by Ed Gorman
To make absolutely sure she was right, she bent down and touched a fingertip to the tiled floor. The stuff was still warm, smooth and warm between her fingertips.
Then she saw the mirror. A bloody handprint. And then the walls. Bloody handprints all over, streaked down the buff-colored walls. She felt sick. Mother. Father.
Then she saw the sink. Heavy swaths of blood on the white double-basins.
Then the shower. This was the worst of all the places in the bathroom to confront. The shower door was opaque. It could be hiding anything. She could open the shower door and…
She tried seeing through the opaque door but couldn't. A body could be lying dead on the floor of the shower and she wasn't sure she'd be able to see it. She became aware of blood smells now, tart, metallic, stomach-turning. Whose blood?
She extended a hand to the shower door handle. Took a deep breath. Wished there were light. Wished she already knew what was waiting for her in the shower stall.
She felt as it a trick had been played on her. That was her feeling when she opened the shower door and looked inside. Even cast in deep shadow as it was, the shower stall was clearly empty.
***
All her fear, all her anxiety and-nothing. She was relieved, and yet vexed, too, because she still had no answer for the blood smears everywhere.
She withdrew from the shower, withdrew from the bathroom, withdrew from the master bedroom. Stood now in the hall, looking around, listening. Nothing to see or hear. Her eyes settled briefly on the bay window at the far end of the hall, it had a window seat. As a small girl, she'd liked to sit there and watch the clouds and refashion them into different shapes-angels and sailing ships and big white fluffy dogs.
Since she could find nothing helpful inside, maybe she could find something helpful outside.
She wanted to change clothes, though. She didn't feel ready for a situation like this dressed in a robe and silk pajamas. She returned silently to her room, changed quickly into a blouse, jeans, and loafers.
She was just leaving her room when she saw the shape in the shadows at the top of the stairs. Human shape. Could be man or woman. Impossible to tell from here. The shape was as dark and sinister as the shadows themselves. And then the shape was moving down the stairs. She thought of calling out, but she sensed that the shape hadn't seen her. So why give her position away?
She hurried to the far end of the hall and the window seat. She looked out the window and what she saw made no sense at first.
What was Ted doing here? There in the turn-around area in front of the garages was Ted's vintage red MG. He hadn't been there when she was downstairs talking to her parents. He must have arrived as she was taking her shower. Maybe they'd called and invited him out because she was home again and he'd been so worried. But, no. He couldn't have made it out here that quickly. And anyway, she couldn't believe that Dad would have let him in his house twice in just a few days. Even Jenny had to admit, for all his charm, Ted's self-absorption could get to you after a while.
So what was he doing here?
And then the significance of his car being here struck her.
What if it was Ted responsible for the scream? For the blood all over the master bedroom?
Ted had been in love with Molly for many, many years, and always would be. And Ted and Dad loathed each other. And always would. What if Ted simply snapped, couldn't take it any longer?
The electrical lines had been cut. So had the phone lines. Ted was somewhere in the house, she realized-and then thought of the shape at the top of the staircase.
If he had been up here…
She needed to check the rooms at the other end of this floor.
On her way, she stopped into the second floor den and picked up a bottle of brandy. Not because she needed a drink but because she needed a weapon. She was angry now, resentful of all of them, Ted and Quinlan and Priscilla. It was time she fought back, really fought back, and if that meant violence, so be it. She was tired of being a helpless girl woman. She had a need to be an adult. And to be treated like an adult. And that meant fending for herself. If she found out that Ted had hurt her folks in any way-
She clutched the brandy bottle tightly and hurried down the hallway, slowing only when she reached the first guest room. The door was ajar. Moonlight traced the edge of the open door. She tried to peer inside without opening the door, but all she could see was angle of bed and bureau and window. No sign that anybody was in there.
She pushed open the door. Before her lay the large canopy bed and the heavy last-century European furnishings that her parents had brought back from a trip a few years ago. Castle Dracula, her Mom had called this room. And it was an appropriate name. The whole room had that feel.
She was three feet into the room before she noticed the dark drops on the tan carpeting. She watched where they led-directly to the bed. But they still didn't tell her much because the drapes on the bed were closed. It was impossible to see what was on the bed.
She'd have to draw the drapes aside. Anxiety filled her chest. Heart racing. A skin of cold sweat on her face, arms and back. She did not want to open the drapes. What if…
All she could think of was the red MG by the garage. Ted. She'd thought he was such a good friend and…
She crept closer to the bed, almost unaware of moving at all.
Being an adult. Taking responsibility for herself. That meant opening the curtains. Looking inside. Now.
A few more steps, avoiding the drops of blood on the carpet, that chain of stains that foretold a terrible tale.
Two more steps. Three more steps. Moonbeams through the mullioned windows. And the absolute stillness of this night. Two more steps. Three more steps. She reached the bed.
Her hand reached out for the dark drape-when you slept with the drapes closed, you were halfway to a sensory deprivation chamber-and came away with something sticky and wet clinging to her palm. She had no doubt what it was as she held it up to the moonlight for inspection. All she wanted to know was to whom the blood belonged. And she knew she was about to find out.
She reached out again for the drape. Her fingers anticipated the sticky feel of blood. She reached out for the drape and…
***
That was when the scream came. At first, Jenny couldn't be sure from what part of the mansion the scream had come. But she quickly realized that the sound was fairly close by.
Her impulse was to run toward the scream, see if she could help the person in danger.
But she was here at the bed, the drape in her hand. If she hurried.
She ripped the drape back and looked inside. A dark figure-almost a silhouette, a shadow-lay on the bed. She pulled the drape back even farther, so that moonlight exposed the interior of the canopy bed. She could not tell in that first awful moment who it was. But she could tell what it was sticking out of his forehead. A butcher knife. The one with the gently curved Scandinavian bone handle her mother had had made specially for the family.
Only then was Jenny able to focus on the face of Ted Hannigan… The eyes were open in shock; blood from his forehead trickled down into his right eye. His mouth was wide open in a scream that would never be fulfilled. His hands were oddly peaceful, lying at his sides, fingers partly splayed. She took all this in within seconds of throwing back the drapes…
And then the scream came again.
She dropped the drape, letting Ted rest in peace. She felt terrible that she had suspected him of being the killer…
She ran out of the room and down the hallway.
There on the top of the steps stood a bloody figure she did not recognize at first, a figure whose clothes hung in blood-soaked rags, whose white body was scarred with long knife slashes and smeared with blood. The blood made the naked breasts and the exposed genitals obscene-they should have been beautiful and clean as they ordinarily were.
This was her mother.
Jenny cried out several things but had no idea what she was saying. She was simply react
ing to the vulnerable sight of her mother who was now starting to fall facedown upon the hardwood floor at the top of the stairs.
Jenny lurched forward, getting her arms under her mother before the woman reached the floor. She held her with great tenderness, getting her under the arms so she could half-lift her and get her into the nearest bedroom.
Molly was sobbing and babbling. She was clearly in clinical shock. There was a guest room with two single beds. In the moonlight, the white chenille spreads seemed to glow. She stretched her mother out on the bed. The white chenille became instantly red.
"Who did this?" Jenny kept asking uselessly, over and over.
She hurried to the closet and got a heavy blanket and covered her mother with it. Then she knelt next to her, checking her mother's wrist pulse, taking the blanket edge and wiping sweat and blood from her face.
It took her a few minutes but she was finally able to calm her mother. Beneath the blanket, Molly curled in upon herself fetus-style. She seemed oblivious to her knife wounds. Her eyes were as haunted as Ted's had been in death. Her teeth made clicking sounds as they grated upon each other.
"Oh, Mom, Mom," Jenny said, brushing sweat from her mother's forehead with her hand. She kissed her mother's cheek, terrified at the notion that Molly was slipping into death.
Then he was there in the doorway. She heard him before she saw him.
"Dad!" she cried, looking up.
But this man with the bloody butcher knife and the blood-dripping hands and the bloodstained white shirt was an imposter. Her father could never look like this-especially not with the fierce, crazed, protuberant eyes and the blood-spattered forehead and cheeks.
"I'm afraid I'm not your dad," he said with eerie calmness from the guest room doorway. "That was an honor that belonged to Ted Hannigan. They deceived me just as much as they deceived you."
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
They'd been embracing.
They were still in each other's arms when Gretchen came through the door she'd just kicked in. The weird thing was, at least for Gretchen, neither Priscilla nor Quinlan showed any fear at the sight of her or her .45.
All they showed was irritation. Like parents really annoyed that their child had come back down the stairs after being put to bed.
"You couldn't even be faithful for a night, could you?" Gretchen said, looking sorrowfully at Quinlan.
He wore a banded-collar blue shirt, chinos, and white Nikes. He always looked handsome in casual clothes and he looked so handsome at this moment that Gretchen profoundly resented his looks. It wasn't fair he should look so good; it made not loving him all the more impossible.
As for Priscilla… She was at last beginning to show the proper respectful attitude-fear. "Gretchen, you really shouldn't be carrying that thing around. You don't want it to go off, do you?"
Gretchen smiled bitterly. "You should be wearing your white uniform before you sound like that."
Priscilla looked confused-and frightened.
"That's how you all sound," Gretchen said, "all you 'mental health professionals' when you're talking to crazy people like me. Like I don't know what this is or something, Priscilla? Like I'm so crazy, it might go off all by itself. Well, I've got some fucking news for you, bitch. It'll never go off accidentally because that'd spoil all my fun. And that's all I can get from this touching little scene here, Priscilla-fun. Seeing two of my favorite 'mental health professionals' bite the big one."
"Do something, Quinlan," Priscilla said. "Talk to her."
Quinlan still didn't look scared. He looked irritated, maybe even a little bored, but not scared. "She loves melodrama, our little Gretchen. So she's staging a psychodrama for us. What is this, Gretchen, the fifth or sixth time you've pulled a gun on me?"
"I'm not kidding this time, Quinlan," Gretchen said angrily.
"I believe that's what you said the last three or four times," Quinlan said. "Now be a good girl and put the gun down on the table over here and get your ass back to your room. We can get together in the morning and discuss whatever needs to be discussed. But for right now, Priscilla and I have some business to discuss." He smiled. "Grown-up stuff, Gretchen."
"I'm not going anywhere," Gretchen said, "and neither are you."
Priscilla was showing signs of panic. This was wonderful for Gretchen to see. She'd been seeing shrinks since she was eight years old but she'd never seen one give in to panic. But she had the feeling she was about to.
Quinlan walked over to her. Put his hand out. Turned his hand palm up. "Why don't you give me the gun so Priscilla can relax a little?"
"Why don't you give her one of your famous injections?" Gretchen said. "The kind you gave poor Jenny Stafford."
"What does she know about Jenny Stafford?" Priscilla said, anxiety growing constantly in her voice and expression.
"She found some tapes," Quinlan said, not willing to admit that Gretchen had been instrumental in Jenny's escape.
"What kind of tapes?" Priscilla snapped.
Quinlan frowned. "Priscilla, will you just please calm down? She found some tapes and I took them back from her. Nothing more to it than that."
"Kiss her," Gretchen said to Quinlan.
"Just give me the gun," Quinlan said, putting his hand out again.
"Kiss her," Gretchen said. "Just the way you were when I broke in here. You would've ended up fucking her over there on the bed. And that's what I want you to do now. I want you to kiss her and then I want you to fuck her. Put on a little show for me."
Quinlan got another panic-tight glance from Priscilla.
"I always knew you were a voyeur, Gretchen," Quinlan said calmly. "It was just a matter of time till it came out."
Gretchen stepped over to Priscilla and put the gun against her temple. "Take him in your arms, Priscilla. Right now."
"I really don't want to do this," Priscilla said, trying to summon at least a modicum of self-respect.
"I really don't care," Gretchen said. "You're going to do it anyway."
Priscilla sighed. Anger was winning out over fear. She put her arms out. Quinlan looked more irritated than ever. But he came over and slid into her embrace.
"Now kiss her, Quinlan."
"I'm really getting sick of this bullshit," Quinlan said.
"Kiss her."
He kissed her.
"More passion," Gretchen said.
They put more passion into it.
"Now start taking her clothes off."
"No," Priscilla said. "No, I won't do this. I refuse to."
Gretchen put the gun to her head again. "Then I'll kill you."
Quinlan nodded for her to comply. He was starting to | show some concern himself. He no longer looked quite so complacent.
Priscilla took off her Armani jacket.
"Now the skirt."
She slipped off her skirt. She stood in a wine-red bra and very skimpy matching panties. She had a very nice body.
"Now take the rest of her clothes off, Quinlan."
"Are you just going to stand there?" Priscilla said to Quinlan. "Talk to her."
Gretchen said, "He's getting scared, Priscilla. He doesn't know what to say to me. He's starting to sense that this is different from the other times. He's thinking that maybe I really | will kill him this time-and you know what? Maybe I will. Maybe I really will."
***
Coffey had known a couple of cabbies who'd souped their engines up. He'd always thought that was a pretty useless idea. Hit the kind of speeds those cabbies did, you'd inevitably lose your driver's license.
He was wishing now that he had a souped-up cab. He was moving so slowly on the freeway. Every few minutes, he'd punch in the same number on his cell phone-Jenny's parents. He needed to warn Jenny about her father. But he always got the same response from the operator. The phone was out of order. All kinds of terrible images played at the edges of his mind, the worst being those involving her father. Or her presumptive father, as the lawyers liked to say. On one of the tapes th
at showed Quinlan and Priscilla using both drugs and hypnotherapy, Tom Stafford had also put in an appearance. He was the man paying for all this.
He wished again that he had one of those exotic, souped-up cabs, one of those cars that would leave a half-block of rubber when it peeled out.
Unfortunately, he had to contend with a nice, dependable, drag-ass car that rarely went more than seventy miles per hour.
He frantically punched in Jenny's phone number again.
***
"Leave her alone, Jenny. I want her to die." Tom Stafford spoke very quietly.
Her father-or the man she'd always assumed was her father-came into the guest room not with great rage or drama but with a kind of weariness, a kind of sadness.
He came over, stood by the bed. In the moonlight, the blood that covered his body in splashes and smears and spatters gleamed wetly. The gleaming butcher knife remained in his right hand, though it seemed to dangle there, forgotten.
She looked up at him from where she knelt next to her mother. "I wish I could feel sorry for you but I can't. You've killed Ted and tried to kill my mother."
"She deceived me," he said, the sorrow and exhaustion still evident in his voice. "Our entire life was a lie."
"She shouldn't have done that," Jenny said softly. "But you shouldn't have done this either." Jenny looked at her mother, at the faint rise and fall of her chest. Her breathing was slowing all the time. Death wasn't far away.
"Oh, Mom," Jenny said. And then leaned forward and kissed her again on the forehead. And took one of her hands and held it gently. Why would her Mom hide such a secret all her life? Why hadn't she been honest with Tom?
She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she momentarily forgot about Tom behind her…
