John Lutz Bundle (56 page)

Anna Bragg emerged from the dimness of the subway stop’s narrow concrete stairwell into slanted, early evening sunlight. A compact, shapely brunette wearing a tight skirt and blazer, she drew admiring male glances as she strode along the sidewalk in her four-inch heels toward her apartment. Anna would have preferred wearing joggers back and forth to work like most of the other women at Courtney Publishing, but she was conscious of her height deficiency and thought it might be affecting her prospects for advancement. By chance or design, most of the other women at Courtney were built like, and in fact resembled, tall twelve-year-old boys.

Anna had decided that for health reasons as well as how she wanted to appear, it was a bad idea to diet relentlessly and exercise away your hips and boobs. Anyone looking at her would have applauded the decision.

Pedestrian traffic piled up at the corner, and Anna waited with everyone else for the light to change. She had a clear complexion, large brown eyes, and a way of holding her head always cocked to the side as if she were straining to hear a slight, distant sound.

Usually she was thinking. Right now she was considering “Greenlander’s meal on the wing” as a crossword clue for “puffin.” Anna’s job at Courtney was to edit their monthly crossword puzzle magazine. While the puzzle writers submitted clues and answers together, it was the clues that most often needed editing. Some were too vague, some too suggestive, some simply irrelevant or downright dull. The clue for “puffin” was one that definitely had problems. It might be too obscure. There were subscribers who didn’t even know what puffins were, much less that Greenlanders ate them.

The traffic light changed, and Anna stepped off the curb and moved with the mass of pedestrians across the street. A van making a right turn honked at her, though the vehicle wasn’t nearly close enough to hit her. The guy driving it might have been leaning on the horn as a way to compliment her. Anna preferred to think of it that way rather than contemplate what else might have been on his mind.

Something, maybe a small pebble, worked its way between the sole of her shoe and her right foot. Anna moved to the side and stopped walking, then raised her leg bent at the knee so she could work a finger beneath her foot and remove whatever was bothering her. The pose she had to strike showed a lot of thigh and brought a lot of male looks, and an especially long look from a handsome, dark-haired man in a blue sport coat and gray slacks. He was average-size—not too tall for Anna—and his regular features almost but not quite formed a smile as he glanced at her and walked on.

It occurred to her that he looked somewhat familiar. Had she seen him around the office? Maybe he worked in her building.

On the other hand, he had the kind of regular, everyman features that were probably often mistaken for someone else’s. He was like a catalog model—handsome, but you tended to remember the outfit.

She’d forgotten about the man by the time she turned a corner and walked two more blocks to her building.

Like the buildings on either side, it was a redbrick, three-story walkup in the middle of the block. Anna took the four worn marble steps to its entry and pushed into the vestibule. The familiar mingled scents of stale urine, disinfectant, and cooking spices told her she was home. White was showing in the fleur-de-lis cutout in her brass mailbox. She fished her key ring from her purse, opened the box, and drew out two pieces of mail.

It didn’t take her long to glance at them and decide she’d throw them in the trash when she got upstairs. She hadn’t won the lottery, or gotten a job offer, marriage proposal, or free vacation. She keyed the mailbox locked and told herself she also hadn’t received an eviction notice or jury summons.

Cheer up, Anna.

She used another key to open the security door from the vestibule to the rest of the building’s interior.

Her legs were twenty-three years old. Even in high heels, she barely noticed climbing the three flights of creaking wooden stairs to her corner unit apartment.

Twenty-three. For all she cared, it might as well have been a ten-story walkup.

The Butcher was pleased when he entered the vestibule of the attractive brunette’s building. He had no trouble finding the mailbox he’d watched her open as he observed her through the long window in the street door. And just in case he couldn’t trust his eyes, the tarnished brass box appeared to be one of the empty ones—only darkness beyond the carved fleur-de-lis. Second row end, he was sure, apartment 3-B.

The slotted card above the mailbox read
A. Bragg.
She was cautious, like most single women in New York, and simply used her first initial. He smiled. He’d seen what office she’d emerged from and followed her down in the elevator and then to the subway and home. While he only knew her first initial and last name, he also knew where she worked and where she lived.

He was also glad to see that, while the building had a sturdy security door between the vestibule and the first floor and stairwell, the intercom looked newer than the mailboxes, and workable.

He was whistling when he left the vestibule and took the marble steps down to the sidewalk, betting that, like most businesses, Courtney Publishing had a website.

Only fifteen minutes after sitting down at his computer, his search engine located Courtneypub.biz.

He clicked on
Divisions
on the home page and saw that Courtney published half a dozen magazines as well as a line of paperback romance novels. Back to the home page, where he clicked on
Personnel.

Courtney’s employees were arranged alphabetically.
Bragg, Anna
was third down.

Wonderful. This was much easier than constructing a puzzle note and then finding a suitable victim. Better to select the victim then construct the corresponding puzzle.

He clicked on her name and found that she was the editor of
CrossWinds
, a monthly magazine of crossword puzzles.

Small world, puzzles.

Fate.

Destiny. His and hers.

Anna Bragg. What might he do with that name? A literary allusion. Sports? Politics? Show business? He knew that while Quinn looked like a kind of handsome thug, he in fact was rather cultured and enjoyed the theater, reading, and dining out. The Butcher had followed him more than once to Barnes & Noble, and had sat directly behind Quinn one night in the theater and enjoyed a performance of an Edward Albee play, one of the playwright’s more enigmatic endeavors.

After the play he’d studied Quinn’s rugged face briefly in a lobby mirror. Quinn did seem to have understood the play.

The killer concentrated again on Courtneypub.biz on the screen of his laptop.

There was Anna’s photo alongside her brief profile. She was smiling, head tilted to the side, looking beautiful. Her company profile didn’t reveal her age, but she was younger than he might have wished. She’d graduated from Sweetbriar with a journalism degree, been with Courtney Publishing two years, and loved her work because she loved all kinds of puzzles. Her ambition was to set the world on fire, but not so the flames couldn’t be controlled. Her likes were red convertibles and gin martinis with olives. Dislikes were dogs that bit and people who deliberately insulted.

The Butcher noted that the profile didn’t list her fears.

Bocanne, Florida, 1980

Alone and lost and lonely.

That was how Sherman felt.

Sam had been gone for three days, and Sherman hadn’t been the same. He didn’t go fishing by himself, and of course there was nothing to read now that the swamp had claimed Sam’s Civil War books. He tried to watch television, but reception wasn’t good, far as they were from town, and he didn’t want to see quiz shows and soap operas anyway. His days were hot and boring, and he felt so strange, like something was about to happen, like he was on a speeding train and another one was on the same track, headed toward him so they were bound to meet.

They
would
meet at night sometimes, in his dreams, and he’d spring awake wondering if he’d screamed out loud and stirred his mother from sleep.

The worst part was, he was afraid and wasn’t sure why.

Evenings TV reception was better, and whenever they were on, Mom would let him watch
The Rockford Files
or
Magnum, P.I.,
but none of it seemed as real to Sherman as the Battle of Gettysburg. He knew none of it
was
that real. There was a special on PBS once about the Civil War, but soon as she noticed what he was watching, Sherman’s mother made him switch channels and watch some quiz show. He knew all the answers the contestants missed, but he kept quiet so as not to rile his mother.

Sherman thought about what she’d said the night they gave Sam to the swamp:
“Bad don’t figure into it, Sherman. It’s about survival.”

Sherman guessed she was right. A person first of all had to do everything possible just to survive. But it seemed to him they’d been doing that okay with Sam alive.

If there were only somebody he could talk to about how he felt inside, somebody like Sam, it would sure make things easier. He knew he couldn’t talk to his mother. He’d considered it a few times, but then he’d see her standing with her fists on her hips, looking at him in a funny way that scared him. Other times he’d think that maybe if they talked about things, whatever was in her eyes that was scaring him would go away.

Or maybe it would get more scary.

He’d seen that look in her eyes before and knew what it might mean, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

On the fifth night after Sam was gone, when Sherman was undressing for bed, he saw that he’d soiled his underwear. This was about the only situation that prompted Sherman to voluntarily change Jockey shorts, so he removed the shorts he was wearing and tossed them in a corner with some dirty socks, then went to his dresser for clean underwear to sleep in and wear tomorrow.

But he was out of underwear. His mother had fallen behind in the wash, and there were only clean socks and T-shirts. Sherman remembered stuffing some not-too-soiled underpants into his closet with some other dirty clothes, and he decided to retrieve them.

Rumpled and dirty clothes were piled two feet high on the closet floor, and the Jockey shorts were buried somewhere in there. Sherman got down on his hands and knees and began digging.

His fingertips slid over a surface unexpectedly smooth. He scooted deeper into the closet and pushed away some of the rumpled clothing and saw something glistening and black. More digging through the clothes revealed black plastic trash bags and his dad’s power saw.

This was odd. Other than trash, there was only one use Sherman knew of for the bags. And he was the one who was always sent to the toolshed to get the saw.

He drew in his breath, and his heart broke like fragile glass as meaning came to him.

Sam…the look in his mother’s eyes. She knew Sherman understood what she was doing—at least most of it—and after Sam died he’d questioned her about it as he never had before. She knew Sam had been different, had changed things forever, and Sherman would continue to question her. Sherman was getting older, getting ideas of his own.

Dangerous ideas.

After his initial attempt to escape into the swamp, his mother had caught him, whapped him over and over with the bamboo rod so hard he could
still
feel it, and made him swear an oath to obey her without question.

He’d sworn the oath when the pain was at its worst, meaning it at the time with all his heart.

He knew he had to break that oath now.

It was about survival.

Forgetting about underwear, he quickly struggled into his jeans and moccasins, a dirty T-shirt from the closet floor.

It was well past sundown, plenty dark outside. This time he wouldn’t wait until the middle of the night when it was more likely his mother was asleep. She was in the living room watching a quiz show now—she loved quiz shows because just like him she usually knew the answers ahead of time—and she wouldn’t want to leave even to check on him. And concentrating as she was on the TV, she wouldn’t hear Sherman remove the screen and climb outside.

More quietly than last time, he worked the screen loose and leaned out to prop it against the house, well alongside the window where it wouldn’t trip him up when he was leaving.

As an afterthought, before climbing out the window, he arranged some wadded clothing and his pillow so it looked at a glance as if he might be sleeping in his bed. He’d seen it done plenty of times on TV, and it might work.

Making only a soft scraping sound as the sole of his right moccasin slid over the sill, he wriggled from the window and lowered himself a few feet to the ground.

Ahead of him loomed the blackness of the swamp. Though his heart rattled up into his throat, he didn’t hesitate. He began walking toward the dirt road that wound between the lush foliage and the canopy of vines and moss-draped branches. The night sky was cloudy, with only a sliver of moon, so the swamp was almost at its blackest. This morsel of luck buoyed Sherman’s spirits as he passed into darkness.

Behind him there was an explosion, and something like a flight of birds rushed through the leaves very near him.

Sherman knew it wasn’t birds—it was buckshot.

“Sherman, you come back here!”

His mother! With the shotgun!

He bolted and ran down the narrow road, now and then splashing through spots where the swamp had spread fingers of water across it. His back muscles were bunched so he could barely move his arms. Any second the old double-barreled twelve-gauge might loose another load of shot his way.

But there was no second shot.

He heard instead a grinding sound, and the engine kick over on the old pickup. The truck had a poacher’s searchlight mounted just outside the driver’s side window, and he knew his mother would use it to locate him.

There was a loud roar, then a metallic grating noise, like a mechanical monster clearing its throat. Sherman knew what it was. First gear.

The truck was coming.

The roar of the truck engine drowned out the other sounds of the swamp. Headlights played over the trees and undergrowth. Sherman’s heart was a banging drum in his chest. The only reason the headlights hadn’t picked him up was because the road was curved. He knew he had only seconds.

Without hesitation he veered off into the darkness of the swamp. The water was at his ankles and he had to slow down. His mother wouldn’t hear him over the roar and rattle of the truck, but she might see any ripples he stirred up.

Still moving swiftly, he was careful to lift his feet high and place them easily almost straight down to minimize roiling the water. Soon he was in deeper water, and foliage that grabbed at his legs and scratched his face, as he moved faster, plowing ahead.

The truck motor dropped to a rumbling idle, and the spotlight beam danced like a phantom over leaves and moss and gnarled roots. Now and then something dark and formless moved swiftly away into blackness, as Sherman must if the beam found him.

“Sherman! You come back here!”

The dancing phantom light was closer. He knew his mother was creeping along the dirt road in the old truck, checking the swamp on both sides with the spotlight.

“Sherman!”

In waist-high water now, he moved cautiously around some twisted banyan roots. When he looked up he could see only blackness. The canopy of growth obscured the moon and whatever stars were out. Pressing his back against the mossy coolness of a tree trunk, he listened to the truck engine barely turning over, the loose left fender vibrating and rattling as the vehicle tilted and jounced over ruts and holes in the road.

Movement caught Sherman’s eye off to the left, and he saw the rough black hump of a gator glide away into deeper darkness. He was accustomed to gators and knew they probably wouldn’t attack him if he kept his distance. Probably.

Something cool and quick darted across his bare arm and he fought not to cry out in surprise.
Snake?

Whatever it was moved on, but Sherman had bit his lower lip so hard it was bleeding.

The loose fender ceased its rattling as the truck seemed to stop, the rumbling of its exhaust and the click and clatter of its idling engine unchanging. The spotlight darted closer, moved away, swooping back and forth like a live thing in the swamp.

Right now the blackness of the swamp Sherman had feared so much in his dreams seemed like his friend. Its thick foliage sheltered him. The snakes and gators that he knew were around him in the night were less menacing. They were in their element and so was he, because here in the dark, in deep water where the truck couldn’t go, he was safe from his mother.

As long as the spotlight beam didn’t find him.

The truck engine roared briefly, as if in anger.

“Sherman! You come back here! Come back to your mother!”