She thought about it. “Uh, no,” she said. “Not really.”
“How about the appearance and flavor of the water?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The coffee was all right this morning. I don’t know as I drank any water, not just plain by itself.”
“I see,” he said. “Is it all right if I come in? I’m not interrupting anything?”
She shook her head. “I was just watching TV is all.”
“You’re not busy with the kids then?”
She shook her head. “Still in school.”
Wonderful. He drew the door shut after him. “Now if I could just check the water in the kitchen taps first,” he said. “Which way’s the kitchen, if you don’t mind?”
She led the way. She was wearing khaki slacks and he watched her rear as she walked. He caught up with her at the threshold to the kitchen, clapped a hand over her mouth and wrapped her in a choke hold, her throat caught in the crook of his arm. She struggled, but she was just a little thing and he was much too strong for her. Her struggles ceased and she slumped unconscious, limp in his grasp.
He undressed her there in the kitchen. He used a paper towel to protect his hand and went through drawers until one yielded an electrical extension cord. He cut it in half and used one piece to tie her ankles together and the other to bind her wrists behind her back. He stripped to the waist and picked her up in his arms and carried her through the house until he found the bathroom.
He set her down on the tile floor, stopped the bathtub drain and ran a lukewarm tub of water. The tub was still running when she groaned and opened her eyes.
She looked at him. Her mouth opened but she didn’t make a sound. It didn’t too much matter if she did; the window was closed, and he had drawn the bathroom door shut. No one could hear any sound she could make.
When the tub was as deep as he wanted it he shut off the water and turned to her. “Now I’m just going to give you a nice bath,” he said. “That’s all.” And he picked her up in his arms — she had luxuriously soft skin, she was wonderful to touch — and placed her on her back in the tub.
He used his hands and ran the soap over her teacup breasts, down over her belly, lathered her pubic hair. He put the soap back in the dish and sluiced water over her to rinse her. Her eyes were wide, rolling in terror, but she still hadn’t uttered a sound since regaining consciousness.
“You’re so sweet,” he said, bending to kiss her on the lips. He took hold of the hair at the back of her neck and drew her head down under the water, pinning her down with his other hand on her breast. She tried to struggle, and he could feel her heart hammering. He looked down at her face, just an inch or so below the water surface. Her huge eyes stared at him. She held her breath until she couldn’t hold it anymore, and bubbles issued from her nose and mouth. He pressed down on her chest and her lungs emptied, spewing forth more bubbles. He took his hand away and her lungs filled with water. Her eyes still stared up at him from under the water, but the life was gone from them now.
#58.
When he was breathing normally again himself he unfastened the electrical cord from her wrists and ankles, dried off both pieces, put them in his pocket. He used a washcloth to remove his prints from the edge of the tub, and he dropped the soap into the water; if it held any of his prints, they would soon melt away.
He got his shirt from the kitchen and put it on. He picked up all of her clothing and left it folded on a chair in the master bedroom. By the time he left the house, clipboard in hand, he had erased every trace of his presence in it. With any luck at all, she’d go in the record books as a victim of accidental drowning.
He walked back to his car and drove away. For a few minutes he was lost in the suburban maze of Florissant, but then he got his bearings and found his way to the motel. He parked, but before getting out of the car he took the two lengths of electrical cord from his pockets.
They triggered a sense memory — the girl rolled onto her side while he drew her wrists together behind her back — and he followed the memory all the way to the end, with the blue eyes staring up at him from underwater, the lips parted, the life gone from her, his now, part of him. His body thrilled with an electric sensation not much reduced from the orgasm that had transported him as he drowned the darling little bitch.
Without thinking much about it, he fashioned a loop at either end of the piece of cord he was holding. The loops were large enough to admit his hands, and the length of cord between the loops was about eighteen inches. He flexed his fingers and felt the muscles working in his forearms.
Why not?
He started up the car, drove out of the motel lot and took the belt-way around to Webster Groves, a suburb not unlike Florissant but southwest of the city. He drove around until he found a neighborhood substantially identical to the one where he’d left the girl floating in her bathtub, and he parked the car at the curb and walked up to the first house he came to, clipboard in hand, and the woman who opened the door was a willowy brunette in her mid-thirties, and he just could not wait to kill her.
He said, “Electric company. I’m afraid we’ve got a problem. Could you show me where your fuse box is?”
It was in the basement, but he never did see it. He let her get to the bottom of the cellar stairs, and there he clubbed her on the nape of her neck with his closed fist. The blow drove her to her knees, and before she could recover he had his own knee planted in the small of her back for leverage. He dropped the wire around her throat, and an instant later she was dead.
Oh, heaven!
#59.
Eleven
When Phil Donahue said he would be right back after this message, Mame Odegaard flicked off the set with the remote control device and carried her coffee cup into the kitchen. This was not the simple process it had once been. Mame was sixty-seven. Five years ago, which would have been some three years after her husband’s death, she had begun to be bothered by arthritis. The condition had progressed, and it was now quite severe.
She could walk, but not without the aid of an aluminum walker. She could tend for herself, but everything took longer than it used to, and was more trouble, and often involved pain. Even doing nothing involved pain — pain in her fingers, pain in her toes and ankles, pain in her knees, pain in her hips. She took Tylenol every four hours and it was easier on her stomach than aspirin, but no matter what the doctors said she would swear it wasn’t as effective as the aspirin, it didn’t get past as much of the pain. But then perhaps aspirin wouldn’t be as effective now as she remembered it, because her condition had worsened since she switched to Tylenol.
Her son wanted her to move in with him and his wife, but he worked for the government and they lived in Maryland, just outside of Washington. They had a very nice house but it was their house, not her house, and this was his second wife, he and Ruth had been divorced for some years now, and she had been real close to Ruth and just couldn’t warm up to the second wife, Stephanie. They got along all right, but a visit was a far cry from living under the same roof, and she didn’t want it.
And she didn’t want to live in a city, either. Nor did she like the idea of a retirement village in Arizona, which he kept proposing to her. There would be people around, he told her, people her own age, and she’d have activities, and the harsh winters of western Oregon would be a thing of the past. And, most important, things would be easier for her. She wouldn’t have to do so much for herself, and the heat would help her arthritis, and life would be, well, easier. Easier and better.
And it probably would, she had to agree, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She’d lived at this house beside the road for forty years, moving into it just three years after she and Karl were married. She’d birthed both her children in that house, and she’d buried her daughter from it, and her husband, too.