Turn to Stone (11 page)

She stopped. Her breathing hammered in her chest. Her voice went dead again.

“And so I prayed to someone else,” she went on. “I didn’t pray for God to deliver me. I realized that God didn’t exist. Instead, I prayed to the Devil to come and destroy Jet Black. And unlike that pitiful God that people worship, the Devil listened to me. He did what I asked.”

“Kelli, the Devil didn’t send Percy Andrews. No one says you have to believe God did, either. Some local kids heard you screaming in the Novitiate. They were scared. They started talking about ghosts in the ruins, and Percy heard them. He came and rescued you.”

“No,” she said. “Percy didn’t rescue me. He saved me, but he didn’t rescue me.”

Stride stared at Kelli, and the serpents on her neck seemed to move. “I don’t understand.”

“The kids didn’t hear
me
, Mr. Stride. They heard Jet. He was the one who was screaming. You see, Percy didn’t shoot him. By the time Percy found me, Jet was already dead. I killed him.”

PART THREE

17

“I got free,” Kelli said.

He waited for her to explain, but instead, she walked to an empty window frame and stared at the river pushing to clear the winter ice. Black mold crept up the walls beside her. The interior was frigid, somehow even colder than the outside air. He glanced at the darkness obscuring the corners. Red eyes watched them. An albino rat hid among the stone debris.

“Do you feel it?” she asked.

Mike Black had asked him the same thing near Tom Bruin’s camper.
Do you feel it?

“No.”

“He’s still here. He hasn’t gone anywhere.”

“There’s no one but us,” he told her.

She turned away from the window. The rat backed up, becoming invisible as the gloom swallowed him. He saw something in her pretty face that he hadn’t seen before, and it worried him. He didn’t know if it was violence. Or madness. Or maybe it was just the despair of someone who was forced to carry the memory of torment with her for every waking second.

“It was a miracle,” she said. “A black miracle, but I would have taken anything. I was tied up. Hands and feet chained to the wall. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. All I could do was stand in a pool of my own waste and wait for him to come back.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“A storm. That’s the kind of miracle the Devil would send, isn’t it? Even blindfolded, I could see the lightning. I could feel the thunder in my body. One violent blow must have hit nearby. It dislodged mortar from the ceiling, and a huge chunk of rock hit my hand. The impact nearly broke my wrist, but it ripped the shackle out of the wall where he’d screwed it into the stone. I was able to kneel down and find another rock on the floor, and I used it to hammer the shackle on my other wrist until I broke it away. I did the same with the chains at my ankles.”

A shudder rippled through her body like another blow of thunder.

“I’d done it,” she whispered. “I was free. All I had to do was run. Someone would have found me. There are farms nearby. Cars on the road.”

“But you didn’t run,” he said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Kelli shook her head. Dirt and dust smudged her face. Her brown hair, damp from snowmelt, was pasted to her skin. “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that a thousand times? Part of me wanted to go, but something stronger took over. I know you think I’m crazy, but it wasn’t me. Someone else was controlling what I did.”

He said nothing, but he couldn’t keep the disbelief off his face.

“See?” she said. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand that you went through a profoundly disturbing experience. Anyone might experience a kind of temporary insanity in the wake of it.”

“I wasn’t insane,” she insisted. “I knew what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was like I was watching from the outside. There was never a question of what I was going to do. I was going to have my revenge. I was going to make him suffer. I made
plans
. I figured out how he would come and where I needed to hide so that I could surprise him. I found a weapon. It was very simple. He was going to die. I was going to take his life slowly and cruelly.”

“You turned to stone,” Stride said.

“That’s right.”

“Just like you wrote in that article about demonic possession.”

She frowned. “Yes.”

“Did you write that article before or after the Novitiate happened?”

“Before, actually. I’ve been fascinated with the subject since my cousin killed herself. I always felt the Devil had a hand in what she did. So I knew what I was experiencing myself.”

“Or you knew how to make it convincing, Kelli.”

“I’m not lying,” she said.

Stride didn’t believe in demonic possession. What he didn’t know—what he couldn’t read in her face—was whether she believed it herself. If you murder someone, even someone who has tortured you, you need a way to explain it. Kelli Andrews was a woman for whom the typical rules of truth and lies, guilt and innocence, didn’t apply. She was a deep, deep well.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I waited for him.” She nodded at the white rat, which had appeared again, considering them intently with its ruby eyes. “I hid in the shadows like that rat, and when he came that night, I hit him in the back of the head. He was unconscious. I dragged him right here, where he’d held me.”

“And then?”

Her face was severe. “I repaid him in full.”

“Do you remember it?”

“Oh, yes. I remember it like I was watching a movie. I stood here, seeing myself torture him.”

“How bad was it?” Stride asked.

“Bad.”

“How long did it last?”

“Hours,” Kelli said. “Many hours. I did horrific things to him. I broke bones. I—severed things. At first, I gagged him the way he’d done to me, but there came a point where I wanted to hear him scream. And he did. Oh, he did. I felt nothing at all. I was dead to his pain. It went on and on, and my heart was ice.”

“How did he die?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. Maybe it was loss of blood. Or a stroke. Or his heart gave out from fear and pain. There just came a point where the twisted expression on his face became permanent, and it never changed again. I realized he was gone.”

“Before he died—” Stride said.

Kelli nodded. She knew what he wanted. “I carved the word
T
EUFEL
into his chest.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. Don’t you see? It wasn’t me. It was like a signature.”

“Did Jet do the same thing to you?”

“No. He did despicable things, but not that. I’m telling you, I don’t know where the inspiration came from to do that to him. It didn’t come from inside my head. It came from somewhere else.” She grabbed the fringe of her jean shirt and pulled it up to her neck, exposing her full, young chest, which was covered by a sports bra. “See, Mr. Stride? No Devil here.”

He gestured for her to cover herself. “Tell me about Percy.”

Kelli looked ready to cry at the sound of his name. “Percy. He found me. It was night, and I couldn’t see, but I heard someone in the ruins below. He was calling my name, shining a flashlight around. I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t. He came upstairs, and his light was in my eyes. I just sat on the ground next to Jet’s body. The Devil was gone. I was myself again. I had nothing left inside, no strength, no tears. I was as ruined as this place, Mr. Stride, and Percy knew it. There was something so strong and tender about him. I fell in love with him right then and there. I was in a kind of wilderness, and he followed me there and found me and carried me back.”

“Did you tell him what happened?” Stride asked.

“I told him everything.”

“What did he say?”

“For a long time, nothing,” Kelli replied. “I was in his arms. He held me, and I cried and cried and cried. I think I cried for an hour. I was so relieved that it was over. All that time, he had this frozen look of horror on his face, and he didn’t say a word. But he never let go of me. I could have stayed there like that forever. And then when he finally spoke, he said: ‘
I killed him
.
Not you.
’”

“Did you ask him to lie for you?”

“I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I would have told everyone, but Percy said it wasn’t safe. He said there were people who wouldn’t understand what I did, no matter what I’d been through. That somewhere in those hours, self-defense became vengeance, and vengeance became murder. That I would probably go to prison, and even if I didn’t, this would follow me for the rest of my life. I’d never escape it.”

Stride knew that Percy was right. On a strict legal basis, Kelli Andrews was guilty of murder. There was a free pass for self-defense, not revenge. He didn’t know if a jury would have convicted her of anything, but it was impossible to be sure. As the details emerged, the public whispers would have started. People would have gaped at what she did. They would have begun debating when she stopped being a victim and became a killer. She didn’t escape. She didn’t walk away when she had the chance. She set a trap, and then she tortured a man to death.
I repaid him in full.

A prosecutor would have stood up in a courtroom and said: “You can sympathize with this woman, but you cannot let her go unpunished.”

Percy knew all that.

Stride asked himself what choice he would have made, finding Kelli next to a dead body in the Novitiate. Hearing what she’d done. Having her cry herself out in his arms. Cops had to make value judgments about right and wrong all the time. He’d done it before and had to live with the consequences, but some consequences were harder than others. Percy had carried the guilt all the way to his own death.

Stride asked himself the question, but he had no answer.

“Percy didn’t do this alone,” he said. “He had to have help.”

Kelli nodded. “He called Tom Bruin. Tom came to the Novitiate. I told him the story, too, just like I told Percy. Percy convinced him to help me. To lie. Together, they dressed the body, and you couldn’t see what I’d done to him that way. Then they staged the gunshots. When the police came, Tom oversaw the removal of the body and did the autopsy himself. He falsified the records. He arranged the cremation. They created a myth. Percy became a hero. It wasn’t what he wanted, but that’s what people were looking for her. Nobody wanted the truth.”

“And you and Percy?”

“It just happened, Mr. Stride. I told you, it wasn’t about gratitude, and it wasn’t about fear either. I wasn’t worried that he was going to expose me. We were an unlikely couple, but we fell in love.” She added: “If there’s anything I feel bad about, it’s that Percy’s and Tom’s friendship was never the same after that. Percy claimed not to be conflicted about what he’d done, but I didn’t believe him. Tom, well—he could barely stand to be around me. I saw the guilt in his face whenever he looked at me. He’d compromised his principles to help me, and to a doctor like Tom, that was almost unforgivable. I felt awful. He never got over it. I also think—I think Tom didn’t trust me. Percy believed me about the demonic possession. He believed in evil and sin. He thought the Devil was real. Tom wasn’t so sure. He never said anything to me, but I think he wondered if I was really just a liar and a killer. Or maybe he thought I’d sprout horns and kill Percy in his sleep. Whatever it was, I felt grateful to him, but we never really got along.”

“Now here we are,” Stride said. “Four years later, you’re back at the Novitiate.”

“Yes.”

“Greg Hamlin,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” Kelli came and put both hands on his shoulders. She was uncomfortably close. “I didn’t need to tell you any of this, Mr. Stride. It was a choice. I know it makes me look guilty. Either I’m insane, or I lost control when I found out about Hamlin’s past with Jet, and I did the same thing all over again. I only have one thing to say to you: I’m innocent. When all of this is done, you’ll have to decide if you want to turn me in for what I did to Jet. But Greg Hamlin? No. I didn’t kill him.”

“Percy almost certainly believed that you did,” Stride told her. “He must have been convinced that you’d done this terrible thing. You’d killed again, just like before. So he covered up for you—again—and then he was so devastated that he couldn’t live with himself. You wanted to know why your husband killed himself. That’s why.”

Kelli backed up. She covered her face with her hands. “I know.”

“You said you were afraid that Percy killed himself because of you. This is what you meant, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Percy didn’t say a word to you about Hamlin? About what he suspected?”

“No, he kept it all to himself. He never shared it. I can’t imagine him lying there—thinking that I—”

“The evidence says you’re guilty,” Stride reminded her. “Hamlin’s history with Jet gives you a motive. Hamlin called you—it was the last call he ever made. Percy probably found evidence in the camper. I’m willing to bet that the evidence pointed at you and that he took it away and destroyed it. The police also found a brown hair in one of Hamlin’s wounds. Will it match yours?”

“I didn’t kill him!” she insisted. “I know how this looks. All day, I’ve been thinking to myself, am I crazy? Was I in some kind of fugue? Could I have done this to Hamlin and not even realized it?

“Maybe the Devil came back,” Stride said, his voice heavy with cynicism.

“Mr. Stride, I
know
what it sounds like. I know you don’t believe me. I remember every minute I spent with Jet Black. All of it. I know what I did to him, but I couldn’t stop myself. Someone else was using my hands, directing my brain. But I remember it. And that’s why I know I didn’t kill Greg Hamlin. There’s no missing time haunting me. I can tell you what I was doing hour by hour for the last month. Yes, I killed Jet Black. I have to live with that, but I did not kill Hamlin. That’s the truth.”

“Then who did?”

“Don’t you think I’ve been asking myself that? I have no idea. The only thing I can think of is that it was someone else who was
possessed
in the exact same way I was. That’s where it came from.
T
EUFEL
. The same killer, Mr. Stride, but using different hands to commit the crime.”

Stride shook his head. That wasn’t right.

Like Percy, he had to make a choice. Put Kelli Andrews in cuffs and take her in—or believe what she was saying. Believe her in the face of everything that pointed to her guilt. Once Sheriff Weik had her in custody, the investigation would be over. She wouldn’t escape punishment this time. The sympathy of the jury would give way to reality. She’d be staring at prison bars for years to come. Maybe that was justice.

She was hard to read. Guilty or innocent. A victim or a psychopath.

Stride knew one thing. The Devil hadn’t come to Shawano. He wasn’t carving words into a man’s chest. Human beings did that.

“There’s nothing mystical about this, Kelli,” he said. “If you didn’t kill Hamlin, someone else did. It’s someone who
knows
what you did to Jet Black.”

Kelli looked into the shadows. The white rat was gone.

“Nobody knows,” she insisted. “There are only three people who ever knew the truth about the Novitiate and what really happened to Jet. Me, Percy, and Tom Bruin. And now two of them are dead.”