A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 20
‘Fool me; I said oh yes, that Nickie and Cully had left at least an hour and a half ago. I assumed he’d been working late at the college, like he did often, to clean up something before he and his family left for Thanksgiving. I kept waiting for him to bring up some point he wanted to talk about but he didn’t . . . I began to get uneasy then, I think. I hadn’t really worried earlier, because it was still early in the evening and all the other attacks were pretty late; except for Heidi Edmonds, and she was in such an isolated place. But I did feel a little funny. I went on and turned away to pour him a glass of wine, at the kitchen counter, and he came up behind me. And grabbed me. And put the knife to my throat.’
Mimi took a deep breath. Charles put his hand on hers, but she shook her head very slightly and he removed it. I put my own hand over my eyes to cover them. I felt Mimi’s fear.
‘Of course then I knew what he was,’ Mimi said, and fell silent. Cully rose to refill our glasses. When he sat down again he put his arm around me.
‘Even his voice was different,’ Mimi said very coldly. ‘He whispered. He told me what he was going to do to me. It was as nasty as you can imagine.’
Barbara and I could imagine. Barbara and I knew. A couple of tears wetted Barbara’s face and she made no move to wipe them off.
‘And he told me why,’ Mimi continued.
I leaned forward. I wanted to hear.
‘It was because we were successful,’ Mimi said to me directly. Then she flicked her eyes in Barbara’s direction. ‘Successful,’ she repeated.
‘He said that?’ Barbara asked incredulously.
‘Successful,’ I whispered.
‘That was what it boiled down to,’ Mimi said. ‘What he actually told me was that we were arrogant women who had everything in the world and needed to learn a lesson; the world would go better, he thought if all these damned bitches learned a lesson,’ she said tonelessly.
‘I don’t understand,’ Barbara said.
‘Because of his daughter – Nell – being so sick, do you think?’ I asked. I knew I must look as dazed as the others. Charles’s mouth was hanging open.
‘That was probably part of it,’ Cully said. ‘And you told me his wife comes from an academically prominent family. He hasn’t gone very far for someone his age – to them. Stuck as a registrar at a little southern college, with a dying daughter and a wife he knew could perceive exactly how he was situated on the ladder.’
‘But she loves him,’ Barbara protested. ‘You know Sarah Chase would never say anything to him about—’
‘But she knew,’ Cully interrupted. ‘Even if she never said anything, he may have been convinced he knew what she was thinking.’
‘Oh, sweet Lucy,’ Charles said disgustedly.
‘And the added pressure and grief of Nell in the process of dying,’ Cully went on. ‘While all of you were going on with your lives, your rich lives. Alicia was loved and prominent, Nickie is beautiful and talented, Mimi is prominent and respected and pretty. Barbara had just gotten tenure, and she was in love. And that little freshman girl, that first one . . .’
‘A little one, to practice on,’ Charles said with more acuity than I’d given him credit for.
‘Exactly – the girl who’d done everything in high school, right, Mimi? The girl who had a future in anything she chose, an achiever of the highest promise.’
‘But he was always so polite to everyone, the women who worked for him thought he was great,’ Mimi said. ‘I can’t understand how he could . . .’
‘The women who worked for him were under him, had no ambitions to go anywhere else or do anything else but clerk in the registrar’s office until they retired,’ Cully explained. ‘It was easy to be courteous. They were never going to top him. They weren’t stealing his daughter’s future. And it was easy to be polite to you all, too. Look at the power he had over you, just by knowing what he’d done.’
‘I’ll never understand it,’ Charles said simply. ‘Even if I heard him talk about it, I wouldn’t understand.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Barbara retorted instantly. ‘I don’t want to even begin to comprehend a mind that sick.’
‘That was all speculative, anyway,’ Cully the psychologist said cautiously.
I’d been thinking. ‘Mimi, he planned to kill you too, last night,’ I said out loud. ‘Or he wouldn’t have let you see him. He must have found out he enjoyed killing women even more than seeing them walk around with his mark on them.’
Mimi nodded once. Charles took her hand, and this time she didn’t shrug him off.
‘What happened after he grabbed you?’ Charles asked when the hush became too oppressive.
‘Oh.’ Mimi pulled herself out of a grim reverie. She looked at Barbara.
‘I guess he was so involved in cursing Mimi that he didn’t hear me come down the stairs,’ Barbara said obligingly. ‘And I hadn’t heard the doorbell because I had my head stuck in the closet looking for Kleenex.’ She sneezed right after she said the word, and we all laughed weakly. ‘I clumped down the stairs, as usual, but he didn’t hear me until I came into the kitchen. I was just saying “Mimi, I found them” and pulling one out to blow my nose, and I looked up and saw—’ Words failed her then. Only the reminiscent shock on her face told us what she had felt when she saw a trusted friend and coworker holding a knife to Mimi’s throat.
Mimi picked up. ‘But it distracted him, I felt him jump. And I pulled away as he turned to Barbara. He went after her right away. Then the lights went out.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Cully whispered.
‘Well, it gave us a second. I knew where the screwdriver was because I’d had to use it to lever the brace off the turkey’s legs, like I always do,’ Mimi explained. ‘A knife would’ve been better, of course, but I grabbed what I could.’
‘I’m just lucky he didn’t stab me,’ Barbara said thankfully. ‘He bumped against me just when I was turning to run out the front door to get help. And I feel like a coward, that I wasn’t going to stay to help Mimi, but it was the only thing I could think of to do.’
‘The only smart thing to do,’ Mimi told her promptly, and Barbara looked relieved.
‘Well, since he caught me as I was turning,’ Barbara continued, ‘I slipped and whammed my head against the refrigerator door handle, I think, and then against the floor when I fell. Two bumps. So I was just about unconscious.’
‘I heard Barbara fall,’ Mimi said. ‘I thought he had stabbed her and it was all over for her. I was trying to get to the kitchen door and go out the back. See, Barbara, I was going to leave you, too. I kept remembering all those thrillers I’d read where they tell novice spies or whatever to stab from underneath, so it’ll go under the ribs instead of bouncing off, so I made myself hold the screwdriver that way and was listening to find where he was—’
‘And then the lights came on and I was there,’ I finished.
Mimi then described our epic struggle to Charles. He looked half-proud and half-horrified. He’d certainly never see Mimi in exactly the same light again.
Barbara asked, ‘But why did you happen to come in just then, Cully? We could have handled it by ourselves, but I guess it was good to have someone untwine us.’ I heard the undercurrent of resentment. I knew, then, that we had all resented Cully’s arrival, his resolution of what was, for all of us, a personal struggle.
Cully looked surprisingly sheepish. As well he should, I thought, suddenly remembering Miss High School Sweetheart. With so much going on, we had not yet discussed her. Possibly we never would.
‘I missed Nickie at the party. Then someone told me her shoe had broken, and I figured she must have come home to change, so . . .’
He’d really thought I’d gone off in a fit of jealousy. If he’d only been worried about the broken shoe, he’d have called the house rather than set out in pursuit.
‘Does anybody know if Theo’s confessed?’ Charles asked.
Barbara shrugged. ‘I don’t know if he has or if he will. They’ll test samples from him along with the evidence from all of us. Something will match up, even if he doesn’t confess.’
‘And he told me he’d killed Alicia. I guess that’ll be admissible in court,’ Mimi said. ‘Though you never know. Think about it and give me a verdict, Charles . . . Listen, gentlemen, I’d like a fire. Why don’t you two bring some wood in? I got a pickup load from Mr Rainham yesterday.’
After Charles and Cully had slammed the kitchen door on their way out, we three looked at each other for a long moment.
‘We would have killed Theo if Cully hadn’t come,’ I said finally.
‘Yes,’ Barbara agreed.
Mimi stared into her glass of wine. ‘How do we feel about that?’ she asked her chenin blanc.
Barbara extended her thin hand and waggled it to and fro. ‘A little of this, a little of that,’ she said almost casually. We smiled at each other. Mimi smothered a laugh.
‘We would have had to live with it,’ I said consideringly.
‘Look at what we have to live with now,’ Barbara said in a savage voice.
‘Alicia,’ Mimi pointed out.
‘Sure, Alicia,’ I said. ‘But after the first satisfaction was gone, wouldn’t we have felt . . . on his level? We might have felt horrible right then, when we looked at him.’
‘After our blood stopped singing,’ Barbara murmured.
‘When the rage was gone,’ Mimi whispered.
‘It’s just as well, I think,’ I concluded.
Barbara ventured, very hesitantly, ‘Do you suppose, Nickie, that Cully’s going to be able to live with seeing you with your mouth all bloody?’
If we had not been sharing this moment of close communion, she would not have asked that. Mimi would never have mentioned it, under any circumstances. But in this moment it was acceptable; a valid question.
‘In all fairness, I wouldn’t like seeing him that way. I mean, it’s a pretty vile sight.’
The others nodded.
‘I just don’t know. We’ll have to see. It may have been too – maenadlike – for him to handle.’
‘The women who ripped apart anything in their path, in a kind of holy madness, one night out of the year,’ Barbara reminded Mimi, who had been trying to remember.
‘Oh,’ Mimi said, flaming up. ‘You mean maybe we should have sat there nice and quiet and been killed?’
‘Maybe if one of us hadn’t acted, if just one of us had submitted, the others would have, too,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ Barbara murmured, after trying for a moment.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘We shouldn’t. We won’t.’ We would try not to, anyway.
‘Sarah Chase and Nell,’ Mimi said. ‘I wonder.’
‘If Sarah Chase knew?’
‘Oh my God, no!’ Mimi protested in horror.
‘That was what I was wondering,’ Barbara said calmly.
I nodded. It had crossed my mind, too. How on earth had Theo explained to Sarah Chase that she was going to have visitors for tea? There was a slim chance that Sarah Chase really had intended to invite us. In that case, maybe he’d told her he’d bumped into Mimi and me by chance, that Barbara was the only guest she’d have to call herself, but . . . Surely even the dimmest woman would smell something fishy?
‘Not consciously,’ Mimi said vehemently. ‘She just couldn’t have had all three of us over that day. She just couldn’t.’
I had to agree with Mimi. ‘But Mimi, we can’t go see her or call her,’ I said firmly, for I knew that that was what Mimi had intended to bring up. She would see the obscenity of it in a second.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I – no.’
Charles and Cully reappeared carrying armloads of dry oak, and proceeded to build the fire with much unnecessary hustle and bustle and advice to each other. They felt the pressure of our silence as we thought our separate thoughts and each viewed her own movie. The film was getting grainy and worn, the soundtrack fading, at least on mine. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to watch those scenes much longer. Mimi was gazing at the bandage on her arm; she’d had to leave the sleeve of her blouse undone to allow for its bulk.
I had put on a dress, in honor of the day and my survival. Cully had zipped it for me that morning; my arms were too sore for the job. He hadn’t kissed me then, even though I’d scrubbed my mouth till it was raw, inside and out, the night before.
He bent now, as he passed the couch, and gave me a quick kiss – on the forehead. He and Charles were going out for more wood.
I rose with my empty glass in hand. I walked to Barbara, stooped over her chair, and kissed her. I went to Mimi on her couch, sat beside her, and kissed her. She held me for a minute.
Then I went to the kitchen to get some more wine.
Sweet and Deadly
1
She passed a dead dog on her way to the tenant shack.
It was already stiff, the legs poker-straight in rigor. It had been a big dog, maybe dun-colored; with only a quick glimpse, Catherine could not be sure. It was covered in the fine powdery dust that every passing vehicle threw up from the dirt road in the dry Delta summer.
In her rearview mirror she saw the cloud raised by her passage hanging in the air after she had passed, a cloud dividing endless rows of cotton. But the road was too poor to allow many backward glances.
She wondered briefly why someone had been driving so fast on the caked and rutted dirt that he had not seen the dog in time to swerve.
A sideways look at the cotton told Catherine that it would make a sad crop this year. The heat had lasted too long, unbroken by rain.
This land was Catherine’s, had been her great grandfather’s; but Catherine rented it out as her father had done. She was glad she did as she recalled her grandfather’s irascibility in bad years, when she had ridden with him across ‘the place,’ as cotton planters called their acres.
She didn’t remember the heat of those dim summers equaling the ferocity of this one. Even this early in the morning, with dawn not too long past, Catherine was beginning to sweat. Later in the day the glare would be intolerable, without considerable protection, to all but the swarthiest. To someone of Catherine’s whiteness of skin it would be disastrous.
She pulled to a stop under an oak, killed the motor and got out. The oak was the only tree to break the stretch of the fields for miles. She stood in its sprawling shadow with her eyes closed, the heat and silence enveloping her. She wrapped herself in them gladly.
The silence came alive. A grasshopper thudded its way across the road from one stand of cotton to the next. A locust rattled at her feet.
She opened her eyes reluctantly and, after reaching into the car for the things she had brought with her, began to walk down the road to the empty tenant shack standing to one side of the intersection of two dirt roads.
The fields were empty of tractors and farm hands. Nothing stirred in the vast brilliant flatness but Catherine.
The sack in her left hand clanked as she walked. The gun in her right hand reflected the sun.
Her mother had raised her to be a lady. Her father had taught her how to shoot.
Catherine laid the gun on a stump in the packed-dirt yard of the tenant house. The bare wood of the house was shiny with age and weathering. A few traces of red paint still clung in the cracks between the planks.
It’ll all fall down soon, she thought.
The outhouse behind the shack had collapsed months ago.
Under the spell of the drugging heat and hush, she made an effort to move quietly. The clank of the empty cans was jarring as she pulled them out of the sack and set them in a neat row across the broad stump.
She hardly glanced at the black doorless hole of the shack’s entrance. She did notice that the sagging porch seemed even closer to deserting the rest of the house than it had the last time she had driven out of town to shoot.
The dust plumed under her feet as she paced away from the stump. She counted under her breath.
A trickle of sweat started down the nape of her neck, and she was irritated that she had forgotten to bring an elastic band to lift the black hair off her shoulders.
The twinge of irritation faded as she turned to face the stump. Her head bowed. She concentrated on her body’s memory of the gun.
In one motion, her head snapped back, her knees bent slightly, her left hand swung up to grip her rising right forearm, and she fired.
A can flew up in the air, landing with a hollow jangle under the steps rising to the porch. Then another. And another.
By the time only one can was left, Catherine was mildly pleased with herself. She dampened her self-congratulations with the reflection that she was, after all, firing from short range. But then, a .32 was not meant for distance shooting.
The last can proved stubborn. Catherine emptied the remaining bullets from the gun at it. She cursed mildly under her breath when the can remained obstinately unpunctured and upright.
It’s a good time for a break, she decided.
She trudged back to the stump and collapsed, with her back against its roughness. Pulling a plastic bullet box from a pocket in her blue jeans, she set it on the ground beside her. She eased the pin from the chamber, letting it fall into her hand. She reloaded lazily, full of the languorous peace that follows catharsis.
When the gun was ready, she didn’t feel like rising.
Let the can sit, she thought. It deserves to stay on the stump.
She was enjoying the rare moment of relaxation. She laced her fingers across her stomach and noticed that they were leaving smudges on her white T-shirt. Her jeans were coated with dust now. She slapped her thigh lightly and watched the motes fly up.
I’ll go home, she thought comfortably, and pop every stitch I have on into the washer. And I’ll take a long, long shower. And then—
There was no ‘then.’
But I’m better, she continued, smoothly gliding over the faint uneasiness that had ruffled her peace. I’m better now.
A horsefly landed on her arm, and she slapped at it automatically. It buzzed away in pique, only to be replaced in short order by one of its companions.
