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Everything just… stops.
I raise off of her torso. Her eyes lock on mine, so wide that her pupils are like little pinpricks. She opens her mouth, a pained gasp escaping.
“Rhett…”
I realize then something is wrong. Very wrong.
I scramble off her body, kick the chair out of the way. It comes away red with blood.
“Sylvia,” I drop to my knees, sliding on the growing puddle of blood beneath her. “Oh,shit,Sylvia.”
Then I see it.
The hilt of the knife, the blade buried in her chest.
44
Rhett
Iam sitting on the front steps.
My head is in my hands. A cell phone at my side, the wooden box beside one foot, the nightstand drawer at my other.
A dead body in the house behind me.
I listen to the wail of the siren. Distant at first, then louder and louder.
I look up just as the tip of the sun emerges from the mountaintop. Swords of gold, spearing through pink clouds. The pinkest I’ve ever seen.
My eyes remain on these clouds as the police cars skid to a stop at my feet, as noise erupts, as three guns are pointed at my face.
I don’t speak as I am thrown to the ground, my hands pulled behind my back, handcuffs secured around my wrists.
My gaze meets the rising sun once again as I am dragged to the police car, as a hand is placed on the top of my head, as I am pushed into the backseat.
The door slams.
I bend over, peering through the window, finding the light once again.
Silence engulfs me, confinement closes in, freedom escapes me, yet the sun continues to shine.
There is always the sun.
* * *
***
EPILOGUE
Rhett
Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Marjorie or Sylvia Stone. Not a day that I don’t awaken to flashbacks of the final day of Sylvia’s life. Of rolling her over and seeing the hilt of the blade buried in her chest.
Following the discovery of Sylvia’s bloodied body in the house where I had been sitting on the front steps, I spent a week in jail, arrested under the assumption I had killed Sylvia. The media coverage was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. The town accused me before I’d even been assigned a lawyer. Despite the world wanting to lock me away again, the evidence spoke for itself: the jewelry stolen from Marjorie’s home the day of her murder, the ski mask, the journal, the shrine to me. Combining all that with the autopsy and forensic analysis of the blade that Sylvia had fallen on (and the lack of my fingerprints on the hilt—ironic, isn’t it?) I was released from county lockup.
My court-issued therapist has suggested (countless times) that I see a psychiatrist who will medicate me for what she has diagnosed as severe PTSD.
I have respectfully declined (countless times).
