She rolled onto her knees and stood slowly, her legs unsteady. She made it to the nearest window and leaned out into the morning air. Rae rubbed her hands over her face, trying to shake her torpor. But she felt as if her bones had been filled with some thick, heavy substance that weighted her. She stared down at the lagoon, eight or ten feet below her. A sinkhole, she thought. Unimaginably deep.
A sinkhole? In the Everglades? Another contradiction that she couldn’t explain. It frightened her. She sensed it wasn’t right and yet her memory of the fact was intact. There are sinkholes in the Everglades: she repeated this silently to herself, testing it, and it just didn’t feel right. Why not?
She concentrated on the color of the water, copper, like a rich tea, from the tannic acid. Mangroves shaded the water, except in the middle, where a hole opened to the blue sky. The only way she would get off the chickee was to become a bird and fly through that hole. Or she would have to take a boat. She couldn’t swim to the mangroves. She didn’t know how to swim, water terrified her.
Andy claimed he understood her terror of water, but he really didn’t, not as a shrink, not as a husband, not as one human being to another. Sometimes he rubbed her nose in it by humiliating her in front of their son. Your mom’s afraid of the water, Carl. Or by taunting her. C’mon, Rae, the water’s wonderful. Or by making her feel that her fear was ungrounded. There’s nothing like making love in the water, Rae. Andy had never been particularly supportive.
At the moment, in fact, she wasn’t sure why she had married him. His charm, his brilliant mind, their home: none of it compensated for his frequent absences, his moody silences, his self-absorption. And sex, she thought, hadn’t been very good between them for a long time.
And what’re you thinking now, Andy? Has Hal made a ransom demand?
She had been missing for—what? Two days? Three? Longer? She didn’t know. Her sense of time had vanished. Perhaps Hal hadn’t made any demands yet. If not, then Andy probably thought she’d gone somewhere to mull things over after their argument. She’d done that before, why should he think differently this time? Since he regarded her teaching career as merely her hobby, he wouldn’t remember that she never had split when school was in session.
So if he believed she’d just taken off for a while, then he simply would wait for her to return. Therefore, he wouldn’t notify the police that she was missing. He would tell Mrs. Lee and whoever else asked that Rae had gone to visit friends.
All things considered, she wasn’t in any particular hurry to get home. Although she worried about Carl, it thrilled her that Andy would now live in her shoes for a while. The realities would be forced on him: grocery shopping, cooking, meals, child care, doctor visits, preschool, the lawn man, Mrs. Lee. Let him juggle his personal and professional lives for a while. Let him wake up in a blind white panic at night because he’d neglected to update Carl’s immunization forms for preschool.
Anger, she felt anger most of all. She’d been angry four years out of the ten they had been married. Angry because most of the time her husband acted as though their son’s conception and birth had happened independently of him. Angry because he made her feel like the hired help, the nanny and the cook and the whore, all rolled into one tidy little bundle. And worse, she’d allowed it.
When Carl was diagnosed as a diabetic Rae remembered, Andy had acted as if it were some kind of curse, something they had to hide from their friends, their professional associates. He had never once given Carl a shot of insulin; to do so would be to acknowledge a problem existed. The bottom line, she thought, was that it wouldn’t take much to despise the man she’d married.
Oh God, my baby, where’s my baby now?
She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, stifling a sob.
Stop it.
Rae paused in the doorway and peered out. Hal stood on the left side of the kitchen, where the stove and sink were, his back to her. He hummed softly to himself, tapping his foot in rhythm to some internal tune. The scent of bacon mixed with the odor of coffee.
He wore gym shorts and a tank shirt. No shoes. He looked the way men in campgrounds looked, sated and sappy.
“I’d like to take a shower and put on some clean clothes,” she said.
Hal spun around. She had startled him and realized it pleased her. “I didn’t hear you.” He looked quickly back at the stove and began to lay strips of bacon on a spread of towels on the counter. “You hungry?”
Famished. But she kept her response simple. “Yes. But I’d like to shower and change clothes first.”
He set the spatula down, wiped his hands on a dish towel. “I brought some of your clothes from the house. They’re right here.”
He went over to the cabinet under the sink to retrieve the leather bag Andy had bought her on their honeymoon in Brazil. He carried it over to where she stood, set it at her feet, and stepped back. “There’s no razor. Nothing you can use as a weapon. But otherwise you’ll find everything you need.”
She unzipped the bag. He had packed her things with an obsessive neatness, shorts over here, T-shirts there, panties on top. It nauseated her to think of his hands pawing through her dresser drawers, touching her clothes, folding them. But her disgust didn’t last long; it wouldn’t change a thing.
Rae selected clothes, a towel, picked up the baggie filled with toiletries, and stood. “Would you mind removing the handcuff? It’s scraped my wrist practically raw.”
He thought about it a moment, then reached into a pocket in his shorts and pulled out several keys. As he unlocked the cuffs, his fingertips brushed her skin, a deliberate touch that nearly caused her to wrench her hand away.
“Where’s the shower?” she asked, rubbing her wrist.
“On the open platform.” He pointed at a wooden stall just beyond the edge of the roof. “You have to pump it a couple of times to get the water flowing. It’s clean enough, but I don’t recommend that you drink it. Breakfast should be ready when you finish.”
She nodded and started past him, but he caught her arm. Caught it gently. She looked down at his fingers on her arm, then looked up at him, into the fathomless blue of his eyes.
Something passed between them, a kind of current that connected them at a level too deep for words. She had the distinct impression that he could read her mind, that he had actually wormed inside her skull and looked out through her eyes at himself, at the two of them.
His hand dropped away from her arm. “This was the only way I could think of to get your attention, Rae.”
The remark clearly smacked of psychosis and only fueled her fear of him. She felt her bones and organs compress, felt her skin shrivel, felt herself growing smaller and smaller, as if she were in the process of vanishing altogether. But when she spoke, her voice sounded surprisingly calm.
“It’s a bit drastic.”
“Until the other night, I was just some con who did time in the prison you worked at. There were only sixteen women on the compound in those days. You have no idea how great it was to watch you women come into work every morning, Rae. You all smelled of the free world. You gave us hope.”
Deny a person something, deny it long enough and harshly enough, and pretty soon that something became the individual’s obsession. She understood that, too, because Andy had felt that way about her in the beginning.
“You barely remembered my first name,” he said. “I doubt if you could dredge up my last name. I bet you can’t even remember what I did time for.”
Her only clear recollection of Hal involved a single incident. They’d been sitting in her office on the compound, going over the courses he would take in the college program, when she’d suddenly developed a throbbing migraine. There had been no warning. The pain had swept from her cheekbones, across her forehead to her temples, then over the top of her skull.
This odd detail had lodged in her memory despite the hundreds of inmates who had passed through the education department at Manatee during her four
years there. Then again, when she thought about some of the inmates who had worked for her, men she’d seen five days a week, fifty weeks a year, she often conjured a face to go with a name. Her connection to that Rae back then hung by the most tenuous, illusory threads.
“You’re right. I don’t remember.”
“Fraud.” He said it with a kind of gleeful pride. “But we’ll talk about that later. I just want you to know that it’s never been my intention to hurt you. I kept you drugged for your own safety.”
Sure. Rae walked past him.
The shower smacked of originality, she would give him that much. Three wooden walls shot up around a showerhead that descended from the edge of the roof. It was open on the side that faced the western part of the lagoon, so Hal couldn’t see her. But the walls didn’t reach the floor, so he could see her legs from the knees down, see her clothes as she peeled them off.
That made her distinctly uneasy. If he walked over here, if he tried to … Stop thinking about it.
She put her clothes and the baggie on the high shelf that ran along two walls. A cheap plastic soap dish shaped like a shell was wedged into a wire container that hooked around the showerhead. It held a fresh bar of Dove soap, her favorite soap, the only soap she had used for years. Coincidence? Or had he known that?
Since the stall stood open at the top, she could drop her head back and stare up through the hole to the sky. Fly through it; that’s your only way out of here. Rae peeled off her clothes, worked the pump. The water, plentiful and tepid, came from some sort of pumping system that used water from the lagoon.
When she finished, she wrapped the towel around her body and watched the water roll down through the cracks between the floorboards. Drip drip. Drip drip.
If all water eventually emptied into the ocean, then maybe these drops would someday touch the beach behind her house. Maybe her son would be running along that beach and these drops of water would touch his feet. If the connection between all things ran as deeply and simply as that, then by licking away the drops she would taste Carl’s skin.
A hole opened inside of her then and she began to cry, deep, silent sobs for her son, for herself. Grief, fear, anxiety, all of it mixed up inside of her like some crazy salad. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressed until stars exploded deep in her retinas.
Stop it stop it stop it.
“Asshole,” she whispered. Crying changed nothing.
But it had released the horrible pressure that had been squeezing up against her heart. Clothes, she thought. Clean clothes. That was the secret: put one foot in front of the other.
She gathered up her soiled shirt and leggings and stepped out of the stall. The mangroves loomed around her, a dense green prison pierced by shoots of chalky light. How fitting that an ex-con’s sanctuary would be a prison.
When she entered the kitchen, she saw that Hal had set the table. It was pine, just like the two chairs. Florida pine, homemade furniture. Hal’s handiwork. Hal, she suddenly recalled, had taken woodworking in prison.
An empty plastic bottle that had once contained Evian water now held three long, purple flowers. Fresh flowers. Wildflowers. Never mind that the plates and utensils were plastic, that the tablecloth looked like something you’d see in an Italian restaurant where the food was bad and the service was worse. He’d gone to great lengths to create a certain atmosphere and it deepened her suspicion.
She claimed the chair closest to her, at the north end of the table, and Hal sat directly opposite her. He began passing her the aluminum bowls and plastic platters of food, a virtual feast. Bacon, fish, fresh coffee, scrambled eggs, grits, hash browns, toast smothered in honey. She saw wedges of oranges, halves of pink grapefruit, strawberries so perfectly red they looked fake.
Rae forced herself to eat slowly, allowing her stomach time to get used to the idea of food again. Neither of them said a word. “I’m curious,” she finally said. “How much ransom did you ask?”
He dabbed at his mouth with a paper towel. “None. I told you before, Rae, this isn’t about money.”
Her husband’s net worth totaled about twenty-five million dollars, give or take. “I don’t believe you.”
He started to laugh, a deep, rumbling laugh that puzzled her, chilled her. It ended abruptly, as though someone had pulled a plug and his amusement swirled like water down a drain.
“I don’t want his money.” He stabbed a piece of bacon from the platter. “I don’t need it.”
“Then what do you want?” she asked.
“You. The only thing I want is you.”
His words slapped her like a wet towel, sharp, stinging slaps that pierced her to the bone. Rae quickly lowered her eyes and kept her hands on her knees so he couldn’t see that they were shaking.
It didn’t matter to Hal that she didn’t say a word throughout breakfast. It thrilled him just to have her sitting across from him, eating food he’d prepared. She seemed to particularly like the fish, bass that came straight out of the lagoon, so fresh it practically melted on your tongue.
He had his sketch pad handy and drew her as she sat there, her hair drying, the strands curling like springs. She had sharp, wonderful features, and bore a vague resemblance to Jessica Lange, one of his favorite actresses. He had every movie she’d been in, even her first, a remake of King Kong that he enjoyed watching just for the touch of class she had brought to the film.
When Rae had worked at Manatee, her hair had been like Lange’s, much longer, those blonde curls brushing her shoulders. Now she wore it to her chin, a loose casual style that softened the bold angles of her face. Her brows looked a shade darker than her hair and possessed a kind of untamed beauty that he tried to capture in his sketch. He had never been much good at drawing people until he began drawing Rae.
It took her a long time to finish all the food on her plate. Then she sat back with the mug of coffee clutched in her hands and watched the sketch as it emerged. He stared at her long, graceful fingers, the unpolished nails cut almost straight across. A peasant’s nails, he thought, not those of a millionaire’s wife.
“How long have you been drawing?” she asked.
“Since I moved out here.” He struggled to get her mouth just tight, the sensuous pout, the fullness. “I started with birds, then Big Guy…”
“Big Guy?”
“The ten-foot gator who lives in the lagoon.”
“How long have you been watching me, Hal?”
“Awhile.”
“You sent those gifts and the tarot cards.”
“Yes.”
“Andy turned everything over to the police.”
Hal made sure he spoke of Steele in the present tense. He still worried that she would somehow find out Steele was dead before he had won her trust. “Maybe that’s what he said he would do, but I doubt if he did it. The police would ask too many questions that he wouldn’t be able to answer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your husband’s involved in shit you don’t know anything about.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Oh, I think this would.”
She shrugged, looked away from him, her profile etched clearly against the backdrop of light. He knew he’d piqued her curiosity. But now he had to proceed very carefully. He needed to reveal enough so that she understood just how duplicitous Steele had been, but not so much that she guessed Hal had killed him.
While her head remained turned away from him, Hal reached into her ever so gently. A violent maelstrom swept him up, a swirling fury of dark, dense colors. He heard shouting, glass breaking. Then her head snapped toward him and he was flung away.
Patterns, he thought. The pattern of her marriage to Steele had been one of arguments, disagreements, shouting matches.
She frowned, rubbed hard at her temple. “So tell me what sort of shit Andy’s involved in, Hal.”
“Paranormal research.” Spy games, death games.
>
“What?” She laughed. “Andy? C’mon.”
Yeah, good ole Andy. He nodded.
“Since when?”
“Years.” Maybe his whole fucking life. Maybe Steele had been one of those introverted, brilliant kids who had an imaginary playmate and fell asleep with spirits whispering in his ear. “Probably as far back as the sixties.”
“No way.” She laughed again, nervous, uneasy laughter this time. “He couldn’t hide something like that from me. If he was interested in the paranormal, then it was only as an adjunct to psychiatry.”
“Think about the books in his library, Rae.”
Tragedy burned briefly in her eyes; Hal knew this was how the light of a dying planet would look.
“How do you know what books are in his library?”
“Because when your housekeeper was out, I looked.” Surprise, shock, and disbelief flickered like lightning across her features.
“I figure there must be more than two hundred books in his library that deal with some facet of the paranormal,” Hal went on.
“What kind of fraud were you busted for?”
It irritated Hal that she abruptly changed the subject, turning the conversation back to him. He wanted to control what they talked about and when. But now that she’d asked, he would go along with it as long as it suited him.
“Psychic fraud. That isn’t what they called it, but that’s what it amounted to. I had a lot of clients who were paying me from five hundred to a thousand bucks a shot to clean their auras, remove curses from their lives, to advise them on business transactions, that kind of stuff.”
“You’re a psychic?”
“I was a metaphysical advisor.” He smiled at that. The New Age was big on labels, so he had found a label that suited what he did. “There’s a difference. I didn’t do psychic fairs, didn’t read cards or tea leaves or shit like that. I advised. Most of my clients were satisfied, they were repeat business. But some of the santeros in the Miami community felt I was invading their turf. They got a couple of my ex-clients to file complaints against me, there was an investigation …..He shrugged. “I ended up at Manatee.”
The Hanged Man Page 11
