Sanctuary

the words were a plea. “It was an accident.”
    “No. God.” It was worse, he thought, by every second that passed it grew worse. “He knew her habits. He studied them. She used to walk, at night, around the gardens.”
    “She . . . she loved the flowers at night.” The dream she’d had the night they’d found Susan Peters spun back into her mind. “She loved the white ones especially. She loved the smells and the quiet. She called it her alone time.”
    “He chose the night,” Nathan continued. “He put a sleeping pill into my mother’s wine so she ... so she wouldn’t know he’d been gone. Everything he did he documented step by step in his journal. He wrote that he waited for Annabelle at the edge of the forest to the west of the house.” It was killing him by degrees to say it, to look into Jo’s face and say it. “He knocked her unconscious and took her into the forest. He had everything set up. He’d already set up his lights, his tripod. It wasn’t an accident. It was planned. It was premeditated. It was deliberate.”
    “But why?” She had to sit. On legs stiff and brittle as twigs, she stumbled to a chair. “I remember him. He was kind to me. And patient. Daddy took him fishing. And Mama would make him pecan pie now and then because he was fond of it.” She made a helpless sound, then pressed her fingers to her lips to hold it back. “Oh, God, you want me to believe he murdered her for no reason?”
    “He had a purpose.” He did turn away now and strode into the kitchen to drag a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard. “You could never call it a reason.”
    He splashed the liquor into a glass, tossed it back quickly, and hissed through the sting. With his palms braced on the counter, he waited for his blood to settle.
    “I loved him, Jo. He taught me how to ride a bike, how to field a grounder. He paid attention. Whenever he traveled, he’d call home not just to talk to my mother but to all three of us. And he listened—not just the pretense of listening some adults think a child can’t see through. He cared.”
    He turned back to her, his eyes eloquent. “He would bring my mother flowers for no reason. I’d lie in bed at night and listen to them laughing together. We were happy, and he was the center of it. Now I have to face that there was no center, that he was capable of something monstrous.”
    “I feel carved out,” she managed. Her head seemed to be floating somewhere above her shoulders. “Scraped out. Raw. All these years.” She squeezed her eyes tight a moment. “Your lives just went on?”
    “He was the only one who knew, and he was very careful. Our lives just went on. Until his ended and I went through his personal papers and found the journal and photographs.”
    “Photographs.” The floating sensation ended with a jerk. “Photographs of my mother. After she was dead.”
    He had to say it all, no matter how even the thought ripped through his brain. “ ‘The decisive moment,’ he called it.”
    “Oh, my God.” Lectures heard, lectures given, whirled in her head. Capturing the decisive moment, anticipating when the dynamics of a situation will reach peak, knowing when to click the shutter to preserve that most powerful image . “It was a study, an assignment.”
    “It was his purpose. To manipulate, to cause, to control, and to capture death.” Nausea churned violently. He downed more Scotch, pitting the liquor against the nausea. “It wasn’t all, it can’t be. There was something warped inside him. Something we never saw. Something no one ever saw, or suspected. He had friends, a successful career. He liked to listen to ball games on TV and read mystery novels. He liked to barbecue, he wanted grandchildren.”
    It was tearing him apart, every word, every memory. “There is no defense,” he said. “No absolution.”
    She stepped forward. Every emotion inside her coalesced and focused on one point. “He took photographs of her. Of her face. Her eyes. Of her body. Nudes. He posed her, carefully. Her head tilted down toward her left shoulder, her right arm draped across her midriff.”
    “How do you—”
    “I did see.” She closed her eyes and spun away. Relief was cold, painfully cold. An icy layer over hot grief. “I’m not crazy. I was never crazy. I didn’t hallucinate. It was real. All of it.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    Impatient, she dug her cigarettes out of her back pocket. But when she struck the match, she only