Fade to Black (3 page)

“Hannah go home now,” Hannah says as Elizabeth pulls up in front of the garage and shuts off the car.

“No, you’re coming to my house, Hannah. Remember?”

“Home!” Hannah insists, pointing at the yellow aluminum-sided house beyond the hedge.

Elizabeth sighs and gets out, then goes around and unbuckles Hannah’s seat belt. She tucks her mail under her arm and picks the child up before she can escape across the yard. “Come on, Hannah, let’s go get your apple juice.”

“Hannah don’t like apple juice!”

“How about grape?” Elizabeth suggests, unlocking the door and hurrying Hannah inside before she can start screaming again.

“Grape?” The child considers it for a mere second before nodding agreeably and saying, “Okay.”

As she settles Hannah at the kitchen table with a small glass of grape juice, Elizabeth wonders what kind of mother she would be. She used to do a lot of baby-sitting back when she was in high school, and the kids always seemed to like her, cuddling up to her and begging her to stay and play even after their parents were home.

I probably would be a great mom
, she tells herself, patting Hannah’s white-blond hair.
Not that I’ll ever find out
.

And it’s just as well. Always, in the back of her mind, is the knowledge that she might not have inherited only her mother’s looks. What if she’d also inherited her mother’s …

Violent tendencies?

She has very few memories of Becky O’Neal, who had left the Nebraska farmhouse not long after her daughter’s third birthday. But she remembers certain things about her mother—bits and pieces of scenes that occasionally run through her mind even now, like the rough cut of a film in the hands of an overzealous editor.

Her mother yanking her out of her high chair by her hair …

Screaming at her for messing her diaper right after being changed …

Smacking her across the face.

Slamming her into the wall.

Throwing her onto the floor.

Kicking her.

Elizabeth squeezes her eyes shut to block out the images and finds Hannah watching her with solemn eyes, a thumb in her mouth.

I could never hurt a child
, Elizabeth tells herself, reaching out to stroke Pamela’s daughter’s silky blond hair.

Never
.

I would never be the kind of mother she was
.

She feels a sharp sense of loss at the thought, because she’ll never have the chance to prove that to herself, or anyone else.

No, she’ll never be anyone’s mother.

“I’ll be right back, Hannah,” she says, shaking her head to rid herself of the disturbing truth, of lingering images.

She goes back down the hall to the front door and pulls it closed, then locks both bolts and the chain.

She glances into the living room out of habit, to make sure everything is as she’d left it. Yes, there’s her needlepoint sitting on the Shaker pine coffee table in front of the floral print couch, and there, on the hardwood floor beside the navy recliner, is the copy of
People
magazine she’d been reading the night before. The drapes are carefully closed.

She decides to open them, since Pamela will be coming over to get Hannah and might think it’s odd to have everything shut in the middle of a sunny summer afternoon.

Pamela’s been inside her house only a few times, and every time she made Elizabeth nervous. It wasn’t as though she’d snooped through the cupboards or asked a lot of questions., but she’d looked around with a shrewd eye that didn’t miss anything. And she’d asked to see Elizabeth’s office.

“I’d love to see where a real writer works,” she’d insisted when Elizabeth had protested that her office was a mess. “And anyway, our house is always a mess and I’ve basically gotten over caring. You need to lighten up a little, Liz. Don’t be such a June Cleaver.”

What could she do but lead Pamela to the spare bedroom, where she kept her computer, desk, and books? She’d half expected Pamela to point out that the room was in perfect order, but for some reason she’d kept her mouth shut about that.

She
had
examined the rows of titles on the bookshelf. They were mostly poular fiction, and a few reference books.

And she
had
asked, “What is it that you write, again?”

Elizabeth told her, even though she’d said it several times in me past. “Technical stuff. I freelance. I do annual reports and newsletters and articles for trade journals, that kind of thing.”

She’d hurried Pamela out of her office before she could pry further, and distracted her by asking whether she’d gotten a haircut.

Pamela loves to talk about her hair. She’s always relating details about how she has it dyed and cut and styled.

The few times Pamela has been inside Elizabeth’s house were never by invitation. She seems to have a way of seeping in, especially in the summer, when she and Elizabeth bump into each other outside more often.

Elizabeth opens the curtains in the living room and in the small dining room, then goes down the hall to shut the doors to her bedroom and the office. When she returns to the kitchen, she finds that Hannah has spilled grape juice all over herself, her pink and white sunsuit, and the white ceramic tile floor. A river of purple is running across the red Formica tabletop and has soaked the pile of mail she just picked up from the post office.

“Oops,” Hannah says guiltily when Elizabeth comes in and sees the mess.

“It’s okay,” she tells the child.

She picks up the mail, which she has yet to examine, and sticks it into one half of the double stainless steel sink. Then she grabs a pile of wet paper towels and cleans the floor and Hannah’s sticky hands and face.

“Yucky,” Hannah comments, then adds, “Poopie.”

Remembering what Pamela said, Elizabeth ignores that. She surveys the purple-streaked sunsuit and says, “You know what? If we don’t get that into the washing machine, it’s going to stain really badly. Will you let me take it off you?”

Hannah nods, looking bored.

Elizabeth wrestles her out of the sunsuit and leads her, clad only in her training pants, into the living room. “Do you want to sit here and watch television while I go down and put your outfit into the laundry?”

“TV,” Hannah agrees, climbing onto the couch.

Elizabeth turns it on, finding a late-afternoon cartoon show. “Here you go, sweetie. Is this good?”

“Good.”

Elizabeth smiles and leaves Hannah in the living room, thinking that as much as she dislikes Pamela’s taking advantage of her, it’s kind of nice to have a little child around the house.

You’ll never have one of your own
, she reminds herself.
You’ll be alone for the rest of your life
.

Sighing, she unlocks the door in the hallway that leads down to the basement. It’s unfinished, and filled with cobwebs and junk left behind by the woman who lived there before and died in the house.

Elizabeth flicks on the light and makes her way gingerly down the steep steps, ducking to avoid a shred of spiderweb dangling near the bottom of the stairs. She puts the sunsuit into the washer that sits in one corner, near an old, deep laundry sink.

“Cold, delicate,” she murmurs aloud as she sets the controls.

She turns to go back up to the kitchen and jumps, gasping at the sight of someone moving in the shadows under the stairs.

She opens her mouth to scream, men realizes that it’s nothing.

Just an old wooden coat stand, some boxes, and her imagination.

But her heart is still pounding as she hurries back upstairs.

“W
ere you a good girl for Aunt Liz?” Pamela asks when she returns an hour later and scoops a squirmy Hannah off the couch.

“She sure was,” Elizabeth lies, wishing she could tell Pamela about how she’d found Hannah—whose “poopie” comment was apparently meant to be a warning—smelling to high heaven and shredding the
People
magazine when she’d come back up from doing the laundry. She could also mention how Hannah had, in one swift movement, shattered her favorite crystal candy dish that had been sitting on the coffee table.

She wished, too, that she knew how to tell Pamela she didn’t want to be called “aunt” or “Liz.”

“What happened to her clothes?” Pamela balances Hannah on her hip and steadies the crying baby in his carrier. “Did she throw up on them or something?”

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Elizabeth tells her about the grape juice incident. “I forgot to get the sunsuit out of the washing machine and put it into the dryer.” More like, she hadn’t been able to leave the little monster alone for another minute because she’d undoubtedly destroy the house. “Let me run down and get it for you now, and you can—”

“Actually, I’m kind of in a hurry right now, Liz. We’re running late and Frank likes dinner to be ready when he gets home. I’ll tell you what, just throw it into your dryer and run it over whenever you have a chance, okay?”

“Sure,” Elizabeth says reluctantly, following Pamela to the door. She watches as her neighbor hurries down the driveway and across her own front yard, still carrying both of her children.

Then she carefully double-bolts and chains her door again, and goes around closing the blinds and curtains. When she gets to the kitchen, she spies her grape-juice-soaked mail still in the sink.

She spreads a layer of paper towels on the table, then carries the wet, sticky pile over and sets it down. She sits cross-legged on a chair and starts going through it.

Since she hasn’t been to the post office since late last week, there’s quite a bit of mail. Some of it is junk, most of it bills, and a few catalogues and magazines.

An envelope catches her eye as she crumples a supermarket flyer into a ball.

A pink envelope, poking out from beneath her phone bill.

She frowns and pulls it out. It’s square and stiff; the kind of envelope that might contain a greeting card.

Her name and post office box address are typed neatly on the outside.

There’s no return address.

But the postmark is Windmere Cove.

For a moment Elizabeth only stares at it, her hands trembling.

It’s probably just more junk mail
, she tells herself.
It looks like a card and there’s no return address, so they can get people to open it out of curiosity
.

Slowly, she slides her index finger beneath the flap and starts to rip the envelope open. The stiff edge catches her flesh, and she winces.

“Just a paper cut,” she says aloud, sticking her finger into her mouth and sucking the metallic-tasting blood away before opening the envelope the rest of the way.

She pulls out a greeting card.

On the front is a photo of a teddy bear with a sad face.

Inside, a scrawled message reads,
I know who you are
.

The card is unsigned.

Elizabeth’s heart is pounding. Shaking her head in disbelief, she tosses the card onto the table and backs away from it.

I know who you are
.

There’s only one person who could have sent it.

Unless it’s some kind of joke,

“It has to be,” Elizabeth whispers. “It’s a joke, or a mistake.... It can’t be …”

It can’t be him
.

E
lizabeth bends to smooth the mauve duvet cover and tuck it beneath the pillows, then winces. She twists to rub the burning spot between her shoulder blades, a telltale remnant of her sleepless night. The few times she had managed to doze off, nightmares had tormented her.

She had been hurtled back to another August night, to the sprawling rented mansion high on the cliffs above the beach at Malibu, to the vast king-sized bed in the master bedroom there. The hot, dry Santa Anas stirred the filmy white draperies on the floor-to-ceiling windows and set the wind chimes on the stone terrace to an eerie, mournful tolling.

And there, beyond the landscaped pool area, a dark silhouette crept toward her, moving stealthily through the shadows.

In that impossibly convenient manner of dreams, she could see the figure clearly though she was inside the house, in bed, tossing in a restless sleep. She sensed that danger was closing in; she knew that in a matter of moments, she would be dead....

No!

Stop thinking of that. It was only a dream....

Only a nightmare
.

Elizabeth lets out a shuddering sigh and abruptly shoves the quilt beneath the edges of the pillow shams. She turns and surveys the room, not reassured by its sun-splashed order or by the faint strains of an old Billy Joel song playing on the easy-listening radio station in the next room.

The day Janet Kravinski had first shown Elizabeth this house, she had pointed out how spacious the master bedroom was, how bright with “all those windows”—three-paned, high rectangles overlooking the asphalt driveway and chain-link-fenced backyard.

Elizabeth had nodded mutely as the Realtor rattled on. She had been remembering the skylit vaulted ceiling and three full walls of glass in that other, long-ago master bedroom that overlooked a lush, landscaped terrace and kidney-shaped swimming pool, and, off in the distance, the blue Pacific Ocean.