by Thomas Perry
19
It was another hot, humid evening in Minneapolis, and Christine was getting tired of the constant hum of the air conditioner, but she was still sweating. She turned off the television set, dropped the remote control on the coffee table, and lay back on the couch. She was tired. It actually took energy to conform to strict rules. Self-discipline was an effort. She was lonely and big. That was the feeling, really, the sheer unpleasantness of having lost control of her body. Even if she could have ignored her growing belly, her face felt puffy, her legs, even her fingers.
She had been extremely careful in the three months since she had come to Minneapolis. She hadn't gone out much except to buy groceries and paperback books. She wished she had a computer. Jane had left more than enough money to buy one, but there was a certain amount of red tape and verifying of credit to get an online account, and Christine sensed that was a bad process to begin. She would wait until after the baby was born and she moved to a new city using a permanent name and all her credit cards were real.
She didn't want to start taking chances now. The reason she was safe was that she had been smart from the beginning. She had gone to see Sharon Curtis, and Sharon had sent her right to Jane. Jane had taken only three days to bring her all the way to Minnesota and hide her in a place where nobody would ever think to look for her. And Jane had hurt two of Richard's people so badly that they would probably never want to come after her again. Seeing it happen would probably affect the other four, too. How could the others keep from becoming hesitant and tentative now that they'd seen the first two hurt? Could they imagine that what Richard paid them was worth getting hit by a car?
When Christine remembered the four people who were after her, it didn't seem so hard to be Linda Welles of Minneapolis. She felt as though she and her baby were in a different world from San Diego, and perfectly safe. Even so, she kept the revolver Jane had given her in her purse. When she drove anywhere in her car, the purse was there beside her on the passenger seat where she could reach it. When she was at home like this, the purse was never more than a few feet away. She had promised herself that she would never let herself be captured by Richard's friends.
When she and Richard had been together, she had given him more than enough chances, but he had never taken her seriously. And Richard had hurt her. The first time he had hit her she considered leaving, but she had not been sure he'd meant it. There had been too much ambiguity. They had been in their house in San Diego. It was really just Richard's house, but she had been living with him for at least six months by then, and so she thought of it as their house. They had just come home from work to get ready for dinner with some clients, so she was in the shower. She came out of the bathroom with a big bath towel around her, and when she passed Richard, he was standing in front of the full-length mirror on the door of the closet, buttoning a shirt.
His arm shot out like a whip and wrapped around her waist. He spun her around as he pulled her close, and the towel came off. She tried to get away, and they wrestled around a little. She struggled and she ended up on the bed bent across his lap. He gave her a light slap across the bottom. She shrieked, but not too loudly because there were neighbors, and she was laughing, too. She squirmed and wriggled, pretending to try to escape, but really just doing it because she knew it would excite him. The truth was that she liked the fact that he was strong and aggressive, and that he was paying this kind of attention to her. She knew he found it erotic, and she found his arousal erotic.
Then he hit her again, another slap. It was harder this time, and it stung. She could feel her eyes watering, not quite producing tears yet, just a reaction to the pain. "Richard! Don't. It really hurt that time! Stop!" But he hit her again and again, and the playful spanking wasn't fun anymore. It was painful. She tightened the muscles of her buttocks and put her hands behind her to fend off the slaps. "Stop!" She was crying, but he didn't seem to notice. After a few more blows she became silent and stiff like a dead person, and he finally stopped. She ran into the bathroom, locked the door, then put on the clothes she had taken off before the shower, still weeping.
He knocked on the door, he called to her, he even made a halfhearted attempt to push the door open with his shoulder, but she knew he wasn't going to break it down. She could hear him move off, and a few minutes later he came back, knocked quietly, and said it was time to leave. She called out that she wasn't going anywhere with him. She stood behind the bathroom door holding her cell phone, ready to dial 911 if he came inside. He didn't. She heard him walk off down the hall, and then thought she heard the front door slam.
She waited a half hour before she was sure he was gone. She cautiously left the bathroom and then hurried out to her car. She drove to an inexpensive motel off Interstate 8. He called her cell phone a couple of times before she decided to answer.
He said, "I thought you were just kidding. You were laughing."
But by then she'd had time to stand in front of the mirror and see the red marks starting to darken into blue and purple bruises, and the pain was not going away. She waited another day to make him sweat and give the bruises time to ripen and darken, and then drove to the company building, went into his office, locked the door, and showed him.
He seemed sincerely shocked, and he apologized. She went back to the motel and spent the next three days thinking about what to do. There were many reasons to go back, and one reason not to, and that was fading with the bruises. She wanted to be sure he really deserved another chance, that he'd misunderstood what she had wanted, and not meant to do her harm. Christine wanted to believe that her own motives were simple and pure, too—that if she went back it would be because she loved him, and not because if she left him she would lose her job and her only place to live. There was also the nagging, uncomfortable question of whether she had misled him by giggling and being playful at first. In the end she decided she could not be sure about anything. She decided to start over again with Richard as though nothing had happened, and wait to see if anything important had.
The next time he hit her was during an argument. She would have hesitated to even call it a fight. They were at a party and she was tired and wanted to go home. He wanted to stay, and he wanted her to stay with him. It was after two A.M., and they were at a house all the way up in Capistrano. He had been drinking, and it was a long drive home. She asked him not to have another drink. She whispered discreetly, her face close to his ear and her arms around him so nobody else knew what she was saying. He didn't argue with her, but he took another drink. She sat down beside him and waited.
When it was three, he was ready to go. As they walked out toward the car, she held out her hand. "Can I have the key, please? I'll drive." He clutched her shoulders and shook her, then held her face close to his. "Listen," he rasped. "Don't you ever tell me what to do again." He slapped her face, pulled her around the car, and shoved her into the passenger seat, then got in and drove.
Before they even reached home, he apologized. He said it was the alcohol that was to blame, and swore he would never drink and drive again. It was four days before she would speak to him. She stayed home from work and wore sleeveless tops so he would have to look at the thumbprints on her upper arms.
The next time, she began to complain to him about the way he left his clothes on the floor of the bedroom and expected her to pick them up. Suddenly he gripped her hair and gave her face three or four slaps. Each time he was angry at her, the violence got a bit more sudden and harsh, and each time, he would apologize longer and more extravagantly. But then, after a week or two, he would speak to her with boredom and contempt in his voice, as though her forgiving him made her stupid and weak.
After that she tried to avoid doing anything that might provoke him. She managed to find ways to live with him without getting hurt, and her success made her believe he was improving.
But by then, the other things had begun to bother her. As she came to understand the business, she admitted to herself that he wasn't alway
s honest. There were discrepancies between what he told customers they were signing and what she knew was on the paper because he'd told her to put it there. The extra, unexpected construction costs he charged to customers were inflated tremendously. Still later she noticed that he was lying about the costs of things in his own company's books. She could tell he was doing it so nobody would notice he was moving money out of the business.
Richard rented out some apartments in big complexes, and listed them on the Beale Company books as vacant or under remodeling, and then collected the rents under the name Richard Beale Rentals. There were even times when she saw him take cash home in a briefcase and lock it in the safe built into the floor of his closet.
During the next few months she tried not to notice what he was doing at work, and pretended at home that their relationship was getting better. It was only after she missed a period, and then another, then a third, that Christine awoke from the trance. She bought the pregnancy test, and the little X turned bright blue, and she was pregnant. She didn't need to spend much time thinking about the implications, because they were already in the back of her mind waiting. She couldn't stay with Richard. She couldn't give birth to a baby as Richard's girlfriend. She couldn't live in Richard's house where he could use the baby as a hostage to control her. She had to get out. But she wasted more time trying to think of a way to do it. Soon she was desperate, because she couldn't hide the pregnancy much longer, and she had to leave before he found out.
One day Christine pretended to be sick and waited until Richard went to the office. She packed a small overnight bag. Then she left her keys on the kitchen counter and her car in the driveway, walked to a pay phone at a nearby restaurant, and called a cab to take her to Sharon Curtis's house. Christine had a natural sneakiness that must have been developed when she was young, trying to outwit the Divine Delia. She knew from intense observation how the minds of tyrants worked. Neither Delia nor Richard would ever walk off and leave a car. For Richard, seeing her car still at his house would be the same as seeing Christine there. It would never occur to him that Christine would leave most of her possessions and a car behind. He would spend days in complete confidence that she was just in a snit and that she would return.
Christine knew that she should have called Sharon in advance, but she was already afraid of leaving that telephone call as the last one on the bill that Richard received. Sharon had been her favorite teacher at Poway High School. She had been younger and more glamorous than any of the others. She taught science—all kinds of science, from first-year biology to advanced placement physics. Science was messy, so she was invulnerable to the formal dress requirements for teachers. She wore the same brands of jeans that students wore, white lab coats so clean they glowed, and had an array of bright-colored sneakers. She had a set of safety goggles around her neck most of the time. She was bright and tough, and kept her students alert by keeping up an ongoing conversation in which she addressed first one, then another. Christine loved her. Watching her was like seeing herself in ten years and being really pleased at how she was going to turn out.
When Christine's family troubles finally caused the household to collapse, she had confided in Sharon Curtis, and Sharon listened to each stage of the disaster and to each of the revelations about Christine's father, but she never made a comment until she was asked. After Christine left school and went to work, she and Sharon met for lunch about once a month. Each time, Sharon would find a way to remind Christine that she should go back to school and then go to college.
The day Christine ran away, she told Sharon all the things about the relationship with Richard that she had been withholding—the growing violence, the dishonesty, the dangerous people working for him—and Sharon changed. She said, "I'm going to tell you something that nobody knows, and when you hear it, you'll understand why you can't tell anyone. I wasn't always called Sharon Curtis. I lived somewhere far away from here. There was a boyfriend, and some of the things that have been happening to you happened to me, too. I always found a way to fool myself into thinking I should stay with him. Things got worse. They can get a whole lot worse than I ever imagined in about a second."
"What's your real name? Who are you?"
"Sharon Curtis is my real name. It's the one I agreed to, and it's the name of the person I am now. We don't really have time for questions about the person I used to be. Not if Richard is in the habit of hurting you and knows you could reveal things that will get him arrested."
"I don't know what to do. He has those people I told you about. They sometimes hunt people down for him, ones who don't pay what they owe or something. I know he'll send them after me."
"Then you've got to be gone before that happens." Sharon looked at Christine with a sad expression. "You've got to disappear."
"But I don't know how."
"There's a woman. About ten years ago, somebody sent me to her. If they hadn't, I'd be dead."
"Who is she?"
"Her name is Jane. You have to go to her. The first thing you do is tell her that I sent you. Then you tell her about yourself, and about Richard and his people." Sharon tore a piece of scrap paper from a pad beside her telephone and wrote the name Jane Whitefield and an address on it in her neat schoolteacher handwriting, then handed it to Christine. "Memorize this and then give it back and I'll destroy the paper."
"Like in the movies."
"Not like the movies. This is real. Don't be careless. The address on that paper has been more precious to some people than anything in any bank. If anything happens to her, a door will close, and nobody will ever be able to go through again."
"I'll be careful. I promise."
"I'm going to drive you to the L.A. airport, just in case he's noticed you're gone and he's watching the San Diego airport. Fly to Buffalo, New York, tonight, and take a cab. If she's not there, wait for her."
"What if she doesn't come?"
"Then try going to Buffalo General Hospital and asking for her. There are people there who know her."
"What does she look like?"
"Tall and thin, with black hair. She wore it long when I last saw her. She has dark skin, and eyes that look as though she can see through you. They're the part that might help. They're blue—bright, clear blue, like water is supposed to look but doesn't. And that reminds me. Don't ever lie to her, not even an innocent little lie."
As Christine thought about that night, she missed Sharon even more than before. Now that she'd had the experience that Sharon had prepared her for, she wanted to tell her about it. She wanted to thank Sharon for taking the risk of telling her she was living under a name she'd only had for ten years. Now that Christine had become Linda Welles, she knew what an extravagant gift that information was. But there was one extra question that hadn't existed for Christine before. She wanted to know why Sharon, the person in her life who always seemed to be in complete control, had ever needed the kind of help that Jane Whitefield offered.
There had been hints that night, but Christine wanted the whole story. Now it was important to Christine to know. Maybe Sharon Curtis was somebody Jane had invented because she wasn't much like the young girl whose life was in danger, and the young girl had worked and studied until she had grown into being Sharon. Christine hoped so. Sharon had a stronger sense of who she was and how that person was supposed to behave than anyone else Christine had met. Was that something Sharon started with, or something she had been able to earn? After ten years, was her identity a disguise, or was it the person she had grown to be?
Christine was up off the couch and pacing, ranging the room the way Sharon did when she was running a science lab. Without really thinking about it, Christine went to the telephone and picked it up. The loud dial tone startled her. She had half-expected the phone to be dead, because nobody had ever called her. The message from Jane about her father was the only call she'd had since she'd bought the phone, and she had missed even that one. All she had heard was the voice mail Jane had recorded.
/> As Christine stared at the telephone, the dial tone seemed to get even louder and more insistent. She dialed Sharon's number and waited. It was ten here in Minnesota, so it was only eight in San Diego, a perfect time to call on a weeknight, when Sharon probably hadn't gone out.
"Hello?" It was Sharon's voice, sounding a bit tired from a day of teaching, and yet, there was something else. It was something Christine had never been sensitive enough to hear before. The tone was guarded, as though some small part of Sharon was prepared for a voice from the distant past.
"Hi, Sharon. It's me, Christine."
"Are you all right?"
"Yes," she said. "I found the woman you told me about, and she moved me to—"
"Don't!" she interrupted. Then she said more gently, "Don't say where."
"To a safe place. I was just going to say it was a safe place. Don't worry," said Christine. "I'm not stupid."
"You're okay, though?" Sharon asked. "You're healthy? You're getting enough to eat and everything?"
"I'm fine and the baby's fine. The doctor says everything's fine. That's one of the reasons why I called. I was sure you would be worried about me since I left, and I wanted you to know that things worked out. She set me up in a safe, dull place and told me how to get by without drawing much attention to myself. She says she'll be back in time for the baby, and then help me move again."
"I'm so glad," Sharon said. "Tell me something without saying anything specific that we'll regret. How is she? I haven't seen her in over ten years."
"She's just the way you said she was—like nobody I ever met before. To tell you the truth, while I was with her, I was a little bit afraid of her."
"Don't be. But take her seriously and do everything she says, to the letter. I'm really happy to know that you made it. You were right that I was afraid something would happen to you on the way. But—"
"A lot did happen, and if she hadn't been with me, I'd have been caught. Let me tell you—"
