Jaclyn the Ripper (20 page)

“I feel like I'm crossing the line.”

“Let's go hand-in-hand, love.”

“You're not helping. I can't think straight.” He pushed away. “I mean, my people are out there without me, and you've got me doing things I'm not supposed to be doing.”

She kept silent. He might convince himself.

“I'm trying to understand this, okay? You tell me that your family's been looking for someone who's been missing for thirty-one years and then—bang—she turns up this morning.”

She shrugged innocently, watched him absently finger a Post-it note in his coat pocket. “I don't understand it, either,” she lied, “so why don't we consider the topic an academically moot point and get on with our lives?”

She knew from Jack's experience that girls weren't supposed to be the aggressive ones. But she couldn't help herself, and dropped her hand on his leg. She slowly traced a heart with her fingernails. Then, a nervous gesture from another time in another universe, she put her hand between her own legs to see if she was hard. She blushed sheepishly. Nothing was there, but thanks to the martini, instead of feeling a helpless rage, she chuckled ironically. With any luck, he would fill that emptiness for her.

“Look, why don't I do this—?”

“Why
don't
you . . . ?”

He frowned, then: “Why don't I call this Amy Catherine Robbins and explain the situation and ask her if she wants to contact your family in the UK? What about that?”

“I don't
care
anymore, love.”
If he calls and talks to the girl, then my hand is played. Fresh from the nineteenth century, Amy Catherine Robbins would indeed figure it out, and so warned, she and Wells would become an impossible catch
.

Except here with this man—right now—she didn't give a damn. She giggled and fell against him, letting her hand slide over his chest and then—oh, the hell with it—she put it on his crotch.

“Can we go someplace?” she whispered into his ear.

He didn't move her hand.

“Can we?” She felt him swell against her fingers. “
Please?
”

 

She closed and locked the door behind them, turned. He had thrown his coat on the chair, was kicking off his shoes and trying to get out of his pants at the same time, knowing if he hesitated now, he'd change
his mind. She ripped off her clothes, and so unchained, threw herself at him. He said wait, but, no, waiting was like being forever strung tight on the event horizon, waiting was death. She tore his shorts off, pushed him violently back on the bed, then straddled him and screamed with pleasure as he slid inside.

“My God, that's
it
! That's
it
!”

Oh, my, this has to be what those whores felt when Jack filled them!
Trembling all over, she collapsed on top of him and tried to ride the pleasure, but it rode her, and she had to sink her teeth in his shoulder to hang on, to not disintegrate. In her mind their sex played through a fog of sweat and celestial slime, spinning like a kaleidoscope.

 

Finished, he rolled away, but she followed, wrapping him with arms and sticky legs. She didn't understand this postcoital need to hang on—Jack never hung on—but she didn't want the moment to end. And if the knife in her purse had been close enough, she would not have stabbed him to death, for he had taken her to nirvana, and she might want to go again soon. Then the afterglow receded, and she, too, rolled away, a little voice inside saying,
Someday he will bore me to tears
.

He sat up and put his face in his hands, and started crying. Surprised, she rose up on one elbow and studied his grief, recalling that most “moral” beings lived in the shadow of guilt and had to flagellate themselves for illicit pleasures.
It is the till-death-do-us-part marriage, the wife and kids coming home to roost, how smashing
. If the sex hadn't been so extraordinary, he probably would have gotten dressed and left, but now the god of lust was laughing at Casey Holland for leading such a dreary, unsatisfying existence. Thinking of that god reminded her of her own bloodlust. The moment was perfect; it cried out for another victim. She could easily slash him to death while he was sitting on the bed in tears, self-absorbed with a false morality, excreting snot instead of semen. Yes. Make a collage with that wonderful thing that had lit up her insides.

Instead, she slid closer, wanting to cuddle and comfort him and didn't understand this reaction, just as he was having none of it. He
shook her off, went in the bathroom, and moments later, she heard the shower. Affronted, she sat up, crossed her arms over her breasts, stared blankly at his clothes strewn about the room, saw his coat and was reminded of why she was here. From her purse, she took out a pen and a pink-flowered notepad, courtesy of Heather. She went to his coat on the chair and from the breast pocket pulled out a yellow Post-it note with Amy Catherine Robbins's current address and phone number. She copied it, then carefully replaced the Post-it note.

She dressed hurriedly. At the mirror over the cheap desk, she put on fresh lipstick, brushed and primped her luxuriant hair, cocked her head and gave her sated self a cute little smile. She picked up her purse and started for the door, then stopped suddenly. This was unfinished. She couldn't just walk away. If she wasn't going to butcher the good lieutenant in lieu of another assignation, the least she could do was let him know. She blotted her lips in a kiss on Heather's notepad, took out the pen again and wrote,

See you again . . . ? Tout de suite?

Amour,

_____J

 

She wrote her phone number on the back, folded the note and slipped it in the lieutenant's inside coat pocket.

Outside, she shielded her eyes from a bright afternoon sun, put on Heather's designer sunglasses, strolled to the Mercedes, drawing grins from two dudes in the parking lot. As she drove away from the motel, she graced them with a little flutter wave.

“How was the doctor?” Amy asked politely.

Kevin Robbins frowned at his daughter. “He tells me I'm doing fine. So I tell him—if you looked like me, would
you
think you were doing fine?”

“Maybe you really are doing fine, Daddy.”

“Don't patronize me, Amy.”

“Sorry.”

She reminded herself to choose her words more carefully now and not to provoke him. She hadn't expected to see her father as a shriveled, white-haired old man crippled with arthritis and in a wheelchair. She should've quizzed Sara more about their parents. Did they need help? Was Daddy in constant physical pain? And more to the point—how did their mom still put up with him after all these years? She wondered if he had played her against her daughters just as he had played them against each other. Yet she couldn't hate him. She just couldn't.
I'd settle for understanding him
.

“You know, we thought we'd never see you again,” he said.

She nodded and smiled wistfully. No matter how many times they asked, she still didn't know what to say.

They were in a courtyard off the living room of the family's rambling Spanish-style home on Shadow Hill Way in Beverly Hills. Exotic plants and flowers blossomed along paths that led to a gentle waterfall from a lion's-head fountain amid tree ferns, miniature elephant grass and rare species of bamboo creating an illusion of serenity. Her father rolled his wheelchair from side to side, an old man's version of a reflective kid on a skateboard.

“So did you see your aunt Amy in New Jersey?”

“No. I called her to get your phone number.”

He chuckled. “She's getting up there. Seventy-nine and still all by herself. Something to be said for that,” he mused. “She's got dogs, though. Little dogs. Won't go anyplace without her dogs.”

“Dogs love you no matter what,” Amy said and wished she hadn't, for when she was little they'd never had dogs or cats.

Her father studied her critically, then looked off, perhaps taking comfort in the fact that if nothing else he had done well financially and nobody could take that away from him. Then he glanced sideways at her, his jaw working, as he tried to fill in the holes and find a place for his resurrected daughter.

“So what do you think of your new sister?”

“I love her.”

“Sara's great, isn't she?” He grinned, his face lighting up, rearranging itself on the wrinkle lines. “Always knew what she wanted, that girl. Summa cum laude at Berkeley, couple of heavyweight internships, MFC or whatever that counseling thing is, and now she's so damn busy she needs a partner, and she's only twenty-nine.”

Oh, no, Daddy, you're not doing this, not again, not like you did it to both of us
.

“Yes, isn't it wonderful?” she replied. “Not only did she get my looks, but she got my brains as well, though she might have trouble in my part of the world because there are so, so many clever people.”

He gave her an incredulous look.

“I run into them every day managing Bertie's career.”

He nodded, silenced for the moment, then took a different tack. “What're you now, Amy . . . ? Fifty-one or -two?”

“Fifty . . .” Amy calculated quickly how old she'd be if she had stayed in the twentieth century and lived until 2010. “Fifty-three.”

“And doesn't she look great?” Her mother, Elizabeth, came through the French doors with a tray of drinks, set it on the bench next to her father, stood back and scrutinized her. “I swear, I don't know how you do it. You look like you're thirty-five, forty at the oldest.”

“Cosmetic surgery, right?” said her father. “You go to Switzerland or Thailand or some weird place with foreign doctors and so-called miracle cures, right?”

“Kevin!”

He spread his hands and poured himself whiskey. “Well?” He turned to Amy. “So what's the answer?”

Nodding at the booze, Amy said pointedly, “Maybe it's just good living.”

“Or maybe it's being in an institution.”

“
God
, Kevin!”

“No, Mom, it's all right.” Amy turned, gestured at her. “Really, it's all right, and I'm fine, thank you.”
Obviously, if nothing else, my little sister still talks to Daddy, and one wonders what else they've said to each other
. She lifted her head proudly.
Then again, if one is given lemons . . 
. Smiling, she turned back to her father and sustained the myth. “Though you might not agree, Daddy, they gave me a clean bill of health. I'm quite sane.”

Kevin Robbins took a large swallow of his drink, grunted with satisfaction as it coated his rancorous insides. He looked away pensively, relishing the silence he had created, yet wasn't finished. A shrewd grin crinkled his face. “You know, I'm not saying this is what's going on, but there are folks I know who'd say you wanted back in the will.” He read her horror and smiled with satisfaction. “Is that why you came home?”

Amy recoiled. “What an awful thing to say!”

“It's a joke!” he said defensively. “A goddamn joke!”

She waited for anger to come—a flood of sweet anger—so she could answer in kind, but instead was filled with a terrible sadness and found herself fighting back tears.

Her mom had seen the tears and glared hatefully at her father. She
wrapped her arms around Amy protectively, pulled her away as she used to when Amy was little. She whispered that Daddy didn't really mean to be so mean, and Amy thought,
It's like Christmas in June, it's all strange and out of time, it's not working, except they're still my parents, and I love them, and it has to work, I didn't come all this way—

“I don't need your money, Daddy.”

“Look,” he growled, “I said I was sorry.”

“I have a life of my own,” she said, not sure if she really did anymore. “I have children and a wonderful husband.”

“How did you have ‘this life of your own' if you were in an asylum?”

Caught. She groped for words.

“A husband and kids,” he went on, “you know what I mean.”

“I wasn't there all the time,” she managed. “And Bertie—he was so supportive, and . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“When do we get to meet this guy?”

“I don't know. . . . I'm not sure,” she said, her voice quavering.

“Sara said—”

“I am
not
getting a divorce, Daddy.” She glared at him, yet was more annoyed with her sister's apparent duplicity than anything else.

“Okay, okay.” He sighed and drank again. “Helluva way to start off—all I'm doing is saying I'm sorry.”

“Perhaps you should wonder why.”

He ignored the shot, squinted thoughtfully at his fountain, then came back to her. “So what does he do, this husband of yours?”

“He writes articles, he teaches. He's a critic, too.”

“Bert Wells . . . Any relation to H. G. Wells?”

“A distant relation.” She blushed.

“He's not a communist, is he?”

“No, Daddy. He's a socialist.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, disgusted. “Jesus H. Christ. I knew there was something, I just—”

“Daddy, stop it!” snapped Amy. “I don't want to talk about my husband, I want to talk about you. . . . You and me. Okay?”

He glowered at her. She lifted her chin defiantly, matched his glare, and when he saw a strength in her that he didn't recognize, he finally
softened, his face becoming curious about this daughter who'd always been out of place, out of step, this renegade daughter without a reasonable explanation.

“Does anybody need anything?” said her mother. “No . . . ?”

She headed for the sanctuary of the house.