A Checklist for Murder (7 page)

It took another fifteen or twenty minutes for Robert to come back into the room after Patty left. But Natasha didn’t ask what had happened. That would give away too much. No, she thought, let him wonder who else might be coming. Uncertainty was the only retaliation she could throw at him. Let him sweat.

For his part, Robert wasn’t offering information either. With the tube again wedged into Natasha’s mouth, he held her down on her back and poured another few swallows of alcohol into her. She heard no pumping sound this time; the stuff flowed faster, but still slowly enough for her to swallow most of it.

And then she heard him walk away. He disappeared back into whatever part of the house he was waiting in for Claire’s return, back to whatever he was doing to keep himself busy in the meantime.

Now there was nothing to mark the passing of time except the long, unfamiliar selections of classical music and a soft-voiced announcer who tastefully avoided bothering the listener with idle chatter. The music on the radio began to blur into fuzzy collections of nattering instrumental lines, anonymous and hypnotic. Tasha lay still on the bed, inside the blackness forced upon her by the hood.

Time passed. More than a few minutes, less than a few
hours. Buzz time. Dream time. Tasha wasn’t really conscious of any particular effect from the alcohol or the drug. But then there wasn’t much to measure it by, bound and hooded and lying there as she was in total darkness.

The dogs. Niko and Queenie. Why were the dogs barking? Tasha struggled to come alert, forced her eyes open. But when they finally opened she still couldn’t see anything.

Niko and Queenie were really going at it, going
crazy
. They hardly ever barked like that, never made that kind of noise at ordinary dog-bark things like cars going by, like strangers coming to the door. What had happened? Tasha couldn’t think.

She cleared her mind enough to realize that the dogs weren’t in the house. If they had been, the barking would have been much louder. Someone must have put them in the backyard. Was her mother home? She fought to clear her mind, but thoughts felt thick and heavy.

Then Tasha felt the fabric against her face, and she remembered. She wasn’t aware of the handcuffs as the dogs brought her back to earth, but when she tried to roll over she felt the restraints against her wrists.

The dogs were frantic. They must be at the glass doors in back, jumping up against the panes, landing on top of each other the way they would do when something really set them off. It didn’t happen often. Since they couldn’t see the street or the sidewalk from the backyard, they were usually quiet unless something was going on inside the house that disturbed them. It would take a lot to get them this worked up, though. She had only seen it happen a few other times.

Like when her father tried to hurt her or her mother.

Something hit the floor in the next room with a huge bang. The family room. The impact vibrated through the wooden floors of the house, barely muffled by the carpeting on the floor. The sound went through Tasha as if she had just been
slammed in the stomach. The dogs were going ballistic. She realized that whatever was setting them off must be right in their line of sight, visible through the glass doors. Niko and Queenie were watching whatever had made that sound. They were seeing, at this very moment, what she could only imagine.

And there it went again. A heavy thud shuddered the floorboards, as it would whenever Tasha and her sister were roughhousing in the family room, turning cartwheels. Falling down. Landing heavily on the floor.

As Tasha lay alone in her mother’s bedroom, feeling her mother’s bedspread against her skin, she stared into the black nothing that was given to her eyes by the homemade canvas hood. It was still held tight over her head with long leather strips laced through the bottom and pulled tight against her throat. But her mind’s eye could almost make the switch,
almost
leave the hooded face mask and enter the eyes of the dogs and be with them there in the backyard, bouncing up and down two or three feet off the ground as the two white frantic furballs bellowed and snarled and clawed at the glass, watching these things that were making such heavy noises in the family room. Witnessing.

The floor banged again and the heavy thud was only a few feet away, just on the other side of the wall from where Natasha lay barely inside her own body. While her physical self remained helpless in the darkness, her awareness hung in the air halfway between her bound form and the eyes of the loyal pets she so desperately wanted to enter into and look out of, whose knowledge she wanted to share as they watched something taking place so close by that if it weren’t for the hood she might see it through her own eyes. If it weren’t for the handcuffs she might reach out with her own fingers. If it weren’t for the thin wall separating the bedroom from the family room, her fingers might even brush momentarily against something as it went by, heading toward
the floor again, toward the impact with the carpet covering the wooden floorboards, sending out the jarring thump that Tasha could feel traveling through the monster house.

Because the dogs knew. The dogs never made those kinds of noises unless something was dead wrong.

CHAPTER

5

A
nother thick pall of silence fell back over the house. Natasha’s drained state overcame her at last. Lying silent in the darkness, pumped with alcohol and some mysterious drug, she couldn’t measure how much time passed between intervals while she drifted in and out of real consciousness. During that time she had no further awareness of her father entering the room.

Much later, she roused herself enough to focus on the radio when the music paused. The announcer began to say something. She concentrated on the words, laboring to hear them clearly. When a brief time check was announced, her awareness seized upon it: eleven o’clock. For a moment she felt steadied by the knowledge, oriented as to time and place. She realized that her captivity had already gone on for six hours.

Although Niko and Queenie left her with no doubts that her mother had come home and that the thudding sounds in the next room, vibrating the floor and the walls, had been caused by a struggle between her parents, she had never actually heard their voices. There had been no screams, no shouting, no cries for help. She wondered fearfully what could have happened to her mother to keep her silent under such an attack.

But the answer came back to her as quickly as she formed the question; Tasha hadn’t yelled or screamed either. Something about the shock of a sudden and brutal attack had stunned her into silence. Had the same thing happened to her
mother? After all, that simple question Tasha had posed when she asked her father if he was going to kill her had been spoken so softly that if others had been here in the next room, they wouldn’t have heard it either. Or had there been some kind of brief shouting match before the dogs went into action, had the alcohol numbed her to it?

There wasn’t a sound anywhere in the house now. She realized things must be very bad. Her mother would never have remained in the house for so long after returning home without entering her own room, not if she had been able to move about freely. And she would never have remained in the house at all after being attacked by Robert with the kind of violence that had reverberated through the floors.

But if Claire ran outside, Robert would have to drag her back in. If he wasn’t able to catch her, then he would have had to hurry in and take Natasha out before anyone could discover her there. Her mother would have sent help to check the house if she had been able to do it.

So had Robert presented Claire with the “papers” he mentioned? Had Claire scorned them? Of course Claire would scorn signing anything on demand, with the divorce action set to resume in just a few days. Had she spun on her heels and started for her bedroom, thinking she was simply walking away from Robert? Worse yet, had she been threatened, told that even now their daughter was bound and helpless on Robert and Claire’s former marital bed?

Tasha knew that would have sent Claire into an instant rage. Her mother wouldn’t have paused for an instant, not even long enough to shriek her outrage at Robert as she darted down the hallway to yank open the door and free her captive girl.

And Robert would have had to stop her on the spot. Jump her. If she had any idea that her daughter was in the house suffering at Robert’s hand, he would have to quickly render her defenseless. He would have to do anything necessary to
make her unable to put up the resistance he loathed. Perhaps a full-fist blow to the side of her face, right below the temple, as he straddled her on the floor? The dogs would have a clear view there. They would go berserk at witnessing this attack upon the woman of the house by a man who was far less familiar to them. The sounds of such an attack would travel instantly all through the house, vibrating the floors, the walls, like rambunctious girls on rainy days turning cartwheels and landing on the floor.

The mind can only absorb so much horror and helplessness. Numbness filters in to protect it from the jagged edges of situations too awful to sustain.

The thick black blur descended on Tasha once more. She no longer knew if she was drifting in wakefulness or sleep as the time wheel turned unmarked. Only vague sensations found their way as far as her preconsciousness when she would shift position on the bed, try to lift her arms only to discover the handcuffs again, try to open her eyes only to encounter the hood once more. She never heard another announcement of time on the radio. If one was broadcast, it went by unnoticed.

Tasha had steadily pushed her sluggish brain through a process of elimination until it worked its way up to the realization that her mother had to be there still, somewhere inside the house.

But where was she now? Tasha floated away on the question.

Black velvet hands reached down out of the black velvet sky. She could clearly feel one hand travel under her knees as the other reached across the back of her shoulders, behind her arms.

“As a groom would carry a bride across a threshold” is the way that both the prosecution and the defense would later
refer to it, while attorneys jousted through their intense legal combat inside the courtroom where the search for truth is symbolized by a blindfolded young woman.

As a bride would be carried by a groom across the threshold, she felt herself lifted off the bed, carried out of the room, down the hallway. She was awake now and recognized the groom’s body. She could tell that it was her father, built solidly, familiar to her in every respect, in his touch, his smell.

Not a word was spoken. Tasha was past asking questions that she knew would get no answers, or worse, that would get answers she had no more strength to hear.

They had traveled only a few steps before she felt her father bend over and lay her on the floor. They hadn’t turned any more corners, so she knew that she was being placed in the family room. She recognized the feel of the carpet on the floor where she and her sister had once been boisterous girls playing in the house whether they were supposed to or not.

After a brief pause she was again picked up by the same strong arms. She felt herself borne a few more paces, turned sideways to slip through a door, carried down a couple of steps. She recognized the sensation of being in the garage. The outside air was relatively cold, the way it gets deep in the night up in the high desert, even in the middle of summer.

After a few more paces she was placed in a car and left there. The door was closed and everything became silent for a moment. She was almost in a sitting position, slumped to the right against the passenger-side door, her bound feet in front of her. She pushed her feet outward slightly, felt the back of the front seat, and realized she was in the back of her father’s Cadillac. Her cuffed hands could reach down and stroke the smooth leather seats; it was the only car in the family with leather seats.

The Cadillac was roomy, even in the back. A backseat with room for three full-sized adults to ride America’s roads
in luxurious comfort, if they are sitting up. It even had room for two adults to slump sideways, hooded, bound hand and foot, and packed in so well that the tops of their heads wouldn’t be visible to passing police cars. Or to curious pedestrians out for an early morning stroll. Or to the odd possibility of flirtatious single women idling in the next lane at a stoplight somewhere and making eyes at the driver, a soon-to-be-single married man deeply involved in the process of simplifying his life.

Tasha could hear deep, regular breathing coming from someone lying on the backseat next to her. With her hands still cuffed in front of her, she was just able to reach over and nudge the person. There was no response. But once her fingers brushed the hair, the skin, she recognized the touch of the woman she had spent her life with. And then the sound of the deep, regular breathing registered clearly in her mind. As a little girl growing up, she had listened to her mother breathing during a hundred naps, had roused her mother on countless wake-up-Mommy mornings. The sound of breathing that had serenaded her even before she entered this world needed no explanation.

The driver’s door opened and someone got in. Tasha never doubted it was her father. She had heard no other voices, sensed no other presence in the house, when her father carried her to the car. But much later, when the Confusers would come, she would be forced to admit that she hadn’t been able to see the driver. She hadn’t heard the driver’s voice. She had never spoken with the driver of her father’s car.

She didn’t even make an attempt to speak with him, to ask questions. Her senses told her once again that her best chance for survival lay in passivity. Her father hadn’t been in a mood, all night long, to tolerate even the smallest resistance. So Tasha played possum and lay still in the darkness of the backseat, inside the blackness of the hooded face mask.