She was his patient again, his prisoner.
No escape this time.
His prisoner forever.
A wave of fear broke over her, and she was screaming.
Shepherd grabbed her, said something, more words that didn’t matter, more protestations of helpfulness and compassion, but she wasn’t listening anymore, couldn’t hear him or hear anything except the ululant glissando of her own voice as she screamed and screamed and screamed, Shepherd and the deputy holding her fast, and Cray rummaging in his bag and now coming toward her, and in his hand, in his hand…
A syringe.
Gleaming.
She saw his lips move, his thin bloodless lips.
This will calm her, he was saying. This will make her sleep.
She didn’t want to sleep. Sleep meant darkness, and she was afraid of the dark.
Her screams became speech, a last plea thrown at the uncaring men around her and the vast night beyond.
“Don’t let him do this, please don’t let him, he’ll kill me, he’ll kill me—”
Cray reaching for her, the needle rising, huge and shiny and as terrifying as the gun he’d trained on her in the Lexus last night.
“He’ll kill me!”
Flash of pain in her neck, the needle biting deep, and at once all strength left her, and where there had been screams, there was silence.
Silence and the onrushing dark.
Silence and falling, a steep plunge, nothing at the bottom.
“She’ll be fine now.” Cray’s voice, so far away, a voice from the shadows that swam around her and inside her, everywhere. “We’ll look after her, I assure you. We’ll give poor Kaylie the very finest care.”
Kaylie.
Not my name, she wanted to say.
But of course it was. It had always been her name, and though she had imagined she could run from it, in the end it had caught up with her, as it must.
Elizabeth Palmer was dead. Paula Neilson, Ellen Pendleton — the other people she’d been — they were all dead. Only Kaylie was left.
It’s who I am, she thought as shadows folded over her. Can’t fight it. Not anymore.
I’m Kaylie… again.
On Tuesday afternoon, one week after the arrest of Kaylie McMillan, a burial service was held on the grounds of the Hawk Ridge Institute.
John Cray stood in a gathering of mourners at the small cemetery near his house. Ordinarily such a ceremony would attract only a handful of staff members, but today’s occasion had brought out nearly everyone who worked at the institute, whether on duty or not.
Even the press had come. A reporter from the local newspaper stood at the back of the crowd, jotting notes in a steno pad. Before the ceremony he had asked Cray for his thoughts.
“It’s always difficult to lose a patient,” Cray had said, his tone cool and steady, “but in this instance it’s especially hard.”
He thought the words would look good in print. He hoped the reporter remembered to identify him as the author of The Mask of Self, and not merely as the institute’s director.
At the head of the grave, the minister of a local church stood with a leather-bound Bible open in his hands, reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. “None of us lives to himself,” he said in his calm, clear voice, “and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord…”
The day was cloudless and bright, but for the first time there was a taste of autumn in the air. Cray wore a greatcoat over a somber suit. He kept his face expressionless, careful to betray nothing.
Everything had gone so well up to this point. It would be a shame to spoil it all by laughing aloud.
His greatest worry had been the autopsy. The county coroner routinely investigated any death at an institution that received state funding. A cursory examination posed no dangers, but there had been the possibility of toxicology tests.
Luckily no tests had been done. Death by natural causes had been the ruling.
And now all evidence to the contrary had been sealed in a mahogany casket, hanging in a sling over a newly dug grave.
“Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and of the living.”
The Bible clapped shut, and a portable winch operated by one of the groundskeepers hummed into action.
Cray and the others watched as the sling was lowered, the casket committed to the earth.
There was a soft thump as the casket touched bottom. The minister poured sand from a bottle into his open palm, then ritually spilled it into the grave.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Cray hadn’t cared much for St. Paul’s effusiveness, but he liked this older sentiment. It was the hard, honest dogma of a desert people. What was a person, after all, except earth and dust? What was a life, in the end, except ashes scattered in the uncaring wind? No romanticism here. No illusions. Man was clay.
When the ceremony was over, Cray lingered awhile, watching the groundskeepers remove the sling and fill in the hole with shoveled dirt. One of the men misinterpreted his continued presence as a sign of grief.
“Don’t feel too bad, Dr. Cray,” the man said kindly. “It’s just one of those things, you know?”
There was wisdom in this, too — the unstudied fatalism that got most human beings through the pointless maze of their lives.
“I know, Jake.” Cray smiled. “Still, I wish I could have done more.”
“Nothing you could do. Just happened, is all.”
“I feel it’s my fault, in a way. If I hadn’t agreed to cooperate with the police—”
“You can’t think of it like that. You did what was right. Anyway, you couldn’t have her running around loose.”
“No. No, that wouldn’t have been good… for anyone.