“You might not want to be so loud,” came Siobhan’s voice from behind him. “Eddie will hear you, and I don’t think he wants to be your best friend.”
Nash froze. He looked around. He was standing in the middle of a hallway. On his left, there was a railing that looked down onto the lower level of the house. On his right was the wall, three closed doors to three different bedrooms. Ahead of him, a large stained glass picture window depicting the sunset. The stairs were next to the window, descending down to the first floor of the house. Nash could smell the remnants of the dinner Siobhan and Carston had eaten, wafting up from the lower level.
Siobhan moved past him, lithe like a dancer. “I’ll check downstairs,” she said softly. “I’m sure that’s where he went, anyway. You look up here.” She went down the steps quietly.
Nash watched her, confused. How had he gotten roped into looking for Carston? He wasn’t going to do it, anyway. He was going down the steps, and then he was—
How was he going to get out of here? Siobhan had specifically picked the place because it was remote.
Of course, presumably, there was a car here. She had to have gotten him here, after all.
But he didn’t have keys to the car.
The floor creaked.
He jumped, whirling, expecting to see Carston behind him.
But there was nothing there, just the open door to the bedroom he’d come out of, and a picture on the wall of a landscape in autumn.
This was stupid. Nash took a step forward, heading for the steps.
He eyed the door to his right. It was closed. Would it hurt to open it? Just to reassure himself?
He seized the doorknob and flung it open. Another bedroom inside, with another floral bedspread. A rectangular rug on the floor. A rocking chair in the corner.
Nash kept going.
There was another closed door. He yanked that one open as well. A third bedroom, decorated much like the other two. This one was smaller, and it was darker. It only had one window.
Nothing here either.
Nash hurried down the rest of the hallway and started down the steps.
But he was only one step down when Carston appeared at the bottom. The bigger man was seething, looking down at his feet. He didn’t see Nash. He barreled up the steps, muttering, “Keys, keys, where did the bitch leave the keys?”
Nash backed away. Was Carston saying that the keys to the car were upstairs in the bedroom, perhaps amongst Siobhan’s things? Well, hell, Nash was going to find them first.
He rushed into the bedroom and looked around.
There.
Siobhan’s suitcase.
He skidded across the floor, began rummaging through it.
Carston appeared in the doorway. “You. Who the fuck are you?”
“Look, we’re the same, you and me,” said Nash. “She’s screwing with both of us. I’m just trying to get away.” Then he spied the keys. They were sitting on the dresser, across the room, glittering and metal and inviting. Nash tried not to let on that he’d seen them. He held up both hands in surrender. “We work together, all right? If it’s both of us against her, we can get away.”
“What do I need you for?” said Carston. “She’s a buck twenty soaking wet. I think I can handle her.” He raised one hand, and now Nash saw that Carston was armed with a carving knife from the kitchen.
“You don’t know what she is,” said Nash.
“She’s a bitch, that’s what,” said Carston.
Nash made a break for the keys.
Carston saw what he was going for.
Nash reached the dresser and closed his hands around the keys. He whirled.
Carston was there. He snatched for the keys.
Nash feinted.
Carston grabbed Nash’s wrist and squeezed.
Pain! Nash gritted his teeth. His foot shot out. He kicked Carston in the groin.
Carston doubled over, grunting.
Nash ran. He left the bedroom. He emerged into the hallway.
Carston was behind him. Nash could hear him scrabbling, swearing.
Nash kept going.
And then Carston was behind him, grabbing his arm, pulling him down.
Nash kicked at the man, but nothing connected.
And then—
A hot, bright feeling. In his stomach.
Nash gurgled.
He looked down.
The hilt of the carving knife was sticking out of his body.
“Keys,” said Carston.
Nash dropped them. He touched the blade of the knife. It was buried in him.
Carston pulled the knife out.
Then the pain hit—excruciating, blinding. Nash screamed.
Carston knelt down and scooped up the keys. He straightened and started to walk down the hall.
What the fuck was happening? Nash gaped at the blood that was spilling out of his body. He’d been stabbed? He was bleeding? And Carston—the fucking pedophile rapist—was just walking away.
Oh, Nash did not think so.
He turned and staggered after Carston.
Carston looked over his shoulder. “Aren’t you dead?”
Nash gathered up his strength. He clenched his hands into fists, clenched his teeth. And then he ran for Carston. He collided with the other man’s body with all the force he could muster.
When Nash hit Carston, Nash stopped moving.
But Carston sailed forward, like a ball hit by the cue ball on a pool table. He hurled through the air and into the stained glass window. The window shattered, an ecstasy of glass pieces. And Carston kept going, out the window, head first.
Nash stumbled forward. His feet crunched on the glass. He peered down out the hole that had been the stained glass window.
Carston was lying on the ground. He wasn’t moving.
“Well,” said Siobhan’s voice.
Nash looked to see her standing on the stairs, halfway up.
“There goes the security deposit.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Carston wasn’t dead. Nash could see that he was moving down there, trying to get up. He leaned forward to get a better look, and he nearly pitched out the window.
“Nash!” screamed Siobhan, scrambling up the steps. She grasped him, pulled him back, set him down on the floor. She looked down at his stomach, her eyes wide. “You’re bleeding.”
Nash gestured at the window. “Carston. He’s not dead.”
“Don’t worry about that for right now.” She put her hands on his stomach. Blood was seeping out onto his shirt. It turned her fingers red. “Nash, what am I going to do about this? This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Nash felt lightheaded and a little sleepy. It was pleasant. He leaned his head back against the wall.
Siobhan held one hand up in front of her face, rubbing her thumb against her forefinger, moving his blood around against her skin. She was fascinated.
Nash knew he should be disgusted by that, by her, but he wasn’t. He was just glad they were close. He looked out the shattered window again.
Carston had rolled over onto his stomach. He was starting to crawl away, dragging one of his legs behind him. It was bent in an unnatural way.
“I didn’t push him out the window just for him to get away,” Nash muttered.
Siobhan turned her head and peered down on Carston. “Oh, dear.” She leaned in and kissed Nash on the forehead. “I’ll be back. Hold on.”
And then she was gone.
Nash wanted to reach out for her, tell her to come back, but that was a lot of effort, and he felt tired, so he didn’t move. He just watched Carston, making his slow crawl. It looked as though he was heading for the car, which was parked maybe twenty feet away.
Carston didn’t get far at all.
Siobhan intercepted him. She kicked him in the face.
He grunted, absorbing the impact, and cowering, curling away from her.
Siobhan kicked him again.
He curled up in a ball, h
ands over his head.
Siobhan spied the knife that Carston’d had. It had fallen out the window with him and landed several feet away, the blade buried in the grass. Siobhan headed over, plucked the knife out of the ground, and turned back to Carston.
He was trying to get up on his feet, but his hurt leg couldn’t hold his weight. He crumpled to the ground, shrieking in pain.
Siobhan advanced on him. She held the knife with two hands, over her head. She brought it down on Carston, stabbing the first thing she came in contact with—his shoulder.
Carston screamed again. He toppled forward, face down against the grass.
Siobhan pulled out the knife. She got down on her knees next to him, and she plunged the blade into him again, into his back.
Another yell from Carston.
Siobhan tugged out the knife and stabbed him again. She did this over and over again, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing.
And Carston kept screaming. He still wasn’t dead.
Siobhan kept going.
Nash wanted to look away, but it was horrifyingly fascinating to watch it. He couldn’t stop staring. And he felt… loose and warm and strange. His stab wound hardly hurt anymore. He thought idly about how the body released endorphins to combat pain—or was that adrenaline? He couldn’t remember. And he definitely didn’t have adrenaline kicking through him now. No, he was jelly.
Carston was still crying out. He was saying something, maybe words, but Nash couldn’t make it out. It sounded like Carston was sobbing.
Nash wished Siobhan would stop. He didn’t like Carston, but he didn’t like watching this either.
Siobhan just kept stabbing. Carston’s back was a mess of blood now.
God, why wouldn’t he die? How many times had she stabbed him at this point?
And then Siobhan stood up. She used her foot to turn Carston onto his back.
He screamed.
Siobhan seized his hair and applied the knife to his throat. More blood. Gushing like a fountain.
No more noise from Carston, although he was still twitching.
Siobhan stood over the body for a minute, staring down at it. Then she dropped the knife on top of Carston and came back into the house.
Nash watched her ascend the stairs. She was covered in blood. Blood was spattered on her face, soaking her clothes, in her hair. She was out of breath, but somehow, she seemed radiant.
She collapsed next to him and smiled a satisfied smile, as if she’d just come from the best experience of her life.
She gestured around. “Well, this isn’t clean. This is…” She threw back her head and spread out her arms and told the ceiling, “downright messy.” She shivered in delight and looked back at him. “Worth it, though.”
“You’re enjoying yourself.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Taking a life is like… going to the center of the universe and seeing the little pulsing place that holds it all together, and becoming one with the force of creation and destruction. It’s transcendent.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Nash.
She laughed. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. It’s too bad, though, really. The experience is wasted on most murderers. They’re too small-minded to have any idea of their place in the grand scheme of things. They think they are the universe.”
Nash shook his head. “What happened to you? What made you this way?”
She laughed a little. “I did promise to tell you everything if you helped, didn’t I? And pushing him out the window was a good help.”
Nash didn’t respond. He was thinking about closing his eyes.
No, he had. Everything was dark and warm and nice.
“Nash!”
His eyes fluttered open.
She grasped both of his hands. “The first time my father raped me, I was only thirteen years old.”
He grimaced. “What?”
“My father,” she said. “He’s the one who killed Farrah and the others. He’s the first man I killed. Trust me, though, he deserved it.”
THE PAST
Siobhan used to hide in her bedroom when her parents fought. When she was younger, she remembered them as true arguments, because she remembered the shrill way her mother used to yell at her father, telling him that he was behaving like a Neanderthal and threatening to take Siobhan and leave.
But her father beat that out of her mother.
Not when Siobhan was small, though. Then, it was only yelling. He yelled and yelled and yelled. Until, over time, her mother stopped saying much of anything at all. And that’s when he started to use his fists.
Her father wasn’t around much, and that was the only favor that had been done her in her youth. Her father traveled for work all the time. He was often sent away by his company for months at a time. He would go all kinds of exotic places—California, Las Vegas. Siobhan never found herself missing him all that much. When he was home, he made Siobhan’s mother sad, and he ignored Siobhan.
Siobhan’s mother was a librarian. She was an intelligent woman who loved to read and loved to imagine. When Siobhan was a little girl, she and her mother would play games together that would go on for hours. They would pretend their house was a castle, and that they were trapped in the tower, trying to escape from an evil dragon. In the pretend world, they always got free, but in real life, the dragon always came home.
Siobhan never understood why her mother stayed. She didn’t seem to love Siobhan’s father. If anything, she resented him. He was a particular sort of man who wanted things just so. When he was gone, they did as they pleased. Ice cream for dinner? Sure. Leave the toys on the floor overnight to be put away tomorrow? No problem. But when he came back home, everything changed, and they had to do as he said or he was angry.
Eventually, Siobhan grew to hate them both. Her father because of everything about him that was awful, and her mother for never stopping any of it. Especially after the raping started.
Maybe her mother didn’t know.
It wasn’t as if her father made a production of it. He’d wake Siobhan up in the middle of the night and put his hand over her mouth and do it without much fanfare. It hurt, and it made her feel dirty, and she hated it.
But maybe her mother did know. Maybe she was only pretending to be asleep, while Siobhan suffered.
Siobhan wasn’t sure. And it didn’t matter, anyway, because she hated them both.
She had dreams of getting away. She thought that once she could leave home, everything could get better. She spun her dreams to Nash on the bleachers in the gym, but she never talked about her parents and how much she hated them. She only talked about getting out of that town, out of that state, going to some city somewhere where she could reinvent herself and be glamorous.
She used to think that maybe getting away would change everything. She didn’t know what was wrong with her exactly, but she knew that she didn’t quite fit in with other people. It was hard for her to make friends. She sometimes felt as if there was this well of need inside her, a hole that had been gouged in her, and that no matter how nice someone was to her, it was never enough.
After a few times of showing her vulnerability to people, asking them to give her all the love and acceptance that she craved, and having them be frightened of her intensity, she stopped letting anyone in. She shut down, and she didn’t reach out.
And no one reached out for her either.
Well, sometimes boys. Sometimes boys flirted with her.
But she never had any friends that were girls.
The closest one was maybe Farrah, but that had been stolen from her by her father.
She and Farrah had started to hang out after they’d both tried out for the school musical and neither had made the cut. They started to talk after school, and then they started to go to the coffee shop in town after school together. After a while, they began to make plans to stay at each other’s houses. Sometimes Farrah stayed over at Siobhan’s, sometimes the other way around. But the last time that Farrah had stayed ove
r, her father had come home suddenly during dinner. He wasn’t due for days, and Siobhan and her mother had both been stunned and worried. They tried to send Farrah home, but her father acted like a normal human being and said it was fine for Farrah to stay. He watched her, though.
The next weekend, it was the party at Pike’s house. If her father had been out of town, Siobhan would have simply gone and not talked to her mother about it. She didn’t have much respect for the woman at that point, and she mostly did as she pleased. Her mother didn’t have the backbone to stand up to her any more than the woman stood up to Siobhan’s father. But her father was home. So, Siobhan lied and said she was staying over at Farrah’s house.
Her father agreed.
And then Farrah went missing.
He must have followed her to the party. Maybe he’d been planning to punish Siobhan for lying or something. But he’d seen Farrah instead, and that had been a distraction he couldn’t pass up.
Siobhan had introduced Heather to him as well. Heather had come to her house to pick Siobhan up for that second party at Pike’s place. She and Heather had been working on a project together for some class. They’d done a bit of work and then gone to the party.
But then Heather went missing, and Siobhan didn’t have a way home, because Heather had driven her to the party.
She got a ride back from Nash, she remembered. He’d wanted to kiss her in the car before she got out, because they’d been kissing all night, but she’d been afraid that her father would see, and she hadn’t let him.
Her father was weirdly jealous of the idea of her with boys. It was as if her father thought of her as his property or something. He would get angry if he had some inkling that she was doing normal things like dating, and he was bad enough to deal with when he wasn’t angry.
So, she’d just gotten out of the car and waved to Nash, like there was nothing between them.
Once his car had driven off, she noticed that there was a light on in one of the sheds on the edge of their property. They had three or four sheds, and they were her father’s domain, not to be tampered with. But she’d been out there earlier in the day, because her father insisted that she clean up all his tools. He’d left them out and couldn’t be bothered to pick up after himself. She was afraid she hadn’t turned off the switch when she was finished hanging everything up.
The Feminine Touch Page 24
