When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

  But if additional proof had been required, the tableau of a helpless girl sobbing at her father’s feet while Max held a knife to her mother’s throat would surely have supplied it, he thought, as Lilith raced around the house locking doors, drawing blinds, ripping the telephones from their sockets.

  She returned carrying a length of clothesline from the laundry room, with a hunting knife in a sheath stuck in the waistband of her low-rider jeans—unfortunately, she reported, there were no firearms to be found. Max switched hostages, tossing the mother to the floor, then dragging the girl to her feet and holding the steak knife to her throat while Lilith tied the parents together back-to-back with coil upon coil of polyester clothesline.

  “My Swiss Army knife’s in my front pocket,” Corder whispered to his wife as Lilith and Maxwell conferred across the room. His plan, such as it was, was four-fold. One, get the little knife out—it wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was all he had. Two, get Max close enough to drop a little bomb in his ear. Three: take advantage of subsequent confusion by inserting knife into Maxwell. And four: repeat step three as necessary.

  “Hey, you two—no talking,” ordered Max, quickly slipping the steak knife back into his pocket—Kinch was stirring again in the darkness. “I don’t want to have to gag you—I’d much rather hear you moan while I do your little girl—but I will if I have to.”

  Do your little girl—hearing the words, Alison went limp. Max lowered her sagging body to the carpet. “You a virgin, honey?” he asked pleasantly.

  Alison moaned; Cheryl slumped backward against her husband.

  “Please, Max, you’re making a terrible mistake,” said Corder, desperately trying to buy time; in the guise of collapsing against him, Cheryl had worked her hand into his pocket. “Even if you escape, how long before they, ah, they recapture you? And what kind of a life will you have out there on the run?”

  As he spoke, he and Cheryl inched their bodies around so that he was facing Max; shielded by his back, Cheryl had withdrawn the knife from his pocket, opened the longer blade (not an easy trick one-handed), and was trying to saw through the coils of rope one at a time without being too obvious about it. Not that Max or Lilith were paying much attention to them. Max was kneeling beside the apparently unconscious Alison, trying to bring her around by fanning her with a magazine from the coffee table, while Lilith snatched up a pillow from the sofa and slipped it under the younger girl’s head.

  Cheryl kept sawing, Corder kept talking. He felt the last coils slackening; any second now, he’d be able to free his hands. “Enough to make it worth your while spending the rest of your life in some maximum security prison? Because that’s what’s going to happen. All these years, I’ve been the only one standing between you and the penitentiary—possibly even a death sentence. But if you lay a finger on my daughter, I won’t protect you anymore. Do you understand me?”

  Max glanced toward them; his eyes widened in alarm. “Goddamn-it!” he shouted, taking out the steak knife again and limping across the room. He looked over Corder’s shoulder, saw the knife in Cheryl’s hand, the cut coils. “Naughty, naughty,” he said.

  Their faces were only inches apart; though his hands weren’t free yet, Corder realized he had to make his move now. “Lyssy is a goood boy,” he said, firmly but soothingly, then repeated the code phrase: “Lyssy is a goood boy.”

  Whoa shit, thought Max—he hadn’t seen that coming. Kinch roared in his ears; his consciousness seemed to be flowing downward, toward the knife in his hand. There’s going to be hell to pay, he told himself as he rushed toward darkness. Absolute hell.

  Wssh-wssh, wssh-wssh…

  A soft, whisking sound. Lyssy glanced down and discovered he was making the noise himself, brushing the back of his hand against the thigh of his chinos. Grounding behavior, he thought—one of the alters has been paying a visit. Uh-oh—don’t let Dr. Al find out.

  He looked around, found himself sitting on the bottom of the front stairs at the director’s residence. No idea how he’d gotten here, or how much time had passed since…since when? He vaguely remembered a voice like dried corn husks whispering in his ear, then flames, then cool, cool darkness—but all that had to have been a dream, it just had to.

  Lyssy took inventory. His right shoulder was so sore he could scarcely lift his arm, and his clothes were spattered with ketchup or food coloring or something.

  Suddenly the silence in the room was broken by a beeping noise coming from the Corder’s living room. A hospital pager—he would have recognized the sound anywhere. But before he could get up, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned, saw his beautiful new friend Lily coming down the stairs wearing a brown sweater and tight-fitting jeans, holding one hand behind her back as if to hide something.

  By now, Lyssy had concluded only that this had to have been the birthday party he’d been waiting for. But he was utterly clueless as to how long he’d been out of it, which alter had surfaced and done what to whom, or why his clothes were all stained and spattered. In any event, the usual imperative was in play: fake it as long as you can, hope nobody noticed anything out of what passed for the ordinary around here. “Oh, hi,” he said. “Been upstairs, hunh?”

  She came closer, peered deeply into Lyssy’s eyes as though she were looking for something—or someone. “You’re fucking with my head, right? To get even for before, in the arboretum.”

  “If you say so,” said Lyssy with a weak chuckle.

  Her dark eyes narrowed, then widened again in recognition. “Lyssy?”

  “Who else?”

  “Oh, swell.” In the living room, the beeping started up again. The girl sheathed the hunting knife she was holding behind her back, took a key ring from her pocket. Dr. Al’s key ring—something else Lyssy would have recognized anywhere. “C’mon, let’s get outta here.”

  “I—I can’t. I’m not supposed to leave the premises.”

  “Fine by me,” said the girl contemptuously. “Stay here and rot, see if I care.”

  7

  This is ridiculous, Irene decided as the car pulled up in front of the director’s residence after a journey of fifty, maybe seventy-five yards from the hospital around the corner. It was such a pleasant midsummer evening, after all, with the smell of new-mown grass in the air. Al Corder’s going to open the door, Irene told herself, look at us like what the hell? and there we’ll be, standing on the doorstep with egg on our faces.

  But the house was dead quiet and the curtains and blinds drawn upstairs and down. No response when Irene rang the bell, though she and Pender could hear the pretentious, two-toned chimes resounding through the house—Bing-bong, bing-bong. “They’re not answering,” she said, unnecessarily.

  “See if it’s locked.”

  The knob turned easily in her hand, the sturdy, handsomely brass-bound oak door swung open under the Happy Birthday banner. “Age before beauty,” said Pender, shouldering past Irene with a humorless smile. “Wait here, okay? Just til we know what’s what.”

  She understood he was trying to protect her, but even knowing there was something in her personality that both appreciated and elicited that behavior from him, she resented it, and hurried after him.

  But he’d only gone as far as the arched, crepe paper-festooned entrance to the Corder’s living room. “Oh, dear God,” she said, looking away quickly—but not quickly enough to prevent the sight from burning itself into her memory. For Al and Cheryl Corder were propped up back-to-back beneath the cheerful birthday bunting and bobbing balloons, bound with coils of rope, their clothes and bodies slashed and shredded, minced flesh and shockingly white bone visible through tatters of bloody cloth, and their faces unrecognizable, so gashed and gouged the features had been all but obliterated. And so much blood—the furniture, the walls, the fireplace, the inside of the curtains, the once-beige carpet, now a Jackson Pollock in crimson and black; even some of the crepe-paper streamers were spattered with gore. Kinch, she mouthed—she’d intended to say it aloud, but no sound
emerged.

  Pender heard the noise first: an insistent, rhythmic thumping somewhere overhead. He touched a forefinger to his lips, then pointed to the ceiling. When she realized that something or someone was still up there, still inside the house, Irene was torn between a powerful urge to flee and an equally powerful, almost physical need to stick close to Pender.

  But it was no contest, really, not with Maxwell back in her world. The first few months after her kidnapping Irene had kept all the shades drawn in her home, even on the second floor, because she couldn’t pass an outside window without imagining his grinning face popping up like a jack-in-the-box. Mirrors were no good either—for a while there, she couldn’t even sit at her vanity for fear she’d see him in the mirror, over her shoulder—and dark rooms were totally unacceptable: her PG&E bill had nearly doubled by the time autumn rolled around. And all that despite knowing Maxwell was locked up in a maximum security facility and couldn’t possibly get at her.

  So what was the prognosis for PTSD patients who find themselves back in a war zone? Irene asked herself as she hurried after Pender, who had already started up the stairs, moving quietly on his rubber-soled Hush Puppies.

  She caught up to him on the second floor landing and followed him so closely down the dusky hallway that she could smell his aftershave. The thumping emanated from behind a closed door with a sign reading My Room, My Mess, My Business. Pender gestured for Irene to step away. With his back against the wall to the side of the doorway, he reached around, turned the knob, and threw the door open.

  Inside, the thumping grew more frenzied. Pender peered around the doorjamb, saw a girl’s bedroom with posters of the U.S. Women’s World Cup soccer team on the pale pink walls and stuffed animals crowding the bedspread. On the floor next to the bed a teenage girl lay on her back, her wrists and ankles bound with adhesive tape. Another strip of tape covered her mouth completely—her taut bare midriff jerked spasmodically as she fought to draw breath through nostrils bubbling with snot. A few more minutes and she’d almost certainly have suffocated, Pender thought with a shudder as he knelt beside the girl. What a nightmarish way to go.

  Irene had followed him into the room. Call nine-one-one, he mouthed to her over his shoulder. She fished her cell phone out of her purse, took it out into the hall, and closed the door behind her—she didn’t want Alison to have to listen to her telling the police about the bodies downstairs.

  “It’s okay, honey, you’re safe now,” Pender crooned soothingly to the girl as he scooped her up in his arms and set her down gently on the bed. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Bet you’d like to get this damn thing off toot sweet, though.”

  Alison nodded. Pender gave her a big clownish wink, pinched her earlobe hard with one hand to distract her, then yanked the tape free with his other hand while she was still in mid-yelp. “Here, blow,” he said, handing her his handkerchief. When she was done blowing, she gave it back to him; he wrinkled his lumpy nose and held it out at arm’s length. “Call in the Haz-Mat team,” he said.

  When Irene returned, Alison was sitting up and asking for water—her throat was raw from screaming into the gag. Irene said she’d get it, and went back out into the hall to find the bathroom.

  The first door she tried was a linen closet, its neatly folded sheets and towels lightly scented with lilac water. But the second door opened onto a spacious bathroom, nearly as large as Alison’s bedroom. Inside, the body of a heavyset woman with a mullet hairdo lay jackknifed over the rim of the bathtub, head down, ass up; the acrid, new-penny smell of blood filled Irene’s nostrils and brought tears to her eyes.

  A few minutes later one of the first cops to arrive on the scene discovered Wally’s body on the floor outside the downstairs bathroom, and the body count was complete.

  Part Two

  Mama’s Place

  CHAPTER SIX

  1

  The undersides of the fluffy clouds to the east were dawn-pink, the tops in bruised shadow as Lilith, stiff and sore after driving all night, trudged up an asphalt driveway so steep she felt like she should have been roped to something.

  Her destination was a pink ranch house with a shingled roof and dormer windows, which appeared to have been airlifted from some 1950s-era suburb complete with hissing lawn sprinklers and little kids riding fat-tired bikes with bells and streamers on the handlebars, then plunked down precariously on the western slope of this scrubby hillside in the boondocks north of Redding.

  Lilith paused on the front doorstep, trying to decide whether it was too early to ring the doorbell. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the living-room curtains rustling. She rapped lightly on the green door. “It’s me,” she called. “It’s Lilith—open up.”

  The man—or was it a troll?—who opened the door was short, dark, and stocky, shirtless under Ben Davis overalls, with matted hair and beard, and a nose so flat and eyes set so far apart that his broad face seemed vaguely unfinished, like an underdone gingerbread man.

  “Hey, L’il T.,” said Lilith.

  “Whaddaya want?” He kept one hand out of sight, behind the door.

  Before she could reply, a woman’s voice behind him cried out, “Well I’ll be dipped in shit.”

  “Mama Rose?”

  “No, honey, it’s fucking Cher. I couldn’t stand them dickless Hollywood phonies no more, so I come up here for a break.”

  Next thing Lilith knew, a six-foot-tall, orange-haired, two-hundred-pound white woman had shoved the troll out of the way, yanked her inside, and hugged her to an enormous bosom that smelled of cigarettes and cold pizza. “Hope you ain’t still pissed off about…Weed,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you later how it went down—for right now, as far as anybody else is concerned the story is that you run into some folks you recognized, and split with ’em. Okay?”

  “But—”

  “Later.” Mama Rose held Lilith at arm’s length, looked urgently into her eyes. “Please?”

  Lilith shrugged. “Yeah, sure, what the fuck.”

  Mama Rose pressed her palms against the girl’s temples, drew her close again, planted a wet kiss on her forehead. “Mmm-wwa! Now let’s get some breakfast into you, we’ll catch up on old times, how’s that sound?”

  “We should probably get my car off the road first. The sooner we get it to the shop, the better.” Referring to Carson’s chop shop, where a surprisingly large percentage of Northern California’s stolen vehicles were either parted out or given new identities.

  Mama Rose licked her forefinger, touched it to an imaginary stove and made a sizzling sound, then raised her eyebrows inquisitively. When Lilith nodded, Mama Rose caught L’il T.’s eye and nodded toward the driveway. He asked Lilith for the keys.

  “They’re in the ignition,” she said, adding hastily: “The thing is, though, I’m not exactly, you know…alone.”

  2

  Why was Lily so angry at him all the time? Lyssy had asked himself repeatedly, during the course of the long drive. Only angry wasn’t exactly the right word—it seemed more like she was disgusted or disappointed with him.

  But if that was the case, why had she suddenly changed her mind and insisted he leave with her? “Are we escaping?” he’d asked her.

  “Well, duh! Unless maybe you’re looking forward to being locked up for the rest of your life.”

  Freedom, Lily: it was everything Lyssy had wished for, stretching out in front of him like the rainbow highway in the bonus round of the “Super Mario Kart” video game. He couldn’t help thinking that deep down, even though he’d never be able to admit it to anybody, Dr. Al would secretly be happy for him.

  So Lyssy had done as he was told (not exactly a novel experience for someone who’d been virtually raised in an institution): changed into the clothes Lily had found for him—baggy white T-shirt and button-fly Levi’s with the cuffs turned up—then made himself small on the floor in the back of the big black Land Rover in the Corders’s garage, covered himself with a scratchy, olive-green blanket, and kept his
mouth shut unless he was spoken to.

  Which hadn’t been often. Around midnight Lily had asked him if he knew how to drive. He said he didn’t think so; she said she hadn’t thought so, either. And a few hours later she told him to stay out of sight and keep perfectly still under the blanket—they were stopping for gas. When he told her he had to pee she told him to hold it—it was another agonizing hour or so before she pulled over to the side of a deserted stretch of road so he could relieve himself.

  But never mind, Lyssy had promised himself—sooner or later he’d win her over, just like he’d won over all the nurses and psych techs at the Institute. And who knows, maybe there’d even be a fire or a flood or a rabid dog he could save her from.

  Eventually, despite the jouncing he was taking, Lyssy had fallen asleep. When he awoke again the Rover had stopped—which was probably what had awakened him—and for once Lily hadn’t barked at him to stay down. Instead she ordered him to wait for her in the car. “They don’t take real well to strangers showing up uninvited,” she’d told him. “Lemme just give ’em a little advance notice—and Lyssy?”

  “Yes?”

  “When you do meet them, don’t say anything stupid.”

  When Lyssy said that wasn’t very likely because, as Dr. Al had once told him, his IQ was so high it was practically off the charts, Lily rolled her eyes. “On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  “Very funny,” he called after her—it had taken a few seconds to think up the retort. The sky was beginning to lighten; he could hear the birds starting to whistle and chirp, just like they did in the arboretum at dawn. Only this wasn’t the arboretum, Lyssy reminded himself, closing his eyes to hear them better—it was the real thing. Awesome! as the ODDs and CODs used to say back on 2-East. Su-weeeeeet!