He stopped at the bottom of the road, glancing back.
Carly was walking slowly down the hill.
He felt a gulf between them, as sure as if they’d just had a fight. And the blasted thing for him was that he knew it was not her fault. He knew that he was the one to blame for being panic stricken and paranoid and overly-protective and wary and…frightened. He sat down on the edge of the road, curbside, his head in his hands.
He waited for his wife.
The first words out of her mouth were: “It’s been a year. The guy was breaking in. Nobody thought you did anything wrong.”
He didn’t look up at her. He knew it was a lie. He knew that he had been what one of the policemen had called “trigger-happy.” He knew that he shouldn’t have shot the gun. He knew he shouldn’t have done anything other than perhaps call the police to come around and check out the noise at his kitchen sliding glass doors.
But he was afraid. Not just of some released lunatic who had sworn a vendetta out on him. But afraid of anything that might test his courage. Afraid of anyone who might suggest that he wasn’t the strong man he pretended to be to the outside world.
“Trey,” Carly said, as if from some great distance, as if she was on the opposite end of the world from him. “Are you all right?”
Luckily, she didn’t mention the tears. He didn’t want to acknowledge them himself.
She squatted down in front of him, touching his shoulder with her right hand. “It’s about that man, isn’t it?”
Trey nodded.
They didn’t say anything.
After several minutes, he got up and dusted himself off.
“It’s going to be hours ‘til sunset,” he said. “I wish I was at work right now. I think I could help. Let’s go find the kids.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mark whispered, “She’s gonna get in trouble if Mom and Dad find out.”
He stood in his sister’s shadow while she bought a corn dog. She loved corn dogs, and Mark liked salt water taffy, which Teresa was also buying for him. When she had the corn dog in her fist, she passed him four wrapped up pieces of taffy.
“I don’t care if she ever finds us again,” Teresa said in what Mark thought of as her haughty princess voice. “She’s a rhymes with rich.”
“Witch?” Mark asked, not quite getting it. He opened a wrapper and popped a taffy into his mouth. “What do you think she’s doing down there?” He pointed to the alley between shops. He didn’t look down it, because it grossed him out to see Jenny and that boy together. What they were doing.
“Mom says it’s called canoodling, and it’s something that grown ups do. Only not on company time, and Daddy’s paying her a lot to be with us. Even though I’m too old to need a sitter.” Teresa took Mark by the hand and led him over to the arcade. “I’ve got six quarters left. I’ll give you three and I keep three. I want to play Street Fighter.”
Mark liked video games a lot, but the dark arcade scared him a little. It practically had no lights inside it, except for the game machines. He didn’t like these types of games, either. They were all about attacking people or car races. He liked the Donkey Kong game they had at home, but he couldn’t find it in the Island Arcadia World. He watched Teresa go over to the Street Fighter game. He wandered around between the machines. There were only a couple of kids hanging out there, and they seemed a lot older than him.
He decided that he didn’t want to play anything. He put the quarters in his pocket and went back out into the sunlight.
Jenny was at the end of the block. He didn’t want to attract her attention, so he tried to hide behind a dress display in front of a shop.
But it was too late. She saw him, and shouted for him. He stepped out into the slanting sunlight. Mark began walking slowly towards her, his head down, his hands in his pockets.
Jenny quickly stubbed out a cigarette. “Where the hell have you been?” She had a look in her eyes like a crocodile. Mark thought she was pretty, especially in the eyes, but not when she was in a mood like this.
“We were waiting for you.”
“And where were you supposed to wait?” she said, grabbing him by the hand and jerking him forward.
“We just went to the arcade.”
She dragged him back to the arcade, and got out of the sun. She stood inside, among the clanging and beeping machines. Jenny squatted down to be at eye-level with him. “I’m sorry, Marky. I just was worried.”
“I know. We shoulda stayed near you.”
“I was just saying goodbye to Tommy. He thinks you’re both real nice. Real well behaved. You won’t tell your Daddy about this, will you?” The pretty look came back into her eyes.
He breathed a sigh of relief. For a minute, she had looked like a monster. Now all she looked like was the pretty girl who babysat him. “No.”
“Promise?”
He nodded. He wiped his finger across his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
Jenny Reed laughed. “That’s so cute. Stick a needle in my eye. God, that’s so cute. You are the cutest thing. That Terry over there?” Jenny let Mark lead the way to his sister.
When they reached her, Teresa half-turned and said coldly, “Oh, it’s you.”
“Listen, woman-to-woman,” Jenny smiled. “You understand about boys, don’t you?”
Teresa said nothing. On the game screen, one of the players kicked another in the head. Cartoon blood splashed out of the opponent’s face.
“I only left you two for a second,” Jenny said, defensively.
Teresa had run out of quarters. “I don’t need a babysitter anyway. Just because my parents think I do and hired you doesn’t mean I need one.”
“That’s right,” Jenny agreed. “You’re old enough. So if your folks ask, tell ‘em I ran to the ladies’ room or something.”
Teresa stuck her nose up at this. “I don’t lie. If my Mom and Dad ask anything, I’ll tell them that Mark and I were fine all day long.”
“Cross your heart, Terry,” Mark poked at his sister’s back, “and hope to die. Come on.”
Jenny chuckled, and opened her purse, looking for something. “Hey, I’m not so bad. I’ll give you some more quarters.”
“Hush money,” Teresa said, disdainfully. She held her hand out.
Mark knew this about his sister: she didn’t lie, but she could be bribed. She liked money and what it could buy. Teresa took several coins from Jenny, and then crossed her heart to seal the bargain.
There were things about Jenny that Mark hated, and things he liked. Whenever her mood shifted to anger, she was a nightmare. But when she was like this, giving out quarters and giggling, he liked her.
“You know you have the prettiest eyes. They’re like blue marbles,” he told her. He felt himself blushing, because he sort of had a crush on her. He just wished she wouldn’t smoke cigarettes or kiss that boy.
Jenny sighed. “You’re an angel. And good for my ego. I’m sorry for taking off like that. I won’t do it again. Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. Friends?”
He nodded.
She hugged him tight.
The squeeze of her hug felt good. Even though his mother and father hugged him a lot at home, on this vacation they both seemed kind of wound up to him.
After two more games of Street Fighter, Mark saw his parents out on the street.
“Hey! We’re over here!” He shouted as loud as he possibly could.
His mother grinned broadly when she looked over, startled, in the direction of the shout. His mother tugged at his dad’s elbow, and pointed into the arcade.
Mark noticed that his dad seemed worried. His dad looked the way Mark had felt when he was afraid to dive into the swimming pool.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
So much of life was unplanned, and yet it often seemed to work out the way it needed to. Agnes Hatcher pulled the car off the road, after she noticed the patrol car behind her. The patrol car fol
lowed her in to the Walmart parking lot.
She parked in one of the spaces, but was only slightly apprehensive.
It will work out, she thought. It was meant to work out.
It was her first time on the outside in years, and even the air was something of a shock to her.
But she had to behave as if she were the woman who owned the car. Kuehl. She had to behave as if she were just stopping off like anyone else might do on the way home from work.
The policeman parked his car behind hers.
Agnes opened the door, and got out. There was a jacket in the backseat. Although it was warm out, she drew the jacket over her shoulders in case there was any blood on her blouse.
The policeman was lanky and young. Possibly in his mid-twenties. He had blond hair and tanned skin. Blue eyes. He was very handsome. She wondered what it would be like to have him on a table. She wondered what she would need to remove from his body that would be his essence, his driving force.
He grinned. “You’ve got expired tags,” he said, opening up a ticket book. “Can I see your registration?”
“You could,” Agnes said, “only it’s not my car.”
His eyes widened a bit. “A friend’s?”
She nodded. “A co-worker’s. I borrowed it to run out and get her some new hose. She has an important meeting. She has a run in her hose.” Agnes said each word as if a man could not possibly understand this problem.
“Well. Tell you what. Tell your friend that she’s three months late. She needs to get down to DMV pronto. Okay?” The policeman nodded.
She could tell that he was flirting with her. It felt cold when people did that. It felt as if they were standing too close, and trying to peer inside her eyes. But she knew that it was what people liked. It was the animal in them doing their mating dance, circling around, waiting for the moment to press their sweaty bodies against yours.
She smiled. “You are just about the nicest cop I’ve ever met.”
“You’ve met a few?”
Agnes nodded. “Uh-huh. I like cops.”
“You ever go to dinner with them?”
She giggled. “Now you’re embarrassing me. I feel like I’m trying to pick you up or something. And I’m not that kind of girl. And I’m far too old for you.”
“I’m twenty-eight. You’re in your thirties, right? Not much of an age difference there.” He stepped closer, thrusting his hand out. “I’m Rick Hunt.”
She shook his hand, delicately. She noticed the veins on his forearm. He was well-muscled. Muscles could be difficult, unless the cutting instrument had a sharp serrated edge. “Rick Hunt,” she repeated. “I’m Kathy. You live around here?”
“Just the other side of the freeway.”
For a moment, Agnes wondered if meeting this cop was part of her destiny. But something felt wrong about the moment. “Well, I have to shop and then get back to work. Can I call you? I don’t really like to give out my number.”
“I understand,” the cop said. He scrawled his name and number across a ticket, and passed it over to her. “Give me a call soon, though, huh?”
She smiled. “Yes. I will.”
She walked away from him, feeling more than a little nervous. He might report the car’s tags to his dispatch, and Darden State might already have reported the Kuehl woman’s death and the stolen vehicle.
Agnes didn’t look back to see if the cop named Rick Hunt was writing anything down. She just knew that she would have to get away from this area of Riverside, California, quickly, if she was going to ever fulfill her destiny.
Inside the store, she found what she needed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“We could be twins,” a woman said in aisle six.
Agnes had just picked up a box of hair coloring. She turned around.
A woman of approximately her height, with shorter blond hair was grinning at her. The woman was no more than twenty. She had brown eyes to Agnes’ green. She had thinner lips. She had a mole at the lower left side of her chin. She was slightly heavier than Agnes. Southern accent. She was a talker. It was practically a disease with her.
“Don’t you think? I know there are a million women in California with blond hair, but look how our faces are alike. I swear, we could be twins.”
“Oh, my,” Agnes laughed. Her voice melted slightly into a southern cadence. “We could, almost. Isn’t that funny. And we’re both from the South.”
“I have a twin,” the woman continued. “She lives in Memphis. We never see each other anymore. She don’t look half as much like me as you.”
“Oh, Lord,” Agnes said. “And me from Chattanooga.”
“No.”
“Yes. I was only born there, though. We moved when I was three.”
“Well, this is just too much…My Jerry’s never gonna believe it.” As the woman continued speaking in her friendly southern accent, Agnes noticed the basket in her arms. The woman was buying make-up.
“I wish I had your skin tone, though,” Agnes said. “I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“No,” the woman said, making a gesture with her hand which seemed at first threatening to Agnes, but then she realized that it was a friendly, confidential sort of gesture. The woman was sweet, honest, sincere.
She would be easy to subdue.
“We buy the same make-up,” Agnes said, nodding towards the Maybelline in the woman’s hand-basket. “But I need to get a good pair of scissors. My son—he’s got a school project. A lot of cutting and pasting. And I need, let’s see, a map. I need one of the coast.”
“Really? Taking a trip?”
Agnes nodded. “My husband and I are thinking of going to Catalina.”
“Twenty-six miles,” the woman began singing and then lost the tune. “You never been there? Oh, you’re gonna love it, honey. It’s beautiful—and the history. That Cathedral Rock place with all the caves—my Jerry, he fishes sometimes with his buddies. He says you get the most fish early in the morning right out by those white cliffs.”
Something in the way that the woman described the place made Agnes think it was the right place to go to.
Jack would be there, too, waiting.
Knowing.
“Let’s go over the school supplies section, honey,” the woman said. She grabbed Agnes by the arm, and they trotted off together. Agnes unconsciously picked up the cadence of this woman’s movements: lively, syncopated, only slightly unsure. Agnes could clap out with her hands the rhythms to most people she had ever met. She could remember to the smallest detail tics and sweeps of limbs, the way a nose wrinkled at a laugh.
When they reached the appropriate shelf, the woman held up a small pair of rounded scissors. “Will these do?”
Agnes shook her head. “No. I need the sharp kind. When he’s done, I can still use them for clipping coupons.”
The woman laughed. “I swear we are twins. Here,” she grabbed a pair of large scissors. She tore them from their cardboard backing. “This’ll do you.”
“Perfect, thanks.” Agnes accepted the scissors, holding them with the box of hair coloring and the lip gloss.
“It is so nice to meet friendly folks in California. Everyone out here seems too rude.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” Agnes shook her head.
Agnes made sure that she got behind the woman in the check-out line and kept talking with her about what a coincidence that both of them should be here, and both should be from Tennessee, and both should have husbands named Jerry.
Agnes told the woman that her car was parked behind the store, back by the dumpsters.
“I hate leaving my car in the sun, don’t you? I practically melt in weather like this,” Agnes said, practicing the woman’s walk.
“Don’t I know it,” the woman said, slapping at the air as if fanning away mosquitoes. “But thank god there’s no humidity out here. Couldn’t you just about die when you think of how sweltering it was back East? Couldn’t you?”
“Sure ‘nough,�
� Agnes said, slipping into a slight southern dialect.
As they rounded the dumpster area, the woman said, “You sure you parked back here, honey? Maybe you’re ‘round the other side.”
Then, she looked back, perplexed, at Agnes.
What she saw made her gasp and she would’ve cried out had not her vocal cords been quickly severed with the dull edge of the scissors.
Agnes watched her hands do it, as if they needed no guidance from her.
As if what her hands were doing was natural.
Instinct.
As the afternoon grew late, Agnes parked the woman’s Buick Skylark at the edge of an arroyo, out in Timoteo Canyon.
She took seventy-five dollars from the woman’s purse, as well as two credit cards. She had noticed that a few miles down the road was a bus station, but she did not know where the bus might take her, or if one came through this time of day at all. Agnes might have to hitch-hike if she was to get to her destination in a timely manner. Everything was starting to work against her, she thought, after the Fates had to have brought her so far.
The woman she’d murdered had bought a Hershey’s bar that day. Agnes, feeling hungry, tore into it and devoured it, feeling a little like one of the animals, herself. She would have to eat more later on.
She needed to keep her energy up.
Then, she opened the map she’d bought, folding it over until she found the island.
Santa Catalina.
She traced her finger from one side of it to the other.
She was looking for some sign from the Fates that this was the right place.
An omen that both his and her unconscious minds were working in unison.
As she traced a line from the town of Avalon south and then west, she found it.
The words: Kirk-In-The-Rock Caverns.
[Criminally Insane 01.0] Bad Karma Page 8
