Mad River Road (37 page)

“Had?”

“He got himself killed about eight years back. Drug deal gone bad,” he explained before Jamie could ask.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said, and she was. For all of them.

“What are you sorry about? It was his own damn fault. Anyway, who cares? It was a long time ago.”

“Where are your parents now?”

“My mother’s still in Texas. My father’s dead.” Brad smiled. “He was lucky. His heart attacked him before I could.”

Jamie shuddered as she absorbed this latest piece of information. “That story about how you got your knife …”

“Was a damn good one, don’t you think? I’m getting pretty good at thinking on my feet.” He laughed, swiveled back toward her. “Why are you asking me these things?”

“Just trying to get to know you,” Jamie said, realizing this was true.

Brad returned to the bed and sat down, taking her hands in his. “You want to know the real me, is that what
you’re saying?”

Jamie felt her body stiffen and recoil at his touch, and she fought to keep from snatching her hands from his. “I want to know the real Brad Fisher,” she repeated. I want to know the man I’ve been sleeping with, she added silently. The man I put my faith in, the man I gave my heart to. The man who raped me, who hit me, who brutally murdered a total stranger in cold blood.

Maybe if she could get this man to talk about himself long enough, she’d find a key to getting herself out of this nightmare.

“Well, okay then,” he said, kissing her softly on the lips before leaning back on his elbows and crossing one foot over the other. “Ask away.”

A
re you going to kill me?” Jamie asked, all her questions melting into one.

“Kill you?” Brad seemed genuinely shocked. “Why on earth would I want to kill you? I love you, Jamie. Don’t you know that?”

Tears filled Jamie’s eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came.

“Is that what’s been bothering you all day? Is that why you’ve been acting so strange?”

Jamie looked toward the window, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. Was he serious? Had he really been puzzling over her behavior, wondering
what was bothering her?
Was that possible?

“Aren’t you a funny little thing,” he said, scooting up beside her in the bed and surrounding her with his arms, chuckling as he kissed her forehead. “You really thought I was going to kill you?”

“I don’t know what to think. I’ve been so scared.”

“Of me?”

“I don’t understand what’s happening.” The tears she’d been keeping at bay began dropping freely from her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

“What don’t you understand, Jamie?”

“Anything.” She began rocking back and forth. “I don’t understand what happened in Atlanta.”

“I got a little carried away, that’s all. I already apologized for that.” A familiar note of impatience edged into the corner of his voice.

“Not just that.”

“What then?”

“Everything,” Jamie said. “I don’t understand anything that’s happened, Brad. How could it have happened?”

“There isn’t always a reason for things, Jamie.”

“A woman is dead, for God’s sake!”

“A woman you hated. A woman who treated you like dirt.”

“That doesn’t mean she deserved to die.”

“It does in my book.”

“You’re saying you killed her because of me?” Oh, God, Jamie thought. Oh, God. Oh, God.

“What difference does it make why I killed her? She’s dead, no matter what.”

“Please, Brad. Just help me understand.”

Brad leaned back against the headboard, folded his hands behind his head, as if he were relaxing in the sun. “I don’t know if I can do that, Jamie-girl.”

Jamie struggled to put her fears into thoughts, her thoughts into words, her words into coherent questions. “Tell me what happened,” she said finally, when no other words made sense.

“I’m not sure where you want me to start.”

“Why did we go to Atlanta?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did we go to Atlanta?” she repeated.

“We were driving through, Jamie,” he reminded her. “On our way to Ohio.”

“No,” she corrected. “I wanted to keep going till we got to Barnsley Gardens. You were the one who insisted we stop in Atlanta.”

“I was tired. I wanted to relax.”

“You wanted to go to her house,” Jamie said, unable to speak Laura Dennison’s name out loud. “You were planning to go there all along.”

“Well, yeah,” he admitted after a pause. “After you told me that story about your earrings, I decided it might be fun to pay the old bat a visit.”

“You’d already decided to break into her house,” Jamie stated.

“We
broke into her house,” he reminded her.

“You’ve broken into homes before.” Another statement.

Brad smiled. “Once or twice.”

“You’ve been in trouble before.”

“Once or twice,” he said again.

“But why did you have to kill her?” Jamie asked.

“She saw us, Jamie. What else could I do?”

“You could have run. You could have come with me.”

“I had to take care of business first.”

“How … how did you kill her?” Jamie asked.

“You know how. You heard the news reports.”

“You beat her to death.”

“It wasn’t as bad as those reporters made it out to be. I just hit her a few times. It didn’t take much.”

“With the candlestick,” Jamie said, her voice a monotone.

“Hey—Mr. Fisher with the candlestick in the bedroom!” Brad laughed. “You remember that game, Jamie? The one where you had to figure out who killed who, where, and with what? What was it called? Clue?”

“Clue?” Were they really talking about some stupid board game?

“Yeah, that’s the one. I used to love that game.”

“You planned on killing her all along, didn’t you?”

Brad wrinkled his brow and tilted his head to one side, as if seriously considering the question. “I was kind of playing that by ear.”

“That’s why you brought the candlestick up to her room.”

“You mean the candlestick with your fingerprints all over it?” he asked mischievously.

The question hit Jamie like a blow to the head. She gripped the bedspread tightly with her fingers to keep from falling over.

Brad smiled. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

He’d set her up. “Why?” she whispered.

“Why what, Jamie-girl?”

What did he want from her? “Have you ever killed anybody before?” she heard herself ask.

There was a pause of several seconds. “Once or twice,” he said, as he had said before.

“Oh, God.”

“Hey, now, don’t start freaking out on me again.”

Jamie fought to keep the scream building in her throat from escaping. She pictured a gold credit card, read the name printed across it. “Grace Hastings?”

“Whoa! Jamie-girl! Give that girl a gold star. You’re a real little private detective, aren’t you?”

“Who’s Grace Hastings? What did you do to her?”

“Hold on. One question at a time.”

“Who is she?” Jamie asked again, trying not to think of the poor woman in the past tense.

Brad shrugged. “A friend of Beth’s. Although I always suspected she had a hankering to be more. Hey, Jamie, you ever had a three-way?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“What happened to Grace Hastings, Brad?”

“Uh-uh. You’ve been asking all the questions. It’s my turn.”

“Please …”

“Have you ever had a three-way?” he repeated.

“No,” she answered. What was the point of protest?

“Ever been with another woman?”

“No.”

“Never been tempted?”

“No,” she answered.

“Not even a little bit?”

“No.”

“Just not your thing, huh?”

Jamie nodded. What was he thinking now?

“What about if I told you it excited me, the idea of you with another woman? What if I asked you to? Would you do it for me?”

Oh, God. “I don’t know.”

“Something to think about,” Brad said, hunkering down on the bed, extricating a pillow from beneath the bedspread and fluffing it up behind his head. “Beth was the same way. You should have seen how upset she got the first time I suggested it.”

“So there really is an ex-wife in Ohio,” Jamie said, trying to regain control of the conversation.

“Sure is.”

“And a son?”

“Yes, ma’am. Corey Fisher. He’s five years old.”

“But you’re not on good terms with Beth, are you?”

Brad scratched the back of his neck. “Not really. No.”

“She ran away from you, didn’t she?” Jamie stated, knowing the answer before she posed the question.

The mark of a good attorney
, her sister would say.

Jamie wondered what Cynthia was doing, if she’d been bothered enough by Jamie’s strange behavior on the phone to investigate further. Except, what could she do? How would she even know where to begin?

“She took my kid,” Brad was saying. “She should never have done that.”

“Tell me about her,” Jamie said. “Tell me about your marriage.”

Brad yawned, as if the story held little interest for him. “Standard boy-meets-girl stuff. We met, fell in love, got married, had a baby. Things were fine in the beginning, although her family never approved of me. I wasn’t good enough for their precious little girl, I guess. She kept telling them I was a ‘diamond in the rough,’ but they weren’t buying it. And her friends, it was the same thing with them. They were nice enough in the beginning, tried killing me with kindness, if you know what I mean, probably hoping I’d go away if they just left well enough alone. Bad enough alone, they’d probably say.” He chuckled at his own play on words. “Except I fooled them. I didn’t go anywhere. And that really ticked them off. Yes, ma’am, that ticked them off something fierce.” His voice trailed
off, as if he were following some distant memory into a far recess of his brain.

“But why did they hate you so much?”

“You tell me. I mean, I can be a pretty charming guy. Isn’t that right?”

“You charmed me,” Jamie conceded.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “What can you do, right?”

“What
did
you do?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did you hit her, Brad?”

“What?”

“Is that why they hated you?”

Brad’s expression soured. “People fight,” he said.

“Is that why she divorced you?”

“Who says we’re divorced?”

“You’re not?”

He sat up, the muscles in his back rippling with tension beneath his black shirt. “According to her, we are.”

“And according to you?”

“Just because she sends me a goddamn lawyer’s letter telling me she’s filing for divorce doesn’t mean I agree to it.” He slid off the bed and walked to the door.

Where was he going? Was it possible he was going to open the door and walk out? Leave her there?

But if that had been his intention, he stopped when he reached the door. He turned around, pressed his back against the far wall. “Relax, Jamie-girl,” he said, misreading the look on her face. “I’m a free man.”

Jamie nodded, trying her best to look relieved. “She sent you a lawyer’s letter?”

“First she has me locked away, then she files for divorce.”

“You were in prison?” Jamie held her breath.

“Better part of a year.”

“Because you beat her?”

Brad shook his head wearily, as if he were tired of being so misunderstood. “I never beat her.” He inched away from the door, still shaking his head. “Why would you say something like that.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Women, shit. You always stick together, don’t you?” He shook his head. “It takes two people to make a fight, Jamie. She wasn’t some innocent bystander, you know. She wasn’t some punching bag, just hanging around waiting to get hit. That woman had a mouth on her, I’ll tell you. Once she’d start in about something, there was nothing you could say or do that was gonna shut her up. Sometimes all I wanted was for her to be quiet. You know how that is? When all you want is a little peace and quiet, and your damn kid won’t stop screaming, and your wife’s giving you a hard time about something you said to one of her stupid friends.…”

“She left you no choice,” Jamie said.

“It’s not like she just stood there. She threw some pretty good punches herself. Hell, I was as abused as she was,” Brad said with conviction.

“That must have been awful for you.” Good for her, Jamie was thinking, praying for the opportunity, the strength, the nerve.

“Yeah, well, what goes around comes around.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means I’m very good at biding my time.”

Jamie lowered her chin to her chest, stared at a long, torn thread on the quilted bedspread, wondering what would happen if she were to pull it. Would the whole
thing unravel and come apart? “Why were you in prison?”

“Long story,” Brad said, pacing back and forth between the bed and the door.

“I’d like to hear it.”

Brad suddenly pulled a chair away from the table and twisted it around, sitting on it backward, his arms leaning on the top of its back, his legs straddling its sides. He gazed at the heavy, mustard-colored drapes as if he could see right through them. Beyond those drapes was Dayton, less than a thirty-minute drive away.

He’s looking at tomorrow, Jamie thought. She closed her eyes, tried not to see.

“You’re not gonna like it,” he said quietly.

“Was it because of what you did to Grace Hastings?”

“Gracie? No.” He laughed, the thought clearly amusing him. “Trust me—nobody’s ever gonna find old Gracie-girl.”

“Why were you in prison?” Jamie asked again, too afraid to question him further about Grace Hastings.

Gracie-girl, she thought.

Jamie-girl.

Were they going to meet the same fate?

“Well, you gotta promise me you’re not gonna get all upset. It was a long time ago, right after I moved to Florida.”

“What happened?”

“I was new to Miami, didn’t know anyone,” Brad began. “One night, I’m in a bar, and I meet this fat, middle-aged guy, and we get to talking. He tells me he’s in town for some sort of appliance convention, wife and two kids back home in Philly, the usual crap. So it takes me a while to realize this asshole’s coming on to me. I’m
not too thrilled about this, believe me, but I decide to play along. I mean he’s the one buying the drinks, and he has a wad of bills on him this big.” Brad demonstrated how big with his hands. “He had this solid gold money clip. I’d never seen anything like it, before or since.” He shook his head at the memory. “Anyway, a few drinks later, he invites me back to his hotel room, supposedly to show me some catalogs, like I give a shit about a bunch of stovetops and refrigerators, and I’m thinking, not only is this moron cheating on his wife, he’s a goddamn faggot, and somebody’s got to teach him a lesson, right? So I go back to his room, we have another couple of drinks, then as soon as he puts a hand on me, I let him have it.” He shrugged. “Guess I hit him a little too hard.”