The Glass Butterfly (35 page)

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Authors: Louise Marley

Tags: #Romance

BOOK: The Glass Butterfly
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“No way.”
“You need to call the police.”
“She
is
the police, Mom.”
“Not anymore, she isn't.” She pulled him back one more step so she could slam the gate between them and Ellice. It wasn't much protection, she knew, but it was something.
Ellice crossed the lane and stood with her legs braced, smiling across the closed gate, her pale eyes the same color as the shifting mist. “Smart kid you have there, Tory,” she said.
Tory had listened to that uninflected tone for hours, sitting in her office. It irritated her now, fanned the flame of her anger. She felt her own lip curl, and she wished she had teeth like Johnson's to show.
She answered in a hard voice she barely recognized, “I know that.” Her anger burned in her throat. She gathered herself, muscles tightening, preparing. She was angry at Ellice for disrupting her life, for threatening Jack. She was angry at herself for waiting too long to take a stand. As her fury grew, she felt like Johnson, taller than before, fiercer than anyone thought she could be. She was afraid of the gun, but that wasn't important. Jack was what was important. She said, through gritted teeth, “What do you want, Ellice?”
The gun twitched at Ellice's side, as if it had a life of its own. Johnson's growling grew louder, and his body, close to Tory's leg, vibrated like a coiled spring. Tory moved slightly, trying to put herself between Ellice and Jack. The dog moved with her.
Ellice's thin lips curved in a feral smile. “What did you do with my file, Tory?”
Tory felt Jack shift slightly behind her. He said in an undertone, “She broke in. Ransacked your office.” The gun twitched again in Ellice's hand.
“We've just sent photocopies of it to the sheriff,” Tory said. “This morning. We sent all of it.” Jack drew a breath, and she realized she had said “we.” Her voice sounded sharp and cold, like the blade of a knife. Like the blade Ellice had scarred her with. “He'll have it in twenty-four hours.”
Ellice's freckled knuckles whitened as her grip tightened on the gun.
“It's over,” Tory said. “You have to face it, Ellice.”
“No.”
“Yes. You can't run from it now.”
Ellice's eyelids flickered. “You tricked me.”
“I did not. It was the other way around.”
Ellice's face suffused, her freckles disappearing in a rush of blood to her cheeks. She raised the gun, and it wavered right and left, its black muzzle like a searching eye, choosing first Tory, then Jack, then, as if aware there was a real threat, Johnson. “You're just like all the others,” she said, her voice rising, shaking. “I trusted you, and you betrayed me.”
Jack said tightly, “Put the gun down.”
Tory said, “It's okay, Jack. Ellice doesn't want to shoot me. Or you.”
Ellice barked a laugh. “You haven't learned anything yet, have you, Tory?” She steadied the gun, pointing it at Tory's breast. “You think you know so much, know-it-all therapist! All your theories and questions and suggestions! You don't have any fucking idea what I might do!”
Johnson surged forward against the closed gate, his growl becoming a snarl. Ellice startled, and turned the gun in his direction. Behind Tory, Jack's breathing quickened, whistling in his throat.
Tory said in a steely voice, “Ellice, if you fire that gun, you won't feel better for long. You should have learned that.” She wanted to put a hand on Johnson's collar, to pull him back, but she wasn't sure if that would make things worse.
“You're not my therapist anymore, Tory.”
“I'm not your enemy, either.”
“All I have are enemies,” Ellice said. The gun looked enormous, the muzzle like a cannon, black as death, holding them all frozen in place.
“There's still a chance for you,” Tory said. She glared at Ellice, measuring the distance between them, judging the angle of the gun and how she could block it.
As her heart began to race, time slowed. She could see every movement of Ellice's eyes, the beat of her eyelids, the thread of her pulse in her freckled throat. She felt herself rise on her toes, ready to move. It was like being poised at the edge of a precipice, ready to leap into the abyss. Physical danger, at this moment, meant nothing. It didn't seem real. She was no longer afraid even of the gun.
She said, in that knife-sharp voice, “Put the gun away, Ellice. I'll help you—”
“No!” Ellice swung the gun up, away from the dog, past Tory, aiming now at Jack. “No one can help me.”
Tory said, “Jack. Back up, and get in the house.”
He said, “No, Mom,” but she snapped back, “Do it, son. Please.” She stepped directly in front of him. The coolness of the air at her back told her he was finally doing it, moving, backing away.
The muzzle of the gun swung to follow him, and Tory seized her moment. She lunged forward, thrusting from her toes, her hands out, open and ready. She hit the gate with both palms, throwing all her weight behind the movement. The gate slammed open, the gate she had repaired so it swung smoothly and swiftly on well-oiled hinges. It struck Ellice a hard blow in the middle of her thighs. There was a sound to the impact, brief and sickening, as hard wood struck flesh and bone. Ellice stumbled backward, grunting, losing her balance, nearly falling.
The gun went off.
Tory's ears rang with the sound of it. It made a dull, aching clap, like that of someone striking an untuned kettledrum. Glass broke somewhere behind her, and at the same moment Johnson, freed by the open gate, charged forward with a roar like that of an angry lion. It was a sound so strange and wild Tory wasn't sure it came from the dog.
Ellice struggled to regain her feet. She tried to point the gun at Johnson, to stop his rush, but he was on her before she could gather herself, leaping at her with his teeth bared, his hackles stiff. His teeth sank into her arm, the very arm with the gun, as if he understood what she was trying to do.
Ellice emitted a hoarse scream. Tory shouted Johnson's name, and leaped after him. She spared a fraction of a second to look back, to see that Jack was safe on the step of the cottage, and then she seized Ellice's wrist with all her strength.
She could never have done it without Johnson. He had bitten Ellice deeply. Blood soaked the black fabric of her sleeve and ran down over her hand. Still he held her clamped in his jaws, snarling through his closed teeth, scrabbling at her with the claws of his front feet.
Tory found Ellice's wrist with her two hands, and twisted. Ellice's blood was slick under her fingers, but she persisted, gripping, squeezing, using all the strength of hands accustomed to wielding hammers and wrenches, hatchets and saws.
Ellice's fingers opened. The gun came free, clattering to the gravel of the driveway. Tory released Ellice's wrist to grab for it, bending, scrabbling along the rocks with her fingers until they encountered the cold metal. She straightened, holding the weapon in her two hands. It was heavy, as she had expected it to be, and she gripped it with all her strength. She took a single step back, bracing her feet wide apart, and pointed the weapon at Ellice.
The trigger was beneath her right forefinger. For one furious, suspended moment, Tory thought of pulling it. She could have done it. She anticipated the feeling of doing it, the stiffness of the trigger, the sound of the report, the thud of the bullet striking Ellice's body. If Johnson had not been there, his teeth still fastened to Ellice's arm, she might have done it. It was possible to do it. There was time, plenty of time, but she would always be grateful, later, that she hadn't.
Ellice was still screaming when she went down, toppling backward onto the gravel. The impact jarred the dog's teeth from her arm, but he wasn't done with her. He attacked. She covered her head with her arms, wailing now as he bit at her wrists, her head, searching for exposed skin as if he were a wolf, or a tiger, a creature accustomed to violence. She was a strong woman, a big woman. When she caught him a blow with her knee, he fell to one side just long enough for her to scramble to her feet. He lunged at her ankles, snarling, gobbets of bloody foam flying as he tried to find purchase on her boots.
The scene, and the sounds, were visceral. Primitive. Nothing in Tory's life had prepared her for this conflict. Her breath hissed through her gritted teeth as she followed the battle, keeping the gun trained on Ellice. If Ellice dared to take a step toward Jack, if she so much as glanced at him, Tory promised herself she would fire. She would do it, consequences be damned. She would pull the trigger, and be done with this madwoman.
But Ellice, with a sobbing cry, lurched to one side, regained her balance, and fled toward the beach.
In three long, unsteady strides, she vanished into the fog. Johnson was right behind her, snapping and snarling, his tail straight as a sword behind him.
Their noises faded with astonishing swiftness, leaving Tory with the gun gripped tightly in both hands, pointing at nothing. The music had stopped sometime during the fight, and now her ears vibrated at the sudden, shocking silence. Still she held the gun, trained on the billowing mist that had swallowed her enemy.
She didn't know when it was that Jack reached her side. He put a warning hand on her shoulder before he stretched his other arm around her for the gun. He took it carefully, gently from her. There was blood on it, and when she looked down at her hands, they were dark, too, and sticky. She waited to feel something about that, about having Ellice Gordon's blood on her hands. No feeling came.
She watched Jack do something with the gun, manipulating it with a deftness that surprised her. It became two harmless pieces, the clip of bullets in one hand, the empty gun in the other. Tory had no idea how he had learned to do that. She glanced down at the beach, where Ellice and Johnson had disappeared, and she began to shiver.
Jack wrapped his strong arms around her—when had they gotten so long?—and they stood together, listening in tense silence for some sound from the fog.
“I need to go after the dog,” Tory whispered.
“No,” Jack said.
“I do. I need to get him back.”
“It's not safe.”
“But he's—he's my dog. He saved us.”
Jack shook his head, blinking in amazement. She understood, distantly, that Johnson must be a great surprise to him. He said, “Mom, do you have a phone? I forgot mine in the car. We have to call the police.”
“Oh. Oh.” She swallowed, and tried to steady her breathing. “Yes, I do have a phone—I bought a new cell phone. It's on the counter—” Tory turned to look up at her boy. A man now. She would have to understand that, somehow. “Oh, my god, Jack. I have so much to tell you, and I'm so sorry—”
“I'm sorry, too, Mom. I have a lot to say to you. But later.” He kept an arm around her shoulders, and guided her up to the door. He was like a dear stranger, much-beloved but much changed, and she felt the strength of his arm with a sense of wonder that was oddly disorienting. He said, “Call the cops now.”
She dialed the police, and stood, trembling with unspent adrenaline as she made her report. When she was done, and when she had answered their questions, they asked her to stay on the line. She stood, the phone in her hand, waiting to see what would happen next. Dried blood crackled on her fingers and dropped in crumbs to the floor.
Jack looked around the cottage curiously. “You've been living here?”
“Yes. Johnson and I.”
He frowned. “Who's Johnson?”
A laugh bubbled up in her throat. She put the phone against her chest, and pressed the back of her free hand against her lips, fearful that if she started to laugh, she wouldn't be able to stop. That Jack would think she had lost her mind.
Several moments passed before she trusted herself enough to say, “Johnson—Johnson's the dog. My dog.”
32
Ora permetta che accenda il lume, tutto è passato.
 
Please allow me to light my candle: everything is all right now.
 
—Mimì,
La Bohème,
Act One
T
he police arrived just ahead of Hank, lights flashing lurid red and blue through the mist. Hank's SUV swept around the corner, headlights stabbing through the fog. He parked crookedly behind the patrol car and leaped out, leaving the door open behind him. He didn't quite run, but he moved more swiftly than Tory had ever seen him move, long strides that carried him past the police car. He reached Tory, standing on the step of the cottage, before the policemen could open their doors. His face was tight with anxiety, and his hands came up to grip Tory's shoulders, her arms, as if to assure himself she was in one piece. She had the impression he was barely restraining himself from pulling her close to him, cradling her against his chest.
He said in a low voice, “You're all right?”
Tory nodded, a motion she was sure looked shaky and uncertain. She didn't feel uncertain, though. She felt triumphant. Transcendent. Hank took her hand, and she wound her fingers through his with a fierce grip. “My hand's dirty,” she said. “It's got blood on it.”
He said in a low, intense tone, “Just so it's not yours.”
“Absolutely not.”
Behind her, she felt Jack's surprised movement. Hank's eyes came up to look past her, to take in the surprise of Jack standing just inside the door. He said, “This must be Jack.”
Jack said, “Yeah. That's me.” He put out his hand, and Hank reached around Tory to shake it. Jack regarded Hank with frank curiosity. “Who're you?”
“Hank Menotti. Your mother's friend. It's great you're here. It's—it's wonderful.”
There was no time to explain anything. The patrol officers came in through the gate to stand in the little yard, looking up at the trio in the doorway, taking cautious glances around at the quiet neighborhood. The squawk of their radios was muted, but it felt intrusive to Tory, and she was glad when they turned them down, touching their shoulders as they moved closer. They were both middle-aged and paunchy, and she had the irrelevant thought that they looked more like grocery clerks than police. They looked far less threatening than Ellice Gordon. Less threatening than she herself had felt, such a short time ago.
“Which one of you folks called?” an officer said.
Tory stepped down to meet him. “That was me,” she said. All at once, embarrassingly, her teeth began to chatter. She folded her arms tightly against herself.
“You had an intruder?”
“Yes.” Tory turned to Hank. “Johnson's gone, too. I don't know where he is!”
“Johnson?” the officer said warily. “Who's that?”
“That's P—I mean, Tory's dog,” Hank said. With a sidewise glance at Jack, as if to apologize for taking control, he went down the step, and put his arm around her shaking shoulders. “Officers, you should come in out of the cold.”
“Sir,” the older officer said, “if you had an intruder, we'd better get someone out looking for him.”
“Her,” Tory and Jack said together.
“Her?”
“She's a sheriff's deputy,” Jack said. “Not in uniform. Tall, light hair, black denim jacket and blue jeans.”
“Is she armed?”
Jack said, with obvious relish, “Not now.”
“I have to find Johnson—” Tory said. She freed herself from Hank's arm, and edged toward the gate.
“We won't be able to find him in this fog,” Hank said.
“Hank, he went after her. After Ellice. He bit her, and then he was chasing her. . . .”
He held her back, the pressure of his hand gentle but firm. “We'll look as soon as we can, but first we'd better explain the situation.”
The police officers glanced at each other. One moved up the step and into the cottage. The other one spoke into his radio as he walked back toward the patrol car.
Jack held the door as the officer and Hank walked past him, but still Tory hung back, peering toward the beach, trying to see something, anything, through the fog. “I could just go a little way, call him—”
“It might not be safe out there,” Jack said.
Hank said, “Jack's right. No one should be wandering around out there until we're sure.”
Tory followed the men into the cottage, but she left the door open a crack, hoping. It felt awful to leave Johnson out there in the mist, to not be able to hear him or see him. She felt as if part of her had been forgotten. Had been abandoned.
Hank and Jack were right about the danger. She knew that. There were people waiting in her kitchen, waiting for her to make sense of a senseless situation. She had to find a way to tell them what had happened and why. She would have to postpone her worry over the dog.
At least Ellice couldn't shoot him.
The officer was standing beside the table, staring at Ellice's service revolver where it lay in two parts on the cracked Formica. Next to it lay the file, clearly labeled with Ellice Gordon's name. The officer bagged the two parts of the gun and labeled them, and pulled out a notebook. As he settled into one of the chairs, the wail of a siren sounded, growing louder as it approached.
Hank pulled out a chair for Tory, and she sank into it, still shivering. He waved Jack into a chair beside her, then stood to one side, leaning against the counter, his arms folded across his chest. He seemed to preside over everything, not only because he was taller, but because he seemed more contained than anyone in the room, even the officer. He caught Tory's eye, and gave her a measured nod of encouragement.
She looked around at them all, the police officer with his pencil poised, Jack with that strange look of relief and amazement, Hank's calm face. She began to speak for the second time that day, disgorging the weeks of secrets and tension in a steady voice, pausing now and then in search of the right word, the most economic expression.
It took a long time, beginning with Ellice's first appointments in her home office. She was interrupted once, when the other officer came in to confer with his colleague, then went out again to talk to the new ones who had arrived. The revolving lights on the patrol cars cast red and blue shadows through the picture window, and Tory watched them as she talked.
She described everything that happened, outlining everything she knew up until Ellice Gordon disappeared into the fog with a furious dog in pursuit. She held nothing back, not her escape, the unregistered VW, the invented name and history, the false Social Security number, the broken-off cell phone call to her son. She recounted, to the best of her ability, the lies she had told, the truths she had omitted.
She glanced up once to see Jack nodding as if it all made sense to him. She pressed on with her tale, giddy with pride at his presence, with relief at his acceptance.
The officer asked questions, wrote down her answers, reducing the immensity of her experiences to a few scribbled words. He called it a statement, and told her she would need to come in to the police station to repeat it in detail to a clerk and then sign it. The familiar, hideous weapon that had spent so many hours locked in her file drawer, that had caused such pain and fear, lay on her table, disarmed, impotent. The officer said Ellice's beige sedan was already being impounded, dragged away through the fog.
When the policeman asked if Ellice had another weapon, no one knew the answer. Tory's heart clenched at the thought that if Ellice had another gun, she could still hurt Johnson. She had to quell a powerful urge to get up from the table, run outside, call the dog's name.
She knew they wouldn't let her go. She clenched her fists beneath the table, and went on talking. She spoke for an hour, until there was nothing left to tell, no questions left that she could answer. Not until she was certain Hank had kept a copy of all the pages in Ellice's file, securely locked up in his clinic, did Tory hand the original over to the policeman, and accept a receipt in exchange. They were on the point of leaving, taking the file and Ellice's gun with them, when she remembered the sound of breaking glass she had heard from the yard. She stopped, halfway to the door, and gazed around her.
“The window,” she said. “Didn't a window break?”
“Why did you think so?” the officer said. “We've been all over the house. Everything seems okay.”
“But I heard glass break, I'm sure I did. When Ellice fired her gun.”
Jack pointed toward the coffee table in front of the little sofa. “It wasn't a window, Mom,” he said. “It was the paperweight. The one with the butterfly.”
She turned to look.
The bullet must have caught it right in the middle. It lay in glowing green shards, the threads of gold exposed to the light so they gleamed softly against the shattered glass, the butterfly outline smashed beyond recognition. The piece of Murano glass, the family heirloom so lovingly carried from Tuscany by a hopeful bride, was ruined.
Tory gazed at it, wondering why she didn't feel anything, not sorrow, not regret, not even amazement that Ellice had managed to destroy the only valuable object in the house. It was, she thought, only an object, with a history and with emotional ties she might mourn one day. For now, all she could think was how close that bullet must have come to Jack. He had been standing near the open door, and if Johnson hadn't leaped on Ellice . . . She felt a fresh rush of anger, but there was nowhere to direct it.
Jack said, “That sucks, Mom.”
“It's not important.”
“It was kind of a strange thing to bring with you. You didn't take anything else.”
“Yes, it was odd. I don't know how it happened. I just found it in my pocket, once I was already—away.”
She crossed to the coffee table, and crouched to pick up one of the biggest of the fragments from the old carpet. She straightened, holding the bit of glass in her palm. It felt dead now, as if the life that had radiated from it, life absorbed from the people who had touched it, carried it, admired it, had drained away.
It didn't matter. All that mattered was right here with her. Jack was here, and safe. Hank was standing in the entryway, a steady, warm presence. There had been a great shift in the shape and structure of her life, and as she looked up at the two of them, so different, but so dear, anything and everything seemed possible. She dropped the bit of glass onto the table.
The full-throated bark from the beach coincided with the faint click of the glass on the wood. Tory whirled to face the open door just in time to see Johnson, pink tongue and long ears flying, bound across the lane, leap over the fence—he had been with her all these weeks, and she hadn't known he could do that—and race up through the yard and in the front door. He tumbled against her legs.
She fell to her knees, and threw her arms around the dog, hugging him to her. Johnson licked her cheek, and nuzzled close to her, covering her in sand and mud. “He's wet,” she said. “Salt water—Hank, he's been in the water!”
Hank disappeared into the back, and returned with a towel in his hands. He started to rub the dog down, and it was clear Johnson was wet to the skin. Tory said, “He never went into the water before!”
Jack came to stand over them. “He looks like he's okay, though, right?”
Hank said, “I'll check him over, but yes. He looks like he's okay.”
Tory clung to the dog's neck and thought that it wasn't just Johnson who was okay. Everyone—everything—was okay. All the weeks of anxiety and fear, of worry and guilt, had evaporated in the span of a few hours. It felt enormous, a transformation too big to take in, as if a theater curtain had dropped, and risen again on a completely different scene. She was no longer afraid, no longer lonely, and she would be able to set everything right after all.
 
It was strange, Jack thought, to realize that, despite all the drama and disruption, it was still Christmas Eve. It appeared that this tall, silver-haired man had invited Tory to Midnight Mass, and she wanted to go with him. When they asked Jack, it seemed right for him to go, too.
It was the first time he'd been in church since Tory's memorial, and he couldn't have imagined anything less similar. Hank knelt in the pew next to Tory as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Jack, feeling awkward and out of place, sat beside them. He gazed at his mother, her shocking red hair brilliant in the flickering candlelight, and listened to the familiar hymns and carols waft around them.
Despite himself, he felt soothed by the scents of incense and candle wax, the familiarity of white choir robes and scarlet vestments, the recitations of the old, old texts. Hank and his mother went to Communion, and though he didn't, he found himself with his head bowed, soaking in the peaceful atmosphere of the crowded church, beginning to believe the crisis had actually passed.

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