by Joy Fielding
She turned the jeans over, careful to keep the metal buckle from slapping against the wood of the chair, then slid her hand into the second pocket. Neither the car keys nor the knife were there. She tried the rear pockets, knowing in advance she’d find nothing. Dammit, she thought, returning the jeans to the back of the chair and biting down on her lower lip to keep from screaming. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
It was in that moment she sensed something had changed. A subtle shift in the air currents had occurred, a change in the light. Whatever. She didn’t have to turn around to know Brad’s eyes were open, that his cruel smile was now stretching across his face.
“Are you ready to die, Jamie?” he asked as the sound of a switchblade being released from its sheath stabbed at the stillness.
Jamie didn’t waste time turning around. Instead she flung herself at the door, tearing at the safety chain and pulling the door toward her, screaming into the small sliver of night she was able to see before the door slammed shut again, and she was picked up and thrown across the room, as if she were an inanimate object, weightless and of no consequence whatsoever. She struggled to her feet as he came at her again, his fist connecting with her stomach as she was almost upright. The air rushed from her body in one giant whoosh and she crumpled to the floor, gagging and gasping for breath. Hands grabbed at her hair, pulling her head up and exposing the whiteness of her neck against the black of his shirt. She saw the blade of the knife as it swooped toward her throat.
Then she saw nothing at all.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Emma saw the car as soon as she opened her front door. It was parked halfway down the street, in front of old Mrs. Discala’s house, and Emma wondered idly if Mrs. Discala’s son, the doctor she was always bragging about, had gotten himself another new car. Although this one looked as if it had seen better days. Oh, well, Emma thought. Haven’t we all? She’d always loved Thunderbirds for their stylish bravura, and this one was baby blue, which gave it a certain added mystique, although she wasn’t sure why. Emma had never owned a car, didn’t even have a driver’s license, but she decided right then and there that if she ever did get a car, it would be a baby blue Thunderbird just like this one.
“All right, Dylan. Let’s get a move-on in there.”
“I’m coming,” her son called from upstairs, although almost a minute later, there was still no sign of him.
Emma stepped back inside her front foyer. “Dylan, come on. You’re going to be late for school.”
Still nothing.
“Dylan, please don’t make me come up there.”
Suddenly Dylan materialized at the top of the stairs. In his hands was a shiny, round, brass object. “What’s this?” He extended Jan’s trophy dish above his head, as if he himself had just come in second in the Women’s Bodybuilding Competition in Cincinnati, Ohio, for 2002.
“What are you doing with that?” Emma was already halfway up the stairs before Dylan had the chance to take a step.
Immediately he hid the brass bowl behind his back, out of her reach. “I’m taking it for show-and-tell.”
“Who said you could go sneaking around in my things?”
The omnipresent threat of tears brought a familiar quiver to Dylan’s voice. “I wasn’t sneaking around. It was in the bathroom. I found it when I was looking for my animal soaps.”
“You used the last of your animal soaps last week. Remember?”
“Why can’t I take this to show instead?”
“Because it’s not yours.” It’s not even mine, she almost added, then thought better of it. There was no telling what Dylan was liable to burst out with in class.
“But it’s pretty.”
“Yes, it is. But you can’t take it to school, Dylan. I’m sorry. Now, can I have it, please?”
Reluctantly Dylan brought the brass bowl around the front of his body, and Emma pried it from his stubborn fingers. “I never have anything good for show-and-tell,” he said, his lips forming an exaggerated pout.
“Well, if you would give me a little notice and not wait until the last minute,” Emma said with exasperation, “I might be able to find you something interesting to take.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know what,” she said, taking his hand and leading him down the stairs, hearing him whimper. “All right. Look. We’ll find something.” She walked into the living room, tossed the bowl on the sofa, and looked helplessly around the room. She had to return the damn thing to Jan. But when? And how? What could she say to the woman? How much truth could she afford to tell?
“There’s nothing,” Dylan wailed.
“Yes, there is,” Emma realized, running into the kitchen. “I have the perfect thing.”
Dylan was right behind her as she rifled through the kitchen cabinets. Where had she put it anyway? “What is it?” Dylan asked.
“A mug,” Emma announced, her fingers closing around its cumbersome handle. She spun around, offered the big, ugly mug to her son. “It’s from Scully’s gym. See the logo written along its side?”
Dylan looked unimpressed. “What’s a logo?”
“It’s the name,” Emma amended, too impatient to explain. “Just show it to the class, and tell everyone that you get one of these free when you join Scully’s, along with a free T-shirt.” Hell, she might actually drum up a little extra business for Jan, which should help atone for her sins.
“Can I show them the T-shirt too?”
“I don’t have a T-shirt.”
“How come?”
“Because I didn’t join.”
“Then how come you got the free mug?”
“Dylan, do you want it or not?”
Dylan clasped the mug tightly to his chest, as if afraid she was about to snatch it away. “I want it,” he said.
“Okay. Now, let’s get going, or you’ll be late.” She opened the front door and stepped outside, holding the door open for her son, only to realize he’d vanished yet again. “Dylan, for God’s sake …”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he called, his little body disappearing around the top of the stairs.
“Unbelievable,” Emma muttered, letting the door snap closed behind her as she stared absently down the street. The blue Thunderbird was still parked in front of Mrs. Discala’s house, and there seemed to be someone inside it, although from this distance it was hard to tell if it was a person or just the shadow of an overhanging tree branch. What kind of tree? she wondered, watching Lily and her son, Michael, emerge from their house, and thinking Lily would probably know what kind of trees grew on Mad River Road. Lily was the kind of person who knew stuff like that. Maybe she’d ask her. Providing, of course, Lily was still speaking to her. She didn’t know if Lily had talked to Jeff Dawson, and if she had, how much he’d told her of the unfortunate incident at Marshalls. How was she going to explain that one? she wondered again, her resolve of last night weakening. Could she really trust Lily with the truth? Did she have any choice?
“Mom,” Dylan was saying, tugging at the sleeve of her denim jacket. “Mom, we’re going to be late.”
“What? Oh. Oh, sorry. I didn’t hear you come down. Are you ready now?”
Dylan lifted the mug above his head. “Nobody’s ever shown a mug before,” he said proudly. “Hey, there’s Michael. Hey, Michael!” he called out, already running down the street to where Lily and her son stood waiting. “I’ve got a mug for show-and-tell.”
“Hey, we have some of those,” Michael was saying as Emma approached.
“Hi,” Emma greeted Lily.
“Hi,” Lily said in return, looking toward the sidewalk.
She knows, Emma thought, falling in step beside her. “Hey, do you know what kind of trees these are?” She made an encompassing gesture with her hands that took in all the trees in the neighborhood.
“Well, these are maples, of course,” Lily said, managing to avoid looking at Emma as she glanced at her front lawn.
“Of course,” Emma agreed.
>
“And those are oaks.” She pointed in the direction of the blue Thunderbird.
“I guess I should know those things,” Emma said.
“Why?” Lily asked, still not looking at her as they turned the corner onto South Patterson.
“I don’t know.” Emma shrugged, wondering if she was just imagining Lily’s coolness. Maybe she was projecting the stiffness into Lily’s shoulders, exaggerating the natural reserve in her voice. Maybe Jeff hadn’t said anything to her at all. Emma wondered if there was any way to find out how much Lily knew, without revealing more than she had to. “So, did you do anything interesting last night?” she heard herself ask.
“Not really.”
Emma took a deep breath as the two boys raced on ahead.
“Jeff dropped by,” Lily said.
The breath caught in Emma’s throat, and she fought the urge to gag.
“He said he saw you yesterday.”
Emma waited, said nothing.
“In Marshalls,” Lily continued.
“Yes,” Emma agreed.
“He said—”
“Mommy,” Michael called back. “Hurry up. You’re walking too slow.”
“Yeah, too slow,” Dylan mimicked, laughing. He lifted his hands into the air, then dropped them to his sides, mimicking Emma’s earlier exasperation.
“Careful with the mug,” Emma warned. But it was already too late. The mug shot from Dylan’s hand, crashed to the sidewalk at his feet, and broke into dozens of pieces. “Shoot,” Emma muttered as her son began to wail.
Lily was immediately at his side, scooping up the broken pieces of cheap ceramic. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I know where we can get you another one just like it.”
“But I need it this morning.”
“We’ll get it right away. Okay?” Lily ran a motherly finger beneath Dylan’s watery eyes, wiping away his tears. “Now, you go to school, your mother will take the bus with me to Scully’s, she’ll get you another mug and bring it to your room in ten minutes. How’s that?”
“Ten minutes?”
“Maybe less.”
Dylan nodded, dislodging several more tears. Emma knew the tears wouldn’t stop until the new mug was safely in his hands.
“Okay, Dylan. Go with Michael now, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Ten minutes,” Dylan emphasized.
“Go,” Emma urged, giving her son a gentle pat on his backside as she pushed him toward the school yard at the end of the street. She shook her head. “Never a dull moment.”
“There’s the bus.” Lily indicated a bus that was fast approaching on the other side of the road.
As Emma ran after her, she saw the blue Thunderbird round the corner and come to a stop at the end of the street. She wondered only briefly what it was doing there as she followed Lily onto the bus, then took the seat beside her in the empty back row.
Lily didn’t waste any time. “Jeff told me what happened yesterday,” she began. “In Marshalls.”
“It’s not the way it sounds,” Emma said quickly.
“How is it?”
Emma bristled at the question. Did she really owe this woman an explanation?
Suddenly, the bus lurched to a stop, admitting two exuberant, teenage girls, who plopped themselves down in the seats on the other side of Emma, their books sliding off their laps and scattering on the bus floor.
“Oops,” one girl said, laughing, as she stretched across Emma’s legs to retrieve them.
“You’re so clumsy,” her friend giggled, lunging after the rest.
“This is so your fault,” said the first girl, whereupon both girls doubled over laughing.
“This probably isn’t the best time to be getting into all this,” Lily acknowledged.
“I agree.”
“But we need to talk about some things. Maybe when I finish work?”
“Fine,” Emma agreed, glancing out the back window. The blue Thunderbird was no longer visible. Such a pretty color, she thought again.
“You are in so much trouble,” the teenager beside her giggled to her friend as Emma turned back toward the front of the bus, staring straight ahead and trying not to think about anything.
“Where’s the bitch going now?” Brad asked, keeping the blue Thunderbird hidden behind a white Lexus SUV as he followed the bus past the school yard. He turned to the woman cowering in the seat beside him, as if he expected an answer to his question.
Jamie said nothing. Brad had told her this morning that he didn’t want to hear another word from her until they were safely out of Ohio or he’d kill her, the way he should have killed her last night, he’d added, and would have killed her, had she not fainted at the sight of the knife coming toward her throat. For some reason, he’d found that amusing, even endearing, as he did her spunk, he’d told her after reviving her with a cold glass of water tossed in her face. “You got a lot of spunk there, Jamie-girl,” he’d said. “Not a lot of smarts,” he’d added with a laugh. “But a lot of spunk.”
Her mother couldn’t have said it any better, Jamie thought now, wondering what the poor woman would say if she could see her daughter now, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, underlined in scaly crescents of dark purple, her pale skin splotchy, her lips cut and caked with streaks of dried blood, her arms covered with bruises, her stomach still aching from where he’d punched her, her neck still sore from being wrenched up and away from her shoulders. Why hadn’t he killed her? she wondered. What awful role did he intend for her to play in the hours ahead?
“It won’t be long now,” he answered, as if she’d asked the question out loud. “Soon as I can get the bitch alone …”
What happens then? Jamie asked silently.
“That’s when I’m gonna need your help,” he said.
And after he killed her? Was it to be Jamie’s turn next?
He’d known all along she was going to try to get away, he’d informed her last night, after barricading the door with enough furniture to ensure that even should he doze off—“Which I just might,” he’d teased, “since I haven’t slept a wink all night”—the noise of a table and two chairs, along with whatever else he’d added to the pile, being lifted or shoved aside would surely be enough to rouse him.
“You were awake the whole time?” she’d asked.
“The whole time,” he concurred. “Who could get any sleep with you getting up, down, up, down? I figured you were testing me, and I guess I was right, but let me tell you, I was getting a little impatient there, waiting for you to finally make up your mind and do something. You’d sit up, and I’d think, okay, this time she’s gonna really do it, and I’d kind of brace myself, although I had to make sure I kept my breathing nice and steady, so you’d think I was in la-la land. Prison teaches you things like that. You see, you can’t ever really let your guard down in prison, so you kind of learn to sleep with one eye open.” He’d shaken his head at the memory. “Anyway, I thought you did a pretty good job there, even though you never stood a chance. I thought it was kind of clever, the way you put on my T-shirt, so you wouldn’t have to go running out the door buck naked, although I’d almost have paid to see that, I tell you. Pretty clever of me too, wouldn’t you say, leaving my jeans hanging over the chair like that? Figured you couldn’t resist looking for those keys. It might have been smarter to head straight for the door, although I gotta tell you, you’d have been dead before you’d even gotten the chain off. So it’s probably a good thing for you, in retrospect,” he said, putting the last word in invisible italics, “that you did choose to go through my pockets. Probably saved your life. That, and fainting, of course. You’re awfully cute when you’re unconscious.” He’d tucked the covers around her chin, cuddled up beside her, allowed the blade of the knife to rest just behind her left ear. “Now I don’t want to hear another word outta you until we’re safely out of Ohio, or I’m gonna have to kill you.” And then he’d smiled. As he was smiling now. “Okay,” he was saying. “I can see you got a mill
ion questions, so I’m gonna be a nice guy and let you ask a couple. Go ahead—fire away.”
He was wrong, Jamie thought. She didn’t have a million questions. She had only one. “What is it you expect me to do?”
“Well, now, that’s pretty much gonna depend on what Beth does. And right now, it looks like she’s getting off this big old bus here.”
Jamie watched as the two women from Mad River Road stepped onto the pavement in front of a relatively nondescript strip mall and made their way through the parking lot, Brad keeping her car a suitable distance behind. “What about your son?” she ventured.
“He’s gotten so big, hasn’t he?” Brad asked proudly, as if she would know. “Amazing how fast they grow, isn’t it?” He pulled the car into a spot that afforded him a clear view of his former wife without being seen himself. “We’re not gonna do anything about my son just yet,” came his belated response. “Not until we take care of his mother.”
“And then?” Jamie watched the two women as they paraded past the various storefronts, barely aware she’d asked another question until it was out of her mouth.
“And then—nothing. We get out of Dodge, wait for the authorities to contact me with the terrible news about my ex-wife’s untimely death. And then Corey gets returned to his daddy. All nice and legal.”
“But surely they’ll suspect—”
“Hey, hey, hey. That’s enough questions for one morning. You let me worry about the rest, okay?”
Jamie nodded. Did he really think the authorities were just going to hand a young boy over to a violent felon, regardless of the fact they were father and son?
“ ’Course it wouldn’t hurt my case if I were married and settled down,” Brad said with a wink. “You said you’d always wanted to see Texas, didn’t you, Jamie-girl?”
Jamie sank down in her seat, beginning to suspect she was dead after all. Was it really possible she was receiving a proposal of marriage from a man who only hours before had come inches away from slitting her throat?
