At that moment, I wanted to tell him everything. Shout out my confessional like he was a faith healer, and I, a man with a broken spirit. I managed to temper my desire, though it boiled inside me.
A criminal thinks things through. . . .
Hadn’t Uretsky said that, or something close to it? Wouldn’t he be prepared for me to talk to the police—to confess everything? No matter what I did, even if I sacrificed my own freedom to admit to all I had done, Uretsky would still make another kill. And the blood of that kill would be on my hands. No question about it. I had to wait this out. Figure out how to “play the part.” For the moment, at least, I was Elliot Uretsky’s hostage, despite my freedom to go where I wanted and do whatever I pleased.
The police officer asked to see our identification, so we showed him our Mass IDs—the ones with the name Uretsky printed on the front. Our names needed to match the labels on the mailbox in the foyer and on the apartment lease. We were Elliot and Tanya Uretsky, at least until the real Uretsky tired of playing his game.
“Are you all right?” Officer Walsh asked Ruby.
Ruby had the dazed look of an accident victim. Her vacant eyes remained downcast, and her answer came out as soft as the flapping of butterfly wings. “Yes . . . I’m fine,” she said. “Just scared and sad for that poor woman.”
“I understand that this is traumatic,” Walsh said. “We have counselors who can help if you need assistance.”
“Thanks,” Ruby said.
I wanted to say, “Nobody can help with what we need.”
Instead, I said nothing.
Ruby sat on the futon, head in her hands. I sat beside her, but she recoiled from my touch.
“I don’t want to be near you,” she said. “I can’t be near you right now.”
“We need to stick together on this,” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me exactly what that monster had threatened to do?”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Upset me? Really? That was your reason? John, I think you’ve done a hell of a lot more than upset me!”
Ruby’s face contorted into a sort of animal snarl. How many times had I seen Ruby truly irate? The answer: never. Of course she got mad at me, often deservedly so—sometimes, just because—but on those occasions she’d go quiet, like a stealth submarine running silent, running deep. This time, she stood and crossed the room, her arms folded tightly against her chest and her back turned.
“What should I have done?” I asked.
Ruby pivoted in a fluid motion to face me. “Told the truth, for starters!”
“And then what?” I didn’t want to yell, but it was hard to keep my emotions in check. A woman was dead, and if you traced the blame, it originated with the identity that I stole. “What would we have done differently?”
“Maybe gone to the police,” Ruby said. “Maybe then Rhonda would still be alive.”
“And tell them what, Ruby? What? That we stole an identity and our victim is now terrorizing us?”
“What were you thinking, John?”
“I thought he was trying to just scare us. I didn’t think he would do it. . . . I didn’t think he could! He couldn’t have known who we were. How the hell was he going to kill somebody close to us?”
“How did he find out who we are, John? How? You said there was no way to trace our actual address from the post office box,” Ruby yelled from across the room.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, find out, dammit! You find out!”
Ruby crumpled to the floor like a folded napkin. She wasn’t just crying tears—she was wailing like a woman in mourning. She lay on her side, crying like that, shaking, and struggling to speak. “I’m not strong enough to handle this, John,” she was saying. “I’m not going to be able to make it. I can’t do this. I can’t—”
Her words were halted by another tsunami of tears. I got down on the floor beside Ruby. She wanted me close to her, I could tell, so I tucked her into my arms, spooning her the way I did when it was bedtime, just before sleep found us. I rocked Ruby in my arms in that spooning position, and I knew as the horror sank in that nothing about our relationship would ever be the same.