“You can.”
I look at her.
“Who lost control?” She pushes me farther than I ever thought I could go.
“She did.” I pull this up from the deep. “Carrie did. Because it was personal. She’d been around Benton from the old days, from the start, when she was at Quantico, at the Engineering Research Facility.”
“Where she also met Lucy long years ago, maybe ten years ago.”
“Yes, Benton knew her, knew Carrie, knew her probably as well as you can know any reptilian mind like hers,” I add.
“What did he say to her?” Anna’s eyes are riveted to me.
“Something about Lucy, probably,” I say. “Something about Lucy that would insult Carrie. He insulted Carrie, taunted her about Lucy, that’s what I believe.” I have a direct shunt from my subconscious to my tongue. I don’t even have to think.
“Carrie and Lucy were lovers at Quantico,” Anna adds another piece. “Both working on the artificial intelligence computer in the Engineering Research Facility.”
“Lucy was an intern, just a teenager, a kid, and Carrie seduced her. They were working on the computer system together. I got Lucy that internship,” I bitterly add. “I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt.”
“Didn’t lead to quite what you intended, did it?” Anna suggests.
“Carrie used her….”
“Made Lucy gay?”
“No, I wouldn’t go that far,” I say. “You don’t make people
gay”
“Made Benton dead? Can you go that far?”
“I don’t know, Anna.”
“A volatile past, a personal history. Yes. Benton said something about Lucy, and Carrie lost control and shot him just like that,” Anna summarizes. “He did not die the way they planned.” She sounds triumphant. “He did not.”
I rock quietly, looking out at a gray morning that has become full of bluster. The wind exerts itself in fierce gusts that fling dead branches and vines across Anna’s backyard, reminding me of the angry tree hurling apples at Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Then Anna gets up with no announcement, as if an appointment is up. She leaves me to go about other business in her house. We have talked enough for now. I decide to retreat to the kitchen, and that is where Lucy finds me around noon after her workout. I am opening a can of whole tomatoes when she walks in, the early stages of a marinara sauce simmering on the stove.
“Need some help?” She looks at sweet onions, peppers and mushrooms on the cutting board. “Kind of hard getting around with only one hand.”
“Pull up a stool,” I tell her. “You can be impressed with my fending for myself.” I exaggerate bravado as I finish opening the can with no help, and she smiles as she moves a bar stool from the other side of the counter and sits. She is still in her running clothes and has a look in her eye, a secret light, reminding me of the river catching the sun very early in the morning. I steady an onion with two fingers of my immobilized left hand and begin to slice.
“Remember our game?” I lay the onion slices flat and begin to chop. “When you were ten? Or can’t you remember back that far? I certainly will never forget,” I say in a tone meant to remind Lucy what an impossible brat she was as a child. “Bet you have no idea how many times I would have put you on admin leave, given the choice.” I dare to push that painful truth. Maybe I am feeling bold because of my naked talk with Anna, which has left me unnerved and at the same time exhilarated.
“I wasn’t that bad.” Lucy’s eyes dance because she loves to hear what a little terror she was when she was a child and would come stay with me.
I drop handfuls of chopped sweet onions in the sauce and stir. “Truth Serum. Remember that game?” I ask her. “I’d come home, usually from work, and I could tell by the look on your face that you’d been up to something. So I’d sit you in that big red chair in the living room, remember? It was by the fireplace in my old house in Windsor Farms. And I’d bring you a glass of juice and tell you it was truth serum. And you’d drink it and confess.”