Imola (15 page)

Roger stepped forward.

Agnes’s hand slipped into a pocket of the splayed coat. It was empty.

The other one
.

She fumbled with the fabric. Where was the other pocket?

Find it
.

Roger’s foot crunched a twig, close by.

Agnes jumped as her hand found the other pocket.

Grab it
.

She reached inside.

Roger leaned over, his voice close. “Here. Take my hand.”

She felt a knife—a folded pocketknife, larger than a Swiss Army knife. A single blade bulged from the handle.

Open it
.

“Agnes?”

Agnes? No. Not now. Don’t go away on me
.

Roger touched her shoulder. “Here. Take my hand.”

Don’t go away. We can do it together. I’ll help. You’ll learn. We need to do it
.

She turned and grabbed his hand. When he pulled, she rose in one quick motion and threw her arms around his shoulders, pressing her breasts into his chest. Her hands met behind him and pulled on the knife blade.

His hands wrapped around her hips. He held the hug.

Take off his shirt
.

Agnes shifted the knife to her right hand and grabbed the edge of his sweatshirt with her left and lifted. He leaned back and crossed his arms, grabbing the lower edges of the sweatshirt. He pulled it over his head and peeled it from his arms in a quick motion. Agnes kept the knife hand behind his back.

She grabbed the sweatshirt, tossed it to the ground, and pressed back into the hug. She felt his warmth against her breasts.

Agnes. We can do it. We’ll do it fast. You’ll like it. A quick slash. We have to go deep. In the neck
.

She tightened her hug, and he responded by dropping his right hand around the curve of her left buttock.

It’s okay. We can do it together. Just stay with me. I want you to see it this time. How easy it is. You’ll love the feeling. The power
.

She brought her left hand to his right cheek and stroked his jaw. He dropped his left hand onto her butt and pulled her abdomen tight against his.

She grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head to the side. Hard. She hesitated. Her mind flashedon the doctor shows. The initial incision.

It’s okay. I’ll do it
.

The knife blade flashed in the sun as it dug into Roger’s neck.

Agnes turned her head right, then left. It was happening again—the time jumps, the immediate changes in scenery, like she was transported in some small-scale time machine. The missing memories weren’t the disturbing part. It was the unsettled feeling that something bad had just happened, a hollow sensation of missing time, like with her missing years. And there it was: the connection with the past, the common denominator. It all centered on Lilin.

Agnes looked down, past the steering wheel. She still wore the baggy pants and cinched belt, but on top she had a Sonoma State University sweatshirt. Roger’s sweatshirt. She remembered getting him to pull his car over. This car. She remembered pulling close to him, hugging him. And then there was Lilin.

Her eyes jumped to the road. It was familiar. She was on the way to Mendocino. In Roger’s car. In his sweatshirt. The road went blurry as the first tears fell on her cheeks. Roger seemed like a nice young man. His future was bright. Was? Was there any chance he was still alive, walking that country road, the back way to Cotati and his university?

He was a man. He proved it. He got what he deserved
.

Agnes tried to shake the voice from her head, but it just made more tears fall. There was no way around it. She’d participated in the trap. Now she was driving a stolen car. Of a dead man. He was dead, wasn’t he?

Oh yeah. He’s dead. Look at your shoe
.

Agnes bent her head over and looked around the steering wheel. On the toe of her right shoe was a starburst spatter of blood, halfway from crimson to brown. She stiffened in the seat and tried to stifle the hitches of sobs.

We did it. Together. We make a great team
.

Agnes wiped her cheeks, but the tears didn’t let up. The familiarity of the road and the comfort of the destination—home—didn’t soothe as it should have. And home wasn’t even home anymore. Her house had been rented soon after she’d gone into Imola. Jason was taking care of it.

Jason. She wanted to see him. She needed him, now more than ever. He must be looking for her. Would he go to Mendocino?

She wanted to turn around and go back to Santa Rosa—to find him. He could straighten this all out. He had connections.

No. We go to Mendocino. We need money. The college boy only had twelve dollars. And the other man had forty
.

The other man? What other man?

Your pants. Where did you think you got the pants? He was the right height, but way overweight. And he only had forty dollars
.

The tires chattered on the shoulder of the highway, and Agnes had to wrestle the steering wheel to correct the car’s course back to the center of the lane. The pants. The sweatshirt. The car. All from dead men. How many lay behind them? How many ahead?

Three. And it depends. Now keep driving. We know where Gert and Ella hid their money. We have to get it
.

Someone lives in the house. And the police are probably watching it.

We need money. Keep driving
.

The afternoon sun was setting the Pacific ablaze with reflective ripples when the Volkswagen turned away from the ocean and onto Reese Drive. Long shadows of the car drifted along the sidewalk as it inched past the old Victorian house. Lights were not yet on, no cars inthe driveway. And there were no cars anywhere along the street that would signal a stakeout.

Up ahead. Pull onto that road. Go up about a hundred yards and stop. We can watch from the vacant lot
.

Agnes turned and parked. The tears started again, and she had trouble lifting her legs out of the driver’s seat. It felt like she wore ankle weights. She stumbled and nearly went over on the uneven ground.

Just short of the side fence, she went into a crouch, then to hands and knees. At the front corner of the house several large shrubs gave good shelter with a clear view of the street and driveway. She crawled under a huge hydrangea and pulled off a few low branches to hollow out an observation post.

There he goes
.

Agnes craned her neck around the house corner and pulled a branch below her visual field. A white Ford cruised past. The familiar features of Officer Steven Wilson brought back memories of the days leading up to her arrest. She didn’t have a watch, but she could estimate the time by the angle of the sun. It was off the horizon by no more than the height of the trees across the road.

The Ford pulled over and stopped. A blue Nissan came up the street and slowed as it turned in to the driveway. Agnes counted two people in the car. The driver waved in the direction of the white Ford. The Nissan continued on the driveway and disappeared. After a minute or two, lights went on inside the house.

A couple. No kids. Kids are problems. We can’t hurt kids
.

Agnes flinched at the shred of morality from someone who took both emotional and physical pleasure in killing then mutilating men. But the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Kids wouldn’t hurt kids. Not like that anyway.

The sun made its last call when the Ford came by again, its headlights gaining boldness in the sinking light. The car slowed but didn’t pull over. By Agnes’s estimation, it was about an hour and a half between checks.

Plenty of time. We know where the money is. We can be in and out in fifteen minutes. Maybe ten
.

Not tonight, Agnes thought. Not while the couple was home. She was tired. She needed sleep. She needed to stop crying. And she didn’t want to leave two more corpses.

She waited, ready to argue her case, but the voice was silent. In her world, silence was as good as agreement. She felt around the base of the plant and smoothed out the leaf litter that was mounded against the stem of the hydrangea. She pulled it into a C-shaped pile and curled around the stem, settling into the crunchy mattress. She shivered against the cold and pulled her torso into a tighter arc. The chill was bearable for now.

Agnes shivered awake, but not due to the air temperature. It seemed as if it had warmed overnight. It was the dream that sent her muscles into spasm. She’d hoped it would have been the one about the gliding seagulls. That it somehow had been a premonition, now a confirmation, of her escape from Imola—her return to freedom. Instead, she got the highway turnout and ice cream vendor dream again. What did that foretell? Her shivers intensified.

She forced the dream out of her mind just in time to see the Ford cruise past.

A muted glow from behind the house reminded her of how the sun always brought the overhead black to a hopeful shade of indigo, nowhere near the sky-blue of daylight, but with a distant promise of another clear day. But the sun’s light preceded its warmth, and she noticed that she had shifted during the night, her body no longer wrapped around the hydrangea stem. A tight fetal ball—her knees pulled up into the honor student’s sweatshirt, her hands pulled well inside the sleeve openings.

She stretched her legs and leaned on an elbow to watch the Ford drive down the street. It flipped around and came back again, this time faster, then disappeared.

It’s time we got ready. They’ll probably leave soon
.

Agnes had heard that the coldest time of the morningwas when the sun made its first showing and heated the air next to the ground, which rose, replaced by more dense, cold air. Pinned under the shrub, she felt the lesson’s substance. The chill combined with nervousness produced an uncontrollable shake. The shake brought another sensation: she had to pee. And she hadn’t eaten since … when?

She duck-walked to an adjacent bush, an azalea, and unfastened the belt, letting the pants fall from her hips. She squatted expertly, and steam rose from the wetted leaves.

She couldn’t refasten the belt. The new, makeshift hole was small and tight, and the shake of her hands couldn’t bring the movement of buckle and belt into synchrony. She was about to give up when she heard a familiar noise: the whir of the automatic garage door opener. In her distraction, the blade of the buckle found the hole. She jumped to her feet, in a crouch, and crept to the corner of the house.

The blue Nissan backed down the long driveway and bounced when the rear wheels fell down the curb. The car accelerated backward on the street, rocked to a stop, and shot forward, leaving a cloud of mist to gradually settle on the cold pavement. Were there two people in the car? It looked like there might be.

There were two. Let’s go. To the back door
.

Agnes moved to the back corner of the house and continued along the backyard fence, pushing on eachslat as she went. One-third of the way to the back, two adjacent panels gave, each hinged near the top with a single, half-in nail. She pushed them aside and climbed through. How did she know about them?