“No,” he said, “but you do.”
“I do?”
“Home for dinner. I hope you’re having something good, in honor of Cate’s big game tomorrow.”
The smile she gave him was intoxicating, and erased the crease between her brows. “You remembered Cate’s game.”
He shrugged, playing it down. “My friend Carter coaches a team so I get all the updates. Tell her good luck for me. Oh and L-S-K.”
“L-S-K? What does that mean?”
“Secret soccer lingo. She’ll know. Now go home.”
“I’ll have my phone on if you need me.”
“No.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday. If Eve—”
“If something happens this weekend, we will find you.”
CHAPTER 47
Harry poured himself a glass of seltzer and sat down in front of the television. It had been a hard choice, which house to watch in, his or the O’Connells’. They both held so many memories. He had grown up in the O’Connell house, but had spent all his time staring at the house that was now his. The house where Eve had grown up.
In the end he decided to stay in his current house. He didn’t want to leave too much evidence to distract Windy at the other place and he wanted to stay close in case his project in the back room needed attention. But he had put the television on at the O’Connells’ so it would seem like someone was home, in case more of those annoying cops came by, and as he looked over now he could see it flickering behind the closed curtains.
He remembered his mama best in the flickering light of the television in that very room. She’d look down at him sitting on the floor at the foot of her lounger, and rub her fingers through his hair, picking up her drink in the other hand. Television turned her hair and the drink the same bluish color, so she looked like she could be on the screen.
“What are you looking at, baby?” she’d ask when he stared at her instead of the program.
“My beautiful mama.”
She loved it when he said that. Sometimes she’d pick him up, let him sit in her lap. He loved the way she smelled like cigarettes and strawberry lotion all together.
They watched the soaps together and all the cartoon movies about princesses. At dinner they would talk about them, or she’d tell him about her day at the doctor’s office, helping people check in and out. She had an important job.
She made him good stuff to eat, grilled cheese with tomato soup, Hamburger Helper. They ate together at the table in the kitchen and she smiled at his excellent table manners. “You’re the man of the house, Harry,” she told him. “You’re my little man.” He had to be the man of the house because his father had died. It was a big responsibility, making sure his mama was all right, but it was his, and he loved it.
One day when Harry was seven, a man named Charles Williams came over for dinner. Mama made Harry’s favorite casserole, tuna with those green noodles and corn flakes crumbled on top, and he got to drink Coke with dinner. But his place was moved. Charles got to sit in the chair opposite his mama. “I want you to be closer to me,” she told him, but her eyes were on Charles. “Tell Charles about those models you like to make.”
He told the man about the airplanes he had built, moving on now to a ship in a bottle. “It’s an illusion, see. Because how could a ship get into a bottle?”
“Harry has been working so hard on it,” his mama said, stroking his hair.
“I am sure,” Charles had said. “But it sounds like it requires a great deal of time. Wouldn’t you rather be learning something useful, like the piano?”
“What a wonderful idea, Charles,” his mama said.
Charles touched the corner of his napkin to his lips underneath the mustache after every bite. When they were done he said, “Thank you, Marissa, that was delicious.” But not meaning it.
“Are you sure?”
“Next time perhaps we could do with a bit less cream of mushroom soup mix and something more, well, home cooked. But otherwise fine.”
When his mother stood to clear the plates, Charles made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Let the boy do that, Marissa. Why don’t we go into the living room.”
He could hear them in there, his mother giggling, then smacking sounds, while he did the dishes. When he came in later, his mother’s blouse was half off and Charles had a strange look in his eye.
“It has been nice meeting you, Harold,” he said. “Good night.”
“But my bedtime isn’t for an hour. I get to watch television.”
“Not tonight.” As he went upstairs, Harry heard Charles saying, “You are too lenient with that boy. You need to discipline him.”
His mother and Charles got married in a quiet ceremony he wasn’t invited to, and he was sent to stay with his father’s sister while they were on their honeymoon. It was paradise. He was the best boy he knew how to be, hoping his aunt would want him all the time. But she just smiled and said, “Come back and visit again some time,” and dropped him off at the end of the week.
It had still looked like the same house, but it was different inside. He could sense it right away. When Charles wasn’t home things were like before, but when he was, his mother treated him differently, like he was something to be careful of.
“Don’t coddle the boy,” Charles said once when his mother gave him a hug.
Charles took away his models, bought a piano and gave him piano lessons. “Isn’t that wonderful of Charles?” his mama asked, and he said yes, because he knew it would make her happy. He was to practice when Charles was at work, and then every Sunday show what he had learned.
The first Sunday he was so nervous he lost his place. Charles stood behind him, staring at the music. “You haven’t been practicing, Harold,” he said.
“I have. I practice all the time.”
“It’s true, Charles,” his mother said, coming to his rescue. His wonderful mother. “Every day after—”
Charles slapped her across the mouth. “I’ve told you to stop babying him.” His mother shrunk, weeping, into the couch and when Harry tried to go to her, Charles stopped him.
“You hurt your mother when you don’t practice. Can’t you see that?”
Harry ran down into the old bomb shelter he called his workshop and wouldn’t come up, pretending he still had his models to play with down there, picturing them in his head and making up stories.
He did his best to stay hidden when Charles was home, but sometimes he miscalculated. Once, when it had been quiet upstairs for over an hour, he came up to go to the bathroom and found Charles with this mother in the living room, his mother’s lipstick smeared, Charles’s pants undone.
“What do you do down there all the time,” Charles asked, leaning back in the couch to show he was Mother’s favorite. Not even zipping up his pants.
“Jack off,” Harry said.
His mama looked horrified. “Harry! That language.”
“That was very disrespectful to your mother, Harold. How do you think that made her feel?”
“I don’t care.”
“Really.” Charles took Mama’s hand and pushed the index finger backwards until she screamed in pain.
“Stop it!” Harry shouted.
There was a snap, and Charles let go. “That is what you did. Now apologize to your mother for hurting her.”
“I’m sorry, Mama. I’m sorry,” he said, on his knees.
He begged to go to the hospital with them but they wouldn’t let him. “Stay here and think about what you’ve done,” Charles said. Harry sat in the corner and cried and dreamed of all the presents he wanted to buy for his mama to apologize. She came back with a big bandage on her finger and wouldn’t look at him.
She had a cast on her arm the time he forgot to take out the garbage, and a black eye for a week when he ate all the cashews out of the mixed nuts. They had to buy special ointment for her palms after the time that Harry heard Charles come home and ran and hid downstairs, leaving a pot of water to boil over on the s
tove. The house smelled funny for a long time after that.
Charles started traveling more but even still his mama wouldn’t look at him. She left his dinner on the table and went into the other room with her drink to watch television. She made it clear somehow that he wasn’t allowed there.
And then one day something magical happened. His mother got pregnant. She was so happy she kissed him and hugged him. Even Charles was happy. He let Harry help paint the nursery and did not do anything to Mama when he spilled some paint, because of her delicate condition.
Harry was ten when she gave birth to his little sister, Misty. She was so tiny and perfect. Beautiful. She made the house so happy. She was a miracle to him.
He loved to hold her and change her. He loved to watch her. One night when he couldn’t sleep he went into her room and just looked at her, opening and closing her little fists as she dreamed. He had been there half an hour when she woke up, hungry, and started to cry. He picked her up and held her against him, rocking her, to quiet her and it worked. But just when she’d fallen asleep the light in the nursery came on and Charles’s voice said, “What the hell are you doing with my daughter?”
He was so startled he almost dropped her. Almost. He caught her. But she started to wail and Charles pushed him aside and grabbed her out of his arms.
“Go to your room—no, go to that other room you like so much. You’ll sleep there from now on.”
The next morning at breakfast his mother’s face was puffy and there was dried blood under her nose. She did not look at him as she put toast in front of him and said, “Harold, your stepfather and I would appreciate it if you would stay away from your sister. It’s not right, you being in her room at night alone.”
She talked like a robot, like a mimic of Charles. His words, his inflection. Only the voice was different.
“I would never harm her, Mama.”
When she looked at him now it was with her own eyes. Her own voice saying, “Harry, why can’t you be good? What did I do wrong that you can’t be good? Why do you insist on hurting me this way all the time?”
He had hoped she was saying that because Charles was in the room. Playing a game. But Charles was already at work. This was his true mama now.
When he got home from school that day, a mattress had been thrown down the stairs into his workshop and there were fittings for a padlock.
He spent more and more time down there. Once when he’d forgotten to replace a roll of toilet paper he heard a thud above him and his mother sobbing. Then Charles’s voice, right over the padlocked door, saying, “Beg for his forgiveness, Marissa. Crawl to me on your hands and knees and beg for it.”
He heard his mother say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I have such a wretched son. I’m sorry for the burden to you. You have been more than kind to him, and more than kind to me. I am sorry for his vileness. He is a monster.”
Harry stole a pot from upstairs so he would not have to use their bathroom and after that, they seemed to forget about him. The padlock was undone in the morning so he could go to school, and relocked at night, but he didn’t see them. It was okay with him, he didn’t mind being alone, except that no one thought to give him any food. Once he made a sandwich in the kitchen, cleaned up spotlessly he thought. But not well enough. That night Charles banged open the door to his workshop and said, “Harold, your mother wants you.”
His mother was in the kitchen, pressed in a corner of the counter, sobbing. She looked smaller than he remembered.
“Did you sneak up here and steal our food?” Charles asked.
“I didn’t sneak.”
Charles grabbed his mother’s hand and dragged her to the sink. “You insolent bastard, answer the question.” As Harry watched, Charles jammed her fingers in the garbage disposal, holding them there with one hand. His other hand hovered at the switch.
“Answer me. Did. You. Sneak. Up. Here. And. Steal. Food.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “I did. I was wrong to do it.”
Charles’s hand stayed at the garbage disposal switch for another ten seconds. Then he moved away, releasing Mama’s arm. Sobbing, she clung to Charles, her lips moving, eyes staring at Harry like he was something she did not recognize, something she feared. Something she loathed.
Charles touched his mustache with one of his long fingers. “You are not to do that again. You have got to stop hurting your mother this way. Go back to your room.”
Not knowing what else to do, he started stealing outside the house. Food. Money. Anything he could turn into something edible. He got caught sneaking the powdered creamer out of the teacher’s lounge. His favorite teacher, Miss Kincade, was the one who caught him.
“Harry, what are you doing?”
“I’m so hungry,” he said. Afraid to say anything else. “Please don’t tell my mama.”
But when it happened again, this time with another student’s lunch, she’d had to. She had called his mother and told her this kind of acting out behavior was the sign of a problem at home. That Harry should get some help.
His mother was in the hospital for almost a week with her concussion, but Harry didn’t really notice. After that they started dropping food into his workshop every few days. And by then he had discovered the girl next door. Eve. Since then it had been one Eve after another.
He settled into the couch and pushed PLAY on the VCR. Fast-forwarding through the introduction, the commercials, until he hit the part he wanted. He watched it, rewound, and watched it again, hitting pause in the middle.
He raised his glass to the television and said, “To us, Windy.” He took a sip. “See you tomorrow.” He hoped she liked the present he’d sent her.
CHAPTER 48
On the way home from the office that Friday night, Windy did one thing she was proud of and one thing she was not. She turned off her cell phone, opened the windows to the warm night air, and sang “Ninety-nine Red Balloons” along with the radio at the top of her lungs. That was the good thing.
The bad thing was buying a copy of the current issue of Sophisticated Bride at the supermarket when she went to pick up Cate’s all time favorite food, chicken fingers. She supposed she should be more embarrassed about feeding her daughter chicken fingers than buying a wedding magazine, but as she went to get in line she could not shake the feeling that everyone was staring at her. She added a head of lettuce to her cart. At least that canceled out the chicken fingers. And it covered up the magazine.
Why did she care if people thought she was getting married? Hell, she was getting married, she reminded herself. She was a bride. She probably should have been reading Sophisticated Bride for months.
But that wasn’t why she was buying it, and she knew that. She was buying it because she could not leave work alone. Because she was obsessed with the case and she was letting it spill over into her normal life. And because she could not stop thinking about Eve.
When Windy got home, she found a long message from Bill on her voice mail saying he wasn’t going to make it into town the next day in time for Cate’s game but he’d see her that night, and an enormous bouquet of white lilies from him on her desk, “So I can be present even when I’m absent,” the card said.
“Someone’s planning on getting laid this weekend,” Brandon whispered, then disappeared into the kitchen to start dinner before she could glare at him.
At dinner they discussed the merits of leaving the flowers on Windy’s desk, or moving them into Cate’s room, Cate lobbying for the latter, all others against. The voting broke down on the issue of changing the name of chicken fingers to chicken toes since, as Windy pointed out, chickens had toes not fingers. Cate opposed the name change on the ground that chicken toes sounded “totally gross.” Brandon abstained, saying no matter what you called them, they were “totally gross,” so it didn’t make a difference. Windy had to kick him under the table to keep him from explaining what he meant; she was still recovering from what happened after he told Cate what was in hot dogs.
Cate was so excited about her game the next day and the slumber party she was attending afterwards—her first one ever—that she got out of bed five times to remind Windy to pack this or bring that. But even in her excitement, and under threat of the longest tickling of her life, she would not reveal what Ash’s message to her, “L-S-K,” meant. “It’s a special secret between just me and Ash,” she told Windy.
When Cate was finally asleep, Windy sat down at her desk with the Sophisticated Bride and started to read it. She wanted to go straight to the article that Eve had marked, but she forced herself to begin at the beginning, thinking maybe there was something earlier on that had triggered Eve to mark that piece later. By the time she reached “Taming Your Inner Mother-in-Law,” she knew a lot more about “The Perfect Bridesmaid Gift for Under $200,” “Banishing That Bulge Before Your Big Day,” and “Elegant Floral Designs That Never Go out of Style,” but nothing more about Eve.
She hadn’t even realized floral designs had styles.
She no longer found the idea of a bride and a serial killer incompatible, however, not after seeing all the rules and decisions and inane things that seemed to go along with trying to get married. There wasn’t a page in the magazine about why you would want to get married, or what happened after you did, how sometimes it could be great and other times really hard. Nothing about marriage being a compromise, about balancing your work and the rest of your life, about raising a six-year-old by yourself and maybe not wanting to share her. About what happens if you get to marry the love of your life and he dies and you have to start over, but you’re afraid.
About what to do if you’re not even sure what you’re afraid of.
Windy decided she was not destined to be a Sophisticated Bride. Maybe if there were a magazine called Deadbeat Bride, that might be more her style. Or maybe she would just stick to crime scene photos.
The clock on her desk showed a quarter to midnight. Almost Saturday. Was Eve out there somewhere, with her knife to another family’s throat?
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 24
