“How?”

Wheaton pauses with his brush, then adds a few judicious strokes. “Autoimmune diseases are poorly understood. Multiple sclerosis. Scleroderma. Lupus. Oh, doctors understand the mechanics of how they kill you well enough. But the etiology? The cause? You might as well consult a witch doctor. Do you know what an autoimmune disease is? A phenomenon in which the body’s immune system – which evolved to protect the body from outside invaders – actually malfunctions and attacks the body itself.” Wheaton gives me a triumphant look. “Isn’t that food for thought? How did the weakling come upon it? Perhaps his guilt and self-disgust were so consuming, his desire to kill me so powerful, that they manifested themselves physically. My disease waxes and wanes in severity as it progresses, and I noticed that the waxing phases occurred when Roger had control. Then he began actively trying to murder me, with Frank Smith’s help. With insulin. You know what that told me? There were chinks in the wall that separated us. He was beginning to see into my mind. That’s when you walked into my life. A mirror of a woman I’d already painted. A woman who was dead. Yet here was her double – her other half- perfectly healthy. I knew then. A new vision had come to me, and this painting was part of it. I had to save myself.”

I stare speechless from the steaming tub. The complexity of his delusion is staggering. Born in the mind of an abused child, it blossomed and flowered in the crucible of a dying artist’s fear of extinction.

“Are you – I mean, has it worked? Are you cured?”

“It’s happening. I can feel it. I’m breathing more easily. My joints are less stiff.”

“But you’re still wearing your gloves.”

A tight smile. “My hands are too delicate to take chances. And there’s systemic damage. That will take time to heal.” He glances up at the darkening sky. “I want you to be quiet now. My light’s almost gone.”

“I will. But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

He frowns, but I push on. “You say you killed the women you painted to release them from their plight. To spare them a life of pain and exploitation. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Yet each Sleeping Woman was raped before she died. How can you stand there and tell me you’re sparing them pain, when you’re putting them through the worst thing a woman can experience short of death?”

Wheaton has stopped painting. His eyes glower with anger and confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Conrad Hoffman. Before he died, he had a gun to my head. He told me he was going to rape me. He said that even if he had to shoot me in the spine, it would still be nice and warm between my legs.”

Wheaton’s eyes narrow to slits. “You’re lying.”

“No.”

“Then he was trying to intimidate you, to get you into the car.”

I shake my head. “I saw his eyes. Felt the way he touched me. I’ve been raped before. I know how rapists’ eyes look.”

A strange cast of compassion comes over the long face. “You were raped?”

“Yes. But that’s not the point. The last woman taken before Thalia – the one taken from Dorignac’s and dumped in the drainage canal – the pathologist found semen inside her.”

His head jerks as if avoiding a blow.

“Was it yours?” I ask softly.

Wheaton throws down his brush and takes two steps toward me. “You’re lying.”

The prudent thing would be to stop, but my salvation may lie in the root of this paradox. “The FBI is sure you killed the Dorignac’s woman. They worked out the timing of Wingate’s death, and they know when Hoffman flew back from New York. Hoffman couldn’t have taken her.”

Wheaton is wheezing now, like a child with asthma. “I took her, but-” He stands with his mouth open, unable to continue.

He really does believe that by killing those women he was sparing them. But I can’t spare him. Somewhere, buried behind those deranged eyes, is the gentle mind of the artist I met earlier in the week.

“Help me understand,” I plead. “A man who saves a twelve-year-old girl from being raped in Vietnam turns around and helps some pervert rape the women he claims he’s saving?”

Wheaton’s chin is quivering.

“I guess it was Roger who saved that girl in Vietnam-”

“No!” A single, explosive syllable. “I did that!”

I say nothing. The fault line running through Wheaton’s mind is torturing him more painfully than I possibly could. His face twitches, and his hands shiver at his sides. With a jerk of his head he looks up at the nearly dark sky. Then he walks to a table behind his easel, lifts a hypodermic syringe from it, and walks back toward me, his face devoid of emotion.

My newfound confidence vaporizes, leaving pure terror in its wake. If Wheaton wants to stick me with that needle, there’s nothing I can do about it. That reality sends me hurtling back to Honduras, to the night my innocence died forever, when I learned the most terrible of life’s lessons: you can shriek and fight and beg for someone to stop hurting you, but it won’t make them stop; you can plead to God and your mother and father, and they will not hear you; your cries will not move to pity those who rend you.

When Wheaton steps behind my head, the skin of my neck crawls, awaiting the prick of the needle. Summoning all my strength, I twist my neck to look up and back. He is standing by my IV tree, injecting the contents of his syringe into my IV bag. I scream now, with all my power, but he tosses the empty syringe on the floor and walks back to his easel. My left arm begins to burn at the wrist, and tears of anger and helplessness flow from my eyes. Sucking in great gulps of air, I try to fight the unknown poison, but in a matter of seconds my eyelids fall as surely as shutters being pulled down by a man with a hook.

26

This time the world returns as stars in a black sky, a universe of stars slightly blurred by glass, and the sound of a man sobbing. The anguished sobs seem to echo all the way from a distant planet. The planet of childhood, I suspect.

I’m shivering again, which is not such a bad thing. It’s when you stop shivering that you’re in trouble. I can barely see Thalia across from me in the tub, so dark is the night. But I’m thankful for the darkness. I’ve been many places where my only light at night was the stars, and I know this: if I can see Polaris and the horizon, I can estimate my latitude. Not with enough accuracy to navigate a ship by – not without a sextant – but enough to guess my location in general terms. It’s one of the practical tricks my father taught me. A good thing for a world traveler to know, he said, especially if you’re ever hijacked on a boat or a plane, which he once was.

I don’t know which star is Polaris yet, because I can’t see either the Big or Little Dipper, which are the quickest guides. Polaris may not even lie within my field of vision. But I am facing north and surrounded on three sides – and overhead – by glass, my view only partly obscured by tree branches. If I can watch long enough, stay conscious long enough, all the stars will move around the sky but one: Polaris, which rotates in a two-degree circle above the north pole. The Pole Star. The North Star. That constant light has guided many a desperate traveler, and I am certainly that now.

My problem is the horizon. I can’t see it, because of the high brick wall outside. Not to worry, says my father. You can use an artificial horizon. The best is a bowl of mercury on the ground. Mercury reflects stars remarkably well; you simply measure the angle between Polaris and its reflection, then divide by two. That’s if you have a sextant, which I don’t. In the absence of a mercury bowl, the surface of a pool of water can be substituted, and that I do have. But the conservatory glass distorts the starlight enough so that, combined with the movement of the bathwater caused by breathing and blood circulation, no clear reflection exists. Not the end of the world, my father assures me. You can guess where the horizon is -