“Again he didn’t know what he was talking about,” she said. “I should have given him more preparation time. Not just sprung it on him.”
“You mean, sprung on him the fact that he was adopted, and he didn’t even know that much?”
Her face twisted yet again. “He didn’t know,” she said. Maggie stared up at the ceiling as she contemplated that knowledge. “I would have approached it quite differently if I had realized he didn’t know that. As it was, he was angry at me, and I’m sure he was very angry at them too.”
“But now you had opened the door, and, once he was older …”
“He said it was too soon, and he couldn’t deal with it. But I knew that, over time, he would. And I always had that hope that, when he turned eighteen, I’d see him again. And, once I saw him, I had that hope that, when he had time to adjust, he’d be there, and I’d have my son back.”
“But it didn’t work out that way, did it?” Nico asked, his voice gentle, soft, and compassionate.
Charlotte was stunned to realize just how much goodness was in that man, that, even in a situation like this, he could sympathize and be empathetic with a woman holding a gun on him.
Maggie looked at him and frowned. “No, and that’s because of the woman beside you. She’s really not a nice person, you know? She took everything from me, and I’ve already lost so much.”
“That’s not true,” Charlotte said. She tried hard to be calm and quiet, but her nerves were again stretched even more with the lies hurled at her. “I didn’t know anything about the arrangements for that rally. I didn’t have anything to do with the timing.”
“Oh, so ignorance is an excuse then, is it?” Maggie shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what you say. You’re guilty.”
“More guilty than John Edwards and Sue Carlson?” Nico asked.
The two organizers who had died in a car accident, Charlotte remembered.
Maggie looked at him in surprise. “Wow, are you police or something? Because I wasn’t expecting anybody to connect that at all.”
“Connect?” Charlotte asked, knowing that she had to get answers that were clear. “Are you saying that you killed the two organizers involved in setting up that rally?”
Maggie looked at her in surprise. “Well, I said people had to pay.” She raised a shaky hand to her head and came away with more makeup. She stared in disgust. “Do you know how long it took to curry favor and to get you to offer me that damn job and then to get started here to find the information I needed?”
“What information could I possibly have had?” Charlotte asked.
“Well, it wasn’t so much information you had, but I needed your contact information to make my plan work.”
“And what plan was that?”
“Well, you needed to go back to Australia, and I needed a way to get you there,” she said.
Charlotte was still trying to deal with the fact that Maggie had killed the organizers from the rally where her son had died. “Hang on a second. Go back to the organizers. How did you kill them?”
“I cut their brake line. They were going home via that nasty highway, and there were a couple really ugly corners. I knew that the chances of them surviving a trip like that without brakes were pretty slim. I didn’t cut it all the way through, but you know what I mean. It’s pretty easy to kill. I don’t understand why people get caught all the time.”
“And, of course, you didn’t get caught,” Charlotte said in shock. “They both died at your hand, and nobody even knew.”
“Nope,” she said, “they didn’t. John and Sue didn’t know either, which was too bad because I really wanted them to know. I wanted them to understand why they weren’t allowed to live anymore and what they’d done to deserve the same fate that they gave my son.”
“You do realize that they had no say either? That security was hired at the location, and it was a terrible accident.”
“An accident doesn’t work for me,” she said, “because that means there’s no blame attached.”
And Charlotte understood. “And, if no blame is attached, you have nobody to blame,” she said quietly. “That’s why you can’t live like this, you know?”
“Well, somebody has to be blamed,” Maggie said. “Who else do you have to target all that rage on if you don’t have somebody to blame?”
“Well, in my case,” Charlotte said, “I turned on myself and felt guilty. You could have done that yourself. Felt guilt that you hadn’t warned Andy to stay away, guilt that you hadn’t shown up at the rally and stopped him from being in a dangerous position, guilt for not having done more and for not telling him that this was a really bad idea.”
“But I didn’t know,” Maggie said angrily. “How am I supposed to stop him when I didn’t know?”
“I don’t know. How was I supposed to save him when I didn’t know either?”
The two women stared at each other at an impasse.
And then Maggie relaxed and laughed. “That’s not bad,” she said. “That’s not bad at all. It won’t do you any good, of course, but it’s not bad.”
“So you killed your parents and you killed the organizers,” Nico said. “And then you came here, intent on killing Charlotte. Why didn’t you just wipe her out on the road one day or shoot her like you’re planning to now?”
“Well, it took time,” Maggie said. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. But I mean, after many deaths, this was a little special. I’ve been waiting for a long time. It wasn’t just revenge for me. It was revenge for poor Andy. And that was important. I figured that I’d find a way to make it happen, but I didn’t want it to be over here. The laws here in America are very different, so I wanted her to die in Australia. Most
