THE COVE. Catherine Coulter

“Toward the end there, I didn’t even enjoy slapping you to get your attention. You didn’t have any to get, and you got too thin. I told Doctor Beadermeyer to feed you more, but he said all he could do was keep you stabilized. Then you escaped by hiding the pills beneath your tongue. “To see you in my house, in my study, just after I’d shot Jackie. It was a shock.”

He struck a pose she’d seen many times in her life. He propped his elbow up on his other arm and cupped his chin in his hand. It was his intellectual, thoughtful look, she supposed. All he needed was Scott’s pipe and perhaps Sherlock Holmes’s hat.

“There you were, leaning over poor Jackie-that greedy little bugger-then you turned and saw me, saw me as clear as day. I could see the recognition in your eyes. You picked up my gun. I’d put it down to get some papers from my desk. But then you picked it up, and I had no choice but to run. I hid outside and watched you shake your head, clearly disbelieving you’d seen me. I saw Noelle and Scott come running in. I heard her screarn and scream. I saw Scott nearly chew through that damned pipe of his.

“Then you ran, didn’t you, Sally? You ran and you threw my prized pistol in the bushes. I couldn’t get you then and I’ll tell you the truth, I was scared. 1 had to get my gun first, though, and I did. But I’ll tell you, I was worried, and I stayed worried for a long time. So what if you told the world you’d seen me, your father? If you did, even though you were certifiably crazy, they might have insisted that an autopsy be done, that dental records be compared, but you were so afraid, you just ran. You ran here, to The Cove, to Amabel.

“I didn’t find out for a good four days that you’d blocked it all out. That you ran because you believed that either you’d killed me or dear Noelle had.”

She was trying to take it all in, to realize that she’d never been wrong, to at last understand what this man was. She said slowly, “Quinlan made me remember. That and re-creating the scene, I guess you’d say. I saw everything then, everything.”

“I bet you want to know who the man was who looked like me. He was just a guy I discovered in Baltimore one day when I was meeting one of the Iraqi agents. He was broke, looked remarkably like me-same height, nearly the same weight-and then I knew when I saw him, just knew that he’d be the one to save me.”

Why, she wondered, was he talking so much? Why was he just standing there pouring all this out to her? And she realized then that it pleased him to brag about his brilliance to her. To make her realize how truly great he was. After all, she’d been in the dark about everything. Oh, yes, he was enjoying himself. “Jackie who?”

“You know, I really don’t remember his last name. Who cares? He played his role and played it perfectly.” Amory St. John laughed. “I promised him a truckload of money if he could impersonate me. I wish you could have heard him practicing my voice tones, my accent. It was pathetic, but both Doctor Beadermeyer and I told him he had a great ear, that he had all my mannerisms, that he could play me to perfection. That’s what he believed would happen. He believed he was going to take my place at a big conference. It was his chance to do something, his chance to make a big score. He was a credulous fool.”

“Now he’s a dead fool.”

“Yes.”

She began to pull on the ropes ever so slightly as she said, “Doctor Beadermeyer is down, but you already know all that. He’ll spend the rest of his miserable life in prison. Holland told the FBI everything. All those people-people like me-will be let out of that prison that you call a sanitarium, like it’s a resort where people go to recuperate and rest.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *