Approaching Menace (4 page)

Hal Ripley also changed. Lately he trimmed the gray hair that sprouted from his ears. Josie sometimes found her boss’s thin voice almost purring to her, hinting of flirtation. He’d begun to stand so close she smelled his cinnamon breath spray. She found his habits of late disconcerting, but if she was the one who was divorced and had an ex showing up whenever, Josie thought she might also act strangely.

She tried to recall the other recent unusual transformation in her boss, but the front door opened. Cora disappeared into her office.

Mr. Antonelli held the door open for his wife.

“Hello. I was afraid we’d miss you this week,” Josie said to the couple.

Mrs. Antonelli came in first. “Good afternoon, Josie.” Her husband merely nodded in Josie’s direction. The only thing Josie could ever recall them purchasing was the crystal rosary bracelet Mrs. Antonelli wanted for her birthday last year, yet once a week the pair came in to look. The wife, petite with a surprisingly strong square chin along with tiny features, fingered each tablecloth that was hanging or stacked. Her burly husband normally looked at Josie like he’d like to finger her.

Gazes from the stocky man with thick charcoal hair and deep-set eyes at first made her uneasy, but she’d soon figured a rebuttal. Whenever Josie discovered his grizzly eyes steady on her, instead of glancing away, she met his stare with her own.

Her tactic worked.

She only needed to return that stare once while Mrs. Antonelli touched the ladies’ vests decorated with unusual buttons. As soon as Josie’s direct gaze answered his, Mr. Antonelli swung away. His gaze rested upon a bare wall.

Glancing at Cora’s open doorway, Josie saw her looking out and grinning. Cora long ago mentioned that she’d seen how this man ogled Josie. Now Cora nodded in the direction of the Antonellis, smirked, and rolled her eyes.

Josie smiled and neared the small person who smelled like she’d just coated herself with baby powder. “How have you been?” Josie asked, noticing that today worry lines folded across Mrs. Antonelli’s slender forehead.

Instead of her usual distracted “Just fine,” the delicate woman looked up at Josie. A damp film coated her eyes. “It’s been hard.” The tip of her nose was pink. She sniffled. “My sister’s granddaughter was murdered.”

“Oh no. Was she the girl at the beach?”

Mrs. Antonelli nodded. Tears fell to her cheeks. “She lived near our house.”

Josie clasped the lady’s cold fingers. “I am so sorry.”

The strong chin quivered. Mrs. Antonelli reached inside her small purse and took out a snapshot. “Wasn’t she lovely?”

Josie stared at the face of a young woman who seemed in the prime of her life. Coal-black hair framed a perfect oval face. A narrow nose. Dark gray eyes.

Josie’s breath caught. Her back tensed. She’d recently stared into those eyes.

She handed the picture back. “She’s beautiful. I saw her not long ago.”

Her customer winced and carefully replaced the picture.

Josie recounted the incident. “Some time during the last two weeks. It was evening. I’d gone to Toni’s Supermarket.”

She relived the scene. A light rain had started. Quite a few people were inside. “I had just gone in and stopped to select apples. A blast like an explosion came from outside.”

Again immersed in that place, she squeezed her eyes shut. Josie breathed and forced them open. She saw the elder’s gray eyes watching hers. “I stared at the glass doors. So did other people around me. The blast repeated and rain poured down.” Somebody had said, “Oh, that was only thunder.” Josie hadn’t known who spoke, for she’d knocked against the apple stack. From their rows, a dozen or more red spheres rolled. They thumped on the floor. Feeling ridiculous, Josie began gathering and replacing them as best she could.

“Someone said she’d just done the same thing. I looked up,” Josie said, again meeting Mrs. Antonelli’s gaze. “And I saw the young woman you showed me. She was squatting near, retrieving navel oranges from the floor. She had such pretty dark hair and those gray eyes.” Josie noticed the eyes because they were wide with fright, as she knew matched her own. “We watched each other picking up fruit from the floor and started laughing.”

Mrs. Antonelli’s face softened. Her lips formed a faint smile. “You met her?”

“I wish I had. But we laughed at ourselves and kept picking. It was like we knew how silly we must have looked to the people around us.” The young woman from Mrs. Antonelli’s picture had then strolled on, pushing her buggy but glancing back over her shoulder at the glass doors with fear in her eyes.

Now she couldn’t see any longer.

* * *

The radio was telling her name. “Libby Bixley was the killer’s latest victim. Arrangements have been made.”

Libby
, thought the man driving. Libby had been lovely.

He smiled, recalling what she did the first time he noticed her. When he became attracted.

She stared with those gray eyes open wide, a gasp leaving her pretty throat. Outside, there was only thunder. She must have thought it was something more. Something more threatening.

But he had been inside the store. In an aisle close to her, he’d watched. Not the weather. Her.

He saw her face, how it blanched when the thunder exploded. Libby’s body jumped and then trembled. The eyes grew wider and her head whipped back.

Libby Bixley knew fear.

She had known it that evening when the weather turned rainy, and she made such a grand display of fright after he reached her yesterday down at the beach.

He had watched for her ever since that evening in the store even though he’d been especially on the lookout for the other one.

Women could reveal their want of him when stormy weather hit. Especially during heavy thunderstorms, so many of them liked to expose every emotion. Excited, trembling bodies. Their mouths open wide. And their eyes.

When storms stuck—that’s when they really wanted him.

He had discovered the most perfect specimen.

Josie Aspen could show fearful reactions like no other.

When he witnessed her display of fright alongside Libby’s that evening at the store, he’d felt such excitement that he needed to fight himself to contain what he wanted to do. From all of the therapy hehad after he got away with those wonderful deeds back in Natchez, he knew.

The urge reached him now. Angry with those therapists and Dr. Hanover, he shook his head.
Keep your hands to yourself and on the wheel. No, look, rain is falling
.

He snapped on the wipers. They swished across his windshield, words from the radio no longer entering his mind.

He’d had to wait. Plot and wait. Once he had seen both beautiful creatures revealing such terror, he watched for them.

Yesterday he located Libby, so lovely stretched on her back across her beach towel, her eyelashes laced together as though she was sleeping.

But she’d surely been waiting for him to arrive.

Those gray eyes had popped opened. They’d turned paler except for their pinpoints. Those had expanded. Libby, with her face twisting in that grotesque expression. Her lips had come apart like they were trying for screams, but she’d only whimpered.

The man’s heart pounded. He turned his hands up from the steering wheel to admire them. Strong hands. Powerful enough to stop her lips’ sounds.

The rain struck his car louder.

When those two women cried out in the supermarket, they wanted to entice him. As surely as he was breathing, he knew they’d reacted that way to attract his attention.

He smiled, tightening his fingers on the steering wheel. The knurled section on its rear reminded him of the feel of Libby’s neck bones.

She had drawn him to her with her fears like a cur in heat drawing in suitors.

And he’d found her.

Shaking with glee, he remembered. Her name was Libby.

But she was not the main woman he was after.

Very shortly an announcer, possibly the same one who just spoke about Libby, would say the name of the other one. Both of the young women had thrown down those fruits. Both knew pure horror.

Again he would experience it close up. Feel her tremble. Know those thrills.

The late afternoon weather around him appeared gloomy. The man smiled at blacker clouds ahead. Thunder and lightning must abound in them. Crashing thunder seemed to thrill Josie.

Of course he knew where she worked. He was headed there now.

Chapter 3

“Come on, Mother,” Mr. Antonelli said not long ago before moving his wife along. Josie considered how his wife paused near the display of new linen napkins, looking sad. Her face retained a forlorn cast as he led her out the door, yet her husband glanced back and gave Josie that look, his gaze scraping across her bust line.

Josie noticed the slamming rain she’d heard earlier had quieted. She put concerns of the older couple aside, opened the shop door, and stared out.

A fog shrouded the late afternoon. Rain fell, though not as heavy as before. The low dark clouds in the eastern sky might hold more. She inhaled the fresh scent of rain. The smell did remind her of a nice shower. No tension had come to her body when this storm passed through. Of course it hadn’t carried thunder or lightning.

She felt her world cleansed but not threatened.

Most cars and trucks had left the small strip mall’s parking lot. Large puddles dotted the area surrounding them, and only the headlights of one car approached down the street.

She shut the door and scanned the store, empty of other people, and grinned at Cora’s office.

Right after the Antonellis left, Cora had come out of there and said, “What a couple. Josie, if that old geezer could ever get his hands on you, he’d be a happy man.” Cora shook her head, making the large waves of her mass of hair slap her cheeks. “He probably wouldn’t do anything,” Cora added with sniggers that shook her full breasts. She returned to that room and shut her door.

Josie tried to ignore her comments. The Antonellis had gone into Dilly’s Donuts, two doors down. Coming to browse in This ’n That Shop was the couple’s excuse, Josie long ago concluded, for having their weekly donuts. She wondered what they did after they left Dilly’s. They seemed to be so different from each other. Maybe after they ate donuts they parted to go separate ways. Mrs. Antonelli would look around in various stores. Her husband would look around at other women.

Mrs. Antonelli had been still dabbing her eyes when she left. The young woman in her picture was named Libby. She’d been so close to Josie in that store, had obviously shared her fear of violent weather, and now she was gone.

Libby met with such a terrible ending. What horrible things must have happened to her during those final moments.

Headlights of a car moving toward the store nabbed Josie’s attention. The car slowed as it neared, making her uneasy, considering its unseen driver might be peering in at her. That person would be unable to see anything through the glass rectangle, except Josie right inside the doorway.

Shaking her arms to loosen their tension, she decided she’d been thinking of the murders too much. A family of four was now scampering through a drizzle to the store next to This ’n That. Grateful for a respite from her dark thoughts, Josie watched them enter Tory’s Gift Shop. The store’s name was painted in pinks and purples on its display window, which held gaudy stuffed alligator heads, T-shirts with scenes from the Everglades, and glazed ceramic ashtray feet that said
Florida
.

Again Josie was amazed at the numbers who shopped there instead of coming into Mr. Ripley’s establishment, for he sold quality merchandise. But she reminded herself that if people preferred to shop elsewhere or to browse in This ’n That and buy nothing, it was not a personal failure.

She left the door. A psychiatrist would probably tell her the personal rejection she sometimes felt was a carryover from her dad’s leaving so often.

I used to think it was me. But now I’m older and know better.

Don’t I?

The phone rang. She rushed to answer it.

“Hello, I love you. What’s the matter?” Andrew said, his voice making her smile.

“Nothing now. I love you, too.”

“We’ve been so busy today that you’d think we were giving away money.”

She grinned, trying to imagine how much cash went through fingers each day at that bank. “I haven’t been busy here.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Josie. Some more people are heading toward me.”

“I don’t blame them.” She hung up much more cheerful than before. She walked to Cora’s door, tapped on it, and walked inside.

The large room felt cold, stripped bare of pictures and everything personal. All that remained there since the Ripley’s divorced was Cora’s desk, a filing cabinet, and her chair.

“I know. There’s not much business. So how are you doing?” the boss’s ex-wife asked.

“Pretty good. And you?”

“Wonderful with my bridge games.” Cora shoved her ledger aside. “I’ve been playing with people from Australia and Japan. It’s great.” Expounding about the wee hours she played into the night on the Internet, she might have been describing an exotic vacation. Her eyes sparkled and her hands became animated characters while she went into detail about a game Josie knew little about.

“That sounds like fun,” she said.

“I’m sure your little brother would have a great time playing with other kids. You’re on the Net, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Colin does some schoolwork on the computer and plays a few games.”

“I’m sure you and your mamma do, too.”

With a grin, Josie left Cora’s office, content that their mother did not know how to use the Internet on the computer in Colin’s room. One thing their family didn’t need was for Sylvie to have easier access to spending money. Colin’s needs had become immense since his kidneys failed. The government covered many of his expenses, but his illness’s other costs weren’t and required large chunks of Josie’s and Sylvie’s paychecks.

Of course Josie knew why their mother spent so much on herself and the house. She was always trying to make everything better to entice their father to come back home.