Blameless (39 page)

This time the sound was mechanical and human-made, but no less frightening than the organic noise of the forest. She tried to run from the racket, but she could not move. She was in something’s grip. Twisting and turning her neck, stretching her muscles until they screamed from the punishment, she was finally able to see that her arms and her wrists were bound to the metal bed with thick leather thongs.

Then the bed began to move. As the noise grew, the bed slowly pulled apart, pulling her apart with it. She was being torn in all directions, severed from the outside in—and from the inside out. The sound of scraping metal and splintering bone screamed in her ears, louder and more horrible than any sound she had ever heard. Pain wracked her body, and agony filled her being. “No!” she cried, finally pulling herself awake.

Diana was disoriented, but relieved, to find herself fully dressed in the familiar bedroom. The city light reflecting on the newly fallen snow threw an eerie, artificial brightness through her undraped window. But before she could calm her ragged breathing, before she could slow her pounding heart, Diana heard the noise once again.

For a moment she thought she was still asleep, that this was just a new setting within the horrible noise dream. Then a powerful bang reverberated throughout the house, and Diana knew that someone had just broken in. Ethan. It had to be Ethan. He had been watching her, and now he was coming to kill her.

Suddenly time became stuck. It took her forever to sit up. And when she finally did, she had to swim through molasses just to raise her arm. She caught Craig’s night table in the corner of her eye and painstakingly pushed her head toward it. The brass handle, which splayed into small bunches of roses on the face of the night table drawer, seemed to grow until all Diana could see was the tarnish outlining the flower petals. Behind that handle was the gun. She froze, knowing it was a physical impossibility, yet knowing she heard, and felt, the soft tread of footsteps climbing thunderously toward her from three floors below.

She looked at her own night table. The telephone sitting on top of it seemed to swell and expand, as if she were zooming in on it with a telephoto lens. Phone before gun, her numb mind finally processed. Phone the police. On all fours, she crawled across the suddenly enormous bed toward the telephone, her knees buckling under her on the spread, the impossibly loud thump of approaching footsteps reverberating through her body.

Finally she grasped the receiver in one hand; the fingers of her other hand hovered over the keypad. The number. Her brain strained for the number. Emergency. The police. Three digits. A three-digit number. But her brain gave back nothing. There was only a blank empty wall were the number should have been. She couldn’t find it. She couldn’t reach it. All she could see was her own number, glowing up at her from the face of the phone.

The footsteps grew louder, closer. The room became brighter, hotter. Suddenly released from their amnesia, her fingers punched three numbers. Relief flooded through her as she clutched the phone.

“Directory assistance. What city, please?” whined a nasal, bored voice in her ear. Too stunned to speak, Diana gripped the receiver more tightly in her hand. “For what city?” the voice demanded.

Diana slammed the phone down and lunged for Craig’s night table. As she scrambled to reach the drawer, she felt the footsteps leave the second floor landing and begin their slow climb toward the third.

And once again, time became stuck. She froze like a frightened and trapped animal. Although she was unable to move, unable to breathe, her other senses were unbearably alive. She saw every detail of the night table’s wood carving, highlighted by the reflected snow-light. Every honking horn and every squeak of the stair reverberated through her brain like an air raid siren. She heard the soft, measured footsteps pounding inexorably toward her. She smelled her own sweat and fear. She was going to die.

A surge of adrenaline hit her frozen limbs like a blast furnace, and she was able to move once again. With awkward, jerky motions, she clawed at the handle and yanked the drawer open. She grabbed the gun but couldn’t keep hold of it. It slid from her damp, trembling fingers and bounced on the bed. Frantic, she dove after it, seizing it with both hands. She held the unfamiliar weapon out in front of her, but she was shaking so badly she was sure she would be unable to shoot. The footsteps reached the third-floor landing, and Diana turned to face the door.

As she curled her finger around the trigger, she remembered Craig telling her it didn’t need to be cocked. “Just press,” he had said. “Point at his midsection and press.”

A long shadow fell across the hallway floor. Diana raised the gun a little higher, gripping it more tightly, steadying it, telling herself she could shoot it if she had to. That any fool could fire a gun.

But Diana was too startled by the sight that filled her doorway to do anything but stare. For the intruder, highlighted by the brightness streaming through her bedroom window, was James.

James Hutchins, supposedly dead for almost two months, was standing there, grinning and holding his arms open wide.

32

D
IANA WONDERED IF PERHAPS SHE WAS STILL DREAMING
, if the terror of the dripping forest and the towering rack had metamorphosed into a ghoulish nightmare of the walking dead. She blinked and the gun in her hands trembled, but still she held on to it, still she kept it pointed at the man in the doorway. The man who was, yet could not be, James Hutchins.

James dropped his arms, and his grin slipped into a sheepish smile, his eyes bright with the delight of one who has pulled off a successful surprise. “I’m alive,” he said softly, handing her his gift. “It’s really me.” He leaned against the doorjamb and casually crossed his arms, looking as brash and appealing as he had the first time she had seen him.

Diana felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. “Don’t move,” she ordered, gripping the gun as tightly as she could.

“You look wonderful,” he said, his eyes soft and magnetic, pulling her to him, drawing her in.

She shuddered and lowered the gun. “James,” she whispered.

He smiled at her, and a piece of hair fell to his forehead with a motion so achingly familiar that Diana longed to push the hair back with her fingers, longed to touch his brow. “I knew you’d be pleased,” he said.

Pleased? she wondered. Was she pleased? Staring at James, at the sweep of his cheekbone, at the cleft in his chin, at the excitement and delight that radiated from his eyes, Diana realized she was far more than pleased, she was ecstatic. Her James was alive. He was standing there, breathing and living. Her mistakes hadn’t killed him. She was being given the greatest gift of all: another chance.

As swells of glorious relief rolled through her, Diana suddenly saw the full impact of his return: If James was alive, then she was free. There would be no arrest warrants or barbed wire or coarse red uniforms—and the long shadow of Herb Levine would disappear from her life. Unconsciously Diana touched her stomach. Her family was free too. The nursery would be filled with laughter, and there would be a crib and a bureau and a changing table, bright-colored bumpers and quilts and a rocking chair where she would sing lullabies to soothe the baby into sleep in the dark silent hours of night. Craig would build a toy box and paint his fantasy mural on the walls.

Waves of pure joy engulfed every part of her being, inundating her, flooding her chest, almost choking her with their power. She was as light as air, weightless, almost floating. Her fingers and toes tingled with elation. It was over. Diana’s hands trembled as she began to raise her arms toward James, to touch him, to hear his heart beat beneath her ear, to bury her nose in the smell of his cologne. To feel, to really feel, to know with every part of her, with her every sense, that he was indeed alive. That she was indeed free.

But something in his eyes made her hesitate. Something in the way he was looking at her stopped her cold. Something that began to suck the joy from her. “I did it for you,” he said, taking a step toward her. “For us.”

Diana scrambled backward on the bed and raised the gun. “Don’t move,” she ordered again, a sudden slew of agonizing questions flooding in to douse her happiness.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” he said with perfect logic. “You need me to love you.” Stepping up to the footboard, James calmly rested his hand on the curved brass, secure in his insight. “And I do.”

She let the gun drop to the bed. Diana looked at him standing there, so hopeful and so much in love. Who could resist the power of being so adored? she wondered. Who could resist the power of almost unbearable charisma?
He’s feeding something in you
, Gail’s voice filled her ears.
Some empty place you’re trying to fill
.

“I love you more than anything,” James said softly, his velvety voice drawing her to him. “That’s why I did it.”

“It’s …” she stuttered, simultaneously wanting to hold him close and push him away. “It’s just so incredible …” James’s words finally got through to her, cutting off her own. She stared at him, unable to speak. Someone was dead because James was alive.
Too sick for you—or anyone else—to do anything for
, Gail had warned her. Diana’s stomach squeezed in panic as she groped toward the answer she didn’t want to find.

Images of Anderson Street flashed through her mind. The steep roadway clogged with emergency vehicles and yellow tape and gawking crowds. The cracked sidewalk under her feet. The scraggly geraniums flopping in the window box next door. The covered stretcher. The paint-splattered sneaker and the naked foot.
It’s a real gory mess in there. Bone … on the walls
. Then, suddenly, Diana knew. Suddenly she saw the whole thing—and understood it all too well. “Ethan,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with disbelief. “It’s Ethan who’s dead.”

“I thought of it the first time I met him,” James said, his eyes sparkling with pride. “Same hair color, same size—from behind, we could have been mistaken for each other.”

“Ethan’s dead,” Diana repeated stupidly. So this was what James had gotten out of his relationship with Ethan. This was the elusive payoff she could never figure out. “But what about—”

“You want to know about the messages,” James interrupted. “That’s the best part: Ethan thought it was a big joke—I got him to tape them all before I killed him. There’s still a few left I never used,” he bragged.

Dazed, Diana nodded, her stomach churning at the careless way he spoke of killing Ethan. Her James was a murderer. Cold-blooded and unremorseful.
You let his charm fool you …

“And then I would have Ethan leave a message whenever you went out,” James was explaining, oblivious to her growing horror. He waved at the window. “I sat there on the fire escape and watched you. Right across the alley. I could even tell when you were taking a shower.”

A furry shiver of revulsion ran up Diana’s back. She hadn’t been paranoid. She hadn’t been imagining it. The eyes had been real. Someone
had
been out there. Watching her. Someone more dangerous than she had ever dreamed. Someone she never thought it could have been.

“How did you miss it?” he asked. “I was even afraid that you’d guess right away—I was sure you’d recognize my voice that first day when I called to tell you I was dead.” James shook his head as a mother would at a naughty but well-loved child. “I planted the whole toe business so that you’d figure out I was alive. I didn’t expect you to think I was murdered.”

Diana just stared at him in stunned silence, trying to grasp the meaning of his words, trying to comprehend the deranged complexity of his scheme.

“I actually was going to kill myself,” he continued conversationally. “To show you how much you loved me. But then I realized it would be a waste.” He grinned, and for the first time Diana saw the depravity lurking below his gleaming smile, a depravity she had been blind to before. “I realized that if I were dead, we’d never get to be together.

“So I decided to fake it.” James’s face glowed with excitement. “Got the idea about the shotgun from Ethan’s girlfriend blowing her head off.”

“Ethan’s girlfriend,” Diana repeated.

“I figured that after grieving for me, when I showed up alive, you’d be forced to admit to yourself how much you loved me—and then you’d come away with me.” James threw his arms upward, almost touching the ceiling, a look of wild ecstasy on his face. “And now,” he cried, “now it’s all happened. Now you can leave here. You’ve no husband, no career to hold you anymore. I made sure I got rid of them all—everything keeping you from me. I destroyed them so that
we
could be the family.” James glanced lovingly at her stomach. “Once our baby is born.”

Diana was filled with an icy dread as the jagged edges of James’s horrible puzzle began to come together. “There is no ‘our baby,’“ she said, moving her hand slowly, casually, toward the gun at her knee. “The baby is Craig’s. Mine and my husband’s.”

“Craig’s left you. I saw him leave with his suitcases this morning.” James took another step toward her, stretching out his hands. “And you know the baby’s mine. You know—”

“Don’t come any closer!” Diana warned him. “Don’t touch me.”

His face crumpled. “I thought you’d be so happy …”

She looked at James, her James, the light in his eyes clouded by disappointment that, once again, she had caused. Despite all that had happened, despite her fear and revulsion, Diana was suffused with compassion for the young boy who had been so violated that he could not be helped. No treatment, no therapy, no rehabilitation could undo the catastrophic harm that had been done to him. Uncle Hank had taken James’s promise and made him into this horror. Hank Hutchins had stolen James’s life from him. And Diana could not give it back. She couldn’t be the great rescuer. No one could. James, her handsome, brilliant James, was far too damaged.

He must have seen the compassion in her eyes, for he dropped to his knees by the side of the bed. “I felt it that day in your office when we made love—I felt your love.” His voice was deep with passion, and, despite everything, was so powerfully evocative of that afternoon that Diana began to tremble. “I know you want us to be together again,” he said, grabbing her hand and pressing it to his lips. “And so do I. Come away with me,” he begged, kissing her open palm. “I love you so much.”