Chapter 36: A Bad Day for Janice
Janice had just flushed the toilet when the police had called to warn her that day. She had to wash her hands before she could pull the phone out of her pocket, but she knew it was bad news.
Her hands were still wet when she hit the buttons to call him back. But it went straight to voicemail.
She sat down to listen to his message. The policeman’s voice was grainy and distant and she had to make out each cryptic word. He said they found him, but she could sense something was still wrong.
What if her boy were dead? It was a hard thing to think about, to wait to hear. She started to lurch slightly like a sick dog with a stomach full of yellow bile.
Alice touched her arm. “Are you OK?”
“I think so.” Janice swallowed back the fear. “We don’t need those anymore.” She nodded her head toward the pile of 500 yellow fliers Alice had photocopied and brought over for her. The pages sat stacked under an empty coffee cup.
“Someone once told me when I was pregnant that having a child is kind of like having a piece of you break off and escape,” Janice said. “You have no control over what it does, whether it’s safe or not.
“You can’t imagine the worry that comes with being a mother.” She shook her finger in the air like she was scolding a remembered child. “That’s what being a mother is. You worry t
hey’ll be hurt. You worry they’ll fall. You worry all night when they don’t come home.”
“You have to have some faith,” Alice said, patting her arm. “You have to believe that everything will be all right in the end. You have to believe in God. You have to believe they’ll make the right decision.”
Janice took a long, slow breath out and leaned her head back against the recliner.
“I know I’ve been angry at you,” she said. “For what you said about Kevin. But I appreciate the help you’ve given me. You’ve been a comfort checking on me all the time. I hope he calls back soon. I’m dying to hear what he says.”
“I am, too,” Alice said. “And I’m sure it will be good news. Janice, you are looking a bit thin and worn out after all this. Have you eaten anything today?”
She closed her eyes and held on tight to the phone in her right hand. “I’m not hungry.”
“You need to eat. I’m going to make you something.”
Alice walked into the kitchen.
“I’m glad it’s all over,” Janice murmured. “Whatever it is. At least it’s over.”
Alice put the sandwich in a plate on Janice’s lap.
“Please eat.”
She went back to the kitchen and sliced up an apple with a large knife. The phone rang a cheesy electronic rendition of a pop song and Janice quickly answered.
Alice set down the knife and came back into the living room, juggling the cut apple pieces in her hand.
“Kevin,” Janice said. “Thank God! I’m so happy to hear your voice.”
“He’s OK,” she shouted.
Alice had smiled. She liked to think she was lucky, but the fact of the matter was other people just had a bad streak of luck when she was around. She made sure of it.
Kevin was on a roll. She couldn’t help but smirk when she thought of him. He had lost his father, witnessed a murder, two of her guys had been busy trying to take him out, and when he had called to warn his mother, well, as luck would have it she had been there waiting.
“Are you all right?” Janice asked, breathlessly. “Is everything actually OK there?”
“I’m ok, Ma, but can you call a lawyer? Grandpa and I have been involved in some shit.”
“What shit?”
“Mom, you know we ain’t supposed to talk about it on the phone at a police station. I
don’t have a lot of time. How’re you doing?”
“I’m fine,” Janice said reflexively. “God, I’m so happy you’re alive! I could kill you.”
“Mom, I need you to come to Minnesota for a while. Look, don’t say anything to anybody about all this. Just come here.”
“Don’t you ever do anything like this again. Any problem and you just come to your mom. I don’t care what it is. I’ll always be here for you. We’ll fix anything together. Just don’t put me through this again. I can’t take it.”
She was making promises she couldn’t keep, Alice thought.
She could just barely make out some of Kevin’s side of the conversation. Alice sat intently on the couch watching Janice’s face for that moment of fear, that moment of registration when the information clicked together. It never came.
The conversation gave Alice time to think about her options. On the side table next to the couch stood a large vase full of half-dead roses and lilies. The water was a murky green. If that wasn’t enough, the knife was also waiting on the kitchen countertop.
Janice’s mouth quivered as she spoke and tears streamed down her face. Alice moved closer to the woman and put one arm around her.
She patted her back.
She smiled a small, icy smile and spoke quietly to Janice. “Is he cooperating with the police? Is he telling them everything they want to know?”
Janice nodded, and Alice’s expression darkened.
“Mom, I haven’t done anything wrong,” Kevin said. “But I need a good lawyer before I tell the cops what happened. After all, grandpa did shoot
a guy. It was self-defense. My time’s up. I gotta go.”
He hung up and Janice sat dazed for a moment, clutching her thoughts. Then she staggered to her feet to get a glass of water.
“Do you need anything?” she asked. Alice shook her head.
“I’ve never been so happy in my life,” Janice breathed out. “He’s OK.”
Three seconds after she had turned and walked toward the kitchen a vase crashed against the back of her skull. It was like the power in her muscles just switched off. Janice sank to the ground.
Alice was left holding two large pieces of crystal in her hands. A few smaller shards shimmered on the linoleum floor under the florescent light.
She reached down and checked Janice’s wrist for a pulse. She hadn’t intended to kill her right away. It was so disappointing. But Kevin did have that kind of luck.
Most people took hours to kill, even with a couple bullets in them. Janice wasn’t one of those people.
Alice dragged the body to the bedroom and lay Janice on the bed. She pulled the sheet up to her neck and closed the dead woman’s eyes. She stood there, looking down for a moment at the sleeping corpse. Then she bent down and kissed Janice on the forehead.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
Death wasn’t usually this neat and tidy. The prints on the glass shards didn’t matter because Alice had filled the vase with water when she gave the dead woman the flowers. All she had to do was slip out quietly without anyone seeing her. With all the members in her crew, it wouldn’t be hard to fake an alibi if needed. She looked down at the body and felt like an “angel of death” standing above it.
The nickname had followed her wherever she went. She smiled thinking of it. The dead always reminded her of the first life she ever took. She was 14 years old. Her stepfather had rechristened her with his final words, “Angel, Angel, why?”
Chapter 3
7: In Sickness and in Richness
Claudia sat at the small desk in the hotel room, crammed between an armchair and a king size bed.
“Where are we supposed to go from here?” she peered out through a thin, white set of curtains into a parking lot below. “Where will we live?”
The Red Cross had given all of them vouchers to stay at the motel six miles away from where they once lived. Tom and Claudia had separate rooms, but she spent most of her time in his room, at his side, handing him a glass of water or helping him hobble to the bathroom on his crutches.
“This is effing humiliating,” he said, staring down at the yellow frothy bubbles in the toilet bowl. “When did we get to the point in our relationship where it’s OK for me to pee in front of you?”
He leaned on her as he washed his good hand, and she helped him back into bed.
She crawled in next to him and put her head on his chest.
His wrist in the cast was close enough to her face that she wrinkled her nose at the smell of unwashed skin.
“Sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do.” Claudia breathed in the scent of his neck and felt calmer than she had in years. “This is love. I’ll take good care of you.”
Tom kissed her hair. “In sickness and in health,” he said.
“Well, the bloggers and news sites all say we’re married so it must be true then.”
“I don’t remember taking any vows,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“You’re right,” she giggled. “I’d never marry you without numerous test drives first. What if I don’t like the goods?”
“Well, you’ll have to wait at least
a few weeks before we can have a real honeymoon,” he said, frowning. “I’m not exactly at my peak performance right now.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you until then,” she kissed his chest down to his stomach and stared up at his beautiful dark eyes.
“Do you think we should ask the news sites for a correction about us being husband and wife?” she said, tickling the lines of his hips with her mouth.
“And ruin your reputation?” Tom groaned. “I’d rather just marry you.”
She smiled as she looked up him.
A month had passed and Tom was still hobbling around. The physical damage had started to heal, but the anxiety hadn’t. They were still not sure where they were going to live. Tom needed a place with good light and a space for painting, which meant every time Claudia liked a place he squinted at the windows and shook his head.
They checked out the listings and pictures online in the motel’s business center and drove out to various places all over in different posh neighborhoods in the city.
The checks were coming in. Paul, now acting as Tom’s agent, kept telling everyone Tom might never be able to paint well again after breaking his wrist and several fingers in the fall.
“He’s a swindler,” Tom said, laughing. “If I’m breathing, I’ll always find a way to paint
, even if I have to hold the damn brush with my mouth.”
But the possibility had driven up the value of his surviving works.
It also made Tom stare at his hand in its cast for moments at a time, anxious to grip his paintbrush again.
“I feel like I’ve been cursed
,” Tom said. “For a painter, what’s worse than having your life’s work wiped out by a fire?”
“You could have died, Tom,” Claudia said.
“I know. But if my work survived, then I would have lived through my art,” he said.
“But you’ll make more,” Claudia said. “It’s going to liberate you to start over with four white walls all over again, in a new place, won’t it?”
He frowned. She sat at the hotel room desk and held up the $30,000 check from the insurance company. “This certainly helps.”
She put the check in the drawer along with a stack of papers that she had covered with writing. It was all she had, that and a small duffel bag. Claudia had never written much before. She never had much to say. But the claustrophobic atmosphere of the tiny hotel room had driven her to the desk in her spare moments when Tom was sleeping and she didn’t want to disturb him with the TV.
“All those boxes I’ve been carrying around for years, all those stupid little trinkets and gifts I never really wanted – they’re gone,” she wrote. “We know what matters now.”
The fire seemed to have cleansed them of all their sins. Claudia no longer cared that Tom had a criminal past. No one cared that they were living together anymore, whether they were dating or not. Even her mother had shut up on the subject.
“I’m just glad you’re alive,” her mom told her on the phone. “You want me to fly down?”
“No, that’s ok, mom,” she told her. “I’ve got Tom here.”
Chapter 3
8: In Purgatory
“Are you crazy?” Claudia asked Tom. “This is where you want to move? After what we’ve been through?”
She motioned out the window with one hand and put the other on her hip. “Look,” she said, looking out the warped old glass pane. “I can see what’s left of our old place from here.”
Through the tree branches, she could just make out the brick structure in the distance, with its black, broken windows hollowed out like dead eyes buried behind scaffolding and plywood.
“It just feels wrong to move somewhere else,” he said. “Like a betrayal.”
“Tom, it’s not like the money is just going to vanish tomorrow. You can spend it.”
“If everyone runs, what’s left?” Tom said. “And some of these new places have no soul. It’s like the walls are made out of cardboard. All I want is a simple place with lots of light and open space and you there. That’s all I want.”
He grabbed Claudia’s hand and squeezed it. “Look around.”
Tom hobbled around loudly on the wooden floors. He ran his hands over the tall, white walls.
She liked the smell of the woodwork, like the smell of an old library. She liked the way sun caught in streaks along the old wooden floorboards and the old, oversized windows looming along almost every wall. She liked looking through the streaked glass panes, glass that so many others had looked through before. Then she spotted the old radiators standing guard in every corner.
“Not even central heat?” she asked. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” he said.
“I thought you were tired of all the banging,” she said.
“Me tired of banging?” he laughed, pulling her closer. “Baby, I could use more of that.”
The agent cleared her throat and crossed her arms. “With your budget, you really could do a lot better.” She sulked.
“No, it’s perfect,” Tom said. “It feels like home.”
They didn’t have to hire movers to assemble the pieces of their lives back together. All they had were two duffel bags of clothes.
Claudia ordered furniture online and big, hulking men came and delivered it, carrying off Styrofoam and cardboard and plastic sheets.
So everything was brand new. It was eerie in a way, like living in a catalog, a place that wasn’t real. Claudia missed the scuffmarks on top of the old dresser she had pulled out of an alley. Slowly, they assembled the brand new pieces and set a stage for the
ir lives together playing house – a modern-style sleek, red couch, a glass coffee table. She always seemed to get stuck whenever she sank into one of the two overstuffed recliners.
Did it really matter what her couch looked like, she wondered. Tom was the most important fixture. The whole room changed when he walked in each morning.
They didn’t have separate rooms anymore. But he did have his own space, the studio. Blank canvases were stacked against the wall, waiting for the touch that would bring them to life. No longer encased in a cast, Tom’s weak, swollen fingers gripped his brush awkwardly. Despite all the promise, an uncertainty hung in the air.
Stan knocked on the door a few weeks after they moved in. His uniform was starting to look too tight across the middle. Gray stubble lined his jaw.
“I wasn’t invited to the housewarming party?” he shrugged.
“How’d did you know we moved here?” Claudia said.
“Public sales records online.” He shook his head. “If I know where you live, they might too.”
Claudia heaved a heavy sigh and crossed her arms.
“I already called a few companies and asked them to remove your names from their websites. I’ve gotten a couple form-letter e-mails saying they have a first amendment right and it’s public record, yadda, yadda, yadda, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”
“Stan, when are you going to find Alice?” Claudia asked.
“We’re looking, darl…” he cleared his throat. “No one’s talking and that’s making it hard. We’ve got some leads. Maybe we’ll get lucky. We’re trying.”