by Kate Aeon
But he hated himself for it. He’d turned away from something magical.
He’d never experienced anything like those moments with Phoebe. Janet had been wild in her personal life, but distant in bed. She’d wanted to be admired — and the more men who admired her and chased after her, the happier she’d been. But she’d considered the act itself a messy duty and had refused anything but missionary sex.
He’d been faithful to Janet during their marriage, but it had been faithfulness born of his own sense of honor and the fact that he had taken an oath he intended to keep. Sex with her had always left him vaguely dissatisfied — he wanted to excite her, and the only thing that really made her happy was when he finished.
Since his wife’s death, he hadn’t been able to look at a woman without thinking of Janet and thinking, too, of the years of unhappiness the two of them had given each other. Women wanted to marry doctors. They wanted the prestige, the country-club lifestyle, and they were willing to lie on their backs and give doctors dutiful sex in exchange for charge cards at Neiman Marcus and a shot at the Junior League.
He started up the stairs. He should write. He needed to work on the book.
And then he looked over at the chandelier, with Phoebe’s panties still hanging on it, and his underwear on one side of the loft and his shirt on the other. He remembered Phoebe, her dark eyes gleaming with excitement, her skin warm beneath his fingers, her cries of pleasure as he touched her, and he started to get hard again. He could feel her teeth on his neck, her fingers in his hair, her sleek-muscled body naked beneath him. He could see her tossing and moaning as he teased her, and hear her screams as he brought her over the edge again and again.
God damn.
When he reached the loft, he looked at the expensive designer rug, now askew; at the upstairs coffee table cockeyed and with one corner shoved all the way up against the couch because he’d been chasing Phoebe across the floor with his tongue.
God damn.
He could close his eyes and see her in his bed for the rest of his life. And on the kitchen table. And up against a wall. And on the washing machine. And with that sweet round ass bent over the back of the couch. And out on the balcony, in clear view of God and everybody. He could see an entire lifetime of deliciously depraved sex in wild places with Phoebe.
Except, of course, that everything else stood in the way.
Tea. Hot green tea, poured through loose leaves in the strainer, with just enough honey to take the edge off the bitterness. Phoebe, underwear replaced and wearing jeans because the skirt had become an unbearable reminder of what she’d missed out on, stood in the kitchen. She heated the water, went through the ritual of making the tea, and poured it into her favorite cup — a big, heavy clear-glass mug from Target, not some delicate china thing from an expensive department store — and breathed in the aroma and tried to convince her heart to slow down. She took her seat at the kitchen table, and propped her bad leg on the footstool she kept beneath it, and closed her eyes.
And sipped.
Some woman had cheated on that man. Some shallow, brain-dead bitch had broken his heart, and all Phoebe could think was that death had been too easy for the worthless slut. Phoebe would have given anything to have someone like that to love her and touch her and want her, and instead she’d gotten Michael the monster, with whom she had experienced something that she had mistaken for sex a total of three times in their eight years of marriage, because Michael didn’t like the mess, or her body’s responses to even his awkward caresses — responses that disgusted him — and as much as that, Phoebe suspected he didn’t like his own body’s loss of control.
Michael had liked inflicting pain, though, both physical and mental, and so instead of sex he had introduced Phoebe to shame and degradation and fear and agony.
On the third and final time that he had experimented with actual sex, she’d gotten pregnant.
Phoebe had been ecstatic, imagining a baby as someone she could love who would love her back. Michael had been livid, and had accused her of sleeping around on him, and had taken her — the day after she told him — to a hunting cabin in the woods far from any help, claiming to his friends that the two of them were having problems with their marriage and that he was doing everything he could to save it. In that awful plywood shack he had beaten her within an inch of her life. Repeatedly. He’d kicked her, he’d hurt her, and in the end she’d lost the pregnancy.
She’d thought she was going to die, the bleeding had been so bad; he’d told her that because she’d been sleeping around on him, she was getting nothing less than she deserved. If she’d died, he would have told everyone that in spite of his best efforts she had left him. And almost everyone would have believed him. And no one would have known the truth.
Phoebe sipped her tea and pretended that living in a rented townhouse with three deadbolts and almost no furniture was normal, that reading cards for a phone psychic line was reasonable employment, that she had earned the life she was living and that she deserved nothing better.
But the touch of a stranger who had — if only for a moment — truly wanted her had undone her, and all the lies she’d told herself just to keep going lay revealed for what they were.
She’d been a kid from a poor family, the child of parents who’d moved from one end of the country to the other, dragging their little trailer and their two daughters from place to place in search of better work. The Rain girls were perpetual outsiders, forever the new kids, always rail-thin and dressed in homemade clothes; they clung to each other as best they could in a series of school systems that split them apart — different buses, different buildings, different playgrounds — but mostly they were alone. Phoebe’s mother kept Phoebe and Nicki clean, kept after their vocabularies with a bar of soap and their manners with the fastest yardstick in fifty states, and made sure they went to church Sundays, kept their grades up, and were respectful of their teachers, so that they wouldn’t earn the epithet “trailer-park trash.” But they got it anyway.
Both girls believed that their family was special and meant for greater things, because both their father and mother told them it was so.
Phoebe, the first child, had graduated from high school with honors and worked her way through college on scholarships, student loans, and work-study programs, and had been the first person in her family to graduate from college, staying in school even after her parents’ and sister’s deaths destroyed her world. She’d gotten a job as a teacher because teachers, to her, symbolized a sort of stability that she could only imagine.
She’d been a good girl. Had waited until she graduated and had a job lined up to get married, had waited until she was married to have sex, had married a handsome boy from a good family, had shaken off the trailer-park dust and the endless wandering, had sworn to put down roots and build a strong home and a strong family in one place. She had promised herself that she would belong somewhere and that she would make her life good. That she would stick, because that was what her parents had wanted for her.
She’d stuck. When, even before she married Michael, things started to feel wrong, she’d stuck. For her vision of roots, a stable life, security. She’d stuck through bad, and through worse, and then through her own little slice of hell itself, and — finally, finally, finally — when some sliver of sanity made its way through her bullheaded promise to herself and showed her that she had to run or die, running had still felt like defeat. Like she’d failed.
And when she’d found the courage to start over, to rebuild her life, to claim a place for herself as a teacher and to try once more to put down roots and to belong, that had twisted into a deeper hell.
And now she stayed not because she had roots but because she was afraid to move. She was afraid to live. She’d become a ghost in her own life, moving in rote patterns, changing nothing, invisible to almost everyone. She had let cowardice and self-pity absorb her — had chosen solitude and fear.
And then, for just an instant, she’d had
a taste of what really living might be like.
Phoebe sipped her tea and pictured the life she’d planned for herself. A piece of ground she owned, a house without cinder blocks beneath it or wheels hidden away under aluminum skirting, a big brood of kids who would all have friends they knew from earliest childhood and with whom they would grow up and share memories. And a man who came through the door each day from whatever sort of day he’d had, but whose face lit up when he saw her. A man whose hands touched her with longing and hunger, who made her laugh, who brought not chaos but stability into her life. A man who would cherish her. A man who would love her.
She might have been a fool to think that she could have all that — that if she were just good enough, she could wheedle such a future out of the Fates. She might have been a fool to dream.
But Alan’s touch had shaken that damned dream off its dusty shelf and brought it roaring back to life, leaving her feeling hungry and passionate and wistful. And foolish.
Because Michael was calling. A child’s ghost was warning her of disaster yet to come. Any dreams Phoebe had ever dared dream were dead and burned to ashes and scattered to the four winds.
The phone rang. Not the psychic hotline phone, just the regular one. But the hair stood up on Phoebe’s arms.
What if it were Michael? She didn’t want to pick up the phone. But she wanted to know why he was calling.
She stared at the receiver. Caller ID wasn’t showing anything. Not PRIVATE NAME. Not UNKNOWN NAME, UNKNOWN NUMBER. Just nothing.
Hand shaking, she reached over and lifted the receiver. “Hello.” Her angry voice cut, knife-edged, through the silence in the room.
And on the other end, a voice sounded nervous and not like Michael. “Phoebe? Is this Phoebe?”
Ben Margolies.
The shaking in her hand got worse, and she pinned the phone to her ear with her shoulder to keep from dropping it and pressed both her hands flat on the table in front of her.
“This is Phoebe.”
“It took me a while to find your number,” Ben said, and she thought he must be lying. This call confirmed her suspicions. Ben had given her number to Michael; that was how Michael had it. Ben had told Michael how to connect with her employer, how to use the system, how to find her. He’d done a good job of hiding his complicity when she was in the shop, but he was involved in whatever was going on. “It seemed like something was really wrong when you were in the shop today. I wanted to check on you — just make sure you were all right. Maybe take you out for... coffee or dinner.”
Phoebe closed her eyes, swallowing against rising nausea. If she went out with him, then what? Would he kidnap her? Or kill her? Was he working for Michael?
Michael was in a coma in a nursing home in Ohio. Michael was in a coma.
None of this made any sense, because Michael was in a coma, and Michael couldn’t be calling; and Ben couldn’t know Michael.
But Phoebe couldn’t go out with Ben. Couldn’t trust Ben, because Ben knew everything Michael had needed to know, and now Michael had found her.
Phoebe hung up the phone without saying anything else, and almost instantly it rang again.
She wasn’t going to pick it up. She wasn’t. Caller ID still showed nothing on the screen.
Phoebe listened to it ring three times, then picked it up.
“Slut,” Michael snarled in her ear. “Two of them in one day, you bitch. You cunt. You fucking whore.”
She slammed the phone down in its cradle and hobbled into the bathroom as fast as she could and barely made it to the toilet in time. She vomited. Out on the kitchen table, the phone was ringing. And ringing. And ringing. In the bathroom, kneeling on the tile with her knee in screaming agony, puking her way to dry heaves, clinging to cold porcelain, Phoebe willed it all to stop, prayed that it would stop.
Eventually the phone stopped ringing.
Eventually her stomach exhausted itself.
Eventually she wobbled upright, and brushed her teeth, and showered, and shrugged into her bathrobe. She couldn’t stay like this, with Michael calling her, with Ben calling her, with her fear and the insane impossibility of it all.
Tea. She needed a soothing cup of green tea to settle her stomach. Maybe a few soda crackers.
Phoebe left the bathroom, went around the corner, and her tea mug wasn’t on the table.
She’d left it on the table.
She looked underneath — maybe in her run for the bathroom, she’d knocked it off. But, no, it wasn’t there either.
She straightened and frowned. She’d been sitting at the table drinking tea. The phone had rung. She’d answered it against her better judgment and had hung up, and it had rung again, and the second time it had been Michael, and from there she had fled to the bathroom. So the mug should have still been on the table, or perhaps under it. She checked the floor all around the table, but she didn’t have much furniture, and no clutter, so there wasn’t anyplace where it could have fallen that she wouldn’t have seen it.
It wasn’t there.
She walked around the raised counter where she kept her fruit in bowls, and into the tiny galley kitchen.
And there was the tea mug, sitting beside the sink where she left it when she was going to wash it. Empty, except for some leaves in the bottom, dried in place.
They couldn’t be dried — she would have had to leave it sitting out all night for them to be dry, and she’d just had tea.
Her teakettle was full of water and cold. Her box of loose-leaf green tea was not on the counter where she was sure she’d left it; instead it was up in the cupboard.
She’d had a cup of tea. She knew she had.
Hadn’t she?
She leaned against the counter, feeling panic rising.
Carefully, she made her way back out to the kitchen table, picked up the phone, and dialed *69.
It rang, and on the second ring Ben picked up and said, “Moonstruck New Age Shoppe — readings, supplies, and more. This is Ben Margolies. May I help you?”
Phoebe hung up the phone. It hadn’t connected her to Michael.
The phone never connected her to Michael. Never gave her any proof that he’d called her. And Michael was in a coma in a nursing home in Ohio.
She walked back into the kitchen and stared at the tea mug on the counter with its crust of dried leaves in the bottom.
There was another explanation for everything that was happening to her, one she hadn’t sufficiently addressed.
The phantom phone calls from the comatose ex-husband, the visitations by the ghost child, and the tea that she seemed not to have made all had a simple explanation.
She was losing her mind.
Too much time alone, too much stress, too much guilt — she remembered the term from her abnormal psychology course. “Psychotic break.” That was a sort of mental snap that changed someone from a normal person to a crazy one — maybe dangerously crazy. Maybe Phoebe was experiencing a psychotic break. What if there had been no phone calls from Michael? What if every bit of it had been in her head? She could really hurt someone. What if she thought she saw Michael standing in a crowd, pulled out her handgun, and shot him, and it wasn’t Michael after all but just some tall man with dark hair and a good smile?
Phoebe really needed to know that Michael was in a coma. That the nurse hadn’t lied to her. If she knew that, she would know that she was safe from him, and she would... see a psychiatrist, maybe. Or put herself in voluntary lockup at whatever facility Broward County had for the dangerously insane.
But she had to know.
She stood there for a long moment, considering, and decided the FBI was her best bet. Michael had crossed state lines to murder people once before. He had escaped prosecution by virtue of being in a coma, but his family had a lot of money, and they weren’t the most ethical people in the world.
They’d seemed like nice enough people when Michael took her home to meet them. Hardworking folks who’d come up from nothing to become pillars o
f their community. Michael’s father bought houses, fixed them up, and rented them, and from the money he made doing that, he bought businesses. Michael’s mother had been born well-off and, for reasons known only to her, had married beneath herself. She had then shaped Michael’s father to fit into the society that was her home. She played hostess to increasingly important partners and clients and considered it her job to keep the best face on everything her husband did. When her children started growing up, it was her job to keep the best face on everything they did, too. No matter what they did.
And she was good at her job.
Phoebe had needed a while to discover that neither Mr. Schaeffer, nor Michael, nor any of Michael’s siblings, had ever faced the consequences of their actions. And that people who were protected from the consequences of their actions turned into monsters, to the precise degree that they were protected.
Phoebe wondered if somehow Michael’s mother had figured out a way to protect him from the murder he’d committed. If Michael was still in a coma. If the man in the nursing home bed was really Michael.
It sounded paranoid as hell, but this was Michael she was dealing with, and Michael had called her.
She found her phone book, located the number for the local branch office of the FBI, and explained her situation to the agent who took her call. He was a patient man, and she was completely straight with him, telling him what she had experienced and what she suspected, but also explaining that she had been unable to track the calls from Michael and that a nurse at the nursing home had insisted that Michael was still in a coma.
The agent suggested that she contact her local police department to see about getting a tap put on her phone, but he also said that because of the seriousness of the crimes that Michael had committed, he would pass on the information that she had given him to the appropriate people in Ohio and that he would let her know what they found out. He said it might take a few days for her to hear back; he didn’t know how their workload was.
She returned to the kitchen, washed out her cup, emptied her kettle and rinsed it, refilled it, put the water on to heat, and then sat down at her table to wait.
