Thing With Feathers (9781616634704) (27 page)

Lasley could barely check himself at the sight of the completely vulnerable beauty tethered naked and prostrate before him. His fleshy face dripped excited sweat and saliva onto her back. He would rob Miss Cindy Marshall of that which is most precious: her honor, self-respect, and her peace of mind. Oh, he would strip her of much more than mere clothing. When he was finished, Cindy Marshall would understand who she would be working for from then on. He reached inside his dinner coat and retrieved the small braided whip.

How long have I been lying here?
Cindy grew aware of her condition little by little. She strained to listen to the sounds in her apartment, not daring to turn her head for a look around. The hum of the small ice box was all that she could hear.
Please, Lord. Is he gone?
she pleaded of a God she had never fully trusted. She wriggled a wrist and realized that she was no longer tethered, though she could still feel the nylon cutting into her flesh. She pushed herself up slowly, feeling stings and aches and flashes of hot pain from every point of her body.

She walked gingerly to her antique dressing table and beheld the reflection there. It was hideous. She could not even recognize herself. Her hair was a tangled mess. She had one severely blackened eye, and the other showed promise of brilliant bruising. Dried blood tracked from her nostrils. Her lips were swollen, and one was split and smeared with blood. She touched the bruises that covered her shoulders and breasts, feeling pain at her slight caress. The insides of her thighs ached terribly, and there was an unbearable, fiery pain radiating from her behind. She turned slightly to see her backside in the mirror and gasped. Her knees went weak, and she carefully lowered herself to the floor as nausea swelled in her stomach. Her days as a high-price call girl were ended. No man would pay hundreds of dollars to spend time with a woman so horribly scarred. As her hair fell over her face, Cindy put her head in her hands and cried.

She’d lost more time. Had she been in a heap on her living room floor for a few minutes or a few hours? She rose to retrieve a Chinese robe from her armoire and covered herself. The smooth, light silk felt icy cool against her skin, and the fabric blotted the bloody seepage that had been trickling and tickling down her backside. Next, she went to her small wet bar and poured bourbon into a tumbler, tossing it back in a gulp that made her cough and spit and rattle her battered body. She yelled at Blair to shut up. Suddenly Blair was not only awakened, she was shrieking, crying and accusing. Cindy could not rid her head of the girl’s incessant sobbing.

Blair screamed back at her, “You said no one would hurt us again, that you ended it! I left my husband for you! I gave up my baby because you promised me this would never happen again—and now he is living in the preacher’s home!”

“Shut up!” Cindy pressed her hands to her ears. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Look at me! Look what he did to my body! Oh, Cindy, look what he did to us!

Cindy turned once more to the mirror.
Is it possible that I have become more unsightly in the last few minutes?
She heaved the empty tumbler at the mirror and shattered the awful image. “What do you want me to do? I can’t always protect you! I thought I could, but I can’t! Sean couldn’t either. No mortal is a match for the evil of the preacher. Just what do you expect me to do?”

Cindy sniffed, wiped her hair back from her face, and closed her robe over her breasts bashfully and tied it snug. She walked to the front door, turned around, and put her back to it, facing the large view windows in her beautiful parlor room. She took a few moments to admire the city lights that comprised her view, the soothing colors in her decor, and the different rich textures that lent the room uncontrived serenity.

“What are you going to do?” a trembling, frightened Blair asked.

Cindy sniffed. “What I promised you. I’m ending it.”

Acting before Blair could talk her out of it, Cindy sprinted as fast as she could across the living room floor and leapt, trusting herself to prayer one last time. Just before she’d reached the row of picture windows, Cindy had prayed to God that she would go completely through the window and not merely cut herself severely.

Finally, Cindy had a prayer answered.

Chapter 60

W
endell had gone no farther than the front steps of his own building when he heard the clanging of emergency bells. As he turned to see if they were near, an ambulance and police car swept past him, heading south. He turned up his coat collar and increased his pace. The sound of those bells always made him go cold inside. All of the sudden the racket ceased, and Wendell could just make out a flurry of lights up ahead.

Oh no!
It looks like Cindy’s building.
But that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with Cindy. Heck no.
There was an elderly gentleman living in the downstairs apartment of her building, Wendell knew.
That was it. Poor chap’s time had come, no doubt.
Wendell didn’t even realize he was running.

He approached the ringed crowd cautiously, both repelled and attracted at the same time to whatever sight drew the others. He squeezed past a bulging woman and peered between the shoulders of two men to glimpse a woman’s shapely leg streaked with blood. A silver heel lay inches away. Wendell knew that shoe. Even as the ice ball formed in his gut, he was pushing people roughly out of his way, shouting her name, hoping she would emerge from the crowd, smiling, telling him it wasn’t her shoe.

“Heavens no, silly,” she would say.

But Cindy would not be emerging from the crowd. Wendell ducked under a blue uniformed man who held his arms out to hold the lookies back, and he saw her. Blood had pooled around her here and there, and one leg lay in twisted, gruesome fashion. Haunting eyes looked into his, and he dropped next to her and fetched her limp hand.

“Oh, Cindy, Cindy,” he soothed, misunderstanding. “The stocks would have come back up. There’s always hope…” But as Wendell rubbed Cindy’s hand in his, dissolving into weeps for the woman he had secretly loved since the first night he’d found her on that barstool years earlier, the Chicago wind provided him glimpses beneath the flapping royal blue silk. Wendell saw the marks Lasley’s whip had made on Cindy’s creamy, diaphanous skin, and he saw far more bruising than the fall that landed her there would warrant. He set his jaw and whispered in her ear as the medics worked to get her on a stretcher, “He will not get away with this. I promise.” Her eyes closed.

Chester Lasley had run into an old newspaper crony upon departing Cindy’s building. The two men stood in the brisk night air and shared a smoke and some old stories. Lasley was feeling robust and manful after his scintillating romp with Miss Marshall, feeling certain he had broken that little filly. He laughed heartily at one of Jake Smitty’s lewd jokes when all of a sudden, there was a crash and shower of splintering light. A piece of glass tinkled inches from his right foot and sparkled in the reflective light of the gas street lamps. At the same moment, he felt, rather than heard, a
whump
. Lasley turned around to see a heap of royal blue silk, torn flesh, and the inescapably fetching eyes of Cindy Marshall. Lasley stood frozen in place, mouth agape. Suddenly, there were people everywhere, shouting and running. Police whistles competed against the noise from Smitty’s puking, and a shell-shocked Lasley was shoved and jostled aside by strollers and nearby building tenants, who rushed to see who had jumped.

Within minutes, the block was a congestion of frenzied activity, but Chester Lasley was still too stunned to move.

He was utterly distracted when a nondescript man walked up to him and asked, “I think I recognize you—are you Chester Lasley?”

“Yes, yes,” Lasley answered distractedly. He resumed his focus on the woman being wrestled into a medic wagon, when he was startled by a punch someone just landed him in his midriff. “What the—?” He looked back to the intrusive fan, but he was gone.

Lasley’s abdomen began to ache something terrible. Still distracted and assuming he was reacting to Cindy’s unexpected jump with a burgeoning case of indigestion, he pressed his hand there to stem the pain. But he quickly pulled his hand away and saw that it was awash with warm, viscous fluid. Lasley’s shriek at the sight of crimson was lost in a sea of shrieks, and he looked down at his dinner coat in horror. It rather slowly occurred to him he’d been stabbed. That man, the image of the stranger, was already growing fuzzy. He’d seen that man before…Lasley shook his head to clear it, lost his balance, and fell. It took fully a minute before a bystander noticed the fallen man with the growing red spot on his front. But by that time, Lasley was dead.

Lasley’s paper just one day earlier, reported that the railroad mogul and aspiring politician had an impressive number of enemies. Many of them, so the gossip went, had offered a price for his head. It was even rumored one such contract was issued by the governor of the fine state of Illinois himself, hearsay which most certainly would assure that the homicide would not be aggressively investigated.

Chapter 61

October 6, 1939

Cloverdale, Oregon

S
he moved her tile. Sean was pensive, thoughtful. Rebecca broached the subject again.

“Don’t you think it’s time, Sean? I have to agree with Will. I mean, it has been, what, almost eight years? I know you don’t want to hear this, but…Sean, she abandoned you. You have every right to seek a divorce. Honestly, Sean, anyone else would have done it long before now.”

Sean did not even look up at her. He made his move, a bad one. She was rattling his cage. “I do that and I’ll never be able to lay claim to my son. Blair was…is my connection.”

“Good Lord, Sean. You don’t even know if she’s alive. Are you going to continue loving a memory when there is a woman of flesh and blood right before you?”

That did it. He looked up at her, surprised. Then he smiled wryly. Rebecca was embarrassed. She hadn’t meant to say everything she was thinking. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Rebecca—”

“No. Sean, my husband has been in the ground for more than six years. I loved El, but he’s gone and my bed is cold at night. You’re lonely, and I’m lonely. We were in love once, remember? We’re the best of friends, Sean. If that isn’t enough for a strong marriage, I don’t know what is!”

“Rebecca…” Sean started again but went blank as to what he would say next. Rebecca waited for Sean to go on, but apparently, he had nothing to say. He simply did not want her.

“Lord, Sean! I’m literally throwing myself at you! Say something.”

“I can’t marry you, Beck-wheat. I’m an old man.”

“You’re not even thirty-five!”

“I’m a very old thirty-four. I can’t do farm labor, can’t even chop wood for the stove, and I’m afraid you’d be very disappointed with me in that cold bed of yours. I’m not well, Rebecca. My heart is weak. I would leave you twice a widow.”

“Your heart is broken, Sean. I can mend it. Give me a chance.” She was blushing. She hid her face in her hands. “Some things are so hard to say, but…I know you could never disappoint me, Sean.”

“I’m sorry, Rebecca. Lord knows I want you, but I can’t. I love you, but…I…I’m sorry.”

She abruptly stood, accidentally knocking her wooden chair to the floor, and looked down at the mah-jongg board with tears welling. “I’m starting to really hate this game!” she blurted as she quickly left the house.