Dark Rivers of the Heart

instruments in the drawer.
        You said so yourself He grabbed one and killed her. It would only have taken seconds. Only a few seconds, Spencer. The bastard knew you couldn't get far, that he'd catch up with you. And he was so excited after the struggle with you that he couldn't wait, shaking with excitement, so he had to kill her then, hard and fast and brutally."
        "Later, he's on the floor, after he slashed me, and I'm running away, and he's calling after me, asking if I killed her, if I liked killing her."
        "Oh, he knew. He knew, she was dead before you ever came back here to free her. Maybe)e he was insane and maybe he wasn't, but he was sly as hell the purest evil that ever walked. Don't you see? He hadn't converted you to his way, and he hadn't been able to kill you, either, so all that was left for him was to ruin your life if he could, to plant that seed of doubt in your mind. You were a boy, half blind with panic and terror, confused, and he knew your turmoil. He understood, and he used it against you, just for the sheer, sickness of it."
        For more than half his lifetime, Spencer had tried to convince himself of the scenario that she had just painted for him. But the void in his memory remained. The continued amnesia seemed to argue that the truth was different from what he desperately wished had happened.
        "Go," he said thickly. "Run for the truck, drive away from here, go to Denver. I shouldn't have brought you here. I can't ask you to come any farther with me."
        "I'm here. I'm not leaving."
        "I mean it. Get out."
        "No way."
        "Get out. Take the dog."
        "No."
        Rocky was whining, shaking, huddling against a column of blood-dark brick, in torment as racking as any Spencer had ever seen.
        "Take him. He likes you."
        "I'm not going." Through tears, she said, "This is my decision, damn it, and you can't make it for me!"
        He turned on her, seized handfuls of her leather jacket, all but lifted her off the floor, frantically trying to force her to understand. In his rage and fear and self-loathing, he had managed, after all, to look her in the eyes one more time. "For Christ's sake, after all you've seen and heard, don't you get it? I left part of myself in that room, that abattoir where he did his butchering, left something there I couldn't live with. What in the name of God could that be, huh?
        Something worse than the catacombs, worse than all the rest of it. It has to be worse because I remembered all the rest of it! If I go back in there and remember what I did to her, there'll be no forgetting ever again, no hiding from it any more. And this is a memory… like fire.
        It's going to burn through me. Whatever's left, whatever isn't burned away, it won't be me any more, Ellie, not after I know what I did to her. And then whore you going to be down here with, down here in this godforsaken place alone with?"
        She raised one hand to his face and traced the line of his scar, though he tried to flinch away from her. She said, "If I was blind, if I'd never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart."
        "Oh, Ellie, don't."
        "Ellie, please."
        "No." He couldn't direct his rage at her, either, especially not at her.
        He let go of her. Stood with his hands at his sides.
        Fourteen again. Weak with his outrage. Afraid. Lost.
        She put her hand on the lever-action door handle.
        "Wait." He withdrew the S.I.G 9MM pistol from under the waistband of his blue jeans, disengaged the safety, jacked a bullet into the chamber, and held the piece out to her. "You should have both guns."
        She started to object, but he cut her off. "Keep the pistol in your hand. Don't get too close to me in there."
        "Spencer, whatever you remember, it's not going to turn you into your father, not in an instant, no matter how terrible it is."
        "How do you know that? I've spent sixteen years picking at it, prying and poking, trying to dig it out of the darkness, but it won't come. Now if it comes…"
        She engaged the safety on the pistol.
        "Ellie-"
        "I don't want it to go off accidentally."
        "My father wrestled on the floor with me and tickled me and made funny faces for me when I was little. Played ball with me. And when I wanted to develop my drawing ability, he patiently taught