He had been gone from the kitchen for at most a minute. What could have happened in a minute, so fast?
He reached toward the shotgun, intending to pluck it off the corpse. The magazine might contain other rounds.
No. Now it’s a suicide scene. Move the weapon, and it looks like a murder scene. With me as the suspect.
He left the gun untouched.
Out of the thin blood-filtered light, into the hallway where a funerary stillness of shadows stood sentinel, toward the enormous chandelier that hung in a perpetual crystal rain above the foyer staircase, he ran.
The shotgun was useless. He wasn’t capable of firing it at anyone. Besides, who was in the house but Georgine and Lisa? No one. No one.
Down the stairs two at a time, three at a time, under the crystal cascade of bevelled teardrops, he grabbed at the banister to keep his balance. His palm, slick with cold sweat, slid across the mahogany.
Along the lower hall in a thunder of footsteps, he heard jangly music, and as he slammed through the swinging door, he saw pendulous copper pots and pans swinging on the racks overhead, gently clinking together.
The kitchen was as softly lit as it had been when he left. The overhead halogen downlights were dimmed so low as to be all but extinguished.
At the far end of the room, backlit by the quivering glow of the three decorative oil lamps on the table, Lisa stood with her fists pressed to her temples, as if struggling to contain a skull-cracking pressure. No longer screaming, she sobbed, groaned, shuddered out whispery words that might have been Oh God, oh God.
Georgine was not in sight.
As the copper chimes subsided like the soft dissonant music in a dream of trolls, Joe hurried toward Lisa, and from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the open wine bottle where Charlie Delmann had left it on the island counter. Beside the bottle were three glasses of Chardonnay. The tremulous surface of each serving glimmered jewel-like, and Joe wondered fleetingly if something had been in the wine—poison, chemical, drug.
When Lisa saw Joe approaching, she lowered her hands from her temples and opened her fists, wet and red, rose-petal fingers adrip with dew. A stinging salt of sounds shook from her, pure animal emotion, more raw with grief and burning hotter with terror than any words could have.
At the end of the centre island, on the floor in front of Lisa, Georgine Delmann was on her side in the foetal position, curled not in an unborn’s anticipation of life but in an embrace of death, both hands still impossibly clenched on the handle of the knife that was her cold umbilical. Her mouth was twisted in a scream never voiced. Her eyes were wide, welling with terminal tears, but without depth.
The stink of evisceration hit Joe hard enough to knock him to the edge of an anxiety attack: the familiar sense of falling, falling as from a great height. If he succumbed to it, he would be of no use to anyone, no help to Lisa or to himself.
With little effort, he looked away from the horror on the floor. With a much greater effort, he willed himself back from the brink of emotional dissolution.
He turned toward Lisa to hold her, to comfort her, to move her away from the sight of her dead friend, but her back was now toward him.
Glass shattered, and Joe flinched. He thought wildly that some murderous adversary was breaking into the kitchen through the windows.
The breaking was not windows but glass oil lamps, which Lisa had grasped like bottles, by their tall chimneys. She had smashed the bulbous bases together, and a viscous spray of oil had burst from them.
Bright points of flame irised wider on the tabletop, became glaring pools of fire.
Joe grabbed her and tried to pull her away from the spreading blaze, but without a word, she wrenched loose of him and seized the third lamp.
“Lisa!”
Granite and bronze ignited in the Polaroid of Angela Delmann’s grave, image and medium curling like a black burnt leaf. Lisa tipped the third lamp, pouring the oil and the floating wick across the front of her dress.