THREE TIMES A LADY (31 page)

Nicholas took a step back and held up his hands in a futile effort to keep her away.  He should have known better than to come here tonight.  There was no escaping his mother.  Never had been.  Never would be.  She
owned
him.

Nicholas’s worked the muscles around his mouth.  When his voice finally emerged from his badly constricted throat, it shook uncontrollably, reduced to sounding the same way it had when he’d been a confused, pre-pubescent boy who didn’t understand the feelings he felt.  ‘No,’ he said, taking another step backward and feeling the wall next to the refrigerator press into the small of his back.  ‘This isn’t right.  You shouldn’t be doing this to me.  You shouldn’t have done
a lot
of things you did to me.’

Annabeth Preston cocked her head to one side and took another step forward.  ‘Like what, son?  Tell me exactly what you’re talking about here.’

Nicholas’s eyes filled with tears, blurring his vision.  ‘You shouldn’t have…’

Annabeth Preston took another step forward and cupped a hand to her right ear.  She was no more than three feet away from him now.  ‘Yes, son?  Go on.  I shouldn’t have done what?’

Nicholas felt his heart break into a million tiny pieces inside his chest.  ‘You shouldn’t have…
molested
me,’ he breathed, his voice shattering in his throat.  ‘I was just a little boy.  You were supposed to
protect
me.’

Annabeth Preston threw back her head and barked out a short, ugly laugh.  Her eyes flashed like heated emeralds.  ‘
Molest
you?’ she asked incredulously.  She shook her head in disbelief.  ‘Are you fucking
kidding
me?  I never laid a finger on you a day in my life, boy.  You were a freak, but I still took care of you.  I
fed
you.  I
bathed
you.’ 

Annabeth Preston shook her head again and exhaled a disgusted breath through her mouth, producing a hard
pfft
sound with her beautiful lips.  ‘Molested you.  Give me a fucking break.  You can just go to hell, for all I care, you ungrateful little sissy.’

The pure
venom
coating Annabeth Preston’s voice finally caused the sturdy wall inside of Nicholas to break.  Taking one quick step forward, he punched his mother square in the mouth with all his might, releasing all the pent-up ferocity he’d kept stored behind that wall ever since he’d been eight years old.  She crashed down hard to floor in front of him.  ‘I
am
going to hell, Mother,’ Nicholas snarled.  He leaned down and wrapped a thick handful of his mother’s silken black hair in his right fist before yanking her up hard to her feet.  ‘And I’m taking you with me.’

Dragging his mother by her hair down the long hallway, he mocked the way she’d always spoken to him.  ‘You
do
know what this means, don’t you?’ he mimicked, kicking open the front door to the house and pulling her down the sidewalk.  Opening up the back door to the massive Buick LeSabre sedan, he tossed her inside.  ‘It means a trip to the butcher’s shop, you sadistic bitch.  And if you think what I did to those other women was bad, believe me, Mommie Dearest, you ain’t seen
nothin’
yet.’

Nicholas leaned his body into the car and held his mother’s disbelieving stare.  For the first time in his life, the fear and uncertainty and confusion that had always ruled his movements had disappeared.  In its place, a confidence like none he’d ever known flowed through his veins, giving him the strength that he knew he’d need for what would come next.  

Annabeth Preston trembled in the backseat of the car.  A sickening rush of blood gushed from her broken nose, streaming down her gorgeous face and staining her satin night robe a beautiful crimson.

‘I’m gonna
hurt
you, Annabeth,’ Nicholas said, wanting her to understand
exactly
how serious he was about this.  ‘Enough’s enough already.  Time to pay the piper, cunt.  As a matter of fact, I’m gonna hurt you
real
bad.’

Slamming shut the back door, Nicholas went around to the driver’s side and slid behind the steering wheel before cranking the ancient engine to life with a quick twist of his right wrist.  Then he turned in his seat and spat directly into his mother’s ugly face, which for some reason or another didn’t look quite so flawless as it usually did at the moment.

    ‘I’m gonna hurt you
real
bad, bitch,’ Nicholas repeated.  ‘That much I promise you.

‘Just like you hurt me and Timmy.’

Still half-drunk from this morning’s ill-advised four-pack at the Smokin’ Oyster Bar, Dana jogged past the line of palm trees swaying in the breeze along Spellman Avenue, doing her best to let the rhythmic pounding of her feet against pavement do its job. 

Some people did their best thinking while out for a run, but it had always been the opposite case for Dana.  More than anything else, running provided an
escape
for her.  An all-too-brief block of her day where she could erase the jumbled chalkboard of her mind and just
be
.

And the sad fact of the matter was that the jumbled chalkboard of Dana’s mind was just too much to bear these days.  Not only had she literally run away from an open case back home in Cleveland, just ten minutes earlier she’d received the sickening news that an Internet video starring little Bradley had gone viral on YouTube.  In the video – a disgusting horror show that had already received more than two million hits on the World Wide Web – the seemingly upstanding judge who’d adopted the little boy was pictured whipping Bradley so violently across his bare backside with a thick leather strap that huge red welts had piled up one on top of the other before finally splitting wide open and leaking torrents of bright red blood. 

Upon first seeing this jarring spectacle, Dana had immediately vomited up all four beers she’d drunk earlier that morning onto the hardwood floor of her rented vacation residence on Indian Bayou Avenue.

Dana gritted her teeth and fought back the intense swell of anger in her chest as she continued to run.  The irony of her actions wasn’t lost on her.  After all, why in should she stop running
now
?  She’d already run away from her career – the job that had kept her going for so many years.  She’d run away from all her responsibilities – including Oreo, who’d she’d returned to the capable hands of Maggie Carter with the vague promise of returning to pick him up again one day.  And she’d run away from the woman dressed in black, practically
screaming
in terror. 

Even more pathetically, Dana had run away from poor little Bradley, had left him all alone in the world to fend for himself.  And just look how
that
had turned out.

Tears streamed down Dana’s face, blurring her vision.  She’d run away from everything and everybody in her life who’d ever meant anything to her and had let everyone down. 
Again.
  People she could never look in the eye again.  Bill Krugman.  Gary Templeton.  Bradley. 
Herself
. 

More than anything else, she needed
redemption
. 

But how? 

Dana’s heart ached in her chest for poor little Bradley.  The boy with the silken blonde hair and enormous blue eyes so similar to her own.  The sweet, precious little boy who’d promised to marry her one day, who’d promised her that after they’d gotten married they could live in a castle and ride horses and pick flowers all day long and go swimming whenever they wanted to.  He’d needed her to stand up for him and she hadn’t been there.  Could
he
ever forgive her?

Didn’t seem likely.

Besides, Dana knew for a fact that before she could even
dream
of taking care of Bradley, she’d first need to learn how to take care of herself again.  Anything less that would be unfair to him.  The little boy had already been through enough in his short life as it was.

Dana sniffled.  With each passing, day the thought of lifting her Glock to her temple and pulling the trigger seemed less and less ridiculous.  The previous night, she’d actually given it a dry run with no magazine in the gun.  She’d been surprised at just how
easy
it had been to pull the trigger.

Shaking her head to chase away all the thoughts swirling around there, Dana ran even faster, fast enough to dry the tears on her face.  She knew that she needed professional help, of course, but she didn’t know how to go about asking for it.  Broken as she was, she had serious doubts
anyone
could ever fix her.

The heavy smell of sea salt stung her nostrils as Dana turned the corner onto Estero Boulevard and picked up her pace even more, the pounding surf across the two-lane street echoing loudly in her ears and the wind whipping through her short blonde hair.  Hitting a good stride, she willed her legs to move faster, and then even faster still, until she broke out into a dead sprint.  Her muscles screamed out in agony as tried desperately to outrun all the demons chasing her. 

No good.  The demons wouldn’t let up.  Her thighs burned from the overload of lactic acid coursing through her system but Dana ignored the pain and pushed on.

Five hundred yards later, she finally came to a panting stop with her lungs on
fire
.  Leaning over, she pressed her palms hard into her trembling thighs for support.  Dizziness clouded her brain as the runner’s high flooded hot through her bloodstream.  A faint, high-pitched ringing sounded in her ears.

Finally catching most of her breath, Dana looked up to see that she’d made it to just outside the sprawling, gated compound of Ascension Catholic Church.  Twenty feet away, an elderly landscaper was tending to a large stand of bushes near the ornate, marble archway.  The man smiled at her when he noticed Dana watching him and leaned his wooden-handled rake against an intricate hedge. 

He mopped at his heavily sweating brow with one thin forearm.  ‘Mass every morning at eight a.m. if you’re interested, young lady.  The pastor’s an awful bore – a bit long-winded in his sermons and something of a doddering old drunk – but some say we have the best choir in all of Lee County.  Even better than the Baptists, if you can believe that.’

Dana forced a smile, but even she could feel just how fake the smile must have looked on her lips.  Still, she couldn’t pretend any more that she was happy when her soul had become a black hole of misery that completely sucked away whatever energy she’d once possessed.  Besides, despite having lived with three different Catholic foster families when she’d been a kid, Dana hadn’t stepped foot inside a place of worship in more than ten years now.  Why
should
she when there was still a God in charge up there who thought it perfectly reasonable to let innocent people die horrible deaths?  Her parents.  Crawford Bell.  Eric Carlton.  ‘Just looking,’ Dana said.

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she immediately felt foolish, like she’d just been caught window-shopping by a salesman who knew she had no intention of buying.  She wished she could reach out and snatch the words right out of the air, but the damage had already been done. 

Thankfully, the old man just smiled at her and retrieved his rake from its resting place.  Nodding thoughtfully, he jerked his thumb over his right shoulder toward the church.  ‘Well, if it’s answers you’re looking for, you can always find them in there.  I know they’re not always easy to find, but they’re definitely in there, that much I promise you.’

Dana let out a deep breath; grateful that the man wasn’t holding her feet to the fire for her stupid words.  Working the muscles around her mouth into the semblance of a
real
smile, she said, ‘Thanks.  I’ll keep that in mind.’

With that, Dana shook the stiffness out of her legs and turned back in the direction of her rented vacation house, already looking forward to the long afternoon of drinking that lay in front of her.  A chance to drown all thoughts swirling around in her brain that so desperately needed drowning. 

As she jogged away, Dana shivered despite the intense Florida heat, unable to shake the eerie sensation that the old man’s watery blue eyes were burning a hole into the back of her skull.

Finally turning the corner back onto Spellman Avenue and jogging out of his sight, Dana shivered again, even harder this time.  No chance in hell of shaking off
that
weird encounter.  Still, maybe a few Rum Runners over at the Lanai Kai would turn the trick.

Only one way to find out.

The rundown seaside bar was infamous on the island for the daily fistfights that occurred there, but Dana didn’t think she’d mind seeing someone punched in the face right about now.  After all,
she
’d been getting punched in the face her entire life.  Why not let someone else experience that oh-so-charming sensation for a change?

No reason that she could think of straight off the top of her head.

Nope, no reason she could think of, at all.

Like the other beach houses dotting Indian Bayou Avenue on Fort Myers Beach down in Florida – nicknamed ‘the Sunshine State’ for very good reason – Dana Whitestone’s vacation residence sat on stilts to protect it from flooding in the event of hurricanes.