End Times (32 page)

Daphne looked around for her aunt and uncle, but they were on the other side of the room, surrounded by friends trying to console them as Karen sobbed and Floyd clutched her helplessly, for once at a total loss for words.

“Janie.” Hilary was the first to approach them, dragging a reluctant Bryce by the arm. “I am so, so sorry for your loss. I don’t even know what to say. There aren’t any words.” Her red-rimmed eyes crumpled and her nose scrunched up pink and translucent as a rabbit’s, the skin around her nostrils bright and irritated from constant blowing. She reached out to hug her friend, but Janie’s arms stayed stiff by her sides, and she stared blankly over Hilary’s shoulder.

Hilary drew back, startled. “Are you okay?” she asked. “I mean, I’m sorry, I know you’re not okay. What a stupid question. But, I mean, you’ll
be
okay eventually?” The edge of doubt grew in her voice, buoyed by Janie’s eerie, unresponsive staring. Realizing that her friend barely registered her, she shot Daphne a look of blatant concern. Daphne shrugged silently.

“Well, let me know if there’s anything we can do,” Hilary said, as much to Daphne as to Janie. “I’m the world’s worst cook, but I’ll totally bring over a casserole or whatever. As long as you don’t mind if it’s burned.”

Daphne thanked her as she drifted back into the crowd. One by one, Janie’s friends and fellow churchgoers stepped forward, choking up awkward platitudes and offering limp pats on the back, embraces that were met with the same stiff-armed detachment.

Daphne could barely believe that the blank-eyed zombie next to her was her cousin. The Janie that Daphne knew cried over dog food commercials, but since the death of her own son, she hadn’t shed a tear. It was like someone had gone in and flicked a switch to
off
, leaving only the shell of her body behind.

When Pastor Ted finally made his way to them, Daphne felt a guilty relief at being able to hand her cousin off. She needed a break, if only for a couple of minutes. She found Owen at the edge of the crowd and wanted to collapse in gratitude as he brought her in for a tight embrace, surrounding her in the dusky, mechanical scent that simultaneously spiked her pulse and calmed her growing panic. When they parted she saw that there were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his face was unusually pale.

“Are you all right?” he asked. She hadn’t seen him since she’d left with Janie in the ambulance, and she hadn’t realized until that moment how much she’d missed him.

“As much as I can be,” she said. “What about you? You—don’t look so good.”

“Thanks.” He smiled wryly. “You sure know how to flatter a guy.”

The glimmer of humor was tantalizing as a jewel in the oppressive afternoon. For the briefest moment, she let herself grin back.

“I’m sorry—I just meant . . .”

“It’s okay. I’ve been working like a dog, and I have to leave in a minute to go home and change for the afternoon shift. But I haven’t been able to get anything about that night out of my mind. That tablet . . . you said it said . . .”

“I know,” she interrupted, her voice low. “The death of a firstborn. What if it was talking about this?”

The words knocked her tears loose again, and a fat, gleaming drop rolled down her cheek.

Owen brushed it away with the back of his hand. “We can worry about that later,” he murmured. “How’s Janie doing?”

“Not great,” Daphne admitted. They both looked over at Janie, who was sitting on the couch with Pastor Ted. She gazed past his head with the vacuous eyes of a doll, clearly not processing a word.

Daphne lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ve never seen her like this,” she admitted. “She’s not even crying—she’s just acting like a zombie. Honestly, I’m really scared.”

“Has Doug talked to her?” Owen asked.

Daphne shook her head. Doug was on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee in his hand, staring stubbornly at the pattern on the funeral parlor’s carpet. “He seems almost as out of it as she is.”

Owen sighed. “Look, as much as I dislike the guy, he may be what gets her to snap out of it. He’s the father—whatever she’s going through, he’s going through, too. It might help if they go through it together.”

“I don’t think he wants to talk to her,” Daphne said, hating Doug more than ever.

“Someone should make him,” Owen muttered. “I’d try, but I’m not exactly his favorite person.”

Daphne looked back at Janie. Her mouth hung open slightly, and her shoulders slumped as Pastor Ted read to her from a pocket-size Bible. She looked like she needed to be propped up, like she could slide down the couch and onto the floor at any moment.

“Maybe I should talk to Doug,” Daphne said. Her stomach contracted at the thought of it, but she’d suck it up if it there was even a possibility it could help Janie.

“It’s up to you,” Owen replied.

But Daphne had already made up her mind. “I will,” she said. “I’ll go do it right now.”

“Good luck.” Owen squeezed her hand tightly before letting go.

She crossed the room to Doug and planted herself in front of him, overriding the nausea that swelled in her stomach whenever they were close.

“Hey, Doug,” she said, struggling to keep her voice friendly.

He dragged his eyes up from the pattern on the carpet. “Hey, Daphne,” he said tonelessly.

“Are you doing all right?” she asked, hoping to start on neutral ground.

“Am I
doing
all right?” Doug’s eyebrows flattened into a low, straight line. “I dunno, Daphne—my wife’s a basket case, and my kid’s dead. How do you
think
I’m doing?”

He laughed a hard, sarcastic laugh and slammed his fist into the wall, causing several heads to turn sharply in their direction. Daphne realized too late that Doug’s detachment and indifference, the antisocial way he’d walled himself off from the rest of the mourners, wasn’t boredom or sadness at all. It was rage—a rage that he’d been trying to keep a lid on by staying well away from everyone, a rage that she’d just brought to the surface.

“Doug, I’m really sorry . . .” she began.

“Sorry?” Doug drew himself up to his full height and advanced on her, making the blood cower in her veins. “My son is
dead
, Daphne—dead because you thought you could play doctor and deliver him at a friggin’ motocross track. And all you can say is you’re
sorry
?”

He bellowed the last word, stopping all conversations in their tracks. The crowd stared openly at them, waiting to see what Daphne would say. It was as if Doug had taken a sword and sliced straight through the thick haze of emotion in the room, severing it so that he landed on one side and Daphne on the other.

“It wasn’t like that.” Her throat was dry. “She was going into labor. Someone had to do something.”

“Yeah—someone with a medical degree,” Doug snarled. “Not you.”

She stepped back, surprised.

“I was just trying to help,” she explained.

“Sure—big help
you
turned out to be.” Spit flew from Doug’s mouth and landed on her cheek. He was towering over her, his face purple with fury.

Daphne looked around at the congregation, appealing for help. Surely someone would realize that Doug was being unreasonable, that he was going too far.

But the faces staring back at her were blank, offering no glimmers of protection. Nobody stepped forward to intervene. They stood suspended as the chunks of pineapple in Eunice’s Jell-O mold, watching, waiting to see what she would say.

Their silence, the sudden unreadable sheen of their faces, unsettled her. “It wasn’t my fault,” she tried to insist—but her voice wavered, unsure.
Wasn’t it?
a voice in the back of her head taunted.
Once a killer, always a killer. Why would Janie’s child be any different?

Doug cocked an eyebrow, taunting her. She felt the mood in the room shift, the gears in the group mind turn, and the mechanisms of blame click slowly into place. They’d read the weakness in her tone, latched onto her own nagging insecurity and seen it as an admission of guilt.

“I was trying to help her!” she tried again, forcefully. These were the people who hailed her as the finder of oil, the bearer of good fortune. So many of them had been at the motocross track when it happened—they’d seen Janie go into labor with their own eyes! Could they really blame her for being the only one who stayed?

“Or maybe you just wanted to play hero,” Doug said bitterly. “You’ve been pretty high on yourself ever since you supposedly found that oil—maybe now you thought you could deliver a baby with no medical training, too.”

Daphne recalled the look of terror on Doug’s face when she’d begged him for help, the way he’d backed away like Janie was a dangerous animal before turning and running into the night. What if he was covering up for his own cowardice, blaming her for having the courage to stay when he had fled? If so, there was no way she’d let him get away with it.

“I begged you to help, and you ran,” she reminded him, sure the crowd would see it her way.

“Yeah, because I’m
not a doctor
,” Doug said condescendingly, his voice wound with tightly controlled fury. “I don’t think I’m God’s gift to everything and go taking babies’ lives in my hands.”

A murmur of assent wafted through the room. Daphne realized with a shock that people were nodding—they were actually
agreeing
with Doug!

“Daphne.” Pastor Ted stepped forward, arms crossed over his long black robe. “Did you try to deliver this child?”

She felt like she was on trial. She flashed back to the courtroom in Detroit, back in another lifetime, with the prosecutor asking her point-blank:
Daphne, did you kill this man?

The answer was the same. She could no more lie here in front of Pastor Ted and the congregation, her friends and family, than she could after swearing to tell the truth in a court of law.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “But I
had
to. The baby was coming.”

“You couldn’t have waited ten minutes for the ambulance?” The voice was high and shrill: Deirdre Varley’s.

“Yeah,” someone in the crowd agreed, and the chant was taken up:
Yeah, you couldn’t wait? Ten minutes? Really?

Daphne looked around incredulously. The people of the town that had taken her in, the first place she’d ever truly felt safe, were accusing her of something so awful that just thinking about it made tears spring to her eyes—she, who had never cried until that night, not since the day she’d learned that her father was dead. The funeral parlor blurred as she struggled to keep the tears from spilling.

“There wasn’t any time,” she insisted. “I
love
Janie—she’s like a sister to me. Why would I try to hurt her baby? What could I possibly stand to gain?”

“Power.” It was Doug again, commanding the room with a sinister sneer. “My son was going to be a prophet, but you wanted that power for yourself, just like you’ve wanted everything for yourself since you got here. So you killed him. And that bastard Owen helped.”

“It’s not true!” Daphne shouted. There was no stopping the tears—there were too many brimming behind her eyelids, pushing to escape. They poured down her cheeks and the crowd glared, seeing them as a confession and admission of guilt. The white-hot cloud of their fury choked the airless room, and she could see the malice in their narrowed eyes, in the grim set of their teeth. They had turned on her. “I wanted that baby to live more than anything. I tried to save him. Why would I lie?”

“
Because you’re a liar!
” Doug thundered. His eyes flashed fire as he took a step toward her, and a horrible premonition made her shrink back, chilling her blood. He was going to say the most awful thing yet, something that would turn the town against her for good. And she was powerless to stop him.

“You lied about everything,” he spat, “who you are, why you’re here, what you did back in Detroit.”

“No,” she whispered. Her heart, her blood, her breath all slowed to a stop as the cold hard truth of Doug’s accusation detonated inside her. He had found out. Somehow, impossibly, the person who most wanted to destroy her had discovered her terrible secret.

Doug’s neck cracked as he gazed triumphantly around the room, staring everyone down, daring them to contradict him. “There’s something you should all know about Daphne,” he said, “a little something she sort of forgot to mention when she arrived. She may have told you that her stepfather’s dead, but I bet she didn’t tell you why. It’s
because she killed him
.”

A gasp snaked through the crowd. Daphne’s knees turned to liquid; she fought through layers of gravity to stay upright.

“Oh yeah,” Doug laughed, his eyes fireballs of hate. “Straight through the heart with a knife. You can look it up in the papers if you don’t believe me . . . but unlike Daphne, I have no reason to lie.”

A shocked silence blanketed the congregation. Daphne felt it tug at her from the inside out, sucking her up like a vacuum, the pressure in her chest threatening to make her implode. Her worst nightmare had come true, and there was no waking from it. She’d been exposed for exactly what she was.

“Is this true?” Pastor Ted asked gravely.

“It . . .” she stammered. “I . . .”

“She’s lying!” Doug screamed before she could form the words. “She lies about everything: She’s a murderer and a liar!”

With that, the crowd seemed to erupt.

“Murderer!” a cracked female voice called from the back of the room.

“Liar!” someone answered, like a twisted game of Marco Polo.

“Baby-killer!” someone else howled.

The accusations flew thick and black as a flock of ravens, swooping in hysterical arcs from one side of the room to the other. Daphne felt like the words were physically attacking her, clawing at her skin, pecking at her eyes, goring a hole in her stomach from the inside.