A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 19
It had gotten colder outside. I didn’t want to go barefoot in temperatures like these, but trying to balance on one high heel was impossible and dangerous. Someone at the party had mentioned that just north of us there was freezing rain and the rain was expected to reach Knolls in a couple of hours. This was unseasonable for the area; the Thanksgivings I remembered were chilly but sunny. Winter was paying a premature visit.
I wasn’t so brave and didn’t feel so smart once I had gone a block in my bare feet. They began to sting with cold. Maybe I should return to the party and wait for Cully to walk me home for the shoes, I thought uneasily. But that wouldn’t make my feet any warmer. I belatedly realized I should have hunted down Cully with more determination, and sent him back to the house for my footwear, since his shoes were intact. I paused on the sidewalk, shivering, and almost turned back. But I’d gone nearly a block, and I knew exactly where my replacements were stored in my closet. Besides, Cully might be busy with his sweetheart.
I gritted my teeth and proceeded. I was half a block from Mimi’s when the lights went out on the entire street. The freezing rain to the north, no doubt. ‘Oh hell,’ I said to the black night to the silent block, to the tension that suddenly leapt from the core of my awareness. I hadn’t known I was afraid. But I knew it now. I was alone in the night and unsheltered.
Obviously I couldn’t stand still. I wrapped my coat more tightly about me, clenched my teeth, and started forward. There wasn’t even much light from the moon or stars; the gathering clouds of the oncoming storm were obscuring them. I could see darker shapes in the darkness. That was all.
Because of the gloom, I overshot the steps leading up to the yard. I slapped myself lightly in punishment. ‘Stupid Nick,’ I muttered. Then my bare foot met the gravel of the driveway that led around back. That might be for the better, really. If I’d gone to the front door, Mimi would have had to blunder through the length of the lightless house to let me in. The kitchen door would be easier; she was sure to be in the kitchen with Barbara. Maybe they’d already gotten the candles lit.
That was a cheering thought. But since I’d had it, I was twice as dismayed to find the kitchen windows as lifeless as the rest of the house.
I patted my way past the cars, narrowly avoided falling into the bushes flanking the back steps, and crept up them with my hands extended. I was clutching both the shoes in my left hand to leave my right free. I heard a car go by in the street. From all the whooping and hollering, I gathered that a group of teenage revelers were excited by the blackout.
I padded blindly across the porch and had the great good fortune to encounter the knob of the kitchen door on my first try. I pushed it open, wondered for a second why it wasn’t locked, and stepped inside calling ‘Mimi!’ . . . and the lights came back on.
I gaped for one long, dazzled second. Mimi was crouched by the breakfast nook and she had a screwdriver in her hand, gripping it fiercely with its business end jabbing upward. In front of her – So ludicrous flashed through my mind – was Theo Cochran.
He had a knife in his hand.
‘Watch out!’ Mimi screamed.
Confused by the sudden light and Mimi’s shout, Theo had half-turned by the time I threw my shoes at him. They missed by a mile (I never could hit the side of a barn), but they provided a distraction. He dodged quite unnecessarily and then tried to decide who to attack.
Mimi settled that by a simple act of heroism. She flung herself at him.
In the middle of chaos, I frantically looked for a weapon to use in the struggle. Mimi was gripping her screwdriver in one hand and grasping his knife wrist with the other. In the shattered seconds I was frozen with shock he wounded her with a twist of the blade, and I saw blood well on her arm.
‘No,’ I said very definitely, and grabbed the only heavy thing that came to hand: the Thanksgiving turkey, slathered with butter, resting on the counter by the sink. I grabbed the legs in their metal brace, darted across the linoleum, swung the turkey back, and brought it crashing in an arc against the side of Theo’s head. On impact, the greased turkey flew out of my hands and skittered grotesquely across the floor.
Theo staggered, let go of Mimi to right himself.
She instantly stabbed him with the screwdriver, and from his grunt I could tell he was hurt, but I didn’t think that blunt end would penetrate enough to wound him seriously, so I wrapped my arms around his chest from behind and bit him in the neck as hard as I could. I didn’t let go even when we hit the ground. Each of my hands grasped its opposite wrist, and even the pain of falling wasn’t going to loosen that hold. On the way down I caught a glimpse of a form huddled on the other side of the kitchen by the refrigerator. He’s killed Barbara, I thought. I’m going to kill him . . . and then I realized that Theo was trying to stab at me backhanded and there was nothing I could do because I was pinned under him.
I bit harder, my mouth filling with salt, and he screamed but kept on trying to stab me. I caught a flashing glimpse of Mimi circling, and wondered how long it would be before he finally succeeded in gashing me. Then an extra weight and a flash of tawny fur landed on Theo’s chest. He screamed louder and Attila took off for the open back door in sheer panic. Mimi seized the instant to fling herself on Theo’s knife arm. I heard her grunt when she hit the floor, I released my mouthful of neck to breathe and quickly sank my teeth in again.
Over Theo’s shoulder I saw Barbara stir – she wasn’t dead, then – look around dazedly, and begin crawling in the direction of our struggling heap. I wanted to shout, to tell her to arm herself, but with my mouthful I couldn’t, and, as it turned out, Barbara had a neater solution than a knife.
She crawled on top of Theo and pinched his nostrils shut, then put her other hand over his mouth. I heard her hiss as he bit her, I felt him writhe to get free, but I didn’t loosen arms or teeth, even when the pressure of his weight on top of me – I’d felt that before – and of Barbara’s body lying across my locked arms began to make me dizzy. Barbara, I thought fleetingly, we were on the right track all along. I gave up too soon.
With the respite Barbara afforded her, Mimi scrambled halfway up and knelt on Theo’s knife arm, and after a few seconds he had to let the knife go. I spied Mimi’s hand snaking out after it as it slid to the linoleum.
Theo wasn’t struggling so vigorously, now. Barbara was making sure he didn’t get any air. He was on the receiving end of death, and he must have known it.
We would have let him die, I think, if only out of fear that if any of us let go he could attack again. But Cully came in the door at that moment to find three women and a suffocating monster in a heap in the middle of the kitchen floor, the Thanksgiving turkey upended under the breakfast table.
I didn’t know it, but Theo was turning a strange color by that time. I could hear the funny noises, but I wasn’t sure who was making them. The weight of two bodies was rendering me semiconscious at best. I was only capable of praying desperately that some end to the situation would come soon, and of keeping my grip around Theo’s body and in his neck. I didn’t even know Cully was there until I heard him say, ‘Mimi! Mimi! You can get off now.’
That didn’t sink through clearly. I didn’t think it was safe to relax our attack yet. I tightened my hold with all my remaining strength.
‘Barbara, he’s dying,’ I heard Cully say quietly. ‘Let go.’
‘No,’ said a voice I barely recognized as Barbara’s.
‘Mimi, call the police, if you can.’ But I heard Mimi already at the phone before he’d finished speaking.
‘Barbara,’ Cully tried again, urgently. ‘Nickie’s being crushed.’
‘Oh,’ Barbara said in a dazed voice, and at last I felt a weight shifting. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said, and I didn’t know if she meant Theo or Cully.
‘Nickie, are you all right?’ Cully asked in a careful voice that irritated me immensely.
I had to unclench my teeth from Theo’s nasty neck to answer. ‘I’ll tell you right now,’ I said viciously in a trembling voice, ‘I’m not letting go till the police are here.’
‘Nickie. He’s unconscious. I think maybe he’s dead, or almost.’
‘Good.’
Mimi’s face appeared, in my limited field of vision. There was a smear of someone’s blood on her cheek. ‘He really is, Nick,’ she told me expressionlessly. ‘I think it’s really okay for you to get up.’
I trusted Mimi’s judgment more than Cully’s. Mimi had no mercy either.
‘How?’ I asked practically.
‘Oh,’ she said, with the slow diction of complete exhaustion. ‘Well. Cully’s holding the knife on him,’ she explained carefully, ‘so I’ll just kind of shove him off.’ She tried. ‘Nick.’ She bent down to me again. ‘You have to let go, first.’
Reluctantly, painfully, I unclenched my hands, then straightened my arms. I heard a shuffling noise as Barbara came to Mimi’s aid. Slowly the weight toppled off me. I felt as if my pelvis had been crushed. I drew in great draughts of air and tried to pull my knees up. My legs trembled, but I managed. I raised my hand and rubbed it across my mouth, which was completely numb. My fingers came away smeared with blood.
‘You look a sight,’ Mimi said, and a smile twitched across her face.
‘I reckon I do.’ I absorbed that face, then slid my eyes over to Barbara’s. I made my stiff lips move upward.
‘Vampire,’ Barbara said succinctly. She tried to answer my smile, but couldn’t manage. ‘We were right, Nickie. We would have had him in one more week.’
They were helping me up when the police came through the door like a cavalry. When they pulled off Theo’s gloves and I saw the network of nearly healed scratches on his wrists, I thought of Alicia, who’d fought all alone.
14
NONE OF US quite felt up to eating the turkey, so we ended up having ham for Thanksgiving. And we held the feast in the evening instead of at noon. After being up almost all night, we had slept late.
Cully had to do most of the cooking, since Mimi, Barbara, and I were too sore; besides, Mimi’s arm gash was bandaged, and so was the bite on Barbara’s hand. Charles was pretty incompetent as a chef’s aide. He turned up about one o’clock and made a laudable attempt to be useful, but it became obvious he’d never chopped an onion before.
Before he got there – while Barbara was still asleep in the upstairs guest bedroom and Cully was rattling pots and pans – Mimi finally explained about Charles. She had been aware all along, of course, of my bewilderment at her shift in attitude. As it turned out, she’d had some hurt and confused feelings of her own to handle.
‘I really was just being hysterical that morning he came to the door,’ she said through stiff lips. ‘I infected you with it.’ She was curled up at the end of my bed along with Attila the Hero. ‘I did finally talk to him when he came by my office at the college, and we had a long showdown on the phone.’ I remembered that evening; I’d had to wait for her to help with the dishes.
Mimi took a deep breath. ‘Because of our weird behavior the morning he came by, he thought I already knew what he was going to confess to me; otherwise I guess he never would’ve told me . . . This is going to sound like a soap opera, Nick. Charles thought I was so upset with him not because of the tussles in the car but because I’d somehow found out he’d slept with Sally, the woman whose party you and Cully went to last night.’
Oh dear, oh dear. Right after Richard’s defection to the woman in Albuquerque. Mimi’s pride.
‘Of course I didn’t know anything about it. But when he asked me to forgive him, he also told me which night he spent with Sally; it was the night Alicia was killed. So he was guilty of screwing another woman, but he wasn’t guilty of something far worse. Sally’s husband was on a hunting trip, and she invited Charles over – she’d dated him years ago – and things just went from there. He was mad at me when he went to see her. For various reasons.’
Uh-huh. Mimi wouldn’t go to bed with him. And that must have been an extremely thorough confession, because that was how Mimi knew about the picture on Sally’s bedside table.
‘I was hurt and disappointed. I’m still not over that. We’re going to have to have a few more talks,’ Mimi said grimly.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked bluntly.
‘I just couldn’t. I knew you were thinking some kind of awful thought, I knew you were upset, but you know how critical you’ve always been of the men I’ve dated. I just couldn’t face your saying, “I told you so.” I knew you didn’t like Charles anyway.’
‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to keep my mouth shut on that one.’
So that little mystery was cleared up; not exactly to my satisfaction, but at least to my understanding. I couldn’t feel fond of Charles, but I promised myself on the spot that I’d try to like him better. He had arrived like a shot the night before when Mimi had called him, and had wanted to sleep across the door to her room to guard her! It was a good thing the police had taken Theo away before Charles arrived. I had never seen anyone more ripe for violence. Mimi had finally gotten him to go home, but with a great deal of difficulty.
‘You know, Mimi,’ I said to change the subject, ‘the day Charles was over here, the day we were so scared? And we thought Theo’s coming saved us?’
‘We let the wolf in.’
‘He came to get you, Mimi.’
‘I thought so. I remembered that day, when I was trying to go to sleep last night.’
‘He had gloves on when he came in. He only took them off when I answered the door and asked him to have coffee with us in the kitchen – when he knew there were two of us here.’
‘But in broad daylight?’
‘Right after Alicia, he must have felt pretty powerful. When he failed that day, and he saw Cully’s things here – remember what a prude we thought he was? – he must have realized he had to plan better. He probably had to scramble to think of an excuse for stopping by at all. And he came up with two. The committee meeting Alicia missed, all the stuff they’d passed. And coming to tea with Sarah Chase.’
Mimi nodded as I pulled myself up straighter in the bed and reshuffled the pillows behind me. She said, ‘Last night I also recalled Theo telling me that same morning that Sarah Chase hadn’t been able to call me because their phone was out. But when we went to tea, Sarah Chase was telling Barbara she’d called her apartment Saturday morning. It was such a little thing, I can’t believe I wondered about it even for a second. I was about to tell you when that Scottie ran in front of the car, and it just went out the other side of my mind.’
‘He almost made a big mistake that day, Mimi. I can’t believe he thought he could just walk in here on the spur of the moment.’
‘Well, he did. We let him in, didn’t we? I don’t think he planned it at all. You know what I think? I think he said, “I just got that bitch Alicia, here I am driving by Mimi Houghton’s house, let’s see if she’s alone. I’ve fooled everyone so far, they’ll never catch me.” He was drunk with power. That’s how I see it.’
‘He failed. So he tried again.’
‘Ugh, ugh, ugh. I can’t talk anymore now.’ Mimi, though covered in a blanket, was shivering. ‘I think I’m going to go climb in a hot tub and soak. Barbara’ll want to bathe when she gets up, so I better get in and get out.’
I slept for another hour after she left. I was only vaguely aware of Cully coming in the room, looking down at me, and pulling the covers up higher around my shoulders. His long thin fingers touched my cheek. I smiled and slept.
* * * *
Our little group was quiet over the ham and sweet potatoes. I think we were all preoccupied with our own thanksgivings of one kind and another, and, more prosaically, we were very hungry after the excitement.
When we’d all settled in the living room with glasses of wine in hand, Barbara said, ‘Well, I guess we should talk about it.’
‘I’d like to know,’ I said, ‘what happened before I got here last night.’ I hadn’t heard Barbara and Mimi give their statements to the police. I’d been too busy giving my own.
Mimi pursed her lips and launched into her account. I remembered her telling the story about Heidi Edmonds the night I’d arrived in Knolls, so long ago.
‘We were just fiddling around in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘We got the sack of giblets out of the turkey and put the brace back on the legs. I boiled the sweet potatoes and mashed them; Barbara put in the cinnamon and raisins and found some marshmallows. Attila was on top of the refrigerator waiting to see if he could get some turkey when we weren’t looking, and Mao was asleep on the couch in the living room.’ Just where the little cat had been, still asleep, when the whole thing was over.
‘I guess Theo was outside looking in the windows only after I sent Barbara upstairs to look for some Kleenex. She was sneezing – she’s allergic to cats – and the box I keep down here had run out.’
‘So he didn’t know Barbara was here,’ Charles said.
‘No,’ Mimi answered. ‘He thought I was alone.’
I felt Cully twitch beside me.
‘He rang the doorbell, the kitchen doorbell, not the front. I looked through the peephole Cully put in last week, but a fat lot of good that did me. Because when I saw it was Theo, I let him in.’
Alicia had let him in, too. After all, it was Theo. Good old bureaucratic Theo, who was actually on our list but whom we still didn’t seriously suspect!
‘He looked funny, but I didn’t pay any attention at first,’ Mimi continued. She barely knew we were there. Her hands were still, for once, clenched in her lap. ‘He asked if Nickie and Cully had gone to the party. Remember?’ she asked me. ‘He heard that when we were leaving his house that day we had tea. But he didn’t hear me ask Barbara over for Wednesday night, because I asked her when we were outside in the driveway.’
I wondered how it had felt to Theo, to see two of his victims and a third potential one sitting in his living room with his wife. He must have enjoyed it. I recalled his pleasure.
