The Book of You: A Novel (26 page)

Wednesday and Thursday

S
HE THOUGHT SHE’D
never sleep, lying in her old bed, the bed that was no longer the bed where the awful things had happened, no longer the bed where those photos were taken. It was now the bed that Robert had been in. She was beneath the quilt cover she hadn’t washed because she didn’t want to wash away any part of him. But she did fall into sleep.

She was in the drying room, his favorite part of the fire station, a place she’d never actually seen, a forbidden realm not meant for her, but he was with her, kissing her, lifting her up, running his hands down her arms, holding them above her head, and standing back to look at her. “Robert,” she tried to say, but the word wouldn’t come out and he wasn’t there anymore.

The drying room wasn’t the drying room anymore. It was Bluebeard’s chamber, and the dummies were no longer dummies. They were dead women with sheeted faces and blood on their mouths that seeped through their shrouds like garish kisses. They swayed from the nooses they hung from, as if blown gently by a quiet wind. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get air. She tried to raise an arm to the doorknob, to turn it, but her arm wouldn’t move. She tried to scream, but her lips wouldn’t move. There was a weight over the entire length of her body. Bile was rising from her stomach, and it hurt her throat to try to gulp it back. Her arms were above her head. She tugged, but something cut into her wrists.

She opened her eyes to the face she least wanted to see.

It wasn’t possible, she thought. He couldn’t really be here. He was supposed to be in jail. DC Hughes had said he was in jail. This was only a nightmare. She told herself to wake up.

She tried to twist, to throw him off her, tried to kick at him, but he only pressed his body into hers harder, panicking her that she couldn’t move at all. There was an inhuman muffled noise, and she saw that she was making those animal noises, not making words.

She squeezed her eyes shut against him, trying again to force herself back into sleep, telling herself again that it was only a nightmare, he had to be in jail. Had to be. They wouldn’t let him out and not tell her.

“Open your eyes.” He grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked her head back; something dug into her neck. “Open your eyes if you don’t want to choke, Clarissa.” She opened her eyes. He released the pressure on her neck. “You were waiting for me, weren’t you? You wanted me to come. You just couldn’t let yourself say it.”

Her heart was pounding so fiercely she thought it would burst. She thought it was beating too much to keep going, that it would give one last squeeze and then stop. She tried again to push him away, but the skin of her wrists felt as if it were being flayed and her shoulders strained so badly she thought her arms would fall off.

He buried his face in her stomach, put his hands beneath her hips, kneading through the silk of her nightdress and pulling her up against him. “You smell so good. It’s all for me, isn’t it? You’ve been thinking about me, haven’t you? And my plans for you. Can you imagine what they are?”

He scoured her cheeks with the quilt. “Are you crying because you’re sorry?” She tried to nod yes, but only moved her head a little, scared that she would strangle otherwise.

He reached down the side of the bed. When he brought his hand back up, there was a knife in it, the blade tapered into a spear point, and she heard herself moan. “Shall we talk about how you’ve been treating me? I promised I’d punish you, didn’t I?” He put the knife down, the end of its tortoiseshell handle touching her waist.

“Pretty nightdress.” It was bunched up, high on her thighs. She was jerking her arms, wanting to tug it down. He smoothed a hand over the smoky purple silk. He grabbed her shoulders. “Did you make it for the fireman?” She started to move her head, no, but again felt the ring around her throat tighten. He ran a finger along it, testing it, then loosening it. “Throttling’s too easy, Clarissa. You’re not getting out of this that simply and quickly.”

He picked up the knife. “This is very sharp.” He lifted the hem and held it taut, then split the nightdress all the way up through the center, sliding the blade slowly forward. “Are you frightened?” She was trying to squash her back into the mattress and away from the knife, sobbing noiselessly. “You should be. I can see you are. I like that.”

The knife was resting between her breasts, pointed toward her chin. She was holding her breath, afraid that even the smallest movement of her chest would make him draw blood.

“I’d thought you were a true princess, but you’re not. You’re like the others. You don’t look like a princess now.” He jerked the knife straight upward, abruptly, and she screamed, but the only sound was a sickening squeak that didn’t stop until she realized the knife hadn’t touched her. “I could have undressed you while you were still chloroformed, but I wanted you awake for this. I’ve been dreaming about this.” He sliced through one of the spaghetti straps, then the other.

He put the knife down near her head, parted the shorn fabric, and twisted one of her nipples, making her cry out another muffled cry. “How do you think I felt, seeing you with him? You didn’t care, did you? You’ve been provoking me, Clarissa. Deliberately.” He shook her so hard she thought he’d given her whiplash, thought her brain was smashing inside her skull.

“You’re worse than my previous girlfriend. No matter how much I do for you, it’s never enough. You tell me to go away, and you find someone else. Another married man, no less. Not that you’d spare a thought for poor Mrs. Fireman.” Spit was foaming in the corners of his mouth. “You fucked him when I was in jail, didn’t you? But he got bored of you, once he’d fucked you.”

He was pressing a hand between her legs. “He doesn’t know what you need.” He was creeping his fingers beneath the underwear she’d made from the same silk as the nightdress. He was pulling off his shirt, unbuckling his belt. She was squeezing her thighs together, but he was cutting her underwear at the hips with the knife and ripping it away. He was jerking her legs apart. “You don’t make it easy for me to control myself.”

She tried to kick him. He punched her, hard, in the stomach, leaving her floppy, making her retch so that she thought she would die by choking on her own vomit. She could taste salt and metal. He wrapped something around each of her ankles, lashing them to the bedposts. She was trying to pull her legs free, trying to say the word
no
, again and again,
no
, but she couldn’t make even that one syllable sound like a word.

Then he was taking photographs. Each time the flash went off, it stabbed through her eyes and he shook her until she obeyed his command to open them again and look at him. At last, he put his camera down and lay on top of her. She was squirming, thrashing, trying to roll herself away.

He raised a fist and smashed it into the side of her head. There was an explosion, and a noise like a drill in her skull. Those must be dancing angels, she thought, on the ceiling. There was that muffled crying again, coming from somewhere.

Something cold rested against the side of her face. She knew it was important to work out what it was and to keep very still until she did, to keep absolutely frozen. And then she realized it was the knife. It was in the split second before she felt the blade tilt and slice through her cheek that she realized.

She felt her body shift into limpness, vaguely saw that his face was changing, that his hands were tearing at whatever he’d put over her mouth. Then she was gasping for air, trying to swallow huge gulps of it as he cut the loop around her neck to free it, lifted her head and shoulders. He was holding a glass of water to her mouth, ordering her to take a sip, but it was running down her chin as she panted, dripping onto her breasts, mixing with something red. Why was there so much red? He was blotting her face with the gashed nightdress.

For an instant, he looked at her as if shocked to see what he was doing; his face crumpled in uncertainty and exhaustion, as if he was puzzled by how it was turning out. His head trembled, and he blinked several times, as if he’d been temporarily blinded but was now seeing clearly again.

Then he was kneading her breasts, pinching and sucking, biting so hard she cried out and he smacked a hand over her mouth and told her to shut up. He was tugging his already unbuttoned trousers off, and his boxer shorts. He climbed on top of her, grabbing her hair and pulling her face close to his. His expression made her think of a painting of Apollo flaying Marsyas, looking tenderly at his victim as if he were nursing instead of killing him. His voice sounded almost loving when he whispered, “You’ve made me wait too long for this,” and forced himself into her.

She was weeping softly, thinking that she wanted to get his DNA beneath her fingernails but couldn’t because her wrists wouldn’t move. When he came, his DNA would be inside of her; there would be evidence there, at least, when they found her body.

“Look at me. Say my name.”

A drum pulsed in her temple. Her neck was too heavy, and her eyes wouldn’t open fully. She thought the wetness in her eyes must be blood, squeezing out through the pressure she felt inside her head.

“Say it.”

Keeping his name from her head, from her voice, was her last talisman.

“Say it,” he said. “You do what I tell you.”

But she realized she couldn’t remember what his name actually was.

He told her again to say it, supplying the word himself at the end of the phrase he wanted from her, and she repeated it, though the words were fuzzy.

“Kiss me,” he said.

She tried to move her head away, but even a millimeter made her brain shake too much, made it ache too much, and he fastened his lips to hers, pushing his tongue into her mouth. She considered biting him but was too scared to try.

“Tell me you love me.”

“I love you.”

“Say, ‘I love you,
Rafe
.’ ”

“I love you, Rafe.”

“Tell me what I’m doing to you.”

She didn’t know what he wanted her to say. She said the only thing she could think of. The only true thing. “You’re hurting me,” she said.

“Good.” He grabbed her hair again. “Now tell me that you’re going to come, that no other lover can do for you what I can, that you belong to me, that this is how you like it.”

She parroted all of this, listened as his breath grew faster, braced herself as his movements became more violent.

When it was over, his body slumped over hers, tamping her into the mattress. She thought he was breaking her ribs, bruising her lungs, boring a hole into her stomach in the place where he’d punched her. It was several minutes before he pulled out.

“You loved it. I could tell you did,” he said. “I could feel you coming. I know better than anyone what excites you, Clarissa.”

She could feel wetness between her legs like acid, and her chest too constricted and scalding to breathe, and her shoulders as if they had been ripped from their sockets, and her ankles chafed and raw from how hard she’d tried to pull them free. Her hands and fingers were numb because the blood had drained from them.

He had the gag in his hands. She could see it was leather, like the one the woman wore on the cover of the magazine. She was weeping again, her breath labored. “I promise I’ll be quiet.” Her voice was a croak, squeezing out of her raw throat.

“I don’t trust you. I told you I’d never trust you again after the trick you pulled in that park. You’re going to learn that I mean what I say. That’s going to be the last thing you learn.” She tried to turn her head away, was tugging again at her wrists to escape, but she was barely able to move at all as he fastened it.

“You need to be gagged for the other things I’m going to do to you. We don’t want you disturbing your neighbors with your screams.” He threw himself onto the bed beside her, shoved an arm over her breasts and a bent leg over her hips, and fell deeply asleep.

The whooshes of air in and out of her nose were so loud. Her chest was heaving, up and down, lifting and dropping, pumping and deflating. She was certain she would wake him, but she couldn’t slow down her breathing, however hard she tried.

Please do not let him wake, she thought. Please, please do not. Please, God. Please help me. It kept going through her head, an unspoken incantation, over and over again. A charm to keep her alive and bring help. But it was soon overpowered by another chant that she couldn’t stop. There was no God. There just wasn’t. There couldn’t be. There was no hope. Laura must have prayed, and God hadn’t saved her. God had let Laura suffer unimaginably.

Her breathing was getting worse. She thought the room was filling with smoke and she was choking on it. She tried to tell herself she was imagining it. She tried to tell herself there couldn’t be a fire because if there was the smoke alarm would go off and she wasn’t hearing its siren. But she knew there wasn’t enough oxygen. There wasn’t. There just wasn’t. She would bite her own tongue as she died, like the wicked queen who couldn’t speak or cry out as she danced to death in the red-hot iron slippers they’d forced onto her feet with tongs.

She couldn’t understand why the room was spinning. She squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could, then opened them, but she was still in the center of a whirlwind. Everything was in a haze. She couldn’t pick out a single object to anchor herself.

When she next opened her eyes, she wasn’t sure where she was or why it was so hard to move or what had happened to make her hurt so much everywhere. But she was sure that there really was a fire and she was dying from inhaling smoke and almost blind because the air was so thick with it. Robert said that if she ever got caught in a fire, she should get low on the floor. He said that staying low was the only way to find air. It was smoke that killed, he said. She was trying to move because she knew that that was what Robert would want her to do. She was trying to get herself onto the floor, trying to get her arms and legs free, but something had frozen her and something else had fallen on her. Maybe it was the roof. A roof had once fallen on Robert in a fire. Maybe the roof had fallen earlier, when the room had been spinning. She wondered if she was dead and in her coffin, with the lid bearing down on her.