When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

  He patted through his pockets, took out his cell phone, realized he’d left it with the ringtone on. Another worse-than-rookie mistake: you’re sneaking around looking for a perp who’s sneaking around looking for you, somebody gives you a friendly ring-a-ding-ding on the old cell, next thing you know you’re so full of holes they could read a newspaper through you.

  He pulled the cell phone’s antenna out as far as it would go, then pressed the green Call button. But as he raised the phone to his ear to make sure he had a dial tone, he became aware of another sound, faint, sputtery, and intermittent, that he must have been picking up on subconsciously for at least a few seconds.

  It was the sound of somebody snoring, and it seemed to be coming from Irene’s office—the only room he hadn’t searched, Pender reminded himself. Swapping the phone for the Colt, and borrowing a clean drinking glass from the cabinet, he hustled out of the kitchen and down the hallway, and pressed the rim of the glass to the office door, listening between snores until he was reasonably sure there was nobody in there but the snorer.

  Pender set the glass down carefully on the hallway carpet, then turned the doorknob slowly with his left hand, while holding the unfamiliar Colt in his right with the safety off and a round up the spout. Probably should have dry-fired the thing earlier to accustom himself to the pull, thought Pender—but it was too late now. Just one more fuckup to add to the list, he told himself as he inched the door open.

  4

  The sated lovers lay entwined atop a patchwork quilt worn silky with age, their naked bodies rosy in the soft glow of twilight. Everything in the one-room cabin was invested with a reddish glow from the setting sun; even Lily’s dark, shoulder-length hair reflected auburn highlights.

  “The first thing I remember noticing about you was your hair,” Lyssy murmured sleepily, burying his face against her neck—he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Tuesday. “Like moonlight on a midnight lake, I told myself—I don’t know whether that’s from a poem or a song, or if I just made it up, but that is what I was thinking.”

  The gentle, insistent pressure and the ticklish warmth of his breath reminded Lily of the way her pony used to nuzzle her with its velvety soft nose, searching for treats she’d hidden on her person. “I always hated it,” she said. “I wanted to be blond, like Sunny Lemontina.”

  The name sounded familiar, but Lyssy couldn’t quite place it. “Who’s that?”

  Lily rolled onto her side, facing him, and sang “Frere Jacques.” When she got to sonnez les matines he grinned sleepily. “Right, right.”

  “She was my imaginary playmate,” she told him. “In the beginning, anyway.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It was a week or two after I moved in with my grandparents.” Lily rolled over onto her other side and snuggled backward against Lyssy. “At first she was like this imaginary friend—only I don’t know if other kids actually see their imaginary friends. I could, though—I can see her to this day. Physically, she was almost the opposite of me. Short blond hair instead of long dark hair, blue eyes instead of brown, and instead of my sort of round face, a sharp witchy one with a pointy little chin.

  “So this one morning we’re sitting next to each other on the parquet floor of my grandparents’ parlor, playing with my new Barbie my grandma gave me. The sunlight’s pouring in like melted butter, making a warm yellow spotlight on the shiny-waxed floorboards, only it keeps moving, shrinking and moving, so every few minutes we have to slide over a few inches, me and Sunny Lemontina, to keep both of us in that warm puddle of sunshine. And the more it shrinks, the closer we get to each other, until pretty soon there’s only gonna be room for one of us.

  “Then Sunny Lemontina looks at me with those blue, blue eyes, and she laughs this evil laugh and says, ‘I know your secret.’

  “I don’t even have to ask which secret, because at this point in my life there’s only one, and it’s so big and so dark that I know if anybody ever finds out about it, I’ll be the one who gets taken away and locked up forever and ever instead of my mommy and daddy.

  “The next thing I know, I’m sort of floating outside my body, looking down at the little blond girl sitting alone in the puddle of sunshine, playing with my new Barbie.

  “And the next next thing I know, I wake up in bed, it’s night time, I can’t remember anything that’s happened since that morning in the parlor, and when I try to open the bedroom door, it’s locked. I freak out, pounding on the door and screaming. Then the door opens, my grandmother’s standing there looking down at me with this weird expression on her face, almost like she’s afraid of me. She asks me if I’m ready to come out of my room yet.

  “I say, ‘Boy, am I!’ Only now my grandfather’s standing in the doorway behind her, he’s like, ‘I’ve already told you more times than I care to count: if you want to come out of your room, all you have to do is promise to stop the nonsense.’

  “Now I have no idea what he’s talking about, but by this point I’ll promise anything. ‘No more nonsense, cross my heart an’ hope to die.’

  “Grandma looks relieved, but Grandpa doesn’t budge. ‘What’s your name? I want to hear you say it.’

  “I’m still clueless—and getting scareder by the second. Doesn’t he know? I’m thinking. ‘Lily,’ I say. ‘It’s Lily, Grandpa.’ Then it’s group hug time. Grandma’s crying with relief and Grandpa’s reaching around her patting my shoulder.

  “All of a sudden I notice my head feels kind of strange—on the outside, I mean. Because it turns out I had spent the day chopping off most of my hair with the pinking shears, and Barbie’s hair too, and trimming the fringes off all the furniture in the house that had fringes, and when the maid caught me, I told her my name wasn’t Lily, it was Sunny Lemontina, and when she went to fetch my grandmother, I told her, ‘You’re not my grandma, you can’t tell me what to do.’

  “Oh, and the cat wouldn’t come near me for a month,” she added. “I never did find out what that was all about.”

  Lyssy turned over onto his stomach, his chin resting on the windowsill just above mattress level. The window, like the other windows in the cabin, was unglazed, with the wooden shutters opening outward; the redwood walls were unadorned save for an enormous USGS topographical map mounted next to the fieldstone chimney. “One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought everybody already knew about the abuse by then—wasn’t that why they moved you in with your grandparents in the first place?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” A tight-lipped affirmative.

  “Then what was the big dark secret nobody was supposed to know?”

  Lily stretched out next to him; together they watched the tumbling, quicksilver water of the creek turning coppery in the failing light. “That it was all my fault that my parents were taken away. That I was a dirty, wicked, ungrateful little snitch who deserved everything bad that happened to her.”

  Lyssy felt his heart breaking for her—for both of them, really. “Oh, jeez,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that all abused kids feel that way sometimes?” He rolled over onto his back and shifted into his Dr. Al imitation: “Let me, ah, tell you something you may find difficult to believe, my young friend. Of all the cruel things your parents did to you, the, ah, cruelest of all was making you feel you deserved it.”

  “Of course I know that now, silly. Dr. Irene said it was because we couldn’t blame our parents—that would have meant they never loved us, and to a kid, that’s even worse than…you know.”

  “I surely do.” A humongous yawn took Lyssy by surprise; he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to stay awake. “But you and me, we don’t have to worry about that now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we have each other,” he murmured sleepily. “To love each other, I mean—we don’ need no steenkin’ parents.” His head lolled to the side and he was out, snoring lightly, a drop of clear saliva trickling down the corner of his mouth.

  Lily, who’d never seen Tr
easure of the Sierra Madre, had no idea why he’d switched over to an exaggerated Mexican accent. Maybe he was embarrassed about having used the L-word, however indirectly. And maybe he was just pretending to have fallen asleep so suddenly—but she didn’t think so. Somebody might fake snoring, nobody’d fake drooling.

  “Okay, well, I love you, too,” she whispered experimentally; she’d never said it to a man before, not counting her grandfather. It felt a little funny—but good. As she smiled down at him, noticing how much younger he looked when he was sleeping, she gradually became aware of a distant noise, a popping, Little Engine That Could pocketapocketapocketa, slowly rising in volume over the human-sounding babble of the creek.

  Fano’s mule, she thought—crap oh crap oh crap, how could I possibly have forgotten!

  5

  Irene swam upward from a deep dreamless sleep, saw Pender’s face floating above her like one of those giant balloons in the Thanksgiving Day parade. It took her eyes forever to bring him into focus. He looked so concerned, hovering there. “S’matter, Pen?” she mumbled.

  “Are you all right? Where are they? Did they hurt you? Do they have your car?”

  “Too many questions. Just lemme…a couple more minutes, lemme sleep a couple more minutes.” She rolled over onto her side, facing the back of the couch, and drew her legs up.

  “Irene! Wake up, Irene, I need you to wake up now.”

  His hand was on her shoulder, shaking her. How rude, she thought, covering her ears with her palms and resuming the fetal position. But it was no use—her head was starting to throb, her back and knees ached, and her neck felt like she’d spent twenty minutes in the ring with Hulk Hogan.

  “Did they drug you?” Pender was saying. “Slip you a mickey, something like that? Should I call an ambulance?”

  “No!” For some reason, the suggestion alarmed her. “No ambulance.” She rolled over onto her back, swung her legs off the couch, and tried to sit up. The blood rushed from her head; the room swam.

  “Take it easy, I’ve got you.” Pender helped her lie back down, positioned a throw pillow under her head. “How about a doctor—is there a doctor I can call?”

  “I am a doctor,” said Irene, almost pouting.

  “Okay, doctor.” Pender pulled the side chair over to the couch to sit on. “Would you please tell me what the hell happened here?”

  Irene sat up again—slowly, this time—and was surprised to find she was still wearing Frank’s pajamas. “They must have slipped something into my orange juice,” she told Pender. Nor would finding that something have been very difficult. They’d only have had to go as far as the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom—in the last six years, Irene had self-prescribed, with varying degrees of success, every sleeping medication known to God, man, and GlaxoSmithKline. “I thought it tasted kind of bitter.”

  “When was that? Do you know when they left here?”

  “One quesh’n at a time,” said Irene, slurring like a ham actor playing a drunk.

  “Sorry. How long ago did they leave?”

  “What time is it now?”

  “A little after eight.”

  Leaning forward, massaging her pounding temples with her fingertips: “A.M. or P.M.?”

  “P.M.”

  Come back to me, little brain, thought Irene, working at the math. “Eight, ten hours?”

  “In your car?”

  “If it’s gone.”

  “Do you know your license plate number?” asked Pender, taking his cell phone out of his pocket.

  “I think so. Who are you calling?”

  “The police,” Pender explained gently. “So they can update the BOLO.”

  “That won’t be…necessary.” Irene was proud of having come up with the word—for a few seconds there it had been touch and go.

  “Why not?”

  “Because…” Blank. Blank mind. Because what? What was the question? Oh, right. Yes, of course: “Because there’s only one place they could have gone.”

  “Where’s that?” asked Pender—but Irene appeared to have nodded off again. “I’d better go make you some coffee,” he said.

  “Good idea,” Irene mumbled. “Make some for me, too.”

  6

  Lily dressed hurriedly. On her way out of the cabin she saw Lyssy’s snubnosed revolver lying atop his 501s, at the foot of the bed. She snatched it up almost as an afterthought and stuffed it into the waistband of her Guess?’s, then tiptoed barefoot across the clean-swept boards, opened the door, and closed it ever so quietly behind her.

  The pocketapocketapocketa grew louder; Lily waved from the covered porch as the open-sided, open-roofed contraption her grandfather had always referred to as the mule came chugging up the dirt road leading in from the highway. A skeletal vehicle with small rubber tires lined up four on each side, a frame of welded pipes supporting a bench seat up front and a railed wooden flatbed mounted over a noisy, sputtering gasoline engine in back, the mule was one of the few motorized vehicles capable of traversing the steep-sided canyons and narrow, deeply rutted trails of La Guarida.

  “Hola, Tío Fano!”

  “Mija!” The driver, a small brown man with a bowl haircut, parked the mule a few yards in from the edge of the fan-shaped clearing, next to the beige Infiniti. Wearing a denim shirt, once-white trousers, and open-toed sandals, he hopped down from the cab and approached Lily with both arms outstretched and his leathery features contorted into a mask of tragedy.

  She hurried down the steps and across the clearing. The ground was bare save for a sparse, limp growth of thin-bladed grass. She held out her hand; he took it in his weathered, work-callused hands and squeezed gently, as if he were giving her a blessing. “Pobrecita. I’m so sorry—my heart is…” His vocabulary failed him (Spanish was his second language, English his third); he let go her hand and pressed his fist against his sternum.

  “Mine, too,” said Lily, her mind racing. Fano, an ageless, undocumented Guatamalan Indian who lived in a shack on the far side of the northern rim of the canyon, had been the caretaker here for as long as Lily could remember. Somehow she had forgotten all about him when she suggested using La Guarida as a temporary refuge.

  And now he held her and Lyssy’s future in his hand. Although there was nothing in Fano’s greeting or demeanor to indicate that he knew she was a fugitive, Lily couldn’t discount the possibility entirely. But if he did know, would she have the courage, the wherewithal, to do what Lilith had once done? Could she kill someone in cold blood? Someone who’d never done her a lick of harm—someone she liked?

  The answer was no, of course not. But the fact that she was even able to consider the possibility told Lily how much she had changed since this morning. It wasn’t just that she’d finally made love—no one knew better than Lily DeVries that there was nothing illuminative or magically transformative about the sex act in and of itself; if there had been, she’d have been enlightened by the age of four.

  But overcoming such a monumental blockage after a lifetime of suffering flashbacks, panic attacks, and alter switches at the mere thought of sex—now that was empowering, as Dr. Irene might have said. And never mind that she’d only been able to accomplish it by pretending to be Lilith—after all she’d been through, Lily was finally beginning, if not to accept completely, then at least to consider, what Dr. Irene had been telling her for years, and had reiterated only that morning: that the alters were not others. That Sunny Lemontina’s anger was her anger, the unnamed little girl’s flight into autism was her flight, Lilah’s sexual desires were her desires, and most important, that Lilith’s capabilities were her capabilities as well.

  “The place is looking pretty good,” she heard herself saying—one of her grandfather’s stock greetings for Fano.

  “Gracias. Señor Rollie came down last week, he told me whatever…how you say, acuerdo?”

  “Agreement, arrangement.”

  “Sí, agrangement—whatever agrangement I have with your abuelo, now I got with him.
” He started to tell her something else, then caught himself.

  Lily thought she had a reasonably good idea what it was. “Did—did my uncle happen to mention anything about me?”

  “About you?”

  Lily couldn’t remember ever having felt so present as she did at the moment. She was intently aware of her surroundings: the sunset stillness in the clearing; the pale green, failing light through the towering redwoods, their feathery tops disappearing into the gloaming like so many Jack’s beanstalks; the feel of the dirt beneath her bare feet and the cold metal of the revolver pressing against her bare belly; the sound of the creek off to her right; and the sweet, loamy smell of the surrounding forest.

  But even with her senses fully engaged, Lily’s mind was running as clear and cold as the creek, focused in laser sharp on Fano, noting the sideways shift of his eyes, the uneasy shuffle of sandals in the dirt. “Please, Fano, what did he tell you?”

  “Just you ran away from home, and if you show up down here, I suppose to call him.”

  Okay, could have been worse, thought Lily. “Is that really all he said, Fano? He didn’t mention I’d had a nervous breakdown or anything?”

  “Que?”

  “Loco—that I was loco en la cabeza?” She twirled a forefinger at her temple.

  Fano was shuffling his sandals again, looking like the man in the TV commercial whose wife had just asked him, Does this make me look fat? “He just say you very…disturb?…about what happen, and everybody very worry about you.”

  “What if I asked you not to tell him I was down here?”