by Kate Aeon
Phoebe went to Winn-Dixie and wandered up and down the aisles, getting a few cans of beans, three cantaloupes, and a bag of grapefruit. Her thoughts bounced between the doctor who had run into her and Michael. She was surprised to discover that she wanted to like the doctor. She would never have noticed him, really. He was, well, plain. Sandy brown hair cut short, kept neat; light blue-gray eyes; straight white teeth in a face that had regular features that didn’t quite add up to handsome.
She looked at him and thought, Reliable.
Not like Michael.
Nothing like Michael, who had been dark and handsome, who’d had women swarming around him hoping for one of his electric smiles.
Michael.
Phoebe shivered and blamed it on being in the produce aisle. It probably hadn’t been Michael on the phone, though she wished she could afford a quick trip to Cleveland to be sure. If she could see him curled in the bed, not responding to anything, she would feel better.
By the time she got home, her anxiety had passed; she felt certain she could figure out who was calling her and put an end to it somehow. She put two bags down on her front stoop and started unlocking the deadbolts, but stopped as she realized she was being watched. She looked to her left and to her right. No one.
She felt the steady stare, though. The fine hairs on her arms and on the back of her neck rose, her heart began pounding, and her breathing got quicker. She unlocked the door, dragged her bags into the house, and locked each of the deadbolts behind her. Then she leaned against the cool, painted metal, shaking.
The sensation should have passed. But it didn’t. Instead, it got worse. Her nerves and her gut insisted that even in her home, with the curtains drawn and the doors and windows all locked and securely barred, someone still watched her.
She left the groceries on the floor and grabbed the pistol — a Browning Mark III — from her backpack. She didn’t have to fish around for it. When she got her Florida carry-concealed license, she sewed a holster into the front section of the backpack so all she had to do was reach beneath the front flap, unsnap the holster, and pull the weapon out. Gun in hand, Phoebe leaned against the door and put most of her weight on her stronger leg, the left one. Then, safety thumbed to off, stance wide, and pistol gripped in both hands just the way the cop she’d trained with at the range had taught her, she surveyed the spaces before her. Stairs right in front of her leading up to a railed loft; most people, she supposed, used that loft as a TV room or a playroom. She didn’t use it at all — no furniture, no storage, nothing — so nothing blocked her view. No one up there. The second-floor bedroom door was closed, the way she’d left it. She hated the idea of fighting the steps to get up there. But she might have to, just to check things out.
To her right lay the open door to her bedroom. She could see her bed, the door into the connecting bathroom beyond, her closet door along the back wall. Bathroom door open, closet door closed. Had she left that closed? She couldn’t remember. No one in the visible part of her bedroom, but there might be someone behind the partially open door to her right, up against the wall.
She scanned left. Impossible to tell about the kitchen, which lay all the way to the back of the open space, half hidden by the bar and shadows — because she’d turned the lights off back there before she left the house. Shit. Her gaze moved forward — her little dining room table, four chairs in their places, tarot stuff still spread all over. Underneath — nothing. Closer, the couch, which stuck out from the wall. Might be someone on hands and knees behind that. Dammit, she needed to rethink how she had her furniture arranged. She’d provided too many hiding places, when the place already offered too many.
She could put a few mirrors around, convex ones that would let her see into the blind spots. One of those would let her see the spot that concerned her most at the moment — the place just to her left, where the tiny coat closet jutted out from the wall and then, on the opposite side, dropped back, forming a little alcove where her television and a couple of bookshelves sat. Someone could be standing right there, just an arm’s reach away from her, and she wouldn’t know it until he burst out from around the corner.
So. How did she move so that she could check out the house? Possible danger to the left. To the right, behind the open door to her bedroom. In front of her, from both the couch and the kitchen. Did she trust her leg to get her safely out the door and back to her car?
Something moved. Back behind the table, in front of the bar, she saw someone take two steps forward and turn huge eyes on her. She aimed at the space between those eyes across the Browning’s sights — then realized the person against the wall was a kid. A girl. Cute. Blonde hair. Maybe seven or eight.
“Oh, hell,” Phoebe whispered and, shaking, lowered the gun. The kid took two more steps toward her, raised a hand, opened her mouth to say something. And vanished.
Phoebe’s shaking got much worse.
The feeling that someone was watching her disappeared with the kid. Phoebe was once again alone in the house — she knew she was alone in the house, the way she could tell sometimes what the cards were going to be before she even turned them over. But being alone in the house had ceased to be the issue.
Hands trembling so badly she could barely hang on to the Browning, she managed to thumb the safety back into place and get the pistol back into its holster in her backpack. She let the backpack slide to the floor, let the door support most of her weight, wrapped her arms tight around herself.
Was she crazy? She’d thought she might have been the last time.
Shortly before Michael tracked her down two years earlier, she’d started hearing voices. Or, more precisely, a voice. Her favorite grandmother’s. When Phoebe slept, Nana appeared in her dreams, shaking her head, telling Phoebe that disaster was coming. When she drove to work, Nana told her to keep going, to not look back. And when she stood in front of the classroom, it was Nana’s voice whispering, “Run.”
Phoebe wrapped her arms tighter around herself, fighting the wash of memories.
...screaming... the white-lightning flash of pain, the taste of iron... blood on the chalkboard...
Phoebe hadn’t listened to the voice. Hadn’t believed. Her grandmother had been dead for almost eight years at the time, and Phoebe had been sure she was suffering from stress and overwork, that hearing the voice was just imagination. She had not wanted to believe, had not wanted to throw away every bit of the life she had fought so hard to rebuild. She kept telling herself that she had earned her life, and the voice kept telling her she hadn’t — that she had to run.
...blood on the floor... on the desks... on the display tables and the reports in careful cursive on lined three-hole notebook paper...
Phoebe couldn’t breathe.
She shook, and closed her eyes tightly against the memory of the child standing there, looking at her, trying to tell her something. Maybe the child had been a hallucination. Maybe the phone call had not been real and the child’s ghost had not been real, and Phoebe was simply losing her mind. That would be best — madness would be far preferable to the alternative. Because if she were going mad, she would still be safe inside her locked doors. He wouldn’t be coming for her.
Again.
But could she hide behind the hope of insanity?
...blood on the walls... and small, broken bodies still beneath white sheets... and the anguished wails of bereaved parents...
Madness would be a comfort. But Phoebe hadn’t listened before; she had instead sought comfort in excuses and a foolish faith in rationality, and the price of that had been more than she could bear.
Under different circumstances, she would tell herself that the constant grind of guilt and worry and the awful scramble to keep a roof over her head and the lights on and food on her table had taken its toll, and she would laugh a little and shake off what had just happened. Just as she’d done before.
Phoebe, however, didn’t have different circumstances. She had her circumstances, and her circu
mstances included a man with Michael’s voice calling her on a phone for which he should not have had the number, for which he could not have gotten her name. It included a phone call that had come through a closed system without leaving a trace. And it included the image of a dead child trying to tell her something before vanishing.
The phone call had been real. The man on the phone wasn’t Michael. Couldn’t be Michael. Couldn’t be. But even if it wasn’t Michael, it was someone who could imitate Michael’s voice, someone who knew things about her that only Michael had known. It could be someone who hated her enough to try to turn himself into the man who had made her eight years of married life and three years of hiding a living, breathing hell. She ran lists through her head.
Who hated her that much? One of Michael’s relatives? The father of one of the kids who died? Some psycho she’d picked up who wasn’t related to her past at all?
Any of the above, or none of the above. Then who knew her that well? Who knew them — the couple that Phoebe and Michael had been, with all their terrible secrets?
Nobody.
The people at Sebastian Bright Experimental School knew some of the story, and the police knew most of it, but the real details — Michael’s voice, his tone, the way he spoke to her and the words he used — were something only the two of them had known during the eight years of their marriage. Michael was a brilliant and dedicated criminal defense lawyer in front of his partners, his clients, the judges; an affable, intelligent, loving husband in front of her family, his family, the members of the country club, complete strangers.
She closed her eyes, hugging herself hard just to keep from feeling like she was going to fly apart, remembering the day she’d finally gathered up the nerve to tell someone the truth. Ran through the Yellow Pages, looking for women’s shelters. Found several, dialed the first one on the list, waited for someone to pick up, and when at last a woman answered the phone, said, “I need help. My husband is... hurting me. Please. I need help.”
“Where are you?” the woman had asked, skipping past all the unnecessary details and going straight to the heart of the matter.
And Phoebe had looked up to find Michael standing these, staring at her, smiling, his index finger pointed between her eyes, his thumb up. Pow! he mouthed, pulling the imaginary trigger.
Phoebe had hung up the phone without answering, staring at that unwavering smile, at the implied gun.
“Naughty girl,” Michael had said. “Hope I heard all there was to hear of that, or whoever you called is going to have a terrible accident.”
Terrified, her heart pounding, she’d dared to stand up to him. “I’ve had enough, Michael. You can’t do this anymore. I’m not your prisoner, I’m not your slave, I’m not a toy for your sick games.” She’d jammed her shoulders back straight and snarled, “And I’m not Eileen. I’m sorry she hurt you, I’m sorry she left you, but I’m not going to pay for what she did to you for the rest of my life.”
And that smile had changed. Michael had watched her, so amused, so delighted. Murmured gently, “No one leaves me, Phoebe.”
“Eileen did.”
“Did she? Mmmmmmm. Lucky Eileen. And you want to follow in her footsteps.”
His smile vanished then, and Michael stared into Phoebe’s eyes, and she felt like she was falling down a well. His voice got softer. She knew in that instant what some part of her had suspected for years. No matter the sad story of betrayal he’d spun her when they were dating — his fiancé, Eileen Ganella, hadn’t left him at the altar. She hadn’t shown up for her own wedding because she was dead; he’d killed her. He’d successfully gotten away with murder once, and if Phoebe crossed him, he intended to do it again.
And he said, “You won’t leave me, Phoebe. Not ever.”
That was the moment she knew that if she stayed with him she was going to die.
Hot tears burning down her cheeks — tears of shame that she could be so much a coward, tears of fear that her life could mean so little, could be crushed out so quickly — she’d hung her head and said, “No, Michael. I’m... sorry I tried to tell someone. I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again. And I won’t leave you.” She had taken his punishment like an obedient slave. Had endured the humiliation yet again, the careful, methodical torture.
And the next morning, when she knew he was in court with a client, she ran. Aching and stiff, terrified for her life — but not bruised, because he never allowed any evidence of his brutality to show — she withdrew five hundred dollars cash from an ATM using two credit cards she’d stolen from his wallet. She knew the PINs she wasn’t supposed to know — she’d watched him when he didn’t know she was watching, and she got them one number at a time over a period of weeks. He changed PINs fairly often. Just not quite often enough.
She’d also used his platinum American Express card to buy three bus tickets, all from different booths. She gave a one-way ticket to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a plump young woman with wistful eyes who’d been staring at a travel poster, and a one-way ticket to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to a relatively clean homeless man who had seen something of her terror in her eyes and had spoken kindly to her. She kept the one-way ticket to San Francisco for herself. When the bus got as far as Toledo, however, she got off, gave her seat to a man who said he’d always wanted to go to California, and purchased another ticket for herself.
To Miami.
With her small supply of cash.
She diced both of Michael’s credit cards into confetti with a sharp pair of scissors, scattered the confetti in three different full trash cans, and got on her new bus. From Miami, she headed back to Fort Lauderdale. She’d never been there, knew no one in the vicinity, had no reason to run there — and she’d made sure that anyone Michael sent to ask after her would be able to figure out that the person who had taken the Fort Lauderdale ticket that she’d purchased had not been her.
She’d hoped that when he eliminated Fort Lauderdale, Albuquerque, and eventually San Francisco, he would never consider those places again. That her careful deception would put him off her trail forever. Nonetheless, that finger had stayed pointed between her eyes for the three years she’d eluded him, and that smile had never left her nightmares, waking or sleeping.
“You won’t leave me, Phoebe. Not ever.”
In the end, he’d been wrong. And right. When he found her, she beat him. She won. But the price she’d paid in winning scarred her in ways she would never escape. She would never again walk without pain. Would never again trust. Would never again love. Would never escape the guilt or the nightmares that she’d earned for allowing other people to stand between her and Michael.
For just an instant she thought of her next-door neighbor — the doctor with the kind eyes. She remembered the gentleness of his touch as he checked her knee for damage, the way he tried to conceal his horror at her scars. He’d seemed — kind. Genuine. He hadn’t been particularly tall or particularly handsome, but Michael had been both those things. The doctor — Alan — was someone that she’d wanted to like. She’d liked his hands on her knee, his wary smile, his wonderful, rich voice in the ordinary face.
But someone with Michael’s voice had called her. The dead had come to visit. She wasn’t safe. She would never be safe. She couldn’t let her guard down for an instant. Could not chance having someone standing between her and Michael a second time if Michael returned.
Besides, her neighbor was simply another unknown. Another hazard. The men who seemed best on the outside — good families, good jobs, good looks — were sometimes the worst on the inside. And how could anyone tell until it was too late?
Chapter Three
Alan stood over a stretcher in the ER, looking down at a dead woman whose unblinking eyes stared up at him. Janet, he thought, but Janet had been blonde and stunning, and this woman had dark hair and was... ordinary. Then she smiled, and her face changed — and she became his pretty next-door neighbor. Smiling. But still dead.
He woke and sat up and s
hook his head from side to side to clear the nightmare. “Hell,” he whispered. Except for that first year after he lost Janet and Chick, he’d never been subject to nightmares — not the kind that came while he was asleep, anyway. He had always been a good sleeper. He brought his work home with him; no matter what anyone might say, doctors who gave a shit about their patients did. But he’d never carried his work into his sleep before.
“Hell and fuck that.” He still breathed hard, and he realized he’d knotted the sheet in his hands. He was sweating. Middle of the day, hot as hell in the house — of course he was sweating. Which was probably what had caused the nightmare, too.
He considered going back to sleep, but he didn’t want to sleep. If he was going to have dreams like that, he’d invest in coffee and never go back to sleep again.
He decided he might as well go work on his secret project for a while, the thing no one he worked with, no one related to him, and not a single friend new about. He stretched and headed upstairs to his home office and the computer. Turned it on, brought up the document he’d been working on, and did a search for “aaa” — his place marker.
He wasn’t too far into the book. He’d forgotten how much he’d deleted. Dammit. He settled into his chair and stared at the blinking line of the cursor, at the nearly empty document, at the smattering of letters on the screen. He rested his hands on the keyboard, fingers on the home row, and he waited for the words to come.
The world stayed with him, though he needed it to fall away. The soft whir of the computer fan. From overhead, a small twin-engine plane circling for a landing at Executive Airfield. The ticking of his watch, usually inaudible but now painfully loud. The oppressive air of waiting gave the townhouse a silence deeper than mere stillness.
The pretty woman next door.
From somewhere in the house, a soft thump that set his heart racing... and then the air conditioner kicked on. Alan sighed, the release from the tension almost painful, as if he’d been an overinflated balloon that had finally burst. Air conditioner. Outside, the temperature was in the high nineties. Without AC, indoors began to feel like the inside of an oven by ten a.m. And because he ran the damned air conditioner all the time, it wore out and broke down frequently. He had some sort of compressor problem, perhaps. Or maybe the ants had gotten into the outdoor circuitry again and eaten the plastic coating off the wiring. That had been $430 to fix last October, when it was still hotter than hell.
