Shadow Creek (8 page)

“I’m just saying …”

“And I’m just asking …”

“I know what you’re asking. You don’t have to say it again.”

“And?”

“I’ll phone him every day.”

“Not good enough.”

“I don’t understand why not.”

“And I don’t understand the problem,” Jennifer said, trying not to sound as exasperated as she felt. Why did everything always have to be such a big deal? Why couldn’t at least one thing in her life be easy?

“It’s just hard for me,” Cameron said after a lengthy pause during which Jennifer wondered if she’d hung up.

“What is?”

“Seeing him like this.”

“What—you think I like it?”

“I think you’re just better at dealing with it,” Cameron said, paying her the first compliment Jennifer could ever remember getting from her sister. “I guess I’m just more sensitive than you are,” she added, immediately taking it back.

“Okay, listen. We’re going around in circles,” Jennifer said. “The fact is that I’m going away for three days and our father will be alone. It’s hot; he refuses to use the air conditioner; he may or may not remember to eat. Somebody has to check in on him. In person.”

“Fine. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Fine,” Jennifer conceded, deciding it was the best she could hope for.

Fine, she thought now, banning further thoughts of her sister from her mind with a shake of her head.

“Careful with that,” James warned, brushing several strands of Jennifer’s hair away from his face with a dramatic flick of his hand. “That hair’s a lethal weapon.”

“Sorry.”

“And speaking of lethal,” James said, lowering his voice to achieve proper dramatic effect, “can you turn the radio up a bit?”

“More details with regard to the shocking murders in the Berkshires last week,” a male voice was announcing.

“Those poor people,” Melissa said. “Can you imagine getting to be almost ninety, only to be murdered?”

“Police are refusing to confirm that one of the weapons used to slay Marie and William Carteris was the same weapon used
to kill another elderly couple, Arlene and Frank Wall, in their cottage in Plainfield the previous week. They also insist there is nothing to connect these murders to that of Brian Grierson, a hiker whose dismembered torso was discovered in a shallow grave several miles from the Walls’ cottage a few days later,” the announcer continued.

“Hello? Is anybody hearing this?” James asked. “Mountains, murders, dismemberment. What are we doing here, people?”

“This is the Adirondacks, not the Berkshires,” Val reminded him with a chuckle.

“Same difference.”

“Different states.”

“
Neighboring
states,” James pointed out. “Look. The murders all took place in isolated spots in the middle of nowhere, that’s all I’m saying.”

“The Lodge at Shadow Creek is hardly the middle of nowhere,” Jennifer said, irritation clinging to each word. What am I doing with these people? she wondered again. Why did I agree to spend almost five hours in a car with Evan’s ex-wife and her crazy friends, having to listen to talk about murder and dismemberment? Why didn’t I just say no?

But even as she was asking herself these questions, she’d already conceded the answer.

She was here for the same reason Valerie was.

Different women, same rationale.

The rationale even had a name.

It was Evan.

“If he cheated on his wife,” she heard her father say, “he’ll cheat on you.”

With his soon-to-be former wife?

Was Valerie still harboring hopes of getting back together with Evan?

Was Evan encouraging those hopes?

And if so, why?

“For God’s sake, Brianne,” Val said, interrupting Jennifer’s thoughts. “Who are you texting now?”

“Nobody.” Brianne made an exaggerated show of returning her BlackBerry to her purse. “I’m going to sleep,” she announced to the rest of the car’s inhabitants. “Wake me up when we get there.”

Great, Val thought, letting go of whatever hopes remained for some quality time with her daughter.

“And try to keep the hysteria to a minimum,” Brianne added, with a glance over her shoulder at James.

In response, James burst into song. “ ‘The hills are alive,’ ” he sang out, Val and Melissa quickly joining in.

I’m in hell, Jennifer thought sullenly, as they continued along Route 9 toward Prospect Mountain.

A
S SOON AS SHE closed her eyes, she saw the blood.

The sheer volume of it had surprised her, along with the way it had literally shot from its source in one great, exuberant whoosh. Also a surprise was its rich, bright red color. Her lips creased into a small, almost imperceptible smile. She always expected the blood to be browner, duller, less vibrant.

Vibrant, she repeated silently, chewing on the word as if it were gum. Exuberant.

Funny words to describe death.

When she was younger and she used to cut herself with a razor, she remembered watching with fascination as the rivulets of blood streamed down her thighs and calves, relief quickly overtaking the initial pain of her self-inflicted wounds.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” her friend Molly had once asked.

“No. It feels wonderful,” she’d confided with a deep, satisfied sigh, about to continue, to tell her friend that every slice into her flesh was like scratching an overwhelming itch, that each cut brought with it its own heady rush, like a narcotic, temporarily freeing her soul, releasing the demons lurking just beneath the surface of her skin. She’d stopped only because of the look of growing horror on Molly’s face. Her friend was incapable of understanding what she felt, she’d realized in that moment. It was pointless to try to explain.

“Does your mother know?” Molly had asked on another occasion.

“Of course not.”

“But there are marks all over your legs.”

“She doesn’t notice.”

“What if she does?”

“I’ll tell her I fell into a bunch of bushes.”

“What if she doesn’t believe you?”

“That’s her problem.”

“I think you should stop,” Molly cautioned before switching to another—safer—topic.

And she did stop, although not because of Molly’s misguided concern or any fear that her mother might find out. She quit for the same reason she quit most of the things she’d once enjoyed—books, hobbies, friends. She got bored.

Besides, she’d found something else that was even better at releasing her inner demons.

She’d met a boy.

A boy who not only understood, but supported and encouraged her darker impulses. Her “uniqueness,” as he liked to say.

The smile widened on her lips. You don’t call someone his age a boy, she decided, even though she wasn’t sure exactly how old he was. Somewhere between twenty and thirty. He was
vague about specifics. “What does it matter?” he’d ask. “Age is just a number. It’s irrelevant.” He stopped short of saying, “You’re as young as you feel,” for which she was grateful. It was something she remembered her grandmother saying with irritating frequency.

He was similarly vague about his name. “Call me Ishmael,” he’d said on one occasion, laughing with her at the reference to
Moby Dick
, a book they’d both loathed in high school. At other times he called himself Jonah or Moses or Elijah. He loved biblical names. Once he’d even told her to call him Jesus, but the name had proved to be something of a deterrent when it came to having sex, so he’d quickly abandoned it. Lately he’d turned to more mundane monikers—Brad, Steve, Michael. “I refuse to be contained by the boundaries imposed on me by others. I am whoever I want to be,” he said, encouraging her to follow suit. “You are your own creation.”

And so one day she created Catherine, and in the days after that, Veronica, Clementine, Joanne.

By far and away, her favorite so far was Nikki. Nikki, with two
k
‘s.

It was Nikki who had the most fun.

“Call me Nikki,” she’d instructed that silly woman at the cottage on the edge of Shadow Creek. Stupid woman, she thought now. Selfish, too. Wouldn’t even let me use her hair dryer when there was one right under her bathroom sink. She’d stumbled on it when she went to take a shower. The thought turned her smile into a frown. It had taken the better part of thirty minutes to wash away that stupid woman’s blood. It had gotten on everything—her clothes, her hair, even her teeth.

“Did you get any in your mouth?” Kenny had asked with obvious worry. He’d been calling himself Kenny for several weeks now. The name was good luck, he’d said, although he
couldn’t say why. “Wouldn’t want you picking up any strange viruses.”

“I didn’t get any in my mouth,” she told him, so touched by his concern for her welfare that she could barely breathe. Nobody had ever worried about her like that before. Nobody had ever been so protective. Nobody had ever made her feel so special, so loved. She would do anything not to disappoint him.

Anything.

They’d made themselves dinner with the leftovers in the fridge, helped themselves to two bottles of wine, then had sex repeatedly in their victims’ too-soft bed, listening as the still-torrential rain pummeled the roof over their heads.

“That’s one hell of a storm,” Kenny said.

“Good thing we’re inside,” she agreed.

“Safe and snug as two bugs in a rug.”

“I can’t believe they don’t have a TV.”

“Cheap bastards,” Kenny said.

“You should have seen their faces when I told them you’d cut the wires.” She laughed. “When they realized something wasn’t right, that they were going to die … That was the best part.”

“Sorry I missed it.”

“Next time you’ll be there,” she said. “So you won’t miss anything.”

“Thinking about what’s best for me, are you?”

“Always,” she said.

And it was true. Ever since they’d been introduced—“Call me Jason,” he’d said—she’d thought of little else.

“Honestly,” her mother had remarked. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. It’s like you’re on another planet.”

It wasn’t even that he was all that good-looking. Rather, he was what her grandmother used to describe as “interesting.”
His features were somewhat coarse—his nose wide, his lips full, his eyes an unremarkable shade of brown. Still, there was something about him that commanded attention. Maybe it was the way he stood, the insolent tilt of his shoulders, the subtle forward thrust of his slender hips, the manner in which his thumbs hooked into the side pockets of his too-tight jeans, the way his eyes appeared paradoxically vacant and knowing at the same time.

The way he looked into her eyes, and then past them, as if he could see right through them into the furthest recesses of her soul, effortlessly settling into the darkest corner of all.

Her secret place.

“We don’t keep secrets,” he’d told her. “Not from each other.” Which was when he told her about his parents’ multiple marriages, how he’d taken a knife to stepmother number two after a particularly nasty argument and been placed in an adult psychiatric hospital for the better part of a year, how he’d slept in a ward with psychotics and schizophrenics, all much older than his eleven years, and how he’d been raped by one of the attendants, a middle-aged man with graying hair and a potbelly, whose breath smelled of black licorice, how even now the slightest whiff of black licorice made him retch.

He told her that while he was in the hospital, his mother had married some old guy from Texas and left New York without so much as a word of goodbye, and how he’d been released into the not-so-welcoming arms of stepmother number three, who had two children of her own and who was forever calling them by each other’s names. “That’s when I realized how unimportant such things were,” he told her. “Call me Daniel, call me Frank, call me Ishmael. It doesn’t matter what you call me. It’s not who I am.”

I love you, she’d thought, whoever you are.

“I am everyone,” he’d continued, unprompted. “I am everyone and I am no one. I am whoever I choose to be. Who are you?” he’d challenged, staring deep into her eyes, his hand reaching out to caress her cheek. His touch sent spasms of electricity throughout her body, causing her knees to wobble and her hands to shake.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, completely in his thrall. “I don’t know who I am.”

“You are whoever you choose to be,” he intoned solemnly.

“Whoever I choose to be,” she agreed.

Which was when she’d told him about her grandparents.

“My mother used to take me over to their house every Saturday night when I was a little girl,” she began, “so that they could babysit me while she and my father went out. My grandparents had these friends they used to play bridge with, the Farellis. Mr. Farelli was pretty good-looking for an old guy, but his wife was really overweight and unattractive. She had this big mole on her upper lip and there were always a couple of hairs sticking out of it. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you. Anyway,” she continued with a laugh, “one Saturday night when I was about five or six, I was at my grandparents’ house, in the guest room, in bed, trying to sleep, and listening to my grandparents and the Farellis hollering at each other, which they always did when they played bridge. I actually grew up thinking that screaming was part of the game.” She laughed again. “So Mrs. Farelli gets all upset at something my grandfather says, and she comes into the guest room to cool off. And she sits down on the side of the sofa bed—I’m not even sure she realized I was there—and she’s yakking away to herself, and I’m, like, captivated by that ugly mole on her upper lip, which is moving back and forth as she’s talking, with these hairs wagging at me like tails, and I suddenly reach up and grab one of them. Pulled
the damn thing right out. Took half the mole with it. And Mrs. Farelli starts screeching and carrying on, like I’d deliberately tried to maim her or something. I mean, I’m a kid, right? What do I know? What’s she doing in my room anyway? And then suddenly everybody’s in the room, and what’s left of that damn mole starts bleeding like there’s no tomorrow, and I’m watching this blood dripping down her lips into her mouth, which is wide open because she’s still screaming, and I’m, like, fascinated by it. I can’t take my eyes off it. And now everybody’s yelling. ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid? How could you do such a terrible thing?’ And I say, ‘But it looks better now. It was ugly.’ And my grandmother says, ‘Who do you think you are, dummy, to decide what’s ugly and what isn’t?’ And then she yanks me out of bed and turns me over her knee and spanks me, hard, right in front of everybody. And then she calls my parents and makes them come over and get me, says there’s something very wrong with me, and they were really mad because I ruined their evening, right? And that was the last time I ever stayed overnight at my grandparents’ house.”