The Break-Up Retreat(86)

She doesn’t sound certain, but I hear the truth in what she’s saying.

“Find her,” I finish her thought. “Incapacitate her, to make sure she can’t hurt anyone else. And then someone takes the car and drives to get help.”

Leyla is nodding; Martina has turned to the window, looking out through it, again.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.” Armin sounds hesitant. “If she’s already killed someone . . .” He turns to Anna.

“Was she armed?”

This is, it seems, the first time Anna has noticed Armin in here, because when she looks at him and frowns she seems back to normal, for a moment, and she sounds like herself when she asks: “Who are you?”

“He’s my friend,” I explain. “Don’t worry about him. He’s going to help us.”

Anna turns back to me.

“We can’t drive away,” she insists. “Not with the gates closed and the power down.”

“Armin has a car outside the gates,” I tell her. “We’ve got a plan for how to get out.”

“Oh,” is all Anna says, and she looks down at her lap, at her own pale fingers, threaded together. The big sweater she is wearing is drooping off of her shoulders, heavy and darkened with rain.

“This is absurd,” Martina turns back around her, and her voice is high and tight. “I’m not going to go chasing a murderer through the storm.”

“Armin and I will go.” I say. “Anna can show us where she left Belinda.”

Leyla speaks up.

“What about Clara?”

She’s still standing, tense and rigid, by the bed.

“You can stay with her. It’s better that way.” I look over at Martina. “The good doctor can lock the door, in case . . . well, just to make sure that no one can get in.”

“But she is coming with us, right?” Anna interjects, looking from me to Martina.

Martina is shaking her head.

“No.” I can hear how dry her mouth is from the way her tongue is clicking. “No. I absolutely will not. I will stay here, with Clara. It’s my duty to her as a patient.”

“Jesus.” I’m about to protest that she didn’t much care about her patients when she wanted to just take off without them half an hour ago, but to my surprise Anna interrupts me.

She looks up at Martina, standing by the window, and says, eyes brimming with tears: “Please, Doctor, you have to come. You might be able to—if she’s gotten back up, you might be able to talk her down. She might listen to you. You’re the only person she might listen to. She looks up to you. She thinks you’re a genius, I know she does.”

Martina doesn’t say anything.

“Please, Doctor,” Anna pleads. “You have to come. You have to.”

Something about the sheer, raw desperation in her voice seems to get through to Martina.

“Okay.” The sound of her voice is pure defeat. “Okay.”

“Let’s go, then.” I rise to my feet, pulling Anna up with me.

When I open the door, my stomach cramps, and I swallow to keep from throwing up out of sheer fear.

“Show us where she is. Show us where you left her.”





Chapter 49


Anna doesn’t want to go first, so frightened that she starts shaking when I ask her to, but she tells me where to go.

“By the pond. Right under the main building.”

She’s grabbed onto Armin’s arm; hunched over from the rain, she looks smaller, shorter, though I think she’s probably got a couple of inches on him were she to stand up straight.

He looks at me and nods, his mouth set in a grim line.

Part of me wants to run. Part of me wants to hide, hide away and pray this will all just dissipate, protect myself and close my eyes against it until it’s over, one way or another.

The image of Belinda—tall, slender Belinda, Belinda who got me coffee that one time against orders, Belinda who greeted me with a soft smile on that first day—is impossible to square with the figure in the window. The shadow in the woods.

The murderer who took Sandra’s life.

But, then again, I don’t really know her. I don’t know what was hiding behind that placid smile. And did she not frighten me, on occasion? Did I not suspect there had to be something darker behind all that smooth perfection?

If I’d only realized then just how much darker it could get.

I steel myself, and I set off, down to the drowned path.

The pond is overflowing, bubbling at the edges, like some demented witch’s cauldron; without the small protection of the cabins by my side, the wind wants to push me into that icy cold water, but I manage to stay upright. I can’t check that the others are behind me, can only trust that they are following along.

I can’t see more than a ten feet ahead; all I can see is rain. It’s coming so fast and strong it hurts, and so does the cold, my skin stinging under my soaked jacket. I feel chilled to my very core, my chest so tight it’s hard to breathe, and when I open my mouth to inhale the taste of the rain fills my mouth.

The main building is a blurry shape to my left, the pond a dark, gaping mouth to my right. I try, desperately, to look for someone on the ground, hoping with all my heart that she’s there, that Anna managed to get a good enough hit to keep her down for long enough.