Kevin O'Brien Bundle (36 page)

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Authors: Kevin O'Brien

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“I didn’t go up there! I didn’t do anything!” Tears in her eyes, Erin glared up at her.
Molly felt a wave of nausea, and she took a deep breath. She plopped down in the cushioned chair beside her. “Okay, I—I understand you’re very upset,” she said in a shaky voice. “And I realize you might be angry at me because I’ve been so sick lately—or maybe you somehow blame me for what happened to your dad. Whatever it is, we can talk about it. But first, you need to own up to what you did. Now, don’t lie to me, Erin. You went up to my studio. You broke some elephants, then you took a tube of yellow paint and you painted a big X—”
“I did not!” Erin shrieked, jumping up from the sofa. She threw down her Fruit Roll-Up. “You’re the liar! I didn’t do anything to your stupid painting! I hate you, I hate you!” Crying, she ran out of the room and charged up the stairs.
“What the hell was that all about?”
Molly turned and saw Chris had come up from the basement. She heard Erin’s bedroom door upstairs slam shut. She rubbed her eyes. “Your sister decided to touch up the painting I’ve been working on for the last two weeks,” she said. “I guess she has some unresolved anger toward me—though I guess she figured out a way to resolve it. Go on up and take a look. My painting’s ruined. She also destroyed about a dozen of my elephants. Some of those I’ve had since I was her age.” Molly found a Kleenex in the pocket of her jeans, and she blew her nose. “I’m sorry I’ve been so ill the last two days. I can’t help that. I know how you and Erin must feel. This is a time when you’ve really needed me to step up to the plate. And I’ve let you down. I understand if you’re angry and confused. . . .”
Half a room away, Chris shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the kitchen counter. “It’s okay,” he said, frowning.
She shook her head. “No, it’s not okay. You’re upset with me, too. I can tell, just by looking at you. You don’t even want to come near me. Talk about unresolved anger. . . .” She blew her nose again. The tissue started to fall apart in her hands. “You know, I have some anger issues, too,” she admitted. “I’m so mad at your father right now. He was a good man, and he loved you and Erin very much. But he—he made some foolish decisions as far as women were concerned. I guess you heard enough about that from your mother. But I can’t help being mad at him for letting this woman—whoever she is—set him up that way. I don’t care what the police say, or what you hear on the news, he was not in that hotel room alone.”
Chris nodded. “Yeah, I heard you talking to that cop yesterday, the one you seem to know so well.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing, forget it.” He started to turn toward the basement again.
“No, I won’t forget it,” Molly retorted, unsteadily getting to her feet. “And you can’t just say something like that, and then leave the room. . . .”
Stopping, Chris turned around and frowned at her.
“If you’re insinuating that anything at all has gone on between Detective Blazevich and me, you’re way off. And if you’re trying to blame me—or—or justify why your father . . .”
Molly couldn’t finish. She felt sick to her stomach. She shook her head and retreated for the stairs. She made it up to the master bathroom, where she sat on the floor by the toilet until the nausea passed. Then she staggered back to bed and climbed under the covers.
She wished she’d never gotten up.
Chris stared at the big yellow X scrawled across Molly’s unfinished painting. The X had finished it—for good. It was just as Molly had described it to him hours ago. Too bad, because what Molly had created so far was pretty cool, like something out of
Mad Men
with all these different characters through the century. Chris could tell she’d used a photo of him as a model for the 1940s sailor who was drinking a cola with this sexy blond woman with a peekaboo bang over one eye. She’d made him look handsome.
He glanced over at the elephants that were broken and splattered with yellow paint. It was the third shelf up—just at Erin’s eye level. He’d seen the yellow splotches on Erin’s door—and on her clothes. He’d talked to his kid sister after dinner tonight, and she’d denied any wrongdoing. She’d insisted she never came up here to “Molly’s stupid old studio.” But it reminded him of when Erin was a toddler and not totally potty-trained. She’d occasionally wet her pants and then insist that a lion had come along and splashed her with a glass of water. Why a lion, he wasn’t sure. But she’d tell the lie and stick to her guns—even when the evidence was stacked up against her.
He knew she was upset, confused, and angry. He felt exactly the same way. He gazed at Molly’s ruined painting and those elephants she’d had since she was a child—and his heart broke for her. Yet he kept thinking back to what Mrs. Hahn had said a few nights back, about how when Molly moved in, that was the start of all their troubles.
Every person he’d come to depend on had died within the last few months—starting with Mr. Corson, then his mom, and then his dad.
Molly had told him earlier today that she was mad at his father for getting himself killed. Chris was angry at him, too, but he also missed him. He had to remind himself this wasn’t one of his dad’s business trips. He wasn’t coming back.
He plodded down the attic steps to the second floor. He glanced toward what was once his mom and dad’s bedroom. Now it was Molly’s room. The door was closed. She was probably sleeping. He knew why she was so sick and run-down lately. He’d heard her tell that cop that she was pregnant. So he was going to have another kid sister or a kid brother. He couldn’t get all that excited about it, at least not right now.
Down the hall, Erin was asleep with her door open and her night-light on.
He went downstairs, where his Aunt Trish had some new age music playing on the iPod station while she prepared food for a brunch tomorrow. A medley of vegetables, bottles of olive oil and cooking wine, and packages of tofu were spread over the counter. His mother’s younger sister had long, wavy gray hair, glasses, and a buxom figure she covered with loose, billowy, earth-tone clothes that always looked secondhand.
Heading toward the refrigerator, Chris worked up a smile. “Hey, Aunt Trish, what are you cooking?”
She was doing something with grape leaves. “We’re making vegetable kabobs, tofu wraps, and meatless meatballs.”
He didn’t have the heart to tell her that most of his parents’ friends probably wouldn’t touch that vegan stuff. He took a Coke out of the refrigerator.
“Chris, I need to talk to you about something,” she said, glancing up at him for a moment.
Sipping his Coke, he leaned against the counter. “What’s up?”
His aunt started cutting the tofu in cubes. She looked down at her work while talking to him. Or maybe she just couldn’t look him in the eye, he wasn’t sure. “I need to make it clear to you—and Erin—that this is just for the next day or so,” she said. “I can’t stay here permanently—and I won’t be able to look after you two. I don’t know if you were thinking that or not. But I have my own life in Tacoma. I’m still planning to go to India for three months starting in February. I don’t know exactly how well you and Erin get along with your stepmother. I suppose it doesn’t matter much to you, because you’ll be going off to college next year. But—there’s Erin to consider. Have you—have you talked to Molly about her plans?”
“Not really,” he murmured. He was stumped. For some reason, he’d imagined his aunt moving into the house—and Molly leaving. Part of him thought whatever bad luck Molly had brought to this house and this block might disappear along with her. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he didn’t want to get close to her. Hell, she had a brother who was mentally ill—and a murderer. Was it something hereditary that could be passed on to his half sibling? And that night they’d waited up for his dad, he’d watched her smuggle a steak knife into the bedroom. What was that about?
Now, with a baby on the way, Molly would probably stay on with them. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t want to stay on.
“What are you thinking?” his Aunt Trish asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing, I hadn’t really considered anything past tomorrow and the funeral and all.”
“Well, you need to talk to Molly, Chris,” she said, blotting the tofu cubes with a paper towel.
He nodded, sipped his Coke, and wandered toward the front of the house. He stepped into his father’s study. For the last few days, he couldn’t set foot in this room without crying. But for the moment, his eyes were dry.
He glanced out the window and noticed a man walking his dog past the house. Chris could only see his silhouette.
He was thinking about Molly and the bad luck that followed her around. He wondered how many days would go by before someone else was hurt or killed.
He studied the Dennehy house—from the street this time, rather than from the woods in back. He had a dog on a leash, a mixed-breed stray he’d picked up yesterday. He’d let it go fend for itself again after this slow walk up and down Willow Tree Court.
He had used the dog-walking routine before to scope out different homes
.
It was a good ruse. People didn’t worry about someone lurking in front of their home at night if the stranger had a dog on a leash. All they worried about was the dog crapping on their lawn. That older couple with the boy in college, he’d cased their Queen Anne home for six nights while walking some dog, a corgi, if he remembered right. No one ever noticed him.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the Dennehy place. He already knew the entrances: front, through the garage, and a sliding glass door into the family room. A window by their breakfast table looked like the best way in. But he might end up just knocking on the front door, too. That was why he had all the different costumes in his secret room at home. Those outfits—deliveryman, cable man, paramedic—they opened doors for him. That had been how he’d gotten inside two of his homes.
The Dennehy house was perfect. There was a widow, an older boy in high school, and a little girl. Their house was a bit different from the one on Rochelle Lane—the one belonging to his widowed aunt. But it was on a cul-de-sac, and the ages of the Dennehy children were close to those of his cousins.
When he was eight, he had to stay with them at their house on Rochelle Lane in Ballard. His mother, who never married, used to dump him there for weeks at a time while she went to chase after some guy. He became the whipping boy for the family. His older cousin used to make him strip naked, and then he’d beat him up. The bratty kid sister told lies about him that would send his monster of an aunt into a tirade. As punishment, she’d lock him in a small, dark closet on the second floor—sometimes for as long as six or eight hours. He was always so grateful for the light. But that was one of the old bitch’s bugaboos—when someone left a light on in a room. His cousins always blamed him whenever it happened, and he’d be locked in that upstairs closet again.
Every time his mother picked him up, he’d beg her not to send him back to live with his cousins. She told him that if he behaved better, he wouldn’t get punished. She always drove him back there whenever some new man came into her life. He remembered dreading the sight of that
NO OUTLET
sign at the end of their block.
Funny thing about time; it seemed those visits to his cousins went on for weeks at a time over a period of two or three years. But it was all within a year. He remembered having his ninth birthday with Warren, the stoner guy who eventually moved in with his mother. He wasn’t sent to stay with his cousins again after Warren came into the picture.
In fact, he didn’t set foot inside the Rochelle Lane house again—not until ten months ago, when he returned to Seattle after some jail time in St. Louis. He’d moved around a lot with his mother, and later with his mother and Warren. And he’d lived many places after he went out on his own at age seventeen. But the place that most seemed like his home had been his cousins’ split-level at the end of that cul-de-sac. As much as he’d hated that place, he felt as if he’d grown up there.
Last February, he wanted to see it again. From the outside, the place hadn’t changed much in twenty years. But other things were different. His bitch of an aunt had died of cancer in 2004. His older cousin, the sexual bully, had been killed in a car accident at age nineteen. He never found out what happened to his bratty younger cousin.
He stopped by the house on a Wednesday afternoon, when the winter sun was just starting to set. He had his switchblade with him. He carried it all the time. He really hadn’t planned on using it that afternoon. He knocked on the door, and someone called out from the other side: “Who is it?”
“You don’t know me, but I grew up in this house,” he answered. “I lived here for three years with my aunt and my two cousins.”
The door opened a crack—as far as the chain lock allowed. Through the chink, a handsome woman in her late sixties stared out at him. She had close-cropped silver hair with bangs and wore a lavender tracksuit.
“Sorry if I scared you,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been away from Seattle for several years, and thought I’d take a sentimental journey. My cousins were the Coulters. I don’t suppose you bought the house from them.”
Eying him warily, she shook her head.
“Does the bathroom in the lower level still have those pink hexagon tiles?” he asked. “And is there still an old hand-crank pencil sharpener mounted on the wall as you walk into the furnace room? I always thought that was a strange place for a pencil sharpener.”

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