“Hold on to that,” he said. “You’ll want it later.”
It took her a moment to realize what she was remembering. When she did, her throat went dry. She spilled the contents of her wallet over the comforter on her bed and gently sifted through them until she found it. The taxi receipt from the morning of her arrival.
Holding it by the corner, she dialed Bugsy. The racing of her heart almost drowned out the unidentified tune that was still, inexplicably, running through her head.
Bugsy’s voice on the other end of the line was groggy. “Good morning, boss. Sleep much? I mean, well?”
She said, “Great. Listen, how soon can you be up here with some crystal iodine and a camera?”
“Ten minutes. Maybe sooner if I don’t brush my hair.”
“Don’t brush your hair,” Imogen ordered, and hung up.
CHAPTER 52
Her captor showed only a trace of the previous night’s insecurity when Rosalind woke that morning. She did not know what kind of pills he was giving her, but they left her dazed. By the time she was fully awake, he had already taped her hands behind her and her feet together and moved her to the recliner. Now he was standing in front of her holding a steaming mug that smelled like hot chocolate, like home at Christmastime with Jason.
Don’t think about that, she ordered herself.
“If I take the tape off your mouth, will you scream at me for sucking my thumb?” he asked, keeping the mug in front of her.
That was the beginning of Rosalind’s understanding. He had not been keeping her mouth covered so she couldn’t shout for help, she realized in that moment, but so she couldn’t shout at him. He was afraid of being disciplined and scolded. He was playing at being a naughty boy and he wanted her to be nice to him.
To be maternal.
“Promise not to yell?” he asked.
She nodded.
He took the tape off, gently this time, and fed her the hot chocolate in small gulps. Lumps of powder still floated on the surface and it was too watery, but it felt like magic on her throat. As she drank, she studied him. He looked different. There were dark circles under his eyes and his hands were unsteady. She decided to take a chance. Pretend he is Jason, she told herself. Pretend he is your son and you love him.
“Has someone been mean to you?” she asked. His hands trembled so much he nearly dropped the mug in her lap.
“How did you know?”
“You look worried.”
He stared at her. “Are you trying to trick me?”
“No, I need you.”
“To take care of you. You sure do.”
“I sure do,” Rosalind agreed, remembering how repeating Jason’s words used to work to calm him down when he was younger and having a tantrum. “So I would not want to trick you.”
“You’d better not,” he cautioned. “That wouldn’t be nice. My other mother tricked me.”
“What do you mean?”
“She tricked me and said she liked me and she took my car away.”
Rosalind’s eyes searched his face. Could he really be this demented? Did he believe what he was saying? And if he did, why didn’t anyone else notice how sick he was?
“What kind of car was it?” she asked.
“Don’t you remember? You rode in it with me. It was a taxi. It was NICE. And Mother was jealous. So she told the newslady about it and it had to go to the police before I was ready. And now I’ve got to find a new set of wheels.” He looked away from her and his face and voice changed. Became more grown-up and more menacing. “She betrayed me. It was a silly thing to do. But I’ll show her. She’ll be sorry when she sees what I’m going to do to Imog—what I’m going to do.”
Rosalind wanted to bring back the safer personality. Pretend you love him, she reminded herself. “That is good hot chocolate. Thank you. Do you think I could have some toast too? I’m hungry.”
The boyish expression returned. “Not toast. Sundaes! We’re having sundaes for breakfast!” He shook a finger at her. “I know that’s not what you are supposed to have for breakfast, but remember you said you wouldn’t yell at me.”
“Of course not,” Rosalind assured him, swallowing down nausea. “You can have sundaes for breakfast on a special occasion.”
He looked at her with wary surprise at first, then started to giggle. He kept it up as he fed her three huge scoops of vanilla ice cream, five spoonfuls of Cool Whip. She gagged on every other bite and that made him laugh more.
“I’m taking good care of you, aren’t I?” he asked. She smiled through the taste of sweet plastic in her mouth. “Only the best for you, Ros. See, this is even real Cool Whip dessert topping, not the fake kind. Nothing fake here. Oh wait, but I forgot—” He ran away and came back with a squirt bottle of Sam Strawberry’s Special Syrup. “Open up!” he told her and, pulling her head back by the hair until her lips opened, poured a long shot of it into her mouth.
That was more than her too-long-empty stomach could take. She did her best but she could not keep from retching. Instinct took over and she struggled to turn her head away, sending the strawberry syrup spilling across the front of her housecoat, into her lap.
He went completely still. All but the hand holding the pink plastic bottle of syrup upside down. Strong adult fingers closed tightly around that, and the rest of the thick red sauce oozed out to puddle on the floor at Rosalind’s feet. When the bottle was empty, he let it drop. It fell with a dull splatter into the mess.
“I worked hard to get that food for you,” he said. His voice was eerily calm. “It was your fault if you got sick.” The calmness began to break apart. “Your ate too fast. You were bad. You shouldn’t have done that.”
Rosalind nodded, hoping to appease him. “You are right. I ate too fast. I should not have done that.”
“Look at this mess. You’ll have to clean it up,” he told her. “You have only yourself to blame.”
“I know. It was my fault.”
He was not listening. She was not even sure he was seeing her as he sneered right into her face and said, his voice harsh, angry, “You disgust me. You’re a disgusting little shit.”
“That’s not true.” She backed as far into the recliner as she could, but he leaned in closer.
“You’re a disgrace to the family. Look at yourself.” He rubbed the syrup from his hand on the sleeve of her housecoat obsessively, as if he were trying to clean off blood. “Look at you. Disgusting. A fucking pig. You eat like a pig and now you look like a pig. Covered in filth,” he snarled. “Oink, oink, oink, piggy wiggy. Who the hell do you think you are? Are you too good for my food?”
His personality had shifted, Rosalind understood. He was no longer the playful boy; now he was the punishing parent. Rosalind took a deep breath. Pretend he is your son. Reclaim the parental role. “Calm down, love,” she said. “It’s all right. Calm down.”
“Calm down?” He jumped into the puddle of strawberry syrup, splattering both of them with it. “Calm down? You want me to calm down.” Now he was leaning over her, his hands gripping her shoulders. “You fucking ruined my life, you ungrateful little shit. I hate you. I. Hate. You.” His teeth gnashed in front of her nose.
Rosalind forced herself not to flinch. Not to show any sign of the revulsion she felt. She said, “I don’t hate you.”
“Yes, you do,” he screamed in her face. “Yes, you fucking do. You are faking. You want to get away from me. You want to leave me. Everyone does.”
Rosalind did not move. “That is not true.”
He wavered, confused for a moment, hovering between personalities. He shouted, “You fucking ruined my life, you ungrateful little shit.”
Rosalind’s voice was easy, unhurried. “You already said that, love. It is not true. I am grateful to you.”
“Shut up. You are lying. Look at me when I talk to you.”
“I’m not lying. I need you. If you were not here, I would have starved to death.” Please, Rosalind prayed, please let it work. “I ne
ed you,” she repeated.
His face was so close to hers that his eyes merged into one great opening that stared, unblinking. She felt like she was being studied by some monstrous Cyclops for signs of lies, of disgust. He let go of her shoulders and pulled slightly away and was the man again. The man-boy-monster.
“I’ll slap you silly if you’re lying,” he said, but the threat had been drained out of him. “I mean it.”
“I know,” Rosalind assured him. Pushing all her hatred for him into the smallest corner of her mind, she forced herself to smile.
He took two steps backward, away from her fast, as if she had shouted at him. From that safe distance he stared at her, his head cocked to one side. His face was a mask of confusion.
He rubbed his left arm with his right hand, smearing red syrup all over his shirt, but not really noticing. A muscle twitched in his neck. After a minute had passed, he opened his mouth. In a plaintive voice, small, young, he said, “What do you call a boat with your whole family on it?”
Damned, Rosalind thought. She kept smiling. “I don’t know.”
“The Kin Ship! Get it? The kinship?” He took a step toward her. “That’s funny, huh, Ros?”
“Yes.”
“I learned it from a Dixie cup. A real one, not a fake one. That’s how you can tell, you know. Fake ones don’t have riddles.”
Pixie cups, Jason called them. “Mom, why do we always have to have the pixie cups with the flowers on them?” he’d asked. “Why can’t we have the ones with the jokes? Those are cool.”
Rosalind had wondered where Jason had gotten that idea.
“Now it’s your turn, Ros. You tell me a joke.”
The relief Rosalind had been feeling slipped away. She had always been lousy at remembering jokes. He knew that. She groped around desperately in her well of memories but all she came up with was Jason—the first time Jason’s eyes focused on hers, the time he came home from school with the class lizard, his concern that she would not know how to take care of herself when he went away to camp at the age of ten, the time they went sailing last summer at the house in Nantucket, when they made cookies for—
“Well, Ros? Tell me a joke.” He was standing, watching her expectantly. His tone contained the first blush of menace.
Come on, Rosalind, she admonished herself. Come on, come— “Why did the cookie go to the psychiatrist?” she blurted.
He made the exaggerated shrug of a ten-year-old aping adult mannerisms. “Why?”
Rosalind hesitated, then said, with a smile she hoped looked genuine, “Because he was only half-baked.”
“Only half-baked,” he repeated. “Only half-baked! That’s funny, Ros. That’s a good joke!” He laughed and Rosalind exhaled out her tension. It was the only joke she could think of, but once she’d begun she had realized that he might take the punch line the wrong way. But he did not seem to. He was just looking at her and chuckling to himself and—
He sprang at her and pulled the knife from his pocket in a single motion. He was not laughing as he pressed the blade against her throat. His lips whispered in her ear, “I’m not crazy, you know, Rosalind. I’m not half-baked. I’m no freak.”
Rosalind heard his breathing, deep and fast and ragged, loud in her head. “I know,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. The knife did not move from her throat. “Of course I know that. I mean, would I have told that joke if I thought you were?”
His breathing slowed but was still uneven. “I guess not. No.” He kept the knife at her throat, but moved so he was kneeling in front of her. His breath covered her face. “You really do need me? Don’t lie.”
“I really do.” Rosalind said. She put as much feeling into it as she could.
“The others, I just wanted them to like me, you know. I just wanted to take care of them, but they wouldn’t let me. They made me feel silly. You will let me take care of you, though, won’t you?” The knife poked a little harder. His eyes were watching her, reading every sign of possible betrayal. Almost aching for a sign.
Rosalind kept her expression neutral. “Yes, I will let you.”
The knife slashed downward, slicing the duct tape holding her feet bound together. For the first time since he had taken her captive, she could move her legs. She looked down at them, stunned, then up at him.
The knife was gone, back in his pocket. Instead of the blade she was looking at the naughty boy again. He smiled at her. “I’ve got to go out for a little while. Got some errands to do. Grown-up errands. But don’t break anything and don’t go anywhere while I’m gone, ‘k?”
“Okay,” Rosalind said.
“I mean it. I’m trusting you.”
“Okay,” she said again, already wondering what she was going to use to pick the lock on the door.
As if reading her mind he said, “I’m not locking the door or anything, because I trust you. But you should know that there are motion detectors all around and if you open the door even an itsy bit, four nail guns will shoot at you.”
He had slipped on his jacket as he was talking, and with the strawberry stain on his shirt covered he now stood in front of her looking like a grown-up again. A grown man. A normal grown man. It took Rosalind a moment to synchronize what she was seeing and what she was hearing.
“Nail guns?” she finally asked.
“Oh, don’t worry. You won’t die right away. At first, until you lose enough blood, you will just be in a lot of pain. It will ring my cell phone, so I’ll know you need me, but I might not get back in time to save you. Then again, I might. Anyway, I know you’re not going to try to leave because you promised. And you don’t want to know the punishment for people who break their promises, do you?”
Rosalind shook her head.
“I didn’t think so. Well, ‘bye for now!”
The sound of the door shutting behind him, shutting and not locking, was torment worse than any physical pain he could inflict, and Rosalind thought he knew it. For the first half hour her head replayed the click of the door for her over and over again, the sound of it shutting followed by silence. The silence of no bolt being slid home, no lock being engaged, click-silence that was invitation and damnation at once. She knelt in front of the knob as if it were a sacred object and rested her head against it and wept.
She could open it right now. She could be free right now. Free of the torment. Free of the pain. She could open the door and walk out to her death—
I might not get back in time to save you. Then again, I might.
—or worse.
CHAPTER 53
Walking around the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian, he didn’t feel like that other man; he felt like Loverboy. Earlier he’d try to only let himself go with Rosalind, and he’d come to a place like this and hardly notice anything. But now, only six days to go, he could feel himself being Loverboy, being a little silly, more of the time. When he felt silly it was like everything was totally in focus. Like the way he was noticing how pretty all the Shoppes were. He really liked it here. Everyone was so happy. And the double P in Shoppes made him think of his you-know-what. A teenage girl with red hair halfway down her back wearing a denim miniskirt and tight white T-shirt that let her nipples show passed him by, and he could tell she was thinking about his pee-pee too.
But he was not at the Shoppes for that. He was shopping for a present for Rosalind. For being so NICE that morning.
He had walked by Carlton’s Cutlery in the Grand Canal Shoppes a lot of times before, but he’d never gone in. It wasn’t good to be too noticeable. He was smart like that. He knew that the population of Vegas was so mobile that if you went somewhere even just two times you were practically a regular and people remembered you. This was his first trip inside the shop, and boy, was it a trip. Looking around at the rows and rows of knives and other sharp objects, he thought they should change the name to Carlton’s Cut-ery.
“You got something to cut, we’ve got something for you to cut it with, that’s our motto,” the jovial
man behind the glass display case told him.
Loverboy tried a smile but he could not meet the man’s eyes. He could tell that the man wanted him to look at him, to pay attention to him, but he didn’t want to. No way. The man’s nose was red and the veins on his cheeks showed pink around his pores. A drunk, Loverboy thought with disgust. He could even smell it. Probably been taking a walk with Johnnie already that morning, just like his father.
Just like his father when he wanted to yell at him, to tell him he was—
Loverboy’s eyes snapped up to the salesman’s face and he demanded, “What? Did you say something?”
The man just stood there, smiling. He shook his head. “No, sir. Not a word. Are you browsing or is there something in particular you are looking for?”
Loverboy shook his head and slid his eyes back to the knives in the glass display case between them. The man hadn’t said anything to him, he assured himself as he stared at the cold blades. Looking at them made him feel calm. There were dozens of them in every shape and length and breadth. The recessed lighting of the store made the metal shine with exciting menace. He felt in control again.
A whole store filled with things for cutting! Oh boy, that was good. And if he wasn’t supposed to use them, why would they sell them right there in the Shoppes? Where anyone could get them? Even good boys like him?
He considered his needs. He would get Rosalind a present but he would only show it to her if she had been really good. He should definitely buy something good and sharp. Sharp enough so that one single pass would be enough. He would not want it to get caught on anything, especially not at the end when timing was crucial. Timing and cleanliness. The cuts had to be clean.
Loverboy held his finger over the glass case of knives, careful not to touch the surface, not to leave a print. “Is this the best one you have?” he asked, indicating the most expensive.
“That’d be the top of the line. They call it the Lizzie Borden. You know, after the girl who murdered her father and—”
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 63
