by J. S. Bailey
Graham glanced at the clock. “Now’s as good a time as any. Go ahead and change into more comfortable clothes if you’d like. I’ll wait here.”
LUPE DIDN’T like how Graham was acting. His politeness was likely meant to disarm her, but for what purpose?
She thought of the olden days as she rode blindfolded in the back of his car, now comfortably dressed in a purple hooded sweatshirt and black sweats—it may have been hot outside, but since she didn’t know how long they would be gone this evening she thought it wise to wear an extra layer.
When Randy first introduced Lupe to his “family,” she’d thought Graham was sweet. He didn’t talk a mile a minute about the war and taxes and lying congressman like Randy’s other “grandfather” Frank Jovingo did. Graham would smile and nod and only speak his opinion when directly asked, and he loved to prank people and throw the blame on Randy or Frank. In all, a good-natured man whose manners and sense of humor could have charmed a woman of any age.
And now this. Graham’s decision to turn on Randy couldn’t have been spur of the moment. It had to have been festering inside of him for years—maybe even since before she and Randy met.
Finally the car came to a stop. Graham got out first and led her by hand to the door. Lupe had taken this to mean that no other houses were in sight because any neighbor spotting a man leading a blindfolded woman over his doorstep would have called the police in an instant.
There seemed to be an extra spring in Graham’s step. “You can take it off now,” he said when he closed the front door.
She obeyed and handed the blindfold to him. “Where is your friend?”
He provided her with a blank stare. “Friend?”
“You know. The one who’s always with you. The one who ties the blindfold over my eyes.”
“He’s busy at the moment. But that’s okay. This secret is only for you.”
Her stomach squirmed. “What secret would you want to show me?”
“You’ll find out in a minute. It’s downstairs.” His eyes gleamed with boyish excitement. “I’d like to know what you think about it.”
Sweat broke out on her forehead. Anything that made the old man this happy couldn’t be good, and why he wanted to let her in on his secret was beyond her. “Okay.”
“First I want to ask you some things,” he said.
She waited for him to continue.
“How hard do you think it is for one person to live as two?”
Her head shook. This was one of those rare instances when she truly didn’t comprehend something spoken in English. “I don’t understand.”
“Then let me rephrase. Do you think it’s difficult for someone to act like two completely different people and never have anyone notice?”
She wasn’t sure where this was going. “Yes, I think it would be.”
His smile grew broader. “That’s where you’re wrong. No one ever knew, did they?”
Ah. He was talking about himself. “But we do know.”
“Only because I was a fool. If I’d been smart about it I would have staged Randy’s murder as a homicide that occurred during a break-in. Oh, his death would have been unfortunate indeed, and to think the feeble old man living upstairs was too slow and afraid to fend off the burglars!”
If she’d had a full stomach, Lupe would have thrown up. “The police aren’t stupid. They would have found out it was you sooner or later.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now anyway. But as I was saying, two people can only exist together inside a person for so long before one dominates the other. It’s taken me some time to truly understand what that means.”
“So you admit that you used to be a good man. Or at least partly good.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Two people live inside each and every one of us. Look at you, Lupe. I know what you used to be. A whore. How many men did you lie with? A thousand? Ten thousand? And now you’ve turned your life around to wait on snobs who drive Porsches and live in million-dollar homes while little children in Meh-hee-co go barefoot and have nothing to eat. Have you really changed inside, or is it only your circumstances that have changed? If you lost your job tomorrow would you go running to the first pimp who would have you?”
Her face burned at hearing her life summarized in those terms. “I would never do that again. Not if my life depended on it.”
“And what about all those little babies of yours?”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and the part of her that had wanted to die last night was rapidly reawakening. “Graham, please. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Just show me what you want to show me and take me home.”
“All in good time. But how many were there, Lupe? Four? Five?”
Please deliver me from this man. “Six.”
“Six little babies dead and gone. How terrible, my child. How terrible.”
Her hand flew out and slapped him across the face, and he staggered back, stunned. “How dare you talk to me like this!” she shrieked. “If you knew the hell I’ve lived through for all these years . . . The first times I had it done I was too stupid to know any better. My mother told me it was nothing, not a baby, not alive. But I know now. And if God condemns me for what I’ve done, I deserve it. You think I haven’t changed? I’ve spent years trying to be as good a woman as possible so that maybe God will change his mind about what to do with me.”
Graham massaged his cheek where she’d hit him. “What is good, Lupe? And what is bad?”
She spat on the floor at his feet. “You’re old enough to know the answer to that.”
He gave a thoughtful nod despite her blatant rudeness. “Very well. Now walk ahead of me.”
Padre, forgive me for everything I’ve ever done, she prayed as he directed her to turn right down a hallway and open the first door they came to. Maybe the secret he wanted to show her was her own deathbed, and she’d just spent the remaining minutes of her life feeling miserable about herself.
“Going down,” he said as he flicked on the light behind her. “And mind your head at the bottom of the steps; the ceiling is a bit low.”
She took the steps one at a time just to spite him and ducked to avoid banging her head. The walls of the stairwell were all cement blocks, and the stairs creaked as if they were about to collapse from rot.
The first thing Lupe noted in Graham’s basement was the quantity of stuff stacked on shelves along three walls. Someone who had lived there only briefly wouldn’t have had the time to accumulate so many things. Buckets, old cans, tools, boards thick and thin, stacks of cloths—Graham must have had this place for years without anyone knowing about it.
The second thing she noticed was the body lying on a table in the center of the room.
She brought her hands to her mouth as if they expected to stifle a squeal, but no sound came out. The pale-skinned dead woman before her wore bloodstained clothes and a head scarf, and the floor had a wet look about it like it had just been scrubbed—and it probably had since the air smelled of bleach.
Graham glided over to the table like an excited child about to show off a new gizmo he’d received for his birthday. “This is Mary,” he said. “Take a good look at her.”
Lupe closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Can you guess how she died?”
“You killed her.”
“Open your eyes and come here.”
She opened her eyes but remained rooted to the spot. Graham took hold of the woman’s right arm and turned it so she could see the inner part, where a gash ran from the crook down to the woman’s wrist.
No blood spotted her skin. Graham must have wiped her up after killing her, though Lupe couldn’t guess why he would have taken the time to perform such a useless task.
“I said, come here,” he snapped, manners suddenly gone.
“I can see well enough from where I am.”
“The knife I used on her is still down here.”
Heeding the implied threat, she stepped up to the
table and covered her nose.
Graham smiled. “Very good. Now touch her.”
She gaped at him. This wasn’t at all what she had expected. “What?”
“Touch her. I want you to feel her skin.”
The very thought made her recoil. “Why?”
“Just do it.”
“I won’t.”
Graham walked over to a workbench, where he plucked up a knife.
Lupe felt her blood run cold.
He rejoined her at the table. “Now do what I said.”
She took a deep breath through her mouth, and very gingerly prodded the woman’s arm with her index finger. The skin felt cold and papery.
She jerked her arm back as quickly as she could.
“We’re all going to end up like this someday,” Graham said, satisfied for the moment. “Our spirits here one moment and in the great beyond the next. I’ve always wondered what the transition is like. For years I’ve asked them about it but I can never get a clear answer.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean, ‘they’? How many have there been?”
He smiled. “Far more than six.”
“You mean to say . . .” She swallowed. “You kill people just so you can learn what it’s like to die?”
“Mary was dying anyway.” He gestured at the table. “Cancer. I granted her release from her pain. Some would call it mercy.”
“What about the other ones? Did they have cancer too?”
“Some did.”
“And why didn’t you do this with Randy when you shot him? Wouldn’t you want to know what it was like for the Servant to die?”
He didn’t answer. “I was going to bury Mary this evening but decided you could be a part of it, too. I cleaned her up as best as I could so you wouldn’t be as upset looking at her.”
Lupe found herself hoping this was some nightmare from which she would soon awaken. “I don’t understand why you wanted me to see this.”
“It’s simple. I wanted to show you how we’re alike.”
“I’m nothing like you.”
He shrugged. “If you think that, let me to put you to the test. How much do you love Randy?”
The question took her by surprise. “More than anything. If it weren’t for him, I don’t know where I would be today.” Probably a worse place than in a basement standing next to a madman and a corpse, if such a place existed.
“Would you do anything for him?”
“Within reason.”
“Would you die for him?”
She was sure she was diving headlong into some kind of trap. “Yes.”
“Then hold out your arm.”
She didn’t move.
“Hold it out!”
This was it, then. He had been planning to kill her after all.
He grabbed her wrist and yanked it to draw her arm away from her chest, and with his other hand he pulled up her sweatshirt sleeve and gently pressed the tip of the knife against her skin. “You have a choice,” he said in his gravelly tone. “If you agree to die right now, I’ll never have anything to do with Randy again. I’ll leave the state and start over somewhere else with whatever time I have left. He can forget I ever existed.”
She could hear her pulse in her ears when she spoke. “I don’t believe you.”
“No?” Graham lifted an eyebrow. “And why is that?”
“If you kill me, you’ll just go after him anyway.”
“If I kill you, he’ll be as good as dead.”
The knife drew a bead of blood, and Lupe winced. Graham’s tight grip on her wrist was making her hand go numb. “You aren’t making any sense. We know the only reason you tried to kill Randy is because you want the world to be without a Servant again. You want us all to suffer the same as your parents’ and grandparents’ generations did.”
The old man’s face flushed. “That’s pure speculation. War may have broken out the same year Hans Mueller died without a successor, but it does nothing to explain the second war or all the others that came after that.”
Lupe, who had been mostly unschooled in her youth, didn’t know enough about world history to argue, but she pressed onward to keep delaying him from cutting her open. “I’ve heard all of you talk about how evil will run wild if there is no Servant. You have to believe that. You were one yourself.”
“Evil is already running wild. Or have you not turned on a television recently? But we’ve gotten off topic.” He smiled. “You still haven’t made your choice.”
“I don’t want to choose anything.”
“If you don’t make a decision, I’ll make one for you and then you’ll both be dead.”
Lupe was smart enough to know that if she followed Graham’s rules and sacrificed her life, she and Randy would both be dead anyway. Graham was not a man to uphold promises. “I will not let you kill me today,” she said.
“Then you’ve given me permission to murder your lover.”
Tears welled up in her eyes anew as she struggled to regain control of her emotions. “I didn’t say that.”
“But you understood the conditions that I laid out for you. By choosing to live, you’ve condemned Randy to death. I also know that you plan on running back to him to warn him about me, which is why you’ll be staying here until he dies.”
Her heart plummeted and the room began to sway. She had been a fool to think she could outsmart him. “They’ll miss me at work,” she said, trying not to let her fear show through. “Someone will come looking for me and report me missing when they find out my car is at home and I’m not.”
He smiled. “Tomorrow morning I’ll let you use a phone to call in sick.”
“The police will be able to trace it.”
“Not this phone.”
She silently cursed herself for not having smuggled her own cell phone to this house. (He always forbade her to bring a purse.) She could have stuffed it in her bra and he never would have known. “So I’m your prisoner.”
“If that’s what you’d like to call it.” He fell silent as he directed his gaze to Mary’s corpse. He seemed deep in thought. “You said Randy is hiring a replacement.”
“At the church, yes.”
“Why would Randy be the one doing the hiring? He’s not in charge of such things.”
“I . . . I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask about it.”
“Do you know who he hired?”
Lupe pictured the skinny kid who had briefly visited her apartment last night. “Someone named Bobby. I don’t know him. I’d never seen him before.”
“But you have seen him.”
“Yes. He drove Randy to my apartment last night.”
“Presumably because his car was out of order.”
“Yes, but I told you I didn’t tell him about the brakes.”
“Then who did, I wonder? Randy is no psychic.”
Lupe folded her arms. “Maybe God told him he shouldn’t drive home. Did you ever think about that?”
Graham’s face darkened. “Let’s go upstairs. You can stay in the guest room while I take care of Mary’s body.”
NOBODY COMMENTED on Bobby’s silent return to the dinner table. The sounds of clinking silverware and glasses made his mind flash back to the family gatherings the Rolands had during his childhood before his paternal grandparents died. How long ago had that been now? Ten years? It felt like a hundred.
The gatherings had been fun. Some of his cousins were close to his age, and after dinner concluded they played with action figures and Legos and had a grand old time. It had been the Golden Age of childhood, he supposed. When the only real things he had to worry about were who got to play with Darth Vader and whose Lego ship would be blown up first. There was laughter all around and few arguments, except for when Bobby’s conservative father would get into debates with his liberal brother-in-law and the rest of the family would leave the room to have some peace.
Following the deaths of Bobby’s grandparents and father, the gatherings ceased. He s
topped seeing his cousins. He wasn’t even sure what they looked like anymore.
Until now, he hadn’t even realized he missed them.
The gathering here at the safe house bore little similarity to those he remembered, but that was okay. Here in Oregon he would turn over a new leaf. He was no longer the boy who had dreams of wearing a cape and leaping tall buildings in a single bound. He was just Bobby Roland—whatever that meant.
He slid into his place at the table and scooted his chair closer to his plate, pleased to find that the food had not gone cold.
Conversation gradually resumed while he ate.
“We’ll have to feed you more often, Bobby,” Carly said as he cleaned his plate some time later. “Right, Randy?”
Randy dabbed a napkin at his lips and nodded. “Only next time we should all meet over at the Jovingos’ place instead of here, for obvious reasons.”
Bobby pushed his empty plate back from the table, certain his stomach was about to split at the seams. “You mean Carly’s family?”
She smiled at him, and he saw a dimple form in her cheek. “You bet. Everyone says I inherited my culinary skills from my mother.” She patted her flat stomach. “I also inherited her high metabolism.”
“In other words, nobody ever starves under their roof,” Phil added, still studying Bobby with calculating eyes. Bobby was surprised he’d spoken to him.
Before Bobby could say anything else, Joanna’s face became long. “Will I be invited to their house, too?”
Randy shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Once you’re home we’ll only be meeting once or twice a year. We’ve discussed this already, remember?”
She gave a halfhearted shrug. “That didn’t mean you weren’t going to let me visit whenever I like. You saved my life. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
Randy took her by the hand, and Bobby felt an awkward lump rise in his throat. “It means everything, Joanna. But it’s necessary for us to remain apart so I can help other people too. Okay?”
She stabbed at a cut-up chunk of lasagna. “Whatever,” she said, and popped it into her mouth.
Bobby checked the time and saw it was already six o’clock. How had the past couple of hours gone by so quickly? “Uh, Randy? Shouldn’t we be getting to work soon? Last night you said we should meet at seven.”
