The consumptive darkness played tricks on her equilibrium, making her dizzy. Walker directed her down to her hands and knees and they crawled under a pair of pipes that bisected the tunnel. As she stood, he pushed her forward and held her to the muddy floor. He shined the yellow light into her eyes.
“She fell,” he said. “That’s all it was: an accident.”
“An accident?” she asked. “You ran her over, Ferrell. Help me through that.”
Still straddling her, his eyes went distant and he shook his head violently. In doing so, he gave her the opening she needed, but she didn’t take it-couldn’t take it. She needed the answers. He spoke so fast, so softly that she could hardly keep up. “She pushed me … shouldn’t have done that … went off the fire escape … thought she was dead down there … had to mov e her … the car. That key … the back axle.”
“You had to move her,” she repeated, directing his focus for her own gain. “That makes sense.”
“I backed it up to get her. She was dead. And there she was … sitting up like that all of a sudden.” His voice trailed off, and she knew he was completely consumed in the memory.
“She’d say I pushed her. But it wasn’t like that. I told her to get away from me, but she wouldn’t. She smelled … of him …
of it.”
“Like the boat,” Matthews allowed.
Walker lowered his head and looked out the top of his eyes at her. He nodded.
“When I saw her sitting up like that … I knew what I had to do.”
“All this,” she said softly, “everything you’ve told me, it’s all understandable.” She left out any discussion of Nathan Prair.
“Let me help you-not like Mary-Ann had planned. Not like that at all.”
The flashlight dimmed. It had only minutes left. To attempt an escape in the dark was unthinkable. Instinctively, she shifted the grip of her right hand, exposing the glass and its razor-sharp edge.
She pushed up to one elbow. It had to be now! She wanted tears in his eyes, his vision blurred. She needed to work him like a lump of clay. “She loved you very much, Ferrell. No matter what happened between her and Neal it never came close to what you gave her. She wanted to help you because she loved you. Why else would she have kept trying the way she did?”
His face tightened.
“And you loved her too, didn’t you?”
Walker’s shoulders shook. “No one knows how much,” he said hoarsely.
The jaundice of the flashlight painted him in a milky light as he flexed his legs to stand. That was the distraction she’d waited for.
Her left hand stole the flashlight from his right, a look of astonishment overcoming him. With her right hand she pulled the curving piece of glass from collarbone to navel, like trying to open a stuck zipper.
Locked in disbelief as much as physical shock, Walker looked down at the wound as if it belonged to someone else. In doing so, he unintentionally protected his throat as her second effort failed. The glass cut his neck below his ear, but only superficially. Walker reared back, stumbled, fell to one arm, and then lifted himself to standing. He screamed like a wild animal.
Matthews struggled to her feet and ran, the light blinking on and off in her hand.
To her astonishment, she heard him clomping along, right behind her.