Hush

HUSH

Theresa Weir writing as Anne Frasier

Smashwords
Edition

Copyright Theresa Weir 2002

Originally published by
Penguin Putnam

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.

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this book via the Internet or via any other means without the
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Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not
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appreciated.

Praise for Hush

"With Hush, Anne Frasier slams into the fast
lane and goes to the head of the pack. This one has Guaranteed
Winner written all over it." —Jayne Ann Krentz

"Warning: Don't read this book if you are
home alone." —Lisa Gardner

He spun the dial on the combination
lock—quickly because he'd done it so many times. Clockwise to
twenty-six, counterclockwise one revolution, stopping at ten,
clockwise to eighteen. He heard the familiar click and pulled down
on the lock, watching with an almost sexual excitement as it fell
open. He slid the catch through the holes in the handle, then
opened the locker, the door rattling with a satisfying metallic
resonance.

The locker was where he kept his souvenirs.
He'd gotten it at an auction, from the physical education
department of a high school that had closed. It was tall, with
hooks to hang things, and shelves to put smaller objects.

Using both hands, he reached in and pulled
out his scrapbook.

Scrapbook wasn't really a good word for it,
because scrap had a negative connotation. For one thing, scrap
implied something torn, something leftover, like table scraps, or
scrap metal. For another thing, if you took away the s, you'd have
crap.

And the book he held with both hands was more
than crap, much more. It was his treasure book, his life.

He walked in reverse until the backs of his
legs came in contact with the metal springs of his bed, the soft
edge of the mattress. He sat down with his treasure book on his
lap, his knees together to support the book's weight, his feet on
the cement floor of the basement.

It was one of the scrapbooks you could get at
any discount store. The kind young girls kept hidden under their
beds, bringing them out to share with best friends. His scrapbook
was an ivory color that had yellowed around the edges because he'd
had it so long. Gold letters spelled out SCRAPBOOK.

It bothered him that it had turned yellow. He
wished it hadn't. But he couldn't get a new scrapbook. It wouldn't
be the same.

He opened the book.

Glued to the first page was a photograph of a
young woman sitting in a hospital bed, a baby in her arms, smiling
at the camera. He gently ran a finger across the photo, across the
woman's face, giving the bundled infant a little caress before
turning the page.

Mementos.

The woman's driver's license. Her tiny book
of addresses and phone numbers. Discount-store photos of people he
didn't know taken in front of fake Christmas backgrounds. Colors
that had once been red were now orange, proving that there was
really no such thing as a good deal.

People were stupid.

They smelled, and they were stupid.

The next page was a Polaroid of his first
kill, taken in the park where he'd left her. She was already dead
when he had her pose for the camera. And since she was a whore,
he'd pulled up her dress and pulled down her pants to expose the
dark pelt of hair that covered her sexual organs. She had a hand on
one hip where he'd placed it, another in her hair in a provocative,
slutty pose.

He'd tried to make her smile, tried to pull
her lips away from her teeth, but her expression just kept slipping
back into a sort of grimace. For his next kill, he brought Scotch
tape so the mouth would stay where he wanted it.

Around her neck was the opal necklace he'd
given to his mother. She wore it all the time. That made him happy
and made his crotch tingle. He pressed the spine of the book
against himself.

He continued through the book, reading the
yellow clippings he'd cut from newspapers. The Madonna
Murderer.

Madonna. Mother and child.

The mothers weren't virgins, they were
whores. Whores! He was the untouched virgin. He was the immaculate
birth.

The cow upstairs hadn't given birth to him.
He couldn't have come from her womb. Not with her stupidity, her TV
game shows, her white-trashiness.

He continued turning pages until he came to a
photo he'd cut from a newspaper. A photo the paper had gotten from
her high school yearbook.

Her hair was long, blond, and straight, her
smile wholesome in a cheerleader kind of way.

Hers hadn't been a satisfying kill. She'd
robbed him of his pleasure, and in so doing, she'd confused him,
sending him into a dark oblivion of pharmaceuticals.

The mental hospital represented a period of
time when his mind was foggy and a veil covered his eyes. When his
normally quick mind was as thick as motor oil, his thoughts
floating away like balloons. But now his head was clear once
again.

Looking at her now, he could almost smell her
woman's blood, her mother's blood, her birth blood.

He pressed the spine of the book down harder
against him, harder, harder, gasping in pain and pleasure.

His mother had caught him masturbating when
he was thirteen.

"Dirty boy," he now whispered in a
high-pitched voice. "Dirty, dirty boy. Don't ever touch yourself
like that, dirty boy. Dirty, dirty boy."

He heard her stumbling footsteps in the room
above his head. His face flushed hot with guilt. His hands shook as
he closed the scrapbook but continued to hold it over his throbbing
penis.

It was ten o'clock in the morning and she was
already on her way to being dead drunk. She was almost always
drunk. He actually liked her better drunk because when she was
sober she saw too much. She would stare at him with her wild eyes,
and he would simultaneously wonder why she hated him and what it
would feel like to kill her.

Outside Ivy Dunlap's bedroom window a
woodpecker jackhammered away at the wooden shutters of the stone
house.

Damn bird. Damn annoying bird.

Her neighbor, Mrs. Gafney, told her if she
put a plastic owl on the corner post it would scare the woodpeckers
away. But then Mrs. Gafney also sprinkled salt into the sidewalk
cracks to kill the weeds, corroding the cement until it turned to
dust. She was the same person who ate packages of cookies after
midnight while the crumbs gave her bedsores, all because The
Enquirer had told her the body burned more calories while a person
slept.

Mrs. Gafney lived half a mile away. In
winter, Ivy could sometimes see the sun reflecting off the metal
roofs of the Gafney house and barn, and on clear nights she could
spot the yard light twinkling an uninvasive hello. Sometimes she
could even hear Mr. Gafney calling to his milk cows, their bells
gently answering as the animals slowly headed for fresh hay and the
milking machines. But in summer, when the leaves were on the trees
and the air was heavy with dew, Ivy could almost forget the Gafneys
existed.

St. Sebastian was a beautiful land of faraway
water. Forty miles to the north was Georgian Bay, to the south,
Lake Erie. To the west lay Toronto and Lake Huron, to the east,
Lake Ontario. Residents of Toronto had summer cottages in St.
Sebastian, but few were brave enough to visit in the dead of winter
when the wind howled and the roads were closed for days. Not far
off, in Bainwood, there were supposed to be men with feet that
pointed backward. Ivy had never seen such men, but Mrs. Gafney
swore it to be true.

In this part of Ontario, the landscape had
been shaped by glaciers that had crawled and creaked patiently
across the earth, rolling the stones smooth. Children spent their
summers picking up those ice-age remnants from farmers' fields,
piling them high until their nails broke and their fingers bled. It
was said that there were no rough stones in St. Sebastian, and of
that Ivy was certain.

Outside, the woodpecker continued its morning
ritual, moving from one shutter to another, testing them all for
bugs.

Ivy lay there listening. Perhaps the tone of
her breathing changed, telling Jinx that she was awake, because the
tomcat pounced on the bed. He was a polite animal, always waiting
until her eyes were open before bothering her, before he tiptoed
across the bed to finally he across her stomach, purring while she
pet him.

She scratched him under his chin the way he
liked it, talking to him all the while, saying things like, "You
lazy guy. You just love attention, don't you?"

She hadn't known she was a cat person until
Jinx showed up at her door one winter night when the snow was two
feet deep and the wind was blowing so hard that the furnace
couldn't keep the house warm. He was half-wild, but his hunger had
made him temporarily tame. She took him in and fed him, and he let
her pet him that first night. But by the next morning, the warm
milk and bread had done their work and he had reverted back to the
cat he'd been before hunger had taken hold. She tried to catch him
to throw him outside—the sun was shining, the wind had stopped—but
he was a yellow streak, disappearing under the curio cabinet, where
he stayed for three whole days. She tried to coax him out with warm
milk, but he wouldn't budge. She offered him a tiny slice of ham,
putting it just out of his reach. One stiff, yellow paw appeared
from below the antique cabinet, swiped at the ham, and pulled it
into the darkness.

"Gotta get up now," Ivy said, gently pushing
the cat to the side and flinging back the covers.

In the kitchen, she put milk in his bowl
before pouring some over her cereal. After breakfast, she ran three
miles on the treadmill, showered, then went outside to the garden.
She was gathering strawberries when she heard the far-off ringing
of the phone through the open kitchen window.

She got to her feet, moving toward the sound
with the bowl of strawberries in one hand. Her sandals, damp with
morning dew, took her down the stone path that led from the garden
to the kitchen. Inside, the phone was still ringing. She picked up
the receiver and answered with a distracted, "Hello?"

On the other end was a voice she hadn't heard
in years. A voice she'd begun to wonder if she'd ever hear again.
It belonged to Abraham Sinclair of the Chicago Police Department,
the man who had helped her disappear.

"It's happening again," was all he said. It
was all he had to say.

The ceramic bowl she'd picked up at a flea
market slid from her nerveless fingers, crashing to the flagstone,
shattering. Strawberries rolled across the floor, finally finding
darkness in the cobwebs and dust beneath the antique pie safe.

Breathe, Ivy reminded herself. Breathe.

The moment she'd feared and dreaded and lived
for brought her to her knees.

"Claudia? Are you there?"

Claudia. A name from another life.

"Yes," she said, her voice sounding
relatively strong considering the way she was kneeling on the
floor, quaking. "I—I'm here."

"It's been a long time."

"Yes."

"We need your help, but I'll understand if
you want nothing to do with this."

He would be relieved if she said she had put
it all behind her, that she'd moved on with her life, that she was
now married with two lovely children. From that imagined life, she
would be able to tell him about her safe, secure, mundane yet
wonderful existence where she carpooled during the school year and
made dandelion crowns in summer.

In a way, she had moved on, but not to the
extent she would have liked. Because she'd come to find out that no
matter how good a person's intentions, it was impossible to forge
deep relationships when you harbored secrets that could never be
told.

She suddenly saw with an almost spiritual
clarity that everything she'd done up to now had been in
preparation for this moment. Subconsciously she'd spent the years
waiting for a phone call she'd hoped would never come. And all the
friends, all the Jinxes and birds and gardens and bowls of
strawberries in the world would never be enough. Waiting for this
phone call—that's what had driven her.

As the years had passed, she'd begun to
believe that her new life was real, her old life over. But now the
life she'd worked so hard to build for herself in St. Sebastian
faded. In her mind, the friends she'd made and the people she'd met
suddenly didn't seem in complete focus.