Better Off Dead (2 page)

"Are you out of your fucking mind?" I asked
him. The ringleader was gangly with dark hair. He was staring
open-mouthed at the wide gap that had opened in my raincoat. I
guess he had never witnessed the glory of a Southern belle in full
bloom before.

"This guy can hardly speak English," I said,
gesturing toward the driver. "He's not the one screaming at you.
Use your freakin' head."

Burly, always helpful, chose that moment to
prove I was telling the truth. "Duke sucks!" he bellowed out my
bedroom window. His voice cut through the crowd's outrage like a
bullhorn. "Duke sucks my Southern ass!"

The pack of students stampeded toward my
bedroom window, crushing the pansies my poor landlady had planted
in an attempt to wring more rent from my yuppie neighbors.

"Go now," I urged the Turkish couple. "I'll
visit your friend in the morning, I promise."

The woman scrambled into the front seat as
her husband gunned the engine nervously.

"Crazy Americans!" he shouted out the
window, shooting the crowd an enthusiastic middle finger. How nice.
Already he was picking up quaint American customs. He'd be a road
rage enthusiast soon.

"It's just football... fever," I explained
into the cloud of exhaust that the Chevy left behind as it
screeched from the curb.

I have bars on my ground-floor bedroom
windows to discourage unwanted intruders. And it's a good thing,
too. Within seconds Duke students were clinging from them like
drunken Spidermen, banging their bodies futilely against the metal
while Burly taunted them with insults from inside the safety of my
apartment.

Sirens approached from a few blocks away—I
was within spitting distance of police headquarters and some
neighbor had finally had enough.

My only consolation in the entire debacle
that ensued was that one of the responding officers turned out to
be a good-looking Hispanic guy dressed in a very nice suit. I had
never seen him before. He was cuter than a June bug, in a
Mormon-missionary-meets-Andy-Garcia sort of way. "Are you going to
frisk me?" I asked hopefully.

"Take a hike, Casey," his cop buddy answered
for him. "Go pick on someone your own speed. Angel here is
taken."

“Thanks for the warning, Charlie,” I said.
“But you know what they say about angels—when you're up that high,
there's always room to fall."

The Angel in question hid a very nice smile
as I buttoned up and shivered my way back inside. I'd let the Duke
students sort out their own mess: Burly had grown as quiet as a
church mouse once the cops arrived, and no one was believing a word
the pack of inebriated students said. Especially since Burly had
long ago perfected the art of looking pitiful. He'd loll his head
back, stick his tongue out a little and tremble. It worked every
time. How could that poor, afflicted man in a wheelchair have done
anything wrong?

"Are you behind this mess?" Charlie the cop
called after me. He threw a student over the hood of his patrol car
so he could pat the kid's pockets down.

"You're just mad because I wouldn't go out
with you," I yelled as I slammed the front door shut securely
between me and the law.

I didn't add that Charlie was about the only
single male on the Durham police force I'd never dated. Not having
the opportunity to see me out of my black teddy and pink marabou
mules seemed punishment enough. 

Burly was contrite the next morning—aren't
they always?—and I managed to leverage his guilt into homemade
waffles for breakfast before I set out to meet my possible new
client. Her name was Helen Pugh, and she lived way out on Turkey
Run Road where the subdivisions that border the outskirts of Durham
and Chapel Hill finally run out, leaving a stretch of small farms
and older clapboard houses. It was a beautiful, rolling patch of
countryside, especially in early autumn. The hardwoods had barely
started to turn, feed corn still swayed in the fields and the grass
was even greener than it had been in the wilting heat of August. I
rolled my car windows down and savored the clean air, letting the
wind blow my hair back as I thought about where I was headed.

For all I knew, Helen Pugh wanted nothing to
do with me. But I'd made a promise to her cleaning lady, and I
would keep that promise.

Besides—there might be a good fee in it. The
Pugh farm was definitely old money. It had to be. You never saw
that kind of sprawling wooden structure anymore. A large, two-story
main house branched out into three different one-story wings that
meandered leisurely over a landscaped yard, while the outer
buildings nestled into the nearby hills as if shelter and
wilderness had coexisted there forever. Huge apple, oak and pecan
trees shadowed the main house. A small forest obscured the land on
either side of the sloping front lawn, but a dirt road wound
through the thick trees back into the darkness. From the curve of
the sloping hills, I was pretty sure a pond waited at the end of
the road.

I stopped the car to stare. I'd grown up in
a ramshackle hovel on the edges of a tough piece of land that was
more leather than soil. In my dreams as a child, a place like this
had been paradise. God, how my grandpa would love it.

I parked next to a blue Volvo with a front
windshield so coated by pollen that it was obvious the car had not
been driven in months. Paradise, it seemed, was little more than a
rustic-looking prison for Helen Pugh.

I rang the front doorbell and waited on the
porch, wondering who took care of the grounds if the owner was
housebound. Someone did. That was obvious. The apples and

pecans had been neatly harvested and the
grass was meticulously cut. Strategically placed plumes of sawgrass
alternated with crescent-shaped marigold patches for nearly half an
acre on either side of the house.

No one answered the door. I rang again and
waited.

Someone was on the other side, I finally
realized, waiting as I was waiting. It had to be Helen Pugh. I
could hear her breathing on the other side of the door. "Hello?" I
asked, conscious that my breathing had adapted to hers. We inhaled
and exhaled together. Her fear seemed to seep through the keyhole,
leaking from the darkened exterior of the house into the bright,
sun-filled October day, as tainted as an obscene gesture in
church.

"Your friend sent me," I said, reading the
unfamiliar name off the piece of paper I held. "Fadime
Yarar-something." I stumbled over the syllables. "She said that you
were being threatened. I'm here to help."

"Fadime sent you?" the woman asked.

"Yes. She's very concerned."

There was a short silence. "I didn't know
she cared that much," the woman finally said. "Will she come back
to work for me?"

"That I don't know. But, look, I'm not here
to help you get your cleaning lady back. There's a limit to what
even the best P.I. can do. I'm hear to ask you about the man on the
phone who seems to want to kill you. Again and again, according to
Fadime."

"Fadime is a good person." Her voice was
soft.

"Yes. But that guy on the phone? Well, he
sounds like trouble. Why don't you let me in and we can talk about
it."

The bolt was drawn back slowly, the metal
cylinder rasping as it slid open. This process was repeated twice
more. There were more bolts on that door than on Frankenstein's
forehead. Finally the door opened maybe an inch. I could not see
inside.

"Here." I held my P.I. license to the crack
and waited. It looked real enough to have fooled everyone else in
North Carolina for the past twelve years. I figured it would hold
up for another day.

After a moment, the door finally opened,
still with no one in sight, as if it operated under its own
power.

I stepped inside, instincts on edge, eyes
fighting to adjust to the sudden darkness. How much did I really
know about what I was getting into?

When the door slammed shut behind me, my
reflexes went into overdrive. I whirled around and damn near pulled
my gun on a slender woman standing behind me in the space between
the doorway and wall. She was literally cowering in the shadows.
One hand rested at the base of her throat, the other clutched a
sweater tightly around her middle.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could
see that she was wearing a blouse and slacks. She was tall and
gaunt, with shoulder-length brown hair that framed a sharp, unhappy
face. I wondered who cut her hair if she never went outside.
Because if hairdressers were doing house calls these days...

"I'm Helen Pugh," the woman said in a soft,
Southern, well-educated voice. Fear trembled beneath each syllable.
"Fadime sent you?" she asked again.

"Yes." I looked at her more closely. "Are
you okay? You look pale."

"I need water." She brushed past me. I
followed without being invited. She led me into a spacious kitchen
with a black-and-white tile floor. Sunlight streamed through huge
windows lining two of the walls. It was a beautiful room, one that
should have been filled with shrieking children and the clatter of
noisy dinners. Instead, every surface was scrubbed free of life.
Hardly an item marred the endless counters stretching from corner
to corner. It was as impersonal as a mental ward rec room.

Helen Pugh walked to a cabinet, removed an
old-fashioned crystal jelly glass and filled it with water from the
tap. She kept her back turned as she sipped the water steadily
until half the glass was gone. Then she stood, staring at the sink,
as if she had forgotten me completely. Her shoulders moved up and
down in a careful rhythm. Breathing exercises, I thought, to help
her over a panic attack.

"Miss Pugh," I asked softly, "is this a good
time for you?" Jesus, what an idiotic question. This woman
obviously never had a good time. I waited by a huge kitchen table,
wondering whether to sit down or not.

She finally turned to me and stared. The sun
streaming in the huge windows caught the highlights in her hair,
causing each strand to shimmer. She was actually quite beautiful, I
realized, and only in her early thirties, though she had seemed
much older at first. Her fearful demeanor had diminished her to a
frailer, far older woman.

"Please sit down," she said. "If you're
here, we may as well talk." She glanced at me furtively. "I don't
want to be this way, you know."

She removed her hand from her throat to pull
a chair out from the kitchen table and her sweater fell open. A red
welt encircled the base of her throat. It was a band of pink scar
tissue that gleamed with that rubbery glow new skin gets. Whatever
had happened to this woman, it had extended well beyond
threats.

Outside, the sound of a lawn mower buzzed in
the distance. Every now and then, a car whooshed past on the road.
These were the only signs of the outside world in Helen Pugh's
life, I realized. She waited silently, gathering her courage to
begin, a prisoner inside this sunny, sterile kitchen.

"Where should I start?" she asked, clutching
her sweater once again to hide her scars.

"How about at the beginning?" I suggested.
"Start with what happened to your throat."

She fixed her eyes on an antique milk jug
perched atop the refrigerator. "You don't know, then," she
said.

"Know what?" I asked.

"My married name was Helen Mclnnes."

"Jesus," I said. "You're her."

"That's me." She paused. "My marriage didn't
last out the... trial. I've gone back to my maiden name."

Everyone in Durham knew who Helen Mclnnes
was. She had accused a Duke University professor of rape about a
year and a half ago. The details of the attack were horrific and
recounted in loving detail by the press as the trial unfolded:
Helen Mclnnes was attacked while walking alone in a remote part of
Duke Gardens one July evening, she claimed, by a man who had
overpowered her from behind, taping her eyes shut with duct tape
and rendering her unconscious with an aerosol drug. When she came
to, she was bound and gagged. He had apparently dragged her into an
empty patch of woods and blinded her further with a black hood tied
over her head. Then he had twisted a scarf around her neck and
repeatedly raped her for the next two hours. She had been
alternately strangled to near-death and penetrated by a man strong
enough to prop her up against a tree, sling her across a boulder
and arrange her in other postures until he was satisfied. She swore
she had heard a series of clicks and whirrs made by a Polaroid
camera throughout the attack. No photos had ever been found. Which
meant that these photos were floating around out there somewhere, a
fact that would have kept me inside my house for the rest of my
life without any further encouragement.

When he was done with her, the rapist had
dumped her facedown in a holding pond in the Gardens, sure she
would quickly drown. Instead, a med student returning home late
from the nearby medical library had heard a loud splash and been
bored enough to investigate. He discovered Helen Mclnnes thrashing
around in two feet of muddy water, still bound and gagged. He was
able to drag her from the pond in time to save her.

The student became a hero.

Helen Mclnnes became a pariah.

Especially after she accused a professor
specializing in aberrant psychology of having committed the crime.
David Brookhouse was acquitted in a rapid and highly publicized
trial. But the story didn't end there. Not content with having been
found innocent, he had recently filed a multimillion-dollar civil
suit against his accuser, claiming Helen Mclnnes had falsely
implicated him in retaliation for his having ended an affair
between the two of them. It had yet to come to trial, but I knew it
was scheduled to soon.

Revenge for an ended affair was the same
defense Brookhouse had used successfully during the criminal trial.
Only then Helen's name had been kept out of the papers as a victim
of rape. The same courtesy did not extend once she was named
plaintiff in the civil suit. Over the last six months, she had
become an unseen lightning rod for the town, with women's rights
advocates raising hell over her predicament and many ardent Duke
supporters accusing her of trying to tear down an honorable
man.