Sweetheart

by Chelsea Cain

  “I think someone killed Senator Castle and they’re trying to cover it up,” he said.

  She smiled sleepily. “Did I mention that liver failure often causes mental confusion?”

  “He had an inappropriate relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl ten years ago. Susan Ward was about to make it public. The girl was killed a week ago. Her body dumped in the park.” Archie wondered whether or not to add the last part. “Not far from where you left Heather Gerber.”

  The senator’s secret didn’t faze her. Neither did Heather’s name. “Who stands to benefit from a cover-up?” she asked.

  “Castle’s publicist?” Archie said dryly.

  Gretchen sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. She moved slowly. She was bruised and battered, but this was the first time she seemed actually sore. “His publicist would love it,” Gretchen said. “They bill by the hour, you know.”

  “You didn’t benefit from anyone you killed,” Archie said.

  Gretchen stood and walked to the dresser where Archie could see a bottle of prescription pills. “I find murder emotionally fulfilling,” she said. She came back to bed and stretched out on her side next to him. “It’s about power,” she said. She opened the bottle and tapped five pills onto his chest. “Power feels good. It’s the same reason people do drugs. You can pontificate all you want about social responsibility, but in the end people do drugs because they like it. It makes them feel good.”

  Gretchen arranged the pills on his chest into a neat little line that rose and fell with his breaths. “What about sex?” Archie asked.

  “Sex has everything to do with power,” she said. She picked up one of the pills between her teeth and held it out to him and he took it, kissing her for a moment, the Vicodin between their lips.

  “Swallow it,” she whispered.

  He took the pill into his own mouth and swallowed. He wanted water, but he didn’t want her to leave him.

  “Did your father really abuse you?” Archie asked. She had told him that, in the basement, and Archie had wanted to believe that it was true. They didn’t know anything about her, really. Her fingerprints weren’t in the system. There were plenty of “Gretchen Lowells,” but none that fit. She’d made up the name at some point. Her face was plastered on every newspaper in America and no one had ever come forward with information about her past. She had told them she was thirty-four. But for all Archie knew, she could have been lying about that, too.

  Gretchen smiled. “No,” she said. “But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” She moved her fingertips from the pills on his chest, down his stomach to his groin, and cradled his balls in her hand. “To blame it on a man.” She nuzzled against his neck. “Why do women kill?” she whispered. “It must be because of a boyfriend or a father or a husband. She can’t possibly have gotten that way on her own.”

  “So you’re a feminist homicidal psychopath,” Archie said.

  “The Betty Friedan of serial killers,” she said. She moved her hand from his balls, hugging his cock with her thumb and forefinger, and with her free hand fed him another pill.

  “Swallow it,” she said.

  He forced it down, the saliva in his mouth barely enough to get the pill down into his throat.

  “If he wants to stop the story,” she said, lifting her hand to her mouth and wetting the palm with her tongue, “he’ll go after Susan Ward next.”

  Archie felt his breathing change, the heat rising from his groin up to his neck. “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” he asked, the pill still in his throat.

  She slid her lubricated hand slowly up and down his cock. “Women aren’t capable of murder, darling,” she said. “You know that.”

  The time was almost right to put his plan into action. Gretchen didn’t know it, but she wasn’t going to leave that cabin a free woman. And if it all went the way he wanted it to, he wasn’t going to leave that cabin at all. Not alive, anyway.

  Henry would take care of Susan.

  Gretchen fed him the remaining three pills one by one. Then moved her mouth down his body toward his groin, fluttering against his flesh, down his chest and across his belly, running the tip of her tongue up the shaft of his cock, around the rim of the head, until she finally took it into her mouth and began to slowly, teasingly slide his erection in and out of her throat. His breath was coming fast now, his heart racing. His face was hot, the sweat on his upper lip sweet and cold. He reached down to his groin and his hand found her head, the blond hair slick under his fingers.

  He had nothing to lose. If he was going to be a sinner, he might as well enjoy the sin.

  He knotted his fingers in her hair and moved her head up and down at his own rhythm. He watched her face the whole time, her eyes tearing, her cheeks flushed, saliva glistening at the corners of her mouth, as she took him again and again, and when her hair fell in the way, he moved it, so he could see her lips, so he could see himself fuck her. He hated her. He loved her. She started to lift her face when he came, but he held her head firm.

  “Swallow it,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  52

  Susan brought in the mail: a copy of The Nation, a flyer from the co-op, two bills, and a packet of return address labels from the ACLU. She dropped them onto the table inside the door, along with her keys. Her mother’s house was stifling. All the windows were closed. That’s how they kept it during the day. It was the only way to combat the heat. You kept the windows and drapes closed until the sun went down and then you opened them all up and prayed for a light breeze. Susan didn’t know how the Victorians had survived.

  Susan’s eyes burned with exhaustion. A few hours’ sleep, and she would be ready to get back to work. She walked upstairs into her mother’s room. She wasn’t going to sleep in that hammock if she didn’t have to. Her mother’s room was painted red and she had what was probably the last water bed in the Portland metropolitan area. Susan turned on the oscillating fan on Bliss’s dresser to get the air moving.

  It had been years since she’d pulled an all-nighter and Susan had forgotten what it felt like. She actually felt sick to her stomach. She stretched out on Bliss’s bed but the rollicking motion of the water under the plastic just made her queasier. She lay there for a while but every time she turned over a tidal surge would roll up and down the waterbed. She had a headache now. It felt like someone was squeezing a steel cap around her skull.

  There was only one solution: a bath. She glanced at her watch. It was almost 11:00 A.M.

  She got up, went into the bathroom off the upstairs hall, and turned on the faucet in the cast-iron tub, filling it with cool water and a healthy gob of eucalyptus foaming bath gel. There were dozens of candles along the perimeter of the tub, an assortment of different colors and scents that Bliss had carefully arranged to create the perfect bathing experience.

  Susan flicked a lighter on and held it to one of the wicks. It caught fire for a moment, and then went out. She tried again. It went out. She tried another candle. It went out. Susan indulged in an indignant groan. That was just like her mother, to buy the cheapest candles at the import store. She stared at the lighter in her hand for a moment and then shrugged and set it back down next to one of the candles.

  It felt good to shed the clothes she’d been wearing for twenty-four hours. She stuffed them into the Guatemalan basket her mother used as a bathroom laundry hamper. Her head really ached now. Even her eyes hurt. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep, she realized, it was stress. Parker. Archie Sheridan. She needed to take it easier. Not push herself so hard. She wasn’t going to be any good to anyone like this.

  She stepped into the tub and sank slowly into the cool water, letting the pleasing menthol aroma of eucalyptus wash over her. She was noticing that her toenail polish was chipped when she heard the bee. It buzzed over her head and alit on the bathroom sink, which was strange because the house had been closed up for two days so a bee couldn’t have gotten in. She was pondering this, her head resting against the back of t
he tub, when the bee did something else strange. It flew up into the air, buzzed around in a circle, and then stopped midair, and dropped to the floor.

  Susan sat up in the tub and looked down. Bliss had painted the bathroom’s wooden floor light blue and there, on the blue floor, like a boat at sea, was the bee, legs in the air, dead.

  Susan felt woozy. She couldn’t remember, for a moment, what she was even doing there, why she was home. Archie Sheridan was missing. She had to get back to the task force offices. She had to find Henry.

  Where was her mother?

  She looked down at the bee. She’d done a story on a family of five in Lake Oswego that had narrowly escaped a carbon monoxide leak. Odorless. Tasteless. The pets had dropped dead. A hamster and a bird. The mother had been smart enough to get everyone out of the house. Another half hour, the cops had said, and the whole family would have been dead.

  Susan pulled herself out of the tub, bath foam sliding off her naked body onto the floor, and immediately slipped and banged her face on the edge of the sink. The shock of pain cleared her head and she grabbed a towel, then wrapped it around her at the chest and started downstairs.

  Get out of the house. She had to keep saying it in her head, over and over again. Because when she stopped, she started thinking about sleep. About how nice it would be to just close her eyes for a second, and then get out of the house when she woke up. But she wouldn’t wake up.

  Get out of the house.

  She lost the towel. She didn’t know when. She must have dropped it. But she was naked, stumbling down the stairs, tears running down her cheeks. No, it wasn’t tears. It was blood. From hitting the sink. She was bleeding. The blood ran into her mouth, a sweet coppery tang.

  She got to the front door and saw someone standing on the other side of the glass. It took her a minute to recognize him out of uniform. It was Officer Bennett, from the Arlington, their protector, their assigned security detail.

  He’d come to save her.

  She reached the door and turned the knob to open it, but it wouldn’t turn. It was locked. She was locked in the house. She motioned with her hand to Bennett, pointing to the knob to indicate that it was stuck, to get her out.

  He just stood there.

  She turned the knob again, but it wouldn’t budge. Something was wrong. The dead bolt was in the right position. The door should open. She pounded on the glass, her hands leaving wet prints on the window. “The bee’s dead,” she shouted.

  Bennett just stood on the other side of the door staring at her, and then he held up her house keys. It was a brilliant sunny day, and behind him Susan could see the blue sky, not a cloud in it, and the bamboo that her mother had planted in a glazed pot on the front porch, and Susan’s favorite rhododendron bush, emblazoned with scarlet flowers.

  She was dizzy. It reminded her of a time in college when she’d had too many pot brownies and passed out on a friend’s beanbag. She’d slept with her face on her hand and she’d woken up with an imprint of her watch on her cheek. She started to sink to the ground.

  There was something she was supposed to do. Get out of the house.

  She could call someone. But the phone was so far away.

  There was a sound then, and she looked up to see Bennett’s face flat against the glass, eyes closed. He stayed there for a moment, like a kid pressing his face against a window for laughs. And then he slid down the glass out of sight and Susan heard the sound of his body hitting the wooden porch.

  The door opened and someone picked her up and began to drag her out of the house. She felt the backs of her heels hit the door jamb, and then the steps down to the front yard and then she was on grass. The grass felt cool and soft and she was glad that she could finally sleep. She looked up and she saw her mother.

  “Hi, Mom,” Susan said sleepily.

  “I hit him with the Buddha,” she said.

  Susan forced herself awake. Breathe, she told herself. Her chest heaved, filling with oxygen, her head clearing an iota with every breath. “Jesus, Mom,” she managed. “You killed a cop.” She closed her eyes. “Call nine-one-one. Call Henry. Don’t go in the house. Carbon monoxide leak. Bennett. He locked me in.”

  “I don’t have a phone,” Bliss said.

  Susan’s mother was not good at problem solving. This was just the kind of insurmountable obstacle that could paralyze her for hours. They didn’t have that kind of time. Susan lifted herself up and grabbed Bliss by the lapels of her polyester paisley pantsuit. “Use the fucking neighbors’,” Susan said.

  Then she folded back down in the grass and passed out.

  CHAPTER

  53

  When Susan woke up she had an oxygen mask over her mouth and was being tended to by two paramedics. A wispy cloud drifted overhead. It looked like a jackrabbit. Susan turned her head and vomited on the grass.

  “Sorry,” she said to the paramedics.

  A uniformed cop was walking by with the Buddha in a large plastic evidence bag. Bliss was following behind him. “I’ll get that back, right?” Bliss asked.

  Henry squatted beside Susan. She heard his knees crack as he settled onto his haunches. His black jeans rode up and she could see that his cowboy boots had tooled pictures of a Native American-style eagle on them. “You feeling better?” he asked.

  Susan took off the oxygen mask. “Is he dead?” she asked.

  “Unconscious,” Henry said.

  Susan felt a light-headed rush of relief. Her mother hadn’t killed him. “Did Bliss tell you what happened?” she asked. One of the paramedics had put the mask back on and the words came out muffled through the plastic.

  Henry rubbed the back of his neck. “She said she came home to check on the goat and found you naked and banging on the door and Bennett outside.” He glanced over at Bliss, who stood arguing with the cop who held the Buddha, and he raised his eyebrow. “She perceived him as a threat and clocked him.”

  Behind Henry, Susan saw another cop walking into the house. She struggled to sit up. “I think there’s a carbon monoxide leak in the house,” she said.

  “There was,” Henry said. “The furnace in the basement was leaking. We shut it off.”

  Susan settled back down. She felt woozy from moving and she sat sucking in oxygen for another minute. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. When she felt well enough, she moved the mask away again. “I came home to take a nap,” she told Henry, “and I started to feel sick and when I tried to leave the house Bennett wouldn’t let me.” The wispy jackrabbit cloud had drifted into a shape that didn’t look like anything at all. “He took my keys and locked me in.”

  “You must have really pissed him off,” Henry deadpanned.

  “This isn’t funny,” Susan said.

  Henry looked around the yard at the ambulance, the patrol cars, the police. He seemed mystified. “Why would Bennett try to kill you?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Susan said. “But he did. I know he did.”

  Henry shook his head. “It could have been Gretchen,” he said. He looked back at the house. “I want both you and your mother under protection full-time again. You always have a cop with you. Got it?”

  Susan was suddenly aware of the fact that she was, except for a blanket, completely naked. “I need to get dressed,” she said.

  “You need to go to the hospital,” Henry said.

  No. He was not going to send her to the hospital. Put her under lock and key. Not with all this going on. “I’ve got to get back to work,” she protested.

  Henry lifted his finger and touched his nose. “Your nose is broken,” he said.

  Bliss appeared then. Susan couldn’t help but notice her freshly applied red lipstick. When she looked at Susan, she winced, her top lip peeling back in disgust. Bliss had never liked the sight of blood.

  The sink. Susan must have cracked her nose on the sink when she fell.

  “Fine,” Susan said to Henry. “But I’m not going anywhere without my purse.”

  “I
’ll risk an officer’s life immediately to retrieve it from your home,” Henry said.

  “Thanks,” said Susan. She turned to the paramedics. “Take me to Emanuel,” she said.

  If she had to go to the hospital, she at least wanted to go to the one where Archie’s doctor worked.

  CHAPTER

  54

  How old were you when you broke your nose?” Gretchen asked.

  Gretchen ran her finger lightly from Archie’s hairline over his forehead and then down to the bridge of his nose. He was lying on his back in the bed. She was on her side next to him. They had just had sex again and he felt strangely weakened by it. There was a new highness now. Different from the pills. The pills were soft, like a bright haze. This was darker, a blackness that skirted the edges of his vision.

  “Seventeen,” he said. He knew the question that came next. “I was in a car accident.”

  “Was anyone killed?” she asked.

  He hadn’t talked about it in so long that he was surprised when he told her the truth. But it didn’t matter anymore, and the very fact that she had asked made him think that she must somehow know the answer. “My mother,” Archie said.

  “Aha,” she said.

  “Aha?”

  “You were driving,” Gretchen said.

  “I haven’t even told Henry this story,” Archie said. Only Debbie. No one else. Not since he’d left home. It was his dirtiest little secret. Besides Gretchen.

  “Was it your fault?” Gretchen asked.

  “I didn’t see a stop sign.”

  Gretchen touched his face, tenderly, he thought. Though it might have been something else. “Your father must have never forgiven you,” she said.

  Archie hadn’t seen his father since he’d left home. “No,” he said.

  They were quiet for a time, and Archie watched the shadows that the ceiling fan threw.