If She Should Die (21 page)

Bethany raised her left hand and pointed to the open refrigerator. Christine walked to it, feeling the cool air pouring out. She saw nothing unusual on the nearly empty shelves. Then she looked down at the open hydrator drawer.

On the cold white metal lay a filthy, dead, long-haired brown river rat nearly a foot long.

“Eat your oatmeal.”

“You didn’t put raisins in it,” Jan Burke said accusingly. “Or cimmaning. I only like it with raisins and cimmaning.”

“It’s
cinnamon
, not
cinnaming
.” Travis rummaged through the kitchen cabinets until he found raisins and cinnamon, then sprinkled both in his four-year-old daughter’s bowl of steaming oatmeal. “How’s that?”

“Not right. You have to cook the raisins with the oatmeal or they don’t get all nice and smooshy.”

“Stir them into the hot oatmeal. They’ll soften.”

“They aren’t right.”

Travis closed his eyes and counted to ten, then said in an even voice, “Mademoiselle, please eat the oatmeal Daddy made for you. I went to a lot of trouble. It’ll hurt my feelings if you don’t eat it. All right?”

Jan softened slightly at being called
mademoiselle
, which she knew was a nice name in a beautiful language she would learn someday. She also didn’t want to hurt Daddy’s feelings. “Oh, okay, I’ll eat it,” she said magnanimously, then muttered into her bowl, “but it’s not right.”

Travis Burke loved his daughter more than he’d believed he could ever love another human being, but he didn’t know how Bethany managed to treat the little girl with unfailing patience. Jan was a very good girl for her age. Everyone told him so. But even the best four-year-olds were difficult, they added. Unfortunately, Travis had never been even-tempered with humans. Reptiles were another matter.

“I’m going out to check on the snakes before Mommy gets back,” he told Jan.

“Ugh. Maybe they’d eat my oatmeal.”

“They like a little livelier fare.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“You mean they eat mice. Alive.” Jan scrunched up her beautiful little face. “Double ugh! And you’d better hurry. Mommy won’t like it if she has to wait for you.”

“Mommy shouldn’t be so rigid.”

“What?”

“Never mind again. I’ll be back in ten minutes. And you’d better eat every bite of that oatmeal.”

When Travis had first married Bethany, her father, Hugh Zane, had wanted to buy them a large Mediterranean-style house in Winston’s most affluent neighborhood, a house not far from his own. Travis had turned down the lavish gift in favor of a ranch-style home less than half the size of the Mediterranean. He’d had two reasons besides not wanting to live under Hugh’s watchful eye. The first was that he didn’t care to be beholden to Hugh Zane for over $400,000. Hugh would remind him in a hundred little ways how much the house had cost, expecting obedience in return. Second, Travis was determined to live on the outskirts of town, away from close neighbors, where no one would object to his keeping the snakes that had been his passion since he was fourteen.

Now their nearest neighbor lived nearly half a mile away, a retired widower who shared a mild interest in herpetology and dropped by every couple of weeks for a look at “the little guys.” Over a mile separated them from other neighbors, who so far had registered no complaints about the snakes, no doubt thinking the odd college professor only kept black, garter, and maybe a couple of small rat snakes.

To Travis’s surprise, neither Bethany nor Hugh had ever let up on him about getting rid of the snakes, although before the nuptials he’d been adamant on the subject. Perhaps they’d thought that with enough nagging they could eventually wear away his resolve like water wearing away rock. They’d been wrong, and Travis had been both amazed and unhappy by his seemingly malleable wife’s tenacity. Perhaps, he thought later, she was more like her father than she seemed.

The snake house measured thirty by thirty-six feet and was constructed of white-painted concrete blocks with windows made of Lexan, a polycarbonate as clear as glass
but nearly unbreakable. Travis removed a ring of keys from his jacket pocket. With the first he unlatched a padlock, with the second a dead bolt, and with the third a regular doorknob lock. He walked inside, swung the metal door shut behind him, and flipped the knob lock shut. He turned on full-spectrum/ultraviolet lights. Water snakes like full-spectrum, while insectivorous species seemed to benefit from ultraviolet. He looked around the well-insulated domain where the heat was carefully maintained at optimum temperatures for the health of the snakes. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen!”

A series of hisses and rattles greeted his cheerful words. Most people shuddered at the sound. Travis loved it.

After his marriage to a prosperous woman, he no longer had to watch every penny and was able to sink a large portion of his savings into the snake house, whose cages boasted the European-style terraria interiors more natural than most simple American styles. Leaves or sand, sometimes a combination, covered the floors of the cages. Many contained small branches he’d gathered from the woods, some branches placed diagonally in the cages for arboreal snakes. This style of cage made tending the snakes more trouble, but Travis thought the snakes deserved the best.

He glanced in a cage at a bright red-and-orange tree boa, a species highly sought after by hobbyists although generally known to be feisty and to dislike handling. “I’m expecting about ten babies from you this year,” Travis said. “You’re not going to let me down, are you?” The boa wrapped herself tighter around a branch, turning away her face. “Bitch,” Travis murmured, smiling.

He moved on to a common king snake with white markings against black. The snake was plentiful in Appalachia and Travis knew too many people felt no immediate fear of it, not realizing that an untamed one is likely to coil calmly
around an arm, then grab and chew with vicious gusto. Travis bore the scars on his right arm to prove the snake’s unpleasant trait. This snake was large and torpid, one of his first acquisitions in spite of their less than friendly introduction. Her mate was kept in a separate cage because of the king snake’s tendency toward cannibalism.

Travis’s tan-and-rust-colored pine snake lay almost invisible in a mass of leaves. He’d found this one in Kentucky and valued it because, of a species known for its belligerence, this was the most aggressive one he’d ever captured. The next cage contained a predominantly gold heavy-bodied ball python. Because of its coloration, this beauty had cost him over $3,000. The species was known to have a life span of twenty to forty-seven years. “You’ll probably outlive me, buddy,” he said to the oblivious snake.

But the snakes holding the greatest fascination for Travis were the vipers, maybe because they were generally the deadliest. Their venom is most dangerous to people because vipers target warm-blooded prey—prey with physiology most like humans. One of Travis’s favorites was the large Gaboon viper with its markings of purple and pink. The species had the longest fangs of any venomous snake. He’d carefully measured this one’s at one and a half inches each. It also had the intriguing habit of lying still when angered, then inflating and cutting loose with a hissing noise so loud some experts compared it to the sound of a car tire deflating.

His western diamondback rattlesnake seemed to glare at him as he rattled ominously. “Bad mood today, Hugh?” Bethany would be incensed if she knew he’d named the bad-tempered, dangerously venomous snake after her father. Travis moved on to the death adder with its triangular head, the black tiger snake with its large body and tendency to spread its neck when alarmed, the desert horned viper that when annoyed rubbed its
scales together to make a loud, rasping sound—

A sharp rap at the steel door made Travis jump and reminded him he’d stayed too long with the snakes. He hurried the length of the snake house, unlocked the steel door, and opened it to face a narrow-eyed Bethany. “It’s time to leave.
Past
time.”

“Sorry, honey. Hey, why don’t you step in and look at the green python? It’s beautiful. The color looks especially good today. Maybe it’s the light—”

“I do not find
any
snake, no matter how good its color, beautiful. And we’re late. Jan has already missed the first fifteen minutes of preschool.”

“Oh no,” Travis said dramatically. “I wonder how far behind she’s fallen in her education? Damn, I hope she can still make it into a good university.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Travis. Preschool isn’t the nonsense you think.”

“All I know is that I got a Ph.D. without one single day of preschool.
Or
kindergarten, for that matter.”

“I am not having this discussion again,” Bethany announced, glaring. “Lock up your house of horrors and let’s get going before we’re even later than we are now.”

In the car Bethany strapped Jan into the backseat so tightly Travis expected the child to turn blue, then asked if he wanted to drive. Travis declined, although his wife’s cautious, creeping, nervous driving style set him wild. Nevertheless, Bethany loved to drive and he hoped concentrating on navigating the car might take the edge off her anger at his tardiness.

They crawled out of the driveway, Bethany peering repeatedly in the rearview and side mirrors and sticking her head out the open window searching for impediments. At last they cleared the driveway and started out at a rip-roaring forty-five miles an hour on open highway.

“So how is Christine?” Travis asked, determined to be
sociable, although he could tell Bethany was still sizzling with anger.

“She’s not good. Something else happened this morning—” She glanced back at Jan. “I’ll tell you about it later, but I’m worried about her. I hope she and Jeremy will be able to come to Jan’s birthday party next week.”

“Oh yes, let’s do hope,” Travis said dryly.

Bethany turned to him. “What’s with the tone? I thought you liked Christine.”

“I like Christine just fine. It’s her brother who bothers me.”

“Why? He’s sweet and gentle—”

“You barely know him, Beth. His kind is unpredictable. I don’t like having a big retarded guy around all those little girls.”

“Travis!” Bethany gasped.

“I
love
Jeremy,” Jan protested loudly. “He’s fun like a kid.”

“Like an
enormous
kid. I don’t want him at the party.”

“
I
want him to come, Daddy,” Jan said truculently. “It’s
my
birthday party and it won’t be fun without him!”

“And
un
inviting him would hurt his feelings and insult Christine,” Bethany added in an affronted voice. “I can’t believe you would even
suggest
such a rude thing!”

“Jeez, what an uproar,” Travis muttered. “I think that cold is really getting to you, Beth.”

“What does that mean?”

“That you’re ridiculously short-tempered.”

“I’m short-tempered because we’re late!”

“Then drive faster. Everyone is passing us.”

Silent with fury, Bethany pushed on the accelerator and they sped up five miles an hour. We’re flying now, Travis thought as he gritted his teeth. To take his mind off her maddening driving, he flipped down the sun visor and looked at himself in the mirror on the back. His light
brown hair showed a few new gray hairs at the temples. It also seemed his hairline might be receding slightly, a disaster as far as he was concerned. He vowed to buy Rogaine this very afternoon. And some of that subtle dye that gradually darkened the hair. His cheeks also looked a bit pale, maybe even sunken, and his green eyes faintly bloodshot. He hadn’t slept well last night.

“You look fine,” Bethany said, “although you nicked yourself shaving. There’s a little bloody spot on the left side of your chin and one on your throat.”

“I hate shaving.” Travis licked a finger and rubbed at the dried blood. “Maybe I’ll grow a beard.”

“Don’t you dare. I hate beards. They make men look older.” She turned and gave him a hard look. “If you cover up that handsome face with a graying beard, you might not be as attractive to the nineteen-year-olds you favor.”

Travis sighed. “I’m not interested in nineteen-year-olds.”

“I was nineteen when you started seeing me.” Travis flipped up the visor as Bethany braked sharply for a large brown leaf she’d apparently mistaken for a squirrel. The leaf having safely blown to the other side of the road, she accelerated with a lurch. “Dara Prince was nineteen, wasn’t she?”

“I have no idea how old Dara Prince was,” Travis said tightly.

“Who’s Dara Prince?” Jan piped up from the back. “Is she a princess?”

“No, mademoiselle,” Travis said. “She was just a student in my class, and a poor one at that.”

“You had no interest in Dara Prince?” his wife persisted.

“No, Bethany, I did not.”

“Oh really?” She looked over at him with one of her dangerously sweet smiles. “Then why did you say her name twice in your sleep last night?”

After the discovery of the rat, Christine thought they would have to slap Bethany to stop her screaming. “For God’s sake, Beth, it’s only a rat!” Tess had shouted above the noise.

“A
big
rat. Dead. In the
refrigerator
!”

“Yeah. Dead. It’s not going to hurt anyone. It just looks gross and it stinks.”

“I’m going to throw up,” Bethany announced.

Christine had suddenly felt calm, almost amused by the uproar caused by a simple rat, repulsive though it was. “Beth, Tess, I think you both need to go home,” she said. “Then I’m going to call the police.”

“You want us to leave you here with
that
?” Bethany had asked in horror, pointing at the rat.

“I don’t think I’m in any danger. You have to drive Jan and Travis to school. Tess, you’ve been up for hours and you look exhausted. The police might not arrive for an hour or two. I’m going to take a shower and try not to sound like a hysteric when the cops come. I want you two
to go about your day and let me take care of myself. I’m not an invalid or a child.”