“Please? I need to call home. You know how it is.”
Stacy groaned exaggeratedly, getting up from her chair. “You gals with young kids. I swear, it really does take a village to raise a child. A village of coworkers.”
“Thanks.” She swung behind the counter and had her hand on the phone when Stacy called to her from halfway down the hall.
“Rachel? You owe me one.”
“I do.” Rachel Durkee forced a smile before picking up the receiver. She had to call her sister. Fast.
Shaun pulled into his garage and waited until the door shut behind him and the fluorescent lights popped on before getting out of the car. He stared in dismay at the caramel-colored leather seat, which now looked as if a big baby had wet all over it. God only knew if it was salvageable or not.
Slamming the door shut, he dug out his garage door key and let himself into the breezeway. He eased off his shoes, crusted with mud and leaf rot, and went on stocking feet through the kitchen and up the stairs. Jeremy was certainly at work, and the cleaning woman didn’t come on Saturday, but he was worried Courtney might be home already from her church thing.
He slipped into the guest bathroom and locked the door, stripped off his bloody shirt and trousers, and tossed them into the bathtub. His arm was a mess-a deep row of bite marks clotted with drying blood, surrounded by plum and indigo bruises. The skin around the bite already looked inflamed. He remembered, from the days when Jeremy was in preschool and biting was part of his peers’ social coin, that the human mouth was worse than any animal’s for germs and infections. Could you get tetanus from a human bite? It didn’t matter, he supposed-he wasn’t going to the doctor’s for any treatment, that was for damn sure. He reached for the medicine cabinet and froze as his face came into view.
He was a mess. His nose was puffy, the flesh beneath his eyes purpling. His skin had split over his chin, and a goose egg was hatching on his forehead. He looked like someone who had been in a knock-down, drag-out fight. Courtney was going to freak.
Shaun flipped the door open and grabbed the hydrogen peroxide. He unscrewed the top and, holding his arm over the bathtub, poured half the contents onto his wound.
He bit down on his yell. Holy God, did that sting. The peroxide bubbled furiously in the bite marks. He turned on the tap, and when the antiseptic had done its job, he used a washcloth to sluice away the dried blood. He let the tub keep filling, soaking his clothes, while he bandaged the bite. He scrubbed off his face and dabbed antibiotic cream on his cut. Short of breaking into Courtney’s cosmetics, there wasn’t anything he could do for his black eyes.
He leaned in closer to the mirror. Behind the bruising, his eyes looked the same as they always had, pale blue and preoccupied. He marveled that he didn’t look any different. That his eyes didn’t show he had killed a man.
He blinked. Of course, technically, he hadn’t killed van der Hoeven. He had simply… let him fall. They had been struggling, and perhaps he had pushed him harder than necessary. But still, he knew now. What it felt like.
He remembered a conversation with Russ Van Alstyne. He had been in college, and Russ had been home on leave. It was before they had given up on their awkward attempts at rejoining the severed ends of their friendship. What does it feel like? he had asked. Killing someone?
It doesn’t feel like anything, Russ said.
C’mon. You have to feel something.
Russ had taken a long pull on his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When you’re doing it, he said, you feel hot. And fast. Like doing speed in a sweatbox.
And after?
Russ’s eyes looked a long, long way off, into a place Shaun couldn’t go. After, he said. After, you feel cold.
Shaun looked into his own fifty-year-old eyes and felt something Russ had left out. Or maybe, being a nineteen-year-old grunt, he hadn’t known the feeling for what it was. Exultation. And power. Let Terry McKellan sit behind a desk and say yes or no. Let the Reid-Gruyn board cluster around a table voting up and down. He had exercised real power, the ultimate power. He was taking his destiny into his own hands.
Don’t get cocky, he thought. Events were still too fluid, too slippery. Squeeze too tightly or hold too loosely and he could be right back where he had been, waiting for the ax to fall on Reid-Gruyn. Except this time he’d be waiting inside a jail cell. But if he were smart, and daring and, most important, willing to use the power he had taken into his hands… he looked down at them. Flexed his fingers. Let himself think, for the first time since he had hauled Millie van der Hoeven out of that tower, that maybe there could be another accident.
Lisa Schoof held the telephone tightly, as if loosing her hold, even for a moment, would let the malevolent black thing fly apart, its shrapnel embedding in her flesh, her blood seeping around the plastic wounds, her life dripping away from a hundred openings that could have no healing.
“Say something,” her sister hissed over the line. “For God’s sake.”
The thing that came to mind, I wish you had never called me, I wish I didn’t know, I wish it were still ten minutes ago, was useless. Lisa didn’t bother to ask for reassurance-Are you sure? Couldn’t there be a mistake?-because Rachel, smart, precise Rachel, didn’t make mistakes like this.
She cleared her throat. “How long?” she asked.
“How long what?”
“Until it’s out.”
Rachel clicked her teeth. A habit she had had since girlhood. “I can justify not calling the doctor in to see her for another half hour or so. She’s still sleepy and just had her medication. After that…”
She didn’t have to finish. Lisa could guess. The patient tells the doctor. The doctor tells the police. The police arrest her husband. It reminded her of the circle game they played as kids. The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone…
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’m doing this for you, not for him,” Rachel went on. “If anyone finds out, it’ll mean my job. Not to mention what it’ll do to my marriage. Be smart. Take care of yourself for a change.”
“Thank you,” Lisa repeated.
“I love you,” her sister said.
“I love you, too.”
Rachel’s voice was replaced by a toneless buzz. Carefully, carefully, Lisa replaced the receiver in the cradle. She caught a glimpse of her blurred reflection in the microwave door. I’m happy, she thought. She pinched her cheeks for color, ruffled her hair jauntily. It’s just another Saturday afternoon. She strolled back into the living room.
Kevin Flynn, who had been examining the photos hanging on the wall, turned. “Everything okay?” he asked brightly.
“Yep.” She settled herself in the middle of the sofa, tucking one leg under her. She wasn’t up to controlling her face, voice, hands, and legs all at the same time. She grabbed a pillow, a souvenir from their honeymoon in Aruba with scenes from the island stitched on the cover. She wrapped her arms around it, one hand on a conch shell, one on a palm tree. “Just my friend Denise. Denise Hammond, you remember her.”
It helped if she thought of him as little Kevin Flynn, who had been a painfully thin freshman during her senior year at Millers Kill High. Skinny Flynnie, that had been his nickname. She did her best to ignore his uniform, the belt strapped around his waist like Batman’s utility belt, for chrissakes, his gun.
She wouldn’t think about his gun.
Kevin lowered himself into the only other seat in the room, the wooden rocking chair. “Yeah, I remember her. Whatever happened to her?”