But that wasn’t true. It hurt more than anything he could ever remember, even more than the shocks his father gave him.
Once again he looked up at his mother, but instead of helping him, she only smiled blandly, as if nothing was wrong at all. “Now you be a good boy, Richard. You be Mama’s perfect little boy, just like you always are.”
She turned around and walked through the doors, leaving him with the big men in white clothes, never even looking back at him.
That day he didn’t cry at all. He didn’t cry when they took him into the room where they kept the hard bed with the thick straps they held him down with.
He didn’t cry when they attached the wires to his head.
He didn’t even cry when he felt the jolts of electricity shoot through him and thought he was going to die.
In fact, he never cried again.
And he always did his best to be his Mama’s perfect little boy.
But the anger — the dark, cold fury he always took care to hide — began to build.
Every day, every week, every month it built.
Every year the rage grew larger, more monstrous.
And his mother never knew it was there.
Always, no matter what happened, she kept believing that he was her perfect little boy, who loved her as much as she said she loved him.
But he knew better. No matter what she said, he knew she didn’t love him — knew she’d never loved him. If she’d loved him, she would have protected him from his father, and from the men in the white clothes with the terrible machine that was even worse than his father’s electric cords.
No, she didn’t love him. She hated him, as much as he hated her.
“Won’t you come in?” The words issued from Glen Jeffers’s mouth, but it was Richard Kraven who asked the question, holding the door wider to let his mother step into the foyer. “I was on the telephone, but if you’ll just give me half a second?”
Courtly, Edna Kraven thought as she nodded her agreement to Mr. Jeffers’s question. Courtly, just like Richard was. “I do hope I’m not bothering you?”
He held up a gently dismissive hand. “Of course not,” he said. Picking up the phone, he spoke briefly into the receiver. “Gordy? I’m afraid something’s come up. I’ll call you later.” Without waiting for a reply from the doctor, he placed the receiver back on the hook, then gently took his mother’s elbow and steered her into the living room. “How nice of you to come,” he said.
Edna lowered herself nervously onto the edge of the sofa, surreptitiously eyeing the furniture in the room. Some of it, she decided, was almost as nice as the things Richard had had. Probably those were things Mr. Jeffers had chosen. Surely that terrible woman he was married to couldn’t have such good taste. Now, as her eyes returned to her host, she felt her heart flutter. Though he didn’t look anything like Richard, there was so much about him that reminded her of her son. His voice, of course. The wonderful, gentle way he spoke. And his eyes, too. They weren’t really the same color as Richard’s had been, but they had the same depth — that quality of looking right inside someone — that Richard’s had.
“I just got to thinking,” she said, her fingers twisting at one of the large buttons on her dress. “You were so nice to me on the phone this morning, I just thought maybe I should talk to you instead of your wife. If I could just make you understand about Richard. You just don’t know how it hurts me when your wife writes those terrible things about him.”
He smiled. “But I do understand,” he said gently. “Believe me, I understand exactly how you feel.”
Edna Kraven brightened. “Oh, I just knew I was right about you. I just knew it! Do you know, you remind me of Richard. It happened the minute I heard your voice this morning. And I just had to come and meet you.”
“I’m so glad you did,” he said softly.
He studied his mother carefully. She was four years older than she’d been the last time he’d seen her, but she hadn’t changed much. The same cheap polyester clothes she’d always worn, her hair still done in that silly style she wrongly thought was so sophisticated. In combination with her heavily made-up face, it gave her the look of those over-the-hill entertainers who scraped out livings in the seedier bars in downtown Las Vegas. With the perfect analytical detachment to which he’d long ago disciplined his mind, Richard Kraven tried to analyze what it could have been about this numbingly boring woman that had inspired such love — even adoration — in his brother.
Perhaps, he thought, it was because they were so much alike.
Or perhaps it was something else entirely — perhaps there was some emotion that people of the inferior intellectual status of Rory and Edna felt that was simply foreign to someone at his own level.
“You have no idea how much it means to me that you’ve come,” he said now. “The pain you must be feeling …”
Edna reached out with doughy fingers to take the hand of this wonderful man. “You have no idea,” she breathed, her voice breaking. “You just have no idea at all. I miss my Richard so much. We used to do things together, just the two of us.” Her eyes went briefly to the front window. “That wouldn’t be your motor home out there, would it?” she asked on a wistful note. “My Richard had one, you know. He used to take me up to the mountains sometimes. Just the two of us.”
A tiny smile played around the corner of his lips. “Did he?” he asked. “Well, as it happens, that is my motor home out there. And just before you arrived, I was just thinking it might be fun to go up to the mountains and do a little fishing. Perhaps you’d like to go along?”
Edna Kraven flushed scarlet. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean — Well, I couldn’t possibly impose on you that way. I just—”
“But of course you’ll come with me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He stood up. “I only have a few more things to put in, and we’ll be off. We can make a picnic of it.”
While Edna Kraven waited nervously in the living room, the man who had become Richard Kraven went down to the basement. He picked up the last of the boxes he’d been transferring to the motor home.
The motor home he’d rented yesterday afternoon, using Glen Jeffers’s driver’s license and credit card.
The box already contained a gas can and a box of matches, and now he added a few more objects to it.
The Makita saw.
The electrical cord with the stripped ends, with which he’d attempted to defibrillate Heather Jeffers’s cat.
The roll of plastic he’d bought yesterday morning, just before he’d visited Rory.
With the box now packed full with everything he would need, he started back up the basement stairs. How many years had he thought about using his mother as the subject for one of his experiments? But of course it had been out of the question.
After all, he only experimented on strangers.
Circumstances, though, had changed.
Now he could see no reason not to make her his subject.
“Ready?” he asked as he paused in the foyer.
Edna Kraven, thrilled at the prospect of spending the day with this charming man who was so very much like her eldest son, heaved herself off the sofa. “One of these days, I’ve just got to lose some weight,” she trilled as she moved toward the front door.
“Not at all,” he said. “I think you’re perfect the way you are. Just perfect.”
As she walked ahead of him down the steps to the motor home waiting on the street, Richard Kraven was already planning the first cut he would make.
CHAPTER 53
It was mid-afternoon when Anne finally returned to her office. She felt utterly worn out, as if she’d had no sleep for at least a week, but she knew that sleeplessness had nothing to do with the exhaustion consuming her. Flopping down into her chair, she sat, head in hands, for almost a full minute, before reaching out to switch her monitor on and erase the sidebar she’d been writing when Mark Blakemoor called. The empty screen seemed to mock her after the story disappeared.