SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (39 page)

“Sure. Why not. Then you can go out to some shit-kicking country-dance place and get some big ole cowboy with a ring of keys dangling from his back pocket to waltz you around the floor.”

“Now you're kidding me.”

“Not about those cowboys. They really do carry big ugly goddamn key rings.”

Charlene laughed.

Shadow settled for five hundred a week to start out at the Hot Spot. She was told tips from couch and table dancing were all hers, but she couldn't trust herself to get that close to the patrons. She didn't want them touching her, or even trying to. All the moves came back to her after a couple of nights, but she was still a little stiff and shy. No one except Scott had seen her bare breasts for ten years. It was difficult to parade around undressed again after leading a normal life for so long.

The thought brought her up sharply. Normal life. How normal could it have really been when her husband carried the seeds of madness and destruction around in his brain like a cancer waiting to spread? Still. For a while, she had been deceived into believing she was living a normal life. Maybe that was the shame of it; it was surely why the shock was so complete.

Bertram said she'd have to do longer sets, but for right now she was on trial. She knew she'd get the extra fifty a week she had asked of him. And if she danced more than once, she'd up it another hundred, maybe two.

“Sky's the limit, hon,” Charlene told her. “You make them money, they pay to keep you.”

On the way home to Seabrook, she picked up some Chinese-to-go from a Hunan restaurant. It was eleven-thirty when she walked into the mansion. She breathed in the scent of industrial-strength pine cleaner. It reminded her of the maid's job. She never thought she'd be able to look at a toilet again without thinking about cleaning under the rim.

She wrinkled her nose and went searching for Charlene. She found her in one of the four bathrooms, down on her knees scrubbing tiles. Shadow suspected that's how she spent all her waking hours—cleaning. It was Charlene who would have been a good maid. Here she had a big place to keep up. She'd stay busy. She might not start talking to unseen beings and hearing voices in her head if she had something to keep her occupied.

“Chinese! I love Chinese take-out. Did you bring chopsticks? I can eat with chopsticks, you know, and fortune cookies. Did you get fortune cookies? Honey, I tell you, this is turning into a sweet deal. I almost believe I won't have to go back to Marion for a while, what with all this luck.”

They camped around the big glass coffee table in the cold, cavernous living room, and ate from the white cartons.

“They like you, don't they?” Charlene asked. “I told you they would. It's this sexy look you got. And that cut you got for your hair, it's perfect. You tried table dancing yet?”

“I don't want to do that.” She stabbed an egg noodle with her fork and, holding her head back, inelegantly dropped it into her open mouth.

“Why not? They ain't allowed to touch you. They touch you, the management throws their asses out the door.”

“I don't want to get that close. They're all a bunch of slime buckets and horny assholes. They wouldn't be in places like that if they weren't.”

“You're there. And you ain't no slime bucket.”

“I might be.” The image of a bucket of slime flashed in her mind and it amused her so much she thought everything about their conversation funny as hell. She took a bite of an egg roll and grinned big so Charlene could see the cabbage leaves dangling from her bared teeth.

“You are not. You are the sweetest, kindest, best. . .”

“I'm a slut of the sluttiest kind.” She tore off a piece of egg roll and slapped it to her forehead where it would stay stuck if she tilted backwards just a bit. She stared at Charlene innocently, egg roll on her head.

“You are not. You're just the prettiest little . . .”

“I am the Whore of Babylon.” She grabbed up some of the red sweet-and-sour sauce from the chicken entree and smeared it onto her lips and cheeks.

Charlene couldn't help it, she couldn't be serious any longer. She burst out with a laugh that echoed overhead against the two-story ceiling and bounced off the yards and yards of white-marble tile floor.

Shadow pretended to ignore the mess she had dripping from her face while she took up a fortune cookie and cracked it open to delicately retrieve the little slip of paper inside. Charlene fell back onto her elbows, she was laughing so hard.

Shadow arched her neck to keep the clot of egg roll from sliding past her eyebrow into her eye. She read aloud her fortune, “You will dance naked for money and men will leave slobber trails on your feet.”

Now Charlene lost it completely and rolled between the coffee table and the white leather sofa. “Stop it, oh God, stop it, you're killing me . . .”

Shadow swiped a trail of red sauce from her cheekbone and licked her finger. “You are a bonafide crazy person,” she said.

Charlene's laughter turned into howls and she had to hold onto her stomach, it ached so much. “I know! That's what they've been telling me for years,” she screamed. “And I'm going to piss myself too!”

“That's what I said. You're a bonafide pissy-panted crazy person. I always knew that.”

Eight

At home Son lived a sedentary and withdrawn existence. When his mother insisted, he might sit with her and talk a while, but she knew he wasn't comfortable with idle chitchat so she asked this of him less often as her health failed. Nevertheless, now that she was confined most of the time to bed, she needed his company more—this was something he understood—but he possessed no road map to show him the way through the quagmire of what he thought of as her petty, daily concerns.

He went over this particular resentment now as he sat, like a prisoner held fast by invisible chains, in an overstuffed easy chair across from her bed.

“How is the new book progressing?” she asked.

She fancied herself his source of encouragement and alleged to take great pride in his creative achievements. But the problem remained. He had nothing to say to her really—nothing that he hadn't already said a hundred times before—and his fund of patience grew leaner the longer he felt obligated to sit in the chair, bound by her infirmity. “It's progressing slowly.”

“Where are you sending Eddie Lapin this time?”

“Maybe to England.”

She clasped together her spindly hands. “To England! London, you mean, like Sherlock Holmes?”

“No, Mother, to the moors. Off to the bleak, forbidding moors where heather grows and neighbors kill neighbors.”

Well, that's still delightful. I'm sure your editor will love it, Son. It sounds like a perfectly grisly place for your detective to solve a murder.”

“I suppose so.” He counted the open crocheted flower petals in a doily spread over the chair arm. Five in each flower. Why hadn't she chosen six or four, why five? Why any at all? What was the purpose of a doily anyway? It was positively Victorian to have them draped over chair arms and backs, spreading like creeping lichens over table tops and shelves. When she died he would . . .

The curious thought made him blink back sudden tears. He didn't hate her. He didn't want her to die. Not his own mother. He loved his mother. She was in all ways perfect and she had been good to him. How could he be such a shit and go about thinking of what he'd do when she died? Look how she cared about his livelihood and his interests.

Look how much time he was spending counting crocheted flower petals and wishing to be anywhere, anywhere at all, but here with her.

“I don't have it all worked out yet.” He cleared his throat, and swept the idea of what life would be like without her from his thoughts completely. “I don't know who the murderer is.” I haven't gotten that far into the book I'm copying.

“Who are the suspects?” She had taken a fat pillow from her back and plumped it to press just behind her bony hips. He thought her color was good today. She wasn't as pale as usual.

“There's a mine worker and a handyman carpenter. There's the maid at the rectory. And there's a woman who is visiting from London, hoping to marry the local barrister.”

“Why does she want to do that?”

He waved the question off with a hand. “I don't think it's her. She's too obvious. I expect it will have to be the rectory maid. She's incredibly jealous of the dead man's relationship with her Catholic priest. That's how she thinks of him—as belonging to her.”

“She's in love with him then? Oh, that's so sad.”

“Did you love my father?” He hadn't known he was going to ask that. He had heard over and over again from her that she had loved his father at one time. ‘At one time' never satisfied him. What happened to make her stop loving him, why didn't she ever tell him that? He deserved to know the details. The man was dead for all he knew, and he had never had the opportunity to meet him. He deserved all the details of their life together because he had been so cheated.

“I loved him at one time,” she said carefully. He noticed her gaze had wandered from him to the wall just over his left shoulder. In order to lie to him more easily?

He sighed and began, little by little, bunching up the doily into his fist.

“Son, he was as good a man as he could be. He was thrilled when I found out, after trying for so many years, that I was going to have you.” Now she was looking at him again. Perhaps some of this was truth.

“So why did you leave him months after I was born if he was such a good man?”

“He became progressively . . . unkind.”

“Unkind? Did he beat you or something?”

She shook her head and the cap of tight curls clung in place like a helmet.

When she didn't continue, he prodded, “How was he unkind? You never told me that before.”

“He couldn't help it. None of it was his fault. He was a nervous man. You have to remember that neither one of us was young anymore. A baby in the house . . . it just . . . he couldn't . . .”

“He hated me.”

“No, Son! He never hated you.”

“Then what happened? I think it's time you tell me, Mother. Past time.”

It was her turn to sigh. She brought her gaze level with his and spoke softly. “He had a nervous condition.”

Son shook his head, puzzled. “What does that mean? He had a nervous tic? He snapped his fingers at the dinner table? He paced floors?”

“Don't be flip. When I say ‘nervous condition’ I mean something quite a bit more serious and you knew what I meant.” The scold left her voice when she continued. “Your father was prone to rages. I didn't know it until after we were married a while. And the rages were prompted by something no one could figure out. He lost his temper all the time. He had no control over it. Out of the blue he'd become thoroughly enraged, shouting at the top of his lungs so the neighbors could hear . . . smashing things . . .”

“He didn't hurt you?”

“He took it out on objects around him, never me. Your crying—and babies cry, they can't help it—but your crying sent him into cataclysmic anger. He would go through the house breaking chairs and china and anything else that got in his way. I'd try to soothe you, but the noise he made and his shouting frightened you so that you cried all the harder.”

“What happened?”

“I left him. One day I packed our things while he was at work and I . . . left him.”

“He never knew where you went?” He knew this part of the family history. They had skipped town, which at the time was Sacramento, California, and taken up residence in Houston, Texas. She was afraid his father would follow them. She lost touch with him forever.

“He never found us,” she said. “Sometimes I think I should have tried to stay longer.”

He thought so too. Maybe then he might have met his father face to face.

“But he was too violent,” she continued. “I was scared all the time. In the beginning he'd apologize and say he had had a bad day, he didn't know what was wrong with him, he wouldn't do it again. Yet the next day something would anger him and off he'd go, stomping around the house like a bull. It wasn't a good environment for a child. I did my best, Son. I'm sorry.”

“Why didn't you ever tell me before? It would have made things more understandable.”

“Do you want the truth or a convenient lie?”

He had the doily balled tight in his fist, knuckles showing white. “I want the truth, Mother.” Don't lie to me. You've been lying to me for years now.

“I . . . I was afraid. I had to wait to be sure his condition . . . that you didn't . . .”

“What?” Though he was not so stupid that he didn't see where she was headed, and what she was going to say to him, what he expected her to say, it still caused flashing lights to go off in his brain, powder kegs of brilliance that numbed him.

“I didn't know if perhaps you had inherited . . .”

“You thought I'd be like him, didn't you? You wouldn't tell me because you had to see if I'd grow into a violent man, too. It was more than any ’nervous condition,’ wasn't it? He was insane or near enough to have been handed a medical certificate saying so.”

Her gaze wandered away to the window where the hydrangea had shaken out great purple heads of blooms. “I didn't know what to think. I was . . . worried.”

“Well, are you satisfied I'm not like him? I don't break things and I don't shout.” Then he laughed and she turned back to him. “I just solve murder mysteries for a living. That's pretty violent.”

She smiled with him now. “I love you, Son. If I could have given you your father, I would have endured almost anything. But it was hellish. It was a nightmare, and I couldn't subject you to that kind of household. You were my responsibility. I owed it to you to get us out before it was too late.”

He kept his thoughts to himself about that. He would rather not discuss her motivation. He knew she needed his approval for it, however, so he stood from the chair, dropping the balled doily into the seat behind him, and he went to her bed. He cupped her old face in his big hands. He could smell the powder she sprinkled on her nightclothes. Prince Machiavelli's Windsong. Sweet, floral, heady. He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Mother, I love you, too. You've always done your best.”