Cynthia stood straight and tall and held the gun in her gloved hand at her side. She pointed the flashlight to the floor, its beam dimming yellow.
“You don’t know how happy I was to see you come back, Rob. And our time together. How it reminded me of our time on the island years ago.”
She stepped a foot or two closer to Robby, watching her feet as she took each step. She halted in the place Carrington had been standing before he was shot off his feet. Slowly, Cynthia pointed the light across the floor and up Robby’s body.
“Do you remember? The summers? The nights? Did your life in the big city, and your new wife and kid ever make you forget?”
Robby shook his head. “No…I didn’t forget you.”
“You didn’t want me to have a baby. You had plans. Dreams. I was Pop Hairston’s girl. Blacksmith’s daughter. You weren’t much better, but you sure thought you were. People said you were. ‘Cause you were born left-handed and you could throw a ball.”
His mind wandered. Wandered to the summer. To the beach. Out on the water. In the night. Drunk on his ass. On the boat.
Coach Cal.
“Here’s my advice,” he said in that red-faced drunken sneer. “Don’t date her. Don’t marry her. And for Christ sakes don’t have a baby with her. She’s gonna spoil everything for you.”
His mind wandered. To the night when he told her. After he was done with the questioning from the police. After they found the body. After the funeral. After consoling his mother. After the next game. When he told her that night what they had to do.
“Cyn—,”
“—so I got an abortion. Like you wanted. And you could go back to Miami, and to your games and your beach girls and onto to the pros. Moving on.”
“I know I—,”
“—you know how hard it is to get an abortion down here? With Operation Rescue and the anti-abortionists and the evangelicals running around? They sure as hell didn’t have the best OB/GYNS around here to begin with. So my abortion was done the old-fashioned way. And you never knew.”
His mind wandered. Back to the deck, he was drinking beer, she was drinking red wine, drinking. On the back deck looking out over the marsh. Fingering Pop’s masterful grillwork, talking over old times, getting acquainted again, catching up. When he asked her the question, and she turned to stone.
“Why didn’t you want to have children?”
Her glance stopped him cold. But he was too drunk to pay it more than a passing notice.
Mateen stood up from Carrington and slowly closed the distance between the body and Cynthia. Robby shielded the light beam in his eyes with his palm. Cynthia’s face was serene as she continued behind the light.
“It worked. Hallelujah. But it wrecked any hopes of me ever getting pregnant again. Because of your career. Not mine. Your dreams. Not mine.”
Mateen kept coming, slowly, slowly behind her. Robby watched. Did she notice? He seemed about to reach to her, perhaps to grab her arm. Stop whatever she was doing.
Mateen’s hand touched her, rubbed her, stroked her back. And she softened at Mateen’s touch.
His mind wandered. To that first night weeks ago when he returned to the island. When he became reacquainted with the man who had been a boy when he left.
“You’re Mateen?”
“He was six or seven last time you saw him,” Cynthia said. “Pop’s last hurrah.”
And then Carrington spoke something in Spanish. “Diversas madres,” he mumbled.
Different mothers.
The scream that awakened Robby in the night. That first night. When the digital clock read 3:30 am. He sat up in bed and listened for it again. Rhythmic. Muffled. Ecstatic.
Her voice in the night. A familiar voice. Her husband gone. She could let her screams leave her body with abandon.
Robby saw her as his mind wandered.
Saw Cynthia riding on top of Mateen in her bed, and he was holding out a hand to stifle her cries.
He could picture the look of shock on Pop Hairston’s face some years ago. Hold the vision in his mind of that last day of Pop’s life. When he came into his shop and found them. Found Cynthia and Mateen on the cot in the corner. No more a child. A young man. With his beautiful daughter. His beautiful sister.
There was a struggle. He could see it. Pop’s hand flashing a leather strap. Another hand reaching for the poker. Pop struck down. The poker falling, clanging to stone floor, from Mateen’s hands.
These two. These two were the partners. Not Carrington and Cynthia. Not in fact. These two standing in front of his eyes.
His mind focused. It left the past and returned to the present. To the future. To his own life. Focus. Get out of the jam. Make the right choice. Find the right words to deliver.
“Cyn…I came for you. I came back to start again. To make amends. To get my life back together. So I could get my daughter—“
“Your daughter…?”
Wrong words. Wrong words. Those words wouldn’t work.
“To see you again. And change what I’ve done…”
The words hung there. The wind thrashed power lines, upended poles, shattered glass on the streets outside the mansion. The hurricane had reached land, tearing through the coastal country, breaking what had once been rebuilt, restored. Turning back time in the places that stood in its path of destruction.
“Some things can never change,” she said. “That’s why they call it the past. You can’t change what you’ve done. What you’ve done…started it all. It all began with you.”
She paused. And in that moment Robby considered how well she knew him. How well she could manipulate him. He saw the broad outlines and he saw the fine detail of her work, as intricate as anything her father made from shaping metal with fire and anvil and stone. She kept him cozy, and doubtful. Unsettled, and close. Uncertain, and sure. He could see it all. He could see how it would end. And he could see in the amber light that he couldn’t alter the outcome.
“We needed Carrington dead. At least the perception. That much was true. And having him really dead, and not just living in some island somewhere with his young white girl. That’s more than a bonus. We needed him dead just like Venable. Carrington missed seeing that. But this? It isn’t necessary, is it?”
Cynthia smiled. And in that smile, Robby reconsidered and thought for a moment he had a small opening. An outside chance. A last chance. A fool’s chance.
“This one is for me,” she said. “It ends with you.”
And she fired the gun two times, in quick succession, once into Robby’s chest and the other into the top of his head as he tumbled forward to his knees onto the plastic floor cover. He hung in the balance there on his knees, blood draining from his mouth, before falling dead to the floor.
With no time and no remorse Cynthia replaced the gun in Carrington’s hand and fired a shot into the ceiling. Mateen mirrored her action by placing his gun in Cochran’s hand, twisting his limp finger into the trigger, taking aim, and firing a bullet into the opposite wall.
Completing their tasks Cynthia and Mateen held each other close, kissed, and considered the long journey, the long night ahead of them, to outrace the wind and keep from drowning.
(Catch up on all the previous episodes of Blacksmith's Girl, including Chapters Thirty-Four, Thirty-Three, Thirty-Two and the rest.)