Joyride (18 page)

Sherry was in her light summer jammies watching a show on the Nature Channel about man-made extinctions and they were talking about the extermination of the dodo on the island of Mauritius somewhere out in the Indian Ocean. The poor dumb flightless birds, biggest-ever members of the pigeon family the show said, were so unused to humans that the sailors who killed them just for fun—they weren’t very good to eat apparently—only had to catch one of them and its squawking would bring a whole bunch of others around so that they could butcher and bludgeon them too. In just a few years they were gone.

She thought this was a shame.

They were moving on to the Carolina parakeet when she heard somebody on the porch and then at the screen door and then Owen walked in smiling with this blind-folded girl in handcuffs. She looked about sixteen. Slim with nice long hair and long shapely legs.

“Who the hell is this?” she said.

“I don’t know. I didn’t bother to ask her yet. What’s your name?” he said.

“Stephanie.”

“Stephanie what, Stephanie?”

“Stephanie Brody.”

“Stephanie’s got to use the bathroom.”

Sherry shrugged. “I’ll get the camera.”

“W-what?” said Stephanie.

She didn’t answer. She walked to the bedroom and took the camcorder off the nightstand beside the Tiffany-style lamp and walked into the bathroom. Owen and the girl were standing there waiting. He positioned her in front of the toilet.

“Okay, you can take off your skirt and panties now and sit,” he said. “Toilet’s right behind you.”

“Please?”

“Please what?”

“Please could you give me some privacy?”

“Could we give her some privacy? What do you think?”

The girl was either very scared or she was sobbing. Her shoulders were trembling.

Sherry smiled and shook her head.

“Nah. Afraid not. You said you had to go. So go.”

She hesitated but Sherry guessed she had to pee real bad because she pulled her skirt around so that the zipper was in front of her cuffed hands and worked it down and pulled down the panties and Sherry zoomed in tight for a close-up of her dark curly pubic hair as she sat and then closer still to capture the bright trail of pee.

Owen brought her hand over to meet the roll of toilet paper.

“Wipe yourself good,” he said.

And now she was sure the girl was crying because she could hear the sobs.

“What’s that?” Sherry said.

“What.”

“On her face.”

“Oh, I must have cut her. Getting her into the car. It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

“Stay there, Stephanie. Owen, take the camcorder.”

She opened the medicine chest and took out the hydrogen
peroxide and a gauze pad and the bacitracin. She dabbed the cut with peroxide and then applied the bacitracin.

“We don’t want her getting infected, do we. Okay, you can stand up and get dressed now. Where do you go to school, Steph?”

“Bushwake High.”

“What grade?”

“I’m a junior.”

“You get good grades?”

“S-some. Yes.”

“In what?”

“English. History.”

“Not so good in math?”

“No.”

Owen took her by the elbow. “Come on, let’s go out in the living room and have a drink. You like champagne, Stephanie?”

“I never tried it.”

“Then you’ve got a real treat coming. You’re gonna love it. Get us a bottle of champagne, Sherry.”

In the kitchen Sherry noted first that it was eight forty-five exactly and second that the girl just now had heard both of their names.

By nine forty-five or so they’d had three glasses of champagne each along with half a plate of nachos and cheese dip and Sherry had washed her off down there with a warm wet cloth so she didn’t mind going down on her at all. The girl kept reacting whenever her tongue moved over her clit though. She kept trying to close her legs. Almost like it was involuntary. She had to pry them open with her hands. The fourth time she tried it Sherry had had enough.

“Look,” she said. “The next few hours are going to determine what we do to you, you know what I mean? So cut it out, okay? Be a good girl.”

She guessed she got the message.

By a little after ten o’clock they had her naked with her hands recuffed behind her back kneeling sideways on the couch with her face pressed into the cushions and her butt in the air and Owen was going up her ass while she taped them with the camcorder.

“The blindfold’s slipping,” she said.

“That’s okay. I want to see her face anyhow. Close your eyes, Steph.”

He removed the blindfold and slapped her ass.

“And keep them closed, okay?”

“Okay.”

“What? Stop the goddamn crying, would you? What did you say?”

“I said okay.”

“Under no circumstances are you to open your eyes, right?”

“Okay.”

“You’re gonna go back after this and you’re gonna fuck every boy in Bushwake High, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I’m gonna go back after this and fuck every boy in B-Bushwake High.”

“And you’re gonna eat every pussy in Bushwake High.”

“I’m gonna eat every pussy.”

“Where?”

“Bushwake High.”

“You want to eat pussy?”

“Y-yes.”

“Good. But I got a better idea. C’mere, Sherry. Get down here in front of her. Gimme the camera. Now I want you to put your tongue up Sherry’s ass. Spread your cheeks, Sherry. That’s right. Now put it right up there, right up her ass. Not her pussy, her ass for chrissake. Put it in deep. That’s right. Good.”

It was just past midnight and they’d finished the champagne and taken turns fucking her with the empty bottle when he decided he wanted to piss on her. She shot them doing it in the tub. He told her she looked good with her hair all drenched in piss. He wanted to shit on her too but after a few tries it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen. Sherry probably could have managed it but she didn’t volunteer. They let her shower. And it was after she showered and they handed her the big fluffy towel that she made her one bad mistake. She opened her eyes and saw them.

She closed them right away but the damage was done. They knew it and probably she knew it too, though she kept trying to make believe it hadn’t happened and she was still making believe right up until the time they marched her into the basement and then it was all
no, nononono please no
until Sherry turned off the camera and put it down on the cold cement floor and picked up the baseball bat and hit her several times in the head with it until she and Owen were sure that she was dead.

The second girl was named Ashley Link and they dumped her body in a ditch along the roadside. It had been far too much trouble and taken far too long to cut up Stephanie’s body and encase the various parts in boxes filled with cement and then drive to the lake and dump them. Owen’s chain saw kept jamming up on such sticky half-liquid substances and once the cement set, the boxes were very heavy. The stench in the goddamn basement lasted weeks.

She figured you learned by your mistakes.

So they stripped her and washed her and dumped her and cleaned up the car and that was that.

Owen was acting awfully damn nervous lately. Sherry didn’t really see why.

They’d brought him in for questioning about the rapes but then they’d questioned pretty much every man of his description in the county and evidently come up empty because that had been nearly six months ago and they’d heard nothing further from them since. They hadn’t actually killed anybody in a while.

The rapes continued naturally and sometimes she helped him with the camcorder and sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes he just went out on his own.

But it was getting harder and harder to get him to relax.

They’d be driving to the supermarket and Owen would say something like, see that girl? Jesus, I raped that girl. You think she saw me just now? You think she noticed the car? Sherry had her doubts that these were the same girls he’d raped because it happened easily half a dozen times and he couldn’t have been all
that
busy, could he? She never contradicted him though and instead took pains to calm and reassure him that no, the girl hadn’t seen them, they’d been going too fast or the girl had been looking the other way or whatever it took.

He’d taken to hiding their videotapes behind a slat in the wall of their garage.

He was showering four or five times a day. She’d come
home from work at the veterinarian’s office and he’d already be home from his day behind the office desk and she’d find him in the shower. He’d shower before and after fucking her.

He’d never done that before.

He bought these bottles of Germ-X hand sanitizer with vitamin E at the drugstore to keep in his pocket and whenever they went out to a party or a restaurant or wherever there was going to be some shaking of hands to do he’d use it surreptitiously under the table or in the men’s room.

When the local TV news reported that they’d found the slabs of concrete he got worse.

It was bad luck on their part or maybe bad planning. They’d had very little rain for a while so the shoreline of the lake had unexpectedly receded and some kids found what turned out to be a human elbow poking out of one of the disintegrated boxes, so the cops dragged the lake and found the rest of them. Nobody was linking them to Ashley in the ditch and certainly not to the rapes but Owen was clearly worried.

She’d gone to some lengths to cheer him up. One of his favorite games since Talia died was for Sherry to dress up in her little sister’s clothing, much of which she’d kept since except for footwear she and Talia were pretty much the same size. She’d pretend to be Talia while he videotaped her—not Talia drugged and asleep as she had been in reality but Talia actively wanting him to take her virginity, to be her first guy.

She’d put up her hair like Talia’s and wash off all her makeup and slowly strip down for him and talk to him all the while in this little-girl voice of Talia’s which she found she could imitate perfectly. Then she’d jerk him off
and blow him acting like it was her first time doing that too. Poor unsophisticated Talia needed his instructions so he gave them to her. And when she fucked him there was even bleeding because she’d bought some fake blood in a novelty store and inserted it with a tampon.

The blood was just water, sugar and food coloring.

So it presented no problem healthwise.

But now even that game wasn’t working half the time. Nor were the handcuffs or the toys.

Owen was becoming unpredictable.

It was almost a relief when they arrested him.

It happened just before dinner. Owen was in the shower. The jazzed-up Ragu spaghetti-and-meat sauce was simmering on the stove and she was reading this item in the paper about a mother who’d almost killed her daughter. The mother hadn’t bothered to take her daughter to a doctor when the girl botched her own homemade belly-button piercing. Infection set in and in great pain the thirteen-year-old took to the living room couch in their apartment so she could at least watch TV. Then stopped eating or eventually even moving. She lay there for about three weeks the paper said. Finally when neighbors complained about the stink they found her wearing diapers not only on her butt, but to soak up the fluids oozing from her belly. The girl’s mother had no health insurance and didn’t believe in doctors anyway.

When the doorbell rang she put down the paper and went to the door and there were these two cops in uniform and two more in jacket and tie. They showed her their badges and asked for Owen and she said he was showering. They asked could they come in please and she smiled and said certainly and suddenly the house seemed
crowded which unnerved her. She excused herself to turn off the spaghetti sauce and went to the bathroom and called for Owen.

She was surprised to find when they arrested him that there were two more uniformed cops at the back door. They were expecting he might try to flee.

She was surprised to find that they were arresting him not just for rape but for murder too.

She was surprised as hell when it turned out that Owen had voluntarily given the police a DNA sample when they’d asked him to six months ago, questioning him about the rapes. He hadn’t told her. They’d only just gotten around to doing an analysis—the labs were way backed up they said. She guessed that the DNA sample explained his nervousness. But why in god’s name he’d do something that foolish even given how dumb the cops were in general was a mystery to her.

Still it was only when they presented her with the search warrant that she began to seriously worry. Not all the videotapes were hidden in the garage. There was one in the VCR. They’d been watching it the night before last. It was one of the older ones which went back two or three years or so. She didn’t remember the girl’s name offhand but they’d brought her home and drugged her and Owen had raped her as usual but in one scene there was Sherry, using the girl’s limp right hand to masturbate with and she was laughing.

In the first year of their marriage Owen had once made a very big mistake. Got it into his head that it would be fun and exciting to use the halothane on Sherry.

“Then here’s the deal. While you’re out I not only get to fuck you and you know, do whatever I want with you, but I whip your butt till it’s red as this goddamn sofa. You wake up, you hardly know what happened to you.” He was grinning. “You wake up a changed woman.”

“Won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Well for one thing if you do anything painful to me, I’ll probably wake up.”

“Your kitties and doggies don’t wake up when Doc Welles is slicing and dicing, do they?”

“That’s different. It’s a steady dose they’re breathing. It’s measured.”

“So? You start to wake up, I reapply.”

“No. No thanks.”

“Why not?”

“Does the name Talia mean anything to you, Owen?”

“Dammit! That was your fault! You were the one…”

“Please. Let’s not go through all that again.”

“I
want
to go through all that again, Sherry! I’m sick and tired of you blaming me for the whole damn thing!”

“I don’t blame you for the whole damn thing, Owen.”

“The fuck you don’t.”

“I don’t. I told you that before. Look. You wanted to fuck her. Fine. But it didn’t work out, did it. Now you want fuck me the same way and it’s dangerous. No thanks! You get it? Jesus!”

“Bitch!”

“What did you call me?”

“I called you a bitch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, please. You’re being an asshole. Fuck you, Owen.”

“Fuck me?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Fuck me?”

“That’s what I said, yes! Fuck you!”

And that was the first and last time he hit her.

But the blow was hard enough to blacken her eye and swell her cheek and when she got up off the floor she didn’t hesitate for a moment or say a single word to him but simply grabbed her keys and drove off in her car while he was still trying to apologize to her from the driveway. She drove to her friend Ruth’s house from Dr. Welles’s office and though Ruth was having dinner guests at the time she took one look at her and let her in.

Ruth’s three guests were her boyfriend and her childhood best friend and her best friend’s husband who as it happened was a criminal attorney and who convinced her fairly easily over coffee and ice packs to report Owen to the police on the theory that if he did this once to her the chances were very good he’d do it again. Abusers typically did. So the four of them drove to the station where she filed a report and had Polaroid photos taken of her massive shiner.

Which, years later, when she was implicated in charges
of rape and murder, made her deal with the DA’s office so much easier.

The deal was quite straightforward. Sherry would plead guilty to two counts of accessory to murder in exchange for her testimony against her husband. Like Patti Hearst and Hedda Nusbaum and many others before her she was a victim too, weak and battered and unable to do other than comply with Owen’s odious desires. She would confess to obtaining the halothane for him and helping him dispose of the bodies and to participating in sexual acts with the victims and she would describe these murders and these acts in full detail at his trial.

In exchange for this she would receive a twelve-year sentence on each count to be served concurrently and would be eligible for parole in three years with time off for good behavior. She would waive her right to a preliminary hearing and her own trial would be over swiftly.

Sherry figured it was a no-brainer.

And by the time Owen in a perfect fury fessed up to the location of the videotapes the deal was writ in stone. The prosecutor and by extension the public were just going to have to live with it.

A deal’s a deal.