Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (14 page)

“I see the farmhouse, Dani.”

I looked through the wet windshield and spotted the lights coming from the old two-story wood-framed house. Bob had called ahead and the tenant had turned the lights on for us.

“I’ve brought along a great bottle of red wine,” Bob said.

“You won’t need to get me drunk, Doc. I’m a sure thing tonight.”

Bob downshifted and rolled right up to the front porch. The ignition was barely off when he wrapped his arms around me and pulled my body into his. His kiss was wet, warm, and longing. It was going to be another great night.

I lugged the basket of precooked turkey, yams, brown gravy, mashed potatoes, and cranberries from the back of the Jeep while Bob hurried inside to start a fire.

“I hope you cooked as good as last year,” Bob called.

“Do I ever let you down?”

I was lying. Mom had actually cooked everything earlier in the day.

Inside, we kicked off our boots and I put the food in the oven to warm. By the time I emerged from the kitchen, Bob had poured two tall goblets full of wine and there was a beautiful blaze in the fireplace. He motioned me to join him and I could feel the fire’s warmth on my legs as we stood before the hearth.

“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” he mimicked, raising his glass.

“Okay, Doctor Bogart, right back at you.”

We were so eager to pull off each other’s clothing that we barely had time for our first sip.

“Don’t you want to eat first?” I asked.

“Hell no, don’t you dare go anywhere.” We fell to our knees in front of the stonework. He whispered into my ear how much I meant to him and I did the same as we fumbled with each other’s shirts. As I undid his buttons, he slipped his hands up the back of my white turtleneck sweater and unsnapped my bra. I tugged his shirt out of his jeans and off his toned body. I kissed his face, his neck, his chest, and moved down to his stomach as he pulled my top off.

His mouth was warm and radiating with love. He undid my pants buckle and unzipped me. With my corduroys off, I leaned back in my white bikini underpants. He stood and I admired his beautiful chest and shoulders as he undid his jeans, slid them to the ground—no underwear! God was he hot.

I fell to my back and he slid my panties off. He kissed my foot, then my inner thigh. I pulled him up on me and looked into his eyes. He told me that he loved me and I knew he meant it. In an instant, everything was smooth, slow, and deep. I was building and he read my excitement. He moved deeper and faster as I wrapped my legs around him.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Now?”

“Yes, please now, now, now!” He exploded inside me and we both gasped in pleasure.

After, we continued to hold and kiss each other, completely unaware of time. He left me briefly only to toss more wood into the fireplace and pull a heavy blanket over us. He ran his tongue over my breast and moved his hand across my hips.

“What about dinner?” I asked.

“Fuck it,” he said. We made love again and drifted off to sleep. Dinner would wait.

I loved being with Bob that Christmas Eve. And there was no doubt in my mind that Bob loved me. I let out a sigh and walked to the backyard where I opened the door to Wilbur’s pen. With an excited squeal, he waddled toward the house.

13

On a friday, three weeks after she’d been attacked, Mary Margaret was discharged and I drove to Canfield Avenue to check on her. The flat-roofed apartment building that her mother owned had a dingy yellow-brick facade. Hitchins’s name was still taped to one of the four mailboxes hanging near the entryway. Another belonged to Mrs. Latham, the snoopy tenant who lived next door on the second floor. I’d telephoned Mrs. Finn before leaving my office and she’d told me that her daughter would be recuperating with her, so I pushed a buzzer next to APT. 1 on a ground-floor unit and waited. Rebecca cracked the door a few inches. She had one of those hotel-type chains, but if she thought that flimsy contraption would keep out someone as violent as Hitchins, she was wrong.

“Come in,” she said, smiling. “Mary Margaret is resting but I’ll get her.”

She left me standing in a dimly lit living room with badly faded wallpaper decorated with red and white roses the size of pumpkins and the stench of stale cigarettes. The white shades on the two front windows were closed. Beneath my feet was a well-worn Oriental rug with smudges left from fallen ashes. Mrs. Finn had a tan Naugahyde couch and two vinyl easy chairs positioned around the rug’s edges. All of the furniture faced a console television that had a rabbit-ear antenna poking up from behind it and family photographs displayed on its veneer top. The largest was a wedding shot of a much younger Rebecca and her beaming late husband, Harry. I didn’t notice anything unusual about her apartment until I looked into the kitchen and saw a barber’s chair anchored to the tile floor where most renters would have placed a breakfast table.

Hanging from the chair’s arm was a long gray strap used to sharpen straight razors. I suddenly felt nauseated. It wasn’t the musty air. It was a memory.

“You girls are going to be punished,” Father George McCleary said as he slapped a razor strap against the open palm of his pudgy left hand. “Don’t you realize God watches you every moment? He writes your names in his book of good deeds and bad deeds and today you’re in the bad book.”

I was only ten, a skinny girl in a plaid skirt and green blazer, the school uniform at Saints Peter and Paul in Elmira. My two best friends, Amy Johnson and Susan O’Brien, were standing next to me at attention. A few minutes earlier we’d been giggling inside a school bathroom using a match to light a cigarette that Amy had pinched from her father’s pack of unfiltered Camels. Amy assured us that she had smoked before, but when she inhaled, she began coughing so loudly that she’d drawn the attention of Sister Sarah McGill, the hallway monitor. Amy was in the midst of passing the cigarette to me when Sister Sarah burst in, confiscated the cigarette, and marched us to Father McCleary’s office.

I knew Father McCleary was a chain-smoker. I’d seen him puffing away. But that didn’t stop him from giving us a stern lecture about smoking at school. All the while, he waved a twenty-inch-long razor strap, which he used for spankings, in front of our wide eyes. Without warning, he slapped the strap down onto his desktop, causing a loud
WHACK
. I jumped. Susan burst into tears and Amy soon joined her. Father McCleary appeared satisfied until he noticed there were no tears streaming from my eyes.

“Dani Fox, step forward, turn around, bend over, and touch your toes.”

I didn’t move. “My mother and father don’t believe in spanking,” I declared.

Father McCleary squinted over the half-glasses perched on his nose. “Is that so, young lady. Well, your parents aren’t here, are they? Now you do as you were told or you’ll get a double dose for being insolent.”

With a chorus of sobs coming from my pals, I took one step forward and turned around as ordered. I was now looking directly into my terrified friends’ faces.

“Grab your ankles.”

I bent forward and took hold of my white socks.

He swung the strap quickly and with such force that I fell forward onto the wooden floor. There wasn’t time to soften my fall with my arms. As I began pushing myself up, I realized my underwear was wet and my face burned with embarrassment. But I did not cry.

“You want another?” he asked.

“No, Father,” I said softly as I took my spot next to my friends.

He raised the strap over his head as if he were going to swing it again and took a step toward the three of us. Susan and Amy shrieked and covered their faces with their hands.

“Let this be a lesson to the three of you!”

He lowered the strap. “I am calling your parents and I will strongly suggest they punish you when you get home.”

That was the first and the last time that anyone had ever struck me. Obviously, that incident didn’t compare to what Mary Margaret had endured. Yet it was burned into my memory and I could still feel the humiliation, helplessness, and anger of that moment when I had no control and another person hurt me.

Mary Margaret shuffled into the apartment living room wearing a terry cloth pale blue bathrobe. She still had bandages covering her face, and because her mouth was wired shut, she couldn’t speak loudly. Mrs. Finn walked behind her as she inched forward and settled into one of the easy chairs.

“I saw you looking at Harry’s barber chair,” Mrs. Finn said. “He used to cut hair at night here. My Harry, if there was a way to earn an extra buck, he was on it. Our families were Irish, but he had a bit of Scotch in him, too, and I don’t mean the liquor.”

She laughed, took a seat on the sofa next to me, and fired up a cigarette.

I asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Mary Margaret replied.

“My mother made you some baklava,” I said, handing Mrs. Finn a paper plate covered with wax paper. “Have you ever had it?”

Neither had.

“It’s a sticky pastry. It goes great with coffee.”

“I’m sure we will enjoy it, dear, please thank her,” Mrs. Finn said, taking the plate into the kitchen. “Of course, Mary Margaret can’t eat solid food yet.”

I felt myself blushing. I’d not thought of that.

“Has Rudy Hitchins tried to contact you—either by phone or coming here?”

“No,” Mary Margaret said. “We heard he’s living with that whore.”

“Gloria Lucinda,” Mrs. Finn volunteered, returning from the kitchen. “But don’t you worry. He’ll soon be doing to her what he did to my baby girl. Then she’ll see what kind of bastard he is.”

We spoke about Hitchins for several moments and then I got to the point of my visit. “You were understandably angry and upset while you were in the hospital. Now that you’re home, I need to know if you are having any second thoughts about moving forward with this case.”

Mary Margaret shook her head.

“When will that bastard be put on trial?” Mrs. Finn asked. “When can we get him locked up again, this time for good?”

I gave them a rudimentary outline of how the process worked and explained that Judge Morano had put the case on his docket five months from now.

“Five months is expedited?” Mary Margaret asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s about when she’s having her baby,” Mrs. Finn said.

“I want jurors to see you pregnant in court,” I said.

“That’s smart,” Mrs. Finn replied.

“How’s the pregnancy going?”

“I wish I’d miscarry. I already hate it.”

“Them’s just your emotions, honey,” Mrs. Finn said. “Hormones. You’re tired.”

I took that as a cue to leave. “I’d better go.”

Mary Margaret asked, “You told me about your boyfriend. Bob, right? How’s that going?”

“We’re both still busy. I didn’t get to see him over the weekend. But we’re fine.”

“Listen, honey, absence don’t make the heart grow fonder,” Mrs. Finn said. “It makes men look at other women.”

“Mother,” Mary Margaret said, “she told me about Bob in the hospital. They’ve been together since high school. He’s her first love. It’s romantic.”

“It should be,” said Mrs. Finn. “You take my Harry. It was sparks from the moment I saw him. I’m not ashamed to say we gave our bed a good pounding.”

“Mother, please!”