Sweetheart (21 page)

He watched her reflection from where he sat. She was beautiful. Sara would be beautiful like that, too, when she grew up. The brown hair, the freckles, the watchful eyes. Debbie rinsed her toothbrush and dried her mouth with a white hand towel. Then she saw him watching her and turned around, resting her back against the sink.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said softly.

Archie shrugged. “Just stress, I guess,” he said.

“You scared me,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He finished the sentence in his head: For everything.

She gave him one of her concerned crooked smiles. Debbie would survive him. It would be hard. But she would be okay. The kids would be okay. They would probably be better off in the long run.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Debbie asked.

He held his arms out toward her. “Come here,” he said. Maybe it wasn’t the pills. Maybe he was actually happy.

She walked barefoot over to him and he reached out and untied her robe and let it fall open. He stood and reached inside the robe and slid his hand down the bumps of her ribs to the round curve of her hip.

She inhaled sharply and bit her lip. “It’s been a long time,” she said.

Archie pulled her toward him and kissed her on the neck, inhaling her. “Tell me about it,” he said. He pushed the robe off her shoulders and it fell behind her on the floor and she stepped away from it into his arms.

He knew her. Her breasts, the left one just a little larger than the right. The constellation of moles on her pale stomach. The small pad of pregnancy fat on her upper abdomen.

He kissed her on the mouth and backed onto the bed, pulling her on top of him. She tasted like peppermint toothpaste. She moaned and reached down to unbuckle his pants. He stopped her, taking her hand by the wrist and lifting it to his mouth so he could kiss her fingers. He willed himself to respond. He wanted to make love to her. He did love her. But his body resisted. It had been like that since Gretchen. He didn’t know if it was the physical trauma of what he’d been through, or if he was just so poisoned by his lust for Gretchen that his body wouldn’t betray her, wouldn’t get hard for anyone else.

He was going to make love to his wife. He was going to do this one last time. Even if it meant cheating just a little. So he decided to let Gretchen into his mind just for a moment. He closed his eyes. And there she was. God, she was beautiful, her blond hair and milky white skin, her mouth open, wanting him. He tasted Debbie’s earlobe, and it was Gretchen’s earlobe. He ran his hands through Debbie’s hair, and it was Gretchen’s hair. He felt instantly hard. He could feel Gretchen unbuttoning his pants, slipping her hand inside his underwear, taking hold of him. It was good. He wondered why he hadn’t done this before. She covered his neck with butterfly kisses like Debbie used to do. But that wasn’t what he wanted. He pushed his tongue into her mouth, pushed the waist of his pants down, and flipped her over and pushed himself inside her. He was rough and the force of him caused her to take a breath and it turned him on more. He thrust as hard and as deeply as he could. He couldn’t stop it. He wanted to fuck her harder than anyone ever had before. Any of the men she’d had. The men who’d killed for her. The men she’d killed. He wanted to reach the center of her.

He heard, from somewhere far away, his wife say, “You’re hurting me.”

And then he came. His whole body shook with it, his back muscles spasmed. All the rage and stress and grief he kept bottled up was screwed up on his face. And he opened his eyes.

“Jesus Christ, Archie,” Debbie said. She was trembling, her eyes huge.

Archie pulled out of her and rolled off her onto the bed. He could taste, in his mouth, a faint trace of peppermint. “I’m sorry,” he said, disgusted with himself.

Debbie was quiet for a long time, sitting on the bed. She held the sheet tight around her torso, her knuckles white where she gripped it. “You see your therapist,” she said finally. “Tomorrow.” She got up and headed into the bathroom, taking the sheet with her. She turned on the faucet and looked in the bathroom mirror at Archie’s reflection, as Archie stared back at hers. “Or I will fucking drag you to her myself.”

A
re you smoking?” Susan asked.

It was dark in the room. Susan had been asleep until the smell of cigarette smoke had wrenched her from a perfectly lovely dream in which she and Archie Sheridan were having an adventure in a city that looked a lot like Atlantis. Susan lay there for a few minutes, inhaling the damning evidence of her mother’s midnight smoke break.

“Mom?” she said.

Her mother didn’t answer.

Susan reached over and flipped on the bedside lamp. It cast a triangle of light that revealed Bliss hunched over the side of her bed, her naked back to Susan, holding a cigarette just below the edge of the mattress to hide the telltale glowing tip.

Bliss’s blond dreads were tied back in a jumble that fell almost to her waist. She glanced back at Susan. “Just a puff,” she said, holding up her cigarette. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Susan sat up. “No,” she said. “You can’t smoke in here. It’s no smoking. You’ll set off the fire alarm. Hold it out the window.”

Bliss drew the cigarette to her mouth and took a drag. “The windows don’t open,” she said.

Susan threw her head back in frustration. “Mom,” she groaned.

Bliss sighed and stretched across the bed to grind the cigarette out in an empty glass on the bedside table. She was wearing black cotton underpants and red-and-orange striped knee socks. “You are such a cop,” she said.

Susan glanced at her watch. It was just past three
A.M.
This could be her chance to get the hell out of there. She got out of bed and crept toward the door to the hall. She was wearing her
I SMELL BULLSHIT
T-shirt and underpants. Not exactly escape clothes, but this was recon. She opened the door a crack and peered out. Bennett looked up instantly from his chair and waved.

Fuck, that guy never went home. He didn’t even nod off.

Susan waved back, trying not to look too disappointed. “Can’t sleep,” she explained. Then she ducked back into the room and flung herself back onto her bed.

“I may get fired,” Susan said. “That girl I was writing about, Molly Palmer. She’s dead. That was her body they found Saturday in the park.”

Bliss looked up, interested. “How did she die?” she asked.

“They don’t know,” Susan said. “They thought it was an OD. But the senator’s dead. And Parker. Again, tragic accident. But it’s got to be connected. And the
Herald
doesn’t want to run the story. Ian said it was because Castle had just died and they wanted to wait a few days to attack him. And now he says they can’t run it without Molly to verify her story.” Susan had promised Molly that everything would be all right. She had promised her a lot of things. She would have said anything to get her to talk. “I think he’s getting pressured,” Susan said.

“You have notes?” Bliss asked. “Tapes of interviews?”

“I gave all my story material to Archie,” Susan said.

Bliss raised an eyebrow. “You gave the only evidence you have to support your story to the police?”

Susan bit her lip. She hadn’t really thought of it that way. “Yeah,” she said.

Bliss reached over and turned off the bedside light, throwing the room back into darkness. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think all those protests I took you to as a kid didn’t teach you anything at all.”

I
s all this really necessary?” Sarah Rosenberg asked. She had agreed to see Archie first thing in the morning and her hair was still wet from a shower, a tangle of brown curls that left dark stains on the shoulders of her gray turtleneck. No makeup. A mug of coffee sat on a coaster on an end table next to her striped chair. The mug had a big red heart on it and the words
WORLD’S GREATEST MOM
.

Archie took a sip of his own paper cup of coffee. Henry was sitting outside the door to Rosenberg’s home office. Two squad cars were parked out front. A patrol cop was on the porch. “It’s in case you try to murder me,” he said. The green velvet curtains were drawn. He couldn’t see the cherry trees.

Rosenberg’s eyebrows knitted in concern. “Are you all right?” she asked.

There was no faking it. He’d seen himself in the mirror that morning. His skin looked like paraffin wax. There were dark circles under his eyes. His hands trembled. “No,” Archie said.

“How is your family?” Rosenberg asked.

Archie glanced at the grandfather clock. Still three-thirty. Someday he was going to pay to get that clock fixed himself. “Just giddy,” Archie said.

Rosenberg was quiet for a moment. She picked up the mug with the heart on it, took a sip, and put it back down. Tea, Archie realized from the smell. Not coffee. “I read about what happened at the school,” Rosenberg said. “That must have been difficult for you.”

He didn’t want to believe that Gretchen would kill his children. Terrorize them, yes. But would she be able to actually murder Archie’s own flesh and blood? “She killed a little boy once,” Archie said softly. “It was notable because she’s only killed a couple of children.” Who was he kidding? “That we know of.” He put his elbow on the arm of the chair and rested his chin in his hand. Rosenberg sat, spine and neck erect, watching him. “Ten years old,” Archie continued. “He disappeared on the way home from playing at the park near his house. She made him drink drain cleaner and then she skinned him with a scalpel.” That had been in Washington State. He’d driven up for the autopsy. “Then she left his body, hog-tied, in his own backyard for his mother to find.”

Rosenberg’s posture didn’t change. “You’ve seen a lot of violence,” she said simply.

Archie took a sip of his coffee. It was a long time after his ten days with Gretchen that he could swallow anything without it burning his damaged esophagus. “It’s hard to drink drain cleaner,” he said. “You end up vomiting a lot of it back up. For the amount in his system, she would have had to hold him down, to force it down his throat.” Archie got out the pillbox. He didn’t even try to hide it. He opened the box and tapped a couple of pills into his hand. “I was lucky,” he said, putting the pills in his mouth. “She only fed it to me a few teaspoons at a time.”

“You weren’t lucky, Archie,” Rosenberg said. “And you didn’t do anything to deserve it.”

That was just it, though. He had.

“I need to catch her,” Archie said. He couldn’t make his family happy, but he could keep them safe.

“How?” Rosenberg asked.

Archie smiled, remembering the engraving over the entrance to Ben and Sara’s school. “ ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire,’” he said.

Rosenberg didn’t say anything.

“Yeats,” Archie said.

“I know who said it,” Rosenberg said. “I’m just not sure how it applies.”

“She’ll keep killing,” Archie explained. He was growing more and more comfortable with his plan, convincing himself that it wasn’t mad. “She can’t stop herself. She burns everything she touches. How do you put out a fire? You feed it, and let it burn itself out.”

“Or you run as fast as you can, and call nine-one-one,” Rosenberg said.

“Or that,” Archie said.

D
ebbie Sheridan answered the door in a white terry-cloth robe with the words
ARLINGTON CLUB
stitched in gold thread on the breast. Susan’s room hadn’t come with a robe. Her room hadn’t even come with shampoo.

“Archie isn’t here,” Debbie said.

Susan tried to crane her neck past Debbie to see if the box she’d given Archie was still where she’d left it. She could hear the kids’ voices inside. “I gave him a box of notes that I need to look at,” Susan said.

Debbie seemed unimpressed by Susan’s predicament. “You’ll have to come back later,” she said, closing the door.

Susan blinked at the closed door four inches from her nose. “Okay,” she said. She was going to go back to her own room, but as she brushed her fingers against the doorknob, she reconsidered and turned and headed for the door to the stairs.

“Where are you going?” she heard a voice call. Bennett.

Susan turned back to face him. “Do they ever give you time off?”

“I volunteered to work double shifts,” Bennett said. He was sitting in the chair. He didn’t even look tired. “Where are you going?”

“Out?” she said.

Bennett stood up, carefully marked his place in the magazine he was reading and set it on the chair, and walked over to her. “You’re supposed to stay upstairs,” he said, eyes narrowing.

Susan splayed her fingers in agony. “I need to have a cigarette,” she said.

“Bad habit,” Bennett said.

Susan smiled. “Have you ever been profiled? I could write a story about you. For the paper.” She fluttered her eyelids. “Something heroic.”

“I have one assignment,” Bennett said, crossing his arms. “To sit here in this hallway and make sure you and Detective Sheridan are safe.”

Susan reached into her pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes and wiggled them. “I could share,” she said.

“I don’t smoke,” said Bennett.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Susan asked.

Bennett reached into his own pocket and pulled out a weathered-looking pack of Big Red. “Gum?”