Tabula Rasa (16 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Because I made you feel something?”

“Yes. You made me feel pity. I’ve never felt pity for another
living soul, not ever. It’s a fucking awful feeling, but it’s a
part of the set of experiences I don’t have and which make it
impossible for me to relate to people in any real way. But the idea
of killing you... I didn’t get a rush from it.”

Lucky for me.

“What about the cat?”

“I feel a sort of detached affection for her. But before you came
along, it was the strongest emotion toward another living being I’d
ever felt that didn’t involve that being’s death.”

“Why are you telling me all this now?” Just because I asked,
didn’t mean he had any obligation to answer, and I was kind of
surprised he was going along with my questioning in the first place.

“I no longer have anything left to lose because I’ve decided I’m
never letting you go.”

I’d suspected as much, and he’d said something close to this
before, but the word
never
hadn’t entered into it. There was
a finality and stubborn resolve to that
never
that caused the
tightness inside me to finally relax. Because I believed him. He
wasn’t letting me go. And he wasn’t going to kill me—at least
not tonight. And whatever else he was planning to do... he was
probably right that I’d like it because apparently I was a freak
like that. Like him in my own twisted way. Yet another reason to not
want to remember my past.

I closed my eyes and against all reasonable common sense, fell asleep
in the only arms that felt safe to me.

***

When I woke, I was back in my room down the hall. Shannon must have
carried me back once I’d fallen asleep. The clock on the nightstand
read
ten o’clock,
and sun was streaming in through the
windows. How had I slept so late? I must have been out eleven hours
at least. I rolled over, stretching, startled to find Shannon leaning
against the door frame watching me.

“You’ll want your own room for sleep. You’ll need a space that
is yours to process your experiences.”

Even though he’d been decent to me up to this point, somehow
everything he said managed to sound terrifying with about thirty
layers of meaning tucked inside them, half of which I was sure I
would never fully unravel until it was far too late.

There was an abrupt buzzing sound, and he retrieved a shiny red phone
from his pocket. It wasn’t a burner like the one I normally saw him
talk on. It seemed quite nice and expensive, definitely not the kind
of phone you ditched in a nondescript undisclosed location every two
weeks.

“Mom, hi.”

I could hear an animated female voice on the other end of the call.

“I know. I’ve been working,” Shannon said. “I know. I know.
I’m free tonight.”

The woman on the other end squealed. An obvious sign of approval. But
then something that sounded like nagging started.

“I found someone,” Shannon said, interrupting her tirade.

Utter pin drop silence on the other end for nearly a full minute.
Then there were more animated questions I couldn’t decipher from
across the room.

“We’ll see,” Shannon said, noncommittally. “I’ll see you
tonight.”

He put his phone back in his pocket and regarded me with something
like amusement. “How would you like to meet my parents? You’ll be
playing the role of my girlfriend.”

“What am I really?” Words like
girlfriend
seemed way
outside the scope of anything that had or would go on between us.
Still, I wanted to know how he defined
this
.

“You’re mine,” he said, as if that clarified everything.

“Your what?”

“Just mine.”

Since Shannon was perfectly comfortable killing a person, he must be
equally untroubled by owning one.

“And when you get tired of playing house?” These questions and
concerns had been in the background since we’d first arrived. But
now that things had escalated between us to a mockery of coupledom, I
was even more concerned about how these things ended with a contract
killer. Surely it couldn’t be a nice ending. And this couldn’t
last forever.

“I haven’t gotten tired of the cat.”

This statement was absolutely insane to me but seemed reasonable to
him. How could he compare me to a fucking house pet? Oh, right,
because I was just another type of pet to him.

“How long have you had the cat?” I asked.

“Seven or eight years.”

He’d managed to care for a cat for that long? Sure, they didn’t
require a lot of maintenance, but he had to make sure she was fed and
got her shots. And she seemed healthy and well taken care of—spoiled
even. He fed her a super fancy brand of cat food that was probably
better quality than most kids got at school. You could put it on a
plate and feed it to a kid, and they’d probably think they were
eating food meant for people.

So maybe there was some credence to his view on this. From your
average person, such an unusual assurance wouldn’t mean much to me,
but maybe he really wouldn’t get bored. If I could make him feel
something without having to die at his hands first, then maybe he
wanted to keep that feeling going. If it had only been me and the
white cat who’d been able to elicit anything close to a human
emotion from him, we were both far too rare to be casually discarded.

I hoped.

“How did you get the cat?” Somehow I couldn’t imagine him
sauntering up to a pet shop or searching the classifieds. What
situation could have possibly moved him to acquire an animal
companion?

He smiled, remembering back. “I was on a job. I had a contract for
her owner. She was skin and bones, barely being fed or properly cared
for and little more than a kitten. She was so dirty that I thought
she was gray at first. When I killed him, I think she actually smiled
at me. She kept following me around, meowing at me as I cleaned up.
For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her behind, so I
brought her home with me.”

I wasn’t sure what kind of story I’d been expecting. I guess
something a little more pedestrian. I shuddered, thinking it was like
she was some kind of trophy from a kill. Like me after Trevor in the
castle.

An awkward silence descended between us, then he said, “So dinner
with my parents?”

I couldn’t believe he was taking me out of the house. And I was
very curious. I was convinced his parents must somehow be evil, and
maybe Shannon was in denial about it or was simply lying. It wasn’t
as if lying would give him an attack of guilt. Though his lack of
shame also made honesty much easier for him than the average person.
If he could control certain parameters, he could tell me anything
without caring what I thought about it.

“There will be ground rules, of course,” he said. “You will not
at any point give them any indication that you are the girl who went
missing or anything about how you truly came to be with me. Let me
handle the details of how we met when they ask. Nor will you seek
their help to escape me. Don’t put me in a position to do something
I’d rather not do. I’m sure you don’t want blood on your
hands.”

I stared at him, not even sure how to process that statement. “You’d
kill your parents if I tried to get help?”

“I’m sure it wouldn’t give me pleasure.”

Oh
that
made it better. How could he speak so casually about
killing the supposedly wonderful people who raised him?

“I’m not like you. You know this. Don’t assume I’ll be held
back by the things that repulse normal people, and plan your own
actions accordingly. It’s likely you’d be far more traumatized by
the event than I would. Just know I will go to any lengths to protect
my secrets.”

“And what would theoretically happen to me if I was this stupid?”
I wanted to know the worst case scenario with Shannon as he saw it
currently.

“Let’s just say it would be a very long time before I took you
out of the house again. You’d be an indoor kitty.”

In truth, I had no intention of saying a single thing. Where the hell
would I go? In the time I’d been in Shannon’s house, I had not
once developed some burning desire to have my photo plastered all
over the news and have strangers in my face trying to convince me of
our history together, or having everyone I met from this moment on
look at me with condescending pity.

I was sure that if I were to be able to go through all that, I would
additionally be able to access my money at least and put together a
reasonably non-horrible life. But I had no anchor. I would always be
“that girl who doesn’t remember anything, poor thing.”

Aside from the initial moment in the castle where Shannon had felt
the spark of pity that no doubt saved my life, he hadn’t acted like
what had happened to me was any big deal. That might sound cold and
horrible, but he hadn’t handled me with kid gloves. There were some
bizarre benefits to spending time with a man who lacked empathy. I
was sure that if I’d been with any other person, I would have
spiraled down further and further into post-traumatic stress as all
the well-meaning concern made life more and more impossible to cope
with. I would have no doubt mirrored and aped the reactions those
around me expected.

Sometimes all a person needed was to be treated like they were
normal. At a certain point sympathy and empathy become another
version of aggression.

“Elodie? Are you going to dinner?”

“I have a choice?”

“About this? Yes.”

“I’ll go, but what will I tell them about who I am?”

“Make something up, but keep it as close to the truth about what
you know about yourself as possible. It’ll be easier to remember.
You should make up a different last name if it comes up, and I
wouldn’t tell them the university you attended. Pick another one,
on the other end of the country, preferably.”

“Do I have to wear the brown contacts? Don’t I look different
enough without them?”

My hair was much shorter and darker. And while I didn’t wear makeup
with just us in the house, Shannon had bought me some. The colors I
would wear would be far different than what would have worked with
long blonde hair.

“What is your objection to the contacts?”

“Discomfort. Not wanting to touch my eye. And what if we forget
them sometime? Or I might forget to take them out. I have to clean
them. A lot of things.”

“What about a pair of non-prescription glasses?”

“Okay.”

“Good. I’ll handle it while I’m out running errands today.
Finish up your leftovers for lunch so I can get it out of my fridge.
I don’t want the kitchen smelling like
lo mein
for the rest
of the week.”

I had thought we might discuss the previous night, or that he might
give me some indication of how he saw our relationship progressing. I
don’t mean that I thought we’d pick out rings or discuss babies,
just that I thought surely he might give me some indication of his
plans for me. In reality, it seemed he only planned to let me see a
few feet of the road ahead of me at any given time. Whether he’d
privately planned any farther than that remained a mystery.

***

At six-thirty, we sat in Shannon’s car in front of his parents’
house. They lived in a really nice—almost posh—upper middle class
neighborhood in a generously sized red brick two-story with large
white columns in the front.

“I thought you said your parents couldn’t afford to send you to
college,” I said, sure I’d caught him in a lie. Not that it would
matter in the grand scheme, but somehow I was disappointed he’d lie
to me about something so trivial. I’d thought that because it would
be easier to be honest for someone with little to no guilt, that he
would
be. Bad assumption on my part.

“They couldn’t. This isn’t the house I grew up in. We were
firmly middle class. I had everything I needed and a lot of things I
wanted, but college was still outside of our budget, and I didn’t
have the kind of grades for a scholarship. But that was twenty years
ago. In that time, my father’s small business has grown and his
investments have paid off.”

“Oh,” was all I could manage, ashamed for thinking he’d lied
about his family. Though I was sure he couldn’t care less whether I
thought he’d been lying or not. He might be a demanding control
freak, but it didn’t seem as though anything had the power to make
him defensive.

Shannon got out of the car and came around to my side, opening the
door for me with a smooth and polished flourish. If we’d been on a
real date and I didn’t know the truth about him, I would have
believed his act. In one hand, he held an expensive bouquet of pink
roses he’d picked up for his mother from the florist on the way.
The perfect gentleman.

On the front porch, he rang the bell while I straightened my skirt
and my hair and pushed the glasses up the bridge of my nose. I wasn’t
sure I would ever get used to these things and thought maybe I should
have opted for the contacts after all.

“Stop fidgeting,” Shannon said as the door opened.

“Shannon!” His mom swept him up in a hug and pulled him into the
house. I stepped in behind them and closed the door, shutting out the
frigid air outside. She seemed to be about early sixties and was slim
and polished in a smart red pantsuit. She had chestnut colored hair
swept back into a bun and bright green eyes. “Frank! Frank! They’re
here!” She called out behind her, a rich, southern twang wrapping
around her words like velvet.

I realized suddenly that Shannon didn’t have an accent. Had he
worked to rid himself of it? I couldn’t imagine someone wanting to
hire a killer who sounded like a lead singer in a country band. There
was no reason Shannon should seem less deadly with a twang or drawl,
but somehow it didn’t fit.

His mother was far more animated and friendly than her polished
presentation might suggest.