When She Was Bad: A Thriller (22 page)

“Lilith,” she broke in. “When she was bad, she was Lilith.” She kissed him again, more lasciviously, her mouth open, her lips soft and sloppy, her tongue expertly insistent, then broke it off. “Well,” she said, panting for breath.

“Well, what?” He was breathing pretty hard himself.

“Who am I? Lily or Lilith?”

“Does…does it really matter?”

“Hell no,” she replied, grabbing his head in both her hands and pulling it down to her breast.

3

You’re not breaking and entering, Pender reminded himself as he circled Irene Cogan’s house, looking for a way in. You’re just—what was it they used to say when they needed a warrant?—effectuating a surreptitious entry.

He discovered an old wooden ladder lying on its side, next to a tarpaulin-covered stack of firewood by the side of the garage. It was in dubious condition, the mildew-splotched wood of the rails soft enough to dig his thumbnail into, but the rungs were dowels an inch in diameter, and appeared to be sturdy enough for the job at hand.

Pender carried the ladder around the side of the house and leaned it against the overhang of the flat, tar-papered roof above the office extension in back. He already knew the trick to hauling two hundred and eighty pounds up an old ladder: distribute your weight among all four limbs so that no single rung has to bear even half the load. Fortunately, the preponderance of Pender’s avoirdupois had always been concentrated above the waist. His belly was the tipping point—once he dragged that over the eaves, the rest followed easily enough.

From the flat roof above the office, Pender boosted himself another four feet to the roof below Irene’s rear bedroom window, which was closed. Balanced with difficulty on the slanting roof apron, he managed to get the merest fingertip purchase on the crossbar of the window sash, then let loose a prayer and leveraged upward with all the strength in his fingertips.

The window flew open, causing Pender to lose his hold on the sash, and with it his balance. Toppling backward, arms flailing, he managed to grab the windowsill; behind him, his Pebble Beach golf cap fluttered to the ground like a powder-blue autumn leaf.

Pender now found himself stretched out full-length on the sloping roof, hanging on to the windowsill with both hands, his Hush Puppied feet dangling in space. Kicking, grunting, he finally got his feet under him again, then duckwalked up the slope until he was at eye level with the windowsill, breathing hard and sweating harder. As he squatted there, trying to catch his breath, he felt an unaccustomed breeze from behind, and realized that with his shorts dragged down and his jacket rucked up, he was showing more crack than an inner-city coke dealer.

After a hasty sartorial adjustment, and a quick peek to make sure the bedroom was empty, Pender climbed through the window feet first, then took the Colt out of his pocket again and flicked off the safety—no way Maxwell would be getting the drop on him again.

Irene’s queen-size bed appeared slept in and unmade, but there were no bloodstains, no sign of a struggle. Pender flattened himself against the door jamb with the Colt held sideways against his chest, then peered into the hallway. Empty. With the gun in two-handed firing position he made his way down the hallway to the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs. Aside from a rumpled bedspread with a few coins strewn around it, the little room was in apple-pie order.

He started down the stairs, keeping to the wall side of the carpeted treads to avoid any potential creaking. The paintings lining the staircase—landscapes, still lifes, and a portrait of Irene Cogan in her midtwenties, looking a little like the young Greta Garbo—all bore the signature of Irene’s late husband, Frank.

The stairway opened out onto the white-carpeted living room. No sign of trouble there, but in the tiny downstairs bathroom, the rectangular screen lay on the tiled floor beneath the open window, and the state of the kitchen suggested either a break-in or a hasty departure—the cabinet doors were ajar, the counters littered with cans and cartons, and the usually tidy pantry appeared to have been ransacked.

As he looked around, Pender caught a glimpse of himself in the glass front of Irene’s china cabinet. Hatless, dark circles under his eyes after his nearly sleepless night, his shoulders slumped and his once-snappy madras jacket practically in rags, Lily’s Uncle Pen was now a ringer for Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.

Satisfied? Pender asked the poor dejected SOB, as he dropped the gun back into his pocket. Are you good and satisfied now? Maxwell’s gone, he’s taken Lily and Irene with him, and however much of a head start he had, it’s now half an hour longer thanks to you.

Pender turned away, hitched up his shorts, and crossed the kitchen. His intention—to call the police from Irene’s wall phone—was a measure of his turmoil: he had the phone to his ear and his finger poised to call 911 before he caught himself on the verge of a classic rookie cop error. Not even rookie—trainee: calling in the crime on the crime scene phone, thereby destroying not just potential fingerprints or saliva for DNA (not all that relevant in the current case, which wasn’t exactly a whodunnit), but also the ability to call *69 and instantly recover the last number accessed.

He patted through his pockets, took out his cell phone, realized he’d left it with the ringtone on. Another worse-than-rookie mistake: you’re sneaking around looking for a perp who’s sneaking around looking for you, somebody gives you a friendly ring-a-ding-ding on the old cell, next thing you know you’re so full of holes they could read a newspaper through you.

He pulled the cell phone’s antenna out as far as it would go, then pressed the green Call button. But as he raised the phone to his ear to make sure he had a dial tone, he became aware of another sound, faint, sputtery, and intermittent, that he must have been picking up on subconsciously for at least a few seconds.

It was the sound of somebody snoring, and it seemed to be coming from Irene’s office—the only room he
hadn’t
searched, Pender reminded himself. Swapping the phone for the Colt, and borrowing a clean drinking glass from the cabinet, he hustled out of the kitchen and down the hallway, and pressed the rim of the glass to the office door, listening between snores until he was reasonably sure there was nobody in there but the snorer.

Pender set the glass down carefully on the hallway carpet, then turned the doorknob slowly with his left hand, while holding the unfamiliar Colt in his right with the safety off and a round up the spout. Probably should have dry-fired the thing earlier to accustom himself to the pull, thought Pender—but it was too late now. Just one more fuckup to add to the list, he told himself as he inched the door open.

4

The sated lovers lay entwined atop a patchwork quilt worn silky with age, their naked bodies rosy in the soft glow of twilight. Everything in the one-room cabin was invested with a reddish glow from the setting sun; even Lily’s dark, shoulder-length hair reflected auburn highlights.

“The first thing I remember noticing about you was your hair,” Lyssy murmured sleepily, burying his face against her neck—he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Tuesday. “Like moonlight on a midnight lake, I told myself—I don’t know whether that’s from a poem or a song, or if I just made it up, but that
is
what I was thinking.”

The gentle, insistent pressure and the ticklish warmth of his breath reminded Lily of the way her pony used to nuzzle her with its velvety soft nose, searching for treats she’d hidden on her person. “I always hated it,” she said. “I wanted to be blond, like Sunny Lemontina.”

The name sounded familiar, but Lyssy couldn’t quite place it. “Who’s that?”

Lily rolled onto her side, facing him, and sang “Frere Jacques.” When she got to
sonnez les matines
he grinned sleepily. “Right, right.”

“She was my imaginary playmate,” she told him. “In the beginning, anyway.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It was a week or two after I moved in with my grandparents.” Lily rolled over onto her other side and snuggled backward against Lyssy. “At first she was like this imaginary friend—only I don’t know if other kids actually
see
their imaginary friends. I could, though—I can see her to this day. Physically, she was almost the opposite of me. Short blond hair instead of long dark hair, blue eyes instead of brown, and instead of my sort of round face, a sharp witchy one with a pointy little chin.

“So this one morning we’re sitting next to each other on the parquet floor of my grandparents’ parlor, playing with my new Barbie my grandma gave me. The sunlight’s pouring in like melted butter, making a warm yellow spotlight on the shiny-waxed floorboards, only it keeps moving, shrinking and moving, so every few minutes we have to slide over a few inches, me and Sunny Lemontina, to keep both of us in that warm puddle of sunshine. And the more it shrinks, the closer we get to each other, until pretty soon there’s only gonna be room for one of us.

“Then Sunny Lemontina looks at me with those blue, blue eyes, and she laughs this evil laugh and says, ‘
I
know
your
secret.’

“I don’t even have to ask which secret, because at this point in my life there’s only one, and it’s so big and so dark that I know if anybody ever finds out about it,
I’ll
be the one who gets taken away and locked up forever and ever instead of my mommy and daddy.

“The next thing I know, I’m sort of floating outside my body, looking down at the little blond girl sitting alone in the puddle of sunshine, playing with my new Barbie.

“And the
next
next thing I know, I wake up in bed, it’s night time, I can’t remember anything that’s happened since that morning in the parlor, and when I try to open the bedroom door, it’s locked. I freak out, pounding on the door and screaming. Then the door opens, my grandmother’s standing there looking down at me with this weird expression on her face, almost like she’s afraid of me. She asks me if I’m ready to come out of my room yet.

“I say, ‘Boy, am I!’ Only now my grandfather’s standing in the doorway behind her, he’s like, ‘I’ve already told you more times than I care to count: if you want to come out of your room, all you have to do is promise to stop the nonsense.’

“Now I have no idea what he’s talking about, but by this point I’ll promise anything. ‘No more nonsense, cross my heart an’ hope to die.’

“Grandma looks relieved, but Grandpa doesn’t budge. ‘What’s your name? I want to hear you say it.’

“I’m still clueless—and getting scareder by the second. Doesn’t he
know
? I’m thinking. ‘Lily,’ I say. ‘It’s Lily, Grandpa.’ Then it’s group hug time. Grandma’s crying with relief and Grandpa’s reaching around her patting my shoulder.

“All of a sudden I notice my head feels kind of strange—on the outside, I mean. Because it turns out I had spent the day chopping off most of my hair with the pinking shears, and Barbie’s hair too, and trimming the fringes off all the furniture in the house that had fringes, and when the maid caught me, I told her my name wasn’t Lily, it was Sunny Lemontina, and when she went to fetch my grandmother, I told her, ‘You’re not
my
grandma, you can’t tell
me
what to do.’

“Oh, and the cat wouldn’t come near me for a month,” she added. “I never did find out what
that
was all about.”

Lyssy turned over onto his stomach, his chin resting on the windowsill just above mattress level. The window, like the other windows in the cabin, was unglazed, with the wooden shutters opening outward; the redwood walls were unadorned save for an enormous USGS topographical map mounted next to the fieldstone chimney. “One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought everybody already knew about the abuse by then—wasn’t that why they moved you in with your grandparents in the first place?”

“Mmm-hmm.” A tight-lipped affirmative.

“Then what was the big dark secret nobody was supposed to know?”

Lily stretched out next to him; together they watched the tumbling, quicksilver water of the creek turning coppery in the failing light. “That it was all my fault that my parents were taken away. That I was a dirty, wicked, ungrateful little snitch who deserved everything bad that happened to her.”

Lyssy felt his heart breaking for her—for both of them, really. “Oh, jeez,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that all abused kids feel that way sometimes?” He rolled over onto his back and shifted into his Dr. Al imitation: “Let me, ah, tell you something you may find difficult to believe, my young friend. Of all the cruel things your parents did to you, the, ah, cruelest of all was making you feel you deserved it.”

“Of course I know that
now,
silly. Dr. Irene said it was because we couldn’t blame our parents—that would have meant they never loved us, and to a kid, that’s even
worse
than…you know.”

“I surely do.” A humongous yawn took Lyssy by surprise; he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to stay awake. “But you and me, we don’t have to worry about that now.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have each other,” he murmured sleepily. “To love each other, I mean—we don’ need no steenkin’ parents.” His head lolled to the side and he was
out,
snoring lightly, a drop of clear saliva trickling down the corner of his mouth.

Lily, who’d never seen
Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
had no idea why he’d switched over to an exaggerated Mexican accent. Maybe he was embarrassed about having used the L-word, however indirectly. And maybe he was just pretending to have fallen asleep so suddenly—but she didn’t think so. Somebody might fake snoring, nobody’d fake drooling.

“Okay, well, I love you, too,” she whispered experimentally; she’d never said it to a man before, not counting her grandfather. It felt a little funny—but good. As she smiled down at him, noticing how much younger he looked when he was sleeping, she gradually became aware of a distant noise, a popping, Little Engine That Could
pocketapocketapocketa,
slowly rising in volume over the human-sounding babble of the creek.