Authors: Richard Montanari
The Violet Hour (25 page)
Jennifer knew it was stupid to be playing a game like this at her age, but she just couldn’t stop herself. She was over forty now, more than a few pounds overweight. But she was a little drunk, she was horny as hell, and the game seemed to have taken over her body, her mind, her will.
Cat and mouse.
Kitty, kitty, kitty.
Taffy had left the club, making her departure extremely obvious to Jennifer, lingering at the door, lingering in the lobby, lingering on the street corner at West Third. She walked slowly up the now-deserted street, toward Lakeside, swinging her hips a bit drunkenly, driving Jennifer a bit mad with desire.
Then she turned down the alley, opened a rusted steel door, and stepped inside one of the warehouses. The fluorescent lights from inside the building painted a wedge of white onto the dark alleyway, and after a few moments, Jennifer followed. But by the time she did, by the time she opened the door and looked down the long, narrow paneled hallway, the girl was gone.
A little spooked, a lot aroused, Jennifer stepped inside the building, closed the door behind her, and inched forward.
She found Taffy behind the last door on the left, in an abandoned office. There was a large wooden desk in the center of the room, a few fifty-gallon drums, and a small table lamp on the floor in one corner that provided perhaps twenty-five watts of light. The girl had taken her coat off and was sitting on the desk. Her feet were up on a dusty but rather substantial-looking oak executive chair, and from the index finger of her right hand dangled a gleaming pair of handcuffs.
Without saying a word, Jennifer looked back down the hallway, toward the alley, then stepped into the room. She removed her coat, letting it slip to the floor, and crossed the office. She sat in the chair and, for a moment, scrutinized the girl’s face in the dim orange light from the lamp. She was so pretty, so fresh.
Did I ever look that young? Jennifer wondered.
The girl wound the cuffs through the spokes of the chair, then clicked them closed over Jennifer’s wrists. She stepped back, spun Jennifer around so that she was facing the door. She unplugged the lamp. The only illumination in the office now was the slanted column of light from the hallway. ‘What?’ Jennifer said. ‘What’s wrong?’
The girl grabbed her coat and stepped toward the door, then waited.
After a few moments, the silhouette of a man filled the doorway, a man in a dark overcoat. He stepped inside the room, into the shadows. The young girl walked up to him, kissed him lightly on the cheek, glanced back in Jennifer’s direction, then walked down the hallway, her heels clicking hard on the grimy linoleum. A few seconds later, Jennifer heard the door to the alley open and close.
They were alone.
‘Hello, Jennifer,’ the man said.
‘What’s going on here? Who the hell are you?’
The man didn’t reply. After a full minute, he reached into his pocket, retrieving what Jennifer was certain would be the instrument of her death – gun, knife, straight razor, bludgeon. Instead, it turned out to be an instrument of her imminent madness.
A digital voice recorder.
The man pressed a button and placed the recorder on top of one of the fifty-gallon drums next to him. The recording began to play, a poem read by someone English. Jeremy Irons, Jennifer thought.
‘Got a question for you,’ the man said, still in shadow. ‘I want you to think back, now. Way back. I want you to recall a night about twenty years ago. Back when you were in college, Jenny. The others remembered.’
‘Others?’ Against her will, Jennifer’s voice had already begun to shake.
‘Yes. Friends of ours. Geoffrey Coldicott. Johnny Angelino.’
The names threw a cold shudder through Jennifer. The night came fluttering back, as it had so many times before. She remembered the Halloween party . . . the people in and out of dorm rooms . . . the heroin . . . Julia Raines. She remembered her hands on Julia’s hips, Julia’s breasts. As much as she fought them, tears began to well in Jennifer’s eyes.
‘Tell me what happened that night, Jenny. Tell me in your own words.’
‘I’m not going to tell you a goddamn thing,’ Jennifer said. ‘Take these cuffs off me.’
‘No.’
The poem continued in the background.
‘Effluence,’ the man said. ‘Is that what brought you back here, Jenny? The
effluence
of that young girl?’
effluence
of that young girl?’
‘Fuck you, motherfucker.’
The man laughed. ‘Speaking of family.’
The recorder, which had fallen silent, hissed and popped a few times. Then a new recording started. At first, to Jennifer, it sounded like someone was recording a memo on a train. The steady click-click-click of the tracks lulled her. Then she heard a familiar voice.
‘No . . . no . . . no . . .’ came the recorder.
Jennifer was ten years old now, cowering in the corner after watching Greta break one of her mother’s figurines, waiting for the punishment. Whenever Greta broke something, which was very often, it was Jennifer who took the punishment.
It was her sister’s voice on the recording.
Jennifer heard the squeak of the bed, the pounding of the headboard against the wall. It wasn’t a train after all. Jennifer closed her eyes for a moment and saw the institutional steel headboard in her sister’s room, the Lalique figures rattling on the nightstand. The vitriol rose within her, hot and fluid.
‘Nooooo . . .’ Greta Schumann moaned. ‘Nooooo.’
‘Had to do a little computer work at your place today,’ the man said. ‘Your primary caregiver on duty wasn’t much of a challenge, I’m afraid.’
Jennifer exploded, the nausea falling away, liquidated by rage. ‘My
sister
!
Y
ou
cocksucker
!’
sister
!
Y
ou
cocksucker
!’
‘You didn’t think about it twenty years ago, did you, Jenny?’ the man screamed, now just a few inches from her face. He seemed to have crossed the room in a single step. ‘Twenty years ago you didn’t care about family, did you? Julia and I were going to have children. Did you know that? Did you? Julia was going to experience motherhood and you stole it from her. You stole it from
me
, you cunt. Now I steal everything from you.
Everything
.’
me
, you cunt. Now I steal everything from you.
Everything
.’
He crossed the office, flipped on the overhead lights, and lifted the lid of the fifty-gallon can next to him. There, amid the deadfall of arms and legs, bent at unnatural angles, Jennifer saw the sprig of graying hair, the skinny wrist bearing the cheap watch with the big numbers on the face. She also saw something dangling from her sister’s hand that looked as out of place as anything else this horror show had produced so far.
Her sister held a rosary.
Greta
.
.
‘I have an idea,’ the man said brightly. And that’s when Jennifer knew exactly who stood before her. He removed a hypodermic needle from his coat pocket. ‘Let’s get high.’
Jennifer Schumann opened her mouth to scream. But it was too late.
Somewhere, she imagined as he wrapped a tourniquet around her arm, in the vicinity of twenty years too late.
41
It had been a toss-up whether to tell her about the gory details. He decided against it for the time being. Somehow, when he looked into her eyes, he couldn’t do it. The words bottlenecked in his throat and he found that, when real people were involved, when murder was involved, everything changed. Amelia St John was flesh and blood and she had a house and a car and a husband and a daughter, and everything he rehearsed on the way over (before he knew that she was the woman from his writing class) sort of dissipated like steam from a sidewalk grate when he looked into her eyes.
Although he still couldn’t find his notebook, he had remembered the name Roger St John from the e-mail list. Not that common a name. He had found it immediately in the directory. The other name, the last name on the list, wasn’t so clear. Schubert. Schunemann. Something like that.
He told Amelia that he was writing a story for the
Chronicle
and that three people on the list that came with the poem had died from an overdose of heroin, and that the police were investigating.
Chronicle
and that three people on the list that came with the poem had died from an overdose of heroin, and that the police were investigating.
When they had kissed that night in the school’s parking lot, he had, of course, noticed the ring – and he sure as hell had no intention of dating a married woman – but she had been right there with her schnapps and soft lips and little black dress and—
She was married.
After Nicky’s initial nervous spiel, Amelia had told him about her efforts to decode the e-mail message, about the young men at Cybernauts, how the whole process had been kind of an obsession with her.
Every so often, as they sat on opposing love seats, realizing how they had been pursuing the same thing, Nicholas Stella and Amelia St John shook their heads in blank wonderment.
Amelia made a few phone calls, one to her husband’s voice mail, one to Karen MacGregor’s house. Within a few minutes, headlights washed the front windows of the house as Karen pulled up in her station wagon and Maddie got out.
Up the steps, through the door, in the house, safe.
Amelia dead-bolted the door as Maddie wandered into the living room, dropped her jacket on the couch, and walked over to where Nicky sat.
‘Hi,’ Maddie said.
‘Hi,’ Nicky replied.
The two studied each other for a few moments. Maddie twirled a curl with an index finger; Nicky smoothed his hair, fixed the collar of his shirt. Finally: ‘My name’s Nicky.’ He extended his hand.
‘My name’s Madeleine. Everybody calls me Maddie, though.’
They shook hands. Nicky was more than a little charmed by the girl’s forthright, businesslike manner. She had her mother’s green eyes, eyes for which Italian men have tumbled for centuries. Meg’s eyes. ‘Can I call you Maddie?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Maddie said. ‘It’s okay. Are you a friend of my dad’s?’
Nicky glanced at Amelia, who suddenly got interested in arranging the magazines on the coffee table. ‘Uh, well, no,’ Nicky said. ‘Not yet. I’m more a friend of your mom’s. I’m in her writing class.’
Maddie wrinkled her nose. ‘You don’t write romance books, do you?’
Nicky laughed. ‘What’s wrong with romance books?’
‘I don’t know for sure,’ Maddie said.
‘I write all kinds of stuff.’
‘Do you like dogs?’
‘Yes. I like dogs a lot, in fact,’ Nicky said, glancing at the huge golden retriever that was napping under the dining room table.
‘That’s Molson,’ Maddie added. ‘He runs from hummingbirds.’
‘Oh, he’ll toughen up,’ Nicky said. ‘He looks like a big puppy to me.’
‘Maddie, it’s time for bed,’ Amelia said. ‘Go get ready, hon.’
‘’Kay,’ Maddie said, heading for the stairs. When she got to the foot of the steps, she turned and added, ‘’Bye, Nicky.’
‘’Bye, Maddie. Sleep good.’
Maddie raced up the stairs.
‘She’s a doll,’ Nicky said.
‘Thanks,’ Amelia said. She sat down on the love seat, across from Nicky, then immediately sprang back up. ‘My husband should’ve called back by now.’
Amelia crossed the room, picked up the phone, replaced it.
‘I’m sure he’ll call soon. I’m sure everything’s okay,’ Nicky said, rising to his feet. He edged toward the front door. ‘I really didn’t mean to freak you out.’
‘It’s okay,’ Amelia said. She walked Nicky to the front door, tried to strike a casual pose against the jamb. She failed. ‘We’ll be okay.’
‘Before I leave, though, I need a favor,’ Nicky said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Does your husband have any yearbooks from Case Western Reserve?’
‘I think so,’ Amelia said. ‘Let me look.’ She returned in a few moments.
‘This is the only year he has,’ she said, holding up an embossed 1987 CWRU yearbook. ‘But there’s two of them for some reason.’
‘Would it be okay if I borrowed it?’
‘Sure,’ Amelia said, handing it to him. ‘But why do you need it?’
‘Background.’ Nicky said. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Nicky was halfway through the door. He turned, studied her for a moment, and said, ‘About the other night.’
‘Yeah?’ Amelia said. She felt she might be nervous if the subject came up. She was right. ‘What about it?’
‘I realize now that it isn’t going to happen, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘But I just want you to know that, at least for a few days, thinking that it might happen was, well, really wonderful.’ Nicky stepped onto the porch.
Amelia began to color, fought it. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’ll be okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Amelia said. ‘But what about you? You going to tell me what happened to your face?’
‘Little disagreement over a past-due account,’ Nicky said. He reached out, touched her hand gently. When she turned her hand over, he placed his business card in it. ‘If you need anything, or if you want to talk about this, call me. Okay?’
Other books
Winter's Tales by Lari Don
Tempting the Wolf by Greiman, Lois
The Best Bet by Roman, Hebby
The Forgotten by Tamara Thorne
The Clone who Didn't Know (The Genehunter) by Kewin, Simon
Rebekah Redeemed by Dianne G. Sagan
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Paint on the Smiles by Grace Thompson
Nothin' But Trouble by Jenika Snow
On Looking: Essays by Lia Purpura