Page 103 of Half the Summer's Night
He looks like he’s about to say something else when Charlotte steps onto the deck, her red hair in a big knot on the top of her head.“Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “But we’re at the spot. I’m about to kill the engine.”
Rowan nods. “Be there in a sec.”
She flashes a grin at us and ducks into the pilothouse. Rowan sighs.
“You looked like you were going to say something,” I say softly, my heart fluttering.
“Let me take care of this first,” he says. “You don’t have to help.”
He means it. I can see it in his eyes. But the truth is, I want to. Kaplan never made my life easy, and then he tried to end it. He ended the lives of two women who helped me when I was a scared, terrified teenager.
He deserves it, to be chopped up and thrown overboard into a Gulf stream that will take him out into the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles from here.
“I’ll help,” I say.
We stand up just as the boat’s engine cuts out, stilling us in the soft, rolling waves. The light is still gauzy from the sunrise, and it casts everything in a sort of pinkish wash that makes this much more beautiful, much more idyllic, than I suppose it technically is.
But then, I’ve never been one for the idyllic, have I?
Rowan and I walk around to the stern of the boat, where two big coolers sit waiting. I know what’s in them.
Charlotte’s already there, her hands in black gloves. She tosses a pair to Rowan, then raises her eyebrows at me.
I nod, and she tosses me my own pair.
When Rowan opens the first ice chest, it’s a tangle of limbs. I stare at it, trying to comprehend that this flesh was the source of all my terror for the last month. This meat destroyed Olivia Pearce and Heather Staunton. Others, too.
He’s nothing, now. Fish food.
Charlotte grabs an arm and tosses it overboard, and then Rowan does the same with a foot. I step forward, memories running jagged through my thoughts. The blood-stained mattress. The photographs on the wall. Kaplan’s hot, sour breath on my skin.
Rowan, stepping into the hallway, just as I knew I was about to die.
I pick up a chunk of Kaplan’s torso. Charlotte and Rowan cut him up while I was recovering, and the work is choppy and amateurish. My coroner’s brain is already filling out the report, even though I don’t need to. As far as Rosado is concerned, Kaplan disappeared.
I throw the meat overboard and listen to the satisfyingthunkas it hits the water.
We work in silence, the three of us. It’s not hard. I’m used to dead bodies and blood. So are they.
When we finish, when the last of him is on his way south, Charlotte announces, “I’ll finish the rest of the cleanup. I know—” She looks at Rowan. “I know you need to, uh, talk.”
My anxiety flares suddenly, and I look between them. I’m still not sure what I think of Charlotte. She’s been kind to me, but there’s something dangerous about her, something that goes beyond the fact that she’s a killer, too.
“Talk about what?” I say, trying to break the silence.
“It’s nothing bad,” Rowan says. “Not as bad as that, anyway.” He tilts his head toward the ice chests. “I mean, you already know the worst thing about me.”
I look at him, vaguely aware that Charlotte has turned away, like she’s giving us privacy.
“Let’s go back to the viewing bench,” he says sheepishly. Then he peels off his gloves and drops them next to the ice chests. A beat later, I do the same, still quaking with uncertainty. Not fear, though. It’s crazy, but I’m not scared of him.
How could I be, after Rowan saved my life?
The wind blows across the deck, washing away any lingering scent of death. All I smell is the salt of the sea. Rowan guides me over to the bench and sits me down, and I can sense how nervous he is—shaking his leg, twisting his hands up together, letting his hair flop into his eyes.
“You’re kinda freaking me out.”
I mean it as a joke, but Rowan jerks his gaze up to me with something like alarm. “You don’t seem scared,” he says.
