Her shoulders slumped, and her voice dropped even lower. “I don’t even remember how it began exactly. But what I’m doing is right. Happy marriages are so rare. When they end because of death, there shouldn’t be anyone left behind. I wait for them. I give them some time to see if they can find someone else to love, but true love doesn’t come around that often, so I help them to not suffer any more. It’s like Romeo and Juliet.”
It really wasn’t, and I didn’t think it fair to Shakespeare to pull him into this fiasco. That was a beef that could wait for another time, though. I said, “What I meant was, why did you push me to find out about it? You know you could have gone on meting out your own brand of romance indefinitely. No one knew about it.”
“Your detective was going to find out. Your detective came here. No one else has ever gotten anywhere near, except for years and years ago at the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“But I fixed that problem, and I could keep helping here, where the widows came. And I could help end the good marriages and the bad marriages, too.”
I didn’t suppose Aven Fisher knew about this alternate side to his practice of domestic law. I had a terrible impulse to laugh, but I held it in. This was probably not the best time for uproarious chuckles. Charlene caught the near-hysterical twitch at the corner of my mouth and told me, “You’ve probably never seen how beautiful it is, and how brave it is, for a woman to die when she loses the man she loves. The women in my family were never afraid to do the right thing. My grandmother wasn’t. And when I was very young, my mother—”
She stopped herself and peered at me hard. Perhaps I’d looked a bit too interested in this. Succinctly she finished, “It’s the right thing to do. I’m helping.”
Charlene was too intelligent to believe that I’d wholeheartedly agree with this, so I did not pretend to do so. I said, “Charlene, you have to know that you’re not helping anyone. You’re hurting a lot of people. Otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to pin the blame on someone else.”
“What the law says is right and what I know inside to be right are two different things—and the law and everyone else doesn’t see any difference. You don’t, obviously.”
“What I think doesn’t matter.”
“All of a sudden, what you think seems to be the only thing that matters.” She didn’t look at me, but at the floor when she asked next, “What are you going to do?”
“What do you want to do?”
She shrugged her shoulders absently and stepped away from me to walk part of the way down a narrow row of shelves heavy with boxes, gazing at them as if she were perusing titles in a bookstore. I realized this was the second time that day that I’d hidden in a file room with Charlene. It seemed like almost everything I did gave me a bad feeling of déjà vu. I had expended almost all my energy coping with Bill, so I was not thrilled to have another case on my hands.
“I’ll stop,” Charlene said, suddenly spinning to face me. “I promise I won’t do it again. If you could just let it go, we don’t need to ever hear any more about it.”
I refrained from pressing her as to why she’d decided killing widows was a cool idea in the first place. There were not enough hours left in the day for me to hear or understand that story. And though once again this was just what I’d heard on detective shows, I didn’t think serial murderers could “just stop” whenever they want to. That was not really important at the moment. What mattered was getting her back upstairs to the office where I could deal with her in a crowd of people, hopefully some of them armed.
“So, how would that work?” I asked. “I really don’t want Bill to have to take the blame for this.”
“He won’t have to.”
“He already is.”
“Right,” she said rather spitefully. “They didn’t even arrest him. What I mean is, there’s a file upstairs. It’s still there today; the police haven’t found it yet, I guess. It’s on Bill’s miscellaneous file shelf in Lloyd’s file room. The police must have missed those yesterday, but I was sure they’d be back.”
“Okay, but what’s in the file?”
Charlene didn’t say, but she slid a slow, lurking smile in my direction that made me feel like I’d just run my nails down a piece of dry stiff velvet. She said, “If they don’t find that file, I doubt they’ll ever be able to make a firm case against anyone. So, how about I just take the file away, make it disappear, and that’s the end of it. That clears Bill and everyone else, and I’ll go to Aven and ask him to make sure you don’t get fired. I’m sure Bill will go to bat for you, too. No harm done.”
I thought that “no harm done” was a relative phrase, since she’d racked up a body count of at least nine, but arguing about ethics was better left to others. I said, “Whatever we do, let’s do it upstairs. I need to go get fired, and like you said, Aven left a pile of work on your desk.”
“Okay. Hey, can I have my car keys?”
The original purpose for our storage room meeting seemed like an event from another decade. For a second I couldn’t even think why she was asking me for such a thing. Then I snapped back to reality, slipped my hand into my skirt pocket, and pulled out the ring of keys. I had to take a couple steps toward her, still flanked by the rickety old shelves. The claustrophobia was hard to take. I did not want to be close to her. She sensed this, too, and refused to budge, just holding out her hand as I dropped the keys into it. There was a little smirk on her face. What was I going to do? I was trying to convince her that all was well enough that she and I could just go back to work—or go back and be fired from work, respectively.
But then she turned her head sharply toward the dark recesses in the back of the room. Her face screwed up with exasperation. She raised her voice and spoke into the darkness. “Hello. Who’s back there?”
I turned to see what she was talking about. I hadn’t heard anyone, but another employee in the room would be a great relief. My mind flashed to a quick thought. Lloyd?
“You might as well come out,” Charlene told the hidden voyeur, as she dropped back out of my line of sight
“I don’t think there’s anyone there,” I said, turning back to her.
The word magicians use is “misdirection,” which is what Charlene had just done to me while she picked up a weapon from the wide selection of debris in the room. I had a moment to register surprise that her arms were raised over her head. Then something dark swooped down, and the world split apart and cracked brightly as Charlene brought a loose file drawer bracket down on my left temple. File brackets are about three feet long, made of steel, sharp edged and capable of doing serious injury to an unwary secretary’s fingers. It was the equivalent of being bludgeoned with a dull axe. The impact knocked me sideways into the shelves of boxes, stunning me so that I didn’t even feel pain. A second blow landed on the back of my head. That one was more powerfully incapacitating, dazing me enough that I dropped to my hands and knees. Three bright red drops plopped onto the floor before my eyes and made big crimson circles that doubled, tripled and then swam in an amazing, nauseating loop as more blood fell. Moaning, I squeezed my eyes closed.
“You’re crazy about Bill Nestor, and you turned him in to the cops the first chance you got,” said Charlene’s voice from somewhere near the ceiling. “I know you’d give me up in a heartbeat.”
While she spoke, I struggled to sit up. I was unsuccessful; all I managed to do was lurch in a sloppy half-circle, like a drunken dog trying to find a place to sleep. Charlene’s voice moved into the next aisle and deliberately, with one great straining groan, she pushed the entire world down on me. Out of the corner of my swimming vision, I saw a barrage of forty-pound boxes hurtling down from the tipping shelf, slamming into me, knocking the wind out of me so that the only noise I could make was one pathetic “whoomp” before I was smothered under a landslide of paper. A few more painful thuds registered through my pummeled body, but I still didn’t have the presence of mind to be more than stupidly baffled by my p
redicament.
From somewhere beyond my landslide grave, I heard, “I’m sorry, Carol—I really, really am.”
Then I heard the sound of her footsteps, muffled through the haze of my slipping consciousness, and a moment later, the door slammed closed as everything went utterly dark.
Chapter Seventeen
Somewhere across town, Gus Haglund was interviewing Bill Nestor and seeing, as I had known in my heart, that this lawyer was a decent human being who happened to have obsessive-compulsive disorder but certainly was no killer. Suddenly, Gus looked up as if his name had been called from a long distance away. He had a terrible feeling that something was wrong. My face flashed in his mind, and he rose to his feet, saying, “Get a squad car over to MBS&K stat!”
Within fifteen minutes, I was being extracted, bloodied and badly bruised, but otherwise unharmed, from under the boxes in the storage room. Gus seized me and held me against him, saying, “Thank God we got here in time.” Then I was taken to a private hospital room where I convalesced for several days until Terry Bronk came to my room and begged me to come back to work because no one else could do my job. I demanded a raise and got it, so I said, “Sure, I’ll come back right after my honeymoon in Paris.” That’s where I was soon to be headed with Gus, my fiancé.
*****
That sounded like a perfectly reasonable rescue to me, as I lay under a crush of boxes in the total darkness of the storage room. Except that I may have gotten some details wrong. Gus and I didn’t share any psychic link that I knew of. Also, detectives don’t say “stat;” doctors say “stat.” The scenario didn’t account for why anybody would think to look for me in the storage room. And imagining that Terry Bronk would offer me my job plus a raise was really just the ravings of a woman with a concussion.
At first my head was shrieking with the bright agony of being creamed with a sharp metal bar. When that pain faded to a raging roar, I had the rest of my pummeled body to contend with. I did not think I’d broken any bones, unless Charlene had managed to crack my skull, but I hurt, badly, in parts that had never had hurt before. But this pain, too, began to fade into obscurity as breathing became increasingly, scarily difficult. The air I could manage suck in, as if through a straw, was woefully under the legal limits for sustaining life.
But I must, must, must stay calm, I told myself. The more frightened I felt, the harder it was to make use of the reedy whispers of air left to me. I counted to twenty, gasping, and made myself concentrate. The darkness, I was relieved to realize, was thanks to Charlene’s snapping off the lights, and not because she had actually blinded me. Still, knowing the cause of my blindness didn’t help cure it. If I couldn’t figure out which way was up, freeing myself would be all the more difficult. And my progress was being clocked by my aching lungs.
All right, then. “Up” was where the paper and boxes were crushing my back. Okay. “Down” was my face, smashed against the cold tile floor and sticky with blood. Where were my hands? I located them at the ends of my arms. Could they move? One of them could. My left hand was not pinned, though most of my left arm was from the elbow up. The fingers were tingling but not yet numb. Fine. One hand is better than nothing.
In addition to the numerous heavy boxes on my back, the two metal shelving units that were now braced against each other had made an upright dam that kept everything in place, with me as an unwilling lodestone at the bottom. I couldn’t hope for an avalanche to provide freedom. I thought perhaps I could lever myself against the floor and shove my way out from under the enormous weight. Actually, there was no “perhaps” about it. I had to do this because it could be hours before a clerk or Lloyd came down here, and I could easily suffocate by then. If I lost consciousness, I was a goner for sure.
I remembered, in those dark minutes, that I had failed to prepare a will. If I made it out of here, I’d have to ask Bill to draw one up for me. And I must make it out, because it would be so humiliating to be the first secretary in history to die literally buried under a mountain of paperwork.
When you’re squirming to get out from under a ton of boxes, you think things like, “I should have worked out more.” I needed powerful thigh muscles to extricate myself from this, but I didn’t have them. Struggling takes up so much damned air. Freaking out was once again sounding like a good option. Maybe if I freaked out, I could bust right up through all this junk like the Incredible Hulk, my shirt torn to ribbons from my bulging green muscles. No such luck. I couldn’t move forward, not an inch. But after a time, which seemed like airless, hallucinating hours, I discovered that I could move backwards. The lower half of my body wasn’t nearly as trapped as the upper half (the half, unfortunately, that liked the oxygen so much), and I found I could wriggle and writhe my legs and hips.
Over the long, sweaty course of scraping myself hideously against box corners, metal brackets, binder combs and notebook flaps, whimpering and yelping as the boxes rearranged themselves and squashed me hard, I wormed my way backwards until finally I emerged, utterly exhausted, gasping and in more sorts of agony than I’d ever cared to know. But I could breathe again. That was something. I didn’t even mind that I’d almost wriggled my way right out of my clothes. My skirt was rucked up around my waist, and my blouse was halfway to my neck. Everything I wore felt shredded as I pushed my clothes back into place, wincing and sucking breath through my teeth. Now would be a terrific time for some clerk to turn the lights back on and find me this way, I thought. I tried to touch my head where Charlene had struck me, but it hurt too much and I was scared to find out how deep the wounds went. But I could stand. More cause for celebration.
If I had been completely in my right mind, I probably wouldn’t have celebrated by attempting the next phase of my escape, which was to claw my way, in complete darkness, back around the boxes and the fallen shelving units. Stupefied determination seems to lend one a certain amount of leeway, though. Spelunking to the door was far easier than getting out from under the boxes. I was positively giddy. Truthfully, I was probably delirious with shock and blood loss. With the only dose of pure dumb luck I got that whole day, I found my way to the door without killing myself, turned on the lights and stood blinking in the glare like a cave dweller who had made a wrong turn.
Long though the time may have seemed, I had probably only been trapped for eight or ten minutes at the most. Freed of oxygen deprivation and impending death, I suddenly wondered if Charlene Templeton was still in the building.
*****
It took some effort to remember what floor I should select in the elevator. My badly scraped fingers hovered at the buttons for several seconds before I took a guess. Did I work on the tenth floor? I thought I probably did. I was swooped up with a lurch that made me feel quite ill and then jerked to a halt as two women climbed on at the mezzanine level and, after looking at me with shock-widened eyes, displayed the utmost in elevator etiquette by facing squarely forward without further staring. They got off two floors later, and one of them said to me as she departed, “Um, your head is bleeding, did you know?”
“Yes, thanks,” I replied, impatiently. I had not seen my head or dared to touch it, but I could see my blouse, which now sported an impressively large, brilliant red spread of blood from my neck to my bustline. I had heard that head wounds bleed abundantly and found that to be true. That was just the one on my temple, the one that hurt the most. I had almost forgotten about the blow across the back of my head, which might be doing anything: leaking blood, bone, brains, all sorts of stuff. I didn’t want to know. The doors closed, and up I lurched again, holding onto the rail now to keep steady. I sure wished I had worn flats that day.
I finally fell out onto MBS&K’s floor and through the lobby doors. Lucille looked up from People magazine and screamed—one can scream with a Southern accent—causing me to scream in return because she’d startled me so badly. On her feet, our goddess of gossip raced around her counter to stare at me, and I gathered my sense of purpose enough to ask, “Where is Charlene?�
�
“Oh mah God, what happened to you?” shrieked Lucille.
In response to Lucille’s scream, footsteps scurried toward us, the clack of business-casual heels on tile. I heard expletives, none of which seemed horrified so much as wildly entertained. “Holy shit!” “Look at that!” “Is that Carol?” “What the hell happened?”
“Charlene Templeton!” I shouted at Lucille. “Did she come this way? Is she back at her desk?”
Lucille’s mouth opened and closed for a moment. Finally she pointed toward the main room, but when I rushed past her, she announced, “Ah’m calling an ambulance!”
“Good! Yes!” I blundered on, hearing more cries of surprise as I went.
Lucille added, loudly, “And Terry Bronk wants to see you!”
I’m sure you’re thinking that going to Charlene’s desk was a stupid idea. “She just confessed to murder and then tried to kill you, Carol,” is what you’re thinking. You’re probably also wondering what she would be doing at her desk. But secretaries—particularly ones like Charlene, who have been at it for a couple decades—have a chip implanted in their heads which makes leaving before all the work is done very difficult, even in the most pressing circumstances. I once saw a woman stay at her desk with a gushing nosebleed, typing with one hand and jamming paper towels against her nostrils with the other. “Just let me finish this letter,” she’d said. So finding Charlene at her desk would not be outside the realm of possibility. I figured at least she would have come here to get her things before going on the lam, which was where I would be going, if I were Charlene.
I hurtled into her cubicle, but it was empty. Behind me, an ancient, technology-impaired attorney named Paul shuffled to a stop and said, “Carol, can you help me send a fax?”
“I’m in such a hurry,” I replied apologetically. Paul had not looked up at me yet. “I bet one of the file room clerks could help you out.”
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 24
