Kill You Twice (21 page)

“On principle,” Bliss said.

“Why do you still have the TV if you can’t watch it?” Susan asked.

Bliss sighed and wrenched her foot up over her head another inch. “For emergencies.”

“What are you going to do, throw it at someone?”

Bliss raised an eyebrow. “I may throw it at you in a minute,” she said.

Susan let out a frustrated groan and flopped back down on the couch. “If you had faster Wi-fi I could stream it,” she said.

“If I had faster Wi-Fi, we’d both have brain tumors.”

Susan clicked on the live video button on the KGW home page. It started buffering.

“What’s so important?” Bliss asked.

“I want to check on something.”

“What?”

“The wife of someone I’m writing about was murdered this morning,” Susan said. “Plus, there’s that guy they found in the park. And that woman who was torched on the
rooftop downtown. Do you keep up on the news at all?”

“I don’t want to think about that kind of stuff,” Bliss said. “It attracts negative energy.”

“Here.” Charlene Wood’s image stuttered on screen. She was standing in the studio in front of a photographic background of the city. “Gabrielle Meester. Murdered.”
An image of a dark-haired smiling woman appeared in a graphic on the side of the screen. There were no leads. They were asking for people with information to come forward.

Susan heard an intake of breath and turned to see her mother lose her balance. Bliss toppled onto the couch, and immediately sat up and pointed at the screen. “I know her,” she
said.

“That’s Charlene Wood,” Susan said. “There’s a poster of her on all the bus shelters in town.”

“Not her,” Bliss said. She pointed at the image of Gabrielle Meester. “
Her
.”

“What do you mean, you know her?” Susan asked.

“She looks familiar,” Bliss said.

“She looks familiar?” Susan asked. “Or you
know her
?”

“I’ve seen her before,” Bliss said.

“From the salon, or a yoga class?”

Bliss pulled her legs into lotus position. Then she picked up the bong and took another hit. The bong water gurgled.

Susan waited.

Bliss exhaled an impressive lungful of smoke. “No,” she said. “Somewhere else.”

The video on the Web site was buffering. “I hate this Web site,” Susan grumbled.

“Why don’t you go to the
Herald
site?” Bliss asked.

Because they’d fired her. “On principle,” Susan said.

Bliss stood up and stretched again. “I’m going to meditate,” she said.

That was code for going to bed.

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Susan said.

Bliss patted Susan’s head. “He’ll come around,” she said. She took a few steps, returned for the bong, and left again.

He’ll come around.

Susan realized that she didn’t know which man in her life her mom meant—Leo, or Archie?

She closed the Web site and searched for information on Mrs. Beaton’s murder online. Nothing useful came up. Archie wasn’t picking up his phone. So Susan focused on the story,
rereading what she had so far and then editing the first few paragraphs. She’d work in Mrs. Beaton’s murder at the end—it would make a great close. Susan had to admit this story
just got better. It was a special pleasure to describe Gretchen’s physical deterioration. They’d run a photo of Gretchen that was as glamorous as ever, of course. It was her beauty
that drew people. If she hadn’t been such a centerfold, she wouldn’t have become a media icon in the first place. Ugly people killed people all the time. But when pretty people did, it
got attention.

The goat was baying at the back door. Bliss let the thing roam free back there. It had already eaten the better part of a hundred-year-old rosebush, and a pair of faux-crocodile-skin clogs that
Susan had outside the back door.

Now she stamped her hooves on the back stoop.

She wanted something.

What did goats want?

Grapes?

Hay?

Antidepressants?

The goat stamped again.

“Okay,” Susan called. “I’m coming.” She got up and made her way through the kitchen to the back door. The door was open to let the air in, and the wooden screen
door knocked gently in the breeze.

She didn’t see the goat.

Maybe she’d heard the door.

“Goat?” she called.

She turned on the back porch light, and a circle of the yard was illuminated, but it just made the area outside the circle look even darker.

Susan peered at the goat’s house in the far corner of the yard.

She took a few tentative steps, down the back porch stairs, into the lawn. The dry grass was brittle under her bare feet. She stepped gingerly, feeling for goat turds. The thirty-foot bamboo
privacy hedge that ringed the backyard created a dark wall against the star-filled sky.

She cleared the compost pile and the fire pit, and when she got to the goat house, she looked inside, and she saw blackness.

“Goat?” she called.

A rustle made the hair on her arms stand up.

Something came forward, out of the dark.

A flash of two glowing eyes. And then a white muzzle.

Susan gave a sigh of relief as the goat pranced forward, baying. She gave the goat’s head a rub. It nuzzled up against her.

The goat was lonely. That’s all. It was the case of the lonely goat, and Susan had solved it.

She petted the goat for a few more minutes and then retraced her steps back inside. It was almost chilly being outside with bare legs.

When she stepped back into the house and closed the screen door behind her, this time she locked it.

CHAPTER

B
ack so soon?
” Gretchen asked.

She was out of bed; sitting up, strapped into a wheelchair, her wrists and ankles bound with leather restraints. A larger leather strap circled her chest just under her breasts, harnessing her
to the back of the chair. Her breasts pressed against the gray fabric of her institutional pajamas. Sweat beaded on her neck and darkened the neckline of the shirt. Her knees fell apart. The gray
pajama pants were too long, and spilled several inches past the leather ankle straps, making her bare feet look especially small.

It was easier seeing Gretchen at night. The hospital was quieter. There were fewer questions. Archie wondered if she had been roused out of bed and put in the chair when he’d told the
staff he was coming, or if she had been left upright like that for the night.

“I brought a friend,” Archie said.

Gretchen was sitting in profile and when she turned her head Archie could hear Henry’s breathing change at the sight of her bloated face.

“Oh, good,” she said flatly. “Henry.”

“Hello, Gretchen,” Henry said. His delight at her physical condition was palpable. He walked right up to her, a bounce in his step, and looked her up and down like she was a used car
he was going to pass on purchasing. A huge grin spread across his face. “You’re looking well,” he said.

He was enjoying this way too much.

Gretchen glared at Henry.

Henry was beaming. He clutched his hands in front of his chest. “Isn’t Gretchen looking well this evening?” he asked Archie. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Was this necessary?” Gretchen asked Archie.

Archie stood inside the closed door to Gretchen’s room. He watched them for a moment. Henry, practically doubled over with glee, pink-faced and bright-eyed; Gretchen, seething in her
chair. Henry needed that moment. He needed to see Gretchen suffering, robbed of her loveliness and power. Gretchen had taken something important from Henry. She had taken Archie, his best friend,
his partner. And there was a part of Henry that could never forgive either of them for that. So he needed this moment. And Archie let him have it.

Henry laughed at her, and Archie let him. And after a while, Henry straightened up and wiped the tears from his eyes. He looked down at Gretchen and he kicked the wheel of her chair. “We
need to talk, hot stuff,” he said.

She tried to look over at Archie.

“Me,” Henry said, leaning over her and gripping the sides of her chair. His voice was humorless now. “Not him. You and I need to have a talk.”

“I don’t find you very interesting to talk to,” Gretchen said.

“James Beaton’s widow was murdered yesterday,” Archie said from the door. Cut to the chase. Henry and Gretchen would go around and around like a couple of territorial dogs all
day.

Gretchen nodded. Dusty Beaton’s murder had been on the news, but Archie could tell that this was the first Gretchen had heard of it. There was no verbal comeback. She was off her game.

Even Henry could tell. “Does the pretty girl want her boyfriend to come sit next to her?” Henry asked.

Gretchen didn’t move. “The pretty girl won’t say fuck without him,” she said.

“This is how it’s going to work,” Henry said, rotating the wheelchair around to face the chair by the bed. “You and I are going to have a talk, and if you’re good,
I’ll let Archie come sit on the bed.” Henry folded his large frame in the plastic chair opposite Gretchen, and then he looked at Archie and patted the mattress. Archie walked over and
took a seat on the edge of Gretchen’s bed, so that the three of them were sitting practically knee to knee.

“I start electroshock therapy this evening,” Gretchen said. She raised a skeptical eyebrow in Archie’s direction. “The new doctor you arranged to lead my team feels
it’s in my best interest.”

“Hey, it’s like the electric chair,” Henry said, slapping his knee with a grin, “but in small doses.”

Archie looked away, at the white wall behind Gretchen’s head. Even across the room, Archie could make out the graffiti that had been carved into the wall and then layered with paint over
the years.
Kill me. They’re listening.

Let Henry do the talking. That was the agreement.

“I have an alibi,” Gretchen said. “I was here when Mrs. Beaton was murdered.”

“See, the thing is,” Henry said, “the Widow Beaton was gutted and mutilated. Seems someone dug her nose out of her face and left it on the carpet.”

Archie looked at Gretchen.

She smiled at him. “That sounds familiar,” she said.

Henry leaned between them. “Who killed her?” he asked.

Gretchen settled back in her chair. Her reactions were a half beat off, like someone who’d had three cocktails too many. “It wouldn’t be my place to speculate,” she said.
She licked a flake of dried saliva from the corner of her mouth. “That’s your job.”

Henry hunched farther forward in his chair, his back muscles tightening under his shirt. “Just give it a go,” he said.

A lock of blond hair fell in front of one of Gretchen’s blue eyes. She looked at Archie with the other one. “If I were to hazard a guess,” she said in a mock whisper, “I
would presume that it was Ryan Motley.”

Henry’s upper lip tightened. He glanced over at Archie. Archie gave him a look that said,
If you strangle her, she wins
.

Henry exhaled slowly, working his jaw. Then he fixed his gaze back on Gretchen. “You want us to believe that he’s been out there killing all this time and we’ve never
noticed?” he said. “What is he, invisible?” Henry clawed his hands in the air. “Does he sneak into children’s bedrooms at night?”

“No,” Gretchen said coolly. “That’s the tooth fairy.”

Henry’s big hands tightened into fists. He was close to her, closer than Archie dared. The veins pressed against the skin of his forehead. She was Henry’s weakness as much as she was
Archie’s. Henry could always control his emotions, except when it came to her. Archie wondered sometimes what bothered Henry most—the fact that Gretchen had nearly killed Archie, or the
fact that they’d had an affair. “You’re making shit up,” Henry said.

Gretchen didn’t flinch, didn’t blink. Her beauty may have been marred, but when she comported herself, she looked as regal as a queen. Henry didn’t like that. Archie could see
it in his face. He wanted her defeated.

“There are a lot of people out there killing other people,” she said. “There are serial killers you don’t know about, and that you will never catch. They will die natural
deaths surrounded by their grandchildren, and no one will ever know what ghoulish trophies grandpa kept in the jars hidden under the shed.”

“Why would Ryan Motley want Dusty Beaton dead?” Henry asked.

Gretchen turned to Archie. “Because you were getting close, darling,” she said.

“Talk to me,” Henry said, tapping his chest. “I’m the one asking the questions.”

Archie couldn’t help it. “Close to what?” he asked.

Gretchen batted her crusty eyelashes at him. “Are you ready to talk to me now?”

Henry got up, stepped in front of Archie, put his hands around Gretchen’s forearms, and pushed her chair back a few feet.

Archie was now staring at Henry’s back.

“It’s not like the others, princess,” Henry said. “He didn’t leave a flower. He didn’t move the body up.”

“He’s copying me,” Gretchen said. “He copies me sometimes.”

Archie could see the stubble on the back of Henry’s shaved head, and, if he craned his neck, he could see Gretchen around Henry’s shoulder. Her hair covered half her face now. A
piece was stuck to the crust at the corner of her mouth. Behind her, on the white wall, Archie could see more scratched messages.
She’s trying to kill me.

“Like with all the kids you’re accused of killing,” Henry said. “Like how he’s the real child killer and you’re falsely accused.”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. She shrugged. “I mean, I killed all the others. I just feel it uncharitable to take credit for actions not my own.”

“I see,” Henry said. “So he copies you sometimes, and sometimes he kills kids his own sicko way, with the torture and the lilies, and then sometimes he kills grown-ups with the
torture and the lilies.” He craned his head back toward Archie. “This guy, he likes to change it up.”

“He was always a self-starter,” Gretchen said.

“You’ve known him awhile,” Archie said.

Gretchen craned around Henry and looked Archie in the eye. “Longer than I’ve known you,” she said.