SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (44 page)

She had not always heard voices. They had started up in the past ten years or so, tormenting her, breaking down the borders of reality so that she was confused, incapable of understanding where she was and what she was doing. Doctors at Marion State did nothing to alleviate this torture beyond giving her medication that dulled her senses and made her dream while awake. They said the Thorazane would help, but it hadn't. She wasn't a proper schizophrenic, she supposed, or so they had told her.

“Stop it.” She whispered, startling herself, but she had to plead with the sounds she could still hear even though her ears were sealed shut with the thick flesh of her hands. “Please, stop it.”

She turned and ran the rest of the way across the catwalk, rushed down one open side where the pool was at her left. She found a doorway and hurried through it. She found herself in an empty room that might never have been used for anything, by anyone. It had one entrance and exit, and at the end of it windows faced the bay. She couldn't see the water for the fog. Everywhere the fog. And that lurker within it, the one who had caused the voices to come.

She turned back, flew past the catwalk, to the opening into the big back section of the mansion. Here was another living area, one that provided a view of the bay on sunny days. The furniture here was not as good as that in the formal living room at the front of the house. The long sofa was covered in a brown plaid weave and there were worn spots on the armrests and two of the flattened cushions. There was a wicker rocker facing the windows, the sunflower-patterned seat pad ripped and mildewed; a maple coffee table, legs scarred; two extra tables too tall for the sofa, one holding a squat aqua-colored lamp with a stained shade the color of smoke.

Charlene shivered, memorizing the dimensions, the placement of the furniture. She rushed through the remaining rooms—two baths, one full, one a half-bath with toilet and sink; another kitchen, but one not nearly as set up or roomy as the one on the other side of the house—the refrigerator was white and old, but still running, she could hear the compressor humming; the stove was a countertop affair; no oven; a table painted black, two uncomfortable chairs pushed beneath it. There were two more empty rooms, like the first she'd entered, meant to be bedrooms, she suspected. One faced the bay, as had the first one, the other was on the side of the house facing the back driveway and the weedy field beyond.

She wanted across the catwalk and away from this empty section of the mansion, but she dreaded the walk across the big open space, and the fog at the windows, and the chance of seeing the coated, hatted figure sliding along the outside again. She drew a deep breath, like a runner readying for the sprint, and, gripping the catwalk's railing on each side of her, she took off at a dead run for the other side. Safe, safe, safe, she repeated to herself as she ran, thinking if she whispered it furiously enough and long enough it would be true, that nothing could harm her. Above her magical incantation the boys' laughter rang out as loud and clear as bells in a Sunday-morning village, and she ducked her chin to her chest as she skittered across the vast openness, speaking louder and louder until she was shouting, SAFE, SAFE, SAFE, SAFE . . . !

Out of breath, wrapped in her baggy sweater, trembling with relief, she came out onto the marble landing overlooking the front entrance and curving stairway. Ahead of her was a flicker of the man at the front door, trying the door knob. She saw him silhouetted in the panels of pebbled, leaded glass. The hat brim was angled down to obscure his face.

She caught and held her breath, old fears returning to paralyze her where she stood.

She watched the gold burnished knob twist an inch one way and then the other, and she caught the scream in her throat before it escaped. The knob stilled, the man disappeared, or never was, she didn't know. She had no way of knowing if she was truly in danger or conjuring it. She had lost the capacity to tell the difference so long ago. It was hell never to know when things might be real or imagined, true hell so much worse than the one preachers talked about from pulpits.

An inner voice—calm and in control—told her to drop to her knees, to crawl beneath the banister railing, to try hiding from view. It would not work, though she obeyed the voice. The chandelier a story above her shone down yellow and bright and revealing.

She crawled this way until she reached her room, and did not come to her feet again until she made it to the drapes hanging to one side of her double, ceiling-to-floor windows. She caught at the drawstring, yanking closed the drapes with a rattling swish. She stood, watching them sway, then hang silently, rebuking her.

She sat on the side of her bed, breathing noisily through her open mouth. Had there been someone outside, peeking in at her? Did she just imagine it? Was he at the door just then, trying the brass knob, skating away into the fog when he found it locked? Was it the rapist who had stolen half her mind?

But no one could get inside. This was a fortress, locked and barred, and secure. Safe. She wouldn't be caught again doing a house chore, taken from behind, astonished to find a hand over her mouth.

Yet the house was too large and empty, full of boys at a party, diving and swimming and involved in horseplay. It was shadowed and dark, lost in a fog so thick it was worse than a somber winter night. That was not safety. That held no security.

Don't think about it.

She wouldn't. She didn't have to. No one could make her afraid if she didn't allow it. Instead, she could go over the map in her head and lay out the rooms, the halls, the closets, the cubbyholes, the exits and entrances, the six-car underground garage that sat empty beneath the back of the house, the immense ballroom, two kitchens, a massive dining room, the men's and women's bathrooms near the pool—with six toilet stalls and six showers in each—the bars, those wonderful bars, all those black wrought-iron bars that covered the entire three stories. The only place she had not investigated, besides the atrium maze, because she couldn't force herself inside, was the dark, muggy, earth-smelling passage beneath the brick catwalk. She'd never go in there. It was too much like a tomb, claustrophobic, never-ending. It was some kind of passage on that floor connecting the two sections of the mansion the way the catwalk connected it on the upper floor. Who could go in there, though? How could anyone walk down a concrete passageway where spiders and roaches and rats and maybe even snakes might slither?

She glanced at the bedside clock she'd brought from the hospital, a wind-up Big Ben she carried with her everywhere. It was eight o'clock. Shadow had been gone an hour. She wouldn't be back until the middle of the morning, three or four a.m. Until then Charlene had to make do. She had to keep the voices out of her head, and the stranger at the windows out of the house. That was—she counted on her fingers—seven or eight hours before she could relax.

She would have to stay busy. When Shadow worked, Charlene worked. It was an arrangement she thought only fair. And she did have to keep herself sane when she was alone—that was the hardest time, and the most difficult thing to do. It had been easier in the state hospital. There were other women to keep her company, life stories to listen to and recall, people who needed her to care for them, to talk to them.

On the streets, before knowing Shadow, Charlene had suffered the worst of all. No one would listen to her. No one! Not even the bums and street people who seemed to listen to one another, at least. They called her crazy lady and shooed her away. Her life was in constant peril, ever veering out of control. She imagined every person she saw whispered at her back, every glance her way one of hatred, every man who came as close as three feet a sexual menace.

She smiled now, thinking of what good fortune she was enjoying. Shadow did listen. Shadow never made fun of her or told her to shut up and go away. She even, on occasion, held conversations with her, just as if she were real and worthy of attention. Shadow brought her take-out food some nights. She let her run with her, and exercise with her on the living room rug. She complimented her cooking, though Charlene knew it was really not that good, and she admired how she kept the house so clean, so shining—“like jewels in a crown,” that's what Shadow told her, that she made everything sparkly and new the way it once might have been.

Charlene heard a light tapping—tap tap tap—at the window covered by the drapes and she started from the bed in wordless fright, the folds of her skirt clutched in both fists. She stood all atremble, listening for it again. When it did not come, after a full fifteen minutes of stiff waiting, she was able to let go of her skirt.

She had to stop thinking she was being hounded day and night. Oh, he was out there, he followed her and threatened her, that was the truth, no matter what the therapists said about persecution complexes and hallucinations and paranoid delusions, but not all the time. Not every minute.

He probably wasn't there now. The fog cover had made her nervous and hysterical. He wasn't there any more than the boys who laughed and played at the poolside were there. Products of her sensitive and exaggerated imagination, that's all they were.

“I'll make strawberry shortcake,” she said aloud. Talking made her feel safer. It was a real voice and centered her in her head where she could tell the sounds came from her thoughts.

She went to the kitchen and turned on all the lights: the one over the sink, the fluorescent rectangle overhead, the light in the walk-in pantry. She closed the blinds at the window over the sink. That did away with the slinking figure she kept spying outside the house. She lined up her ingredients on the long counter. There was the packet of soft spongy shortcakes she had asked Shadow to buy, the green plastic basket of ripe strawberries, the tub of whipped cream. She cleaned the strawberries, lopping off the green leaves, washing the ripe fruit, slicing them one by one into a bowl. She added a half cup of sugar and stirred and stirred. She let it sit a while to soak in the sweetness while she prepared the round cakes on individual saucers.

Shadow wouldn't eat more than one. She had to watch her figure, after all. But Charlene could eat all the rest, the remaining five. All at once or over a period of a couple of days, anything she liked, because she was free . . . “White and twenty-one,” she finished aloud, laughing at herself. Happy now. Doing something. Making things right and real.

Look at the strawberries, she told herself, in the dissolved sugar, how red the juice! Feel the way the cake snaps back if I make an indentation with my finger. Taste how the whipped cream melts on the tongue, sweet and light as a summer cloud. She nearly danced in delight at how sensuous the food made her feel.

Life was glorious with Shadow. It was the way life should be, a friend on your side, a person to care for and watch after, to clean for, to cook for, to be proud of when she brought you money to spend on yourself for anything.

“Buy some clothes,” Shadow told her. “Buy a hamster or some guppies or a dog. Dye your hair, Charlene, or get a bicycle. Anything you want, you buy. This money's yours.” And she did. At the dime store in LaPorte she bought Magic Rocks and put them in a jar of water to watch them grow. She bought a fistful of pale pink roses made from sea shells. She bought a cup and saucer that said, “Texas Is the Place You Want To Be.”

Her room filled with things she had never been able to buy before, things she'd lusted after and hadn't the nerve to steal when Marion State let her out on her sojourns. Shadow never once said she was wasting money or that she should have bought something else. Shadow laughed happily on seeing the purchases, and sometimes drank her coffee from the Texas cup.

While swooping heaping spoonfuls of sweetened strawberries into the cake cups, Charlene halted with the spoon in the air, and thought a black thought that came like the fog from out at sea, quickly, covering everything and blotting out the world. Shadow was crying in the night.

Was that last night, after they had gone to bed? Yes. Wakened from a sound sleep, Charlene heard her weeping, inconsolably, the cries muffled. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't her imagination because it had made her come awake, disturbed her sleep. She had tiptoed to the bedroom door and opened it. The crying was louder. She crept down the hall to Shadow's room and stood outside the door to make sure. It was weeping, all right, real and heartbroken.

Now what should she do about that? She dumped the strawberries onto the cake and began filling another one. What could she do about it? Shouldn't people be allowed to cry when they needed to? Didn't it help them to cry, to wash away the pain inside?

But she had never seen or heard Shadow cry before. Not in the hospital. Not in this house. And now that she had found her in that condition she realized Shadow might not be as strong and dependable as she had thought in the beginning. She might still be sick, the same as Charlene was sick. Sickness might never leave people, she decided, topping the strawberry shortcakes with lumps of cream and placing half a strawberry right in the center for decoration. Mind sickness might go underground and hide, but maybe it was always there, waiting to come out, like a virus that bided its time, that lingered without symptoms until one day it took over the system and killed you. It was that way with her. It was always there.

What would she do if Shadow got sick enough to go back to the hospital? She couldn't stay in this monstrous place alone. Dear God, no!

Well, she'd return to the hospital with her and she'd care for her there as she had done before. She'd talk her out of it. She'd be at her side until she recovered.

So what if Shadow didn't recover?

Shaking her head, shaking away the very possibility, Charlene took the shortcakes to the refrigerator and aligned them side by side—pretty yellow, red, and white desserts she couldn't wait to devour one after the other.

Now it was time to clean the kitchen and mop the floor. Next, she would scrub down the bathroom on the second floor, the one they used most often. It was as large as a normal-sized bedroom, so many tiles to wipe, walls, floor, tub, sink. There was dusting to be done. The banister to polish. The mirrors to clean and make shine. Shadow's bed to make. The halls to sweep. And one night soon she must clean the ballroom, however long it took her, or however much effort it entailed.