David held up the photo.
As he studied Emily’s face, Jessup slowly assumed a frown. “Did she maybe wear a little necklace thing?”
“She wore a gold locket.”
“What’d it look like?”
“In the shape of a heart, inset with a rare red diamond. I had it designed for her. When you opened the locket, there was a gold thorn fixed in it.”
“Thorn because of your name. That’s very tender, Dave. That touches my own heart.” He closed his eyes and raised his free hand to massage his forehead with his fingertips, as if to encourage a submerged memory to surface. When he lowered his hand and opened his eyes, he said, “I never opened the locket. I never saw no thorn. I don’t clearly remember your Emily because she had such attitude. One of them nothing-but-trouble types. I didn’t get much good use of her before I killed her.” He met David’s eyes. “They’ll find her in that secret room, I think. Your peace is near, Dave. You don’t got to keep tearing at yourself no more. Once they find her and you know, then you can be done with this, move on, be happy—and happy in a way you don’t expect you ever can be.”
| 67 |
David felt wrung out. He thought he should want to kill Ronny Jessup, but he didn’t care about this hateful creature any longer. Even if there had been no guard watching through the windowed door, even if he could have done the deed and gotten away with it, he would not have wrought violence here. He didn’t believe that killing this monster would be wrong, even though the state’s highest-ranking officials, in their ever-more-outrageous virtue signaling, might equate the execution with the crimes that Jessup committed. Anyway, although Ronny had once been a juggernaut of horror, he was now an empty vessel adrift, and he would be so for the remainder of his miserable life. Striking out at this man would be nothing more than a vulgar, pathetic attempt at self-exoneration, when in fact he had no authority to exonerate himself.
As David closed the clasp on the envelope full of photographs, Ronny Jessup said, “When they open that room, Dave, when they find them pretty girls, don’t you let them go and bury your Emily. She might look dead, and by some measurements she might be dead, but she’s not really dead, not forever.”
David got to his feet.
“What I said about bringing all them beauties back to life with electricity—that part were a big crock of shit, Dave. Just one more thing to get the law thinking ‘by reason of insanity.’ No court is gonna treat old Ronny too hard if I don’t know real from fiction, if I think all that electricity shit in Frankenstein movies is true.”
David stared down at him.
“But none of them girls is really full dead. Them girls is preserved good as hams or sausages or canned pears or anything in any supermarket, neither spoiled nor withered, preserved by ancient chemical formulas, creams and elixirs of life, smoothed on them pretty bodies and injected. But that’s not all.” He smiled and shook his head, pleased with himself, proud of his accomplishments. His gentle, musical voice might romance a listener into lending a measure of credibility even to his most irrational claims. “Softest creams and powerful elixirs according to ancient formulas, but there’s also big magic in it, Dave. True magic in it.”
David looked up at the high window, from which the bird had flown. The winged watcher had not returned. He didn’t believe it would return even if he stood there for the rest of his life, watching for it.
“There’s real magic in that deep secret room,” Jessup repeated. “You don’t need no electricity, Dave. All you need to do is whisper her name in her ear and peel back the bandage from her mouth and kiss her. Kiss her good, and she’ll be woke and ready.”
David regarded Jessup in silence.
“Kiss her good, Dave, and she’ll be yours again.” When David turned away from the table, Jessup said, “Thousand a month now. Old Ronny done right by you, like I promised.”
“You get nothing more. Not a penny.”
Jessup spoke quietly, with equanimity, with seeming confidence that the threat of defunding him would not be fulfilled. “Don’t go breaking your promises, Dave. You know how that turns out. You know how that turned out for sweet Emily, you breaking your promises. You break your promise to Ronny, it’ll turn out worse for you than me.”
At the door opposite the one at which the guard stood, David pressed a call button to summon an escort to accompany him out of maximum security.
“Old Ronny knows more than you do, Dave. Old Ronny hasn’t told it all. You’ll come back when you understand. You’ll come back to hear more, but there won’t be no more without you pay my account.”