The Bitter Season (5 page)

The whispers came in the night,
seductive and sinister, like snakes sliding into bed beside her.

Trust me. Let me help you . . .

Trust me. Let me comfort you . . .

Trust me. Let me touch you . . .

In the dream, she was eight, she was twelve, she was seventeen, nineteen—all at the same time. Her reaction was instant: fear, dread, her heart rate doubling, a terrible chill running through her like the blade of a sword. She woke with a gasp, a cold sweat drenching her. But she made no overt movement. Out of old habit, she lay as still as possible as she took in her surroundings, just in case she had awakened into a nightmare.

She made a visual inventory of the room in the glow of the nightlight: the bedside table draped in soft blue fabric, the chair with her robe tossed across the seat and arm, her slippers, the blue drapes that flanked the window . . .

As the roar of her pulse subsided, she became aware of the
tic tac, tic tac
of sleet against the windowpane.

She was home, in the present, safe. Her husband, Eric, sighed and stirred on the other side of the bed. Evi held her breath, hoping she hadn’t disturbed his sleep. He turned over and settled, and she relaxed a little.

As many times as he had told her he didn’t mind waking up with
her in the night, she still hated doing that to him. It upset him to know she was upset and that there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t erase her bad memories. He could only help her try to make better, happier ones. Every day they were together accomplished that.

She slipped from the bed like a wraith, barely disturbing the covers, and moved soundlessly out of the room. The house was cold. She wrapped her robe and her arms around herself and went down the hall to her daughter’s room.

The same amber nightlight as in her own bedroom glowed in Mia’s room—and everywhere else in the house, for that matter. She couldn’t tolerate absolute darkness. The light just kissed Mia’s cheek as she slept, letting Evi see her daughter’s long eyelashes and rosebud mouth, her small hand curled beside her pillow. At five years old, Mia declared herself no longer a baby, but her thumb was always at the ready as she slept, just in case.

Evi crept into the room and carefully rearranged the blankets around her daughter’s shoulders, making sure the nose of her teddy bear poked out above the covers. Her heart swelled with love as she watched her child sleep. And just at the edge of that love lay the familiar fear that this couldn’t all be real. She couldn’t have such a perfect life with such a perfect family. How could she have met a man as good and kind as Eric? How could she be lucky enough to have him love her? How was it the universe had given her this beautiful child to call her own, to raise and love?

“Too good to be true” was the theme of her daily existence.

She and Eric had been married six years now. Maybe when they had a decade together she would start to let her guard down, stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Doubt was the last and biggest hurdle she circled around and around, never quite brave enough to attempt to clear it. At least the pace at which she ran around it had slowed from frenetic to familiar over the years. Her therapist was satisfied with that much. She
didn’t share Evi’s disappointment in herself at her inability to be completely happy.

She had the perfect husband, the perfect child, the perfect home, the perfect job. Why could she not be perfectly happy? Was she ungrateful? No. Nothing could be further from the truth. Was she weak? Did she know deep down that she didn’t deserve any of it? That was her greatest fear—what if that one remaining voice of criticism was right after all?

“You have to convince yourself that voice is wrong,” Dr. Price had told her so many times over the years. So many times that Evi had long ago become too embarrassed even to bring up the subject anymore.

Leaving Mia’s room, she went downstairs to the living room and curled up in a corner of the sofa with her knitting, and turned the television on to keep her company and distract her from her anxiety.

The nightmares left an emotional aftertaste that lingered. She didn’t have them every night, or even every month. When she had gone without one for a long time, she could almost convince herself they would never come back. And once they returned, she despaired of their ever letting her sleep in peace.

A local channel was rerunning the ten o’clock news, showing the weather advisories and preemptive school closings. Temperatures were hovering just at freezing, with precipitation coming in a mix of rain and sleet. The only vehicles advised to be on the road overnight were the trucks from the Department of Transportation that were out laying down sand and salt in anticipation of intrepid morning commuters.

Mia would be disappointed not to have school. Unlike Evi, her daughter was a social butterfly, friendly and confident. Those were traits Evi had to work at. She loved her job and the kids she worked with. She was proud of the work she did and the accomplishments of the Chrysalis Center, but none of it came easily to her. Her daughter, on the other hand, had the confidence of a child who had never known what it was not to be loved completely. Mia would always
have that. No matter what else happened in her life, she would always know that she was loved absolutely.

That had to be one of a mother’s greatest accomplishments, Evi thought. She wondered how differently her life would have turned out if she’d had that kind of unconditional love as a child.

No matter, she told herself, because her life had turned out like this: perfect. And as she thought it, and as she smiled wider, she felt the residual anxiety from the dream fade away.

She focused on her knitting: a winter scarf in shades of pink. She had a stack of scarves in a variety of colors and textures already stashed away in the gift closet, Christmas presents for the girls she worked with—her extended family of troubled teenagers.

“Isn’t the news depressing enough the first time around?” Eric asked as he came into the living room in red plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a faded black T-shirt that had been through the wash too many times. He slouched down onto the sofa beside her, blond hair tousled, a sleepy smile on his handsome face.

“I missed it the first time around,” Evi said. “I was doing your disgusting hockey laundry.”

“You are so beautiful,” he said. “Have I told you in the last two minutes how beautiful you are?”

He smiled at her like he was trying to pick her up, like he was sharing an inside joke, shining brown eyes always ready with a wink.

“You are the perfect husband. But your hockey laundry still stinks.” Evi chuckled. “FYI: Mia doesn’t have school tomorrow.”

As a firefighter, Eric was twenty-four hours on and forty-eight hours off. He took full advantage of his days off to be the househusband and be involved in his daughter’s life. He was, in the opinion of all Evi’s friends, the perfect modern man.

“If this sleet keeps up, we’ll all have the day off,” he said.

“I’ve got a big meeting—” Evi started.

Eric narrowed his eyes. “I don’t want you driving if the roads are bad. Never mind that you’re a safe driver. These first bad weather
days leading into winter, people lose their minds. You’d think they lived in Miami and had never seen snow.

“Stay home and play
Frozen
with us,” he suggested. “Mia might let you be Elsa. Once. Only once. I get to be Kristoff
and
Olaf.”

“I’ve been informed I don’t sing well enough to be Elsa.”

“I love you anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“Trouble sleeping tonight?” he asked, trying to slip that in casually.

“I’m fine,” Evi said. “I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. A little TV, a little knitting . . . I’m fine.”

“It’s the pressure of being a local celebrity,” Eric said teasingly.

The Minneapolis
Star Tribune
had recently run a weekend feature story on Chrysalis and its work with victims of sexual abuse, domestic violence, and sex trafficking. In her capacity as the center’s senior social services case worker, Evi had been pictured and quoted, speaking out about the difficulties faced by victims who had aged out of the foster care system but didn’t meet the requirements for most women’s shelters.

“I’m last Sunday’s news,” she said.

She had been a little uncomfortable with the spotlight, brief as it had been, but publicity for the center was always welcome. The article had generated interest from several local TV and radio stations in the week that followed, but media attention had since moved on to new stories.

Evi dropped a stitch in her knitting as one of those new stories filled her television screen with photos and graphics. Her heartbeat quickened. A strange cold flush ran over her from head to toe.

NEW COLD CASE UNIT TARGETS UNSOLVED HOMICIDES

The photograph took her back in time. Ted Duffy in a suit, looking authoritative, his face set in stern lines as he accepted an award,
his wife, Barbie, and his twin brother standing in the background clapping.

“Using half a million dollars in federal grant money, the Minneapolis Police Department, in conjunction with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, will launch a dedicated cold case unit this week . . .”

The unit’s first case would be the unsolved murder of decorated sex crimes detective Ted Duffy.

Eric looked from Evi to the TV and back. “What? Do you know that guy?”

“No,” she lied, setting her knitting aside. She turned back to her husband with a smile. “A dedicated cold case unit will be a godsend for a lot of victims’ families from back when. Kate Quinn will be knocking on the door of that unit first thing tomorrow.”

“While we sleep in,” Eric said, getting up from the couch. He held his hand out to her and pulled her up and into his arms. “Let’s go back to bed, Mrs. Burke. We’ve got some serious snuggling to do.”

Evi pressed her cheek into his shoulder and hugged him tight. “That’s the only place I want to be.”

In the here and now with the man of her dreams. But when she closed her eyes, she saw only the faces of her past.

Sleet began to pelt the windows
at around one thirty in the morning. The sound woke Professor Lucien Chamberlain from a shallow sleep. He fumbled for his glasses on the nightstand and checked the time on his phone.

Beside him, his wife slept on, undisturbed by the rapid
tic tac tic tac
of the ice pellets striking the glass. Of course, she had taken to wearing earplugs to bed because she claimed he snored. Ridiculous. He didn’t snore.
She
snored. She snored especially when she had been drinking, and she had been drinking more than usual lately.

She thought he didn’t notice. She thought she had become so adept at hiding it over the years that she could fool him. The truth was he didn’t care anymore. As long as she didn’t embarrass him in public or in front of his peers or their neighbors, he ignored her.

That was, and had been, the state of their marriage: tolerance and cohabitation. He had no interest in her as a woman any longer. He never really had. His life was about his career. She had her committees and charities. They were companions for social events.

She had never been a beautiful woman, he thought as he looked at her in the dim light from the bathroom. She had started leaving a nightlight on after stumbling into the shower stall by mistake one night, injuring herself badly enough that she had needed to go to the emergency room.

The hospital staff had jumped to the conclusion that Lucien had
beaten her, and had called the police. It still made him furious to remember how shabbily the police treated him, and how the neighbors reacted when Sondra’s eye blackened and her bruises ripened—the surreptitious stares and quickly averted eyes. As if they could believe he, a highly respected member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota, would ever have been so stupid and brutish as to punch a woman in the face.

He had resented Sondra for putting him in the position to be judged and gossiped about. Her overly eager attempts to explain away the bruises had only made him seem all the more guilty. And the more irritated he became, the more obsequious she became, until he questioned the logic of ever having married her in the first place.

No, she was not a beautiful woman, and at fifty-eight her plainness was giving way to a heavy, matronly look he didn’t like at all. He told her to diet and exercise. It didn’t help. He believed she secretly ate sweets and hid the evidence. He once went through her dresser drawers when she was away visiting her mother, but had found nothing incriminating, only a vast collection of foundation garments she never appeared to wear.

He had married her for her family connections and, to a lesser degree, her money—better, more logical reasons than looks or lust. They had been together nearly thirty years.

He watched her sleep now, envious. He had always been a light sleeper. His brain was always working. Now he would lie here, driven mad by the incessant
tic tac tic tac
while his mind worried at the day-to-day annoyances of academia, and the power struggle going on in the History Department.

He fretted because he hadn’t published anything recently. And that thought automatically brought the rush of bitterness that he had never been able to sell his book on the comparative similarities and differences in the warrior cultures of medieval China and Japan, his masterwork.

He should already have been named head of East Asia studies, not be fighting for the title. If he had a published book that was well received by his peers, the university would not have been able to deny him. He would have been the clear front-runner. Instead, he was in competition with Ken Sato and some Vietnamese woman from UCLA.

Sato, who never failed to irritate with his unconventional lifestyle and his unconventional teaching methods. Lucien suspected Sato was being considered for the job largely because he was Japanese, and the chosen star of that pompous ass and committee member, Hiroshi Ito. Lucien had considered suing on the basis of racial discrimination if Sato—or the Vietnamese woman, for that matter—were to get the position. He was far more deserving. Then again, he worried what a lawsuit would do to his reputation. Reputation was everything in academia.

If Sondra’s father had still been alive, his influence at the university would have negated all other issues. What terrible luck that he had died of a heart attack nearly a year past. Lucien was beginning to feel that the powers of the universe were against him. And now, to further complicate his life, was this ridiculous business with Diana and the Office for Conflict Resolution. The mere thought of it infuriated him. The conniving little bitch—jeopardizing his promotion, forcing him to take the actions he was about to put in motion . . .

No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

Tic tac tic tac
. The sound was relentless.

Then came a sound out of time, out of place. A sound that seemed to come from another part of the house. Downstairs.

He sat up in the bed and strained to listen. They lived in a lovely old established neighborhood. But there were plenty of criminals in the run-down parts of the city. Crime was no longer a rarity in Minneapolis. Lucien blamed Minnesota’s overly generous public assistance programs for ruining the work ethic of the poor minorities.

He’d had a home security system installed years ago. Sondra had the jewelry she had inherited from her mother. He had a valuable collection of Asian antiques he had accumulated over the years, most notably artifacts of generations of samurai and ninja warriors. Had Sondra forgotten to set the alarm after dinner? It was her responsibility. He often worked late in his study, too engrossed to be bothered with household details.

Tic tac tic tac tic tac . . . thump
.

Or was it just the wind? There was a shutter loose on one of the study windows. Someone from the handyman service was supposed to have come four days ago to fix it, but it had been banging against the house earlier in the evening. He had snapped at Sondra for hiring the incompetent fools in the first place.

She had originally called them to clean the rain gutters and put on the storm windows. The service was unreliable, its workers rude. Lucien wrote a scathing review of their work on Yelp after the storm window fiasco. The owner promised to rectify the situation in a timely fashion, but they had yet to show up. They were in no hurry to do a job for which they would not get paid. Now the shutter, which they had probably purposely loosened in the first place, would drive him mad the rest of the night with the syncopated combination of
bang, thump
, together with the
tic tac tic tac tic tac
of the freezing rain on the windows.

He wasn’t going to get a minute’s sleep, and first thing in the morning he had yet another meeting with Foster, the department chair; the director of undergraduate studies; and Hiroshi Ito, professor emeritus. He needed to be sharp, to present himself at his best. The decision on the head of East Asia studies would be made before the Thanksgiving break. He would go into the meeting with confidence, sure in the knowledge that he had an ace to play that Ken Sato could never trump, but still, he wanted his sleep. He wanted to look as confident as he felt.

Maybe if he closed all the doors between the stairs and the study,
the sound would be muffled enough not to bother him. It was on the other side of the house from the master bedroom.

Giving his sleeping wife another resentful glare, he threw the covers back and slipped out of bed. A creature of habit, he put on his dressing gown, adjusting the sleeves of his pajamas so the cuffs showed and tying the belt in a tidy knot. He paused at the head of the stairs, just in front of his pair of eighteenth-century Qing dynasty carved rosewood chairs and the spotlighted Qing period portrait on silk. He paused and listened.

Thump bump, thump bump, thump . . .

Yes, the shutter. After his meeting tomorrow he would take a moment to go on Yelp and write another scathing review of the handyman service.

He made his way down the stairs with the bearing of a king, the amber glow from the tiny art spotlight floating ahead of him, ever dimmer and more diffuse. He didn’t bother turning on a light at the bottom of the stairs. The white of the streetlight at the end of the block came in through the transom above the front door. Turning, he made his way toward the back of the house. His study was just beyond the dining room. He would shut the study door, and shut the heavy pocket doors to the dining room on his way back.

Bang thump . . . bang thump . . . bang thump . . .

The sleet tapping on the windows seemed louder to him down here for some reason. His level of irritation rose as he realized he must have neglected to turn off the lamp in the study. The glow came into the dining room from across the far hallway. The dining room seemed cold and drafty. The diaphanous white curtain at the French doors to the patio drifted into the room, fluttering like a ghost in a movie.

The chill he felt then came from within.

One of the doors stood open a foot or so—just enough for a person to slip inside.

Lucien stood frozen, unable to think, unable to move.

The dark figure came from the direction of his study. A ninja! he thought in astonishment. A silent intruder dressed entirely in black, even the hands covered; even the head was covered in black, only the eyes showing. Eyes looking straight at him, shining black, like an animal’s.

Lucien drew a breath to call out, but no sound came out of his suddenly bone-dry mouth. It felt as if the walls of his throat were stuck together, cutting off his air, as if an unseen hand had him by the neck.

In the next instant, the violence began like a sudden, terrible storm. The ninja came at him, and was on him before he could do more than stagger back and slam into the dining room table. The strength and power of the assailant was overwhelming. He felt like a frail old man, like his bones would snap and crumble to dust beneath the other’s strength.

And they did. His collarbone shattered beneath the first strike. He could raise only one arm up to protect his head, and it went numb as he was struck on the wrist.

The attacker’s fists were like iron, raining down blow after blow. Lucien scrambled to get away, falling toward the open patio door, landing on one knee on the hardwood floor. His kneecap exploded with pain. Even as he tried to crawl for the door, he looked back over his shoulder.

The faint light caught for a second—not on the fist of his assailant, but on the weapon he clutched in one hand. The
nunchaku
: two handles fashioned of iron-hard oak connected at one end by a short horsehair rope. The ninja wielded the weapon as a club, bringing it down with vicious intent, striking Lucien’s head once, then twice.

His vision blurred as his eye socket collapsed. He heard the crunch of his skull fracturing beneath the second blow. He lost consciousness before he could register the next strike. He was unaware as the assailant kicked him viciously in the ribs and then
stepped behind him and brought the
himo,
the horsehair rope that linked the two handles, beneath his chin and used the ancient weapon as a garrote to choke him until his tongue came out of his mouth, swollen and purple.

The assailant dropped him to the floor in a heap, and dropped the bloody
nunchaku
beside him. Shards of bone penetrated the left frontal lobe of Lucien’s brain, severing neural pathways, disconnecting the structures vital for forming thought and emotion. The damage set off an electrical storm, sending random signals to his limbs. His arms and legs jerked and twitched like those of a marionette in the hands of a mad puppet master.

*   *   *

T
HE ASSAILANT
STOOD BACK
and watched by the silvered light that fell through the patio door, mesmerized as the victim’s arms and legs jumped and flopped. The movement subsided slowly until the man lay still on the floor.

The face was caved in like a smashed jack-o’-lantern’s. His right cheek was lying in a pool of blood. The left eye hung from its shattered socket by a tangle of nerves and blood vessels. The nose was a lump of mush. He was still breathing in irregular fits and starts, gurgles and wheezes, causing tiny bubbles to form in the bloody mess of his mouth. Several teeth lay scattered on the Oriental rug.

The weapon lay near the man’s mangled left hand, as if he had been the one wielding it. Blood and hair stuck to the heavy oak handles.

Pulling a cell phone from a pocket, the killer leaned down close and took a photograph of the victim’s face, and then took another from slightly above, making sure to get the weapon in the picture, feeling almost giddy with the rush of excitement.

Killing felt good, satisfying, exciting.
Very
exciting. Empowering.

In no hurry, not concerned about being found, not concerned that the police might be coming, the assailant rose and went back
into the study. A small lamp gave enough light to view the collection of ancient weapons mounted on the walls and in display cases. Knives and daggers, helmets and fearsome painted face masks of long-dead warriors from the other side of the world. And swords. Long, curving swords, some with elaborate scabbards and handles of carved wood, some with etched steel blades, some simple and plain. All of them deadly.

One of the swords was chosen and carefully lifted down to admire, and an idea formed and slithered through the killer’s mind like a viper. The blade hissed as it was slipped from its scabbard. The light shone down the length of it. The edge was tested against the pad of a thumb. A tiny bead of blood welled up and ran down the blade. The sight of it brought an almost sexual stirring within.

“Lucien?”

The woman’s voice was far away and tentative.

“Lucien? Are you down here? You should be in bed! You have that meeting in the morning.”