“That,” Black Shoes said, “is some smart thinking, young lady. We’ll have to get on that, ask around. Not sure it’ll do much good, though.”
“You said you were a close-knit town,” I said, biting down my frustration.
“Those two kept to themselves,” Black Shoes said. “It’s too bad. Maybe if they’d been friendlier, we would’ve noticed sooner. There’s a lesson there for you girls,” he said, like it’d just occurred to him. “You can’t help that you were grown in a test tube. But you can always try to be civil. You don’t have to be like Vera and Delilah.” He made eye contact with me now, steady. “You don’t have to hide away like witches in a storybook.”
Those trees, the word repeating and repeating, hewn again and again. Precise and urgent at once. A litany, an excuse, a justification. A curse and a prayer. W I T C H E S. The work of multiple people, I realized now. Dozens. There’d been too many words spread across the trees for all the writing to have come from one person. I should have recognized that the moment I saw those words ringing the clearing. It hadn’t been the work of just one man, arriving in the shelter of night. It had been a whole town.
And now Black Shoes had brought that word into the room, placed it between us like a dare.
He was watching me. It was a test. Would I swallow the word, pretend it was nothing? Would I smile and agree with him that we could be nicer, sure, of course, recognize the threat, let this go? Leave the Strouds’ fate unexamined, unmourned, and unavenged? If I said something—if I spoke up now—I wouldn’t be able to go back to my old life. I understood that, cleanly and clearly. Choosing between saying something now and letting it go would break my life in half. The freedom to leave and return to my old life, or violence.
I made my choice. “You killed them,” I said, not breaking our eye contact. “It wasn’t a stranger from out of town at all, was it? It was you.”
Saying the words aloud changed me. It reached down into me and altered the shape of who I was. The men were unsurprised; they’d understood the inevitable conclusion of this evening as soon as they had walked in. I’d been the only one in the dark, trying to play along with them.
Ignoring me, Black Shoes held out an arm to Isabelle. “You look uncomfortable over there, sweetheart. Why don’t you come closer?”
Isabelle gave me a searching look, like I was taking on the role of Patricia now, the person who could tell her what to do. But I was frozen. She moved closer, just an inch. Black Shoes shifted closer until he was next to her. His thigh nearly touched hers.
“Has it been you all along?” I asked tightly. “Have you been following us?”
“I haven’t been following anybody,” he said, a contemptuous laugh wrapped around the word. “All of us here in Kithira mind our own business. We never went looking for trouble.”
The dizziness began at the back of my skull, washing forward. Without even thinking about it, I leaned forward, stared directly into his eyes. Those small, dark pupils, little holes in the fabric of his being. I could slip a hook in there and just pull the truth out.
But the night at the motel, I’d been alone. It was a private, impulsive act, an opportunity seen and seized in the dark of night. Even the prison had offered a certain anonymity. Now I was surrounded. Two men in here, two with Tom. I wasn’t sure what the other men would do if they realized what I was, what I could do. And they were watching my every move.
Black Shoes seemed to view my silence as an invitation to explain: “I remember sitting there watching TV, back in the seventies. The Homestead. Every time one of you was born, there were photos and interviews. Front-page headlines at the breakfast table. That doctor fellow went on TV and told the world that this was only the beginning of a bold new future.” He held his hands up, a clownish mockery of wonder. “I looked at him and I thought, does he know what this means? Does he know what this means for him and his wife? For his own father, for his own sons? This man was teaching women how to take over the world, and nobody else seemed to notice. Nobody ever stopped to think exactly what we were progressing to. Thank God for Ricky Peters. That man restored a certain level of moral clarity to the whole conversation.”
“By murdering innocent people?” I asked, a reflex.
“He’s a hero. When Ricky Peters set that fire, he killed one man, sure, but he also short-circuited the wholesale destruction of mankind. That should have been the end of it all. But you girls couldn’t leave well enough alone. You’re from that place, aren’t you?” He directed this question downward at Isabelle. “Then maybe you can explain why you girls couldn’t just take your disease somewhere else. Make another little freak show for yourselves. Why you had to force yourselves on the rest of the world, come and live in good God-fearing towns.”