Jocelyn heard a metallic thump. “See this?” Knox said. “I’m sick. I’ve only got a few months to live, so whether I die tonight or I die a few months from now, it’s all the same to me. But I’d really like to hear your side of the story, Francine.”
“No!” Jocelyn shouted.
She sped up, blowing through two more stop signs and swerving around a double-parked taxi.
“And what will I tell the police when you turn up dead in my kitchen? Don’t you think it will be suspicious?” Francine asked.
“You’ll tell them I came to gloat. I have a long history of harassing you and your husband. I’m a drunk. You’ll tell them I showed up intoxicated to harass you. Maybe I fell, maybe I had a heart attack. Either way, you’ll say I dropped dead in your kitchen. I lost credibility a long time ago, Francine. No one will question you. My prognosis is well-documented. There won’t be an autopsy. Now, I’m halfway through this cup, so you better start talking.”
“What do you want to know?”
“How’d you frame Cash?”
She laughed. “Oh, my husband is so easy. He’s weak and very stupid. It wasn’t hard. Of course, the food poisoning went a bit further than I intended. I had to take him to the ER. The good thing was that it was late enough to where he still could have gone and killed her.”
Jocelyn came to a dead stop where the gas company had opened up the street. They hadn’t set up any signs, just a cone, a Philadelphia Gas Works truck and a gaping hole in the middle of the street. The stream of expletives that shot out of Jocelyn’s mouth would have made a sailor blush.
“The food poisoning,” Knox said. “You give him the same thing you gave Rush and Razmus?”
“The detective and the PI?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, yes, the very same. Listeria. Yucky stuff.”
“Why poison them, by the way?”
Jocelyn tried backing up one-handed, but a car had already pulled up behind her.
“Why not?” she heard Francine say.
She clutched the phone tighter and gritted her teeth. “You fucking bitch,” she said. Behind her, the other driver began making a three point turn.
“Where’d you get listeria?” Knox asked.
“The eleventh grade biology teacher.”
“He grows it in his lab? He just gives it to you to poison people with?”
Francine scoffed. “Don’t be naïve. Everything has a price. He has eight children. His wife only allows him to fuck her once a month with the lights out in the missionary position.”
“So you sleep with him?”
“When I need something, yes. Or sometimes just to watch him flagellate himself for weeks afterward.”
Finally, the other driver completed the turn and pulled away. Jocelyn backed up and turned as fast as she could, heading in the direction she had come.
“That what you do for fun? Watch people suffer?” Knox asked. His wheezing was getting worse.
“People are no fun if you can’t watch them sweat it out every now and then.”
“You’ve been watching Cash sweat it out for years.”
Francine snickered. “Oh yes. My husband is most entertaining. As I said, he is weak. The opportunities for provoking his guilt were nearly endless.”
“What do you mean?”
Jocelyn weaved her way through a seemingly endless network of narrow, one-way side streets, having to turn around twice because of people who had double-parked their vehicles dead center in the street and left them there. They didn’t even put their blinkers on.
“Fuckers,” she said.
Francine went on, her tone conversational, as if she were having brunch with a girlfriend. “In case you hadn’t noticed, my husband can’t keep his dick in his pants, especially around young girls. He tries, or he thinks he does, but he is just not capable of controlling himself. He did it in college, then three days before our wedding, then he did it with Sydney, and with Becky Wu. Those are just the ones I know about.”
“So he cheats?”
“Incessantly.”
Knox coughed, a wretched-sounding wet cough. On a great wheezing exhale, he said, “You married him anyway.”
“He serves a purpose.”
“The cheating doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me, but marriage would be no fun without something to punish him for.”
“How do you punish him?”
“It depends.”
“Frame him for murder? Spread rumors to your colleagues that he’s impotent?”
“You catch on quick, although he really does have trouble getting it up.”
Jocelyn heard Knox swallow again. Then what sounded like his mug hitting the table hard. His voice was getting weaker, his breathing more labored. She could envision him toggling the dials on his oxygen tank. “Did you put the bees in Becky Wu’s bag?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Biology teacher?”
“No. One of my most sickly students—her mother was a beekeeper. I befriended her for a time. Learned a lot about bees. Did you know all it takes is a little bit of smoke to make bees sluggish? Burn a little bit of newspaper in a bucket, and you’ve got a homemade bee smoker. Sedates them quite well. Back then, I had a young man, a former student, who was willing to do anything at all for me, so I had him plant them in her bag.”
Another wet cough. “What happened to him?”
“Who knows? He’s probably in prison. Really, he was always quite troubled.”
Jocelyn was almost there. She got stuck behind a food delivery driver. He’d left his car in the middle of the street, the driver’s side door ajar. She watched him make his way up to one of the row houses lining the street. He jogged, but he still seemed to be moving in slow motion.
“Did you tamper with the EpiPen?” Knox wheezed.
Francine laughed. “Of course not. That would be far too suspicious. I really didn’t intend for that little twit to die. That idiot was supposed to have an EpiPen with her, but she left it in her locker. Teenagers. They think they’re invincible. Her death was a bonus. The allergic reaction would have been sufficient. Not so easy to suck your coach’s dick when your tongue is swollen, is it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Knox said.
Francine’s laugh was positively giddy.
Jocelyn beeped. The delivery driver ran back to his car. He waved at her and got in. It was an eternity before he finally pulled away.
“Were there others?” Knox asked.
“Others that my husband cheated with? There was a girl in college, but I didn’t do anything to her. I was far more concerned with punishing Cash. So one night while he was out supposedly studying with her, I staged my own rape. It wasn’t hard to do. Meet a stranger at a bar, have some rough vehicular sex, go home, break a window, throw the house into disarray. It was quite fun, really. I tortured him with that for years. The best part was that I didn’t have to fuck him, but he felt so sorry for me, he was at my beck and call twenty-four-seven. Of course, he did tire of it. He threatened to leave.”
“I’m not sure I want to know, but how did you get him to stay?”
“I tried suicide, of course. Overdose.”
Jocelyn heard rustling again. The sound of two taps. Knox checking to see if his phone was still there? “Weren’t you worried you’d actually die?”
“One has to take risks.”
“Cash must have felt really terrible after that.”
“It was glorious. He was twice as attentive as he was after the rape. Every second of his life was consumed with pleasing me. The only thing that puts him in that state now is a good miscarriage.”