F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 (7 page)

           
Oh,
the punishment. He metes it out so casually these days. Simply for belittling
him because he lost the blonde. Laughed at him because she escaped him.
Resented my taunts, so the swine punished me.

           
But
no matter. I survived. And in that poor nurse's death I've found hope. Proves
he's not omnipotent. Not quite the Ubermensch he believes himself to be
—
that I believed him to be
.

           
She
escaped him.

           
Perhaps
there's still hope for me.

 
 

           
"YOU COMING DOWN SOON,
MOM?"

           
Kara turned at the sound of Jill's
voice. In the dim twilight leaching through the bedroom window she saw her
daughter standing uncertainly in the doorway. Jill was still dressed in the
dark green plaid dress and white tights she had worn to the funeral. Her dark
brown hair had somehow held onto the French braid Kara had worked it into this
morning.

           
"In a few minutes, Jill. I just
want to sit here a while longer."

           
Jill walked over to where Kara sat
by the window and put a hand on her arm.

           
"Are you okay, Mom?"

           
Kara put an arm around Jill's thin
little shoulders and hugged her close.
Someday
I'll be okay
, she thought,
but not
yet. Not for a long time
.

           
"I'm fine," she told Jill.
"Just sad."

           
It was over. Finally. Kelly had been
laid to rest in a tearful ceremony late this morning. Six nurses had come all
the way from
Manhattan
to say good-bye. Kara had been touched by that. They had accompanied
the family back to the house and were downstairs now with her mother, Bert,
Aunt Ellen, and a few neighbors who remembered Kelly.

           
Kara knew she should be downstairs
playing hostess, but she couldn't manage that right now. She didn't want
anybody else here in her house tonight. Except Jill. And maybe Mom.

           
Kara wanted them all to go home now
and leave her alone with her grief. She wanted to hold onto that grief, use it
to keep Kelly alive, use it to retrieve the memories of the past they had
shared so intimately.

           
Go
away! All of you!

           
She'd heard it was good to share
your grief; that was what wakes and funerals were for—not for the dead, but for
the living. To Kara, it was morbid, all of it.

           
"Aunt Kelly's with God,
right?"

           
For the hundredth time, Kara
reassured her little girl that her Aunt was indeed up in heaven with God.

           
"And she's happy, right?"

           
So important to Jill that her Aunt
was happy. It seemed to make Kelly's death easier for Jill to accept. But it
didn't work for Kara.

           
"Very happy. She's up in
Heaven's ICU taking care of all those scorched souls they ship in from
Purgatory every day. She's happy and very, very busy."

           
On the last word, Kara felt her
voice start to crack. She hugged Jill more tightly against her.

           
If
I start crying now, I'll never stop.

           
She got control and pushed Jill to
arm's length, glad she hadn't turned on the lights.

           
"You go downstairs and play
hostess with the mostess for a little while, then I'll come down and take over,
okay?"

           
Jill brightened. She loved to be put
in charge.

           
"Okay!"

           
They hugged again. Kara could never
get enough hugs from Jill, or give her enough. She loved her like life itself,
and strove every day to give her child two parents' worth of affection.

           
"Love you, bug," she said.

           
Jill kissed Kara on the cheek and
ran downstairs.

           
Kara leaned back in her rocker and
rocked, much as she had in this same chair, in this same room, when she'd been
nursing Jill. That had given her such warm, pleasant feeling. Now she looked
out at the bleak, frozen landscape and thought how well it matched her present
mood.

           
The farm.
Her
farm. Forty acres with a house and a barn. True, the barn was
falling apart and there was no livestock. Kara had no desire to be a farmer,
but she was growing something: Christmas trees. That was for tax purposes,
mainly. An accountant had told her that her tax rate for the property would go
down if a certain percentage of the acreage was planted. Scotch pines were a
perfect solution. Once she'd planted the seedlings, they needed no care beside
an occasional spraying which she did herself. And someday she'd be able to sell
them as Christmas trees.

           
She rocked and listened: Through the
floor she could hear her mother moving about downstairs, clanking the pots,
still so much at home in the kitchen that had been hers for thirty years but
now belonged to Kara. Mom looked like she'd aged ten years since Christmas. She
wasn't saying much; especially noticeable was the lack of bickering with her
sister, Aunt Ellen. Hanging between Mom and Ellen no doubt was the memory that
it had been Ellen who first had urged the twins to come to
New York
and live there as she did. Bert's voice
floated up occasionally. Kara's usually jovial stepfather had been subdued this
trip, muttering only an occasional phrase. He seemed to take Kelly's death as
hard as a man who had lost his own flesh and blood. Kara loved him for that.
And piping above it all was Jill's voice, high-pitched, incessant. Good old
Jill. No such thing as a pregnant pause when she was around.

           
How Jill had loved Kelly, and Kelly,
Jill. The two of them, separated by more than twenty years, would whisper and
share secrets like two sisters, just as Kara and Kelly had when they were kids.

           
So many memories. What relationship,
what life-sharing could be more intimate than that of identical twins? Kelly
and Kara Wade had dressed alike, braided their long blond hair alike, had even
played the traditional tricks of pretending to be the other.

           
She smiled as she remembered the
time at the local county fair when they had driven one of the Little Miss
Lancaster judges to distraction by taking turns showing up wherever he went.
They shared the award that year.

           
They had grown apart during these
last years of separation, of living in different states, but on the occasions
they got together, it was as if they had never been apart.

           
Kara had always assumed she'd know
instantly if something awful happened to Kelly. Wasn't there supposed to be a
psychic link between identical twins? But Tuesday she had gone to bed early and
had spent the night in a sound sleep. Kelly had plummeted through more than a
hundred feet of cold air, screaming all the way, had had the life smashed out
of her on the filthy pavement below without causing the slightest ripple in
Kara's slumber.

           
It didn't seem right.

           
But then, nothing about this whole
thing seemed right.

           
Kara picked up the list of Kelly's
personal effects that were being kept for evidence. She hadn't—
couldn't
—let Mom see this. The vial with
half an ounce of cocaine was the hardest to accept, but the clothing described
wasn't much easier.

           
…
one garter belt, black… two full length stockings, black… one pair silk
panties, black, slit-crotch style… one bra, black, open cup style
…

           
Kara forced her bunched jaw muscles
to relax. This could not be her sister they were talking about here.
Slit-crotch panties? Bras cut so the nipples poked through? Kelly would never
wear these things. She would have fallen on the floor laughing if anyone asked
her to wear this garbage.

           
This
is not my sister!

           
It was Kelly they had buried today,
but who had Kelly become? Who had made her this way?

           
Kara had to know. She knew she would
not rest easy until she found out.

           
And who had pushed Kelly through
that window?

           
Kara hoped that, whoever they were,
they were sweating and worrying about being caught. And when Rob did catch them
she hoped they got sent up for a long, long stretch during which they'd be
buggered by every ferocious hood on Riker's
Island
.

           
She hoped they were spending every
moment of every day in sweaty, shaky, skin-crawling, heart-pounding panic.

           
"Phil? It's me—Ed."

           
"Are you crazy calling me here
now? Julie and Kim will be back from church any minute!"

           
Ed Bannion cringed at the heat of
his brother's anger. He could almost see Phil's clenched teeth, the splayed
fingers of his raised hand.

           
"I gotta talk to someone, Phil.
I'm going crazy!"

           
"Have you been drinking?"

           
"I've had a few."