This was her mother.
Jenny cried out several things but had no idea what she was saying. She was simply reacting to the vulnerable sight of her mother who was now starting to fall facedown upon the hardwood floor at the top of the stairs.
Jenny lurched forward, getting her arms under her mother before the woman reached the floor. She held her with great tenderness, getting her under the arms so she could half-lift her and get her into the nearest bedroom.
Molly was sobbing and babbling. She was clearly in clinical shock. There was a guest room with two single beds. In the moonlight, the white chenille spreads seemed to glow. She stretched her mother out on the bed. The white chenille became instantly red.
"Who did this?" Jenny kept asking uselessly, over and over.
She hurried to the closet and got a heavy blanket and covered her mother with it. Then she knelt next to her, checking her mother's wrist pulse, taking the blanket edge and wiping sweat and blood from her face.
It took her a few minutes but she was finally able to calm her mother. Beneath the blanket, Molly curled in upon herself fetus-style. She seemed oblivious to her knife wounds. Her eyes were as haunted as Ted's had been in death. Her teeth made clicking sounds as they grated upon each other.
"Oh, Mom, Mom," Jenny said, brushing sweat from her mother's forehead with her hand. She kissed her mother's cheek, terrified at the notion that Molly was slipping into death.
Then he was there in the doorway. She heard him before she saw him.
"Dad!" she cried, looking up.
But this man with the bloody butcher knife and the blood-dripping hands and the bloodstained white shirt was an imposter. Her father could never look like this-especially not with the fierce, crazed, protuberant eyes and the blood-spattered forehead and cheeks.
"I'm afraid I'm not your dad," he said with eerie calmness from the guest room doorway. "That was an honor that belonged to Ted Hannigan. They deceived me just as much as they deceived you."
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
They'd been embracing.
They were still in each other's arms when Gretchen came through the door she'd just kicked in. The weird thing was, at least for Gretchen, neither Priscilla nor Quinlan showed any fear at the sight of her
or
her .45.
All they showed was irritation. Like parents really annoyed that their child had come back down the stairs after being put to bed.
"You couldn't even be faithful for a
night
, could you?" Gretchen said, looking sorrowfully at Quinlan.
He wore a banded-collar blue shirt, chinos, and white Nikes. He always looked handsome in casual clothes and he looked so handsome at this moment that Gretchen profoundly resented his looks. It wasn't fair he should look so good; it made not loving him all the more impossible.
As for Priscilla… She was at last beginning to show the proper respectful attitude-fear. "Gretchen, you really shouldn't be carrying that thing around. You don't want it to go off, do you?"
Gretchen smiled bitterly. "You should be wearing your white uniform before you sound like that."
Priscilla looked confused-and frightened.
"That's how you all sound," Gretchen said, "all you 'mental health professionals' when you're talking to crazy people like me. Like I don't know what this is or something, Priscilla? Like I'm so crazy, it might go off all by itself. Well, I've got some fucking news for you, bitch. It'll never go off accidentally because that'd spoil all my fun. And that's all I can get from this touching little scene here, Priscilla-fun. Seeing two of my favorite 'mental health professionals' bite the big one."
"Do something, Quinlan," Priscilla said. "Talk to her."
Quinlan still didn't look scared. He looked irritated, maybe even a little bored, but not scared. "She loves melodrama, our little Gretchen. So she's staging a psychodrama for us. What is this, Gretchen, the fifth or sixth time you've pulled a gun on me?"
"I'm not kidding this time, Quinlan," Gretchen said angrily.
"I believe that's what you said the last three or four times," Quinlan said. "Now be a good girl and put the gun down on the table over here and get your ass back to your room. We can get together in the morning and discuss whatever needs to be discussed. But for right now, Priscilla and I have some business to discuss." He smiled. "Grown-up stuff, Gretchen."
"I'm not going anywhere," Gretchen said, "and neither are you."
Priscilla was showing signs of panic. This was wonderful for Gretchen to see. She'd been seeing shrinks since she was eight years old but she'd never seen one give in to panic. But she had the feeling she was about to.
Quinlan walked over to her. Put his hand out. Turned his hand palm up. "Why don't you give me the gun so Priscilla can relax a little?"
"Why don't you give her one of your famous injections?" Gretchen said. "The kind you gave poor Jenny Stafford."
"What does she know about Jenny Stafford?" Priscilla said, anxiety growing constantly in her voice and expression.
"She found some tapes," Quinlan said, not willing to admit that Gretchen had been instrumental in Jenny's escape.
"What kind of tapes?" Priscilla snapped.
Quinlan frowned. "Priscilla, will you just please calm down? She found some tapes and I took them back from her. Nothing more to it than that."
"Kiss her," Gretchen said to Quinlan.
"Just give me the gun," Quinlan said, putting his hand out again.
"Kiss her," Gretchen said. "Just the way you were when I broke in here. You would've ended up fucking her over there on the bed. And that's what I want you to do now. I want you to kiss her and then I want you to fuck her. Put on a little show for me."
Quinlan got another panic-tight glance from Priscilla.
"I always knew you were a voyeur, Gretchen," Quinlan said calmly. "It was just a matter of time till it came out."
Gretchen stepped over to Priscilla and put the gun against her temple. "Take him in your arms, Priscilla. Right now."
"I really don't want to do this," Priscilla said, trying to summon at least a modicum of self-respect.
"I really don't care," Gretchen said. "You're going to do it anyway."
Priscilla sighed. Anger was winning out over fear. She put her arms out. Quinlan looked more irritated than ever. But he came over and slid into her embrace.
"Now kiss her, Quinlan."
"I'm really getting sick of this bullshit," Quinlan said.
"Kiss her."
He kissed her.
"More passion," Gretchen said.
They put more passion into it.
"Now start taking her clothes off."
"No," Priscilla said. "No, I won't do this. I refuse to."
Gretchen put the gun to her head again. "Then I'll kill you."
Quinlan nodded for her to comply. He was starting to | show some concern himself. He no longer looked quite so complacent.
Priscilla took off her Armani jacket.
"Now the skirt."
She slipped off her skirt. She stood in a wine-red bra and very skimpy matching panties. She had a very nice body.
"Now take the rest of her clothes off, Quinlan."
"Are you just going to stand there?" Priscilla said to Quinlan. "Talk to her."
Gretchen said, "He's getting scared, Priscilla. He doesn't know what to say to me. He's starting to sense that this is different from the other times. He's thinking that maybe I really | will kill him this time-and you know what? Maybe I will. Maybe I really will."
***
Coffey had known a couple of cabbies who'd souped their engines up. He'd always thought that was a pretty useless idea. Hit the kind of speeds those cabbies did, you'd inevitably lose your driver's license.
He was wishing now that he had a souped-up cab. He was moving so slowly on the freeway. Every few minutes, he'd punch in the same number on his cell phone-Jenny's parents. He needed to warn Jenny about her father. But he always got the same response from the operator. The phone was out of order. All kinds of terrible images played at the edges of his mind, the worst being those involving her father. Or her
presumptive
father, as the lawyers liked to say. On one of the tapes that showed Quinlan and Priscilla using both drugs and hypnotherapy, Tom Stafford had also put in an appearance. He was the man paying for all this.
He wished again that he had one of those exotic, souped-up cabs, one of those cars that would leave a half-block of rubber when it peeled out.
Unfortunately, he had to contend with a nice, dependable, drag-ass car that rarely went more than seventy miles per hour.
He frantically punched in Jenny's phone number again.
***
"Leave her alone, Jenny. I want her to die." Tom Stafford spoke very quietly.
Her father-or the man she'd always
assumed
was her father-came into the guest room not with great rage or drama but with a kind of weariness, a kind of sadness.
He came over, stood by the bed. In the moonlight, the blood that covered his body in splashes and smears and spatters gleamed wetly. The gleaming butcher knife remained in his right hand, though it seemed to dangle there, forgotten.
She looked up at him from where she knelt next to her mother. "I wish I could feel sorry for you but I can't. You've killed Ted and tried to kill my mother."
"She deceived me," he said, the sorrow and exhaustion still evident in his voice. "Our entire life was a lie."
"She shouldn't have done that," Jenny said softly. "But you shouldn't have done this either." Jenny looked at her mother, at the faint rise and fall of her chest. Her breathing was slowing all the time. Death wasn't far away.
"Oh, Mom," Jenny said. And then leaned forward and kissed her again on the forehead. And took one of her hands and held it gently. Why would her Mom hide such a secret all her life? Why hadn't she been honest with Tom?
She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she momentarily forgot about Tom behind her…
She was stroking her mother's cheek with the back of her hand when her mother's eyes opened suddenly, and she looked up at a point directly above and behind Jenny…
And screamed.
Jenny looked up just in time to see Tom bringing the bloody butcher knife straight down to plunge it into her neck…
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
"Take her bra off, Quinlan."
"This has gone far enough, Gretchen. It really has."
Gretchen smiled. "You're scared now, aren't you?"
She went over to him, pushed the gun in his face, "admit it, you're scared."
"This isn't a pleasant experience for any of us," Quinlan said.
Gretchen smirked. "I love it when you get stuffy, Quinlan. It turns me on." She looked at Priscilla, who stood there in her wine-red bra and skimpy panties.
Gretchen had never seen Quinlan acting shy before and, she had to admit, there was something pretty sweet about it.
"Take her clothes off, Quinlan."
"Don't do it, Quinlan," Priscilla said. "Give in to her once, and she'll just want more."
"Sort of like you and Quinlan here?" Gretchen said. "Wanting more all the time?" She turned back to Quinlan. Her voice softened; tears trembled in her voice. "All I ever wanted was for him to love me. And to be faithful. My father wasn't faithful to my mother, none of my boyfriends were ever faithful to
me
-I just wanted Quinlan to be different. And I thought he'd understand that. You know, because he had all this superior wisdom and superior insight." She put the gun to Quinlan's temple. "But you're just another con artist, aren't you, Quinlan?"
"Please put the gun down," he said quietly.
She smiled. "Can you see him start to sweat, Priscilla? See up here? On the forehead? He's really starting to get scared now. And it's embarrassing. Because he's a total control freak, aren't you, sweetie?"
"This isn't helping anybody, Gretchen," Quinlan said, still speaking quietly. "Now please put the gun down, and I'll send Priscilla away and we'll talk."
"Send Priscilla away?" Gretchen said. "Before you've serviced her? I'll bet Priscilla wouldn't appreciate that, now, would she?"
"Please, just let me go," Priscilla said. "Then you and Quinlan can resolve your differences. Please."
But Gretchen still wanted to have some fun. "Now, how can you stand there, Quinlan, and not want to put your hands all over her? This is a very, very nice body here. Prime meat, as one of the boys in the psychiatric hospital used to call it. And he should know-he used to cut up women with knives. And I'll bet he'd love to get you alone, Priscilla, a body like this." She looked back at Quinlan. "So c'mon. Get these clothes off her and take her over there and service her. Because if you don't, you're going to start pissing me off. And I don't think you want to do that, Quinlan. I really don't."
But Quinlan didn't make a move or say anything. He just stood there, looking depleted. All his powers to dominate situations had left him. He looked weak and confused.
"Please," Priscilla said again. But to whom was she speaking? She didn't seem to know. She was just mouthing a word. Please and thank you. Weren't those the
magic
words?
"Well, boy," Gretchen said, "you're really letting me down, you know that? A beautiful woman standing here without many clothes on-and you're too shy to do anything about it. You're starting to slip, Quinlan. You really are. But luckily, I'm here to help you."