Robards, Karen (41 page)

“Fine,” he said mildly, and hung his jacket on the

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coatrack before opening the refrigerator door to help himself to an orange juice, too.

Since Tony’s advent rendered her off duty, and she seemed to sense trouble brewing, Gloria left with a quick good-bye. Jessica drained the last drops of her orangejuice and eyed him with some resentment.

“You’re going to tell Mom, aren’t you?” she demanded.

Tony sighed, and rested a hip against the counter opposite where she sat as he chugged his orange juice. “Don’t start, Jess. You know I have to. You don’t want people telling your mother you didn’t take your insulin, then take your insulin. It’s as simple as that.”

Jessica glowered at him. “God, I hate this damned disease!” she burst out.

“You don’t know how lucky you are to have it.” “What?” Jessica stared at him in disbelief

He nodded. “Yeah. Lucky. You know why? Because it’s treatable. All you have to do is take your insulin when you’re supposed to, and watch what you eat, and you’ll be fine.”

“And that makes me lucky?”

Tony looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Did I ever tell you about Rachel? My daughter? No? Well, I had a daughter. She would be about your age if she had lived, but she didn’t. She died when she was eleven years old. She had cystic fibrosis. Now there’s a disease that’s not treatable. She hated cystic fibrosis just like you hate diabetes, but there was nothing she or I-could do. No treatment could save her. I would have given anything I possessed-everything I possessed-my life, even, without a second’s hesitation,

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if we could have treated her disease with two shots a day and a special diet.”

He broke off. Jessica stared at him, wide-eyed. After a moment he managed a crooked smile. “So, you see, you’re lucky. So damned lucky.”

“Tony, I’m sorry.” Jessica looked appalled.

Tony nodded and took another swig of his orange juice.

“Does Mom know?”

Tony nodded again. It was funny, he reflected, the more he talked about Rachel the easier it became. It still hurt, but he no longer felt he imight die from the pain.

“Tony?” “Hirimm?” “You like Mom, don’t you?”

Immediately he felt a little wary-Jessica and Grace had been alone together for a long time, and who knew how she might feel about the addition of a third party, even one she liked as much as she did him-but he nodded.

“Have you ever thought about-well, maybe dating her, or something?”

Tony cocked an eyebrow at her and did his best to keep his face suitably bland. “You wouldn’t mind?” Jessica shook her head. “Some of the guys she dates,

if she married them, I’d have to run away from homeYou’d be okay, though.”

This time Tony knew his face was anything but bland. He was amused, surprised, curious, even a little touched, and there was no way to hide all that. “Are you by any chance trying to marry your mom off?”

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Jessica shrugged. “Not to just anybody. But-I’m a freshman in high school. In four years, I’ll be going away to college. I hate to think of going off and leaving Mom all alone. I wouldn’t mind so much if she had somebody like you.”

“You are trying to marry your mom off!” Tony couldn’t help it. He grinned from ear to ear, picturing what Grace’s reaction would be if she could hear this conversation.

“You’re not going to tell her, are you?” Jessica looked suddenly anxious.

Tony laughed out loud. “Now, would I tell your mother that her daughter practically proposed to me on her behalf?” He shook his head. “I appreciate the thought, though, Jess. I really do.”

. As it happened, Jessica’s friends stayed until supper time, ‘and then Jackie and her children stopped by and ate with them. Used to the casual closeness of his own large family, Tony accepted the presence of Grace’s sister and children philosophically. The only problem was, he had no chance to have any private conversation with Grace. He hadn’t even managed to kiss her hello.

After Jackie and her brood left, Grace and Jessica chatted as they cleaned up the kitchen. Watching them from his spot on the couch in front of the TV, Tony was struck once again by what a good relationship they really had.

As he had told Jessica earlier, she was lucky. Kramer and Chewle were at the back door, wanting out. He got up and opened it, and they streaked across the backyard, barking in furious answer to the yapping

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of a dog down the street. Tony glanced up at the clock over the pantry. It was five minutes after ten o’clock.

On a Friday night, Jessica could stay up as late as she chose.

Here he was, dying to get Grace alone, and it looked as if it wasn’t going to happen, at least not any time soon if the way mother and daughter were gabbing was any indication.

Wasn’t that the way life always worked?

“I’m going to take out the trash,” he said, heading for the full trash can on the far side of the refrigerator. Grace nodded, so caught up in something Jessica

was saying that he wasn’t even sure she heard. With a wry smile, Tony reflected that he felt like the father in a family sitcom, kind of third-wheelish.

But it was good to feel like part of a family again. He pulled the plastic liner from the can, knotted the top of it, and set it down while he put in a fresh liner. Then he picked up the bag of trash and headed out the door.

Kramer and Chewle were over behind the garage, snuffling at something. It was impossible to tell what it was in the dark. Tony dropped the trash bag in the big metal garbage can in the garage and went to investigate. It was a beautiful night, warm and clear, with a huge orange moon hanging low in the sky and thousands of twinkling stars spiraling around it. Indian summer. He loved it. It was his favorite season of the year.

Rachel had died in an Indian summer.

The memory brought bittersweet sadness with it. She had loved Indian summer, too.

When he returned to the house, he was going to

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march Grace and Jessica out into the backyard so that they could enjoy the beauty of the night.

If he had learned nothing else in his life, he had learned the importance of squeezing all the goodness possible out of each day.

The dogs were whining and pawing at something in the shadow of the garage. It was darker there, so dark that Tony could not quite make out what they had found. Whatever it was had not been in the backyard earlier, he was certain.

The object lying in the grass at the base of the garage wall was black and sort of cylindrical and large, more than five feet long. Frowning, Tony realized that he was looking at something wrapped in the same kind of oversized garbage bag he had just deposited in the garage, with duct tape wrapped around it, striping it with gray every few feet.

Then Kramer hit pay dirt. Her paw ripped through the plastic-and what looked like an overstuffed white glove flopped out. Both dogs snuffled at it, whining.

To his horror, Tony realized that he was looking at a pale, bloated human hand, still attached to its arm. Alarm bells went off like gangbusters in his mind.

The hairs rose on the back of his neck. Kramer looked around, snarling at somethingiust beyond him even as Tony whirled, reaching for his gun—

Something that felt like a baseball bat hit him with the force of a home run-caliber swing right in the side of the head, and stars exploded before his eyes. Then everything went black.

LLING HIS MOM WAS FUN. He had meant to do it later that night, do the whole family at once

after his dad got in from Indianapolis and Donny came home from handing out more flyers about Caroline being missing. But at about nine o’clock, his mom caught him eating the rice pudding she had made for his dad, just like he had done the week before. She had a major cow, screaming that somebody as fat and zitfaced as he was had no business eating sweets.

He walked into his bedroom, got his dad’s pistol from where he had hidden it under his bed, and returned to the kitchen with it. Man, had she shut up fast when she saw the gun. Her mouth had popped open like a fish’s, her hand had clutched her throat, and she’d said his name in this weird kind of voice that told him she knew what he was going to do.

‘Bye, Mom,” he said, and shot the ugly bitch right in the face.

Of course, she was even uglier after that.

She’d bled like the pig she was. In a matter of niin—

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utes, there’d been a big puddle on the kitchen floor where her head rested. There were splatters on the walls, too, kind of like spaghetti sauce with inushroonis Z I

and noodles in it. He couldn’t have that, couldn’t leave the niess although he didn’t feel like cleaning it up, because he didn’t want Donny and his father to realize what was going down until it was their turn to bite the big one.

He got a bunch of towels froiri the linen closet, wrapped a couple around his mom’s head-on second thought, maybe she did look better with only half a face-and then wrapped trash bags around that. He’d already discovered how handy trash bags were for st

reamlining the handling of a dead body. He had wrapped Caroline in trash bags before he’d stashed her in the basement freezer of a neighboring family that had gone on vacation-he would retrieve her tonight, and leave her in the house with the rest of them. Caroline had frozen up real good, kind of like hamburger. He’d checked on her a Couple of times, and she didn’t even stink.

Killing his mom first had kind of upset his schedule, though. He’d meant to off the judge lady and her daughter first, and then come home and do his mom and dad and Donny while they slept. But his mom had reatly pissed him off. He was fucking tired of being called fat.

Bundling the body in more garbage bags, then wrapping duct tape around it in strategic areas so the bags wouldn’t separate, he pondered what difference this slight change would make in his plans. Finafly, as he wiped up the blood on the floor and on the walls

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with his niom’s best towels-boy, Would that piss her off if she knew-he concluded that, like everything else that had happened, killing his niorn first had probably been for the best.

Still, what if the cops were too danined dunib to connect the murdered niother and daughter in Bexley with his own murdered family in Upper Arlington After watching them screw around with his modest little forays into thejudge lady’s house over the last few weeks, and then try to solve the mystery of Caroline’s disappearance, he wasn’t too impressed with their intelligence. It was, he thought, entirely possible that they might miss the connection.

But not if he left his mom’s body in the judge lady’s house as a calling card.

Smiling, he picked his mom up-the fat pig weighed like lead lung her over his shoulder, and carried her out to her car, which was parked in the attached garage. It was a new car, a Maxima, and his inom loved it. She would never let him drive it, though she loaned it to Donny every tinie he asked.

He would drive it tonight, and she would ride in the backseat, dead.

He went back into the house to stuff pillows under the covers on her side of the bed so that it would look, to anyone like Donny who might casually check, as though their rnom was asleep in bed. Then he took the keys to the Maxima from her purse, grabbed a couple of dollars in case he ran low on gas, got the gun, and picked up the bag he had already stocked with the other items he needed for tonight.

Finally he got in the car and drove away. He’d had

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to bend his mom’s legs to make her fit in the backseat. Too bad she was dead. He liked to think about how uncomfortable she would be.

At the judge lady’s house, instead of parking a few blocks away as he usually did with his motorcycle, he parked on the next street over so that he’djust have to go through the front and rear yards of the house that backed up to hers before climbing over the fence into her yard. By now, he knew the lay-out around here as well as he knew his own neighborhood. He felt a pang of regret as he reflected that this was the last time he’d have reason to visit the judge lady’s house. It had been almost a year since he had discovered her identity with the help of an Internet search group dedicated to reuniting adoptees with their biological parents. In that period of time, watching her and her kid had almost turned into his hobby, or something. Oh, well, all good things must come to an end, he thought.

Getting out of the car, he glanced through the windows and realized that his mom’s body was too easy to see on the backseat. All anyone had to do was peer in-even wrapped in garbage bags, the bundle looked odd enough that it might prompt a call to police.

He hadn’t realized that the streetlight on the corner provided so much illumination. For a moment he considered moving the car. Then he decided he’d just take his mom with him. He’d meant to come back for her anyway, so he’d just be lugging the body to the house a little earlier than he’d planned.

Man, she was heavy. He stuck the gun into his jacket pocket-well, Donny’s jacket pocket-and hoisted her onto his shoulder, after first making sure

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that there was no one around. In just a few minutes he was safe in the dark, out of reach of the street lamp’s illumination, just him and the moon and the stars and the rustling leaves underfoot and the creaking branches overhead.

Bexley was really a lovely community, he thought. Almost as nice as Upper Arlington.

Somewhere not too far away, a dog began to bark. The little yappy dog he’d heard almost every time he’d visited the judge lady’s house.

Tonight he might do the universe a favor and off the dog, too.

When he got to the fence around the judge lady’s backyard, he lowered his mom to the ground on the other side he was afraid thatiust dropping her might split the plastic bags open and leave him with another mess to clean up-and then climbed it himself