Deanna Madden #1 The Girl in 6E (8 page)

JEREMY BRYANT KNOCKS
on the door, holds up the box, and waits for the cursory response. It always takes a minute to come, a minute in which his palms sweat, and he wonders. He wonders if this is the day that the knob will turn and he will be face-to-face with her. Today isn’t that day.

“Leave it. Thank you.”

Always polite. Always brief. Always that beautiful, lilting voice that seems to hold so much distance in it. He signs the electronic pad, waves to the silent peephole, and walks the long hall to the elevator.

Waiting for her to open the door had never worked. He is going to try something different today.

He presses the elevator button, steps inside, presses the 1 button, then quickly steps off and allows the doors to close. He flattens against the walls, hidden from view, and waits, his eyes glued to the box in front of the door to apartment 6E.

The minute the elevator car leaves, making its empty descent, there is the click of a door opening. He tenses. The door opens, a silent movement, then a pale arm and a dark head reach out, grab the package, and pull it inside. There is another click, and the door is closed. He leans back against the wall quietly, thinking.

Brunette. Pale.
It is more than he knew yesterday. He hears the elevator’s exhausted ascent, and then it is opening, a black man in workout clothes getting off. He nods to the man, steps into the car, and lets it carry him back downstairs. Waiting for the car to reach the ground floor, he wonders, as he always does, why she hides. Because hiding most certainly seems to be why she keeps inside. Hiding from whom? Or what?
Hiding from something, that was for damn sure.

I LEAN AGAINST
the front door and eat teriyaki chicken, which came with rice and some steamed-to-death green stuff they called vegetables. I used to have cable, but three months into the service something broke and the screen would display only an error message. I called the company, which walked me through four different troubleshooting solutions (none of which worked) before they came to the conclusion that I would need a service call.
No, thank you.
I told them to disconnect the service. Television took time away from camming anyway. As far as Internet goes, Mike logged into my system remotely and set it up so I could steal Internet from my three closest neighbors. I normally use the Internet from “Team Bradley,” which is the apartment to the right of me: it has the fastest connection. But in the rare instances it is offline, disconnected, or running slowly, I use one of the other two wireless networks available, courtesy of my favorite horny hacker.

With no cable, my biggest form of entertainment is eavesdropping on my neighbors. I lean back, listening to dead silence on the other side of the metal door.
Surely someone will be in the hall soon.
I hope for the bodybuilder down the hall with the bleach-blonde girlfriend. They always have drama-filled conversations. There is a noise and then the slam of a door. I can tell by the sound that the door bounces a bit, not quite shutting, but the footsteps continue, and by the shuffle of them and the speed at which they are by my door, I know that it is Simon. When his feet are flush with my door, I speak. Loudly, so he can hear me.

“Your door’s not shut.”

His footsteps stop, and I can tell from the light underneath my door that he has turned to face me. I also know, without getting up, that he is looking in my peephole, though he knows from every other experience that he can’t see anything inside.

“You freak me out when you do that.” His words are muffled, almost too quiet, but my one sensitive ear easily picks up the phrase.

“You’d hate it even more if someone went in and stole all of your crap.”

“Yeah.” He turns, his footsteps retreating, and I hear the final click of his door being pulled tight. Then he’s back, and I can tell from his pace that he’s about to ask me something. “When are you…uh…getting…”

“On the first. You know that. My order always comes on the first.”

“Okay. I’m just a little low.”

“Ration.”

He pauses and then starts to move again.

“Simon.”

“Yeah?”

“You were late last night.”

“Yeah, I had, uh…some things—”

“Simon…” I speak slowly and clearly, so there is no room for him to misunderstand. “If you are late again, I will stop the orders.”

“Yeah, yeah. I won’t be. I promise. You know I won’t. Promise.”

He waits for a moment, and I don’t respond, spooning a forkful of rice into my mouth. Then he moves, and I hear the plastic
swoosh
of my garbage as he picks up the bag and moves down the hall. Along with locking me in at night, Simon carries my trash and any outgoing mail downstairs. I leave it outside the door, and he takes it to the dumpster out back. I hear him at the elevator, hear the car as it starts upward toward him. Past the elevator, I can’t hear much of anything. As strong as my hearing is in my left ear, it doesn’t make up for the inability of my other. I am hard of hearing in my right ear. It is not a condition I was born with, but rather the sole result of an accident that happened several years ago. I’ve never told anyone about the defect, as it doesn’t seem to affect my daily life and certainly doesn’t seem worth a doctor’s visit or surgery to fix it. I almost like the additional quiet. It is another layer between the outside world and me.

In the outside world, there is an entire community devoted to people like me. Not online prostitutes who fantasize about death, but those who want to kill, those who obsess over gore and screams. When I was in community college I found their forums, joined their Twitter groups, signed up for their creepy monthly newsletter. I quit that community pretty quickly. I had hoped for an AA-type group, one that would allow members to support one another in their dark moments, help them keep one another off the streets and safe from others. Instead, they fed off one another, sharing fantasies and realities, discussing along the open lines of the Internet how to properly slice a throat, fashion a garrote, or know if you have choked someone to death or just to the point of passing out. That’s something you never learn from the movies. That when someone is strangled, the eyes-closing, body-slumping image that you see in the movies—they aren’t dead. They are passing out from asphyxiation. In order to kill them, you need to keep squeezing, wait a good minute longer. Then they will be dead.

Being on those forums, peeking into the minds of those even more depraved than me…it wasn’t good for my urges. Gave them too many ideas, gave them too much to feed off of. I closed my forum accounts, unsubscribed from the newsletter, got the hell off of Twitter. I switched to plan B: slowly starving my urges to death, cutting them off from contact with the outside world, refusing to give them food and nourishment in the form of indulgent fantasies. While Dr. Derek doesn’t necessarily believe in plan B, he does approves of it, though he is quick to point out that it hasn’t accomplished much in the last three years.

Dr. Derek wants a more proactive approach, thinks that the only way to cure me is medication. He thinks if I take the medicine regularly, popping the proper dosage each morning with a plastic cup of water, I could rejoin society. Live a normal life. But that isn’t a cure, only a Band-Aid. I’ve taken those drugs, and I don’t want the life they would bring. To have a free body but a caged mind? To stumble through the world in a zombielike state, never feeling anything, never conscious enough to really know anyone? I’d rather live my life as it is. Where I experience everything, even the horrific fantasies of my psychotic mind.

I discard the second half of my TV dinner and check my watch. Time to get back online.

HIS FIRST VICTIM
had been Haley McDonald. Seven years old, a redhead with glasses, Haley had been an unplanned event. He had been driving cross-country, eyes heavy, head nodding, and had pulled into an interstate rest stop to sleep. He had dozed for almost an hour, awakened by a loud woman who screamed obscenities into the empty parking lot air, then stomped toward the rest stop’s pavilion, tapping a box of cigarettes onto her wrist and mumbling words of nonsense. He had straightened his seatback and glanced over while reaching for his seat belt, his eyes catching on to and holding the view of the tearstained little girl, her face turned to his, her small body in the front seat of the old station wagon. He didn’t think, he didn’t prepare, he just opened his door, stepped out, and opened hers, reaching in and pulling on her arms, stopping her questions with a quick shush. “Get in my car,” he said softly. “I’ll take you someplace nicer.”

She didn’t ask questions, she didn’t cry out, she just let him pick her up and set her in his backseat, jumping slightly when he shut the door. He never knew how long her mother was in the rest stop’s restroom, or how long she waited to return to the car, or how long it took a police officer to show up on the scene.

All he knew was that two miles down the highway, when he told her to crawl into the front passenger seat, she did. And thirty miles down the highway he stopped, checking into a roadside motel. And one hour later, she was dead. He strangled her so there wouldn’t be blood and carried her out while the parking lot was still dark, putting her in the trunk and driving away. He ditched her body in a dumpster in Oklahoma, and—as far as he knew—no one discovered her there. Then he drove home, to an expectant wife and a warm dinner. And he realized, with shock, that he felt no guilt. That the fantasies he’d been harboring his entire life had finally been satisfied without any negative side effects. That after death he slept better that night than any night before. And for a while after that, his mind had been at peace. His soul quiet. Content.

He had been twenty-four. His next kill happened at twenty-six.

THEY SAY THAT
children are affected by their role in the family, only children more than others. G. Stanley Hall, a famous psychologist, referred to an only child’s situation as being “a disease in itself.” Only children are known to be more independent but can also be stereotyped as spoiled, egocentric, and overindulged. The Thompson family didn’t have room for indulgence. Survival was the main focus of their family unit, and everyone, including Annie, was aware of their tight situation. Days like last Sunday, when frivolities like cake and presents scattered the house, were few and far between, and Annie had savored every moment of it.

Before my life took a downward spiral toward horrific, I was the eldest child, one of three—our age gap so great that the twins felt like my own children. Summer and Trent were six—eleven giant years younger than me. Dad says that Mom freaked out on her thirty-ninth birthday, suddenly obsessed with having another kid after a decade of just me. Modern technology blessed her with two.

I had six and a half years with them, enough time that I fell hard: they took and held hostage two large parts of my heart. As desperate as Mom had been to conceive at age thirty-nine, once the twins had been born, Mom had emotionally checked out of the maternal role, leaving me to step in with hugs, kisses, and diaper changes. I showered them both with love, and then puberty hit. After that, Dad did most of the sweet talking and bedtime stories. I don’t mean to indicate that Mom stuffed us into a corner of the house and ignored us. She was a fun, spontaneous parent, but she was just…different. As I got older, we grew closer. Her disconnect seemed to be with the younger children; the twins’ tears and tantrums pushed her buttons and rattled her psyche. The older I got, the closer we grew and the less time I spent with the twins. That, I blame on hormones.

Teenage hormones turned me into a fair-weather sibling—loving when it was easy, bitchy and argumentative when I felt like it. Unfortunately, bitchy was how I most often was. I should have hugged them more, kissed their bruises, let them pick the channel on TV. They loved me, idolized me, and followed me around, begging for kisses. I would give anything to just go back and have one day with them again.

I hate my former self; hate her selfishness and her lack of appreciation for her perfect suburban life. I had everything in the palm of my perfect, lazy hand and didn’t even realize it.

JEREMY’S EIGHT-YEAR-OLD NIECE
swings her feet as they hang off her perch on the top of the picnic table. “Maybe she’s a vampire, Jermy.”

“A vampire.”

“Yes! You said she never leaves the ’partment during the day. I bet she’s a vampire. They only come out at night.” She grins up at him over the top of her chocolate ice-cream cone, her toothless grin a mess of melted chocolate.

He raises his eyebrows, considering. “That is a very good idea. Maybe she
is
a vampire.”

“’Cause you said she had pale skin, right?” Her eyes are big as she licks the edge of her waffle cone and nods emphatically. “Gotta be a vampire.”

“Hmmm. But she does eat food. She’s always getting big boxes of food, from different diet companies.”

“Is she…?” She moved her hands around her waist, in a large circle, and puffs out her cheeks dramatically.

Jeremy laughs. “Overweight?”

She dissolves into giggles, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Yeah. Mom says I’m not allowed to say ‘fat.’” She widens her eyes in horror and slaps her hand over her mouth. “Oops. Don’t tell her I said it.”

“She’s not overweight, Olivia. She seems kind of…” He sucks in his stomach and his cheeks, trying to look as emaciated as possible.

She falls over laughing, holding her side—the soggy remains of her cone dropping to the dirt. “Skinny!” she screams, pointing at him and squealing with laughter.

“Yes,” he says, grinning over at her. “Though I can’t say for sure. I only saw a wrist.”

She sits up, suddenly solemn. “Maybe she’s ano rex kick.”

“Anorexic? Hmmm…I hadn’t thought about that. Hey, what do you know about anorexia?”

She shrugs, her small shoulders scrunching. “I don’t know. Mom says Katie is that.”

Jeremy nods, focused on his cone. “You know, Katie will be fine. She is just going through a difficult time. You can help her, you know that?”

She turns to him, her intelligent eyes widening.
“Me?”

“Sure. You can be the best little sister in the world. That will make her happy.”

She thinks about that, pursing her lips and looking away from him. “So…you want me to be a good little
brother
, right?”

Sensing a shift in the conversation, Jeremy grins. “Yes. What’s your point?”

“Mom says if you were a good little brother, you’d go out with Bethany.”

Jeremy follows her finger, outstretched and insistent, his eyes finding and focusing on the leggy blonde with a well-enhanced upper half. “Really? That’s what your mom said?”

Eyes wide, she nods quickly. “Yep. Mom says we have to find a girl for you.” She lowers her voice conspiratorially. “One who’s
not
a vampire.”

He laughs, trying to stifle the sound as she fixes him with a stern look. “I appreciate your concern, but
Bethany
is not really my type.”

The little girl snorts, and her voice takes on an authoritative tone. “Mom says Bethany is
everybody’s
type.”

His eyes find the blonde again, traveling over her short shorts, the tight shirt, and the pound of makeup that covers her face. “Well, forget Bethany. That’s not gonna happen.”

“Is that so?” The playful voice of his sister causes Jeremy to look up, light blue eyes pinning him with a strict stare. “Pray tell,
what
is wrong with the swimsuit model that I have delivered to your doorstep?”

The little girl looks up with a frown. “This is a park, Mom. Not Jermy’s doorstep.”

Her observation is ignored as Lily parks herself on the bench between them. “Huh? What’s wrong with her?”

“I’ve told you, I don’t need to be set up with anyone.”

“Right, because you have some girl who won’t talk to you taking up all of your spare time?”

“She’s interesting. A lot more interesting than a short skirt with a pound of makeup.”

“Silence doesn’t mean interesting. It could just mean boring. Sometimes you open the door and find out that it’s a big ornate sexy door to an empty closet. Maybe the only thing you’re interested in is the mystery, and you’ll find yourself bored with what’s inside.”

He gives her a wry grin. “Don’t worry, I probably won’t ever see what’s inside. I don’t see her opening that door anytime soon.”

“Exactly why you should go out with Bethany. She’s been drooling all over you for the last hour. You need to step it up, before you get old and gray like me.”

He throws an arm around her shoulder, bringing her tight to him. “You’ll love me anyway, even if I am wrinkled and alone.”

She hugs him back, smiling despite herself. “Maybe.” Then she stands, shooting her daughter a firm look. “No more ice cream for you. We have dinner in two hours.”

Jeremy waits until she strides off, her hands cupped around her mouth, hollering orders at different children as she moves. Once she is out of sight, he leans over. “Here, you can have the rest of mine.”

He hands her the last bit of his cone and looks out at the backyard of his sister’s house. “I was thinking about giving this other girl something, a present.”

Her face brightens. “Like a balloon?”

“Or maybe flowers.”

She frowns slightly. “I don’t know if vampires like flowers.”

“I don’t think she’s a vampire. I think she’s lonely.”

“Be careful, Jermy. Don’t let her suck your blood.”

He grins at that advice, watching as she jumps off the bench and takes off toward the jungle gym. Maybe his sister is right. Hell, he knows she is right. It was ridiculous for him to pass up Bethany for a girl who won’t even open a door for him. Chances are, if she—from day one—had opened her door to him like a normal person, he probably wouldn’t have ever given her a second thought, no matter how many packages she received. Normal people open their doors. People who have something to hide keep them closed.

He glances at Bethany, her canned laughter traveling across the park. She is beautiful, friendly, would probably spread her legs and give him the ride of his life. There are a thousand girls like her, girls he runs into at every turn. Girls like her had decorated his high school and dominate the bars that line the downtown streets. He has bedded more of them than he cares to remember, each time feeling dirty at the completion, none of the sex worth the weeks of emotional baggage that followed. He is now ready for a real relationship—the connection of two souls with a purpose other than mindless fucking and relationship games.

Vampire girl probably isn’t the best ying to his yang if he is wanting a relationship. Physical and emotional contact seem to be a bit of a prerequisite to that. Step one, he needs to get her to open that door. After that happens, maybe he can start thinking about something more.

She has to be lonely. What kind of life can it be, with her alone in that apartment?