Dawn in Mont Carmel was so beautiful that Grace admonished herself for having never dragged herself out of bed to experience it. The clouds were tinged with cold in the violet sky, tempering the stars until they were faint points of light.
Of course, waking up at midday with Taureau’s warm body curled around hers was good enough reason to stay in bed, and she would have loved to repeat that daily ritual.
His low grating snore should have been the rhythm to put her back to sleep when she first woke, but when she opened her eyes that morning it was because he jostled her while getting out of bed.
It had happened overnight. The change had come like fog creeping in. The change in atmosphere, and the sense that something was happening, brought her out of sleep. Suddenly cold, Grace had burrowed deeper under the covers and sought his warmth, but found his back to her and his body stiff. He wasn’t asleep. He was coiled tight, back taut but shuddering every few moments, in time with quiet sniffling sounds.
Unsure what to do, Grace had just stayed where she was, trapped in helplessness. She didn’t know what had happened. After they’d made love they’d spent the rest of the day puttering around the house and yard together. There had been no tension, and Taureau’s mood had been as light as hers.
Now there was this agony in the bed they shared. While she’d slept, he’d cracked open. The blackness had poured out and surrounded him. Grace didn’t know if he’d been caught unawares or had let it in. Either way, now that the mistrust had been chased away this toxic thing had crept in.
She’d slipped into sleep for a little while when her body couldn’t take the exhaustion any longer. The sun came up and Taureau got out of bed. Whatever demon he had battled silently through the night had won. She knew when he went into the closet to dress that he wasn’t coming back, and when he left her alone she got out of bed.
By the time she had dressed and pushed her feet into her flats, she had heard him leave the house. She listened but didn’t hear the grind of the motorbike. He had shut himself away again.
The sense of wrongness filled the house. The acidic feeling in her stomach grew as she unloaded the cafetière from the dishwasher. Unsure her stomach could take her usual strong cup, she made tea instead, then stepped outside.
And she sent a text to Reeve to return. She hoped it would be another false alarm, but she knew in her blood that she would be leaving Mont Carmel that day.
His eyes were on her from behind the curtains of the gable window. She felt his gaze, and stared up for minutes at a time, waiting for him to take the invitation to join her, to lope from his electronic fortress with his hands dug into his pockets and slide into the Adirondack next to hers.
Not long after the stars vanished into the morning blue, Simon appeared, shambling through the door in jeans and a T-shirt with an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. She suspected he’d sprung out of bed with her message and just got into his car.
He tossed his smokes onto the small table and reached for her teacup.
‘It’s cold.’
He grunted and drank it down in two gulps, then leaned over the back of the other chair and lit up.
After a moment of listening to him snuffle away the sleep, Grace reached out and took the cigarette from his fingers. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘No problem.’ He scrubbed his face with both hands, then rested his chin in them to watch her puff on the rest of his smoke. ‘Has he gone for a ride?’
‘Nope.’
She took one last drag, then crushed the butt beneath her foot. ‘I don’t know what happened. Everything seemed fine yesterday after you left, or I thought it was. I guess I don’t know anything. I just know it’s done.’
She glanced at Reeve. He looked up and squinted in the morning sun. He said nothing, and she growled as she got to her feet.
‘Tell me what to do. How do I … what happens next?’
‘You go home. You go back to your job. You forget about this place.’
Grace gaped at him. ‘Go back to my job? Forget about this place? What is wrong with you?’
‘There’s nothing else you can do, Grace. You can’t stay here for ever, so the only thing to do is to leave.’ He picked up his cigarette pack, lit another, then leaned back against the house. ‘He wants you to stay. He’s counting on being able to keep you without having to do anything. He got you here without having to do much of anything. If you leave, he has no choice but to let you go or do something to keep you. If he wants you, he’ll have to face up to the fact that he wants more than his loneliness and solitude.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘I’m not your shrink, and I’m not his. You won’t know what will happen until you leave him.’
‘You sound like a crappy women’s magazine,’ she grumbled and wrapped her arms around herself. It wasn’t the chill in the air, but the comfort that came from being wrapped in something of Taureau’s.
He took a long draw from his cigarette, then flicked the ashes from the end. ‘I’ll wait for you inside.’
She watched him stamp the smoke out and turn to head back in. She wanted to freeze time so that he stood mid-stride and she could take all the time in the world to mull over every aspect of leaving and staying, but, once he had gently closed the door behind him, Grace’s stomach lurched.
What was the worst that could happen if she just refused to leave? Would he have Reeve pick her up and carry her out of the house? Or would he just shake his head and let her stay?
She knew what would happen if she didn’t leave with Reeve. One day she’d call him again. It would be an endless cycle until she finally did leave.
She loved Taureau. She didn’t understand it and didn’t trust herself with it. How could she love someone when he’d only given her the pieces of himself he didn’t hide? How could she love someone so guarded? He shunned the chaos of being alive and took solace in being alone even when she was there with him.
Grace knew she could love a broken man, but she couldn’t continue loving someone so content to stay broken.
As she headed towards the guesthouse, she prayed that he wouldn’t let her do it.
Just as she suspected, Taureau was leaning next to the window. He didn’t even try to pretend he hadn’t been watching her. He just waited and gazed as she came up the stairs. She stopped, hand on the banister, waiting to see if he’d say anything, and when he didn’t she took a seat and hugged herself to be rid of the disappointment.
‘I told you this would happen,’ he finally said. ‘In the beginning, I told you.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘What you said, rather arrogantly, was that you’d bring me out here and use me, and I’d be left wrecked because of it. That’s not what this is.’
He looked down at his knuckles, white where he made a fist against his stomach. ‘No, I don’t think it is.’
‘You came at me hard that night you told me about your son. You turned it around and made out like I was asking too much of you, and then you –’ She placed her fingers over her mouth and her next words burned to be let out. ‘You are so full of shit, you know? You say you can’t feel anything, but that’s not true. That’s impossible. You feel everything. I saw the look on your face after your father showed up here, and when you told me about your son, and when you talked about Bette. You feel, but you’re just so damned determined to feel only the worst, aren’t you?’
When she had finished speaking, she sucked in a deep breath and buried her face in her hands until the nausea passed, and then she murmured against her fingers.
‘It was never about what I wanted, Jacques. It wasn’t even about what you wanted. It was about what we wanted, and now what are you going to do to keep me?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to do anything.’
Grace didn’t look up as he strode past her and down the corridor flanked by desks loaded with equipment. He returned seconds later with a disc in his hand.
‘No,’ she said as he tapped the front of the DVD player, then said it again when he popped the disc in. ‘Jacques, please, I don’t want to see it.’
She stood and made a grab for his arm, but he shoved her back onto the loveseat and, remote in hand, stood over her.
‘You’ll watch.’
Grace drew her hands up to her chest. She knew that if she tried to leave he’d hold her back, that if she tried to cover her face he’d hold her hands at her side. He’d put her on her knees and twist her neck to get her eyes on the screen if he had to.
He pressed a button on the remote, and as the word PLAY blinked yellow on the blue screen, she braced herself, but knew there was nothing she could do to prepare for what she was about to see.
The picture appeared, a sickly green. Night vision. Only the lights were on, and the camera was poised in a corner so almost all of the room could be seen. After about a minute, eerie shadows stretched across the floor, and three people entered the room, two men and one woman.
Jacques Taureau, Jeffrey Brown and Bette Laurin.
Bette twirled midway to the bed and gave Taureau’s hand a tug, then skipped back and quickly shimmied out of her dress. The men followed suit, down to sickly white-green skin.
‘You don’t need to see the sordid details. We might as well get to the grisly part,’ he said icily, and raised the remote.
The bodies came together cartoonishly fast on the bed, and then Bette’s lithe little form zoomed across the room. The lights went out, and a few moments later everything went still.
Grace’s pulse picked up when Taureau returned the speed to normal. Two figures sprawled on the bed while another paced at the foot. For a few moments Bette Laurin was out of the picture, and the young version of Taureau rolled onto his back.
She came back, naked and brandishing a kitchen knife. She stood at the end of the bed, just staring.
How odd, Grace thought as she watched Bette carefully straddle her sleeping boyfriend. She had pictured mayhem and carnage, not this slow stalk. Her skin crawled and her stomach rolled as Bette sat on Taureau’s torso. The only sound was the buzzing in her ears as she held her breath.
At first it seemed as though nothing was happening. Bette was just sitting there, hunched over her lover. Next to them, Brown slept on.
And then came the most grotesque scene Grace had ever witnessed. The position of the camera and Bette’s body prevented her from seeing the cuts, but she saw the aftermath, and it was hideous. Taureau’s body came to life beneath Bette, some twitching, alien thing. He was so much bigger than she was, but she was the succubus who had already taken his life’s breath. He grasped at her, but she merely swatted his hands away.
The calm in Bette Laurin broke at once. She scrambled back. The knife fell, glinting as it caught some light, and landed in the bed. On her feet now, Laurin shook, standing over Taureau as he continued to suffer. She clasped her hands in her hair and doubled over as though cramped, then spun around.
All of that, and this was the worst to see: the look of anguish on her face as she stumbled away. It was watching someone realise that the nightmare that had shaken them awake was real.
‘I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering why in the fuck she decided to do it,’ Taureau said, and turned the video off. ‘There was a doctor at the trial who thinks she believed that I was someone else, and a part of her woke up and she was a little girl again, waking up with a man asleep in her bed, and she took her chance. That I believe. That I understand. What I don’t understand is, why me? Who not Jeff? Why did she pick me? What did I do to her that, when she broke, made her come after me?’
Grace shook her head and opened her mouth, but nothing came out, not even a breath.
His back still to her, Taureau spoke: ‘Now do you have it through your thick skull that I can offer you nothing that I haven’t already given? You know everything and you’ve seen everything, and now you can leave.’
I won’t, she wanted to say, but the need to be away from the hard man he had revealed himself to be and the thing that had turned him that way overpowered her.
Her insides rubbery, she pushed herself out of the chair and just stood there for a moment until the rush of blood passed.
Then she left.