The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted: A Psychological Thriller (2 page)

“Yeah.” She fell silent for a moment and pushed her hair behind one ear. It was a nervous habit she’d had since childhood. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“No. It’s okay. I’m fine with it. Really.”

She offered a thin smile.

“Can I ask you something, though? Was I the only one who thought she was evil?”

An unsettled expression crossed Tracy’s face, and then she turned her head away, shaking it. “Everyone thought she was kind of crazy, I guess. The ones who wanted to see it.”

“Did you?”

“Want to see it?”

“Did you know?”

She turned back toward me, but this time her expression was easy to read. “I should have done something that day, Patrick. I should have stayed and listened.”

That day.
My stomach twisted into a knot. I struggled against my thoughts, pushed the words out slowly,
“But you had no way of knowing...”

“I knew,” she said, nodding, and then softer, “I knew. I was just…afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Of the other kids. Of her. Of…everything, I guess.” She looked down, hair behind the ear again. “I just left you there. Alone. It was all my fault.”

I lost Tracy’s voice and quite possibly my mind. The knot pulled tighter in my gut, and suddenly everything came rushing back to me. I was there again, living the nightmare. White light. White noise.

“Patrick?”

I snapped back to the present, stared at her with what I knew was a dazed expression. The lump in my throat made it damned near impossible to speak, my voice coming out gritty and tight. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah…look, I’d better go back upstairs.”

“Patrick…”

“Fine, really.” I attempted a smile, then pushed past her. Headed up the staircase, quickly, and straight for the bathroom.

I locked the door behind me. My back against the wall, eyes closed, I took in a long steadying breath. A thousand thoughts rushed through my head. A thousand memories.

Then I pulled the pad from my pocket, and with shaky hands, wrote the word
vicious
fifty times.

Chapter Two

In
The Count of Monte Cristo
, Alexandre Dumas wrote that houses have souls and faces like men, and their exteriors carry the imprint of their characters. To me, our house always looked dark and ominous, a shadowy projection of the horrors inside its silent, secretive walls. As a kid, I remember staring out through those dreary windows and wondering whether the world outside was as awful as the one within. Bad memories lived there. Horrible ones.

I decided to take Warren’s advice and go back anyway—not for sentiment, as he’d suggested, but to rid myself of those memories. I needed to go through the place, chase away my ghosts, and then walk out that front door one last time.

But going in
was another story.

I stood in the doorway and felt my nerves jangle with slow-burning apprehension. Bad vibes seemed to rock this place from its foundation. I stepped in, stopped, then looked around.

She’d done most of her dying here before moving on to Hospice, but as I walked in, I could still feel a sense of approaching death hanging heavy in the air. Stillness, but not the kind that lent itself to peace or tranquility—no, this was something different, a life waiting to end and a peculiar numbness that seemed to resonate throughout.

The kind that gnaws at your insides.

Warren had obviously hired a cleaning crew to wipe away the postmortem effects, everything in its place, not a speck of dirt anywhere. An oxygen tank covered in plastic stood in one corner; in another, an empty trash container sat on the counter. I gazed at the bed: neatly made.
A sanitized version of hell
, I thought, then moved on.

I peered into my former bedroom and shook my head. She’d wasted little time converting it into her sewing room once I’d left for college.

“I put your things in the garage,” she’d said matter-of-factly at Thanksgiving break. “Take what you want. The rest goes to Goodwill.”

Great to see you, son.

Moving on to the living room, I gave it a quick scan and then a drawn-out sigh; nothing ever seemed to change here. Those tattered drapes. The outdated television. I thought about that damned music box, and a sharp pang of anger flickered, then fizzled. The thing meant more to her than I did.

As filthy-rich as my uncle was, I never understood why my mother insisted we live in such lower-middle class squalor. Was it to elicit sympathy? Because she never thought she deserved better? Warren offered repeatedly to get us out of here.

“Camilla,” he’d plead, “let me help you. You don’t have to live this way.”

“Don’t need any charity,” she’d say in her typically dismissive tone. “I can manage on my own.”

So we existed on a meager income, inside a two-bedroom box, and in a part of town that people kindly referred to as “undesirable.” Our threadbare, second-hand furniture had the smell of other people’s lives—ones I was sure had been much better than mine—and I wore clothes to school that had outlived their usefulness on someone else’s back before landing on mine.

“You don’t need fancy new clothes,” she’d tell me in her singsong voice. “What you have is just fine.”

God, I hated that woman.

Warren did his best to help, gifting me with what she wouldn’t provide, but I always sensed it was more because he felt sorry for me than anything else. He never really succeeded in being the stand-in male figure in my life, seemed he always radiated more pity than love. I knew the difference—most kids do—so I grew up resenting his misplaced, half-hearted attempts.

And I resented even more that he could have put an end to my mother’s abuse, but didn’t. Instead, he chose to look the other way, always immersed in his political career, running here, running there to God-knows-where.

My real dad died when I was barely a year old, and I only knew three things about him. His name was Richard, he had a bad heart—which eventually killed him—and he worked in the textile business. As a kid, it took me a while to figure out what that actually meant. For the longest time I thought he remodeled bathrooms.

Oh, make that four things. He left my mother with the burden of raising me alone, as she reminded me constantly.

When I turned eighteen, I put as much distance between her and me as I could. Warren offered to foot the bill for college, and I ran with it, seeing it as my one-way ticket out of hell. I moved as far away as I could. Odd, though, how distance doesn’t always separate us from the bad memories and associations as much as we’d like. Even now that she was dead, her effects still lingered.

I opened the basement door and turned on the light—or tried. A naked yellow bulb dangling from the ceiling flickered a few times before going dark. I flipped the switch up and down, hoping to give it life, but with no luck: blown.

Found an old flashlight in the kitchen junk drawer, but true to form, she’d let the batteries die. It seemed as if nothing here was meant to survive.

The clock radio on the kitchen windowsill stole my attention, and I froze. Bad memories, everywhere. I couldn’t believe she still had the damned thing. I reached for it, pulled the batteries out, then slammed it into the sink. Felt a note of satisfaction hearing it crack.

Got the flashlight working and headed for the basement steps.

It looked as if nobody had been here in years. Old sewing equipment hugged one wall: an antiquated machine, three tailor’s dummies, and enough spools of thread to mend a small nation. Her sewing hobby never really got off the ground, despite all the supplies she’d picked up at garage sales. The floor was strewn with boxes covered in dust, cobwebs stretched between them, some labeled with marker, some not at all.

I pulled the lids up on a few but found nothing other than a whole lot of junk inside. Dozens of dusty, colored bottles in one; another was filled to the brim with packages of crackers, expiration date: October, 1983.

What on earth was she planning on doing with them?

Finding anything useful here was an exercise in futility. But then as I headed back toward the steps, the flashlight beam connected with an open box, and I could see an old book that looked vaguely familiar. I pulled it out.
Gulliver’s Travels,
one of my favorites. Curiosity got the best of me, so I examined the rest of the contents. More books from high school, a jumble of papers, and small objects that I couldn’t see clearly in the dim light. I tucked the box under my arm, then headed upstairs.

As I reached the top of the steps, Warren moved into the doorway. I jumped. He stood, staring at me.

“Scared the hell out of me,” I said, feeling my heart thump a few beats ahead.

“Find anything?” he asked, eyeing the box under my arm.

I felt an odd twinge of defensiveness. “Just some old books.”

He nodded slowly as if measuring my words. I broke eye contact by glancing down at the box I was holding, keeping my attention on it as I spoke. “Not much down there except a whole lot of clutter, really.”

“Quite a pack rat, your mother was. She never liked to throw anything away. It drove me crazy when we were kids. I think she got it from our mother. She was like that too, you know.”

Small talk. I offered a dim smile.

“You know,” he continued, staring off into the kitchen, his voice tempered with cautious diplomacy, “I was just thinking I could drive you to the airport if you’d like. Maybe get a bite to eat or something on the way.”

“Appreciate it,” I said, glancing at my watch, “but I don’t have much time. My flight leaves in an hour-and-a-half, and I’ve got a rental car to return.”

He mouthed—but did not say—
oh,
while nodding, as if suddenly getting the point. “No worries, then,” he said, a little too brightly. “I just thought maybe—”

“Some other time,” I answered back quickly, realizing I was squeezing the box tightly against my thigh. I caught myself eyeing the door, the one I wanted to walk out of for the last time, the one Warren was now blocking.

He stared at the floor and pursed his lips. I knew the move all too well—a mannerism he’d perfected throughout his political career, one he often used to give the impression he was thinking things over. “There’s this matter of the house,” he finally said. “I’m putting it up for sale. I’d like you to have the proceeds.”

I shook my head quickly. “That won’t be necessary, Warren, I—”

“No, really,” he interrupted, “I’d like for you to have the money.”

“No,
really
,” I said, feeling my anger swell. “I
really
don’t want it. Give the money to charity. It’ll be the one good deed that ever came out of her.”

He looked at the floor again, pushed out a heavy sigh. “You know, Patrick…”

You know, Patrick
always meant trouble coming.

“I realize you and your mother didn’t always see eye to eye.”

“Never,” I replied.

“What?”

“I said, never. We never did.”

“But she was my sister, and she’s dead now,” he said, his tone climbing the ladder of edginess, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d try and show some respect for her when you’re around me.”

“
Respect?”
That was it. I’d had enough. Enough of Warren, enough of her and this house, enough of everything. All I wanted now, was out. “You see, here’s the thing, Warren: you have to give respect to get it, and
she
never gave one ounce of it. Not one.”

“But she was your mother.”

“Barely,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.” I pushed past him and headed for the door.

“Patrick!” he shouted. “Don’t
leave this way. I don’t want bad feelings.”

“You’re about thirty years too late for that, Warren.” As I jerked the door open, the box slipped from under my arm to the floor, and everything inside scattered. I got down on my hands and knees, started hastily shoving items back inside.

Warren hurried over. “Let me help you with that.”

“I don’t need your help!” I said. “I don’t need it at all! You’ve done enough!”

He knelt beside me anyway, and we both grabbed for
Gulliver’s Travels
at the same time. I gritted my teeth and yanked the book away with force, startling him. He held my gaze for a moment in total silence.