A Secret Rage (25 page)

‘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.

Charlaine Harris is the #1
New York Times
bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, the basis for the critically-acclaimed HBO show
True Blood
, as well as the award-nominated
The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries
,
The Lily Bard Mysteries
, and
The Harper Connelly Mysteries
.

STANDALONE NOVELS

Sweet and Deadly

A Secret Rage

THE SOOKIE STACKHOUSE SERIES

Dead Until Dark

Living Dead in Dallas

Club Dead

Dead to the World

Dead as a Doornail

Definitely Dead

All Together Dead

From Dead to Worse

Dead and Gone

Dead in the Family

Dead Reckoning

Deadlocked

Dead Ever After

A Touch of Dead

The Sookie Stackhouse Companion

After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse

THE AURORA TEAGARDEN MYSTERIES

Real Murders

A Bone to Pick

Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

The Julius House

Dead Over Heels

A Fool and His Honey

Last Scene Alive

Poppy Done to Death

THE LILY BARD MYSTERIES

Shakespeare’s Landlord

Shakespeare’s Champion

Shakespeare’s Christmas

Shakespeare’s Trollop

Shakespeare’s Counselor

THE HARPER CONNELLY SERIES

Grave Sight

Grave Surprise

An Ice Cold Grave

Grave Secret

MIDNIGHT, TEXAS

Midnight Crossroad

THE CEMETERY GIRL MYSTERIES

Pretenders, co-written with Christopher Golden

ANTHOLOGIES, co-edited with Toni L. P. Kelner

Many Bloody Returns

Wolfsbane and Mistletoe

Death’s Excellent Vacation

Home Improvement: Undead Edition

An Apple for the Creature

Games Creatures Play

Weird World of Sports

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