepen around her.
I don’t know how this ends, she told the dark. I don’t know my true place in it.
Yet the only response she got from the dark was a deepening of it as she climbed the stairs.
But there might be some light upstairs and there would certainly be light when she went back outside.
And if by some twist of fate there wasn’t, if all that remained of the world was night and no way to climb out of it?
Then she’d make a friend of the night.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to . . .
Dan Halpern and Zachary Wagman for the edits and the patience.
Ann Rittenberg and Amy Schiffman for the added guidance (and the patience).
My early readers—Alix Douglas, Michael Koryta, Angie Lehane, Gerry Lehane, and David Robichaud—who filled in all the blanks when it came to the broadcast news biz.
A special shout-out to Mackenzie Marotta for keeping the balls in the
air and the trains running on time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DENNIS LEHANE is the author of twelve previous novels, including the bestsellers World Gone By; Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; and The Given Day. He lives in California.
WWW.DENNISLEHANE.COM
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ALSO BY DENNIS LEHANE
A Drink Before the War
Darkness, Take My Hand
Sacred
Gone, Baby, Gone
Prayers for Rain
Mystic River
Shutter Island
Coronado: Stories
The Given Day
Moonlight Mile
Live by Night
The Drop
World Gone By
CREDITS
Cover design by Rachel Willey
COPYRIGHT
Lyrics to “Since I Fell for You” in Epigraph used by permission of Alfred Publishing, LLC.
SINCE WE FELL. Copyright © 2017 by Dennis Lehane. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-212938-3 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-06-267714-3 (international edition)
ISBN: 978-0-06-268846-0 (international Canadian signed edition)
ISBN: 978-0-06-268813-2 (B&N signed edition)
ISBN: 978-0-06-269992-3 (BAM signed edition)
EPub Edition May 2017 ISBN: 9780062129406
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