Strangers (29 page)

The tendons on Claire’s neck twitched spastically. One, two, three, she blinked at him.

Christ, Michael thought, the old crone really acted weird around him. Big change now that her gray matter had turned to Jello. He’d always been the number one boy, the dearly devoted son-in-law, and bet your ass he’d worked hard for
that
image.

“I know you can’t really say anything yet, Mom,” Michael said.
Sure, Mama-in-law, I want to do all I can for you now that you’re a fucked up wreck! “So
if there’s something you’d like, how about you nod your head and we’ll figure it out from there, okay?”

Claire Wynkoop didn’t nod her head nor, shake it from side to side. Her eyes zoomed in on Michael’s, clicked and locked onto that invisible “here to there” pathway, and blinked: one, two, three.

“What is it, Mom?” Michael said. He stepped into the room.

She seemed to shrink, cowering, as though she were somehow trying to recede so far into herself that she disappeared.

Michael said, “Mom…”

Claire glared at him. Her back straightened. She didn’t blink. There was no mistaking what he saw in her steady gaze.
She hated him! She feared him!

Claire raised her left hand. Around her head she made a motion as thought drawing a wild profusion of Little Orphan Annie curls. Then she pointed at him. The index finger of her left hand was accusing—condemning.

Hate and fear—and she
was
telling him
why!

His heart raced. He had a strange sensation, completely unlike anything he had ever known: the skin around his eyes, his nose, the corners of his mouth, felt as though it were tightening.

For a fraction of a second, he wondered if he were afraid.

Michael moved closer. He bent at the knees, squatted, the tips of his shoes almost touching her slipper-shod feet. His voice was gentle, soothing, reassuring. “Mom, I think you see something and it disturbs you. I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t want you to be upset. Mom, I love you. You know that.”

Her eyes were an icy denunciation.

“Mom,” Michael said, “
this
is Michael, okay? I married your daughter. I’m the father of your grandchildren. Mom, I think you’re all confused and upset. You’ve been sick, Mom. It could make you see things that aren’t there, or things that aren’t true, that don’t make any sense. So, Mom, you trust me, okay?”

Whether she did grant him her trust or if she simply decided that she was weary and worn down and could no longer cope with her knowledge, he would never know, but Claire raised her left hand. Then around his head she traced the outline of his aura.
Goddamn her! She
does
see it! Goddamn her, goddamn her. She’s touching it—I can
feel
her touching…

Claire’s lips moved. Her voice tiredly emerged with the timbre but not the volume of a long unoiled door-hinge: “Ruh-hed.”

Ruh-hed.
Christ, there was no doubt in his mind. She was somehow seeing his aura! For a moment, he envied her seeing what he himself had never seen either on himself or on anyone else.

Then he knew he had to kill her.

But careful, he had to be careful. He could not give himself away, not now, when The Time of the Strangers was so close. He had to be sure there would be no
suspicion, that
Beth would not think…

Yes, he had to kill her.

Now.

And he did.

— | — | —

SIXTEEN

“WHY DID you decide to see me?”

“My husband thought it was a good idea. And I talked it over with a friend”—she was spitting out the words, one tumbling into and over the next—“who knows a lot about psychology. I mean, he is a psychologist and he teaches psychology. Really I guess that’s it.”

She crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt,
dug
at the cuticle of her thumb with the nail of her index finger. Her gaze skittered across the office; she didn’t want to look directly at him. There was a Miro lithograph on the wall, a Mr. Coffee on a stand near the picture window, a mahogany desk. When she’d stepped in, she had almost expected a Victorian leather sofa, just like all the psychiatrist cartoons. No couch, though, just the two Danish modem
arm-chairs
they occupied, set at angles on either side of a low, tiered lamp table.

“When I ask questions, Beth, I’m seeking information so that I can help you,” Jan Pretre said. “You didn’t answer my question at all, did you?”

“No,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Jan.”

“Not Jan, if you please, Beth,” he corrected. “Not here. This isn’t a social situation. We both want this to be a professional relationship and that means you’ve come to see Dr. Pretre. Is that all right?”

She nodded.

“Very well. I’ll ask you again. Take all the time you’d like thinking about it, but give me a real answer. What are you doing here? Why do you think you need—a psychiatrist?”

Forcing herself to speak slowly, to put a pause between each word, she said, “I need help, Dr. Pretre.”

She did; she had no doubt of that.

That was why she had agreed to Michael’s suggestion: “I don’t know exactly what’s happening to you and I don’t know why it’s happening but we’ve got to do something, Beth!”

That was how he’d begun, three days ago, Monday morning, at the breakfast table, after the children had gone to school. Michael spoke calmly, saying precisely what she herself thought, but the sound of his voice made the skin at the nape of her neck feel as though it were being pricked by dozens of tiny needles.

“Beth,” Michael said. “I don’t think I can help you. You don’t talk to me and you don’t listen to me.”

Talk to him?
God, it required all her will to remain sitting there in the kitchen with him. She wanted to run out the door in her nightgown and slippers, jump into the Chevette and drive away, not giving a thought to a destination, or maybe yanking the wheel hard, the gas pedal to the floor, sending the car zooming from the highway into a telephone pole and ending it, ending this nightmare that possessed her during sleep and enshrouded her by day.

“Remember Jan Pretre, the psychiatrist, Beth?” Michael said.

She did. That afternoon, she’d made the appointment and now she was here, blurting
still
more of an answer to his question: “I feel, oh hell, I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Go on with that, Beth,” Jan Pretre said.

“I have these recurring, obsessive thoughts, these delusions…”

“Why don’t you tell me about it
without
the jargon.”

“Oh, I’ve been thinking these crazy, crazy things I can’t get out of my mind, about Michael.”

“I want you to be more specific, Beth. Tell me one particular crazy thing.”

Head down, Beth studied her hand. She had ripped her cuticle bloody.

She took a deep breath. “All right, this was about a month ago, right after we saw you at Engelkings. Well, it was the day after that.”

It came back to her as it had been coming back, repeating itself again and again, as the totality of the experience, its sights and sounds and smell—and terror. “I was bathing,” she said. “It’s funny because I remember thinking how happy I was. For the first time in a long time, yes, I was happy.”

The smell of rose-scented bubble bath made her think of flowers she would see again next spring. She swirled a fingertip in the water, watching the islands of dissipating white bubbles break apart and then lazily link together in new shapes and sizes.

“You know, it felt so fine that it was me there inside my skin that I started singing. Oh, I can’t carry a tune if it has only one note, but I was singing away, and slipping down in the tub so the water lapped at my chin, and then I heard…”

Even with the bathroom door closed, the sounds were perfectly clear: There was a bump and then another so
like
it it might have been an echo. Something slid down the wall, like the sound of a rat’s running feet, and she heard the tinkling crackle of breaking glass, and she knew precisely what had happened: a picture falling from the wall by the staircase, the glass shattering. Then there was a bump—it was no louder than that—and then, just as Michael screamed, “No!” so heavy a thud that the house actually shook. At least, she thought she felt that. Footsteps pounded down the stairs. Michael screamed again, this time, “Beth!”

She leaped out of the tub. She snatched a bath towel from the rack and tied it around her. The bathroom rug slipped underfoot. She fell against the vanity. It didn’t hurt then. Two days later, the bruise on her hip was a gloomy rainbow of
color,
it was still there, laded yellow and green.

“So I ran out into the hall and I saw what had happened.”

Mother lay at the foot of the stairs. Michael was beside her on his knees. Mother was dead She had to be. She looked broken, as though if you tugged at her hand it would come loose at the wrist, as if a touch would send her head rolling across the floor.

“I just stood there. I guess I was in shock.

Michael looked up at me. ‘She fell. I saw her. She was right at the top of the stairs. Then she went down.’ That’s what he said.”

Beth put the heels of her hands to her temples. Her mind was exploding. She pressed hard, holding her head together. The towel around her became untied, slid down her body. She felt the humiliating vulnerability of nakedness and there was her mother—deadeadead—and there was Michael and she was caught in a debauched surrealistic painting. Death and Michael and Nude on a Staircase and then she screamed.

“‘What did you do to her? What did you do?’

I kept yelling that at him and then the next thing I can clearly remember, I was dressed and we were at the hospital and Mother was DOA—I heard someone say that at the emergency room—and then a doctor, maybe a nurse, gave me something, and everything started to blur together…”

“I see,” Jan Pretre said. “Tell me, Beth, have you had feelings of, let’s call it ‘mistrust’ about your husband in the past?”

“I…I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Maybe I
do
know,” Beth said slowly. “Okay, I’ve sometimes had this idea that Michael isn’t at all what he appears to be, that he’s, well, a different man entirely. It’s hard to put into words.”

“You’re doing fine,” Jan Pretre assured her.

She went on, telling him what she could in the best way she could. It sounded insane, she realized, but…
Hey, he’s a headshrinker and you’re supposed to tell a shrink your insane thoughts!

“All right,” he said. “Let’s talk about your father.”

“What? I thought we were talking about my feelings about my husband.”

“But now it’s time to talk about something else,” Jan Pretre said. “We’re on an investigation, Beth, looking for clues to help us determine
why you
think what you do about Michael. You’ve labeled those thoughts ‘crazy,’ and certainly they seem irrational. We have to hunt for the roots of your fantasy so that we can deal with the cause of the problem and not merely this symptom.”

“You’re the doctor,” Beth said weakly.

“Yes, I am,” Jan Pretre said, “and it’s important you remember that, Beth. I ask questions, offer suggestions, and sometimes flat-out tell you what to do and how to do it because I have reasons. You’ve come to me for help—and if I’m to provide that, you’ll have to have confidence in me.”