Dead Wrong (36 page)

“Just so that I can go about my business without wondering what you’re doing,” he told her as he cut away the unused portion of the rope with the knife.

“And what business would that be?”

“Waiting for your sister.” He went to the window and looked out. It was still light, but darkness would soon enough descend.

He needed a revised plan.

“Does she know that you’re here? That you were coming here?” he asked.

“No. I told you. I wasn’t able to contact her to let her know. I thought she was here, or on her way here. That’s why I left the message on the answering machine.”

“So you don’t know where she is now?”

“No.”

“What could have delayed her?”

“I have no idea.”

He paced for a moment in front of the fireplace. “Where are your car keys?”

“In my bag.”

He picked up the tan leather bag and sorted through it until he found the key ring. He tossed the keys back and forth in his hands for a minute, then, without a word, left the cabin, closing the door behind him.

Swell,
she thought.
He’s stealing my car and leaving me tied up here.

Nah. That’s not his style,
she told herself.
He’s looking for the upper hand. He’s hiding the car so Mara doesn’t know I’m here. So that she’ll walk into the dark house and he’ll grab her, just like he grabbed me. And there’s no way I can warn her.

But there’s Aidan. He doesn’t know about Aidan. . . .

She tried to stand, but with her arms behind her back and her ankles tied, she had difficulty getting up from the too-soft seat cushions. By the time she’d gotten herself to the edge of the sofa, his footsteps were on the stairs. She eased back into the position she was in when he left.

“Where’d you hide my car?” she asked casually. “I’m guessing down in that deep ravine. That’s where I’d leave it.”

“Smart, aren’t you?”

“I get by.”

He laughed. “You’re something, you know that? I don’t usually care much for blondes, but you’re something.”

“Your mother was blond, wasn’t she?” Annie couldn’t resist.

“Don’t go there, Dr. McCall.” His voice held a quiet threat. “You do not want to go there.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to bring up unpleasant memories.”

“You are pushing your luck, and you know it.” He went into the kitchen, and she heard him banging around.

Better to bang on a few pots than bang something off my head, she rationalized.

“I’ve made us some soup,” he said from the kitchen doorway, which was behind her, so she could not see him.

“Then you’re going to have to untie me if I’m going to eat.”
And then maybe I can talk him into letting me go into the bathroom, and I can look in the closet and see if there’s anything there I can use as a weapon. I can break off a toothbrush so that it has a sharp end—

“If you’re hungry, I’ll feed you. But I won’t untie you.” He stood in front of her now. “You’ve had too much time to yourself, too much time to think of what you might do if you get a chance.”

“You’re pretty smart yourself,” she said wryly.

“Thanks,” he said as he pulled her to her feet. “See if you can hop on over to the table here . . .”

He pulled out the closest chair for her, and she fell into it awkwardly.

“Not my usual graceful self,” she told him.

“I’ll bet you are graceful.” He looked down at her. “Did you dance when you were little?”

“What?”

“When you were a little girl, did you take dancing lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. You remind me of a girl who lived near us when I was in high school. She took dancing lessons. She was the first person I ever knew who I’d call graceful. Even when she walked, she . . . flowed.” His eyes clouded, remembering. “She was beautiful.”

“I guess you never hurt her, did you, Curtis?”

“Of course not,” he snapped back. “How could you even suggest such a thing?”

He pushed himself away from the table and went into the kitchen, leaving her alone, wondering if she should try to push his buttons. If she rattled him, would it prove to be advantageous or detrimental?

“Well, since we’re here, alone, with all of this time to kill, maybe we should use it to get to know each other,” Annie said when he came back holding a loaf of bread and a butter knife.

“Like what would you like to know, lady shrink?” He buttered a piece of bread and offered her a bite.

She shook her head. “Thanks, but I seem to have lost my appetite.”

“You might be sorry later. Never know where your next meal might be coming from, but, hey, suit yourself.” He grinned and took a bite of the bread. “Now, what were you going to ask me?”

“Was it your idea to change your name from Gibbons to Channing?”

He stopped chewing momentarily, then resumed, slowly, until the bread was paste and he finally swallowed.

“My foster parents suggested it. They wanted me to take their name.”

“No doubt to help you to put the past behind you. Very kind of them, very caring. They must be wonderful people.”

“Nicest people I ever met.” He nodded.

“I guess that’s why you left when you did.” Annie sat back to watch his face. “You must have felt all that churning inside and wanted to get away from them before it exploded. Were you afraid of hurting them?”

“I never would have lifted a finger against either one of them.”

“Then you just were afraid that they’d see what was inside you. Afraid that they’d recognize what you were becoming.”

He knocked the knife off the side of his plate. “It was just time to go, that’s all.”

“How old were you when you knew that something was growing inside you, Channing? How old were you when you realized that you were not like other people?” Her voice dropped, and she prayed he wouldn’t respond by slicing her throat. If she could keep him talking, keep him absorbed, she could keep his focus off Mara’s arrival, maybe take away a bit of his advantage.

He bit off another piece of bread, again chewing slowly, as if debating whether to respond or to discontinue the conversation altogether.

“I was always different, and I always knew it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel different from everyone else. But you being a shrink, you probably figured that out.”

She nodded as he spoke, as if to affirm his statement. “Did it start when Unger went to prison?”

“Nah.” He stirred his soup with his spoon. “Long before that. She started trading me to her johns for drugs . . . shit, for as far back as I can remember. The only time it stopped was when we lived with Al. He gave her whatever she wanted, so there was no need for her to put me out. That was the only time I was safe, when we lived with Al.”

“And then he went to prison. . . .”

“You know a lot, don’t you, lady shrink?” he said without looking at her. “Yeah, Al went off to prison. I have tried, all my life, to forgive him, but I just never could.”

“Forgive him for what? I thought you said you were safe with him.”

“For being so goddamn stupid to get sent up for some stupid piddling thing like stealing, and leaving me alone with her. He had a gun in his pocket when he walked into that little Mom and Pop. He never took it out, but it was on him, and they said that made it armed robbery.” His face darkened. “Just plain stupid . . .”

“And as soon as he was gone . . .”

“She started taking men in again. Some of them liked little boys. She didn’t care, didn’t give a shit, long as she got what she needed.”

“And there was never anyone you could tell . . . no one you could trust? A teacher? Your minister?”

“We weren’t exactly a churchgoing family. And at school, well, I was just a poor, transient kid. Way behind everyone else in the class, always, ’cause we’d moved around so much. Then there were days when I was in no shape to go to school . . .”

His eyes darkened, and his voice dropped.

“And then Al came back . . .” Annie prompted.

“Yeah. She’d been too high to remember he was coming home that day, and she was having herself a party with some guy she’d picked up. Al came in and started looking around the house for her. When he found her, boy oh boy, you should have heard the two of them.”

“Big fireworks, eh?”

“Screaming, both of them.” He shook his head, remembering. “He left the house, and she finished up what she was doing with this other guy, then sent him packing right before Al came back. He’d been drinking, I could tell that, and when he started in on her, I just snuck into the closet and closed the door. I stayed in there, hiding, but then I heard all the commotion in the living room and I opened the door just a bit. He had her on the floor, with her skirt up . . . and then that knife was in his hand. Up and down, up and down, up and down . . .”

“Six times.”

“Yes. Six times. She started screaming when she saw that knife—never made a peep the whole time he was raping her, but she saw that knife and, oooweee, she was screaming bloody murder. Which was exactly what Al had in mind, I suppose. . . .”

“I am so sorry,” she whispered. “No child should ever have to see—”

“Don’t.” He squeezed his eyes closed tightly. “Don’t think you can win me over by pretending to sympathize—”

“I’m not pretending. No child should ever have to go through what you went through.”

He stood abruptly, then began to clear his place, carrying the bowl and plate into the kitchen. She heard the sound of running water. A few minutes later, he came back into the room and sat next to her.

“Sorry. I was taught to clean up after myself. Where were we? Oh, right, Unger was killing my mother and I was watching from the closet.” For all the emotion he displayed, they could have been talking about the weather.

“Anyway, in the long run, it worked in my favor. They took me out of there and sent me to live with the Channings. That was the first real home I ever had.”

“But you thought you didn’t deserve it.”

“Wouldn’t be much of a shrink if you didn’t see that, would you?”

“Wouldn’t be much of a shrink if I didn’t see that everything that happened to you by the time you were four or five made you what you are. Then, later, seeing your mother raped, watching her murdered, just gave you a visual blueprint for your anger and—”

“Yeah, yeah, my anger and my pain.” He laughed hoarsely. “I’ll tell you what took away some of the pain, lady shrink. When I came out of that closet and saw that she was dead and I picked up that knife and slid it into the places where he’d cut her—”

He raised his right hand and began to plunge it down slowly, stabbing an invisible knife into an invisible body.

“—and made believe that I had been the one to kill her”—his face took on a dreamy look—“I had been the one who’d made her bleed like that. . . .”

“So that she couldn’t let you be hurt again.”

He nodded. “I used to fall asleep at night praying that I’d wake up in the morning and be big enough, strong enough, to hurt her so that she could never hurt me again. I was grateful to Al for doing it, and at the same time I hated him, because I wanted to be the one. He took that from me.”

“But you pulled her skirt down and covered her face,” she reminded him. “You tried to hide the fact of the rape, and you shielded her eyes.”

“Yeah, well,” he mumbled, “she was still my mother.”

Outside, a car door slammed. He sat up like a shot.

“Shit. She’s here.” He ran to the window and looked out, watching two figures move through the light from the car’s headlights. “Who’s that with her? Who is it?”

He turned to Annie, furious.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged.

“You tell me.” He crossed the room and grabbed her by the arm. Cutting the ropes that tied her ankles together, he pulled her roughly to the window and held the drape back by less than half an inch so that the lamplight would not be visible from outside the cabin. “He looks like law. Is he one of your buddies from the FBI?”

“Yes.”