pulled you down with me.” He set his coffee cup on the kitchen table, lowered his face to his hands. Was he crying? Then he suddenly raised his head. “We should have faced up to what happened, never paid her a cent, ever.” His words clogged in his throat. “A couple hundred bucks a month was never going to be enough for her anyway.”
Mrs. Trumbo was rubbing his shoulders with her big hands. “What’s done is done, Ron. Always, in the back of my mind, I knew she’d turn up again. She’s vicious, relentless, but agonizing about it won’t help. Show me that text message. I need to know what she wants you to do.”
Ronald pushed his phone at her like it was a snake that had bitten him. “Here, I don’t want to read it again. She’s not going to stop, Mom, not until Agent Savich and his family are dead, or all of this blows up on us.”
Ronald swiped his gloved fingers over his tear-shined eyes. “This is all my fault. She wouldn’t have been there if not for me. I thought she loved me, believed in me. And she was so beautiful, you thought so, too. I shouldn’t have let any of this happen. I’m sorry, Mom, so very sorry.”
Mrs. Trumbo leaned down and hugged him to her chest as she read the text message. Then she kissed the top of his head and lightly stroked her fingers over his face. “This isn’t your fault, Ron. You couldn’t have known how twisted she was.” She sucked in her breath. “What she wants this time can’t, won’t, happen. We have to deal with this some other way.”
Ronald looked up at his mother and said in a voice deadened with disgust, “She wants me to go after the Savich kid, leave him in an isolated place. She knows he’d die, Mom. It’s winter, and it’s cold. He would die, and it would be because of me. She wants Savich to go searching for him. She wants him to find his son dead.”
The words hung between them. Mrs. Trumbo said very precisely, “You won’t do that.” She gave the phone back to her son, straightened over him, and threw back her shoulders. She looked like a Valkyrie.
“I’ve thought about this, Mom, and what I need to do is run, disappear. If I don’t do anything else for her, they might not be able to put all of it together. You might still be safe.”
“If you run, we’d lose each other. I’d be alone. But you’re right, Ron. This has to stop. Somehow. Your leaving might be the only way to keep you safe. But you’re not going to be driving anywhere tonight. It’s too cold, and I’m hoping we can think of some other way to deal with this. I made up a bed in the basement. Go downstairs and get some sleep. I’ll wake you before anyone else is up.”
They watched Ronald slowly rise, hug his mother close, whisper something, and walk, shoulders hunched, from the kitchen.
Mrs. Trumbo pulled off her apron, took her son’s coffee cup to the sink, methodically rinsed it out, and set it in the drainer. She looked around the kitchen and turned off the light.
Pippa and Wilde looked at each other. “I don’t know what I expected to hear,” Wilde said, “but it certainly wasn’t all that. Time to go say hello.”
57
Pippa said quietly from the front doorway, “Mrs. Trumbo, you don’t want to go upstairs. That’s right, turn around.”
Pippa walked to the bottom step and looked up at Mrs. Trumbo. She stared down at them, no expression on her face, but like her son, she looked exhausted. Her voice was flat, indifferent. “Oh, it’s you, Agent Cinelli, Chief Wilde. I’m tired and I don’t wish to speak to either of you tonight. Perhaps tomorrow. Please go. Good night.”
“I can’t, ma’am. I’m staying here in the honeymoon suite. Listen to me, you need to speak to us, Mrs. Trumbo. We’ll go in the living room. Chief Wilde will bring Ronald up.”
Mrs. Trumbo closed her eyes a moment, then said, “How did you know he was here? No, never mind that. It’s not important.” She straightened her shoulders again. The Valkyrie was back. “Let me say right away: I was behind everything. Leave my son out of this.”
Pippa said again, “Let’s go into the living room.”
They heard Wilde’s voice, a muffled shout from the basement, the sounds of a scuffle, of furniture falling. Pippa started