Crosscut (2 page)

“So.” The stranger’s voice was sharp and high-pitched. “First question. Am I here?”

Kelly stared. On the counter were scissors and a funnel and a roll of electrical tape. And her high school yearbook.

“You think you’re dreaming a sailor girl in your kitchen. You think I’m a nightmare.”

Kelly opened her mouth but couldn’t form words. A girl? This freaky being flexing those weird fingers? Something wrong with them, like doll’s fingers. And her face was expressionless.

“Question two,” she said. “Can you run?”

Kelly looked at her feet. Fear curled around her chest like a thorny vine. She couldn’t lift them. How could the stranger know that?
Was
this a nightmare?

“So that’s a no.” The stranger’s lips drew back over her teeth. “No flight. No fight.”

The fear pricked sharper. Kelly looked toward the front door. “Scotty . . .”

The stranger reached for the answering machine on the kitchen counter and pressed
play
. Kelly heard her husband’s voice.

“Kell, I’m not going to make the party. I have to pull a double shift. Don’t hate me.”

She dropped the groceries. A bottle broke and milk gushed across the linoleum. Scotty kept talking and Kelly’s legs remained frozen. The stranger’s freaky hands opened the high school yearbook and flipped through it.

“West. Skinner. Delaney. Colfax. Chang . . .” She stopped. “Tell me about your classmates. How much do you know?”

Kelly felt saliva pooling in the back of her throat.

“Well?”

The stranger kept flipping through the yearbook, and Kelly felt tears forming. She knew why those hands were freaky. The stranger was wearing latex gloves.

She looked at Kelly. A new voice roared from her throat, deep and booming.
“Tell me.”

That voice unglued Kelly’s foot. She moved it backward. Now the other. A sound was sliding from her mouth, a moan. This wasn’t a waking nightmare. She had to run. She slid her foot another inch, turned, and flung herself toward the door.

The darts from the Taser caught her between the shoulder blades. The electric shock made her drop instantly. Her face smacked the floor. She lay splayed, her arms and legs shivering like jelly. Saliva ran out of her mouth onto the cool tile beneath her cheek.

She saw the stranger walk to the knife rack. The sound of metal rang in the kitchen. The stranger pulled out the carving knife. Kelly felt her skirt turning wet and warm as she peed herself.

The stranger’s boots appeared. She flipped Kelly onto her back as though she were a hunk of meat. The knife shone under the kitchen lights. Outside, the wind chimes rang.

The stranger leaned over and dog tags swung out from beneath her utility shirt. On the chain with the tags was a gnarled piece of metal. That wasn’t navy. Kelly saw a scar near her collarbone. Tracks, like an animal had mauled her.

“If you can’t talk about it, we’ll have to take a different tack. Let’s see if you can feel it.”

She put down the knife, grabbed Kelly’s wrist, and pulled her toward the refrigerator. Her grip was like a wrench. She took the roll of electrical tape, whipped it around Kelly’s wrists, and wound it around the handle of the refrigerator door, binding her there.

Kelly’s juddering subsided into pins and needles. She could feel her muscles coming back under control, but when she moved her leg, it flailed like a frog jabbed with an electrode in biology lab. She heard the stranger opening cabinets and pulling things out. She turned her head.

The stranger now held a bottle of Drano crystals. She walked to the spot where Kelly had fallen and poured the drain cleaner on the wet splotch of urine. It hissed and bubbled and filled the air with the caustic stink of lye and ammonia.

Reaching for the carving knife, she knelt and hitched Kelly’s skirt up to her panties, revealing chunky thighs. She held the Drano above Kelly’s leg and pressed the serrated edge of the knife to the inside of her thigh.

“Let’s start over. Tell me when it hurts.”

The wind skipped over me. I stood in the parking lot, shielding my eyes from the setting sun. The heat was a wall against my face.

“This was a bad idea. Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Out on the highway an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past. Dust spun in the air behind it, blowing across the razor wire that marked the edge of the naval base.

Jesse looked at me as if I’d blown a cylinder. “Are you nuts? You can’t back out now.”

I peered over the roof of the Mustang at the strip mall. “Nuts isn’t backing out. Nuts is going in there.”

He pulled off his sunglasses. “Let me get this straight. Evan Delaney is chickening out of her high school reunion?”

The invitation read,
China Lake’s brightest nightspot hosts our festive gathering
. The nightclub sat between the adult bookstore and the auto wrecking yard. Beyond them stretched a million acres of absence: the Naval Air Warfare Center, where mirages hovered over the desert floor and the horizon flung itself up into mountains, purple and red against a huge sky.

Above the door of the club a banner batted in the wind. BASSETT HIGH 15
^TH
—WELCOME BACK, HOUNDS! Music banged through the windows. I could see the crowd packed inside.

“It’s a setup,” I said.

I handed Jesse the invitation, which specified,
Dress: party casual
. In the high Mojave that means shoes optional, but the reunion committee had lied.

“They’re dressed to the nines. I see sequins.”

“Damn, I should have gone with the ball gown and stilettos.”

I made a face at him. He looked perfectly presentable in jeans and a white button-down shirt. For that matter, I looked perfectly presentable in jeans and a white button-down shirt. How had I let that happen? God, we’d be voted cutest couple. They’d stick little cardboard crowns on our heads and ask whether we were engaged and why Jesse looked like he’d been smashed over a cliff. I’d say on and off, and because he had been. Then I’d stupidly mention that we were both lawyers, and spend the evening explaining that no, I didn’t practice anymore and yes, their ex really could sue them for pouring sugar in the gas tank of the car. Why the hell had I come?

I pointed at the window. “That’s Ceci Lezak handing out name tags. She ran the student council like it was the Reichstag.”

He looked. “Explaining that funny little mustache. Come on; I want to meet her. Plus that guy who set his hair on fire at the talent show, and the girl who turned those four chickens loose, with numbers painted on their backs.”

“One, two, three and five. That was me.”

“And your mortal enemy could turn up.”

I groaned. “Seeing Valerie is the last thing I need.”

I glanced north at mountains arrayed like saw blades. The Sierras and Panamints, and the Cosos, where Renegade Canyon cut deep through the rocks. One afternoon there, one debacle, had led to four years of rancor.

“We’ll set up a steel cage and you can settle old scores,” he said. “Grease up with Swedish meatball gravy and go at it.”

I stepped back. “You need to cut down on the painkillers. And the satellite TV.”

He drummed his fingers on the trunk of the car. “Last winter you fired a clip of ammunition at a homicidal maniac in your own house. You can’t let a few snobs in shiny dresses send you packing.”

I sighed. He took my hand.

“Besides, don’t you want to see your old boyfriend? What’s his name, Tommy Chong?”

“Chang.”

He grinned. “Thought so.”

He headed up the curb cut and toward the door of the club, nodding at the auto wrecking yard. “Stay here and admire that giant heap of old tires. I’m going in.”

I put a hand on my hip. “It isn’t your reunion.”

His smile was wicked. “Wanna bet?”

He pushed through the door.

Nobody was faster on his feet than Jesse, metaphorically speaking. Anything he thought up, he could undoubtedly pull off, despite being five years younger than everyone else here, and having grown up in Santa Barbara, and the fact that nobody in my graduating class had been anywhere near as gifted and good-looking, or paraplegic.

“Dammit.” I chased after him.

Inside, I found him beneath the strobing disco ball, at the sign-in table. Ceci Lezak was searching through a box of name tags. Her taffeta ruffles covered a build like a furnace. Her hair was sprayed into place with pointillist exactitude. She looked harried.

“I can’t seem to find it,” she said.

Jesse leaned an elbow on the table, smiling at her. “Student council was never better than when you ran it. I remember that cool campaign slogan. . . .”

“ ‘Lift Off With Lezak.’ ” She stopped hunting and beamed at him. “Why don’t I make you a new name tag?”

Oy. I walked up. “Hey, Ceci.”

She clapped her hands together. “Evan, wow. Look at you, all fit and tan and . . .” Eyes on my outfit. “Spick and span.”

“You’re very festive this evening.”

“And you’re a writer and all.” She handed me my name tag and a welcome pack. “You’re not going to do an exposé about tonight, are you? Reveal our old high school secrets in print?”

“No. I won’t blow your cover, I promise.” I stared at Jesse, tapping my index finger against my lips. “You look so familiar.”

Ceci smiled. “This is Jesse Blackburn. He was our foreign exchange student.”

“No, that’s not it.” I snapped my fingers. “Of course—Court TV, the trial. When did you make parole?”

The door opened and heat swarmed over us. In the doorway stood a suburban Brunhilde, blond, ungainly, and six feet tall.

“Oh, my hell, you’re really here.” Abbie Hankins laughed deep in her throat and engulfed me in a hug. “I win the bet. Fork it over, Wally.”

Her husband lumbered through the door. He was taller and even rounder than Abbie, a Saint Bernard in a garish Hawaiian shirt. She passed me to him as if I were a rugby ball. He lugged me against his side, laughing.

“Thanks for costing me twenty bucks, Delaney.” He saw Jesse. “Dude.”

He grabbed Jesse’s hand and pumped it. At the table Ceci laced her fingers together, smiling expressively.

“You’re looking debonair tonight, Dr. Hankins.” She ran her gaze over Abbie’s sundress. “That’s sweet. Wal-Mart does such fun fashions nowadays.”

A woman strode up wearing a reunion committee name tag and a dress that made her look like a spangled boar. Ceci waved her close, whispering and nodding at Jesse.

“There’s no welcome pack for him, nothing. And I shouldn’t be handling the table all by myself.”

“Should we call Kelly?”

“No. This is the last straw. I bet she had a few belts to loosen up before she came, and now she’s home trying to put her lipstick on without running it up to her ears.”

Realizing that we were listening, they shut up and pasted on
Go, team!
smiles.

Ceci gestured to Jesse. “You remember our exchange student?”

The boar wrinkled her forehead. “Sure. Right . . . So good you could make it.”

They bit their tongues, staring at him. I knew they saw the wheelchair and little else. They hadn’t seen the headline,
One Killed, One Critical after Hit-and-Run
. They hadn’t watched Jesse spend these last years rebuilding his life. And they couldn’t see that he looked better than he had in a long time. A deranged driver had blown him off his feet, but flashbacks, chronic pain, and grief at losing his best friend in the crash had kept him down. When finally he had sought help, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, at last, he was on the mend.

Wally was suppressing a smile. “How are things back in ...”

“Manitoba. Good.” Jesse took the name tag from Ceci. “And I was a political prisoner.” He turned and headed into the club.

Ceci held out a welcome pack to Wally. “It has your fifteen-year commemorative pin, the
Dog Days Update
book, and coupons for ten percent off at Krause’s Auto Body.” She handed Abbie her pack. “Discounts at Weight Watchers, too.”

Abbie smiled. “How’s their program working for you?”

Ceci colored. Abbie and I strolled after Jesse.

“What’s with her?” I said.

“She’s the dental hygienist for Wally’s practice. She’s an anal-retentive neat freak who thinks she could run his life much better than a slob like me.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “She’s been coming on to him for years.”

I managed not to gape. Abbie and Wally had three happy blond children and always seemed to make each other laugh. We should all be so lucky.

Above the bandstand hung strings of red lights shaped like chili peppers. The band was pumping out old pop rock, the jump juice of our youth. People crowded around the buffet table, their plates piled with coleslaw and weenies toothpicked to pineapples. Fusion cuisine, desert-style. The acreage of shiny spandex on display could have covered the
Hindenburg
.

I smiled, suddenly glad to be back.

China Lake is the navy’s top weapons-testing facility. I was thirteen when the U.S. Navy transferred my family here. It was not the California of my dreams, consisting instead of crystal skies, shrieking fighter jets, jackrabbits, and blowing sand. When we drove into town my mother, who had weathered transfers from Norfolk to D.C. to Pearl Harbor, inhaled sharply.

My father, driving with one elbow cocked on the window frame, smiled and said, “Welcome home, Angie. Again.”

She smoothed her hair against the wind and peered back at my brother and me. She had on her game face.
This is what we do. We’re a navy family. Chin up
. Right then, my stomach hurt. Twenty years later, this place was more or less my hometown.

Abbie stuck by my side. “Man, look at Becky O’Keefe. Tell me my butt isn’t that big.”

“Not by half.”

“You’re a lousy liar.”