"What's going on, Chick? Am I a hostage?"
"Bad choice of words. You're a houseguest who I will not permit to make a dangerous trip down the mountain on icy roads at night. I have your safety to protect."
"The phone is dead."
"Lines are down again because of the storm."
"Then how did you call the lodge? Were you faking that call?"
"I don't take well to being quizzed, Paige. I'm not some country club pussy like Chandler. I'm a man who is used to being in charge-used to controlling his space:'
Of course, the minute I said that, I knew it was wrong but this wasn't turning out the way I envisioned it.
Her teeth were bared, her feet spread. In that moment, she looked like she was getting ready to kick my ass.
I had another rush of anger. I was beginning to hate her guts.
Chapter 40
ANGER COLORED CHICK'S FACE AS I STOOD THERE WITH the dead phone in my hand. Apparently, I wasn't cooperating with his twisted fantasy. I watched as he made a huge effort to compose himself, taking half a dozen deep breaths.
"I need to tell you something," he finally said. "I've been waiting for just the right moment, and now that we're alone with no distractions, I think you need to understand a few things. It's important because it affects everything between us."
"There is no `us: Chick."
"When I first saw you in Hawaii almost a year ago, I had never seen anyone so breathtakingly beautiful… "
"Please, Chick… "
"Stop arguing and interrupting! Listen to me, for chrissake!" He took several more breaths, then calmed himself again and continued.
"Y'see, Paige, I've never been a man with a big emotional component. I don't know why that is. Maybe it was my dad dying so early in my adolescence. Maybe it was because my mother and grandmother were such hovering crones. I don't know what caused it. But then, in Hawaii last January, I saw you. You were my definition of human perfection. Right then a floodgate of emotion just opened. All these feelings I'd never felt before, they just swamped me."
"Chick, please! Don't do this. You don't have a clue who I am."
He cocked his head like an animal scoping prey. The look was chilling.
"But I was married, so it was one of those impossible things," he continued, as if he hadn't heard me. "You had Chandler. I had Evelyn. So you went home; I went home. That should have been the end of it. But Paige, I couldn't get you out of my mind-couldn't erase the memory of you from my thoughts. Little things, adorable things about you haunted my every waking moment. The birthmark on your calf, I love that birthmark. The way you like to sit with your legs tucked under you, the giggly laugh you have. The little hairs on your arms, so fine, so perfect?'
Jesus Christ, I thought. This guy is out of his fucking mind. "Chick, you've had quite a bit of wine, so let's stop this right now, before either of us says something we don't mean."
"I've been planning to tell you this for months, Paige. I've thought about nothing else for almost a year. From the second I first sawyou getting out of the pool at the Four Seasons, it was love at first sight."
He took another sip of the Bordeaux and set down the glass. "I have plans for us. Dreams."
I thought, I've had enough. This asshole murdered my husband. If I'm going down, then it might as well be swinging. So I shouted my next words right in his smug face.
"Plans for us? I'm not interested in you, you silly son-of-a-bitch. I still love Chandler!"
"Chandler is dead!" he shouted back. "He's gone. Evelyn's gone. It's just us now."
I could see where this was headed. He would convince himself that I wanted him, despite my protests. First rape, then maybe even murder.
Suddenly, Chick lunged toward me and grabbed my purse. "What've you got in there?" I was clutching the bag so tightly he must have sensed I had something inside. He jerked the bag open and pulled out the broken wineglass stem, waving it between us. "What's this for?"
I didn't answer.
His eyes fell on Bob Butler's letter and the drawing. He reached into the purse and plucked them out. He opened the letter first, took one step back, and scanned it quickly. Then he glanced at the picture.
The truth of Bob's accusation was immediately all over his face.
He dropped the letter to the floor. His eyes went dead, like the flickering glass eyes on the wall-hung animals.
He whispered something. At first I didn't understand him, but then he said it louder. "You complete me."
The insanity of that remark rocked me.
"You killed them both, didn't you? First Chandler, then Evelyn. All of it because of this twisted fantasy that you and I would one day be together?'
I had to get out of here now or die trying. "Give me the keys to the car, Chick."
"I can't let you leave, Paige."
"You gonna kill me, too?"
He stepped forward. Both his hands were extended toward me, a strange look of frustration clouding his face.
It was time to make my move, so right then, when he wasn't expecting it, I gave him a kin-geri, which is a polite Japanese term for a kick to the balls. My foot strike caught him squarely, in the bulge of those tight, Roberto Cavalli stretchies. He grabbed his crotch, doubled over, and then dropped to his knees in pain.
I exploded through the house and out the front door into the night. The fresh snow was almost a foot high on the porch. I ran down the steps, slipping once and going down, but I rolled immediately up to my feet and sprinted toward the gold Mercedes, running my fingers under the front bumper, looking for the hide-a-key. Nothing.
"Paige, come back here! Don't make me do this!"
I turned and saw Chick standing on the front porch holding a scoped deer rifle. I spun and ran as fast as I could, into the trees at the side of the drive. I had carelessly left my sweater inside and the cold, wind-whipped snow swirled around me. Then I heard a rifle's report, heard a limb snap nearby. I kept running, heading up the steep bank into the forest by the side of his driveway, my short choppy sprinter's stride churning in the deep drifting snow.
Chapter 41
I'VE PRETTY MUCH SPENT MY ENTIRE LIFE BEING WHAT other people wanted. First, it was my loser father. Then I was forced to endure that hen party with my mother and grandmother. I've tried to fit in. Tried to belong. I've joined clubs full of people who bored me, brown-nosed people who, if they weren't socially or corporately important, I probably wouldn't have wasted a bullet on. My life was ordered by the stringent guidelines and demands of others.
And what had come of all this endless ass-kissing? Disaster, that's what. I had a personal balance-sheet that resembled the crater on Mount St. Helens and a dead wife who mocked me from the grave, the memory of her coarse insults bubbling relentlessly in my subconscious. I had an angry daughter I'd come to hate, and a business career that was like nine miles of dirt road.
The only thing I'd asked for in my crummy life, the only perk, if you will, that I had applied for, was just a little happiness in the arms of this one woman. I had fantasized over her. I had even killed for her. And what did this contribution to my own madness produce? Nothing. It produced not one damn useful thing, except an ever-widening circle of rage.
So here she was, standing before me like a crazed kamikazi, armed with the broken stem of a fucking hundred-dollar Venetian crystal goblet, ready to unzip my ass with its jagged point. You see what I'm saying? When the hell is Chick Best gonna catch a fucking break? When's the Chickster gonna get a little TLC?
And then, next comes this bullshit letter from Bob Butler, accusing me of murder. My instincts on that toothpick-chewing Carolina hayseed had been right on target. He'd sniffed around until he'd finally found the auto body shop, and then written Paige that I was the one who'd run Chandler down.