With the principal dead, Render had gone in search of Molly's third-grade classroom, killing one member of the faculty en route and wounding two others. He found her room and grievously wounded her teacher, Mrs. Pasternak, and would have abducted Molly if the police had not then arrived.
'In the gardens, we wore an electronic shackle around one ankle, which would trigger an alarm in the security office if we ventured farther than allowed. I made no attempt to escape. There was a fence, after all, and a world outside that knew my face too well. I became something of a horticulturist, specializing in roses.'
With the arrival of the police, he had taken Molly and twenty-two other children hostage. He wasn't a stupid man-in fact he had earned two university degrees-and therefore knew that having killed two and wounded three, he could not hope to negotiate freedom for himself. By then, however, his ever-simmering anger, which was the essence of his personality, had grown into a fiery rage, and he determined that if he could not have the control of the daughter that he had for so long pursued, then he would deny other parents the pleasure of their children's company.
'One day, as I worked alone in the rose garden, what should appear before me but a nine-year-old boy with a disposable camera.'
Render had killed five of the twenty-two children before Molly shot him. He'd brought two pistols and spare magazines of ammunition. After reloading both guns, he'd reacted with such fury to something he heard from a police bullhorn outside that in his rage he left one weapon lying on the teacher's desk, and turned his back on it.
His voice these twenty years later, colored by something darker than his usual anger, mesmerized her: 'On a dare, to prove his courage to his pals, the boy had cut a hole in a far corner of the fence, distant from the actual sanitarium buildings, and had crept across the grounds, hoping to photograph one of the infamous patients as evidence of his nerve.'
Although only eight years old and unfamiliar with firearms, Molly had picked up the second pistol from the teacher's desk. Gripping it with both hands, she squeezed off three shots. Rocked and terrified by the recoil, she still managed to hit Render twice-first in the back, then in the right thigh-and fortunately harmed no one with the third shot, which lodged in a wall.
'The infamous patient the boy chanced to come across was me,' said Render. 'He was skittish, but I charmed him, mugged for the camera, and let him take eight photographs there among the roses.'
When Render, having been shot twice, crashed to the schoolroom floor, the seventeen surviving children fled. In their wake, a SWAT team entered to find Molly weeping at the side of her badly wounded teacher, who would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
'By the end of our little photo shoot, the boy had let down his guard. I hit him very hard in the face, and hit him again, and then strangled him there among the roses. The experience would have been even more satisfying if he'd been a young girl, but you have to work with what you're given.'
Later on that bloody day, twenty years before this current encounter, Molly had wondered how she could have wounded him twice with three shots even though she had never handled a gun before, though she had been shaking with terror, though three times the punishing recoil had nearly knocked her off her feet. That she had been able to stop him seemed a miracle.
'Not far from the rose garden was an old cistern, an enormous stonewalled underground tank. They'd once had a complex rainwater-collection system that funneled runoff into the cistern to be used for maintenance of the landscaping in dry months.'
Molly had told her mother that some spirit had been with her on that awful day, an angel that could have no influence with Render but could guide her and steady her to do what must be done.
'The cistern hadn't been used in sixty years. They left it there because the cost of tearing it out was prohibitive.'
Thalia had assured young Molly that she-and she alone-deserved the credit for her courage, for what she'd done. Angels, Thalia said, didn't work their miracles with guns.
'Using gardening tools, I pried off the cistern lid and dropped the boy into that hole. So dark in there, and such a stench. Shallow water far below. He landed with a splash, and a chorus of rats squeaking in fright.'
In spite of her mother's well-meaning counsel, Molly believed then, and to this day, that some guiding spirit had been with her in that schoolroom.
She felt no spirit now, however, and was inexpressibly grateful for the pistol in her hand.
'I buried his little disposable camera at the foot of a rosebush. It was the Cardinal Mindszenty rose, so named because of its glorious robe-red color.'
Render moved, not toward her-and risk being shot-but around her, slowly circling away from the toilet stalls, in the direction of the sinks.
'Police came looking for the boy, of course, but they took some time to find him. The rats had done their work. But better yet, the bottom of the cistern had cracked and broken out ages ago. The boy had settled into a natural limestone catacomb under the cistern. His condition, when they discovered him, didn't give the CSI techies much to work with.'
Slowly Render moved past the first sink, then past the second.
Molly turned, tracking him with the pistol.
'Suspicion fell on another patient. Edison Crain, his name was. A plump, sweaty little man. Ten years before, he had raped a young boy and strangled him to death-his only known act of violence.'
Second by second, the lavatory seemed less real to Molly, while simultaneously Render grew more vivid, commanding her attention, as hypnotic as a weaving cobra.
'Crain had lived ten blameless years since then, had been a model patient, and it was thought that his cure was well advanced, that he would be eligible for medically supervised release in a year or so. But the poor troubled thing must still have been eaten with guilt over the boy he did kill, and must not have trusted his own sanity. Because when suspicion fell on him, he cracked and broke, confessed to the murder of the camera boy.'
Having circled a hundred eighty degrees of the room, Render stood with his back to the window, his feet in the puddle of rain.
'They transferred Crain to a maximum-security hospital, and I? well, I escaped all consequences. That was fifteen years ago, but still, when I'm lying alone in bed at night, between the desire and the spasm, the memory of strangling the boy excites me no less than the first time I resorted to it for stimulation.'
Molly had been aware of a difference in him, the nature of which for a while eluded definition; but now she understood it. Render's characteristic anger was not in evidence. His hot temper had cooled.
New to him was a self-satisfied air approaching smugness. And the intense focus of a predator. The dark amusement in his voice. A glimmer of wicked merriment in his eyes.
Twenty years in the care of psychiatrists had resulted in the maturation of his raw anger into sociopathic contempt and psychotic glee; the wine of rage had become a more sophisticated, well-aged venom.
'And now my questions,' he said. That smile again. Almost a smirk. 'Is your mother still dead?'
Molly couldn't grasp Render's purpose in coming here. If he had meant to harm her, he could have struck her from behind instead of announcing his presence.
'Does anyone still read the dumb slut's books?'
Unreality chased surreality, round and round. Why would he travel so far only to tell the story of the strangled boy when he knew that Molly could not loathe him more than she already loathed him, or to disparage her mother when he knew that she would dismiss his slurs and insults with contempt?
'Are any of her books even in print? She was as bad a writer as she was a bad hump.'
His taunting seemed designed to goad Molly into shooting him, but that made no sense. His matchless arrogance and his capacity for cruelty surely meant that he was incapable of grief or guilt. His passion was homicidal, not suicidal.
'Are any of your books in print, sweetheart? After tonight, what does it matter that you've written anything? Or that you've existed at all? You're a failed writer, a barren woman, an empty hole. Dark, dark, dark-they all go into the dark. You, too. And soon. To avoid the horrors that are coming, have you thought about turning that pistol on yourself?'
She sensed that he was about to slip out through the open window. 'Don't try to leave,' she warned.
He raised his eyebrows. 'What-you think you can ring up the sanitarium and they'll quick send out some white-coat types with a straitjacket? The gates are open, sweetheart. Don't you realize what's happened? The
