Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (35 page)

"That’s me."

The delivery man handed over the gigantic vase.

"Wait here, I’ll get you your tip." She slurred her words a little.

"No ma’am, it’s been taken care of." He gave her a small salute and left.

She relocked the door and carried the roses over to the kitchen counter. They were magnificent and they burgeoned from the cut-glass vase. She plucked the small card taped to the glass and opened it. The note read simply:

Look in the coat closet

Karen giggled. Scott was one hundred percent forgiven. Maybe she’d even do that thing he always asked for tonight.

She buried her nose in a rose, inhaled the
dampsweet
perfume. Then she cinched the belt of her bathrobe and walked over to the closet behind the couch, pulling open the door with a big smile that instantly died.

A naked man with black hair and a pale face peered down at her. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and swallowed.

The cartons of leftover Chinese food stood between his feet.

She stared into his black eyes, a strange coldness spreading through her.

"What do you think you’re doing?" she said.

The man grinned, his member rising.

Karen bolted for the front door but as she reached to unhook the chain he snatched a handful of her wet hair and swung her back into a mirror that shattered on the adjacent wall.

"Please," she whimpered.

He punched her in the face.

Karen sank down onto the floor in bits of glass, anesthetized by wine and fear. Watching his bare feet, she wondered where her body would be found and by whom and in what condition.

He grabbed her hair into a ball with one hand and lifted her face out of the glass, the tiniest shards having already embedded themselves in her cheek.

He swung down.

She felt the dull thud of his knuckles crack her jaw, decided to feign unconsciousness.

He hit her again.

She didn’t have to.

2

ON the same Friday evening, Elizabeth Lancing lay in the grass at her home in Davidson, North Carolina, watching her children roughhouse in the autumn-cooled waters of Lake Norman.

Her husband Walter was on her mind.

Tomorrow would have been their seventeenth anniversary.

Pushing against her thighs, she rose and strolled barefoot down to the shore.

Jenna had wrangled John David in a headlock and was trying to dunk her younger stronger brother as their mother walked the length of the pier.

Beth sat down at the end where steps descended into the water.

She moved her fingers through wavy
carbonblack
hair just long enough to graze her shoulders. Her fingertips traced the lines these last brutal years had channeled into her face.

Beth knew she was plain. That was fine. She’d been plain her whole life.

What wasn’t fine was having the hard countenance of a fifty-year-old when she’d just turned thirty-eight. Lately she’d noticed how lived-in she looked. If Walter were still here maybe what few looks she had wouldn’t be deserting her.
    

She rolled her jeans up to her knees.

A rogue jet ski skimmed across the middle of the lake, invisible save for its brief intersection with a streak of moonlit water.

Beth’s feet slid into the liquid steel, touching the algae-slimed wood of the first submerged step.

It was a chilly night and she rubbed her bare arms, thinking,
October is the cruelest month. Darling, has it been seven years?

In one week Beth would have to contend with another anniversary—this coming Halloween night would mark seven years since Walter’s disappearance.

The writer and murderer Andrew Thomas had been a close friend of her husband. Andrew’s old house still stood in the trees on the opposite side of the cove. Someone had taken up residence there in the last year and it was strange to see those lights across the lake again.

The circumstances attending Walter’s disappearance had grown no less bizarre or mystifying through the passage of seven years.

On a cold and wet Halloween night in 1996, he’d sat Beth down at the kitchen table and informed her that their family was in terrible danger.

He’d told her to take the kids away.

Refused to explain what was wrong.

Said all that mattered was getting Jenna and John David out of the house immediately.

She could still remember her husband’s eyes that night, carrying a component she’d not seen in them before—real fear.

Out beyond the steps, bubbles broke the surface and the water-slicked head of Jenna blossomed out of the lake.

My last image of my love—I see Walter in the rearview mirror as I drive away with our children into the rainy Halloween darkness. He is standing on the front porch signing "I love you," his hands held high in the orange
porchlight
.

She never saw Walter again.

His white Cadillac was found two weeks later in Woodside, Vermont, parked near a dumpster, the driver seat slathered in his blood.

Beth knew in her heart that Andrew Thomas had killed her husband.

She could not begin to fathom why.

"Come in, Mom!"

Beth descended two more steps, the water now at her knees.

"It’s too cold, sweetie."

"You’re such a wimp," Jenna taunted, treading toward the steps. "I might just pull you in."

"Oh no you won’t."

Jenna’s head disappeared and Beth climbed back up onto the pier, smiling as she scanned the water.

"I see you!" she yelled though she couldn’t. "I see—"

Wet arms wrapped around her own and Beth screamed.

"Got you," John David said. "You’re going in."

"No, J.D.," Beth pleaded as he muscled her toward the edge. Though only a prepubescent boy of eleven he was strong and quick. "I’m your mother and I am telling you that if you push me into that water I’ll ground you forever. Is it worth it?"

John David sighed and let go.

Beth stepped away from the edge and faced her son, thinking,
You’ll be taller than me in two years
.

Beads of water glistened on his hairless
littleboy
chest.

"Now I want to tell you something," she said with convincing parental sternness. "You listening to me?"

"Yes ma’am."

His voice was still high, at least a year from turning.

"I want to tell you…this!"

Beth shoved him off the pier and he screamed as he hit the water. She laughed, raised her hands in victory, and shouted, "Never underestimate the Mom!"

As John David bemoaned the injustice Jenna jerked him underwater by his ankles. The ripples made by the jet ski had begun to lap against the beams of the pier.

"I’m going in!" Beth yelled. "Don’t stay out long!"

"Come on, Mom, it’s Friday night!"

Walking back up the pier, she acknowledged this interval of peace—her children had touched her; what else mattered?

When she reached the cool grass she glanced back at her kids, then on across the lake at the quarter mile of shoreline where the monster used to live.

She’d received a letter from Andrew Thomas after Walter’s car turned up in Vermont.

As she walked into the house to fix herself a drink and look through her wedding album, the words of that
thing
echoed in her head:

Dear Beth,

Before I begin, please know that I did not murder my mother. And don’t believe what you read in the papers. I say this only to qualify what I have to tell you about your husband. Walter is dead, Beth, and it’s my fault, and I am so, so sorry. I want you to know that he died protecting you and Jenna and John David, and he did not suffer. Also know that because of his efforts, you and the children are safe. He’s buried in a secluded grove of pines in the Vermont countryside. I wish I could personally deliver this news to you but I have to disappear now. I hope you understand. I’m not an evil person, Beth. I tried to make the right choices. I’m going to keep on trying to make the right choices. But evil is alive and well in the world. And sometimes all we can do is not enough.

Andy

3

MY name is Andrew Thomas and I live in a world that believes I am a monster.

Once upon a time I was a suspense novelist. I had money. I lived in a beautiful house on a lake in North Carolina. I had friends. Lovers. I knew what respect and a mite of celebrity felt like.

Then someone came along and destroyed all of it.

His name was Orson Thomas and he was my fraternal twin.

Under threat of blackmail he took me to a remote cabin in the high desert of Wyoming.

He was a psychopath.

He showed me a side of myself I will spend the rest of my life annulling.

But the horror of what happened in that desert is another story.

In the end I escaped.

My brother was killed. His accomplice—a soulless individual named Luther Kite—I shot and left for dead, tied to a chair on the front porch of Orson’s cabin in the vast and
snowswept
desert.

That was November 1996 and I faced returning to a world that feared and hated me.

Bodies had been unearthed at my home on Lake Norman.

I was suspected in my mother’s death.

I was suspected in Walter
Lancing’s
disappearance.

I was the writer turned serial killer.

Orson and Luther had framed me in every way imaginable.

I couldn’t go home.

I was wanted.

And though I’d done questionable things in the name of self-preservation, I was by no means a murderer.
  

So I ran.

The village of Haines Junction, Yukon saved my life.

I’d been running two years when I found it—through desert villages in northern Mexico, the Baja Peninsula, the towns and cities of America.

I worked a summer in a lumber yard in Macon, Georgia.

I was a busboy for one week in Baltimore.

A ranch hand for a west Texas winter.

I slept in tents.

Homeless shelters.

Bunkhouses.

Fields beneath stars on cool clear nights.

I grew my hair out.

I didn’t shave.

I didn’t bathe.
 

I left places.

Arrived at new places.

I stopped reading.

Stopped writing.

I fulfilled my alcoholic tendencies.

I traveled by bus.

Hitchhiked.

Jumped a train once through South Dakota.

I never talked to anyone.
  

Because my name had become synonymous with murder and matricide I lived in constant fear, suspected everyone.

At a construction site in London, Kentucky, the foreman asked if I liked to read thrillers. Maybe he was just being friendly. I wasn’t there the next day to find out.