Terrified (3 page)

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Authors: Kevin O'Brien

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Terrified
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She saw the three nickel-size scars along her left rib cage. She quickly shed her bra and donned the blue smock to cover herself—and the scars. Then she wiggled out of her panties.
The nurse took her blood pressure, and announced it was normal. That was a surprise to Megan—considering how sick and anxious she felt.
“I’ll get Dr. Amato in here,” the nurse said. “You give me a yell if you start to feel queasy again. My name’s Loretta.”
“Thank you, Loretta,” she said, lying down on the table. There was a slight incline at one end of the table, so her head was propped up. She could see the mirror above the sink. It reflected her clothes hanging from a row of hooks on the wall behind her. She stared at her purse among the clothing—and the folded-up newspaper sticking out of it.
She thought about the victim of the Garbage Bag Killer—and that section of torso they’d found with the burn marks on the side.
She felt another wave of nausea, and put a hand over her stomach.
Lying there on the table, she waited for the doctor. The woman who had signed her name
Megan Anne Keeslar
on the medical form stared down at the pale blue smock she was wearing. She didn’t want to be pregnant—she couldn’t be.
Yet she wondered if the pale blue meant it would be a baby boy.
C
HAPTER
T
HREE
Seattle—July 14, 1997
 
“
P
lease, stop,” she whispered. Megan had tears in her tired, bloodshot eyes. “Please, God, make him stop… .”
But Josh kept crying and crying. Megan held him tight, rocked him, and walked the floor with her nine-week-old, colicky son. It was late: 11:44, according to the digital clock on her VCR. The Monorail had stopped running for the night.
Dressed in a T-shirt and drawstring plaid pajama shorts, she had the fan blowing on her as she paced barefoot back and forth in her small living room. She was exhausted. Her arms ached from holding him and bouncing him. This cry-fest was a nightly ordeal now. Around midnight, Josh always woke up, screeching at the top of his little lungs. And he wasn’t hungry at all, just cranky. Megan did everything her pediatrician and the books told her to do. But nothing seemed to work. She couldn’t tell if he preferred the lights on or off—or maybe it was just that one light in the corner of the room he wanted on. Did the sound of the TV soothe him or upset him? She still didn’t know. One night, her rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” had seemed to quiet him down, but then he’d stayed awake and attentive long after she’d run out of farm animals:
“Old MacDonald had an iguana, e-i-e-i-oh …”
The following night, serenading him with the same song had caused him to scream bloody murder. All the crying made him spit up a lot. Megan knew she smelled like baby puke half the time.
The books said if she reached her wit’s end, she should just leave the baby in his crib and let him cry—until she felt better. But how could she feel better while he was screaming like that? And she had her neighbors to think about, too. They hated her. Moving into this building, she’d made it her goal to remain anonymous. Well, not anymore. Thanks to Josh and his nightly scream-a-thons, everyone loathed the woman in 4-E.
She’d gotten used to doing things with one hand while holding him. She set the fan on high, hoping the white noise would soothe him. Then she grabbed his yellow blankie with the cartoon giraffes on it, and covered him. Plopping down on her Ikea sofa, Megan rocked the screaming, squirming, and sweating little bundle in her arms, and prayed. “Please, God, make him stop. Please …”
She should have gotten her money back on the home pregnancy test she’d taken ten months ago, the one that had come up negative. Her premonition about the blue smock in Dr. Amato’s office had been far more accurate. Indeed, she’d been with child, a boy—so she’d learned during the third ultrasound.
At first, she’d dreaded the notion she might be pregnant. But once Megan realized she had new life growing inside her, everything changed. Suddenly, she didn’t feel so all alone in her crummy one-bedroom apartment by the Monorail. She had someone else to care about—a reason for starting all over again.
Even with a husband, a beautiful, big house, and all their friends on Chicago’s North Shore, Mrs. Glenn Swann had felt a lot lonelier and aimless most of the time. She’d been far worse off.
Mrs. Swann’s photo made page three of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
on November 16, 1996—two days after Megan’s first visit to Dr. Amato. The photograph ran alongside a report about the Chicago-area Garbage Bag Murder case. Everyone was certain Glenn Swan had murdered his wife.
The story ran on the national TV news that night, and they showed the same photo of the late Mrs. Swann. With a hand over her mouth, Megan watched the broadcast. She automatically glanced out her window to see TV lights flickering in the windows of the apartment buildings across the street. She wondered if those people were watching the same thing.
For the next few days, Megan was afraid to set foot outside her apartment. She imagined Dr. Amato or his nurse or the receptionist seeing that photo in the Seattle paper. She thought of her neighbors in the building and people at Vine Street Gourmet who might think the dead Mrs. Glenn Swann looked terribly familiar. Every time she heard the elevator door open down the hall from her apartment, she thought it might be the police coming to get her. Every time the phone rang, her heart seemed to stop.
Megan figured it was the type of story people would be talking about for quite some time: a prominent surgeon accused of murdering the wife he’d been abusing for over a year; her fake suicide scene on a high bridge over the Mississippi; the doctor reporting her missing when it seemed obvious he’d chopped her up, then left her body parts in garbage bags at various locations along Chicago’s North Shore. Megan had thought she would have to become a total recluse for months.
Yet as sensational as the story was, Seattleites had had enough of the ongoing O. J. Simpson civil trial not to care about a somewhat similar, lower-profile case in the Chicago area. While each new development of the Garbage Bag Murder case was covered in the
Chicago Tribune
, which Megan still bought at the Pike Place Market newsstand, there wasn’t much in the Seattle newspapers about it again.
They never did find Mrs. Glenn Swann’s head. And of course, they never would.
If she’d been conflicted over letting Dr. Glenn Swann go to jail for his wife’s murder, Megan found the baby only strengthened her resolve to do nothing. After all, was there really much difference between wifebeaters and child abusers? She would have been a fool to expose a little boy to someone capable of so much violence. Glenn was rich, and his lawyer could probably get him visitation rights—maybe even full custody. She couldn’t let that happen. It wasn’t just herself she was trying to protect anymore.
Dr. Swann was currently serving his third month of a life sentence at the Illinois Stateville Prison. He still insisted that he hadn’t killed his wife. Megan knew it was the truth. What she didn’t know was the real identity of the woman they’d assumed was Lisa Densmore Swann. The victim in the Garbage Bag Murder obviously had the same blood type as Mrs. Swann, the same complexion, and the same burn marks on her left rib cage.
Megan couldn’t help wondering if Dr. Swann had
branded
one of his girlfriends the same way he’d burned his sad, sorry wife. Maybe he’d used one of his big, smelly Cuban cigars on that poor creature, too. And there was every possibility he’d murdered that anonymous woman.
Not a week went by without Megan having to rationalize to herself why she’d left Glenn Swann to rot in prison. Her son, Josh, was still the best reason. She tried to imagine how the cruel and quick-to-anger Dr. Swann would have been around a perpetually crying, colicky baby. He wouldn’t have stood for it.
“C’mon, sweetie,” she whispered, rocking him. “Please, Mama needs a break… .”
He cried and kicked so hard, he was turning crimson.
Megan tried singing to him: “This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb, with a …” Or was it drum? Why would he play knick-knack on someone’s thumb? It didn’t make any sense. But she kept singing anyway, because the pauses Josh took between his screams became longer and longer.
That’s it, that’s it, honey
, she thought.
The phone rang, startling her. Josh let out a loud wail. “Oh, shit,” she muttered, glancing at the VCR clock: 12:09
AM
. It was probably a neighbor. Staring at the phone and the answering machine across the room, she bounced Josh in her arms and prayed they’d hang up. The answering machine clicked on.
“This is 4-D,” the woman announced. “I know you’re there, because I can hear your baby crying. In fact, I’ve heard your baby crying every goddamn night for the last I-don’t-know-how-many-nights. I’m not sure what kind of mother you are, but …”
With a sigh, Megan snatched up the phone. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I almost had him quieted down. He’s colicky. He—”
“I’m trying to sleep for chrissakes,” the woman interrupted. “If you can’t shut that baby up, I’m calling the police—or child protective services. I mean it. This is ridiculous. It’s negligent. I’m so sick of listening to that noise. There must be some sort of law. I’m calling the police if this keeps up.”
“I’m sorry!” Megan snapped. Her hand holding the receiver was shaking. Josh was crying in her other ear. “I’m doing everything I can—”
“You know, when I get up for work in five and a half hours,” the woman cut in, “and you’re asleep, I’m going to start pounding on your wall and see how you like it.”
Megan heard a click on the other end.
Josh was still crying.
She started crying, too. Weary and defeated, she sat down on the sofa again, placed Josh on his belly across her lap, and rubbed his back. She’d had some success with this position in the past—until about a week ago when it had only made him crankier. She tried humming to him, but kept choking on her tears.
Was the woman in 4-D really ready to call the police on her? Megan had been in Seattle for almost a year now, and she still felt like a fugitive. The rare occasions she spotted a police car stopped in front of her building were always cause for panic—until she knew for sure the police hadn’t come for her. The idea of them knocking on her door absolutely terrified her.
To her utter relief, Josh began to quiet down. She kept rubbing his back and humming.
She thought about the woman in 4-D. The bitch was probably the same one who had thrown up in the elevator a while back. Megan had heard her stumbling home drunk several times—slurring into her cell phone, making all sorts of racket. But did she ever threaten to call the police on 4-D?
Would it have killed the woman to be a little patient, a little neighborly?
Megan realized trying to remain anonymous in that building no longer worked to her advantage. In fact, she’d tried so hard to become unrecognizable and unnoticeable, she no longer saw herself when she looked in the mirror. She hadn’t yet come down to her pre-pregnancy weight. She had once been an expert at camouflaging bruises and black eyes, but now she didn’t have the time or energy to do anything about the dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep or the brownish roots to her shoulder-length blond hair. She didn’t know that woman in the mirror—any more than her neighbors did.
She figured the best way to deal with Miss 4-D was to take the high road. The next morning, Megan strapped Josh in the baby harness and they walked over to Vine Street Gourmet, where she bought a $16.99 bottle of merlot. She left it by 4-D with a note:
Hi, Neighbor,
I’m so sorry my baby’s crying kept you awake last night. Please believe me. I’m doing my best to quiet him down whenever he gets cranky. But he has colic & that can’t be helped. I don’t like it when he cries either. In fact, it breaks my heart to see him so miserable. Anyway, I hope you’ll accept this bottle of wine as an apology for the noise.
 
Thanks very much,
Your Neighbor, Megan Keeslar (Josh’s Mom)
Megan told herself that people were far more patient with noise levels when they knew and liked their neighbors. So maybe Miss 4-D would cut her some slack after the friendly, apologetic note and consolation prize. Hell, maybe she and 4-D would even end up friends. She fantasized about a transformed warm and friendly Miss 4-D volunteering to babysit a couple of hours a week:
“Why don’t you grab a nap or go for a walk, Megan? You need a break. I’ll look after him… .”
But 4-D never contacted her to say she’d collected the apology gift. Megan knew she’d gotten it, because she’d heard her in the hallway, talking on her cell phone and remarking, “Oh, someone left me something… .” Then she’d heard the door shut. And nothing after that, no follow-up.
At least the bitch didn’t call the cops the next time Josh cried.
Still, there was always that apprehension it might happen, the tentative feeling that the police might come banging on her door at any minute. The smartest thing she could do was not get too close to anyone.
It was just her and her baby boy. There was no one to call when she worried about him—or when he did something amazing. Megan took scores of photos of him, but couldn’t share them with anyone. For all intents and purposes, Josh had no grandparents, or aunts or uncles. She was the only family he had.
She couldn’t get past the feeling that one day soon, he would be taken away from her. Megan told herself that was probably a fear all parents carried inside them. But she couldn’t dismiss her premonition.
After all, ten months ago, she’d been right about that baby-blue smock in the doctor’s office.

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