The world on our side. I was a little sorry I’d missed that.
“I had my evidence and I was going to remind the world what Dr. Bellanger had actually done. I was just biding my time. But then your mother took the stand—oh, your mother took the stand! You should’ve seen her. A girl you’d take home to your mother. Pretty dress. Nice hair, la-di-da. She sat up there and she talked about how I’d threatened all of you. She talked about how scared she was. Everyone in that room was in love with her. It was after her testimony that I went to my lawyer and said we should take the plea bargain. ‘I can’t do it,’ I said. ‘Nobody will believe my evidence, coming on the heels of that.’”
“What was your evidence?” I asked, riveted in spite of myself.
“The evening of the fire,” Ricky said, “your mother came to talk to me. Usually the ladies steered clear of me, and I steered clear of them, but here she came, out of the shadows. She was jumpy, like she had bugs under her skin. She got real close, whispering. ‘You’re right about Bellanger,’ she said. ‘You’re the only one who saw it all along. He’s a bad man.’ It felt like a miracle. I’d been waiting for those girls to recognize how much they’d debased themselves by aligning themselves with the doctor. All my hard work was finally paying off.”
“That’s it?” I asked, ignoring the chill down my spine. “My mother telling you that she hated Bellanger? That’s nothing.”
He held up a hand, a simple command: Wait. His skin was surprisingly smooth, almost poreless, protected from direct sunlight for years “She showed me a gun. She was carrying it with her. A handgun. She said, ‘Let’s you and me do this, Ricky, end it all now. Don’t let him get away with it. He has my girl under his spell, and he’ll never let her go.’” He locked eyes with me and he didn’t look away.
End it all now.
“Bullshit,” I said. “There was no gun found in the wreckage. No gunshot wounds.” But there was a slick of betrayal in my belly, this image of my mother wielding a gun, wild-eyed, willing to ally herself with a man who’d dedicated his life to destroying us. And it had been because of me. Her jealousy over Bellanger’s role in my life.
“Exactly. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I figure she changed her mind. Do you know why she set the fire instead of using the gun? So it would be easier to pin it on me. She’d heard me yelling at Bellanger about hellfire. The whole world had heard it. With a fire, you don’t have to worry about fingerprints or who bought the gun. I never gave her an answer, but she found a way to pin the whole thing on me.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, trying to make it sound true.
Ricky Peters opened his palm flat, as if showing me he had nothing, even as his eyes glittered dully against me, mocking. I knew he was enjoying this.
“Why do you think I ended up here? All the evidence points to me. I threatened to take that man’s life, and I truly did want him gone. I’ve never denied that. I was on the compound the night of the fire. I left behind evidence. There was gasoline found at my apartment. I was forced to take a new plea deal. Fifty years behind bars, and I waived the right to appeal. It was the best I could do. If I went against your mother without physical proof, and that courtroom looked at me the way you’re looking at me, I’d have been facing the chair. So I did what I could.”
I breathed in, breathed out. My mother with a gun. My mother with a match. The wild look in her eyes as we ran, that freedom, that thrill.
“Do you want to know what gets me through the lonely nights? Maybe I didn’t convince the whole world that Dr. Bellanger was an evil man,” Ricky said. “But I convinced your mother. And now look: His work was lost. Nobody else managed to step into his shoes. For a while, life was restored to the way it should be, just men and women creating families together. Or I thought so, until you showed up in the news.” I felt that deep-seated hatred beneath the surface, cold and unyielding, always there.
“You’re upset that I’m trying to restore what Bellanger achieved at the Homestead,” I said. “Is that why you had my mother attacked?”
He didn’t even blink. “We just covered this. I’m not the bad guy here.”
By now some of the other visitors were trickling away, the guards’ stares drawing a tighter lasso around the room. “Bonnie Clarkson,” I said, and his expression shifted. “That attack was in your name. A little girl left scarred.”