SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (36 page)

She flushed all the little tablets down the toilet and put the empty bottle back into her purse.

He had told her she was strong. She didn't feel strong. She felt physically weak, almost ill, her stomach full of butterflies like a girl leaving home for the first time, her hands shaking. She put her thumb into her mouth and chewed at the nail. Caught herself and jerked it out again. No. She shouldn't mutilate herself like that. People would think she was nuts.

She'd find something besides the maid's job in Houston to keep her mind off the children. She would go to the workout gym and, no matter what it took, get her body in shape again. She did a mental assessment of her body and thought it wasn't bad. She had never been overweight, and bearing the children had left no stretch marks on her fine skin. Not so much luck as a strict regimen of exercise during pregnancy, keeping the weight down, and using oils on her expanding belly. Maybe she could find a nice little apartment and decorate it in mauve and gray . . . No. She wouldn't decorate it to look like her lost home. She'd let Charlene decorate it, that's what she'd do. She'd find a job and make some money, Charlene would keep house . . .

Regrets. So many of them. She should have forced Scott to talk to her about his mysterious relationship with his mother. She should have called someone when he began acting strangely. She should have gone to school before the children were born so if something happened to Scott, she could support her family. And she had done nothing, but let it happen. It was as much her fault, almost, as it was Scott's.

She had never prepared herself for life, and even less for loss and misfortune. She had known they didn't give jobs—had she needed one—to mothers and housewives. They had no need of them at all. Women hardly ever did those jobs anymore, except on a part-time basis. She had let herself become an anachronism. She was about as worthless—and unneeded—as an extinct species.

The thumb crept back to her mouth and she gnawed on the nail as the miles rolled past.

She was just a little scared, that's all. And that was natural. She wasn't backing out now. She had plans. If she took them one at a time, she could handle anything. Other people found a means for coping after suffering tragedies and deaths. She wasn't so different.

She blinked at the sudden, coppery taste of blood and jerked her thumb from her mouth.

She laughed and the man across from her flinched in his seat by the window. He looked over, frowning. She frowned back until he turned away.

All right, so she wasn't altogether one hundred percent absolutely normal and sane, and she had a compulsion to bite the skin from her fingers, and she was scared shitless, but . . . but . . .

She could still find a way to live.

The next time her thumb moved up to her lips, she put her hands beneath her hips and sat on her burning fingers.

Houston wasn't far now. Here I come, ready or not.

She daydreamed about a little apartment with a balcony full of flowers, her new job a nice, easy one where they paid her enough to cover all her expenses, and life began taking on some kind of shape and meaning again. Charlene was there with a feather duster and a recipe book. Somewhere a wise person waited to tell her all about what had happened that day and why. God whispered in her ear at night that the children were safe and free of pain, free of fear and suffering. Scott was there with God and he was being taught what he had done wrong, where he had erred, and he was sorry, he was prostrate with grief for his sins. All she had to do was move forward through the days and the days took care of her. The questions were going to be sorted and answered. She would find new spirit and hope. Life was bountiful again and the future was more than a black deadly wall waiting for her to run into it.

That's what she had to think.

So she wouldn't lose her way again through the fog.

Before the bus reached Houston, her hands were once again free, and she gnawed at the little finger of her right hand.

~*~

By the end of the day Kay had a room in a cheap boarding house near downtown Houston, not far from the bus station. Twenty-five bucks a week, bath down the hall, no one could use the kitchen. She unpacked her few things, carefully setting out the two silver-framed photos of Gabriel and Stevie on top of a rickety chest of drawers. She ate a cheese sandwich and tomato soup in a downtown diner, and when she paid, she asked for five dollars worth of quarters. Outside, she stepped into a telephone booth that was open to the traffic and held the receiver close to her ear. She called information and found her mother-in-law's phone number. Her hands shook as she dialed it. It rang once, twice, three times. Her palm began to sweat and she changed the phone to her other ear so she could wipe her hand on her skirt.

A bum passed close by and saw her pile of quarters on the phone stand. He held out his hand to her. She made a face at, him and shooed him away with her free hand.

On the fifth ring the phone was picked up at the other end. “Mrs Mandel?” Kay asked.

“Who? Who do you want?”

She had to speak louder. The evening traffic was horrendous. “Is this Mrs Mandel? Scott's mother?”

“It is. But my son is dead. What is this about?”

Kay shuddered. This is Kay.”

“Hey?”

“Kay. Katherine Mandel, your son's wife.”

“He killed your kids,” she said without pause, but her voice lowered as if in respect for the dead. “I thought he might, it was always in the back of my mind, and I was scared all the time for them.”

Mystified, Kay said, “Why didn't you ever warn me? What was wrong with him? You've got to tell me why he shot my boys and then himself right in front of my face. Did you know he did that? He said it was because of something in his blood. What did he mean by that, could you tell me? I have to know why he did it.”

“His father died a raving maniac, took a shotgun to himself, pulled the trigger with his big toe. Scott was just a little boy, five or so. Scott found him in the garage where he did it. I was at work. Neighbors had to call the ambulance. Later Scott's cousin Brucie got cancer and blamed his whole family. They found them stabbed to death in the kitchen. My sister-in-law, her husband, and Brucie's two brothers and one sister. Piled them up in the middle of the kitchen floor, how do you like that?

“But me, it wasn't me. None of my side ever did nothing crazy like that, let me tell you. We come from Georgia, good stock, and except for my granddad who was supposed to have shot a couple of niggers worked with him on the WPA, there never was any mental defectives on my side. I expect that's what Scott was talking about in the blood and all. And it was, too. He done the same thing his father did. I wanted to tell you about it, but he wouldn't never let me talk to you.”

Kay hung onto the phone as if to a lifeline, the blood draining from her face. She felt faint. The bum was back hanging around the glass side of the booth, beckoning to her, pointing at the quarters. “I have to go,” Kay said, fearing she might fall to the floor of the booth and be vulnerable to robbery by the bum or anyone else who happened by this busy street. A man riding in a pickup truck leaned out and whistled at her. She wiped sweat from her forehead. “I have to go now.”

“It weren't my fault,” Mrs. Mandel was screaming over the receiver. “I told Scott to be careful, he had bad genes in him, he might do something terrible some day, but he never listened to me. He wouldn't even let me come see my own grandchildren. I had to wait until they were in sealed caskets going into the ground, that awful Texas ground . . .”

Kay hung up and pressed her face against the booth's wall. The glass was cool to her feverish skin. She turned, stumbled from the booth. She had to remember where her room was, where she lived now. She halted, remembering she'd left the rest of her change in the booth. When she turned she saw the bum scuttling away into a weedy overgrown acre that separated the diner and an apartment complex. To hell with it.

Afternoon had shaded rapidly to evening while she had listened to Scott's mother, and now a ribbon of lights from the traffic showed her the sidewalk. She had to get to her room. She had to forget what Mrs. Mandel had told her. She hadn't been able to think directly about what Scott had done ever since she'd come back to herself in Marion State. She walked around the edges and peeked at it from out of other thoughts that crowded her mind, but she never took a good look at it head-on. She couldn't. Not and stay sane.

She knew what he had done, and she remembered the sounds of the gunshots and the color of the blood, but she never allowed herself to see all the pieces together, never approached that scene in her memory too closely because it would swamp her with grief and submerge her with sorrow. She would never climb from that pit if she went into it again.

The first man in her life had been a liar and a cheat. She married a man twenty years her senior when she was just seventeen. Her mother said don't do it, you're making a big mistake, it won't work. But he was wealthy, she was poor. He offered her a home, a future, security. All the wrong reasons, and she had suffered the consequences. After a year she suspected him of philandering—late business meetings, out-of-town trips, cooling ardor—and she called him on it. "You think marriage means fidelity?” he asked, laughing at her. “Not for me, Kay. I'm way too old for that sort of thinking.”

When next he left their Memorial home she broke the windows, destroyed every beautiful object in the house, smashed the furniture, and ripped the carpet from the wallboards. The divorce was final before the ink could dry.

Then she had married Scott Mandel, a man who seemed honest and loving, but who hid the secret of a history of suicide and murder. While she was working at Babe's, a high-class exotic dance club that drew the businessman and his clients, Scott came through the door with co-workers. They left without him. After a few months of dogged pressure, some movies, the theater, quiet dinners, she decided to chance it again. Scott wasn't wealthy, he was closer to her age, and he promised to be faithful.

He never told her there might be a problem. He let her have their children without telling her. He harbored the idea that one day he too would go insane and kill, but he never tried to prevent it, and he carried his secret so long, with such utter deceptiveness, that she never had a clue. Not until the end.

Was that the reason he had chosen her, a young girl who danced in a topless club, a girl without education or experience of the world, so that she would never decipher what it was that made him tick? He wanted someone stupid, someone who might overlook his reluctance to see his mother, someone who was gullible and willing to do anything he wanted, agree to anything he said.

She hated him now with a fury she could barely contain. She buried her fingers in her clenched fists as she walked, head down, following the sidewalk, ignoring the traffic and the occasional catcall from the open car windows of passers-by. There was no way to get back at Scott. The release she had felt upon destroying her first husband's home allowed her to retain a shred of dignity. She paid him back for the pain he inflicted. But with Scott, there could be no act of revenge.

She shook her head furiously, hair whipping her cheeks, tears of pure frustration running down over her chin and into the hollow of her neck. If she could get hold of Scott now, she'd kill him herself. She would have killed him without hesitation had she known what he was planning to do to her children. She didn't care if he was responsible legally or not, if he had been insane or not, she blamed him for everything, from the day he walked into Babe's until the day he shattered her fairy-tale life. The boys were all she'd ever really had, all she had ever really wanted. Being a mother fulfilled her like nothing ever would again. He never should have fathered her children! He never should have taken the chance!

Hate and rage burned her cheeks and made them red. Her blood pressure soared, and her clenched hands shook at her sides as she stalked to the nearby boarding house that smelled of old women and unclean sheets. Up the stairs, into her room, closing the door, she stood still, wishing she could lash out at someone or something to release the building fury that bubbled close to the surface of her mind. She rushed across the tiny room and grabbed the pillow, began beating it relentlessly against the sagging mattress of the bed. She beat it until the pillowcase tore and the pillow went flying across the room to land with a smack against the wall.

Standing there holding the case bunched in her hands, she glared into the darkness and saw fed, the red of blood, the red of murder, the red of betrayal and lies and dying young.

Had a man, any man, stepped into her room at that moment, Kay Mandel would have turned on him and clawed open his throat with her nail-bitten and savaged fingers. Nothing in the world would have been able to stop her. It was men who left their women to raise children alone the way her father had left her mother. Men who took mistresses and thought it their divine right to do so. Men who took up guns and . . .

Men who were the enemy.

Six

Kay arrived at the Severenson Maid Service offices promptly at nine when her appointment with the manager was arranged. There was a brief interview, but the job was really hers already, due to Dr Shawn's earlier phone calls to the company. Kay filled out the W-2 forms, papers for health insurance, and was told her pay was seven dollars an hour, time and a half for overtime.

She was put into another room—a small cubicle with one chair and a television with a video recorder sitting alongside it. There, for the next hour, she watched dully as the duties of a Severenson maid were detailed. An actress in a maid's uniform went through the motions. Kay thought she wasn't having much fun. Greeting the client at the door, making sure the uniform—traditional black with a white skirt and white cap—was in order, no gum in the apron pocket, no cigarettes, hair put up off the neck, shoes clean and shined. If there was a list left by the client, the maid was supposed to do those chores first—what Severenson called “special chores, always done in good humor and with an obedient smile.” That did not negate the fact that she was responsible for cleaning toilets, tubs, doing one load of laundry, vacuuming, dusting, bed-making, and general tidying up. The video hurried the actress through these chores, showing just the beginning of them, and then the results. A perfectly clean and orderly household. Sparkling like new. A glory to behold.