Sweetheart (3 page)

Debbie had left a lamp on, and it threw a warm half-circle of light across the dark hallway. Archie slipped his muddy shoes off at the door and walked over to the hall table and dropped his keys next to the lamp. A photograph of him and Debbie and the kids sat propped on the table in a silver frame. He looked happy, but he couldn’t remember when or where it had been taken.

He felt Debbie behind him a moment before her arms moved around his waist.

“Hi,” he said.

She leaned her cheek against his shoulder blade and held him. “Was it bad?”

“I’ve seen worse.” That hung in the air for a minute. Then Archie turned around and wrapped his arms around her. Debbie’s short brown hair was tousled and she was wearing a black tank top and red cotton underpants. Her body was toned and strong in his arms. It was a body he knew as well as his own. “Kids okay?” he asked.

She leaned in and kissed him lightly on the neck below his jawbone. “They’ve been asleep for hours,” she said.

Archie lifted a hand to Debbie’s cheek and looked at her face, kind and open, strong cheekbones, a long fine nose, a blush of freckles. And then, a flash of blond, the smell of lilacs, and there she was: Gretchen Lowell. Always at the periphery of his consciousness. Archie winced.

He could feel Debbie’s body tense under his hands.

“Is it her?” she asked.

He cleared his throat and shook the image from his head. His hand fell away from her cheek. “I should get some sleep.” He wanted to get the pills out of his pocket again, to take just one more, but he didn’t want to do it in front of Debbie. It hurt her too much.

“Is it hard not seeing her?” Debbie asked.

Archie wondered sometimes how much Debbie knew about his relationship with Gretchen. Debbie knew that Gretchen haunted him. She might have even used the word “obsessed.” But he didn’t think Debbie knew how far he had crossed the line.

“We said we wouldn’t talk about this,” Archie said gently.

Debbie turned Archie around to face the mirror that hung on the wall behind the table. “Look,” she said, and she slipped her hands under his shirttails and lifted his shirt up above his nipples and held it there. Archie hesitated and then looked at their reflection. His ex-wife was pressed beside him, her head resting against his shoulder, dark eyes shining. His face looked creased, half cast in the shadow thrown by the lamp, his long nose and lopsided mouth, thick hair and sad eyes, each a physical remnant of an ancestor, black Irish, Croatian, Jewish. He allowed himself a wry smile. Christ. Even his genotype was tragic.

Debbie moved a hand down to his abdomen and touched the long scar over his diaphragm where his spleen had been removed. It was his thickest scar, an ugly six-inch slash, the raised white scars from the stitches still visible around it, giving it a particularly Frankensteinian appearance. The scar tissue was tough, and he could barely feel Debbie’s fingertips brush over it. She moved then to the smaller scars that scattered his chest. These were finer, the scalpel pressed firmly into his flesh more to pass the time than to inflict pain. They looked like silver blades of grass, each laid out even with the one before it, like hash marks on a grotesque score card. Debbie traced her fingers over the slightly puckered lump of flesh that marked the stab wound below his left ribs.

“We had a deal,” Archie said. “Life, in exchange for the locations of her victims. She kept her part of the bargain. I was the one who couldn’t handle it. She won’t talk to anyone else, Debbie. Think of the two hundred people she killed. Think about their families.” It was a speech he had given often to himself over the two years he had gone every week to meet with Gretchen Lowell. It was all part of his effort to convince himself that he was just doing his job. He didn’t believe it anymore. He wondered if Debbie did.

“One hundred and ninety-nine,” Debbie said. “You were number two hundred, Archie. And you’re still alive.”

She moved her hand up to the other scar, the scar that began below his left nipple, arced through his chest hair, and traveled down to its original point, in the shape of a heart. Gretchen Lowell carved a heart on all her victims. It was her signature. But her other victims had been corpses, the hearts bloody wounds obscured by decomposition and a litany of torture. As head of the Beauty Killer Task Force, Archie had stood over their bodies, stared at their morgue photographs, been one step behind for ten years. Until he walked into the trap that Gretchen had set for him.

She had infiltrated the task force six weeks before she revealed herself to him the night she drugged him. They had thought she was a psychiatrist, offering her expertise. He wondered now if he would have been so quick to trust her if she hadn’t been so beautiful.

The heart scar was delicate, the new flesh a dainty thread of pale skin. His prettiest scar. For months he couldn’t bring himself to look at it. Now it felt as much a part of his body as the beating heart beneath. Debbie’s fingers grazed it and Archie felt an electrical jolt run through his nervous system.

He reached up and took her hand by the wrist. “Don’t,” he said.

Debbie pressed her face into his shoulder. “She’s killing you,” she said, the words small and muffled in the cloth. “She’s killing us.”

Archie’s voice was barely above a whisper. “I love you,” he said. He meant it. He loved her and their children more than anything. He loved them completely, and it wasn’t enough. “But I can’t just forget about her.”

Debbie looked up at Archie’s reflection. “I won’t let her win.”

It broke his heart. Not because she was worried that he was in danger, but because she thought she had a chance of saving him. Whatever fucked-up game he and Gretchen played, it was between them. Gretchen didn’t care about Debbie because she knew that Debbie wasn’t a threat. “It’s not a contest.” What he didn’t say was, she’s already won.

Debbie looked at him for a minute, not saying anything. And then, slowly, sweetly, she kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s sit up for a while,” she said. “Watch TV or something.”

Archie was grateful for the shift in topic. “Like married people,” he said.

Debbie smiled. “Yeah.”

Pretending to be normal. That was something that Archie was good at. “I’ll be the husband,” he said. He followed her into the living room, just as the pills kicked in and the codeine rushed through his system. Like a kiss, it was soft and warm and full of promise.

S
usan sat naked on the floor in front of the oscillating fan, goose bumps rising on her flesh every time the fan’s warm air hit her. She’d taken a cool bath and her turquoise hair was wet, her bob combed flat against her head. She had just changed her hair from pink to turquoise two days before, and her scalp still stung from the bleach. That, and the fact that it was ninety-five degrees on the second story of the cramped Victorian, made sleep elusive. The bath had helped. She’d gotten the cigarette smoke smell out of her hair. Though not, somehow, the smell of Parker’s buttered popcorn.

She stared at the white laptop that sat on the floor next to her. The final draft of the Molly Palmer story was due the next day. The fucker was finally going to get what was coming to him.

The door to the room flew open.

“Mom!” Susan cried.

Susan’s mother, Bliss, looked startled. Her long bleached dreads were wrapped up on top of her head; her cotton caftan floated loosely around her wiry, yoga-toned body. She was carrying a Japanese teapot on a wicker tray. “I’m just bringing you mint tea,” she said.

Susan ran her hands through her wet hair and brought her knees up to her chest to hide her naked body. Whereas her mother was fifty and had the body of a thirty-year-old, Susan was twenty-eight and had the body of a fifteen-year-old. “Knock. Okay? I don’t want tea. It’s like a hundred degrees.”

“I’ll just set it here,” Bliss said, bending over to place the tray on the floor. She looked up at Susan. “Have you been eating popcorn?” she asked.

Susan had moved back in with her mother. This is not how Susan described it to anyone who would listen. To anyone who would listen, she explained that she was merely staying with her mother. “Staying” being the operative word, implying an imper-manence to the condition.

In fact she was “staying” in her old room.

It had been Susan’s room, ten years ago. But Bliss had transformed it into a meditation room two minutes after Susan was out the door to college. The walls were painted tangerine, silver beaded Indian curtains hung over the windows, and tatami mats covered the floor. There wasn’t a bed, or any other furniture, but Bliss had had the foresight to hang a hammock, should a guest room ever be required. When Susan suggested that she might purchase an air mattress, say, or a futon, Bliss had explained how a quarter of the world slept in hammocks and how this hammock was an authentic triple-weave hammock from the Yucatán, not like the single-weave crap hammocks that people hung in their backyards. Susan knew better than to argue with Bliss. But she hadn’t been able to twist around without a fiery pain in her shoulder blade since her first night in that fucking hammock, triple weave or no.

The room smelled like the sweet, stale smoke of a hundred Chinese incense sticks. It was worse in the heat, and even with the windows open, the air in the cramped Victorian’s second story was oppressive, like too-tight clothes. At least the hammock offered ventilation.

Susan told herself that she would get an apartment when she finished the story about the senator’s relationship with Molly Palmer. Right now, the story had to come first. Time could not be wasted browsing rental sites and viewing apartments. The story must have priority.

She turned to her laptop and opened it. The story glowed white on the pale blue screen. The cursor blinked. She started typing.

She would have died before she told anyone the truth: that she was scared to be alone. That she still felt the pressure of the belt around her neck. That she still had dreams about the After School Strangler.

She entered Castle’s “no comment” into the second paragraph of the story, and smiled. It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d written personal essays and cute features about salmon festivals and logging shows.

A lot had changed in the past nine weeks, since she’d been assigned the story of profiling Detective Archie Sheridan as he worked to hunt down the Strangler. She had changed.

She had thought about calling Archie a dozen times over the past two months. But she never had. There was no reason to. Her profile series had run. He’d sent a nice note about her last story on the Strangler, and wished her all the best in the world. No invitation to get coffee. No “let’s keep in touch.” She supposed he had bigger things on his mind.

It was for the best. Don’t fall for older, involved men. This was her new rule. And Archie Sheridan? Twelve years older than she was, and in love with his ex-wife. Just her type, and therefore totally off-limits. Plus, she had a job to do.

She refocused her attention on the screen in front of her.

Her current priority: unmasking Senator Castle for the jackass he was. The paper had fought her at every turn, dismissing the whole story as an old rumor. Until Susan found Molly. There had been talk about the senator’s so-called affair for years. And several reporters had even tried to track Molly down. Molly had refused to talk to any of them. But she and Susan had something in common. They had both had shit happen to them as kids that made them stupid about men.

For Susan that had led to bad boyfriends, drugs, if you counted marijuana, which no one in Portland, Oregon, did, and the worst sort of exhibitionism, confessional journalism. Molly was worse off than Susan in all departments.

Maybe, Susan thought, they could help each other find their ways out of the woods.

Or at least be less clichéd about it.

Susan reached over and picked up the mug of tea her mother had left her and touched the earthenware to her lips. But it was still too hot to drink.

Susan was aware, in the early morning, of the landline ringing. Her mother had the same phone she’d had when Susan was little, a red rotary phone that hung on the kitchen wall and had a cord so tangled you could pull the receiver only a few inches off the base. It had a loud bell ring that Bliss liked because she could hear it when she was in the backyard turning the compost pile or milking the goat. Why Bliss cared if she heard it, Susan didn’t know, because her mother almost never answered the phone. So Susan was surprised when the phone stopped ringing after a few rings.