Mad River Road (38 page)

“He died?”

“Papers said it was a massive brain hemorrhage.”

“And you were arrested?”

“Hell, no.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There was nothing linking me to what happened. No one knew me. Nobody saw me go into his room. We were very discreet,” he said with a wink.

“Then how …?”

“…  did I get caught?”

Jamie nodded.

Brad’s face darkened. “Never trust a woman,” he said ominously.

“You told your wife,” Jamie said, suddenly piecing it all together.

“We’d been fighting all day. Don’t ask me about what. She told me she wanted a divorce. I told her I’d see her
rot in hell first. I guess she didn’t believe me.” Brad shook his head in genuine amazement. “She moved out. Next thing I know she’s talking about taking my son and going to California. That’s when I believe I mentioned what happened to that queer in the bar. Kind of as a cautionary tale. Few days later, the police are at my door. They find this guy’s money clip at the back of some drawer. I’d forgotten I even had the damn thing. Anyway, the long and the short of it is I’m arrested and denied bail, they haul my ass off to jail, and I spend over a year in some stinking cell before a judge decides the evidence they have is inadmissible. Turns out it was an illegal search, and the money clip is considered fruit from a poisonous tree. Something like that.” He laughed. “Kind of ironic, isn’t it? I’m arrested because of one fruit, and I get off because of another.” He laughed again, banging his hand on the tabletop for emphasis. “Anyway, they had to let me go.”

“When was that?”

“They released me a few weeks ago.”

He’d gone from a jail cell to her bed in only a few weeks?

“I came home to find a couple more faggots in my apartment, if you can believe it, and my wife and son vanished into thin air.”

“How did you find out where she’d gone?”

“Well, now, that’s where our little friend, Gracie, proved very helpful.”

“She told you Beth was in Ohio?”

“I didn’t give her much choice.”

“I’m sure she called Beth to warn her.…” Jamie heard what she was saying, stopped when she realized how
ridiculous those words were. Grace Hastings hadn’t warned anyone. She’d never had the chance.

He was smiling, as if reading her thoughts. “My turn,” he said.

“What?”

“My turn to ask a question. Like in
Silence of the Lambs
. You remember
Silence of the Lambs
, don’t you, Jamie?”

Jamie nodded. Were they really talking about movies? First board games, and now movies?

“Great movie.
Great
movie,” he said again, agreeing with his own assessment. “You don’t think so?”

“I guess.”

“What do you mean, you guess?
Silence of the Lambs
was a great movie, no question about it.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen it.”

“Well, we’ll have to rent it one night, after all this is settled.”

“After what is settled?”

“After we pay a little visit to Mad River Road.”

Jamie nodded understanding. “You’re going to kill her, aren’t you?”

“That’s the plan,” Brad said easily.

“And where do I fit into your plan?”

Brad pushed himself out of his seat, returned to the bed, stroked Jamie’s cheek as he sat down beside her. “You? Why, you’re my girl, Jamie. You fit right beside me.”

What does that mean? Jamie wondered. What was he saying? “You expect me to help you kill your wife?”

“I expect you to help me,” he said. “Same way I helped you in Atlanta.”

E
mma lay on top of her bed, staring at the far wall, watching her childhood play out across its bare white surface, like an old-fashioned home movie. She saw herself as a chubby-cheeked child of three or four, being catapulted high into the air above her father’s head, confident hands extended skyward to catch her, then tossing her across his broad shoulders like a sack of grain, and racing with her back and forth across their expansive backyard, her joyous squeals trailing after them. In the background, she heard her mother’s voice cautioning her father to slow down, be careful, watch where he was going. “No,” she heard the child protest as her father’s booming laugh filled the sky. “Faster. Faster.”

Next she saw herself tucked inside her twin-size brass bed, listening to her parents argue in the room next to hers. The child brought the pale pink blankets up over her head in an effort to silence their anger, and when she emerged, she was several years older, the once-chubby cheeks now thinner, a newfound wariness filling her big, blue eyes. She heard her mother’s angry voice, followed by a loud noise, and then another, and she jumped from
her bed, afraid that the house was collapsing around her. Which, of course, it was, although not in the way she imagined. Emma watched her younger self climb out of bed and hurry to her parents’ room, pushing open the door and catching just a glimpse of a shattered mirror on the floor beside an overturned chair, as her father, sweat-streaked, dark hair falling into furious, dark eyes, rushed toward her and carried her back to bed. “What’s wrong?” she asked him repeatedly. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s fine,” he assured her. “Go back to sleep, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Except the next day he was gone, and nothing was ever all right again.

Emma blinked, watching the sad little girl morph into a shy child of nine or ten, as she bounced a rubber ball off the concrete wall behind the six-story apartment building in a mostly gray part of town, where she and her mother lived. Emma’s imaginary friend, Sabrina, watched from the sidelines, patiently waiting her turn. Sabrina was named after the Kate Jackson character on
Charlie’s Angels
, which was Emma’s then-favorite TV show. It was on several times a day in reruns, and Emma watched it as often as she could. She’d seen some episodes so many times, she knew the lines by heart and could recite whole scripts word for word. The early episodes were her favorites, the ones with the original angels, although she liked Cheryl Ladd almost as much as she’d liked Farrah Fawcett. And Jaclyn Smith was certainly pretty, although she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, as her mother had pronounced caustically after only several seconds of viewing. While her mother didn’t like her watching so much television, the fact was
she was rarely home. In the days following Emma’s father’s desertion and the subsequent foreclosure on their home, her mother had been forced to work two, and sometimes even three, jobs to make ends meet, going from one job to the next without a break, leaving first thing in the morning and sometimes not coming home until Emma was already in bed. Emma was rarely asleep when her mother came home, but she often pretended to be. She didn’t want to talk to the woman she held responsible for all the losses in her life.

The one friend she managed to make at her new school was a heavyset girl named Judy Rico, who was also new, although that friendship came to an abrupt halt when Judy, in an effort to make herself more attractive to the popular girls at school, announced one afternoon at recess that Emma’s mother was
her
mother’s cleaning lady. Emma winced at the image of herself pushing Judy Rico to the ground and jumping on top of her, pounding Judy’s face with her fists until blood dripped from her nose and down her white blouse, and a teacher had to come to Judy’s rescue, dragging the still-flailing Emma off her and carrying her to the principal’s office. After that, everyone left her alone. But that was all right. Who needed friends when she had Charlie’s Angels?

Things improved, at least for a little while, after they moved to Detroit, and her mother got the job at Bishop Lane School for Girls. Emma pictured herself in her neatly pressed school uniform, remembering the initial flush of pride she’d felt when she first slipped her arms into the sleeves of her dark green jacket. This is where I belong, she remembered thinking as she took up her
position in the back row for her class photograph with the other teenagers, smiling proudly for the camera.

And then everything went blurry.

Emma closed her eyes, rolled over in bed, refusing to see more. What was there to see after all? The episode with the libidinous gym teacher? It had happened all right, but to Claire Eaton, not to her, and the teacher had been summarily dismissed after Claire’s mother complained to the school principal, who was definitely
not
Emma’s mother. And the photographer she’d met in McDonald’s, well, he was all of seventeen years old and his camera was his dad’s Polaroid, and she doubted he’d noticed her eyes at all, so busy was he staring at her newly developed chest.

“Why did I tell everybody I modeled for Maybelline?” she moaned at the ceiling.

Because she’d been telling that lie for so long, she almost believed it herself, she realized. It had started innocently enough. A boy, eager to impress her, and no doubt, hoping to get lucky, had told her she had beautiful eyes and asked playfully if those were her eyes on the packages of Maybelline mascara. It was an easy leap from there. The next time someone told her she had nice eyes, she filled in the rest herself. It wasn’t that farfetched, after all. Her eyes were the same color, the same shape as the girl’s in the ads. Who would know the difference? How would anyone ever find out the truth?

God, what other lies had she told lately? That she’d written a story about her modeling days and sold it to
Cosmo?
That she was an army brat, that her father had been killed in Vietnam?

That was the trouble with lies. They bred like rabbits. And that was okay, if you told those lies to someone like
Lily, who was naive and trusting and pretty much believed whatever you said. But when you told those same lies to someone as jaded as Jan Scully or as experienced as Jeff Dawson, then you were just asking for trouble. All those questions he’d asked. And he’d looked far from convinced at her answers. “Damn it,” she said, swinging her legs off the bed and marching to her closet, extricating a beat-up, brown canvas suitcase from the back and throwing it across the bed. I’ve got to get out of here, she was thinking as she flung back the top of the case and started hurling clothes in its direction. It wouldn’t take her long to pack. She didn’t have a lot of things, even counting her latest “purchases,” and Dylan had even less. She quickly emptied her dresser drawers, then started removing the clothes from their hangers. In less than twenty minutes, every piece of clothing she owned, except the blue cotton pajamas she had on, were in the suitcase. “Well, that was smart,” she muttered, realizing she’d left herself nothing to wear.

Besides, where was she going?

“Anywhere,” she said, reaching into the suitcase and extricating a pair of jeans and a navy sweater. Her underwear was harder to find, and she ended up unpacking virtually the whole valise and having to fold everything again. “Anywhere but here.” She might not have much, but she still had her instincts, and her instincts were telling her it was time to cut her losses and run, that it was no longer safe for her here on Mad River Road.

Still, her rent was paid up until the end of the month, she thought, sinking down on the bed, suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue, and if she left now, in the middle of the night, she’d have to leave behind all her furniture
and other belongings, and she didn’t have enough money to buy more things, even secondhand. Besides, how could she take Dylan out of school when the school year was almost over? Hadn’t she just been lying awake, remembering how painful it had been being constantly uprooted? Hadn’t she hated her mother because of it? Did she want Dylan to hate her too?

“Damn it,” she said again, pushing the suitcase off the bed and watching her clothes spill out across the floor. She couldn’t leave. Nor did she really want to. No—what she wanted was to make a fresh start. Tomorrow morning, she’d tell Lily the truth, about everything, and hope that Lily would understand and find it in her heart to forgive her. And then she’d go to Scully’s, return the stupid trophy she’d stolen, apologize to Jan. In another few months, when she thought it was safe, she might even let Dylan start using his real name, and so would she, and they’d make a new beginning by reclaiming their former selves. She’d rediscover the person behind all the lies.

Emma flopped down on her back and stared at the ceiling. There was only one problem with that, Emma thought: she had no idea who that person was.

Lily turned over in bed and opened her eyes. Jeff Dawson was smiling at her from the pillow beside her. She wondered how long he’d been watching her as, wordlessly, he reached for her, and she felt herself melting into his arms.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kenny demanded from the foot of the bed. “He’s a loser, for God’s sake. Get out while you still can.”

Lily gasped and bolted up in bed, her eyes scanning
the darkness for men she knew weren’t there. Jeff wasn’t lying beside her; Kenny wasn’t yelling at her from the foot of the bed. “Good God,” Lily said, listening to the sound of a motorcycle in the distance and wondering if that ghostly sound had propelled Kenny into her dream.

What would Kenny have thought of Jeff Dawson? she wondered. Would he really have considered him a loser, or would he have liked him?

“
I
like him,” she whispered softly, as if afraid to give the words too much resonance.

“You two have something going on?” she remembered Emma asking the first time she’d seen the two of them together.

“Of course not,” Lily had replied, but Emma had sensed the truth even then.

Although what did Emma know of truth? Lily wondered now. Who exactly was Emma Frost, and how many lies had she told?

Once again she replayed her earlier conversation with Jeff, that unbelievable story he’d told about catching Emma shoplifting. That couldn’t be right. Then again, why couldn’t it? Lily really didn’t know Emma very well. She knew virtually nothing about her life and hadn’t been around her enough to have any clear understanding of the way her mind worked. In fact, the more she learned of Emma, the more of an enigma she was becoming.