“Everything! About the fight I had with Belinda that night. After I found that photo of them, their disgusting photo, their love letters. I was begging her, how can you do this? How can you choose to live in such sin? And Bindy was crying and she said she loved Emily but she loved Stefan too.”
“Jill! Stop this! You weren’t even there that night.”
“Oh yes I was! You know I was. I came to bring her home, to get her away from this…thing, whatever it was, their three-way thing…and she shouted in my face, I’m not your little doll, Mom. I’m not your little robot!” The gun in her hand bobbed and shook. It was a miracle that it hadn’t gone off. “And then he barged in. He tried to grab the golf club. He missed. I was so angry, I couldn’t even see. I just hit out. At her. At him. Everything was out of control. Everything was gone.”
“What happened?”
“Bindy stepped between us. She stepped right between us.”
“What are you saying?”
“Come on, Thea! You don’t have to live with it, for the few minutes you have left to live! He didn’t kill her. I killed her. I killed my little girl.”
With a guttural cry, Stefan ducked down and lunged for Jill, grabbing her around the knees but impossibly, she was too quick, stumbling back but never losing her footing. It was Stefan who went down hard. Fueled by some malevolent syrup, she kicked Stefan in the chest, knocking him backward, off balance, so that he had to reach for the bench to try to get up.
Haltingly, as if his voice were an instrument that needed tuning, Stefan began, “You…evil, you…” and then went on, “You let me think that I killed Belinda when I didn’t? You knew all along, and you let me go to prison?”
“Who cares about you? You belong in prison, you sick piece of trash. You were out of it. I put your hand on the golf club. Then Emily dragged it away and dragged me out of there.”
“How did you convince Emily to lie?” I asked her. She held the gun in both hands, leveled at Stefan’s chest, so I fought down my desire to shout.
“Her name’s not Emily, by the way, Thea. Convince her? She was a pervert. She couldn’t wait to do all the stuff I wanted her to do. She knew I would take her down too. If Belinda never went to Black Creek, she would be an accomplished woman of grace. Look what Emily did for her. The first sin is hard, the next one is easy. Why should I go to prison? After everything I’ve already lost? At least I had something to give. What did she have to give? What did he have to give? Nothing.”
“Jill, stop. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I won’t stop, Thea. Or maybe, okay, I won’t kill you. Maybe I’ll do what I planned. I’ll shoot Stefan right in front of you and let you go on living, like I had to do.” She began to cry and her hands shook. “Who cares what happens to you? Who cares what happens to me?”
She stood up straight then and put the barrel of the gun under her own chin.
This, I had never rehearsed this in my mind. This wasn’t something I ever imagined my way into doing. I took a step forward and slugged Jill in the side of the face. She fell to one knee and the gun went off with a crack so loud that I saw lights flip on in several of those distant houses. I felt the thud of the discharge in my side, as if I’d been holding an M-80 under my arm when it went off. I stood back and pulled the whistle out of my pocket and blew the whistle, over and over. More lights went on. Stefan scrambled for the gun, pushing Jill down and kneeling on her so that she couldn’t move. “What do we do?” he said to me. “We can’t tie her up or anything. What do we do?”
“Use her sweater to tie her up. Tie her hands behind her and tie her to the bench.”
I called the police and reported someone threatening people with a gun. It was clear that we would have to be the ones to guard Jill with the gun. I’d never used a gun in my life; I didn’t know if Stefan had. But they had to be pretty self-explanatory. Stefan handed me the gun, while holding on to Jill’s arm, trying to get her sweater over her head and round her wrists. She thrashed and kicked and leaned over to bite his hand. “You nutcase!” he yelled, and pulled both her arms behind her. Jill jerked her head back and hit Stefan in the mouth. “That does it,” he said. He kneed Jill in the back hard enough to knock the breath out of her and jerked her arms up over her head, tying the sweater around her hands. Then he pulled off his own shirt and tied it around her feet.