Run (24 page)

I have the gun and the two bullets, but something tells me that’s going to be my last resort.

“Hi Marie,” I say.

She’s sitting in her chair, of course, at the kitchen table. In front of her is a cherry pie that looks like something out of a cooking magazine. Besides luring girls to their deaths, it seems that Marie Rader is a supremely talented baker. I love pie. In fact, cherry has long been my favorite. After I get done here, however, I know that the tart taste of the fruit will always make me think of her.

“Where’s my husband?” she says, looking past me like I was a kitten that he’d dragged home and let loose to find his precious Marie.

“Alex?” I say casually, smiling. “He’s dead, Marie.”

Her head jerks, and I see a faint layer of sweat above her top lip.

“Lying little bitch,” she snarls, scanning the table for something.

The knife.

I let her get it. I want to fight her. I want to feel her struggle and gasp. I want her to know how the others felt when their final moments came. The sequence of events that Marie, poor old wheelchair-bound Marie, set in motion with her pathetic but effective ruse of needing help.

I picture each one of Alex Rader’s Sweet Sixteens—Leanne, Megan, Shannon, Mom, even me. I know that if not for Marie, all of those innocent girls would be alive. She’d been bait. And she’d gone along with it all.

“I shot him,” I say without feeling. “In the head. In the crotch. Though neither of those areas were any use to you, you withered bitch.”

She doesn’t blink. I wonder if her lids are paralyzed like her legs and her unfeeling heart.

“You’re lying,” she says, holding the knife.

Marie Rader doesn’t even look human to me anymore. I think of her as a vile spider, scooting around with those arms of hers. I point the gun at her.

“Drop it.”

“Make me,” she says.

“Don’t make it easy on me, Marie,” I say.

She pushes back from the kitchen table, her arms rippling with sinew and muscle. I don’t mind the challenge. I welcome it. I am consumed with fury, but I don’t show it. It’s like the idea of killing her is a drug to me. Like vanquishing her pathetic kind of evil will give me the biggest rush of my life. Bigger than shooting Alex. He was an obvious monster. I’m all but certain that I’ll get so much more pleasure at taking out this insidious creature who has just baked the most beautiful pie I’ve ever seen.

“Why do you want to kill me?” she asks, inching closer. She’s about to play the victim card. I can smell it. “My husband forced me to do all sorts of things,” she goes on, blinking hard to force out a tear of emotion.

As if.

“Marie,” I say. “You are like a Venus flytrap. So pure and tragic in your wheelchair, with no feeling below the waist. The truth is, you just sat there consumed with bitterness, waiting for the next girl to come by so you could entrap her.”

“It wasn’t like that, Rylee.”

“You know my real name, don’t you?”

She glances at the knife she’s holding. Her face is hard again. I can tell she hates me for reminding her.

For knowing what I know. Not about him. But about how pathetic she is.

“Yes, I do,” she says, her voice snapping a little. “I should have killed you when I had the chance, Alexandra. I should have tattooed you like the others and then slit your little throat. I know what you are to him.”

It figures that she was the tattoo artist. The tail of a koi fish peeks out from under the bulging upper sleeve of her light pink T-shirt.

Just then, she starts coming toward me. She is turning the wheels of her chair with one arm. In her hand is the knife. I fire but miss.
Shit!
I have only one bullet left. I fire again, striking her in the kneecap. As if that would give me any hope for retreat. Blood flows from her dead limb and she doesn’t even acknowledge it.

She can’t feel anything.

The wheels of the chair spin faster.

I take a step back, thinking what to do. How I will stop her. I have no bullets. I drop the gun to the floor, regretting doing so instantly. I should have used it to bash in her skull.

“Alex isn’t much,” she cries at me. Now her eyes are narrow and full of sorrow, but she’s a fraud and I know it. “He’s pathetic. But he’s mine. He does what he’s told. He goddamn owes me.”

I think back to what my father freak said before I obliterated him.

“
I did what I had to do. I had no choice.
”

“You pulled the strings, Marie!” I scream at her. “You’re the pathetic one!”

The knife sends a triangle of reflected light into my eyes and I blink.

“Guilt was Alex’s motivator. Revenge on all the pretty girls was mine,” she says, as she lunges with the blade pointed at me. “Now you’ve ruined everything.”

In a flash, she’s nearly on me and I do the only thing I can think of. I plant my foot between her legs and catch the base of the chair. It is fast and decisive. The knife falls to the floor. Marie Rader goes flying backward through the plate glass slider that leads to her patio.

Oddly, she doesn’t scream.

She starts coming toward me again. I don’t know exactly how I accomplish it, but I manage to plant my hands on her chair as she flails about. With all the strength that’s somehow still inside of me, I push her through the glittery shards of glass on the patio toward her massive koi pond.

The one she bragged about while she was poisoning me with her ice tea.

The water surges over her head as she starts to sink down beneath the surface.

Instinctively, I return for the knife. I stand by the water’s edge as Marie flails around. She’s coughing and choking, but she grabs hold of the cement edge of the pond. I see her rise up. Those arms of hers. They are like a pair of pine trees. They undulate with muscle tissue. I see the veins in her forearms press upward like a mass of worms under her skin.

“Goddamn you!” she says. Her eyes are wild. She starts to pull herself up and I do what I know I have to do.

And partly because I want to do it. I can’t stop myself. I take the knife and slam its glinting edge through her fingers and she screams. Yet she hangs on. I stomp on her other hand with my shoes like I’m crushing the life out of a scorpion. Which she is, and at the same time, she’s an insult to the creature. Her fingers are lying there on the edge of the cement and the water is turning to blood.

She goes under again.

The koi are drawn to her. I wish they were piranhas. I wish the waters were a vat of hydrochloric acid.

No matter. I am done. So is Marie.

Chapter Twenty-one

Cash: None.

Food: None.

Shelter: None.

Weapons: None.

Plan: Finish the job.

I KNOW I DON’T HAVE much time. Fuschia Lady told me she was watering her precious plants herself because she was leaving town and didn’t trust the neighbor kid to do a thorough job. She’s gone and she’s the closest neighbor. That’s in my favor right now. Marie and I made a lot of noise and I’m hoping no one else heard or cares enough to call the police.
The police
. Since Alex Rader was a cop, my respect for the cops has nose-dived. Rolland once said that the police are limited in what they can do, but I know that there was at least one among them—and maybe more—who do what they want no matter the price. Going to the police? Mom went there for help and look how it turned out for her. It is one thing of two that I know she and I will agree on. The other is that Hayden must never know what I know to be true. Like Mom, I carry that burden now. I love my little brother too much to have him live a life knowing that his heart circulates poisoned blood.

Like mine.

The koi pond is red with Marie’s blood and I feel sorry that the fish have to swim in the filth of her body. Even so, I kick her fingers into the water with the tip of my shoe. Under the surface I see her face. Her eyes are open and so is her mouth, in a permanent scream. She was handicapped but she put up more of a fight than her husband, the worthless pig.

I start for the living room and though I scan it with speed I still see everything and capture it in my memory forever. Like a camera with my finger on the shutter. Click. Click. Click. The scene, the furnishings. Everything is mundane. A TV sits across from a sofa. A recliner points toward the set and a basket containing needlework sits at the end of the carpet ruts left by Marie’s chair. I grab the wedding photo of Alex and Marie, smash the glass and pull the photo from the frame. Folded, it goes in my pocket.

The ruts. My eyes trace the worn parallel lines in the carpet throughout the house. They stop at the only place Marie cannot go.

The door that leads upstairs.

If Alex Rader had wanted to keep a souvenir from the prying eyes of his wife then it would be where she could not follow. He wouldn’t have to lock it. I turn on the light and head up the steps. It is one large room with the dormers looking out toward the street. Alex Rader has set it up as his office. It is like no office I could have imagined. Yes, I’ve seen porn. Never on purpose. Not really. There have been times when I’ve gone online and clicked the wrong link and in an instant I’m in a world of naked bodies moving and emoting in ways that indicate great pleasure but frequently make little sense.

One time I saw something so strange I still don’t know what they were doing. Or how many were doing it.

And truthfully, I don’t want to know.

The room is paneled with a dark oak wood. Using the seams in the paneling as a guide, Alex Rader has taped up photo after vile photo. These are scenes so sickening that I have to steady myself as I try to take them in without vomiting. I wouldn’t mind vomiting right now. But I don’t have the time. I move closer to a section of the wall that holds a familiar face.

Megan Moriarty does the splits in her cheerleading uniform from Kentridge High School. It is one of the images of her that I’d seen online.

Next is Shannon Blume’s picture, the same pretty, but sad-eyed photo that had appeared in the newspaper—the one that her parents held in their arms as they called out to the world for help in finding their daughter.

Leanne is there too. But this photo is not familiar. It was candidly snapped when she was caught down by the marina, unaware.

She was being stalked.

Next, are photographs of Mom. I almost lose my breath as I have no choice but to look at them.
I’m
in some of these photos. One was taken last year at the Seattle Center when my family went there for a textile show Mom said she had to see. We were being watched. Hayden, Rolland and I are looking at something by the International Fountain, a big water feature that looks like a steam punk version of a sea urchin.

But not Mom.

She’s looking
at
the camera. Right at it. Her eyes look scared, pleading.

I remember nothing about that day that suggests anything peculiar happened.

Alex Rader was there watching us.

I move closer. Underneath the photos taken before the various abductions are pictures of my father raping and torturing.

And making me.

It was possible that he’d set a timer to shoot these photos, of course, but something catches my eye in the one of him on top of Leanne, her cut-off shorts, pulled down to her ankles.

I hear a thumping sound, but I’m so mesmerized by what I see, I ignore it.

I look closer at the photo. A reflection. I see Marie holding a camera. It’s clear as day, on the shard of a mirror that hangs over the bed in the underground prison.

What the?

I pull down the photos. I am a maniac right now. There are dozens, but I claw at each one, tearing some, but bringing others off in perfect condition. I couldn’t stop myself if I wanted to. I wonder who the other girls are. I think there are at least four more that were added to his collection. All are like the original four—blonde, blue eyed, slender, pretty. His type.

I hear the thumping, louder this time, and I turn around.

Using her one good hand and the stump that I’d made for her with the kitchen knife, soaking wet Marie has heaved herself up the stairs. She slithered. She could barely speak, but she is as mad as hell and she won’t be denied.

“To get out of here,” Marie spits out, “you have to get by me.”

She has the knife in her hand. I see by looking past her that she used it like a rock climber to hoist herself up the stairway. A trail of water and blood follows her like a dying snail. Except, she’s no snail. Marie is fast. Faster than anyone could have imagined. I have only been upstairs a few minutes and she’s managed to track me. She’s pulled herself toward me. Her hair is wet and soaked with blood.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” I ask, as though someone so vile could even fathom it. “Do you realize how many lives you ruined?”

“Try being in a wheelchair,” she says. “See how that ruins your life.”