Claudia Must Die (5 page)

Parker wiped her nose with the back of her hand, smearing snot all over her face. “It’s poisoned.”

Her mother shrieked, but no sound came out. She swayed on her feet, and Parker’s grandfather had to hold her steady.

Grandmother had turned her attention back to Parker. “Why do you think it’s poisoned?”

Parker’s body convulsed, sending her mother further into a frenzy. “I can taste it,” said the child finally.

Her grandfather grunted in disgust, but his wife waved him silent. “Who gave it to you?”

“Mrs. Jeffries!”

“The Bible school teacher!” hollered her mother. She waved a finger in her mother’s face. “This is your fault! You pleaded with me to sign her up for extracurricular activities, and you even recommended Mrs. Jeffries.” Her mother had rushed over and wrapped her arms around her child. “My baby, my baby.” She sobbed.

“Get a bloody hold of yourself, Maria!” Grandfather had suffered through enough. “No one has poisoned the child.” He snatched the cookie. “Don’t believe me? Watch this!” He bit off a large portion and chewed. Immediately, he crinkled his face and spat it out.

Parker’s mother gasped, horror-stricken. Even Grandmother looked concerned.

“It’s not poisoned. I think she used too much baking powder. They’re awful.” He spat out the remaining chunks on the floor. “But it isn’t poisoned, Maria.”

“B-but you don’t know that for sure. I’m going to take her to the hospital and have her stomach pumped,” declared Maria.

“You’ll do no such thing.” Grandfather pulled Parker to him. “You can’t go around wrongfully accusing your neighbor of poisoning your child. People in town already think you’re cuckoo.” He had immediately regretted his words, looking away, ashamed.

Grandmother had just sighed, but her husband was right. Maria’s reputation in town had been getting worse. Her medication was increasingly unable to control her paranoia, and no matter how many doctors or shrinks she saw, no one knew why Maria was batty. The first signs had appeared in early childhood, when she swore that her purple stuffed hippo had convinced all the other stuffed animals not to like her. Maria had claimed all of her stuffed animals pushed her off the bed, which was why her parents found her sleeping on the floor in the mornings.

At first, Maria’s parents had thought their child just had an active imagination, and they hadn’t wanted to squash her creativity. Soon, they realized she actually believed all the nonsense she spouted. In the second grade, Maria had accused a classmate of stabbing her in the eye with a mechanical pencil. There was nothing wrong with Maria’s eye, and the school officials kindly suggested Maria should attend a school that could cater to her needs and imagination more.

Some medicines worked for a while, enabling Maria to lead a normal life, but as she grew older, normality grew rarer and rarer. When Maria had Parker, her parents had moved closer to their daughter and grandchild, to keep an eye on the situation.

After the cookie incident, Grandmother had gently pulled Parker from Maria’s clutches. “Honey, why don’t you pack your bag and stay the night with Grandpa and me. We’ll have pancakes for dinner, and you can watch your favorite movie,
Mary Poppins
.” Her grandmother stood and swatted Parker’s butt gently. “Now scoot and get ready.”

Parker hadn’t known it at the time, but that was the last day she would spend living with her mother. Her grandparents couldn’t bring themselves to giving the child back to Maria and watch their daughter’s illness overtake the youngster, too. Not their grandchild. They would not stand by and watch Maria turn Parker into…‌in truth, they didn’t even know the right word, but they still wouldn’t watch it happen.

Parker still had contact with her mother, but her grandparents always supervised the visits. When Parker was twelve, her mother committed suicide—at least, that’s what the coroner said. Unbeknownst to Parker, Maria had left a note saying that if they found her dead, it was because she had been murdered. Parker knew her mom was troubled, but it was only later in life that she pieced together more of the details. Still, she hadn’t wanted to delve too much into it. Searching for clues that her mother was insane was too much. Let sleeping dogs lie.

When Parker’s grandparents died during her freshman year, Parker was all alone. Her father was still unknown. All her life, her grandparents had insisted they didn’t know his identity, and she had believed them. Parker never told a soul, but she suspected she was the product of rape and that perhaps that was why her mother was a stark-raving loon. Unable to live with the guilt, Parker buried the thought deep inside her.

Except that Ida’s death brought all of those thoughts and memories back to the surface. Now that she had Fritz, Parker finally had someone to talk to about her childhood, her mom, and even the remorse. She had never told another living soul anything about it until that day, not even a dog.

Chapter Nine

Francis sat in his rocking chair at home, thinking of Ida. They were never much like cousins, more like brother and sister. Ida’s father died when she was five, and her mother couldn’t handle raising a child on her own. The two of them had moved in with Francis and his parents. Besides his mother and Ida, Francis didn’t care too much about his family. Most of the men abused their wives, including his late uncle and father, and beat the crap out of their children.

Hitting women and children was abhorrent, to Francis’s mind. No man could call himself a man if he committed such atrocities. At the age of seven, Francis started doing pushups so he could protect his mother and Ida. He signed up for boxing lessons when he was nine. Two years later, he took up Tae Kwon Do. By the time he was fifteen, none of the men in his family—or anyone within ten miles—would challenge Francis to a fight.

When Ida told Francis one of her high school boyfriends had tried to take advantage of her, her cousin had a “chat” with the young man. The boy’s family moved out of the neighborhood the following week, and Ida never saw him again.

After Ida started dating women, she teased Francis that it was because no man wanted to be within five feet of her. Francis didn’t give a damn that she was gay. If one of her girlfriends had ever laid a hand on Ida, he would have a “chat” with the woman as well. Normally, he followed his own rules, but he was flexible when he needed to be.

Francis couldn’t figure out Parker, or, to be brutally honest, he couldn’t put his finger on why Ida was so head over heels in love with the mathematics student. No, not mathematics—computational engineering. Francis had visited MIT’s website to figure that one out, and even that didn’t help. But he knew Parker was smart with numbers, at least. And this degree at MIT was rather new, cutting-edge even.

Parker was average looking. Most men would pass her on the street and not take any notice—unless they looked into her eyes. Even Francis melted when he gazed into her emerald-sea eyes. Ida had once said she felt Parker looked deep inside her and saw her soul with every glance. With those eyes, Parker conveyed what she thought, loved, and hated. No words were needed. Just a look.

What Francis admired the most was that Parker saw things in black and white. People who acknowledged shades of gray pissed him off to no end. There was a right, and there was a wrong. Only three times in his life had he accepted a shade of gray, and each instance had to do with the women in his life: his mom and Ida.

Francis did not believe in hurting people. Protecting people, yes. Hurting them, no. Yet he had hurt that boy who had tried to rape Ida. And he had hurt his own father twice: once for putting his mother in the hospital, and a second time the day his father had slapped Ida.

When Francis had smashed his father’s nose and seen the blood burst all over his hand, he hadn’t been able to hide his grin. He knew that a monster slept within him. Only his self-control tamed the raging beast inside.

And that self-control was slipping. When Francis saw Ida shot through the head, he immediately knew he would commit murder. He never considered his hits for the army as murder, nor his hits associated with business. Business was business, not murder. But Ida—no one could hurt her without paying for it.

Francis remembered the day his scrawny cousin had first moved in. His mother had asked him to take Ida to the local pond to swim. It was a sweltering day in July. Ida’s father had been dead four weeks. Many would have guessed that it was Francis, not Ida, who recently lost a father. Francis was morose. Ida was quiet, but a contented quiet. At dinner, she chatted when necessary, but mostly she observed.

Francis studied her intently. He sensed that Ida was happy to be living with them and glad that her father wasn’t around anymore, but was clever enough not to let on how she felt.

They sat by the pond, neither of them wanting to swim.

“You don’t talk much.” Ida eyed him.

Francis glanced in her direction and casually skipped a stone across the pond.

“I like that, about you. Too many people talk, yet I haven’t met anyone worth listening to.” Ida picked up a stone and tried to skim it across the pond.

Francis smiled, not at her inability to skip a stone but at her statement. At the time Ida, had been just five years old.

He scanned the ground intently, seeking the perfect stone. Once he found it, he held it in his hand and rubbed it with his left thumb.

“You can’t chuck the stone at the water’s surface. You want it to skim across the top—use finesse. It will get you further.” Francis demonstrated how to hold it, and then how to release it deftly, like a gentle breeze tossing a feather on the wind.

Ida realized it was the first time Francis had spoken to her. He had never even uttered the word “Hi” when they met. When his mother had shooed them out of the house, to the pond, Francis had just nodded and pointed as a way of escorting her. What had struck Ida the most was the firmness of his voice, even though he was only seven. His tone conveyed that he was in control.

That was all he had said that afternoon, and after that, he hadn’t spoken to her for three days. They spent every day together. Going to the pond became a daily ritual, one that each relished. Francis brought a book—the largest book Ida had ever seen:
The Count of Monte Cristo
. Ida brought her sketchpad. Not once did they enter the pond, not even to dip their toes. Their mothers thought they were swimming, like normal kids with pent-up energy, but Francis and Ida preferred being quiet. They packed their own backpacks, so their mothers wouldn’t realize they weren’t swimming. Francis’s mother would have been proud that her son was an intellectual—the exact opposite of her brutish husband. Ida’s mother used to paint when she was younger, before she married. Both children knew this about their mothers, and were close to them, but something held each of them back from sharing their silent side with their moms.

Francis didn’t want his father to find out. He wasn’t afraid of his dad—well, not too afraid—but he knew that if his mom breathed a word of it, his father would wail on her for making his son soft. A queer.

Ida knew her own mother had given up her creative aspirations when she’d had Ida. Her mother had never said such a thing, but when she talked about quitting art school to marry Ida’s father, a look of sadness filled her eyes. Ida was born six months after they married. Her parents had only known each other for ten months. Ida’s father wasn’t a bad man; he just lacked brains and ambition.

Ida’s mother’s one-night stand with a firefighter whose arms bulged even when he wasn’t flexing turned into a six-year marriage. Ida’s father died in the line of duty. Her mother didn’t have a college education, and while her husband wasn’t the brightest, he kept their family and finances afloat. Occasionally, he lost his Irish temper.

Ida’s mother was an artist who didn’t really understand how the real world worked. Conceptually, she got it. But checking accounts, credit cards, rent, and grocery bills were not conceptual; they were concrete facts of life and treating them as abstract caused nothing but problems. Creditors hounded her night and day. Francis’s father had been forced to deal with one bank, which had threatened to have her arrested. Ida’s mother did not understand why it was illegal to open one checking account, write a bunch of checks and then close the account the next day. The money had been there. It was the bank’s fault for not being quick enough.

Their money troubles rattled Ida. At seven, she understood finance more than her mother ever would. By the time she turned thirty, Ida was a financial whiz whose company gobbled up fledging businesses all over the world.

When Ida’s obituary ran in the
Boston Globe
—stating she had died in a car accident—the financial world mourned the loss of a genius. Even CNBC announced Ida’s death along the ticker. Outside of the business world, no one cared, not besides Francis and Parker. Ida’s mother had passed away two years earlier.

Francis stared at his hands, thinking of his cousin’s words: “Too many people talk, yet I haven’t met anyone worth listening to.”

What had Parker said that first time she met Ida? A wan smile crossed his face as Francis tried to imagine Parker saying something suave to sweep Ida off her feet.

No, that wasn’t right. He knew in his gut that Parker wouldn’t have spoken a word. Ida was the talker once she grew up. Francis used to take Ida to dinner, and they would spend hours deep in conversation. She would do all the talking, and Francis would grunt or nod his head. She was never put off by his silence, and clearly thought his grunts and nodding were insightful.

The only way Parker talked was with her eyes.

Month’s before Ida died, she had given Francis a painting. It was an abstract work featuring emerald green strokes and nothing else. Ida titled it:
Worthwhile Chatter
. Francis never got a chance to ask her what the title meant. It wasn’t until he looked into Parker’s eyes that he understood the artwork’s meaning. One look in those eyes, and Ida had been enraptured. All of her earlier protestations that she would never fall in love, preferring to move from one fling to another, fell mute. Before Parker, not one of Ida’s relationships lasted longer than two months. The spark, usually sexual, fizzled out when Ida realized the woman had nothing worthwhile to say.