Liberty or Death (33 page)

 

I watched Clyde's normally benign face change to something fierce and menacing. Watched him take a step toward me, one step and then another until he was towering over me and I was cringing against the wall, holding the towel out in front of me like a shield. It was like watching a friendly dog suddenly turn and snarl, unexpected and therefore more frightening. "Andre," he repeated. "Who's Andre? I thought your husband's name was Michael?"

"Andre Lemieux. The state trooper who's being held hostage. He's my..."

That was as far as I got before the spatula clattered to the floor and he grabbed me by the arms and hauled me to my feet. He held me there in an agonizing grasp, managing to squeeze all the places McGrath had bruised last night. My feet barely touched the floor, and he did it with as much ease as if I were a pixie. "Jesus H... so McGrath was right. You are a cop..." His voice was full of fury but his eyes were confused, flickering up and down me like he was searching for answers to a question he hadn't asked.

His grip tightened and I bit my lip to keep from crying out, unhappily aware that if I hadn't fallen asleep, I would be long gone. My life wasn't the stuff of fairy tales. He was no Prince Charming. I had awakened not to the prince's kiss and the magic clearing away of the brambles, but to another round of violence and menace. Despite my new risk-averse avatar, I was no more free of pain and danger than before.

In the back of my mind, I wondered if she who had hesitated was lost. "No, Clyde. Listen. I'm not a cop..." Fear made my voice faint as a whisper.

That seemed to make him angrier. Before I could finish, he gave me a shake that made my head rock on my neck and made my senses spin. "Who the hell are you, then?" The words exploded in my face, so close we could almost have kissed. So close I could see the spots he'd missed when he shaved, his wrinkles, his fillings, and the pores of his nose. Sometimes violence is as intimate as love. "Who? And what the hell are you doing here?" He shook me again. My head spun dizzily and my stomach lurched and danced.

"Please, Clyde. Please. Don't shake me again. I already feel so sick. I'm afraid I'll..."

Like most men, he didn't deal with sickness well, so the plea had legs. He held me out at arm's length, ungentle, but steady, and glared down at me. "You'll talk?" he demanded. "No funny stuff?"

Funny stuff? My gun was downstairs in the car, energy and strength farther away than that. This was a case of as ye sow, so also shall ye reap. I had played Superwoman so long that finally, someone believed me. Another time, I might have laughed. It was comical, really, to have this big raging man perceive me as a threat. I was a dangerous woman. So dangerous that when he abruptly dropped his hands and let me go, I fell flat on my ass and could only sit there, stunned by the awful pain that the sudden jarring awoke. I pulled my knees into my chest, waiting for the worst to pass.

He loomed over me, the spatula back in his fist like a cudgel, and for an insane moment I imagined the headlines: EDUCATIONAL CONSULTANT KILLED BY SPATULA-WIELDING DOMESTIC TERRORIST. Like I always say, people whose eyes glaze over when I say I'm a consultant have no idea.

"Get up," he ordered. "We need to talk."

"You think I'm doing this because I want to?" Tears were running down my face. I grabbed the fallen towel and dabbed at them with shaking hands. My body was like Jello, as traitorous lately as these militia thugs. Willpower, Thea. Expecting that he was going to grab me again, and knowing that assistance from these people was proving far worse than doing it myself, I rolled over onto all fours, then onto my knees, and rose slowly to my feet. "We'll talk," I agreed. "Just let me take a pill and then we'll talk." I fumbled the pills out of my pocket, struggled with the cap, gave up, and handed it to Clyde. "Here. You do it." Anything childproof is well beyond the ability of an incapacitated adult.

He read the labels on both bottles before he opened them and set them on the sink. Did he think I was some latter-day Mata Hari, sucking down cyanide now that I'd been discovered? I tried to shake one out, but with my unsteady hands, they came out like salt from a shaker, sprinkling all over the sink and onto the floor. I stared at them, wanting to rescue them, paralyzed into inaction. I could take one pill or save many. I glanced at the mirror, as if the woman in there might have an answer for me. But she was not someone I knew. A ghastly creature with grayish-green skin, snaky coils of unwashed hair, and glittering red-and-green eyes. A horror movie character had invaded my body.

The smell of cooking rising from Clyde's clothes made my stomach do flip-flops. Hard to recall, at this moment, that I'd come here to rescue somebody. I couldn't even get a pill into my own mouth. Suddenly he reached past me, grabbed the glass, filled it with water, and shoved it into my hand. "Here. Take the Goddamned pills and let's get on with this."

Clyde, don't swear,
I thought.
It doesn't suit you.
Mechanically, I picked up a pill, put it in my mouth, and drank. Maybe all I needed were orders. That was it. I needed a keeper. Andre and I had often joked about that. He thought I needed someone to supervise my life and make sure I had fun, got exercise. Ate. Took care of myself. It looked like he was right. While I drank, Clyde picked up the spilled pills and put them back in the bottle. Good thing, because when I finished drinking, the glass fell out of my hand and smashed against the sink.

In the midst of all this awfulness, I was beginning to see things more clearly. Not about me and Clyde, or me and the rest of the militia, but some of the bigger picture. It was the moment to spring into action. To try and do something, if it wasn't too late. But though I felt better after a long sleep—at least, had felt better until Clyde shook me up and knocked me down—I was still far from being able to spring or leap.

I stepped past him, crossed the room, and lay down on my bed. I closed my eyes, and groaned. Today I couldn't even fool myself. I was not Superwoman. The springs sagged as he sat down beside me, and I tensed in anticipation of more grabbing and shaking. "So if you're not a cop, who the hell are you?"

"His fiancée."

"What?"

"Is it still Saturday?"

"Huh? Oh. No. It's Sunday. What does that have to do with anything? You a different person every day of the week?"

Poor Clyde. Who would have expected he had a sense of humor? "Explaining. Last Saturday I was supposed to marry Andre Lemieux. He never showed up. You guys took him. I came to get him back."

"That's a good one," he said. "You came up here, all by yourself, thinking you were going to get him back?"

"Yes," I said, and then, "Please don't laugh at me. I feel bad enough already."

"I'm supposed to believe this?"

"Why not? It's true."

"So who are you really?"

"My name is Thea Kozak. Theadora."

"Got anything to prove that?"

"You're kidding. Right now I may seem impossibly dumb to you, Clyde, but I was trying to do it right. I may have blown it here, but I tried. I tried to be Dora McKusick. You go look in my purse and you'll see that I've got all the right ID. I know what it's like to be pushed around, threatened, scared, deliberately hurt... this week, God knows, there's been plenty of that." That one hit home. He blinked and looked away. "I even tried to be a good waitress."

Grudgingly, he said, "You're not bad... So, if you're not a cop, what are you? ATF? FBI?"

"Educational consultant." Even sick as a dog, my own sense of humor popped up. I wished that I had a copy of this conversation on tape to listen to again someday. If there ever was a someday. No sane person would believe it.

Clyde didn't believe it, either. "Educational consultant! And I was born yesterday. Look, Dora, or Thea, or whatever your name is, you're in serious trouble here. I think it's time you started telling the truth."

I stared at him with my glittering red-and-green eyes. During my time in the restaurant, I'd rarely seen Clyde anything but serene. Now he was almost as overwrought as I was, his face red, his eyes confused, his hands knotted together in a menacing coil. Somewhere along the way, he'd lost the spatula.

"You know how hard it is to prove a negative, Clyde?" He just stared and blinked. "Sorry. I mean, how am I supposed to prove that I'm telling the truth? Which I am. You want me to tell you about Andre? How I met him? He was the detective assigned when my sister, Carrie, was murdered. I hated his guts; he hated mine. Turned out we were made for each other. The night he proposed? I was coming back from a conference in Hawaii, a real bummer experience. He picked me up at the airport. Stopped in the breakdown lane. Knelt down right there beside the traffic and..."

I sat up and stared right into his face, talking louder and faster now. Not knowing what to say and unable to stop talking. How dare he think I wasn't me? That I wasn't here for love? Why else would anyone do this? This was exhausting and ugly and terrifying and it hurt. What could I say that might reach him? Touch him? Where was our point of overlap? What mattered to me that also mattered to Clyde? "You want to know what my wedding dress looked like? Like a giant satin and lace and pearl marshmallow, little scallops of lace here"—my hand fluttered lightly across my chest—"and on the sleeves. For half an hour I was the most beautiful woman in the world. How excited he was about the baby? The baby I just lost? He had names picked out, Goddammit! Names."

Damn! Here he was, something soft coming into his face, and my throat was closing. I forced words past the lump, let the tears fall. "He was making a cradle out of tiger maple. Sanding it until it was smooth as glass." I had a flash of Andre's intent face, bent over the wood, a faint smile instead of his usually serious expression, running an exacting hand over the curve of a rocker. Saw him look up and see me, beckon me over, his smile broadening as he ran that same exacting hand over me, stopping where our child rested, a small sound of pleasure, or possession, or anticipation, escaping. I was here because of Andre. Because he had quietly, firmly, and with incredible persistence worn me down and burrowed his way into my heart.

Words I hadn't meant to say tumbled out. "I've never seen a man more excited about having a baby. Now I've lost them both. Everything I love, I lose, so why don't you just go ahead and shoot me?"

Hold on,
I thought. I'm supposed to be trying to turn Clyde, not descending into a wallow of maudlin self-pity. But if I couldn't have the baby and I couldn't have Andre, then why bother? I didn't think I could go through this again, ever, this dangerous, painful business of falling in love. So what did it matter what Hannon and his band of murdering assholes did to me, anyway? What did it really matter?

"You're a hell of an actress, even for a cop," he said.

I slapped him as hard as I could across the face, and, as he sat there, trying to sort out whether to be surprised or angry, I screamed at him, "I wish I were a cop, Clyde. Then I could arrest you all. You and your buddies Stuart Hannon and Jimmy McGrath for kidnapping, assault and battery, to say nothing about the murder of that pathetic woman who was Jed Harding's wife... Paulette... And don't try to tell me that Paulette left town, because I wasn't born yesterday and I've seen that trailer. Have you?"

I gulped some air, then rushed on before he could speak. "I can see what makes them tick, Clyde. Power and intimidation. Chance to be big shots. But I don't understand about you. You're a decent guy... a good person. You're hardworking and kind. Gentle. In love with a pretty woman who, if she ever got her head unwedged, would see she loves you back. So I don't understand..."

I had to breathe again. He opened his mouth, and I blurted out, "...why you're mixed up with a bunch of murderers. Why you're willing to stand by and let them kidnap and kill people. Why you've let them brainwash you into thinking it's all for the cause, that you have to go along because it's militia business, when that's not what this is about at all, Clyde. Do you know why they really want Jed Harding set free? Do you? And I'll give you a clue. It's not because he's one of you."

He stared at me. Opened his mouth, then closed it again, and stared. "Why don't you tell me," he said.

"They want Jed Harding out so they can kill him, Clyde. Because Jed Harding, for all his wild and crazy acts, is a good man like you, deep down. And he knows too much about what happened to his wife. He's the weak link. A person who might actually tell the cops what happened to her, or at least all he knows. The man who knows too much and someday might feel compelled to tell it. About Paulette. About Gary Pelletier. And probably, once he's talking, about other things they've done or plan to do."

Suddenly my brain was coming alive. Buzzing like a chain saw, cutting through the jam of logs that had kept my thoughts dammed up. Suddenly I saw it all. Saw too much. Even as my words were pouring out to Clyde, I was looking ahead, and I saw more terrible stuff. "Taking Andre wasn't a random act, you know. They didn't just happen to kidnap him because he was the first cop who came by. They took him because he was the investigating detective on the Pelletier shooting, which led him to Harding's wife's murder. Because he was getting too close. This is cover your ass, not fight for a cause."

He was staring at me like I'd grown a second head, instead of merely finally getting a second wind. "This is a lot of bullshit," he said. "You're just trying to confuse me."

"Do you really think so? Do you know what happened to that woman? Does everybody know and nobody cares? Do you honestly believe that it's okay, because you're in the militia, to execute cops and cut women up with chain saws?"

"You're just trying to mess with my head," he said. "That's what they told us you cops will do."

"I'm just trying to straighten out your head. And I'm no cop."

It was as if a mental defroster was clearing the fog out of my mind. I understood why Jed Harding had gone after the guy at the VA. Because he wanted to get locked up. He had counted on their honor, or sense of brotherhood—the militia code—to protect his family. That and the fact that it was a small town. They might look the other way if it was a dumb bimbo from away, like Paulette, who had cheated on her husband, but not if the victim was a grandmother or a small child. But Jed Harding had overestimated their virtue, or misunderstood their level of self-interest.