Kill You Twice (22 page)

Henry leaned to the side, blocking Gretchen’s view. “When was the last time you saw him?” he asked her. He leaned his weight on his good leg. He did that late in the day, when
his leg bothered him more. Archie hoped that Gretchen wouldn’t see it.

“Just a few days ago,” Gretchen said.

“Now, see there, angel face, you’re fucking with me,” Henry said. “That makes it very hard for me to take you seriously.”

“I heard you almost died,” Gretchen said. “It must be hard for you. A man so invested in being strong, reduced to a lesser version of himself. Did they tell you that
you’d recover fully?” She leaned around Henry’s shoulder again and shot Archie a devious smile. “They were lying.”

Henry’s head was down.

Archie put a hand on his friend’s back and stood. “That’s enough,” he told Gretchen. He walked around behind Gretchen’s wheelchair. The photograph was in his inside
jacket pocket. Now he slid it out and squatted next to Gretchen. He showed her the picture. “I think that this is you,” he said.

Her eyes traveled slowly down his face and chest, and then fixed on the photograph. She didn’t move. Archie could hear her breathing. “That’s a shadow,” she said.

“I saw another photograph,” Archie said gently. He put his finger on the teenage boy in the picture. “One where he is taking the picture.” That girl had been skinny, with
a flat chest and dark hair; shoulders slumped, trying to take up less space. Nothing like the Serial Killer Centerfold. “You must have worked hard to reinvent yourself,” Archie
said.

“And look at you now,” Henry said dryly. “Such a looker.”

Archie studied Gretchen. Scrutinizing her for answers, some hint of recognition, a flicker of emotion. “What were they to you?” he asked.

Her eyes moved back up to meet his. Her head swayed a little. He realized how much effort she was putting into this, appearing functional with all those drugs in her system. But the clues were
there—swollen eyelids, slack jowls, heavy limbs. She was exhausted. The hair stuck to the crust at the corner of her mouth fluttered as she exhaled.

“Will you get my hair out of my eyes?” she asked.

Archie hesitated only for a second, and then he reached out and touched her hair with his fingers, brushing it back across her cheek, and then tucking it behind her ear. His fingertips grazed
her earlobe and the touch reverberated up his arm.

The hair gone, her full face was revealed. Even with the added weight, inflamed skin, crud stuck to the roots of eyelashes, sores at the corners of her mouth—he could still find something
lovely about her. He wondered how long that would last. How many years in this place it would take before he could face her and not feel that physical draw.

“Give us a minute,” Archie told Henry.

Henry didn’t move.

Archie turned around. He could do this. He just needed Henry to trust him. “It’s okay,” Archie said. “She’s tied to a chair. I think I can handle this.”

Henry snorted. He took a step, cringing only slightly as he put weight on his bad leg. “I’ll be right outside,” he said. He paused and leaned back in front of Gretchen.
“You look great, sugar lips,” he said. “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

Gretchen stared straight ahead.

Henry chuckled. “This was fun,” he said. He was still smiling as he left the room.

When the door was closed, the two of them sat there. The leather straps that held Gretchen’s wrists to the arms of the chair were lined with sheepskin. They buckled like belts. Her arms
were pale and spotted with bruises. Archie didn’t know how much weight she had gained. Her body had changed. Her thighs spread wider on the seat. Her hips looked bigger. Her once-flat belly
was now rounded. Even her neck and face looked filled out. Her breasts were fuller than before. Her angles had softened. But her figure was still there. It still pulled at him.

He wanted her to look worse. He wanted to look at her and feel nothing.

“Thinking up new ways to hurt me?” Gretchen said.

“You’re the expert,” Archie said. “You taught me everything I know.”

“I didn’t think you’d like it so much,” she said.

Archie didn’t answer. He looked outside, through the bars, at the brick wall.

She said, “If we’re just going to sit here, I’d like another Lorazepam.”

Archie glanced at the closed door. It was soundproof. No one was listening.

“I killed a man a few months ago,” Archie said.

Gretchen stared at him.

He studied his shoes, the laces confiscated downstairs. “That man who kidnapped the boy and killed those people during the flood. He killed Jeff Heil, a detective I worked with.”

“The one who poisoned Henry.”

Archie nodded.

“Was it self-defense?” Gretchen asked.

Archie scratched the back of his head. “At first.” He glanced up at her. Her face was absent of emotion. “He came at me,” Archie explained. “We fought.” He
touched his forehead, above the eyebrow. “He had a skull fracture. A piece of the bone was missing. His brain was exposed.” Archie rubbed his eyes. “He was subdued. He was
probably dying. He was certainly not a threat.” Archie looked at his hands again. They were soft hands, the hands of an academic, not big like Henry’s. He was not a fighter. As his
apartment wall could attest. “I punched him,” Archie said. “I jammed my fist through the hole in his skull.” These hands, his hands, had done this. He still couldn’t
quite believe it. “The bone fragments gave way.” He turned his hands up, studying the palms. “His brain was warm Jell-O. It just slid out between my fingers.”

“Did you like it?” Gretchen asked.

Archie folded his hands and looked up at her. “I’m not like you.”

Her brow furrowed. “But you don’t regret it.”

“I’m glad he’s dead,” Archie said. “It makes things easier for the boy.”

“You got away with it,” Gretchen said.

“They never found the body,” Archie said with a shrug. “They accepted my version of events.” He glanced back at Gretchen’s bed, where he had left the photograph of
the Beaton family. He had Gretchen’s full attention now. If there was one thing she loved, it was seeing Archie turn himself inside out. “You know that’s how my mother
died,” he said.

Gretchen licked her lips. “In the car accident?” she said.

“She had a skull fracture,” Archie said. “No air bags. No shoulder strap. Her head hit the dashboard.” It had been almost twenty-five years, and his chest still tightened
when he thought about that day. “It took her ten minutes to die. I tried to hold her skull together, but by the time the ambulance got there it was too late. I could feel her brain pulsing
under my fingers; I thought she was alive. But it turned out that it was just my own pulse I was feeling.” His hands betraying him again. He was sitting close to Gretchen, their knees almost
touching. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I was seventeen,” he said. He let that hang in the air for a moment, and then he rocked his chair back and grabbed the photograph
off the bed from behind him. When he had it, he scooted the chair back right in front of her, the feet of the chair against the feet of her wheelchair. Her knees were open slightly, and he sat with
his knees open, too, just a little bit wider, so that the outside of her knees rested against the inside of his. He laid the photograph on her lap between them.

He felt her stiffen. He might not have noticed it if they hadn’t been touching. But she reacted to the contact of the photograph against her body. It meant something to her.

He was on the right track.

“That’s about how old you were here, isn’t it?” he said, touching the shadow of the girl. His hand was on the photograph; the photograph was on her upper thighs. Touching
the girl in the photograph was like touching Gretchen. He was aware of her breasts, rising and falling with her breaths; her breathing quickening. He said, “That day, when I went through that
stop sign, it changed everything. My life is before that day, and after that day.” He could feel the burn where their knees made contact. She was pressing her knees out against his, or the
other way around. “Just as there is my life before you, and after you.”

He traced his fingertips over the girl’s shadow, her long limbs exaggerated by the angle of the sun, her elbows, the silhouette of her skirt. “This girl”—he tapped his
finger on the photograph—“hadn’t killed anyone yet.” Archie moved his finger to the image of James Beaton. “You said that he was your first victim.” Archie held
the photograph up, showing it to her. “What was the thing that changed? What happened to her?”

“She’s dead,” Gretchen said. “You couldn’t have saved her.” Her fingers curled around the arms of the wheelchair. “There’s a stream that runs next
to a red barn off Gilman Road on Sauvie Island, past the pumpkin patch—I buried what remained of her there under a grove of oak trees.”

He saw her then. Archie had only caught a glimpse of her a few times. He didn’t know who it was. Something changed in her posture, behind her eyes. It was as if, for a moment, she let the
mask fall. He didn’t know who was on the other side. But he was willing to take advantage of it.

He pointed to the teenage boy in the photograph of the Beaton family. “Is he Ryan Motley?”

Gretchen fixed her eyes on the boy and nodded slowly.

“I need to hear you say it,” Archie said.

She looked at Archie. “Yes.”

Archie pushed the chair back, brought his knees together, and stood. His head was already out the door, ready to get back to the investigation, ready to find Colin Beaton.

He heard Gretchen ask, “How is the dog?”

He turned. She was still where he’d left her. Strapped to the chair—unable to move. Her head was twisted in his direction.

“The dog is missing,” Archie said.

A warm sweet smell filled the room, and Gretchen turned away from him.

“You can go,” she said.

There was something wet on the floor.

Archie walked back around to her chair. A dark stain was growing on the lap of her gray pajama bottoms. The seat of the chair was slick with wet, something dribbling along the metal frame and
down her pants leg.

“Are you okay?” Archie asked.

Gretchen’s eyelids fluttered, her nostrils flared. Her hair was back in her face again. “It’s the medication,” she muttered. For a moment he didn’t recognize her.
She looked helpless. “I’m peeing myself,” she said.

A stream of urine ran under her chair and formed a scribble of dark yellow on the linoleum.

CHAPTER

D
on’t panic,” Bliss
said. She held an earthenware mug, and was wearing drawstring tie-dyed pants and a
T-shirt with the slogan this is what a feminist looks like across the chest. Her thick blond dreadlocks hung loose over her shoulders. The sunlight was streaming in behind her, illuminating every
stray fuzzy hair so that her head looked like a bundle of frayed ropes.

Susan roused herself. She had finally invested in a futon, so she didn’t have to sleep in the hammock her mother had installed in Susan’s old bedroom the day after Susan had left for
college. It was now a meditation/yoga room. The hammock was for guests.

Bliss wasn’t leaving. Whatever she had in the cup smelled like the compost pile.

Susan sat up on the futon. It wasn’t one of those fancy futons with the natural wood frames. This futon sat directly on the floor. With futons, you got what you paid for.

Susan’s neck hurt.

“Promise me you won’t freak out,” Bliss said.

Susan’s mother had a habit of overreacting. When Verizon had tried to put in a cell tower in their neighborhood, Bliss had protested by chaining herself to the front door of the building
where the rooftop tower was supposed to be erected. Never mind that it was a retirement home. Bliss got on the evening news, and Verizon relented. Susan reminded her mother of that every time
Susan’s cell phone dropped a call because of bad reception. “Were you reading
The New Yorker
again?” Susan asked.
The New Yorker
always sent Bliss on a terror. Some
people clipped coupons or funny comics. Bliss clipped stories she read about famine or child trafficking or household items that could kill you.

One time, after reading a story about the dangers of BPA in plastic products, she threw away all the plastic in the house, including toothbrushes, the produce drawers and shelves from the
fridge, all the Tupperware, and Susan’s brand-new professional featherweight ceramic ionic hair dryer.

Bliss still wore gloves to the ATM machine so she could avoid touching the BPA-coated ATM receipts with her bare hands.

In normal circumstances, Susan was the kook—in the presence of her mother, Susan was the voice of reason.

“Don’t overreact,” Bliss said. “Until you know the whole story.”

“Did you throw away something of mine again?” Susan asked, feeling her lip start to curl.

“We have a guest,” Bliss said. She squatted and put the mug in Susan’s hands. It was hot and smelled even ranker close up. “Drink this.”

Susan held the mug as far away from her face as possible. “What is it?”

“Kindness tea. It’s calming.”

Wait a minute. Susan narrowed her eyes at her mother. She could be sneaky sometimes. “A guest?”

Bliss was wearing her serene look now, the one she wore when she was charging people fifty bucks an hour to teach them how to meditate. Her forehead was smooth, she had a dippy smile on her
face, and her eyes looked sparkly and spacey, like an anesthetized rabbit. “She spent the night on the couch,” Bliss said in a calming tone. “She’s scared, and I’ve
told her she can stay.”

None of this was making any sense to Susan. “What is it, like a cat or something?”

“Noooo,” Bliss said. She fiddled with the sash of the black kimono she was wearing as a robe. “Not a cat.”

The screen door had been unlocked, banging in the wind. It had been that way for hours before Susan had locked it. She was wide-awake now. “You found someone asleep in our living
room?” she said, incredulous.

“My living room,” Bliss said lightly. “My house. You’re a guest.”

Susan was looking around the room for something she could use to bludgeon an intruder to death, but everything there was too goddamn tranquil. Soft pillows. Tapestries on the walls. A poster of
some freaky Indian guru.