by Joanne Fluke
So the wedding had gone off as scheduled, minus the doves. Laureen’s father had been firm about that. And Millie had talked about Laureen’s wonderful wedding until the day she died.
“Laureen?” Alan reached out for her hand. He looked very solemn. “Will you promise to be honest if I ask you a question?”
“I promise, Alan.”
“After all that’s happened in our life together, would you marry me again? Knowing what you know now?”
Laureen nodded. “I’d marry you, Alan, anytime you asked me. And you?”
“Absolutely.” Alan smiled at her. “You’re the only one I’ve ever loved.”
Laureen blinked away happy tears. It was true. She knew that. And she’d forgiven him for his affair with Vanessa.
Alan turned back to the album. “Look at this one, honey. You’re raising your skirt to show off your garter and my brother Harry’s leering at your legs. He certainly looks different with all his hair.”
Laureen nodded in agreement, distracted by a terrible twinge of conscience. For one brief moment, she’d almost confessed an affair, too, a long time ago. But it would only hurt Alan if he knew, and she’d vowed to carry her guilty secret to her grave.
Alan turned the page and pointed at them cutting the cake. “They always take this shot, don’t they?”
“It’s a standard.” Laureen pasted on a smile and banished her guilty thoughts. “This is my favorite photo, the one of us feeding each other.”
“I remember that moment.” Alan chuckled and squeezed her hand. “You were so nervous you missed my mouth with the cake.”
“And you gave me such a big piece that I nearly choked.”
They were quiet for a moment, reliving the memories. Laureen was the first to speak. “We were so young and naive back then. Think we’ve learned anything important over the past twenty-two years?”
“That money and success don’t matter nearly as much as we thought they would. We were just as happy in our first efficiency apartment as we are in this big expensive place. And we’ve learned that love can survive all sorts of obstacles.”
“That’s true.”
Alan started to grin. “Of course, I didn’t mention the most important thing we’ve learned since this picture was taken.”
“What’s that, Alan?”
“We’re much better at feeding ourselves.”
Staggering slightly as he got off the elevator, Hal steadied himself with one hand and tried to fit the key into the hole. It was the right kind of lock, but Alan had been telling the truth. He hadn’t given Vanessa a key because this one didn’t fit Alan and Laureen’s door.
“One down, eight to go.” Hal mumbled. He was almost positive Vanessa’s key wouldn’t open Grace and Moira’s door, but he had to try. Still too drunk to make any sort of assumptions, he was having trouble enough just remembering which floor he was on. When he reached the second floor, he was very quiet. Moira might come out and bean him with a hammer or something if she thought he was a burglar. But the key didn’t fit in Moira and Grace’s door, and he dropped it into his pocket again. Two floors down, seven floors to go.
He was out of the elevator before he realized that the third floor was his floor, and that he’d already compared Vanessa’s key to his key. Hal got back into the elevator and resumed what he thought of as his quest. Heroes of ancient times had searched for the Holy Grail, and Excalibur, and the Golden Fleece. His quest for the Unlockable Door wasn’t quite that romantic, but he didn’t have to encounter fire-breathing dragons and armor-plated knights, either.
Hal leaned against the wall for a long time after trying Johnny Day’s lock, wishing he could stretch out on Johnny’s thick green carpeting and close his eyes. It took great resolve to press the button for the fifth floor. The coffee had worn off and that last snifter of brandy was catching up with him.
By the time Hal stepped off, he was seeing double. He weaved his way down the hallway and braced himself against Clayton’s door. Concentration. Hal blinked hard and the two doors he was seeing merged into one. It took several tries, but he finally managed to get the key in the lock and turn it. What happened next almost made him fall on his face. Clayton’s door swung open on its well-oiled hinges.
“Aha!” Hal let out a whoop of pleasure. Now he could go home to bed. If he could get there.
Hal’s legs refused to carry him any longer, and he sat down on the rug with a thump, staring at the darkness inside. What had Vanessa been doing in Clayton’s apartment?
He ran his hand through the thick pile carpeting and frowned, trying to think of a connection. He shut his eyes to concentrate, but before he could draw any conclusion, he passed out cold.
Betty frowned as she stared at the screen. The moment she’d realized that her secret friend was in this movie, she’d pressed the button to record. And then she’d seen that it was another scary movie, the kind she didn’t like. Why had they typecast him in roles like this? He was handsome enough to play a romantic lead, and he might be able to do comedy, too, if they’d only give him a chance.
Even though she knew it was only make-believe, Betty still felt very afraid. The man who drew the funny animals was dead, and her secret friend had killed him. She wasn’t so sure she wanted him to visit her again, not even if he brought her candy.
She remembered a trick that Charles had taught her when they were young and saw the movie about the vampire. She’d wanted to leave. Charles had told her to cover her eyes with her hand and peek out through her fingers and she’d remember it was only a movie.
Betty put her hand over her eyes and peeked through. It worked. This was only a movie on her television set, all pretend. She watched as her secret friend dragged the body into the elevator and the doors closed behind them. Now she had to take her fingers down so she could use the remote control to find the rest of the movie.
It wasn’t on forbidden channel four. They were running a late-night commercial for a company that sold pianos. These were old pianos and she’d seen this commercial many times before. It must be a very effective sales device because the cowgirl had bought one and moved it up to forbidden channel nine.
Betty smiled as she switched to channel three. She’d found it! It was just like reading a story in the newspaper. When they ran out of space on one page, they continued it on another. Television was like that now. Betty was forever having to switch channels to watch the ends of movies.
Her secret friend had thrown a rope over a beam on the ceiling. Now he was tying a loop in one end and hooking it around the funny animal man’s neck. Betty got her eyes covered just in time. She watched through the space between her fingers as he pulled on the rope and hoisted the funny animal man up in the air to dangle. Then he tipped over a chair and put it underneath and the movie was over at last.
Betty knew that there was something very frightening about all the movies she’d seen lately. It had to do with the forbidden channels and the actors who appeared on the screen. She thought she remembered Jack telling her that they weren’t really actors. Of course they could be part of a neighborhood theater group. Sometimes public access television ran amateur programming and that would explain why the movies weren’t very professional. Once upon a time, Jack had sat right here in this very room and told her all about it, but she’d forgotten most of what he’d said.
Her frown changed to a smile as she pressed the button for forbidden channel eight. The doll-lady was sitting on a couch, paging through a magazine. There were bunnies around her feet again and Betty wished she had some, too. But why didn’t they hop away? She was trying to figure it out, when the doll-lady raised her foot and a word popped right into Betty’s head like magic.
“Slippers!” Betty was so delighted she said the word out loud. The doll-lady was very generous. She’d given Betty the big patchwork doll, so she could have company now that Jack wasn’t here. Maybe, if she could remember the words, the doll-lady would let her wear the fuzzy bunny slippers.
Betty reached for the notepad by the side of her bed and wrote down a B for bunny. That wasn’t enough. B was for bunny, but it was also for ball. She sang the rhyme out loud. A is for apple and B is for ball. C is for cat and D is for doll. She needed more letters for the bunny slippers, but that was as far as she could remember. Perhaps she could draw a picture.
She worked very hard at the drawing and when she’d finished, she had a good picture, almost as good as a photograph. She circled the things, she’d forgotten their names already, and put in the mark that meant question. Now all she had to do was show it to the doll-lady.
She stared at the picture for a moment and then frowned, vaguely recalling that young children wore things like these. Was she too old to have them? She glanced down at her hands. She’d heard Nurse say that her job was like taking care of a big baby, but hers were adult hands. How did people judge age if they couldn’t remember birthdays?
Betty searched her mind for the answer. If she had been a horse, she could have gone to the mirror and looked at her teeth. Horse traders could tell an animal’s age by checking its teeth. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. It was clever if you knew what it meant.
Then a funny thought popped into her head and Betty laughed out loud. If she’d been a tree, somebody could have counted her rings. She had two on her left hand and one on her right. That told her absolutely nothing, but the rings were certainly pretty. She held up her right hand and the big Tiffany-cut stone glittered in the light. It was a diamond and diamonds were forever. Charles had said that when she’d opened the box. It was too bad that Charles hadn’t been as forever as the diamond.
At a sound outside her door, Betty switched off the television set. Then she pulled up the blankets and closed her eyes so the Nurse-bird would think she was sleeping when she came in to do the bed check.
SIXTEEN
Walker moved close enough to recognize Alan and Laureen stretched out on the lounge chairs. Alan was sleeping on his stomach, snoring softly, and he looked very uncomfortable. Laureen was on her back with the blanket pulled up to her chin, as if she were taking the air on the deck of a cruise ship.
He studied their sleeping faces for a moment. Walker couldn’t blame them for fleeing their own apartment. Dead bodies made him uncomfortable, too. He’d never grown used to seeing the slack features and wide-open eyes staring up at nothing. Sometimes there was a surprised look, a perplexed expression, or a grimace that didn’t quite fade as death froze the features into a mask.
Walker’d had several close encounters and he had the scars to prove it, a six-inch knife cut that had nearly spilled his guts out on the ground, and a shoulder wound that still twinged whenever it was about to rain. Usually it didn’t bother him, but there were times like tonight when he wanted out. They’d offered to let him retire after this job, but now that his family was gone, there was really no reason to take them up on it.
Some people accepted death as inevitable. Others sought all sorts of ways to ensure immortality, like spending a fortune to be preserved at subzero temperatures and thawed when modern medicine had found the cure for their fatal disease. Walker had decided that he’d be better off ignoring death and living each day as it came, which seemed to work just fine until something happened to remind him that his luck couldn’t last forever.
Many might argue that his luck was relative. Walker had lost his wife and his six-year-old daughter in an auto accident. At least that was what he’d told people, omitting that the accident involved a bomb under the hood of his car. If you had good protection, they moved on to your family.
As Walker reached out to press the elevator button, his hand was trembling. His still got the shakes every time he thought about that morning, five years ago. The phone had rung at eight o’clock, just as Jenny had been sitting down to her favorite cereal, a gruesome concoction that turned pink and soggy when she poured milk on it.
“I’ll get it, hon.” Cheryl had sprinted across the floor to grab it before he’d even pushed back his chair. She’d been a long-distance runner before they were married and had almost made the Olympic track team. She probably could have made it four years later, but she’d married him and had Jenny by that time.
“He did? Right next to his eye? That sounds nasty, Mavis.” Cheryl had held the phone with one hand and refilled his coffee cup with the other. “It’s not really serious, is it?”
Walker had studied the furrow that appeared on his wife’s forehead and sighed. Definitely a problem.
“Of course.” Cheryl’s voice had been very sympathetic. “We’ll just switch weeks, all right? And tell Danny he’ll look like a pirate.”
Cheryl had hung up the phone and poured herself a cup of coffee. Then she’d flopped down in a chair and sighed. “Danny had an allergic reaction to a spider bite. His eye’s swollen shut and Mavis has to keep him home from school. Do you mind driving the bug today, Walker? I have to do the car pool.”
“Sure, no problem.” Walker had agreed immediately, even though he hated to drive Cheryl’s bug. When rust spots had appeared on her lime-green car, she’d covered them up with flower decals. From a distance, it looked polka-dotted, which was bad enough, but when people got a close look at the pink and purple and yellow daisies, they smirked.
Cheryl had laughed and Walker had known she was reading his mind. “Sorry, hon. I know how you feel, but I can’t cram six first graders into the bug, and there’s no time to run over to get Mom’s station wagon.”
“I told you, no problem. It’s probably good for me to drive around in a flowered car. Builds character. What was that business about the pirate?”
“Oh, that.” Cheryl had smiled. “The doctor gave Mavis a patch to put over Danny’s eye. Naturally, he hates it. I just thought he might leave it on if she tells him he looks like a pirate.”
Jenny had nodded solemnly. “Danny wants to be a pirate when he grows up. He loves airpranes.” Walker and Cheryl had exchanged amused glances over the rims of their coffee cups. “Want to explain?” Walker had done his best to maintain a straight face. Jenny had developed a slight lisp and she was very sensitive about it.
“On the drive to school.” Cheryl had pushed back her chair and stood up. “Any gas in the van?”
“Not much. I was planning on filling it this morning.”
“Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. Isn’t that our motto, hon?” She’d given Walker a quick kiss on the forehead. “There’s not much in the bug, either. Come on, Jenny. Give Daddy a kiss and get your coat. We have to leave right now or we won’t make it to school on time.”
He’d still been sitting at the table, drinking the last of his coffee, when he’d heard the explosion. By the time he’d run out the door, his van had been an inferno. The doctor had said they’d died instantly, but that had been small comfort.
For the first few weeks, Walker had been in a state of shock. And when that had worn off, his guts had churned with white-hot anger at the men who’d killed his family. He knew that a man hell-bent on revenge took foolish chances, so he’d waited, and two years later the opportunity had come. His retaliation hadn’t brought Cheryl and Jenny back, but it had been sweet. And then he’d closed the book on his dream for a normal life. A man in his profession had to be a loner.
Walker thought about Ellen as he got off the elevator and walked down the hall. It was a real pity they’d raised questions about Johnny Day, and he was glad that Ellen hadn’t joined in their speculation. He hated to think of what would certainly happen if she started adding up the facts. If there was some way to warn her off, he’d be tempted, but the orders he’d been given were very specific.
In spite of his orders and training, Walker had still gotten personally involved. He’d liked Ellen the first time he’d met her. She was bright and witty, and because she was so totally defensive around men, he’d spent a lot of time trying to bring her around. The turning point had come just a week ago, when he’d found her on a ladder, arranging supplies on her
storage shelves. She’d asked him to please give her a hand, so he had. Right out of the box of spare parts.
Ellen had stared at him for a moment and then cracked up. She’d laughed so hard, he’d had to help her down from the ladder and she hadn’t stopped laughing for at least five minutes.
Now she even teased him back occasionally. And she was an absolute master of the pun, Walker’s favorite form of humor. That crack she’d made to Vanessa after he’d given her the bunny slippers had almost finished him off. And as her ability to laugh had grown, so had her trust in him. That had been his real objective. Ellen had to trust him enough to believe the lies he was required to tell her.
Walker smiled. He’d actually talked her into going up to the Jacuzzi with him last night, a step in the right direction. Of course she’d worn a discreet one-piece suit, and over that, a terry-cloth robe. She’d taken it off to jump into the Jacuzzi, but only after asking him to turn off the lights. Even though she had the perfect body for a bikini, Walker knew it would reveal too much of what she thought she had to hide. He’d never met a woman so paranoid around men before, which made his job even more difficult. There were times when Walker felt like marching Ellen over to the mirror, stripping off every stitch of her clothing, and forcing her to look at herself objectively.
Reaching for his key, Walker paused at the door for a moment. Part of him wished that Ellen would be awake again tonight, waiting up for him. No one had cared about what time he came home since Cheryl and Jenny had died. On the other side of the coin, she might get suspicious if she realized that he’d been out two nights in a row. Then she’d start asking questions and that could be very dangerous for her.
