Black-Eyed Susans (38 page)

“Get out, Lydia,” Tessie sobs.
“Getoutgetoutgetout.”

I’m crossing the yard, running.
Barefoot. It feels like a dream. A starry night above my head. A sweet, drifting
perfume, nauseating.

Shadows hang off every tree, ready to
smother me. I focus on the light trickling out of Effie’s kitchen window. On the
cold steel in my hand. On the idea of Effie, alone with a monster. The one eating her
brain, the one who turned girls to bones, the one who used to brush my hair and secretly
despise my weakness. Maybe all three.

Waiting for me. Using Effie as bait.

What is that on the ground?
I bend
and brush my fingers on the grass. Confetti. It litters a path between my house and
Effie’s. I rub the bits of paper between my fingers. Watch the pieces tumble and
float downward like brilliant abstract thoughts.

It isn’t confetti
.

The grass is littered with black-eyed
Susans.

Someone has ripped off their body parts and
left me a trail.

I’m gasping, sucking at air that is
evaporating.

Van Gogh’s sky is spinning above
me.

My head is exploding with images, and
settles on one.

He has finally wiped the mud off his
face.

My monster. The Black-Eyed
Susan killer.

He’s clean, and shaved. Smiling.

The Susans yip with joy.
That’s
him that’s him that’s him!

I can feel his arm trapped around my
shoulder. Smell the cologne on his suit coat.

Hear his lazy, reassuring drawl.

If you had three wishes, Tessie, what would they be?

We made love twice. He’s already on the
edge of the bed.

“I’m going to take a shower,
sweetheart,” he says. “Then I’m going to have to run. So pack up,
OK?”

Sweetheart.
Like I’m a 1940s
thing on the side. How about getting a little more mythological? Calling me Eurydice? Or
Isolde? I’m thinking that Lydia Frances Bell deserves better right now than
scratchy sheets and
pack up
and
sweetheart.

The shower is already running.

I slip naked out of bed, shivering. He
always keeps it freezing in his apartment. He doesn’t like the noise of the
furnace coming on and off.
Whatever.
I grab his shirt off the floor and slip my
arms into it. Flap the long sleeves like a bird. It’s his last day at school
before his China sabbatical. He says Tessie doesn’t ever need to know we slept
together, which is, like,
huge.
I’m thinking she’ll get over the
testimony stuff. I give her a month.

These packing boxes are freaking
everywhere.

Maybe I’ll explore. Find a memento he
won’t miss.

I stick my hands in the pockets of his old
man suits. I wish he’d let me dress him. His shirts are way too starchy. They
scratch my
neck. I thumb through a stack of textbooks that would bore
the crap out of me. I rove around in his boxer shorts drawer. Ordinary, ordinary,
ordinary.

The shower’s still running.

I open and shut more empty drawers. Check
out the freezer.

Thumb through a pile of mail. Geez, even
Tessie leaves me better surprises.

I almost didn’t bother to open the
cabinet under the kitchen sink.

That’s where I found them.

Straggly yellow flowers with black eyes,
sitting in the dark.

I’m kneeling. Staring at a petal stuck
to my hand. Pulsing with rage.

At him. At myself, for knowing all along but
being too afraid to see.

At Lydia.

I don’t know how much time has passed.
Seconds? Minutes? The light still glows steadily from Effie’s kitchen.

You control your mind, Tessie.
The
doctor. In my head. Leering. Mocking.

I will myself to stand.

Petals are everywhere, glued to my knees, to
the soles of my bare feet.

I reach down to brush them off.

They are not petals.

They are tiny, twisted scraps of Kleenex.
Fragments of tissue that have disintegrated in the washer. The ones constantly nesting
in the pockets of Effie’s robes and sweaters.

This is Effie’s trail. It leads to her
front door, miles away from the grave where Tessie went to sleep.

Except Tessie is waking up. The old Tessie,
who outran boys,
who beat a plodding heart, who risked scabs and bones
and scars,
who did not lose
because her dead mother cheered her across the
finish line.

I see Tessie crouched on a track in blinding
sunlight. Heat rises in visible waves. Her eyes are down. To finish first, she will
spend the least amount of time possible in the air, over the hurdles.

Her fingertips are poised on gritty
dirt.

Mine are twisting Effie’s
doorknob.

Both of us, ready for the gun to go off.

He’s like a serial killer Mr. Darcy,
offering me his hand so that I can step into the boat bobbing away off the ratty dock.
We took this wiggly little path down from the cabin to get here. His idea, the rental
cabin. Our special goodbye night, he says, before he takes off for China or wherever
he’s really going. This place is remote as hell. I wonder if he brought other
girls here. Or does he choose a new spot every time? Everything’s black. The
water, the sky, the forest of trees behind us. And what about that tarp in the bottom of
the boat? Does he really think that Lydia Bell is this stupid? Of course, I’m
stepping into a boat with a serial killer but that’s what you have to do when
there’s no real evidence and you’re the very last hope.

“Careful,” he warns as I step
down. “Want to drive?” While I sit, he’s yanking the outboard string,
having a little trouble getting it all revved up. I could offer advice but I
don’t.

“No, thanks,” I say.
“I’d be scared. I’m just going to sit back and look at the moon if I
can find it. I have a flashlight. Maybe I’ll read to you.” I wave the book
in my hand,
The Ultimate Book of Love Poems: Browning to Yeats,
even though I
have a photographic memory and I’ve read this book a billion times.

“I didn’t know
anything was capable of scaring you,” he teases.
Hmm,
I’m thinking,
the scared thing might have been too much.

“You’re going to love it out
here on the lake in the dark,” he’s saying. “Just your style. Wait to
read until we get to a good spot. I’ll cut the motor and we can drift a little.
Drink a little wine.”

He’s about two miles out, slowing the
boat down, when I flick on my flashlight, open the book, and begin. “‘You
love me. You love me
not.
’”

The words get lost in the noise of the
engine.

“What?” Impatient. “I told
you not to read yet.”

I go silent, which is hard.

He kills the motor in the middle of the
lake.

I’m prepared, of course. Ten questions
are typed out in my head, numbered one under the other. I shut the book.

Question No. 1: “Did you kill those
girls?”

“What girls, sweetie?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t love
you anymore? That I would tell?”

“Lydia. Stop.”

“Did you know who I was that very
first day in your office? That I was Tessie’s best friend?” I want him to
say
no.
I want him to
explain.

It’s hard to see his face in the dark.
His body remains perfectly relaxed. “Sweetheart, of course I knew. I know
everything about you and Tessie. You are fucked-up little girls.”

I’m watching his hands, fiddling with
a coiled rope.

It’s official. Lydia Frances Bell
loved a serial killer.

My heart is pounding pretty hard, which is
to be expected. I keep my eyes on the rope. “Where are you really going on that
plane?”

“Surely your big brain has better
questions than this, Lydia. But to answer … I’m not sure yet.”

“I have ten questions
total.”

“Fire away.”

“Do you really have a daughter named
Rebecca?”

“I do not.” He’s
grinning.

“No family? No
friends?”

“Unnecessary, don’t you
think?”

“My other three questions don’t
matter.”

My fingers curl around Daddy’s gun in
my coat pocket.

“I’m pregnant,” I say.

The gun, now aimed at his chest.

Blood drooling out of his shoulder
instead.

I didn’t even hear it go off. A
gunshot on the lake sounds like the sky is cracking. Like it might rain shards of glass.
That’s what Tessie used to say.

I steady my hand.

“Wait, sweetheart.” He’s
pleading with me. “We can work this out. You and I, we’re the
same.”

The foyer, dark.

“Effie?” I call out.

“In the kitchen, Sue.” Her voice
traveling over from the next room. Lilting. Her panic erased. I smell something
burnt.

I wonder if it’s gunpowder. If my
neighbor has shot her digger snatcher dead with that little pearl-handled revolver she
keeps loaded in her bedside table against my wishes.

You can do this. For Charlie.

I round the corner.

It is an ordinary tableau.

And a chilling one.

Lydia, a very alive,
blond
Lydia,
seated at the table.

Effie, beaming and placing a blue-flowered
china plate in front of her.

“There you are!” Effie enthuses.
“False alarm! It wasn’t the digger snatcher after all. It was just Liz here.
Which is a real treat.”

Lydia, smiling. Not buried in an anonymous
grave. Not broken. Not sorry. A part of everything.

Her lips are slashed with
bright red. I see the tiny, tiny black birthmark on her upper lip that one boy teased
her was a tick. She’d held her hand over her mouth for a week.

Her left leg is crossed over the right knee
at a slightly odd angle. She used to sit just like that one summer to hide a mark from
her dad’s belt buckle. It became a habit she couldn’t break.

I knew her habits. I knew secrets that made
her howl. I could tear her to shreds.

Lydia watches me carefully. Still not saying
a word.

My gun clatters to the floor.

I don’t move. Because that was my
move.

“You dropped something, honey,”
Effie is saying. “Aren’t you going to pick it up? You might remember me
talking about Liz. She’s the researcher from the national historical society who
visits me now and again. She stored some of her boxes of Fort Worth research in my shed
not that long ago. She visits societies all over the nation!”

I remember.
Boxes, taped tightly shut.
Charlie, helping Effie and a strange woman lug them to the shed.

“Liz came over tonight to get
something she needs out of them, and didn’t want to wake me,” Effie
continues. “I told her it was best not to skulk around here in Texas. She spends
most of her time in more civilized places like Washington and London, isn’t that
right?”

Lydia, this
dyed,
smiling, nodding
Lydia, has been insinuating herself into Effie’s life. Pretending to be someone
she isn’t. Spying, like she always did.
Watching me.
Watching Charlie. Delivering her diary to my doorstep. Returning my shirt, soaked in
red. Playing her little games.

“Where is he?” I hiss at
Lydia.

It was Lydia who always told me not to say
the doctor’s name out loud.
Seize control. Limit his power.

“The digger snatcher isn’t here,
honey.” Effie, trying to clear things up. “Like I mentioned, it was Liz in
the back yard. We were just discussing that little Mudgett man from Chicago who tried to
build one of his murder castles downtown. Liz knows
everything
about old Fort Worth. I agree with her that a plaque should be
erected on that lot where he planned his slaughterhouse for girls.”

“I’m sure she knows all about
serial killers.” I can’t tear my eyes off her. The brilliant, familiar eyes.
Expensive tortoiseshell glasses. Hair tied up in a chic, messy knot. A chunky Breitling
leather watch hugging her wrist. A plain wide band of hammered silver on her right
hand.

“He’s dead, Tessie.” The
first words Lydia has uttered to me in seventeen years. Her voice, triumphant. “I
killed him.”

“Of course he’s dead,”
Effie prattles. “Mr. Mudgett died in prison in 1896. He was hanged at Moyamensing,
Liz. You just told me a second ago that he twitched for fifteen minutes.”

I press the trigger four times.

Simple as that for a fucked-up Texas
girl.

I crawl over him to the wheel.

It takes eleven minutes to whip around the
lake in the dark and find Dumbo
.
My marker. The large tree on the west shore
with a single branch that curves up like an elephant’s trunk.

This is the creepiest spot in the lake. Dead
Man’s Triangle. Good fishing, but if people go under here, they often don’t
pop back up. I’ve driven a boat around this lake since I could see over the front
and my father was a drunk, which means pretty much since the day I was born. Daddy and I
had our best times on this lake. I gutted the fish without throwing up, and he swilled
vodka out of Coke cans and always did.

My mind is
so quiet.
Like, quieter
than it’s ever been. It’s weird. I stop the motor. Drift for a second.
Better get back to business. It isn’t that hard to push him out of the boat.
Plop.
He sinks in less than a minute. I don’t feel a thing, watching
him go under. I toss in the old book I found under his kitchen sink with the black-eyed
Susans and the Cascade.
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
.
Blood had soaked
the brittle binding, or I would have kept it. That book was my No. 8, 9,
and 10 questions, but he was about to lasso me with that freaking
rope.