“Whatcha doin’ here, Kennedy?”
Behind them, Giselle grumbled, “That’s all right. Keep talking.”
Kennedy glanced at Giselle, then scrolled through a list of phone numbers on the screen. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Why don’t you let me make my first call before you start asking the intimate questions?” When he raised an eyebrow, she explained, “It’s kind of like asking, ‘Where did your whole life go wrong?’”
“I guess. But only if you think one direction is better than another.” Below a nose that looked like it’d been broken at least once, he had a wide smile full of sharp canines.
Suddenly she wanted to feel his teeth against her skin. Her lips felt as though they were stinging. She itched all over. She felt parched and thirsty. A feeling pooled low in her abdomen, as though she were carrying something heavy there, a desire she’d been lugging around for years. She wanted to get out of there, and they had five hours before the shift would end, and then her father was coming to pick her up and drive her back to that awful house. How could she sit here in a packed room and make calls to strangers, keep her voice steady and read the lines?
She knew that whenever she and Nathan Doyle had the opportunity to get out of there, he would do what she said, take her wherever she asked, and allow her requests.
* * *
—
Nathan had a gun on his hip. Black ink. The handle showing above the waistband of his jeans. She ran one finger over it where they lay on his bed. His hipbone was a scallop under the surface. He twitched as if Kennedy had tickled him and grabbed her wrist. He looked at her, let it go.
When they’d first come into his place, he’d put a CD on, something metal with guitars and drums so fast it became a wash of sound and air, like being under a waterfall. He’d moved faster than she expected, snatching at her clothes as if they were bothering him, tossing them aside. She almost hadn’t minded. His hands were callused and rough—a man’s hands. A decade and a half ago, the last time a male had touched her, it had been with warm, smooth boy fingers. Sitting next to Nathan Doyle for three evening shifts in a row had been the foreplay; fourteen years of incarceration had been the foreplay, she’d told herself. What she couldn’t have guessed was the rush she’d get from clinging to his muscled frame, his smoky scent, his movements, his scruffy mouth on hers. She’d always thought she would want to be adored, and instead she felt her fingertips flicking over his shoulders, neck, adoring him.
Kennedy looked around now for something to put on and threw on the hoodie he’d worn earlier. She zipped it up. Her legs were shaky, and she felt raw inside, strangely triumphant, like she’d left Berk Butler behind at last. Nathan told her to go ahead if she wanted to get herself cleaned up. He was twenty-nine, a man who came and went but obviously mostly went. The maltreated apartment above Extreme Pizza showed it. As Kennedy walked through the main room, she realized she’d never been in a dwelling that had absolutely no reading material before. In high school, even the Kimberson house had been strewn with celebrity magazines and romance novels—the kinds of things Laine and Gerry Wynn didn’t allow.
When she returned to the bedroom, Nathan was smoking, sitting on the edge of the mattress, his naked back to the room, the window cracked for her benefit. She gestured with her hand and he passed her the cigarette. She took a drag and gave it back.
“Did you really pull a job on a Butler’s?” She lay down on the bed behind him.
“Wasn’t so hard. Hard part was surveillance footage. They picked me up two days later.”
She almost said she had known a Butler when she was a kid. A kid. It surprised her that that was the word that came to her mind. But she hesitated to reveal that she’d known Berk. To admit that one fact was to admit everything. “That family’s fucked up,” she said instead.
Their name appeared in the paper regularly and everyone knew at least something about the Butlers.
“True that.” Nathan stubbed the cigarette into an ashtray and inched down onto the bed next to her. She leaned her head against his shoulder. There was a blurry clock with no hands on it, a prison tat, on his biceps. But an expertly done tattoo-parlor rose unfolded black petals over his heart. His body was a visible mesh of hard and good times. “You come from nice people,” he said gently.
“What? No,” she scoffed, nosing against his chest. He put a hand on her hair.
“I can tell. You come from someplace. You’re tough, but you have grace.” He turned his face and looked at her with those intense dark eyes. He took her by the chin with one thumb and finger and kissed her. She felt embarrassed by her emotions. When he’d been inside her she’d felt as if she’d burst from both happiness and shame.
He said she must have been young when she went in, and she said yes but not to be mistaken, she hadn’t been that inexperienced.
“Lotta time,” he pressed. “What’d you do, kill someone?”
Kennedy could see by his face he was kidding. Still she pulled away from him, unzipped his sweatshirt, and found her own clothes on the floor. She didn’t say anything and pulled on her pants.
“I tell ya though: from the outside that Butler’s store sure shone. White-gold in the dark. And I wanted it, I had to have it, you know what I mean?”
Kennedy nodded her head, wondering which location he’d robbed and whether Berk had been working there. She put on her shoes, combed her hair with one hand. “I was high. I’ve never known what I did,” she said.
“Honest to god?”
She smirked and asked if he believed in God.
He leaned forward and pointed to his back, where Gothic lettering spelled out Apostate across his shoulder blades. “Used to be an altar boy, until I got caught hocking the chalices.”
“I was near the place it happened. I found her. I moved her. And I didn’t tell, not when I should have. I was scared.”
“That ain’t good. But killing someone? I’ve known some who have. Seems to me you ain’t likely to forget it.”
Kennedy considered it. “Haley had a few boyfriends. It could have been one of them, but that whole night—it’s like trying to remember what happened in a dream from fifteen years ago. One of them is stalking me. I don’t know if he wants me to talk or not talk. He was always an idiot.”
“Who is he?”
She brushed her hair with her fingers, then slid her arms into her jacket. “You’d know the name.”
Nathan sat up and pulled Kennedy to him by her army jacket collar. He put his tongue in her mouth, his beard bristles on her lips. Even though she needed to call a cab, she lingered. “You’re sweet, Kennedy. I don’t see it.”
She picked up her purse and said she hoped he was right.
Chapter 20
Gerry poured himself a scotch and carried it up to his office. He’d set a daily limit and stuck to it most of the time. It was part of the agreement he’d made with himself after his first coronary episode a few years back. Nonetheless, he loved the first few sips: that unfolding flavor of woody caramel with a hint of floor wax. He wanted to be ready to pick Kennedy up if she called after work. She kept insisting on taking the bus, saying she wanted to live a “normal life,” whatever that was—but usually he would push and she would eventually accept his ride. In those moments, he felt a quiet triumph. He enjoyed the peaceful rides, her looking out the window. He enjoyed the feeling he could do something for her.
When she was a teenager too, giving the girls rides had meant winning their loyalty. He could recall picking Kennedy, Carter, and Haley up from the school. Kennedy had been in the front seat, and she was the one to ask him to find a job for Haley—it was clear they’d hatched a plan before he came, and worked up to their ambush. He’d said he had no room at his firm for an intern. He’d called up Doug Macaulay. Doug had said he could find room in his office, and the school was thrilled. They’d never placed a student alongside a paralegal. A
couple weeks later he’d stopped in at Macaulay’s to drop off contracts and it turned out to be her first day: Haley begged him not to tell the twins how she dressed “at work.” He’d looked at her plain navy slacks and white blouse, exactly right for the law office. Her orange hair was plaited into one twisting rope down her back. “You look like a young Hillary Clinton,” he said, and she blushed. She’d go far, he remembered thinking. He’d wished his daughters had the same drive.
He shook the memory away. He was glad Kennedy was working, even if he had some concerns about what type of people she’d meet at the call center. She was his responsibility, like Haley had been when he put her into that adult environment, he thought, swirling the scotch, watching how the alcohol whispered its shape to the glass.
As he’d thought many times, Kennedy was his; Carter was lost to him—especially if her car’s being parked in Kimberson’s spot meant what he thought it did. Gerry began to feel his temperature rise and he took another swig of his drink. It melted the anger.
He could probably have two drinks, he reasoned, since Kennedy’s shift went all the way until ten. He sipped the scotch, savoring it, telling himself to make it last, just in case he needed to drive later. He opened the top drawer of his desk and felt around under some CDs for the note. It wasn’t there.
That was right; he had moved it. He went to the closet. Inside, behind the vacuum cleaner and some old suits, was a panel. The bathroom was adjacent. The closet panel led into the water heater for the shower, and the only reason to ever open it was to make repairs. He flicked the latch and pulled the plywood off. His fingers found the book and he yanked it out, already feeling warm. The note was inside the cover where he’d put it. He replaced the panel, flicked the latch closed again, and carried the book and note over to his desk.
The one-inch-by-one-inch note was written on ordinary notepaper in the rotund flourishes of a teenage girl’s handwriting.
Gerry opened it and reread it. He ran his hand over the page. When he’d finished, he refolded it carefully—he only struggled a little, but the folds had been there for years and that made it easier to feel which way the paper should go.
If investigators had found it at the time, it might have exonerated his daughter. He wondered if Kennedy had seen it and forgotten in the chaos that came. More likely it had been placed there and never found. But what was done was done. It did her little good now and therefore he had no intention of showing her. It was better for both of them to keep the past in the past. She was doing well, he told himself. Slowly she was moving into a life.
He put aside the note. The book cover was silver and embossed with a single word: Sex. He flipped it open to one of his favorite pages. I’ll teach you how to fuck, it said in large letters. The opposite page showed the blonde in leather, sitting on a stool, her legs spread slightly, one hand between them over the body armor that covered her. Her nipples peeked through holes in the bustier. Below a black silk mask that mostly hid her eyes, she sucked defiantly on her middle finger.
He would bet his life on the fact that neither daughter remembered his confiscating the Madonna book from them. Not considering everything that had happened since. Laine had been furious to discover the twins had it—It portrays gangbangs, and skinheads, she’d whispered, though she’d been afraid to take it from them because she didn’t want them to know she had snooped, had read something about the breaking of trust between parents and children. Nonetheless, she worried they must have forged IDs to get it. Gerry had waved his hand; ridiculous, he said. He knew how kids operated. They’d probably convinced someone else, some boy, to buy it for them. Laine wanted them to find a way to ask the girls without a terrible confrontation, but Gerry just walked into Kennedy’s bedroom and demanded it flatly. The girls provided the explanation. An older boy they knew who was gay had lent it to them. Robin, Gerry suspected, the one from church who hung around and played the keyboards with them. But the girls wouldn’t say, they only pleaded for him to give it back. Otherwise they would owe the boy fifty dollars.
“Who do you owe fifty dollars?” Gerry asked, wanting them to sputter out the boy’s name so he could feel he’d won, but the girls wouldn’t tell.
“What are you going to do with it?” Carter asked, practically in tears.
Gerry had flipped it open in front of them and leafed through the pages. Pin-up shots of the pop star in a bra, naked on the beach, in garters, examining herself while kneeling with a mirror. That was the tame stuff. Then the skinheads. So many skinheads. A muscular man on a leash licking her fishnets. Photographs of her tied to a chair, tonguing other women who were pierced, tattooed.
“No, Dad!” Kennedy pleaded.
“Don’t look!” Carter screamed.
“This is just trash. Tell your friend it was destroyed,” Gerry said, and left the room. Later, he’d asked Laine if this was what was in women’s minds.
“Not mine,” she said, though he’d suspected as much.
What had the girls felt when looking at it? Horror, revulsion, or secret intrigue, the hot rush of excitement? Gerry wondered if it had been passed among other hands, imagined a whole group of teenagers with the material, giggling. But no, Gerry had thought, there were some things that Kennedy and Carter kept to themselves. As much as they drew the world in, the bond between them also kept it out.
When his wife had asked later what happened to the book, he’d coughed and said that he threw it in the garbage.
But something about the book had captivated him. Everything was in black and white, as if it were art. He couldn’t shake the idea that thousands of kids had bought the book, hidden it from their parents—that he and Laine and their whole generation had missed out on something. Something wild and dangerous. The boomers had invented rock and roll, and yet what had they ever really tried? He had ridden on a motorcycle once—one time—but he had never tied his wife to the bed and spanked her. He wondered now if it would have made any difference. The cover was starting to come off the spiral binding and he had to turn the pages slowly. He stared at a picture of Madonna surrounded by men who were outfitted in women’s nylons and heels. It did nothing for him. He flipped to ones of her in the leather bustier. She looked afraid, enraptured, angry. She looked like no one in Blueheart Woods. He stared at her breasts threatening to pop from the thin, slick fabric.
He remembered breasts under his hands, all sorts of breasts he had known, of different sizes and calibers, their nipples dark brown or pale pink or even hovering reddish, poking from cotton, polyester, knits, sheer blouses—it didn’t matter. Each was as lovely as the moon in the moment. He reached down below the desk, felt himself over the top of his pants.
The light stopped him. For a second, it seemed as if the hallway grew brighter, his office darker. She passed by the open doorway.
He sprang to his feet.
At first he thought it was Kennedy, that she must be there, but he knew that wasn’t true. She was at work. And the hair—the hair was red. It was a young girl, he saw that clearly. She walked at an ordinary pace and was past the doorframe in a second. Gerry called out, “Kennedy? Kennedy?!”
He stood listening, his heart racing. He couldn’t hear anything.
The light in the hall looked normal now. Perhaps it was just a blink, a stutter of the light. Some kind of surge. He’d set the alarm downstairs, he recalled, when he’d come back in from dropping his daughter at the call center. It was something he’d been doing in the evenings since Kennedy got out—a bit afraid that having her here might bring them unwanted attention. He downed the rest of his scotch and grabbed a design magazine his decorator had gifted him, Coveted, depicting a large, immaculate bed and a pair of club chairs in pale tones. He threw it on top of Sex to hide it. No one could come upstairs without walking past his office first, he reasoned. Even though she knew the alarm code, Kennedy couldn’t have come in. He would have seen her. It was as if the girl had been in h
is bedroom all along and walked from there past the office and guest bedroom, which were across the hall from each other.
“You must be drunk,” Gerry told himself as he edged around the desk toward the hall to assess the situation. It was possible his tolerance for alcohol had gone down since he’d cut back. He placed a hand on the doorframe and leaned out. There was nothing, no one. In stocking feet, he stepped from the carpeted office onto the hardwood and started down the hall to look into Kennedy’s room. He tried the knob, then pushed the door back hard. It hit the wall with a thunk. She’d left a light on, but the room was empty. He felt something cold and looked down. His sock was wet. He leaned one hip against the wall, pulled his leg up, knee out, peeled off the wet sock. Had he sloshed his drink on the way up earlier? It hadn’t been that full, he told himself. He turned his head. Farther down the hallway were droplets, a streak of brown, dirty water, like something tracked in from outside.
There was a loud clatter that seemed to come from the kitchen and Gerry straightened. He stepped back into his office and grabbed the first thing that looked like a weapon. It was a large glass decanter. It was a fifteenth-wedding-anniversary present, given right before the marriage began to shatter. He and Laine had never believed in guns, though now suddenly he wished he had one. He took a breath and forced himself back out into the hallway and down the stairs to the main floor, holding the decanter up, ready to swing and crack it across a face should anyone emerge.
“I’ve called 911,” he shouted, though his voice was not loud enough to carry through the whole downstairs. He could hear his own terror, scratchy in his throat. He should have called the police, he realized as soon as he said it, if he really did believe there was an intruder.
By the time Gerry had made his way through the dining room, he could see there was no one in the kitchen. A wooden block of knives that normally sat on the marble island had been knocked over, and they shone all over the floor. He stood still, staring at them, Wüsthof, the black handles, long blades like mirrors. His gaze went to the patio doors that led out to the Japanese garden, but they were shut and locked. He ought to have sensor lights installed, he realized. It would be easy for someone to come through the back of the property.
Little Threats Page 14
