Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Flopping onto the bed next to her husband, Anne slipped her arms around him, gave him a kiss, then lay her head on his chest.

  “You’ll never guess who called me at the office today,” she said, suddenly certain that Joyce’s crazy tale could only have been a figment of the woman’s imagination. “Joyce Cottrell.”

  “Joyce?” Glen echoed. “You’re kidding. What did she want?”

  As Anne began relating the conversation she’d had with their next-door neighbor, she felt Glen’s body stiffen. All the fears that had been allayed by his smile only a few moments earlier came flooding back to her. Still, she tried not to let her voice or her body betray the questions that were ricocheting in her brain. “Crazy, huh?” she asked as she finished.

  “Maybe we’ve been right all along,” Glen suggested, but his bantering tone didn’t quite cover the instant’s hesitation before he answered. “Maybe she really has been drinking over there all these years.”

  Anne sat up and looked into Glen’s eyes, now openly searching for that look she’d barely glimpsed a few minutes earlier. “Then it didn’t happen?” she asked.

  “How could it have?” Glen countered. With a quick hug that Anne read as an evasion, he stood and crossed to the bathroom.

  Glen’s mind raced as he tried to figure out how to answer Anne’s question. He didn’t want to lie to her, but he didn’t want to worry her, either. Surely, if he’d been wandering around the backyard stark naked, he’d remember it, wouldn’t he?

  But the last thing he remembered of the morning was being in the bathroom, naked. He’d showered, and was about to shave, and then—

  The black hole in the day, as if lightning had come out of nowhere and struck him unconscious.

  Glen’s mind was churning. Why was he even thinking of lying to Anne? Why not just tell her he was missing part of the day?

  The answer came to him as quickly as the question: because she would insist he go right back to the hospital, despite what Gordy Farber had told him this afternoon. Besides, nothing had happened anyway.

  Or had it? What if he really had gone outside, and Joyce Cottrell had seen him? Why on earth would he have done something like that? He’d been asleep on the bathroom floor.

  Then he spotted his razor, still lying in the sink, exactly where he’d left it this morning. Except now he could see that it wasn’t his razor at all; his had been five years old, its plastic case scratched and stained.

  The Norelco he was staring at now was brand-new.

  Where could it have come from?

  Could he have been sleepwalking? Could he have actually gone out and bought a new one? But surely he couldn’t have done that naked, could he? He would have wound up in jail! So he must have gotten dressed, gone out, and bought a new razor. But that was nuts, too! He’d been naked when he woke up!

  A sharp terror closed in on him. He was losing his mind! Maybe he should call Gordy Farber again. But there wasn’t anything wrong with him—the doctor had already told him so!

  “Glen?”

  Anne was at the door now; he could feel her watching him, and when he glanced into the mirror, he could see the worry in her eyes. Making up his mind, he picked up the gleaming new shaver and turned around.

  “I’ll bet Joyce has been fantasizing about me for years,” he began, improvising a story even as he spoke. “I suspect she saw me out there chucking my razor, poured herself another gin, and mentally stripped me naked. The wish is often father to the thought, isn’t it?”

  “Your razor?” Anne asked, confused. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Now the words came more quickly. “I dropped mine. So I took it out and threw it in the garbage.” He held up the new shaver. “And I went out and bought myself a new one.”

  “Stark naked?” Anne demanded. “You took it out stark naked and threw it in the trash? Then what did you do, head out shopping with no clothes on?”

  “I was wearing a bathrobe,” Glen insisted. What the hell was happening? How had he gotten himself into this? And what if she went out and looked in the trash barrel? “I mean, I was wearing a bathrobe out in the yard. I was dressed when I went down to Freddy Meyer’s.” At least that part wasn’t made up! He had been dressed when he’d gone to the Broadway Market that afternoon. As Anne continued to stare at him as if he were speaking in some strange, incomprehensible tongue, he offered her the shaver. “See? New shaver.”

  Anne felt totally disoriented. When she’d first told him about Joyce’s call, she knew something was wrong, and the story he’d just told sounded totally far-fetched! In the years she and Glen had been married, plenty of electric shavers had given out on Glen. And she knew what Glen did with them.

  He dropped them in the wastebasket. He did not take them out to the backyard and throw them directly into one of the garbage barrels!

  Saying nothing, Anne went down the back stairs of the house, out the back door, and across the yard to the trash containers. Lifting the lid of the first one, she peered down into the depths of the barrel. And there it was.

  Shattered—broken into a dozen pieces—but unmistakably the remains of a ruined electric shaver. A shaver that could not possibly have been that badly broken simply from having been dropped into a sink. What was going on?

  She headed back to the house, entering the kitchen just in time to hear her son’s excited voice.

  “Hey, Dad,” Kevin was shouting up the front stairs. “Where’d this come from? Is it for me?”

  Moving quickly through the kitchen and dining room, she found Kevin standing in the foyer, holding a fishing pole in his hand.

  “Where did that come from?” she asked.

  Kevin grinned mischievously. “Down in the basement,” he said. “I was stickin’ my gym clothes in the wash and I found it. Where’d it come from?”

  Anne was still gazing at the fishing pole when she heard Glen speak from the head of the stairs.

  “I bought it,” he said.

  Anne turned to stare up at him. There was something strange in his voice, just as there had been when he told her about the razor. “You bought a fishing rod? But you—”

  Glen started down the stairs, determined not to let Anne see his confusion, the panic that was creeping up on him as he searched his memory for some clue as to where the fishing rod might have come from. But there was nothing—no more memory of the new fishing rod than of the new shaver. It will come back to me, he told himself. Sooner or later, it will come back to me. Forcing a grin as he came to the bottom of the stairs, he slipped an arm around his wife and held her close. “Don’t you remember?” he asked. “Gordy Farber said I have to get a hobby. So I chose one today. I’m going to go fishing.”

  Fishing. The word echoed eerily in Anne’s mind. Only a few hours ago Sheila Harrar had been telling her how her son had disappeared after setting out to go fishing.

  Fishing with Richard Kraven.

  And now here was Glen, saying he was taking it up as a hobby. Of course, it was nothing more than a coincidence, but even so, the thought made her shudder. It would probably be only a passing fancy, something Glen would lose interest in within a week or so. And if he didn’t, so what? Despite her perfectly rational arguments, she knew that her first instinct when she came into the house a few minutes ago had been right.

  Something in this house was different.

  Her husband was different.

  CHAPTER 30

  Joyce Cottrell’s life had not gone exactly as she planned it. By the time she was looking at her fiftieth birthday from the wrong direction, she had given up all hope of a lasting marriage and a family of her own. Her few relatives were all gone. Her phone almost never rang, and she rarely spoke to anyone save the people she worked with at Group Health on Capitol Hill. Her parents had left her the house she’d grown up in, but not quite enough money to get by on, and a career beyond making a home for the husband and children she’d expected to have had never been among the few plans she’d laid out for he
rself. She’d been married briefly but when she’d come home to her parents after Jim Cottrell left her six months after the wedding, a job hadn’t been high on Joyce’s priority list.

  She had returned home to lick her wounds and pick up the broken pieces of her emotional life.

  Now, almost thirty years later, she was still at it. Her parents, who had provided refuge during the long months when she was too ashamed of her failure even to leave the house, had finally died. Joyce’s few friends had long ago tired of her woeful tale of betrayal, and stopped calling her.

  The years had stretched into decades, and though she eventually secured a job as a receptionist on the swing shift at Group Health, she had also turned slowly into a strange kind of recluse. While she rarely left her house except to go to work, trash did not build up in Joyce Cottrell’s house as it did in those of older recluses, nor did paint begin to peel, or furniture grow stained and threadbare. Joyce Cottrell kept her house meticulously clean, immediately redecorating any room in which paint began to fade, choosing colors and fabrics from catalogs, finally venturing forth to make her purchases only when the newly redecorated room was complete in her mind down to the last detail.

  Over the years, she had become expert in stripping paint from old wood, paper from old plaster, and worn fabric from the excellent frames with which her parents had furnished the house. She had become even more expert in applying the new materials she bought on her rare shopping expeditions, and in time the house had evolved into an eclectic assortment of rooms, each of them reflecting whatever fashion had been in vogue at the precise moment Joyce had most recently decided to redo it.

  No one, though, had seen the interior of the house in years, for whenever one of her neighbors—the only people who saw her with any regularity at all—asked if they might see what she was doing, Joyce would always protest that the house wasn’t done yet. Nor was it a lie: one or more of the house’s ten rooms was always in some stage of redecoration.

  Joyce herself was in a steady state of redecoration, too, as she dreamed and planned for the glittering party she would throw when the house was finally ready, a Martha Stewart-perfect party to celebrate the completion of the redecorating and mark her reemergence into the social world. She spent hours and days imagining herself as the beautiful, charming hostess, throwing open the doors to her elegant home to hordes of admiring friends.

  Unfortunately, Joyce had not developed the same knack with herself that she had with the house. Her figure could best be described as “full,” a circumstance that Joyce concealed as well as she could by wearing loose-fitting clothing in bright colors, and her hair was, at age fifty-three, even blonder than it had been half a century earlier. Joyce’s taste in makeup hadn’t changed since she was a teenager, running to the same bright lipsticks and eye shadows—a riot of reds and oranges, blues and greens—that she loved in both her clothes and her interior decoration.

  People who chose to be charitable might have said Joyce Cottrell looked a little blowzy.

  Those who chose not to be charitable could have said she looked like an over-the-hill hooker.

  It was precisely what attracted the man to her.

  That, and the fact that she lived next door to Anne Jeffers.

  CHAPTER 31

  Sources within the police department will neither confirm nor deny that they are investigating the possibility that Richard Kraven did not act alone, and that his execution may have triggered the beginning of a new wave of murders, with Kraven’s accomplice now acting by himself. The same sources also refused to discuss rumors that in light of Miss Davis’s career as a prostitute, the long-disbanded task force investigating the Green River murders might be reconstituted. Police are, for the moment, treating the Capitol Hill slaying as an isolated event, and are so far refusing to entertain the possibility that it could mark the first incident in a new wave of serial killings. In the meantime …

  The man felt utter rage when he read Anne Jeffers’s article in the paper that morning. For one thing, it had been buried deep in the second section, when it clearly belonged on the front page. After all, it was a murder he had committed, and it had been every bit as gruesome as any that Richard Kraven had ever performed.

  Hadn’t he done it the very same way?

  Hadn’t he cut open the girl’s chest and hacked out her heart and lungs?

  But the other murders made the front page, while his had barely shown up at all.

  And he knew why. It was the reporter, Anne Jeffers. She didn’t think he was important enough. That was why she hadn’t put any of her stories about Shawnelle Davis where they belonged. He’d stewed about it for more than an hour, his anger growing steadily.

  A little before nine the idea had come to him.

  He had to get Anne Jeffers’s full attention.

  And he knew exactly how to get it:

  He would find out where she lived, and the next time he did something, he’d leave her a little souvenir.

  Something on her doorstep …

  Picking up the phone book, he flipped through the pages then ran his finger down a column until he found it. He could barely believe it—the bitch reporter lived right up the street from him!

  Before he even thought about what he might do when he got there, the man set out, quickly walking north. It wasn’t long before he emerged from the district of shabby apartment buildings around Group Health into the slightly less run-down area that bordered the better neighborhood where Anne and Glen Jeffers lived.

  He walked past the Jeffers house on the other side of the street, gazing at it almost surreptitiously. It was large, and stood at the top of a slope, well back from the sidewalk.

  And it had a large porch.

  Large enough so that he could toss something onto it from the curb if he had to. He wouldn’t even have to risk approaching the house, which might leave footprints, or something else that could identify him.

  The man walked up the street another block, circled around a second block, then started back toward home, still on the opposite side of the street from the Jeffers house.

  He was almost abreast of it when someone emerged from the house next door.

  A woman, stepping out onto her front porch to pick up the morning paper.

  The man stared at her high-piled blond hair, her overbright makeup, and her green and yellow dress.

  Cheap.

  Just like Shawnelle Davis.

  Now a new idea—an even better idea—was developing in his head.

  When the woman disappeared back into her house a moment later, the man remained, rooted to the spot, studying the house, then moved around to view the structure from the alley behind.

  Several times the man left the area. But drawn to the house next to Anne Jeffers’s like a moth to a flame, he kept coming back.

  Finally, in midafternoon, the woman came out again.

  She started down the sidewalk, and the man followed her.

  He followed her all the way to the Group Health complex and into the emergency room on Thomas Street.

  He pushed through the main doors after her, pausing in the foyer just long enough to see her take her place at the reception desk and slip her nameplate into a holder: JOYCE COTTRELL.

  The name fixed in his memory, the man pushed deeper into the hospital, moving through the corridors until he came to the main entrance in the new wing facing Sixteenth. Leaving the building, he crossed Sixteenth and was soon back home. He picked up the telephone book again.

  There she was, Joyce Cottrell, listed with an address on Sixteenth Avenue North. Right next door to the Jefferses.

  The man dialed the number, let it ring twenty times, and hung up.

  For the rest of the afternoon and through the evening the man kept calling the number, never getting an answer. Each time he dialed, his confidence grew. By nine-thirty, when he left his apartment to walk the few blocks north for the second time that day, he knew what he would find.

  A dark house, totally empty.r />
  But when he got there, the house was not dark at all. Lights glowed in two of the downstairs rooms and one of the upstairs ones.

  The man lingered on the sidewalk across the street, watching. And then, at exactly ten, one of the downstairs lights went off, as did the upstairs one, and another light upstairs came on. All at the same instant.

  The man smiled. Either three people inside all had thrown light switches at exactly the same moment, or the lights were on a timer.

  Walking quickly over to Volunteer Park, the man found a pay phone by the conservatory. He dialed Joyce Cottrell’s phone number one final time.

  As before, the phone rang on and on but no one picked it up.

  Joyce Cottrell lived alone.

  Returning to the empty house, he began looking for a way to get inside.

  Within less than a minute he’d found it.

  Joyce Cottrell had never moved the extra key from the hiding place where her mother had always left it, under the mat on the back porch. Just like his own mother and hundreds of thousands of others.

  The man liked Joyce Cottrell’s house. It was much bigger than any house he’d ever been in before—big enough that his entire apartment could have been put into just its living room—though it wasn’t at all what he’d expected it to be. Shawnelle Davis’s apartment had looked just as he would have imagined a whore’s place to look—the furniture had been as cheap-looking as Shawnelle herself. But Joyce Cottrell had nice furniture, and everything looked clean and fresh, like it was brand-new.

  The man prowled slowly through the house, looking at everything, touching only one thing. Then, as it grew close to the time when Joyce Cottrell would come home from work, he slipped into the master bedroom.

  As he waited in her closet for Joyce to come up to her room, his nose was filled with the scent of sachet. The lavender sweetness instantly triggered a memory from when he was a little boy.

  His mother’s closet had smelled like this.

  He inhaled deeply, immediately transported back to a day long ago when he had gone into his mother’s closet to play dress-up in her shoes, doing his best to balance on her high heels.