Crazy Love You (25 page)

He feels like his feet are made of lead as he slogs toward them. In the dark, he can't tell who is who. Molly's dress is so wet and torn now, it clings to her body. The rain is battering him, soaking him. Then, he sees lightning strike the ground between him and the bluff and soon after hears a giant detonation of thunder. The world seems to still in the silence. He watches in horror as one of them—Priss or Molly—falls from the bluff. His own wail of protest echoes through the night.

•  •  •

I fell asleep at the drafting table. And when I woke up with a start, Priss was standing over me. I stared at her, and then down at the sketches on the table in front of me. Again, not what I wanted—not at all. It felt like a dream—and that dream lay manifest on the page before me. She was looking, too, issued a mocking little laugh. She seemed pale and young, as she had on the day we first met. She hadn't looked that way to me in years, like the child she was.

She's not a child, Ian. Never let her convince you of that
, my crazy mother warned me.

Finally, she strode away, her pencil-thin heels clicking on the hardwood.

“What happened to this place?” she asked. “What did you do?”

“Me?” I asked her. “I didn't do anything. What did
you
do?”

“You always try to blame me for the things that go wrong in your life,” she said. She moved a torn cushion off to the side and then sank onto the couch. “When are you going to grow up?”

I always thought of her as big, larger than life. In the book, her breasts are enormous, her waist a sliver, fanning out into broad hips and big, powerful legs. Her eyes are almond-shaped, cat eyes. But in life, she's just a wisp of a thing. Still there's a power that radiates from her flesh. She's radioactive. The damage she does is silent, insidious. It wastes you from the inside out. She's sweet like lead paint, tastes good on your tongue. But her poison works its way into your blood, shuts you down from the inside out.

“You didn't do this?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said. She even had the nerve to look offended. “I've only ever loved you. I protect you.”

“You hurt people.”

She laughed at that. “Do I? Are you sure about that?”

She stood and slithered her way into my arms. And my arms, traitorous, wrapped around her. She pressed her body against me, and I felt myself grow hard. That aching desire for her burned a hole in my center. Her lips, hot and soft, were on my neck, and then her hands were unbuttoning my jeans. The warm press of her breasts, her cool hands on my flesh. Ah, God, I could never resist her.

A deep animal hunger took me over. I spun her around and took her from behind, bent over the ruined couch, pushing myself deep, deeper as she moaned and her breathing came sharp and ragged, desperate. She cried out, at first in pleasure, then the tenor changed—pain, anger. I held her down with my hands hard on her back, my hips pressed tight against her. I could feel her writhing to get away. But she couldn't. I was too powerful for her. And the knowledge of this made me drive myself deeper into her. She wasn't that strong after all.

“Ian,” she said. Her voice was blistering with anger. “You
fucker
! Let. Me.
Up!
”

I came inside her, and let out a moan of pleasure I couldn't contain. It was a deep, guttural roar and I was a lion, king of the jungle. Then I moved away from her, pulled up my pants that had fallen around my ankles. She hauled herself off the couch slowly as if in pain, put herself back together. And when she looked at me, she wore an expression of malicious glee.

“Happy now?” she said. “You can add rapist to your list of crimes.”

I was too breathless from my anger at her to react to her words. Then I was weak, too weak to stand. I sank to the couch. Rapist? Was I that? But it was just like her to goad me into doing something horrible, to distract me from the horrible things she did.

“Did you push Megan?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

She was shaking. It was slight, almost imperceptible, but I could see the quiver in her fingers.

“I want you to tell me,” I said.

She moved into the kitchen, broken glass and ceramic crunching beneath her feet. She took a bottle of vodka from the fridge, a glass from the cabinet—the only one that hadn't been smashed, and poured herself a glass. She tossed it back and poured another.

“Like the Beech fire, and the art room blaze?” she said. “And all the rest of it?”

Yes, there was more. A lot more.

“All those things you blame on me,” she continued.

“All those things you
did
.”

“Let's just be clear. I never did anything you didn't want me to do. And you know it.”

“Did you push Megan onto those tracks?” I asked again. For some reason, I desperately wanted her to say yes. And I wanted her to say no just as badly. Maybe this was all just a horrible accident, an ugly coincidence.

“Why would I do that?” she asked. “You love her. You told me that. She loves you. Why would I want to hurt her?”

“Because . . .” I said. I felt foolish saying it. “Because you're jealous. You don't want me to love anyone but you.”

She let out a derisive chortle. “You think an awful lot of yourself, don't you, Fatboy?”

“Just answer the question.”

But she didn't answer. She finished her drink and, with a little wobble in her gait, walked toward the door. I watched her move, wanting her to leave, wanting her to come back. Outside, it started to rain again and I found myself wondering about the book. Who had fallen off the cliff—Molly or Priss? Who was stronger? Who had a greater will to survive? Why didn't I, the author, know the answer?

Before she reached the door, the buzzer rang, announcing someone outside. I got up to answer. She looked at the video monitor and there was a man standing there, holding a shield up to the camera at the street door.

“Don't open it,” she said. She tried to block my passage to the intercom. But I pushed her roughly aside. I had never been angrier with her, the love I had for her a distant echo.

“I have to,” I said. “It's time.”

She was here in my apartment. When the police came up, I was going to tell them everything. And she'd have to answer the questions herself for once. There was no other way out of the apartment except through that front door. No fire escape, no back exit. She was trapped now, she'd have to show herself to someone other than me.

I pressed the unlock button without asking who it was. Priss gave me a shrug and headed into the bedroom, where she slid the door closed. Did she think I was going to let her hide in there?

•  •  •

A few moments later, there was a hard knock on the door.

“Detective Grady Crowe, New York Police Department.” It was the name on the business card Meg had handed me.

The man outside my door was thick through the middle, with a purposeful five o'clock shadow, and better dressed than one might expect from a detective.

“Ian Paine?” He held up a leather wallet holding a gold shield and an identification card. He wore a gold wedding band on his left hand. For some reason I found myself thinking that my father had never worn a wedding ring.
Jewelry is for fancy boys
, he'd say with a laugh. He didn't need a ring to show his commitment to my mother. He loved her, stood by her until the day he died.

“That's right.” I had only opened the door a little, blocking it with my body.

“I'm here to talk about Megan's case,” he said. He looked me up and down, tried to peer around me into the apartment. “Her subway assault.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“She said you might have some information involving a woman named Priscilla Miller. She suspects that Ms. Miller might be the assailant. Do you think that's true?”

“I honestly don't know.”

He gave a quick nod.

“Can I come in? I have something you might be interested in seeing.”

Truth was, I already had cold feet. I thought about refusing him entry. I had a right to do that. But how would it have looked. I let him inside, momentarily having forgotten that the place looked like downtown Beirut.

“Wow,” he said, looking around. He had a big aura, took up a lot of space. I suddenly felt crowded. “Not much of a housekeeper, are you?”

“Someone trashed my place,” I said. It sounded lame.

He raised an eyebrow at me. “When?”

“Just now. I was out with Megan, and when I came back this is how it looked.”

He walked around, blew out a breath. “Hell hath no fury, right? This girl must be a piece of work.”

Actually, it's
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned
from
The Mourning Bride
by William Congreve. Most people think it's Shakespeare, but it's not. I thought about Priss listening at the door. Why didn't I walk over and slide it open to reveal her standing there? I can't answer that question.

I gave him a little laugh. “Yeah. She can be pretty psycho.”

“What can you tell me about her?” he asked. He had this tone, it had an amiable, almost conspiratorial edge to it. Like a we-all-know-how-women-can-be kind of thing. But I'd spent enough time with the police to know all their little tricks.

“Because I honestly can't find anything about her,” he continued. “She doesn't have a record at all. In The Hollows, New York—that's where you're from, right?” He made a show of checking his notebook. “There are no recent birth records or death records of anyone by that name, no record that anyone by that name ever got a Social Security card, went to school, got a driver's license.”

I didn't say anything, just perched on a bar stool.

“But I put in a call to The Hollows PD. They connected me with a retired cop turned private detective, a man named Jones Cooper. He was very familiar with you, Mr. Paine. He gave me an earful.”

“I bet,” I said.

“He says that there's no Priscilla Miller. That she's your hallucination. That she's your imaginary friend.”

“He does think that, yeah,” I admitted. Now would be the perfect reveal.
He may think that
, I could have said.
But here she is.
I could have pulled her from her hiding spot in the bedroom. But something powerful inside kept me on my bar stool. I was bound and gagged by it, whatever it was.

“Hey,” he said. He pointed to the shelves of books in the hallway. One level was devoted to my book—all the U.S. editions, plus the foreign editions, multiple copies. It looked pretty impressive, all of them lined up. I was proud of it. “I am a big fan, by the way. I've been reading
Fatboy and Priss
as long as you've been writing. I am a comic book junkie, have been all my life.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

“In the books,” he said. He was on a roll. “And I know it's just fiction, okay? But Priss is, like, Fatboy's superhero, right? I mean, she does all the things that Fatboy wants to do but can't do, won't do, for himself. He's meek and gentle, prone to depression, medicating with food, drugs. But Priss is not afraid of anyone or anything. It's like she's his anger, you know? His rage.”

“That's true,” I said. “But that doesn't make him complicit. We all can have dark impulses. Not acting on them is a virtue, not a weakness.”

All I had to do was to tell him she was in the bedroom. Why didn't I do that? I don't know.

“Do you have dark impulses when it comes to your fiancée? I mean, marriage is a big step.”

“What?” I said. He was good. “No. I love her. She's all I ever wanted.”

He looked at me carefully, raised a dark eyebrow, and then offered a sympathetic nod. He walked around the apartment.

“You, on the other hand, have a record a mile long,” he said. “Your juvenile record is sealed, but Detective Cooper filled me in on the whole arson thing. You got mad, set things on fire.”

“No,” I said. “Not me. Priss. My dad made me take that plea. He was afraid. We'd lost my sister Ella to crib death, and my mother was in a mental hospital.”

I thought I saw the door to my bedroom move, as though Priss was leaning against it listening.

“That's rough,” he said. “A horrible thing for any kid to go through. It had to do some damage, right?”

He offered a concerned frown, then he gave his head a little tap with his finger.

“I had therapy.” I still called Dr. Crown sometimes, just to talk when the memories came back, when the veil of depression threatened to fall, when anger got the better of me. But it had been a while. I'd been well—until Megan. Now I was really starting to think I might need to give Dr. Crown a call. Maybe I would, right after I got rid of this cop.

“Right,” he said. “You've been good. It's been a while. There's a drunk and disorderly a couple of years ago, some fight you got into outside of a nightclub. You did a lot of screaming, had to be subdued. That was a misdemeanor, a ticket. Then, last year you punched some guy in the face, broke his nose. You pulled assault for that. But the judge gave you a fine, because the guy was an asshole. You have two moving violations—speeding. One parker, got your car towed. No fires in a while. You on meds?”

“No,” I said.
Nothing legal, Officer.
“I grew up.”

“Good,” he said. “Good for you.”

My patience for this guy's shtick was wearing thin. “You said you had something you wanted me to see,” I said.

“I do.”

He pulled a smartphone from his pocket, did some tapping, handed it to me. It was a video, a crowded subway platform. I knew immediately that it must be the CCTV footage from Meg's subway incident.