Ginny pulled up one of the loose chairs now littering the floor and sat astride it, with her arms across the chair back and her chin on her arms. She looked like she was in the process of posing for a Norman Rockwell painting.
“Hello,” she said. “You’re Gregor Demarkian. You’re the great detective. Maggie Kelleher pointed you out.”
“I saw her,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what kind of great detective I am. These days I seem mostly to be retired.”
“You haven’t been retired down here,” Ginny said. “You shouldn’t be so modest. I know what you’ve done since you came to visit David. You’ve been wonderful. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t helped me out.”
“Here?”
“At this party.” Ginny’s right arm made a sweeping arc in the air. “I’d still be back where I was, in jail, or in the county jail. I know that. I know what all of them were thinking. Did you know that I’d separated from my husband?”
“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “I heard that.”
“He didn’t believe in me, either,” Ginny said. “None of them did, not really. Some of them say they did, but it isn’t true. It’s strange what you find out about people, when you’ve been through something like this.”
“You find out a great deal,” Gregor agreed. “But most people never find themselves in a situation like this.”
“Well, it’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’s a good thing. It’s too horrible to think about, even now, after all this time. I’m glad you came down to help me, Mr. Demarkian. You did help me. You helped me more than you’ll ever know.”
“Oh, I think I know,” Gregor said. “I think I know exactly. You know what’s puzzling me, at the moment?”
“What?”
“I keep wondering how long you expect to get away with this. Because you must know you can’t get away with this forever. You have to know that that just isn’t possible.”
Gregor Demarkian had never believed in shape-changers, but now Ginny Marsh seemed to be one. She changed right in front of his eyes. Her eyes went sharp and small. Her nostrils pinched. She lost all her small-town quasiprettiness in a flash. All that was left of it was her hair, cascading blond and bright over her shirt collar and down her back.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her voice very low, very low, impossible for anyone around them to hear.
“Of course you know what I mean,” Gregor said. “You killed your child.”
“Stephen killed my child,” Ginny said. “You proved it.”
“I proved no such thing. Stephen killed Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer, yes, that he did, but he didn’t kill the child. You killed the child. You were the only one who could have.”
“How can you say that? Stephen went out on the kitchen terrace with Carol Littleton and took Tiffany with him. It was in his confession. It was in all the papers—”
“It wasn’t part of his confession,” Gregor said, “it was in the fake suicide note he wrote for Zhondra Meyer. And he had to have a name, of course, because he couldn’t remember killing the child. Because he hadn’t killed the child. And he had to have a reason, too, for killing Carol Littleton later. He couldn’t tell us why he really killed her. That would have destroyed everything he had been working for.”
Ginny turned her face away. “I still don’t understand what you mean. I think you’re being cruel, that’s all. I think you like to—to torment people.”
“When you cut Tiffany’s throat, she was alive, Ginny. She was alive. The blood pumped out of her. That’s what Stephen said.”
“I didn’t cut Tiffany’s throat. I’d never do anything like that. I loved my baby.”
“Oh, Ginny,” Gregor said. “You’ve never loved anybody but Ginny and you know that. I know that. I’ve watched you operate, on television before I came down, here today at this party. You’re a remarkable young woman, in a way. You killed the child with your own hands, but then you got better. You sat in that jail cell day after day and killed Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer and Stephen Harrow, too, all without raising a finger.”
“Stephen killed Carol and Zhondra,” Ginny said. “You told me so. And Stephen killed himself. Clayton Hall was there. He saw him. You saw him. Even Lisa saw him.”
“I know who saw him, Ginny. I know you were sitting all alone in that cell they gave you, reading your Bible and biding your time. But you killed them anyway. All the way along, all Stephen was trying to do was stay sane and protect you. He did the second part reasonably well, but he didn’t manage the first. By the time Stephen Harrow put that bullet through himself, he was something worse than out of his mind. He was staring into the pit of hell and hearing it call to him.”