Praying for Sleep

she looks at him coldly. “It’s something else, isn’t it? It’s not just that I was seeing Robert.”
    The estate. Of course. Her millions.
    “You and Robert talked about getting married,” Owen says, “you talked about divorcing me, cutting me out of everything.”
    “You talk like it’s money you earned. It was my father’s. And I’ve always been more than generous. I . . . Wait. How did you know Robert and I talked about getting married?”
    “We knew.”
    Stunned by a blow sharper than his palm a moment before, Lis understands. We knew. “Dorothy?”
    Owen wasn’t seeing a lawyer at all. Dorothy was his lover. Was and still is. Obedient Dorothy. They planned Lis’s death all along. For Owen’s insane pride and for the money. Charming, careless Robert had perhaps left some evidence of the affair around the Gillespie household, or perhaps had simply not stopped talking when he should have.
    “Who do you think called the day of the picnic to get me into work? That wasn’t my secretary. Oh, Lis, you were so blind.”
    “You were at the park after all. I thought I saw you.”
    “I stopped at the office and had my calls forwarded from there to the phone in the Acura. I was at the park fifteen minutes before you. I followed you to the beach.”
    And he waited.
    Dorothy forgot Lis’s copy of Hamlet intentionally, thinking that she’d go back to the truck alone for it. Owen would be waiting for her.
    But it was Robert, not Lis, who went after the book, hoping to meet Portia. Robert must have wandered past Owen, who attacked him at the mouth of the cave. Bleeding badly, Robert had run inside and Owen had pursued him. Claire must have heard Robert’s calls for help and followed.
    And it would have been Owen who found the knife Lis had dropped near Robert’s body.
    “The mutilation! Why, you bastard!”
    “Let the punishment fit the crime.”
    “Michael never hurt Robert?”
    “Hurt him? The son of a bitch tried to save him! He was crying, he was saying, ‘I’ll get that blood off your head, don’t worry, don’t worry.’ Some crap like that.”
    “And you’ve been waiting for something like this. . . .” She laughs, looking around her at the night. “You didn’t go out there to kill him at all. You went to bring him here! You were going to let him . . . let him finish the job tonight!”
    “At first I thought that was why he escaped—to come after you. Then I tracked him to Cloverton. He—”
    “That woman . . . Oh, Owen . . .”
    “No, he didn’t hurt her. He just tied her up so she couldn’t reach the phone. I found her in the kitchen. He’d been muttering to her that he was on his way to Ridgeton to save someone named Lisbonne from her Adam.”
    “ You did it?” she whispers. “You killed her?”
    “I didn’t plan it. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! I made it look as if he’d done it. I dumped her motorcycle in a river. The cops thought he was going to Boyleston but I knew he was headed this way.”
    Of course he did. He knew all along that Michael had a motive for coming to Ridgeton—to find the woman who’d lied about him in court.
    “And you shot Trenton. And the deputy outside!”
    He grows eerily calm now. “It got out of hand. It started simple and it got out of hand.”
    “Owen, please, listen to me. Listen.” She hears in her voice the same desperate but soothing tone with which she’d addressed Michael a half hour before. “If you want the money, for God’s sake, you can have it.”
    But looking at his face, she knows that the money isn’t the point at all. She thinks of her conversation with Richard Kohler. Michael might be mad, yes, but at least his demented world is incorruptibly just.
    It’s her husband who’s the psychopath; he’s the one immune to mercy.
    Lis realizes now that he must have begun planning her death from the very beginning of the evening—when he first heard about Michael’s escape. Making a scene about the sheriff ’s putting men here, insisting she go to the Inn—they were just efforts to make him look innocent. Why, after he murdered Michael, he’d have rung up Lis at the Inn and told her to return. All’s safe, my love. Come home. But he’d be waiting for her. For her and . . .
    “Oh, God,” she whispers.
    Portia too.
    She realizes that he must have intended to kill her as well.
    “No!” Her wail fills the greenhouse. “No!”
    And she does the very thing she’d left her basement hideout for, the very