Chapter Twenty-Seven Black Friday

To reach the storeroom and the shop’s back door, Lizzy had to hurry down a long, narrow hallway that ran alongside the dressing rooms. Father Gabriel had impressed her, and she wanted to look presentable, so she straightened her dress as she walked, smoothing it quickly; it was wrinkled from the day of hard work and sitting on the couch. The rolled plastic yellow tape measure that she had used for fittings was still in one dress pocket, and there was a ballpoint pen in the other.

Behind her, distracting her and slowing her steps, she heard Uncle Hubert quietly ask Aunt Christine about how much scotch Mrs. Bennet drank that afternoon.

"Why do you ask?" her aunt asked.

"That bottle was half-empty when she started pouring for us."

"You know she's not going to work as hard as she did today without lubricant," Aunt Christine replied, but not unkindly. "And she worked hard today. The White Christmas idea was a good one, and she's celebrating."

"She's been sneaky celebrating all day ."

Lizzy surrendered the conversation as she stepped into the storeroom. It always seemed cold due both to a temperamental thermostat and to the white gowns overcrowding the space. Walking into it produced the illusion of walking into a winter wonderland, cold and snowy. Drifty.

After a day of Christmas music playing in the shop, the snowy illusion brought a bit of Winter Wonderland to Lizzy's mind, making her think of herself and Fitzwilliam:

Later on

We'll conspire

As we dream by the fire

To face unafraid

The plans that we've made

Walking in a winter wonderland

The back door was hidden from view behind a large double rack of dresses, one rack higher than the other. "Mom?" She called it out softly as she stepped around the rack, less to provoke a response than to announce her arrival. She swallowed her sudden impulse to ask for Parson Brown, smiling at herself and the wayward thought.

On the far side of the rack, Lizzy was confronted by her mother.

And a large man, a stranger—a killer.

Her smile died.

Mrs. Bennet was huge-eyed, pale, her elbow gripped by one large hand. The man's other hand held a gun to her temple. The back door stood open, allowing the wind to whip in. Lizzy inexplicably noted the swaying, loose wisps of her mother's graying blowing in the wind. She hadn't noticed before how gray her mother had become.

Outside the door, the back parking lot was dark. Usually a single light on a narrow pole kept it illuminated, but it was not shining. The only glow in the lot came from inside the store room, an illuminated trapezoid of white light falling on the dirty, footprinted snow.

"Lizzy?" her mother whimpered. Her eyes were terrified but unfocused, lost. Drunk , Lizzy realized. Uncle Hubert was right. I hadn't paid enough attention. I stopped paying attention in general. I wanted to leave the spying and the artificial anxiety at Langley, in the past.

Her training rushed back to her now, though. She may have distanced herself from her Company habits, but they were not gone. Although her comportment did not change, Agent Bennet’s body tensed, poised itself, and became weaponized.

"Mom, please. Stand still," she commanded in a whisper. She faced the man, staring into his eyes. "What do you want?"

In response, he lifted his head and tossed his chin over his shoulder toward the open back door. Looking in that direction, Lizzy first saw black shoes in the storeroom light…then a black overcoat…then the black gun in a hand. The white of his collar showed before his grim, satisfied smile.

"Father Robyn?"

The priest had not come in but stood just outside the doorway in the trapezoid of light as if it were a fell spotlight. "Hello, Fanny —or should I say Agent Bennet ?" He did not wait for a response. "I need you and—your mother? Mrs. Bennet ?—to come with me."

Behind him, she could now discern the looming shadow of a large van darkly silhouetted against the dark. She did not try to process his sudden appearance— maybe later.

Instead, she spoke emphatically, unmistakably, to her mother. "Do what he says, Mom."

He is the Wicker Man. Lizzy knew it.

Mrs. Bennet nodded confusedly as she stared at her daughter and then at the gun in the priest's hand. "Agent Bennet? Father Robyn?" She repeated the words as if they lacked any meaning, brute sounds.

Lizzy stepped out the back door as Collingwood backed carefully toward the van. He stood well in front of her and reached with his free hand to open the van's side door. Mrs. Bennet followed. Lizzy glanced back and saw the other man still gripped her mother's elbow, still had the gun pressed against her head. He had closed the back door of the bridal shop.

Collingwood gestured with his gun for Lizzy to stop beside the van. It was big, tall, and lengthy. Black…or maybe navy. Lizzy had used similar vans for surveillance on previous missions. The rear section appeared to be empty, although her angle of view kept her from seeing all the way to the back. The vans she had used had a windowed partition between the front two seats and the rear cargo area. This one did not; she could see forward to the windshield. It did have a bench seat behind the front seats.

"Put Mrs. Bennet in first, Leo," Collingwood ordered.

Leo led Lizzy's mother to the side and helped her up and onto the bench seat. She slid all the way to the end, muttering. "I don't understand, Lizzy…"

"Now you." Collingwood gestured again with his gun, this time to Lizzy. She could not gauge his facial expression in the dark, but the courtly mock-formality of his tone was completely gone.

She climbed inside and seated herself beside her mother. As she scooted, she felt the seatbelts and immediately helped her mother get hers fastened. Her mother's movements, intended to help, were slow and fumbling, but eventually she was belted. Leo squeezed onto the seat beside them, forcing Lizzy to sit bodkin. Collingwood closed the side door from outside. She pretended to buckle her own seat belt, timing her pretense to coincide with the sound of the closing door. It did not seem that Leo had noticed that the belt did not click.

The driver's door opened, and Collingwood got inside. The gun in his hand had been incongruous enough, but the sight of him behind the wheel struck Lizzy as almost funny. Almost. He placed his gun on the passenger seat, within reach, and fastened his seat belt.

Leo jabbed his gun into her ribs as a reminder of his presence. The injury from Caspar Mountain protested sharply―the first time it had hurt her in days―but Lizzy did her best to stifle any reaction to the pain.

A moment later, the van was in motion and Collingwood turned it onto the narrow street. Eyes on the road, he took a phone from his coat pocket, put it in a phone holder attached to the dash, and touched the screen. Its GPS app glowed. An address had already been entered. Arrows appeared and a map, but the audio must have been turned off.

"Where are you taking us?" She glared at Collingwood in his rearview mirror.

"To the end of this tale." His lips stretched into a cruel smile. "At least, it will be the end for you…and Agent Darcy."

Lizzy's intake of breath was audible, impossible to hide. Collingwood’s smile became a gloating smirk in the mirror. "Your partner has caused me considerable trouble. And you have, too. It's a shame for your mother that she answered the door. I expected it to be you, the youngest in the shop, still spry after a long day." He shrugged as if more affected by his dashed expectation than what it meant for Mrs. Bennet.

"Who is Agent Darcy?" Lizzy’s mother asked, trying to understand the conversation but lagging behind. "Why is everyone an agent ?"

Collingwood nodded in response to her question, agreeing with it rather than answering it. "Yes, Mrs. Bennet, I've wondered that, too."

"I'll explain it all later, Mom." Lizzy tried to sound kind and unafraid, but she saw Collingwood snicker in the mirror. She stared back at him. She wished she could ask about Fitzwilliam but could not risk revealing more than she had. At least what Collingwood said implied Fitzwilliam was still alive and that they were heading toward him.

"So, you're him? The Wicker Man?" As she asked, Lizzy squeezed her mother's hand, hoping she would understand the unspoken request for silence.

"Me? Literally? No, Synecdochally, yes. Or, you might say that I am the head of the Wicker Man. It was never Wickham, despite the similarity of the names." He pointed at himself, his head. "I am the head—but not the belly of the beast. Not the body. Others, like my friend Leo here, make up the body." He waved one hand. "Think of it as vaguely like the relationship between Christ and his church."

Lizzy shook her head in disbelief. "Christ? You've got to be kidding! Are you really even a priest?"

Collingwood navigated a turn, chuckling as he did. "What are any of us, really , Agent Bennet? We're all playing parts. Life's unequal stage and suchlike. Are you Agent Bennet or are you Fanny Prince…or are you Elizabeth Bennet?"

"The last," she answered decisively.

"Ah, yes," he said as if he understood all she meant, "but Elizabeth Bennet is also Agent Bennet and Fanny Prince…and all the other aliases, isn’t she? Do you really think you can separate yourself from them? After all, Wickham's hand slipped up your thigh, Elizabeth Bennet."

Lizzy jerked at that, at his knowledge.

He chuckled again. "Rook narrated that."

Rook?

"Lizzy, is this your priest? Why is he talking about your thigh ? Who's this man beside you? Where are we going?" Mrs. Bennet was edging toward hysteria in tipsy slow-motion.

Collingwood gave his henchman a speaking look. Before Lizzy could decipher its meaning, Leo leaped up, braced himself with his free hand on the seatback, and reached across her, using his gun to club Mrs. Bennet violently―a heavy cobra strike. Her mother slumped in the seat, held up by her seatbelt, a rivulet of blood running fast down from her temple toward her ear.

Lizzy gasped. She twisted in the seat and found herself facing the bloody gun muzzle. Leo had moved back again with remarkable speed. "You bastards! She’s got nothing to do with this!" She turned back to her mother and checked her pulse. It was weak but steady, and her breathing was shallow but regular. Unconscious but hopefully not seriously hurt.

"Now we can talk without interruption." Collingwood calmly ignored Lizzy's shout, her attendance on Mrs. Bennet. "Am I a priest?" He returned to her earlier question. "It depends on what you mean. I went to seminary, took classes, studied ancient tongues, graduated, and did all that was necessary to become a priest. So, yes, I am a priest…outwardly. But if you mean do I believe, am I a priest, inwardly ? No, I'm no priest. This has been the best cover I could devise. Who is less threatening than an Episcopal priest? Especially a gay one? Who is more likely to seem of less consequence?"

"So you're not gay? That's part of the cover, too?"

His laugh was chilling. "Now, would that make me homophobic ? Let's just say that I'm serious about my pleasures, and I am willing to take them from wherever and whoever I safely can. Man or woman, young”―he looked at Lizzy―“or old”―he looked at Mrs. Bennet. I do not discriminate."

She put her arm around her mother, instinctively protecting her. "So you've been behind the Wicker Man all along? Wickham was… what ?"

"A blind, a distraction. My beard, so to speak.” He laughed. “No, he was more than that. In his way, he was a help. I had the idea long ago of having an… avatar . Someone besides me who would serve as a focal point for what I was doing, allowing me to remain completely hidden. Someone who would run the risks while I would reap the rewards. Wickham was my avatar.

"Except that, unlike me, he could not control himself. Ordo amoris. He liked corruption too much, liked to corrupt young women, and I could not break his habit. He managed to keep his hobby from being much of a problem. Until you ."

Collingwood turned the wheel again. They were in a poorer neighborhood among buildings with windows boarded. He was willing to talk, to share his cleverness, since he planned for her, her mother, and Fitzwilliam to die. He delighted in his triumph.

"You concerned me from the beginning. Normally, Wickham chooses women who are… brittle . But you were not brittle. There's an underlying strength, a fortitude, an unruliness to you that I don't think you can completely hide. And when Wickham stopped fucking Lady Catherine—and her other bedmates—after your first visit, I knew he was…too involved."

"Involved?" Lizzy asked, shaking her head, dubious.

"Oh, don't misunderstand me. Wickham was never in love with you. That possibility didn't exist for him. I would never have chosen him or given him responsibility otherwise. But he became infatuated , completely invested in corrupting the heart and abusing the slender body of good Fanny Prince…and thereby break the heart of soft Ned Moreland. He was obsessed with sending Fanny, ruined, back to Ned. Her ruin, Ned’s ruin, was to be his masterpiece. I tried to talk him out of it, and I tried to warn you—Fanny—but I didn’t suspect you at that time. That took longer. You are very good at pretending, Agent Bennet. No, my suspicion came later. I simply wanted Wickham properly focused on the matters at hand, on the Wicker Man."

"So, the tension and contempt between the two of you?"

"All part of the act. Well, mostly part of the act."

Lizzy knew her seatbelt was still around her waist. Even after her twisting, it continued to look as though it were fastened. Slipping her hand into her dress pocket, she closed it around the ballpoint pen. She used her thumb carefully with a small motion to push the cap of the pen off, exposing the ballpoint, all the while keeping her hand and the pen in her pocket.

"So, when did you begin to suspect me?" She needed the conversation to keep his attention and also to divert Leo's attention at least partly to Collingwood as he listened.

The priest steered into another turn. "After Wickham's trip to Rapid City. But I was unsure. My people did not discover the Company agents tailing Wickham until he got to Vivos xPoint. I miscalculated. I thought the agents had picked him up there. Vivos xPoint, the community, is mine—or the Wicker Man's—including the security, of course. The Company team might have seen Wickham meet with Bang Fumerton. They had to be eliminated."

Another turn of the van.

"So, that place―the bunker community, Vivos xPoint―there was an explosion there recently, wasn't there?" Lizzy asked with feigned innocence. She now had a sense of events, and she wanted to push a button and check his reaction to see if she was right.

His head sank on his shoulders, and his smirk curled into a sneer. "Yes, after the mess on Casper Mountain and the loss of Wickham, I called the Wicker Man's lieutenants together. The failure with the Pow Wow, the chance that you or Darcy…or Bingley…might put it all together and suspect me…I called everyone together to regroup, retrench. To end operations until you were all dealt with, until I was sure I was―we were―safe."

Charlie is in danger, too. Or he will be. Lizzy made herself put the thought to the side and focus. One mission at a time, even if she hadn't asked for this one. The whole situation seemed impossible, artificial, staged—an evil priest in a van, a henchman with a gun—except that it wasn't.

It was Lizzy's Black Friday White Sale.

"But Darcy had figured it out, put it together, hadn't he?" I was right. Her tone was a deliberate goad.

Collingwood’s eyes burned. "Almost. But he thought I would be there in person. I wasn't."

"Your lieutenants died?"

He did not answer other than to flick his eyes toward the rearview mirror, the anticipation of revenge visible in them.

She tried to keep the priest talking. "Why The Wicker Man ? Why use that name? That movie?"

Lizzy had a tight fist now on the ballpoint pen. Her fingers were wrapped around it, her thumb locked down over the non-writing end. Leo shifted in his chair. He hadn't noticed her hand in her pocket. He was looking at Collingwood, not Lizzy. Listening. She took another quick glance at her mother and made herself continue to wait. Mrs. Bennet's temple did not seem to be bleeding much. There was just a crooked stain of drying blood discoloring her cheek. Although Lizzy was worried about her and worried about Fitzwilliam, she had to choose her moment.

Collingwood slowed for a red light. Traffic signals had become rarer in this part of the city, outskirts that Lizzy had never visited, not even as a child. He sighed, but in preparation rather than frustration. "I've lived my life…nailed to a religion I do not believe, that I detest," he said finally, in a quiet, convincing whisper that was just audible over the engine. "I did it because it allowed me to pursue what I do believe, to pursue a life of rebellion against it.” Reaching up, he pulled his white collar loose, removed it, and tossed it in the passenger seat. "The movie appealed to me when I first saw it, the pagan against the Christian, the idea of appeasing the old gods, the bloodthirsty ones—not the new, weak, bleeding, crucified God of Christianity.”

As the light changed, he turned to her. "I want a different world, Agent Bennet, one ruled by the old gods. A pagan world where only strength and pleasure are respected, not persons. " He spit the last word as the van moved under the green light. "A world ruled by natural justice, nature red in tooth and claw, as the saying goes. Not by the love and surrender, the milquetoast bromides of the New Testament. The Sermon on the Mount.” He spit on the van floor. “I can't bring that world into being ex nihilo , of course, but I can destabilize these"―he gestured out the windshield at the empty warehouses now surrounding them―"these remnants of Christendom further. I can fan hatreds until the whole God-rotten system collapses under its own weeping, bleeding, self-righteous weight. All this backward belief in equality, in each person as an end, will finally die, and people will submit to their natural masters, to strength and pleasure."

Lizzy stared. "You mean—to the pleasure of the strong…"

He turned his head for a second and gave her a smile, horrifying in context. "It's Nature’s way, isn’t it? We all, including we strong, submit to Her— because She is strongest of all."

When his head turned back to the road and the van started to gain speed, Lizzy acted.

My moment.

She turned in the seat and, at the same time, yanked the ballpoint pen from her pocket. She lifted it and swiftly whipped it down, driving the pen’s point into Leo’s neck. It sank sickeningly into him. Blood gushed hot around her hand, fountaining into her face. He fell off the bench, his gun going off and firing toward the top of the van. As he landed on the floor, blood continued to gush out of his neck, and he gurgled in distress.

Even before he hit the floor, Lizzy had reached into her other pocket and grabbed the rolled tape measure. She let it unspool as she pulled it out, leaped forward, and wrapped the tape around the priest's throat. He had been reaching toward his gun when she yanked him backward by the neck, and then she quickly whipped the tape around it again, pulling as hard as she could, one foot braced against the back of his seat.

He stopped groping for his gun, instead trying to steer in sudden jerks to throw her off balance. The van leaped up onto the sidewalk and careened toward a faded blue postal mailbox. They smashed into the side of it, creating an explosion of envelopes and boxes. With one hand, Collingwood attempted to slip his fingers beneath the doubled tape, trying to loosen Lizzy's noose around his neck, resist the chokehold. With the other, he continued to whip the steering wheel. The van ramped back off the curb and onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing an eighteen-wheeler that whipped past, horn blaring.

By this time, he was gasping for air. Lizzy pulled on the measure with all her strength, thankful her aunt had the good sense to buy the unbreakable kind. Collingwood turned the wheel again just before he collapsed forward. The van crossed the opposite lane, went up and onto the opposite sidewalk. It barreled through a chain-link fence, rusty and dirty in the bouncing headlights, bare earth and dark buildings beyond it.

The impact threw Lizzy forward against the back of the driver's seat. A shed or outbuilding was ahead of them, and they plowed into the corner of it, the sound of splintering wood filling the night as the van continued to lurch forward. She tumbled over the driver's seat, landing partly onto the seat-belted Collingwood. Then she was thrown to the side as the van's left side climbed a stack of cinder blocks. The van tipped…tipped…almost tipped over. Then it fell back, rolling like a ship on a stormy sea before finally stopping in a cloud of dust made visible by the headlights.

Lizzy ended up on her back, wedged between the seats. As she put down a hand to scramble to her feet, she felt a gun on the floor. She didn’t know whether it was Collingwood’s or Leo's—she grabbed the grip, lifted it, and shot the priest twice point-blank. He slumped heavily against the steering wheel, his breath escaping in a long involuntary sigh, the two ends of the tape measure hanging down from his neck, a yellow replacement for his white collar.

The engine had stopped, and an eerie silence filled the air. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

Lizzy's ribs were aching, her body bruised. What she had done, the surrounding stink of blood, made her sick to her stomach.

Ignoring the pain and the odor, she stood quickly and, after putting the gun in a pocket, checked on her mother. Mrs. Bennet was still unconscious, seat-belted safely in place, a parable of the drunk escaping injury in a wreck.

Leo lay on the floor in a pool of blood with a backdrop of blood spatter on the wall of the van. His eyes were fixed open, the ballpoint pen still protruding from his neck. Lizzy released Collingwood’s seat belt and, fueled by adrenaline, she pushed his body over the space between the front seats, angling it so he landed atop his henchman on the opposite side from her mother.

She slid into the driver's seat. Somehow, Collingwood’s phone was still in its holder and the GPS was working. She turned the key, holding her breath. The engine fired, coughed, coughed again, and miraculously began to run. Exhaling, she turned the van around, punched the gas, and accelerated through the hole it had created in the fence on entry.

"Hold on, Fitzwilliam," she whispered fiercely, her eyes forward. "I'm coming! I'm coming!"

The GPS showed her a right turn, and she took it.