Black-Eyed Susans, page 28
I feel sick.
The phone rings. I jump up, knocking over a bottle of water.
Lydia’s ink begins to blur.
I blot frantically at the pages.
The phone shrills again. Insistent.
I stare at the Caller ID.
Outler, Euphemia.
At least a quarter of the pages left. I don’t know how Lydia’s story ends. Or how quickly my time with the journal will be up. I have to figure, very, very soon.
I pick up the receiver.
“Sue? Sue?” Full-on Effie panic.
She lowers her voice.
I think the damn digger snatcher is here.
Lydia, age 17
2 DAYS AFTER THE TRIAL
Tessie is screaming at me.
You gave my diary to the doctor? You rifle through my things?
“I had to give jurors the full picture.” Good grief, she is freaking out. I thought she’d get it. “I gave him the diary to protect you. I testified to all that stuff to help convict Terrell.”
“Yeah, right. You had to tell them I didn’t bathe? That you found lice in my hair? That I stole painkillers out of Aunt Hilda’s medicine cabinet?”
“I’m sorry I said the boys call you Suzy Scarface. That was a very unfortunate headline.”
“Do they really call me that, Lydia?” Tessie looks like she’s about to cry. But I can’t give in. She always wants things both ways.
“You testified for you,” Tessie is saying. “So you could be a star.”
We’re standing on her grandfather’s terrace like we have a million times before. She’s shaking, she’s so freaking mad at me. But, like, I’m getting madder by the second, too. Doesn’t she understand everything I’ve done for her? She’s yelling, and I’m yelling right back, the catfight of the century. Finally, she doesn’t have a comeback. There’s just silence and black night and us, breathing hard.
“I saw you with the doctor.” Her tone creeps me out.
“What are you talking about?” Of course, I know what she’s talking about. But which time? How much does she know? I take a stab. “You mean the time I gave him your diary?”
“I guess. I was walking Oscar at the college. What did you think you were doing, Lydia? Get out.”
Her grandmother is suddenly at my back, clawing my shoulder, wheezing a little, because she had to climb all those stairs. She never liked me much. “Girls—”
“Get out, Lydia,” Tessie sobs. “Getoutgetoutgetout.”
Tessa, present day
2:29 A.M.
I’m crossing the yard, running. Barefoot. It feels like a dream. A starry night above my head. A sweet, drifting perfume, nauseating.
Shadows hang off every tree, ready to smother me. I focus on the light trickling out of Effie’s kitchen window. On the cold steel in my hand. On the idea of Effie, alone with a monster. The one eating her brain, the one who turned girls to bones, the one who used to brush my hair and secretly despise my weakness. Maybe all three.
Waiting for me. Using Effie as bait.
What is that on the ground? I bend and brush my fingers on the grass. Confetti. It litters a path between my house and Effie’s. I rub the bits of paper between my fingers. Watch the pieces tumble and float downward like brilliant abstract thoughts.
It isn’t confetti.
The grass is littered with black-eyed Susans.
Someone has ripped off their body parts and left me a trail.
I’m gasping, sucking at air that is evaporating.
Van Gogh’s sky is spinning above me.
My head is exploding with images, and settles on one.
He has finally wiped the mud off his face.
My monster. The Black-Eyed Susan killer.
He’s clean, and shaved. Smiling.
The Susans yip with joy. That’s him that’s him that’s him!
I can feel his arm trapped around my shoulder. Smell the cologne on his suit coat.
Hear his lazy, reassuring drawl.
If you had three wishes, Tessie, what would they be?
Lydia, age 17
3 DAYS AFTER THE TRIAL
We made love twice. He’s already on the edge of the bed.
“I’m going to take a shower, sweetheart,” he says. “Then I’m going to have to run. So pack up, OK?”
Sweetheart. Like I’m a 1940s thing on the side. How about getting a little more mythological? Calling me Eurydice? Or Isolde? I’m thinking that Lydia Frances Bell deserves better right now than scratchy sheets and pack up and sweetheart.
The shower is already running.
I slip naked out of bed, shivering. He always keeps it freezing in his apartment. He doesn’t like the noise of the furnace coming on and off. Whatever. I grab his shirt off the floor and slip my arms into it. Flap the long sleeves like a bird. It’s his last day at school before his China sabbatical. He says Tessie doesn’t ever need to know we slept together, which is, like, huge. I’m thinking she’ll get over the testimony stuff. I give her a month.
These packing boxes are freaking everywhere.
Maybe I’ll explore. Find a memento he won’t miss.
I stick my hands in the pockets of his old man suits. I wish he’d let me dress him. His shirts are way too starchy. They scratch my neck. I thumb through a stack of textbooks that would bore the crap out of me. I rove around in his boxer shorts drawer. Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary.
The shower’s still running.
I open and shut more empty drawers. Check out the freezer.
Thumb through a pile of mail. Geez, even Tessie leaves me better surprises.
I almost didn’t bother to open the cabinet under the kitchen sink.
That’s where I found them.
Straggly yellow flowers with black eyes, sitting in the dark.
Tessa, present day
2:34 A.M.
I’m kneeling. Staring at a petal stuck to my hand. Pulsing with rage.
At him. At myself, for knowing all along but being too afraid to see.
At Lydia.
I don’t know how much time has passed. Seconds? Minutes? The light still glows steadily from Effie’s kitchen.
You control your mind, Tessie. The doctor. In my head. Leering. Mocking.
I will myself to stand.
Petals are everywhere, glued to my knees, to the soles of my bare feet.
I reach down to brush them off.
They are not petals.
They are tiny, twisted scraps of Kleenex. Fragments of tissue that have disintegrated in the washer. The ones constantly nesting in the pockets of Effie’s robes and sweaters.
This is Effie’s trail. It leads to her front door, miles away from the grave where Tessie went to sleep.
Except Tessie is waking up. The old Tessie, who outran boys, who beat a plodding heart, who risked scabs and bones and scars, who did not lose because her dead mother cheered her across the finish line.
I see Tessie crouched on a track in blinding sunlight. Heat rises in visible waves. Her eyes are down. To finish first, she will spend the least amount of time possible in the air, over the hurdles.
Her fingertips are poised on gritty dirt.
Mine are twisting Effie’s doorknob.
Both of us, ready for the gun to go off.
Lydia, age 17
10 DAYS AFTER THE TRIAL
He’s like a serial killer Mr. Darcy, offering me his hand so that I can step into the boat bobbing away off the ratty dock. We took this wiggly little path down from the cabin to get here. His idea, the rental cabin. Our special goodbye night, he says, before he takes off for China or wherever he’s really going. This place is remote as hell. I wonder if he brought other girls here. Or does he choose a new spot every time? Everything’s black. The water, the sky, the forest of trees behind us. And what about that tarp in the bottom of the boat? Does he really think that Lydia Bell is this stupid? Of course, I’m stepping into a boat with a serial killer but that’s what you have to do when there’s no real evidence and you’re the very last hope.
“Careful,” he warns as I step down. “Want to drive?” While I sit, he’s yanking the outboard string, having a little trouble getting it all revved up. I could offer advice but I don’t.
“No, thanks,” I say. “I’d be scared. I’m just going to sit back and look at the moon if I can find it. I have a flashlight. Maybe I’ll read to you.” I wave the book in my hand, The Ultimate Book of Love Poems: Browning to Yeats, even though I have a photographic memory and I’ve read this book a billion times.
“I didn’t know anything was capable of scaring you,” he teases. Hmm, I’m thinking, the scared thing might have been too much.
“You’re going to love it out here on the lake in the dark,” he’s saying. “Just your style. Wait to read until we get to a good spot. I’ll cut the motor and we can drift a little. Drink a little wine.”
He’s about two miles out, slowing the boat down, when I flick on my flashlight, open the book, and begin. “‘You love me. You love me not.’”
The words get lost in the noise of the engine.
“What?” Impatient. “I told you not to read yet.”
I go silent, which is hard.
He kills the motor in the middle of the lake.
I’m prepared, of course. Ten questions are typed out in my head, numbered one under the other. I shut the book.
Question No. 1: “Did you kill those girls?”
“What girls, sweetie?”
“Did you think I wouldn’t love you anymore? That I would tell?”
“Lydia. Stop.”
“Did you know who I was that very first day in your office? That I was Tessie’s best friend?” I want him to say no. I want him to explain.
It’s hard to see his face in the dark. His body remains perfectly relaxed. “Sweetheart, of course I knew. I know everything about you and Tessie. You are fucked-up little girls.”
I’m watching his hands, fiddling with a coiled rope.
It’s official. Lydia Frances Bell loved a serial killer.
My heart is pounding pretty hard, which is to be expected. I keep my eyes on the rope. “Where are you really going on that plane?”
“Surely your big brain has better questions than this, Lydia. But to answer … I’m not sure yet.”
“I have ten questions total.”
“Fire away.”
“Do you really have a daughter named Rebecca?”
“I do not.” He’s grinning.
“No family? No friends?”
“Unnecessary, don’t you think?”
“My other three questions don’t matter.”
My fingers curl around Daddy’s gun in my coat pocket.
“I’m pregnant,” I say.
The gun, now aimed at his chest.
Blood drooling out of his shoulder instead.
I didn’t even hear it go off. A gunshot on the lake sounds like the sky is cracking. Like it might rain shards of glass. That’s what Tessie used to say.
I steady my hand.
“Wait, sweetheart.” He’s pleading with me. “We can work this out. You and I, we’re the same.”
Tessa, present day
2:44 A.M.
The foyer, dark.
“Effie?” I call out.
“In the kitchen, Sue.” Her voice traveling over from the next room. Lilting. Her panic erased. I smell something burnt.
I wonder if it’s gunpowder. If my neighbor has shot her digger snatcher dead with that little pearl-handled revolver she keeps loaded in her bedside table against my wishes.
You can do this. For Charlie.
I round the corner.
It is an ordinary tableau.
And a chilling one.
Lydia, a very alive, blond Lydia, seated at the table.
Effie, beaming and placing a blue-flowered china plate in front of her.
“There you are!” Effie enthuses. “False alarm! It wasn’t the digger snatcher after all. It was just Liz here. Which is a real treat.”
Lydia, smiling. Not buried in an anonymous grave. Not broken. Not sorry. A part of everything.
Her lips are slashed with bright red. I see the tiny, tiny black birthmark on her upper lip that one boy teased her was a tick. She’d held her hand over her mouth for a week.
Her left leg is crossed over the right knee at a slightly odd angle. She used to sit just like that one summer to hide a mark from her dad’s belt buckle. It became a habit she couldn’t break.
I knew her habits. I knew secrets that made her howl. I could tear her to shreds.
Lydia watches me carefully. Still not saying a word.
My gun clatters to the floor.
I don’t move. Because that was my move.
“You dropped something, honey,” Effie is saying. “Aren’t you going to pick it up? You might remember me talking about Liz. She’s the researcher from the national historical society who visits me now and again. She stored some of her boxes of Fort Worth research in my shed not that long ago. She visits societies all over the nation!”
I remember. Boxes, taped tightly shut. Charlie, helping Effie and a strange woman lug them to the shed.
“Liz came over tonight to get something she needs out of them, and didn’t want to wake me,” Effie continues. “I told her it was best not to skulk around here in Texas. She spends most of her time in more civilized places like Washington and London, isn’t that right?”
Lydia, this dyed, smiling, nodding Lydia, has been insinuating herself into Effie’s life. Pretending to be someone she isn’t. Spying, like she always did. Watching me. Watching Charlie. Delivering her diary to my doorstep. Returning my shirt, soaked in red. Playing her little games.
“Where is he?” I hiss at Lydia.
It was Lydia who always told me not to say the doctor’s name out loud. Seize control. Limit his power.
“The digger snatcher isn’t here, honey.” Effie, trying to clear things up. “Like I mentioned, it was Liz in the back yard. We were just discussing that little Mudgett man from Chicago who tried to build one of his murder castles downtown. Liz knows everything about old Fort Worth. I agree with her that a plaque should be erected on that lot where he planned his slaughterhouse for girls.”
“I’m sure she knows all about serial killers.” I can’t tear my eyes off her. The brilliant, familiar eyes. Expensive tortoiseshell glasses. Hair tied up in a chic, messy knot. A chunky Breitling leather watch hugging her wrist. A plain wide band of hammered silver on her right hand.
“He’s dead, Tessie.” The first words Lydia has uttered to me in seventeen years. Her voice, triumphant. “I killed him.”
“Of course he’s dead,” Effie prattles. “Mr. Mudgett died in prison in 1896. He was hanged at Moyamensing, Liz. You just told me a second ago that he twitched for fifteen minutes.”
Lydia, age 17
I press the trigger four times.
Simple as that for a fucked-up Texas girl.
I crawl over him to the wheel.
It takes eleven minutes to whip around the lake in the dark and find Dumbo. My marker. The large tree on the west shore with a single branch that curves up like an elephant’s trunk.
This is the creepiest spot in the lake. Dead Man’s Triangle. Good fishing, but if people go under here, they often don’t pop back up. I’ve driven a boat around this lake since I could see over the front and my father was a drunk, which means pretty much since the day I was born. Daddy and I had our best times on this lake. I gutted the fish without throwing up, and he swilled vodka out of Coke cans and always did.
My mind is so quiet. Like, quieter than it’s ever been. It’s weird. I stop the motor. Drift for a second. Better get back to business. It isn’t that hard to push him out of the boat. Plop. He sinks in less than a minute. I don’t feel a thing, watching him go under. I toss in the old book I found under his kitchen sink with the black-eyed Susans and the Cascade. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Blood had soaked the brittle binding, or I would have kept it. That book was my No. 8, 9, and 10 questions, but he was about to lasso me with that freaking rope.
It takes no time to motor back, yank up the tarp in the boat, and collect all our stuff around the cabin. Be out by 11 A.M., the notice on the back of the door instructs me. Make sure the boat is properly docked. Leave the cabin key on the table.
My teeth are chattering and my hands and feet are numb when I stick his key in the ignition, but I’m feeling pretty good about myself. I drive around to the Lake Texoma State Park camping area and dump the tarp and his suitcase in two giant garbage bins on either end.
I’m halfway to the rental place to return his car when I run out of gas.
Tessie, present day
2:52 A.M.
My monster’s dead.
My best friend’s alive, folding a white napkin into a tidy point.
So why do I feel this terrifying urge to run?
To scream at Effie.
Run.
Lydia, age 17
I thought Daddy was going to kill me. He had to pick me up at a Whataburger in Sherman. I had walked four miles. There was blood on my face and clothes. I told the woman behind the counter that it was a burst packet of ketchup when I asked if I could use the phone. Daddy is smarter than that.
He broke me just like he always does. I was so tired. I could barely move. He didn’t have to threaten much. I wish I could have called Tessie.
Daddy said a lot of things on the way home. You have no proof he was the killer. Under no circumstances will you have an abortion. Jesus Christ, Lydia. Jesus Christ.
