Game (19 page)

“From the outside, he seemed normal,” she went on. “He
would tease me and bug me. I was his older sister. That’s normal. He messed with my Barbie dolls….” She shivered suddenly, chilled by the memory. “I mean, I’ve heard… I’ve been told that a lot of boys do that to their sisters’ dolls. But there was something…. It wasn’t just cutting off their hair or drawing on them. He used to… he used to cut the, y’know, the breasts off….”

“Like he did later,” Jazz whispered in awe. “As Green Jack.”

Samantha shuddered. “Green Jack. Oh, God. That’s what he called himself sometimes. I remember he was just a kid and there were days when he would say, ‘I’m not here anymore. It’s just Green Jack now.’ Mom and Dad didn’t notice or didn’t care, but it always freaked me out. I used to think that’s why he did it—just to freak me out. And when he got arrested, a part of me was like… was like, ‘He did all of this just to freak me out.’ Which is crazy, isn’t it?”

Jazz considered himself an expert on crazy. As best he could tell, Aunt Samantha didn’t come close.

“If only I’d seen a newspaper or read a website from back east, when he was calling himself Green Jack. Maybe he would have been caught earlier….” She struggled to regain her composure.

“Aunt Samantha…” he cautioned. He sensed—knew—that they were headed into dark territory, down into the memory mines, where the ore was densest and the danger greatest.

But he couldn’t stop her. Not now. She went on. “One night I woke up and he was standing there, in my bedroom.
In the dark. I was fourteen, so he must have been eleven. Maybe ten. I don’t remember when it was in the year. But he was just standing there. Naked. Staring at me.”

“Did he—”

“No. No, he never touched me. And I was never afraid of that, if you want to know the truth. Somehow I knew I was safe. I think… I think because I was related to him, I was somehow off the list. Back then, at least. Now, who knows? Maybe he’s changed.”

Could he have changed? Jazz thought it possible. But change wasn’t always for the better.

Just then, they heard a light thump from upstairs. Aunt Samantha jerked as though awakened gratefully from a nightmare, and the kitchen somehow became brighter than the sunlight through the window should have allowed.

“She’s early,” Samantha said brusquely, and rose, setting her coffee cup in the sink. “I’ll help her get started. Maybe you can get breakfast going?”

“Sure. Hey, Aunt Samantha?”

She paused in the doorway. “Yeah?”

“I changed my mind. You can call me Jazz.”

Connie sat on her bed in a lotus position, legs folded over each other, her wrists resting lightly on her knees, eyes closed. There was a single yoga studio in Lobo’s Nod, and Connie didn’t like the woman who led classes there, so after three she’d bailed. Ginny Davis—poor, dead Ginny—had lent Connie a set of yoga DVDs that looked like they’d come from the ancient 1990s. Then again, yoga was an ancient practice, so maybe that was appropriate.

At any rate, she’d learned a lot from those DVDs, techniques she’d used over the past year to relax herself, especially before a performance. But right now, she was having trouble centering herself. She couldn’t get those deep, cleansing yoga breaths she craved.

Images of Jazz flashed through what was supposed to be a clear and passive mind. Jazz in the hotel room. Next to her in bed. On the floor. Jazz at the airport, with her father…

It was no good. She couldn’t relax. She blew out a frustrated breath and opened her eyes.

“Whiz!” she yelped. She must have been more relaxed than she’d imagined. Or at least more distracted—her younger brother had managed to sneak into her room without her hearing the door open.

“You are in
so
much trouble!” Whiz said, with something like awe in his voice. He wasn’t even taking delight in his older sister’s travails. He was just impressed at the sheer level of trouble, like a man reaching a mountaintop only to see a taller peak in the near distance. “I didn’t think you could
get
in this much trouble!”

“I know,” Connie said, pretending not to care. She couldn’t keep up the pretense for long. “Uh, exactly what have you heard? What did they say while I was gone?”

Whiz scampered over to her bed and plopped down next to her. “Dad was cussing.”

Ouch. Never a good sign. As if Connie needed to know, Whiz proceeded to reel off the exact words Dad had used. Connie blinked. She hadn’t even known Whiz knew some of those words.

“What about Mom?”

“She cried. Not much. Just a little.”

Connie deflated. Her father’s anger was one thing. Bringing her mother to tears was another. She didn’t know why, but those tears touched her more deeply than her father’s anger ever could. In a way, she was glad her parents didn’t know this. Such knowledge would make controlling her
almost trivially easy:
Don’t do X, Y, or Z, Connie—you’ll make your mother cry.

“Was it worth it?” Whiz wanted to know. “You’re gonna be grounded until, like, you’re eighty years old.”

“They can’t ground me that long,” Connie said.

“But was it worth it? You know”—and here Whiz looked around as if under surveillance and dropped his voice to a near whisper—“S-E-X?”

As much as she wanted to drop-kick Whiz into a garbage chute most days, Connie had to admit she loved the little snot monster, who was simultaneously too grown-up and too childlike. After busting out a plethora of Dad’s four-letter words, he still felt the need to spell out
sex
.

“We didn’t have S-E-X,” she informed him. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Well, that’s good. ’Cause Mom was really worried about that.”

“Dad wasn’t?”

“Dad was…” Whiz hesitated. “Never mind.”

“Come on. Tell me.”

Whiz shook his head defiantly.

“God, it’s more of his black/white crap, isn’t it? It’s not the nineteen-sixties. It’s not like when his parents were growing up or even when
he
was growing up. It’s—”

“That’s not it,” Whiz said quietly.

“What’s not it?”

“The black-and-white thing. The racial stuff.”

Connie stared at her kid brother, searching his expression
for signs of one of his pranks or tricks. But he was utterly solemn, totally serious.

“What do you mean? Ever since I started dating Jazz, it’s been ‘white men this’ and ‘black women that,’ and ‘Sally Hemmings’ and—”

Whiz shook his head. “He doesn’t care. He said, ‘She can date a whole platoon of white boys, just not that one.’ ”

Connie set her jaw. She knew what was coming next. “How do you know this?”

Whiz rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Connie. I listen to them at night through the air-conditioning vents. Don’t you?”

Actually… no.

“It’s the serial-killer thing.”

Well, of course it was the serial-killer thing. Her father didn’t trust Jazz. So typical. No matter how much Jazz had proven himself—

“And,” Whiz went on, “he told Mom that the idea of you getting hurt scares him so much that he can’t even talk to you about it. And all the race stuff is just the only way he can think of to keep you guys apart without thinking about you…”

Without thinking of me raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered by my own boyfriend. Ah, crap.
She couldn’t find it in her heart to stay angry at her dad. Not anymore.

“Jesus, Whiz. Talking to you is better than yoga sometimes.”

“Don’t take—”

“—the Lord’s name in vain. I know. Sorry.”

“It isn’t gonna happen, is it?” Whiz asked.

“What’s that?”

Whiz swallowed. “Jazz isn’t gonna hurt you, is he?”

Aw, man
… As big of a pain in the butt as her little brother could be, she knew he loved her in that stunted way little brothers have. It killed her to see the conflicted pain in his eyes as he asked. She saw more than merely her brother’s concern; she saw Dad’s fear reflected there, too. All her life, her father had been so powerful, loomed so large, that she’d never been able to imagine him afraid of anything. Not even Jazz. Not even something…

“No one’s gonna hurt me,” she told Whiz. Seized by a rare impulse, she hugged him to her, pleasantly surprised that he didn’t pull away.

She kissed him on the exact center of the top of his head and said it again, this time louder, loud enough to convince herself, too.

For the first time in recent memory, Jazz had the run of the house. After breakfast, Gramma had fallen into one of her periodic obsessions with Grampa’s grave. Sometimes she believed that he’d risen from the grave—“Like Jesus and Bugs Bunny!”—and could only be persuaded otherwise by a trip to the cemetery. Jazz hated those days; Gramma would spend hours crawling around the headstone, inspecting the dirt and individual blades of grass for some sort of perfidy. It was a lousy way to spend a day.

But Aunt Samantha cheerfully volunteered to take Gramma, meaning that Jazz was alone in the house without having to worry about his grandmother. He almost didn’t know how to act. It was so quiet—true quiet, without the foreboding of a potential Gramma eruption lurking.
Maybe I should call Connie and we can fool around in my bedroom for a change.

It was an automatic thought, and it made him pensive almost immediately. He
should
call Connie. But what could
he say to her? Especially after the way he’d treated her father at the airport. Combine that with the hotel-room fiasco and he’d be surprised if she ever wanted to speak to him again.

Oh, you could
make
her talk to you….

No. Shut up, Billy. Not Connie. I don’t do that to Connie.

He meandered around the house, straightening things here and there. Inspired, he started throwing away some of the old junk that his grandmother had accumulated over the years. The serial-killer pack-rat tendency ran strong in the Dent genetics, and Gramma would never tolerate Jazz throwing things away while she was around. But with her gone for the day, he could do some cleaning and she’d be none the wiser. It’s not like she was lucid enough to memorize her piles of crap.

He thought about Connie as he roamed the house with a garbage bag. He’d been unfair to her, he knew, but how to fix that unfairness was beyond him. He relived the night in the hotel room, running it through his damnably perfect memory over and over. Waking from the dream. Pressed deliciously and deliriously against Connie. Her turning to him, eyes wide and full and dark. Reaching for each other. Familiar touches gone explosively unfamiliar, explosively craved.

And then… pushing her away, falling backward onto the floor, lust twisted to panic, to fear.

Yeah. How could he fix that? How could he erase in Connie’s mind the memory of her boyfriend fleeing from her in terror?

He hauled the garbage outside and set it by the mailbox for pickup, then returned to the house, where he wheeled his
suitcase into the spare room. He didn’t blame Samantha for not wanting to sleep here. The room had lain unused for close to two decades, its surfaces gray and textured with dust. More than that, though, the room seemed to vibrate, ever so slightly out of sync with the rest of the house, the rest of the universe, really. As though something fundamental and primitive and crucial had broken here, and never been patched.

Billy’s room. Billy’s bed. Jazz didn’t have to wonder what Billy had dreamed and fantasized, lying awake at night. He knew all too well—Billy had written his fantasies in the blood and screams of innocents from Nevada to Pennsylvania, from Texas to South Dakota. No secrets remained.

He dusted a bit, then unpacked. He needed clean clothes, so he went across the hall to his room. True to her word, Samantha had hung a sheet over the wall of Dear Old Dad’s victims. Jazz found himself liking his aunt more and more. Wouldn’t most people seeing them for the first time—most normal people—have taken down the pictures? Connie thought they were morbid. G. William thought they were a disturbing tie to the past. Howie thought they were a buzzkill.

Gramma thought they were Santa’s elves.

He fired up his computer and checked his e-mail. Other than the usual spam and porn links from Howie (
delete, delete, delete…)
, there was nothing, which meant that no one had figured out this e-mail address yet. Good.

On the desk lay two sheets of paper. Photocopies of evidence from the sheriff’s office. The first one was the letter Billy had left at Melissa Hoover’s house:

The PS still stabbed at him, cored him. When Jazz had point-blank asked Billy “Did you make me kill my mother?” Billy had just laughed. Later, he had said, “You’re a killer. You just ain’t killed no one yet.”

Which statement was true? Was it all Billy screwing with his mind?

Well, of course it was Billy screwing with his mind. That’s what Billy did. Dear Old Dad had a PhD in mind screwing. The question was, was it
just
Billy screwing with his mind?

He shook his head and actually said “Stop it!” out loud to
himself in his strongest voice. What had happened? How had Janice Dent died? By Billy’s hand, or by her son’s?

That’ll be the first thing I do. The next time I see him, the first thing I do will be to ask him that.

And the second thing?

He remembered Special Agent Morales leaning toward him. She wore no perfume. Her face was smooth and unblemished by makeup, and her grin had revealed big, strong teeth. “You want to do more than find him, don’t you? You want to kill him,” she’d said. “Well, I can help with that.”

The second thing—he would figure that out when the time came.