Die Before I Wake (34 page)

He’s been poisoning me with some insecticide called diazinon.”

Quietly, Claudia said, “I know what diazinon is.”

“I still can’t believe it. I thought I knew him better than this. He seemed like such a decent guy. A good husband. Good father. He loves his little girls so much. And I really believed he loved me.” I was trembling all over, whether from the cold rain or the aftermath of terror, I couldn’t be sure. “I’m so worried about the girls,” I said. “You don’t think he’d do anything to them, do you? I’m going to call Dwight Pettingill as soon as I get settled. Tom can’t think I’ll let this lie. He has to be stopped. He has to—” I realized I was babbling. I glanced over at Claudia, who was uncommonly quiet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I realize this must be as much of a shock for you as it is for me. You’ve known Tom all your life.”

“Yes,” she said. “I have.”

In the dark, with the oversize hood of the yellow slicker hiding her face, she bore an uncanny resemblance to the grim reaper. The executioner. A shiver skittered down my spine, and I shook it off. I was safe now. I glanced in the side-view mirror. Nobody was following us. Tom had really, truly let me go. I could relax now. It was over.

In the darkness of the grocery store parking lot, reflections from the red-and-white Shop City sign fell in bloody pools on the wet pavement. Claudia pulled into the empty parking space next to my Toyota Highlander.

I fished my keys out of my purse and blipped my doors open. Turning to Claudia, I said, “I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve been a good friend. I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too, lovey. Take care.” I scurried to the Toyota and climbed in before I could get any wetter. As if that was possible. I cranked the engine and turned on the heater, and was sitting there shivering, waiting for the windshield to defog, when the passenger door opened and Claudia climbed in beside me. “I forgot to give you directions to the motel,” she said.

“Oh. Right.”

“You go two blocks down on Main and take a right. Turn left at the first intersection. It’s just down the street. The Maineway. You can’t miss it.” I hunched my shoulders and rubbed my cold hands together. “What would I do without you?”

“It’s a good question. One we’ll never know the answer to. It’s a damn shame it had to go this way, but sometimes you just don’t have a choice.” Something odd in her voice, some peculiar inflection, caught my attention. She dropped the hood of her slicker, and that was when I saw the gun in her hand. “Sorry, snookums,” she said, “but there’ll be no motel for you tonight. Or any other night, for that matter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you do. Give yourself a minute to think about it. I’ll wait.” She smiled, looking smug and more satisfied than I’d ever seen her. “I’m in no hurry.” I have to give myself credit; I never do anything halfway. When I’m wrong, I’m spectacularly wrong.

There’s nothing like a fatal miscalculation to ruin a girl’s day. Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last few weeks in a diazinon-induced fog, I might have figured it out. Or maybe not. As I reached back frantically in my memory—what there was of it, between the gaping holes that would remain forever empty—

every shred of evidence, every subtle nuance, had pointed directly at Tom.

Which was, of course, exactly the way Claudia had planned it.

Staring down the barrel of that Saturday-night special, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I know this sounds crazy, but through the terror—and believe me, you haven’t known fear until you’ve found yourself facing the business end of a gun—another emotion kept fighting its way to the forefront: elation. Sheer, undiluted joy. Because if Claudia was the villain in this piece, that meant Tom wasn’t. He was innocent. It was probably too late for that knowledge to do me any good, but at least my instincts had been correct. I’d known, right up to our final confrontation in the driveway, that something didn’t feel right about this. The Tom I knew, the Tom I loved, couldn’t possibly be the monster he appeared to be.
I’m sorry,
I told him silently, regret-ting that I’d probably never be able to tell him just how remorseful I really was.
I’m
so
sorry I stopped
believing in you.
I focused on the single bright note in all of this: the girls wouldn’t lose their dad. They’d grieve my death, but they hadn’t known me for long, and eventually, they’d forget about me and move on with their lives. I could live with that. Or, more accurately, I could die with that. Especially knowing that they wouldn’t lose both of us, that Tom would still be there for them.

“Drive,” Claudia said. “Any funny stuff and I’ll shoot you.”

All-righty then. I might be a little slow at times, but I wasn’t stupid enough to argue with a woman pointing a loaded gun at my head. I backed out of the parking space, shifted into Drive, and headed for the exit. “Turn left,” she said.

After I’d made the turn, I said, “Where are we going?”

“Never mind. You’ll find out when we get there.

Just drive.”

Trying to keep the conversation going while ignoring the thumping of my heart, I said, “So it was you all along. Not Tom.”

She smirked. “Had you fooled pretty good, didn’t I?”

“I don’t understand. Tom said he followed her there that night. But she was alive when he left her.”

“Darling Tom. Beth called me, in a tizzy because they’d had a terrible row. I told her to meet me at the bridge. We used to hang out there when we were teenagers. Drink some beer, smoke a little pot, make out with the boys. So it didn’t seem strange to her that I should suggest the bridge as a meeting place.

I let her go ahead of me, which was a good thing, because Tom went after her. He flew past me out on the state highway, so I pulled into Lasselle’s convenience store and waited until he came back without her. I didn’t want him to see me and put two and two together.”

“Of course not. What about the suicide note? Mel said it was in Beth’s handwriting.” Claudia smiled. “I can make anybody do anything when they’re on the wrong end of my gun.” She punctuated the statement by kissing the gun barrel lovingly.

“Why did you kill her?”

Claudia’s smiled disappeared. “The bitch deserved to die after what she did to Tom.”

“You mean cheating on him with Riley?”

“Cheating on him and getting pregnant. For God’s sake, had the woman never heard of birth control? It almost killed Tom, you know. He was so much in love with her. And then there was Sadie—he loves that kid so much. He was devastated when he found out she wasn’t his. Beth came sniveling to me for sympathy. I pretended to give it, even though I could clearly see the truth. Tom wasn’t going to be happy until he was rid of her forever. So—” Beneath the slicker, she squared her shoulders. “I took care of it for him.”

“I don’t understand. I thought you and Beth were friends.”

“We could never be friends,” Claudia said bitterly.

“She had Tom, and I didn’t.”

So it was as simple as that. Call it jealousy, call it unrequited love or even obsession, but what it boiled down to was that Claudia wanted what Beth had, and was willing to kill for it. And now, as Tom’s wife, I was in possession of that same coveted treasure. The moment I married Tom, my fate was sealed.

I cleared my throat. “Why didn’t you ever tell Tom how you felt about him?”

“I tried once. During his blackest period after Beth died, he came over to my house one night for a drink and a sympathetic shoulder. We ended up having several drinks, then tearing each other’s clothes off and having screaming sex. Afterward, I was in bliss. I really believed this was it. The man I’d secretly loved for half my life was finally mine.

And I made the mistake of telling him I loved him.

But instead of saying it back to me, the way I’d imagined, he got up, put on his clothes, and went home. The next day, he called to apologize. He said the whole episode was a mistake, that it had arisen out of loneliness and grief and an overabundance of alcohol. He was too much of a gentleman to mention the confession I’d made. And I pretended right along with him that those words had never been spoken. I told him not to sweat it, that the night had meant nothing more to me than some good, healthy sex, and that we could go back to being just friends, with no hard feelings between us.” Her laugh was brittle.

“I’m one hell of a liar. He bought it hook, line, and sinker. For me, it was one of the most painful, embarrassing moments of my life.”

“I’m sure it was.”

We were headed into the wilderness, and a suspicion began to nag at me. Unless we changed course soon, which didn’t seem likely, we were headed directly for Swift River Road. Returning to the scene of the crime, perhaps? The woman didn’t have much of an imagination if she always killed her victims in the same location. On the other hand, if not exactly imaginative, reusing the bridge was at least economi-cal. She didn’t have to waste gas, at three dollars a gallon, driving around looking for potential homicide sites.

I was right. Funny how being right was no longer satisfying. We took the turn onto Swift River Road, leaving civilization—such as it was—behind us.

Here, there were no streetlights to illuminate our way. Heavy rain clouds had blotted out the moon.

With only the Highlander’s headlights to guide us, Swift River Road was dark, and wet, and more than a little creepy.

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You put those batteries on the stairs?”

She laughed, a deep, whiskey-throated laugh. “I was hoping you’d break your neck. But as it turns out, you’re tougher than I thought. And wasn’t it just like Riley to be your knight in shining armor?

Sometimes I really hate that guy.” Maybe she hated him, but I didn’t. I still wasn’t impressed that he’d slept with Tom’s wife, but now that I knew he wasn’t a killer—I couldn’t believe I’d actually suspected both of them at varying times—

I was willing to forgive him for his indiscretion. And I was damn glad he’d been there to scrape me up off the floor and dial 911. “And the diazinon?” I said.

“It’s a pesticide, snookums. I own a greenhouse.

Without pesticides, all my precious babies would be eaten alive by multilegged little monsters. The diazinon keeps them healthy and beautiful.” While it kept me nauseated, headachy and paranoid. Grimly, I said, “How’d you do it?” She grinned, inordinately pleased with her own cleverness. “I mixed it with your shampoo, sweetie.

That nauseating stuff that makes you smell like strawberry shortcake. I did it the day you fell. While you were on the couch that evening, being fussed over by the entire neighborhood, I slipped away and went upstairs. It only took a minute to mix it in and shake it up.”

What if I hadn’t been the only one who used that shampoo? What if the girls had used it, or Tom?

What about my unborn baby, who’d done nothing to deserve this? But of course, Claudia didn’t know I was pregnant. If she had, would it have made a difference? Probably not, since she hadn’t cared enough about Tom or the girls to even conceive of the notion that one of them could have been sickened right along with me.

You bitch!
I wanted to shout.
You miserable, un-feeling bitch!
But I couldn’t. Not while the woman had a gun pointed to my head. I was almost certainly going to die, but there was no sense in antagonizing her and hastening the process.

“What about Mystery Man?” I said instead. It should have occurred to me at the time that Claudia was the most likely person to have sent him on his evil mission. But I’d been distracted. I’d just found out I was pregnant, and I was still wrapped in a diazinon cloud.

“Oh, him.” She dismissed him with a wave of her free hand. “While you were in the bathroom with the kids, I paid him fifty bucks to follow you around and scare you. I was just toying with you. Trying to keep you off balance.”

“And the belt? You’re the one who cut the belt on my Toyota?”

“I was particularly proud of that one. My uncle Ernie was a backyard mechanic. I spent half my childhood scooched down beside him, passing him wrenches. It was a piece of cake, so easy a baby could have done it. I came over in the middle of the night with my sharpest kitchen knife, slid under the car, cut the belt, and was back home in less than five minutes. I knew I was safe. You would never have suspected me.”

Ahead of us, the bridge loomed, its skeletal, hulking form barely visible in the glossy headlight reflections. “Drive up onto the bridge and park,” she instructed. “Leave the headlights on. I don’t suppose you have a flashlight in this thing?” I did. Flashlight, flares, jumper cables, the telephone numbers of everyone from AAA to Newmarket General Hospital. Just in case. After my breakdown, Tom had equipped the vehicle with everything I might need if I should ever undergo another automo-tive emergency. How could I have ever imagined him to be a killer, this man who cared so deeply about my welfare? But the human brain has an amazing capa-city to distinguish patterns. We look at a work of art that consists of nothing more than a few lines which, up close, appear to be nothing. But when we stand back, our brains fill in the empty spaces, connecting those lines until we see whatever it is the artist intended us to see. A house, a tree, a hippopotamus.

So it was with me. Claudia had drawn a series of seemingly unconnected lines. But when I stepped back and looked at them as a whole, my mind filled in the empty spaces and I saw exactly what Claudia had intended me to see—my husband’s guilt.

If she hadn’t been about to kill me, I might have admired her cleverness.

We got out of the car. The rain was coming down so hard now it was almost blowing sideways. We both lifted our raincoat hoods—like it was going to matter if my hair got wet, since I was about to die—

and with the gun still trained on me, Claudia opened the trunk, found the flashlight, and took it out. “Over there,” she ordered, flicking the switch. “Move it.” With the gun at my back and the flashlight beam dancing ahead of me, I let her guide me over the metal grating to the bridge railing. Below, I could hear the rushing water. The current was swift, the river engorged because of the recent rains. “Climb up on the railing like a good girl,” she said, while I just stood there, looking at her stupidly. I’d thought she was going to shoot me. At least shooting would be quick and, as far as I knew, most likely painless.