carry him down the mountain and carry him home; soaring and falling and impact and free.
Justice watched in horror as the President jumped, disappeared beyond the rim. He heard himself shout something and threw his body forward, onto his knees, onto his belly, and crawled to the edge and shoved his head out and looked down.
In time to see Augustine’s body turn over and over between the jagged black walls, a speck plummeting through moonlight and darkness, and strike an outcropping of granite with a sound that carried faintly up to Justice, like an echo of death, and fall again and finally vanish into the river.
He wanted to cry, to scream, to tear things with his hands; instead he pulled himself back and lay with his head cradled in his arms. Self-condemnation: I should have saved him, I should have saved him! Then there was grief, black and consuming. And then, after a long while, there was nothing at all-as though the defensive machinery of his mind had erected a wall to block off emotion.
I didn’t do it, Christopher.
The President’s last words. And they began to repeat themselves inside his head, slowly, steadily, like a liturgical chant. But he did do it, Justice thought. The denial had been a cry for relief, relief of guilt: he knew he was mentally ill, he couldn’t cope with his psychosis, and in the end the knowledge had become so intolerable that it had forced him into taking his own life.
I didn’t do it, Christopher.
Unbalanced, yes, no question of that-but suppose it wasn’t psychosis after all? Suppose it was a complete but nonviolent breakdown brought about by the enormous pressure and anxiety of the past few days? Suppose the shock of finding Harper’s body had unbalanced him so severely that he had half-believed he was guilty, run because of that? Suppose he had committed suicide only because he was sick and frightened?
I didn’t do it, Christopher.
Justice sat up; he was cold, cold-and there were thoughts beginning to move dimly at the edges of his mind, as though trying to form some sort of visceral insight. He got to his feet, started over to where the horses were nuzzling grass in the moonlight. Stopped again and stared sightlessly at the black line of trees to the south.
I didn’t do it, Christopher.
Then who did? If it wasn’t the President, who is it?
The insight began to come together.
I didn’t do it, Christopher.
And he knew who it was.
Insight, intuition-just like that he knew who the psychopath was and it was not the President; it was not the President, he had died for nothing.
Justice ran to the roan mare and swung up into the saddle, heeled the horse swiftly downslope.
Toward the person who had murdered not three men but four; toward the person who had murdered Nicholas Augustine.
Eighteen
The front door of the house was unlocked, and Justice opened it without knocking and stepped inside. A ceiling globe burned in the hallway and flickers of firelight created dancing shadows in the family room; everywhere else there was darkness. He paused for a moment, listening to the purring and the snapping of flames, and then slowly walked to the doorway on his left and entered the family room.
She was sitting on the couch near the hearth, hands folded in her lap, head turned toward him. Claire Augustine: the First Lady, the President’s wife.
Murderer.
Justice hesitated again. How many times had he read scenes just like this in mystery novels? The detective, the policeman, facing the murderer in the final chapter; the confrontation scene in which the truth was revealed at last: the motives, the hidden relationships, the intricacies of plot and counterplot. The clues and the clever deductions. The confession. The wrap-up.
But this was not a mystery novel and this was not that kind of confrontation. What was involved here was real crime and real pain, the real deaths of the attorney general and the domestic affairs advisor and the press secretary and the President of the United States-murder and madness so devastating that it literally affected the lives and futures of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. This was the confrontation at the end of the greatest single tragedy in the history of America, and it was awesome, and it belonged with terrible irony to him and to the woman sitting across the room.
Justice went to stand in front of her. And felt nothing in that moment except emotional exhaustion-no anger, no hatred, no pity, not even grief. If there was anything left in him at all, it was a sense of shame.
“Mrs. Augustine,” he said.
She seemed to quail at the sound of his voice, the grim authority in it. She looked small sitting there, hunched, as if she had withdrawn into herself so deeply that it had become physical as well as mental. Her eyes were wide, but there was no lustre in them, no animation-the eyes of an interloper inhabiting the body of the First Lady.
He said tonelessly, “The President is dead, Mrs. Augustine.”
Her reaction was convulsive; a look of fearful disbelief made her face seem grotesque in the flickers of orange light. Her hands came up, fluttering like white wings, and turned palms outward as if to push away the truth of his words. She whispered. “What are you saying?” in a voice that trembled, nearly broke.
“It’s true,” Justice said. “He fell into the river gorge at Lookout Point. I was there but I couldn’t save him. I just couldn’t save him.”
“Oh my God!”
“He thought he’d killed Mr. Harper,” Justice said. “He was a sick man and he found Harper dead in his cottage and he thought he’d done it. But he didn’t do it, Mrs. Augustine. We both know that.”
“No,” she said, “no,” and tears welled in her eyes, began to spill over her cheeks in glistening runnels. Her body quivered, her hands came together above her breast and wrapped in the material of her blouse, twisted it so hard Justice heard a faint ripping sound.
He forced himself to keep looking at her. “It was you, Mrs. Augustine,” he said. “You’re the one who killed Harper and Briggs and Wexford, you’re the one who’s really ill. And you killed the President too, just as sure as if you’d bludgeoned him to death like the others.”
“Stop it! Please stop it…”
“I don’t know why you did it,” Justice said. “Maybe you thought you were helping the President, saving his career by eliminating people you believed were his enemies-”
“I can’t stand any more of this, I can’t take any more!”
“Then confess the truth and it will be over.”
She stared up at him with her huge wet eyes. And the tears stopped and the trembling stopped, and he could almost see her gathering herself together at the edges. “Yes,” she said finally, in a voice that was dull and lifeless, but controlled now, “the truth. It’s time for the truth; it’s much too late for anything else.”
“That’s right,” Justice said. “Go ahead, Mrs. Augustine.”
“I waited too long,” she said. She was not looking at him now, was looking instead into the fire. “Out of love, out of blind hope. Out of weakness. I’ve always thought I was strong, but I’m not; it was just a facade. I didn’t know what to do; I tried to confide in Elizabeth Miller, of all people, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was like a little girl alone in the woods at night, surrounded by shadows I couldn’t understand and couldn’t cope with. I kept thinking the night would end and they would all go away. God forgive me, I waited too long.”
Justice frowned. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, ma’am. Why don’t you just confess the truth and be done with it?”
“I am confessing the truth. I’m doing what I should have done days ago, weeks ago.”
This isn’t going the way it should, he thought. Not the last chapter of a mystery novel but a confrontation nevertheless, and it isn’t going the way it should. It was as if she had managed to take subtle command of it, as if their roles had somehow shifted.
