As if watching a television rerun, Jess saw herself pushing open the downstairs door, locking it after her, racing up the flights of stairs, entering her apartment, once again locking the door after her, taking several steps inside, suddenly feeling the sharp tug of wire around her throat, struggling with her assailant, momentarily breaking free, seeing the door, wondering if she could get to it, open it, before Rick Ferguson could get to her.
Her mind’s eye narrowed in on the locked door of her apartment, as if she were adjusting a kaleidoscope. What’s wrong with this picture? a little voice asked, snapping her sharply back into the present. The door to her apartment had been locked, she realized, swallowing a gasp, as was the outside door. How then had Don gotten inside? “How did you get in?” she heard herself ask.
“What?”
Jess pulled slightly away from his embrace. “How did you get inside the house?”
“The door wasn’t locked,” he said.
“Yes it was,” she insisted. “I locked it after I came in.”
“Well, it was open when I got here,” he told her.
“And my apartment?” she asked. “I double-locked the door as soon as I got inside.”
“Jess, what is this?”
“A simple question.” She took several steps back, stopped when she felt Rick Ferguson’s feet against the backs of her legs. “How did you get inside my apartment?”
There was a moment’s silence, a look of calm resignation, then, “I used my keys.”
“Your keys? What do you mean? What keys?”
He swallowed, looked toward the floor. “I had a second set made when you had your locks changed.”
Jess shook her head in disbelief. “You had a second set made? Why?”
“Why? Because I was worried about you. Because I was afraid something like this might happen. Because you need me to look after you. That’s why.”
Jess looked down, saw Rick Ferguson dead at her feet, her gun still inside his open hand. Don had saved her life, for God’s sake. Why was she suddenly so angry with him? What difference did it make that he’d had a copy of her keys made? If he hadn’t, she’d be a corpse, for God’s sake. Was she really going to be angry at him for saving her life?
She felt an annoying tickle in her throat, tried to dismiss it as a by-product of the injury to her neck, almost succeeded, until she felt the tickle creeping stealthily toward her chest, like a large spider. Picking up both strength and speed, it scurried across her arms and legs, depositing its poison, leaving everything it touched numb. Was she going
to have an anxiety attack now? she wondered incredulously. Now when it was all over? When she was safe? When there was no reason for her to panic?
And then she heard Adam’s voice.
Go with it
, he said.
Don’t fight it. Go with it
.
Adam, she thought. Adam, whom Don distrusted and had tried to warn her against. Adam, whom Don had investigated, who wasn’t who he said he was. What did Adam have to do with any of this? “I don’t understand,” she said out loud, staring at Don, wondering if there was more he hadn’t told her.
“Don’t worry about anything now, Jess. All that matters is that you’re safe. Rick Ferguson is dead. He can’t hurt you anymore.”
“But it wasn’t Rick Ferguson you were worried about,” Jess persisted, remembering his phone call to her sister’s, stubbornly trying to make sense of all that had happened. “It was Adam you claimed was dangerous. You said you’d had him investigated; you said the state bar had never heard of him.”
“Jess, what’s this got to do with anything?”
“But Adam was never a threat to me. It was Rick Ferguson all along. So, why would Adam lie?” Once again the kaleidoscope shifted, its contents scrambling to present yet another picture. “Unless he didn’t lie. Unless it was you who lied to me,” she said, scarcely believing her own ears. Was she really saying these things? “You didn’t call the state bar, did you? And if you did, then you found out that Adam Stohn is exactly who he says he is. Isn’t he?”
There was a long silence. “He isn’t right for you, Jess,” Don said finally.
What was going on? What was Don saying? “Isn’t that for me to decide?”
“Not when it’s the wrong decision. Not when it affects me, when it affects us, our future together,” he told her. “And we
could
have a future together, if you’d only stop fighting me. You need me to take care of you, Jess. You always have. Tonight proved that.”
Jess looked from her ex-husband to the body lying on the floor, then back to her ex-husband, the kaleidoscope in her mind twisting and turning furiously, until the captive bright pieces of multicolored plastic could no longer differentiate between up and down, right or left, and the kaleidoscope burst apart, scattering the delicate slivers of her reality into the air. “Why did you come over here tonight?” she asked, “I mean, you knew Adam was out of town, and you thought Rick Ferguson was on a plane to California, so what made you come over? How did you know to have a gun? How did you know I was in danger … unless you set this whole thing up?” she asked, her voice trailing into the air, the sudden realization of what she was saying slicing through her body as painfully, and as easily; a piece of wire rope. “You did, didn’t you? You set this whole thing up!”
“Jess …”
“You coached him, told him what to say, what buttons to push. Right from the beginning.”
“I used him to bring us back together,” Don said simply. “Was that so wrong?”
“He almost killed me, for God’s sake!”
“I would never have let that happen.”
Jess shook her head in disbelief. “You orchestrated everything. The way he was waiting for me when I got to work
that first morning, the way he followed me up the stairs, like he’d stepped right out of my nightmares, nightmares you knew all about, goddamn you! It wasn’t a coincidence that he used the word
disappear
. You told him about what happened to my mother, didn’t you? You knew exactly the effect it would have on me, the anxiety it would produce.”
“I love you, Jess,” Don told her. “All I’ve ever wanted is for us to be together.”
“Tell me,” Jess said.
“Tell you what?”
“Everything.”
“Jess, what do details matter? The important thing is that we were meant to be together.”
“You did this so that we could be together?”
“Everything I’ve done since the day we met has been for that reason.”
“Tell me,” she repeated.
He took a deep breath, releasing it slowly into the space between them. “What do you want to know?”
“What exactly was your relationship with Rick Ferguson?”
“You know my relationship with him. He was my client, I was his lawyer.”
“Did you know he’d killed Connie DeVuono?”
“I never asked him.”
“But you knew.”
“I suspected.”
“And you offered to get him off if he’d do you a favor in return.”
“Connie was still alive when I agreed to take his case. I had no idea at the time he was planning to kill her.”
“But you knew he’d broken into her apartment, knew he’d raped her, knew he’d beaten her, knew he was harassing her.”
“I knew the charges against him.”
“Don’t be coy with me, Don.”
“I knew he was probably guilty.”
“So you suggested a deal?”
“I suggested we might be able to help each other out.”
“You told him all about me, coached him in what to say and do.” Jess’s voice was a monotone, her questions flat, as if they’d already been answered.
“Something like that.”
“But why? Why now?”
Don shook his head. “It was something I’d been thinking about for a long time, a way to prove to you how much you needed me. And suddenly, there he was, opportunity knocking, as it were. And the idea sort of came together in my mind. Plus, there was something about the symmetry I found appealing—you know, four years together, four years apart. I knew I couldn’t afford to wait much longer. And then along came Adam Stohn, and I knew I couldn’t afford to wait at all.”
“What exactly did you tell Rick Ferguson to do?”
“Essentially what he did best. I gave him free rein, as long as he didn’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me? He almost killed me!”
“I was right behind you. Jess. You were never in any real danger.”
Jess rubbed the front of her neck, felt the blood still damp. “You told him to break into my apartment and slash my underwear! You told him to destroy my car!”
“I told him to frighten you. I left the details up to him.”
“He killed Fred!”
“A canary, for God’s sake. I’ll buy you a hundred canaries, if that’s what you want.”
Jess felt the tickle of the spider’s legs spreading from her arms and legs up toward her brain. Could she really be having this conversation? Could they really be saying those things to one another? Could she really be hearing them?
“And tonight?” she asked. “What was he supposed to do tonight?”
“I told him that, considering your famous tenacity, you’d never rest until you saw him convicted of Connie’s murder. I knew he couldn’t resist coming after you, and I wanted to make sure I controlled the time and place, so I simply encouraged him to finish the job as quickly as possible.”
“You sent him here to kill me.”
“I sent him here to be killed!” Don said, and laughed. “Hell, I even gave him a key.” He laughed again. “I used him, Jess, to get what we both wanted.”
“What we
both
wanted?”
“Be honest, Jess. Wasn’t the death penalty what you were after? The state wasn’t going to do it. I did it for them. For you. For us,” he added, the laughter gone.
“So you set him up.”
“The man was an animal. Scum. Your words, remember? He killed Connie DeVuono. He fully intended to kill you.”
“But you called me at my sister’s, urged me to spend the night. You begged me not to come home.”
Again Don laughed. “Knowing you’d do just the opposite. Knowing your pride would send you scurrying back as
fast as you could. God forbid you listen to what your husband tells you to do.”
“My ex-husband.” Jess quickly reminded him.
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “Your ex-husband. The man who loves you, who’s always loved you, who never stopped loving you.”
Jess raised her hands to her head in order to stop the sudden spinning. None of this was real, she thought. None of this was actually happening. This was Don, for God’s sake. The man who’d always been there for her, who’d been her teacher, her lover, her husband, her friend. The man who’d nursed her through her mother’s death and years of crippling anxiety attacks. And now he was telling her that he’d deliberately engineered their return. He was telling her that he’d been behind Rick Ferguson’s prolonged campaign of terror. He was telling her that he’d come here tonight to commit murder. All in the name of love. My God, what else was he capable of?
Jess’s mind raced backward through the last eight years. Her anxiety attacks had begun just after her mother’s disappearance, had lasted throughout her marriage to Don, abated only after their divorce. Had they been trying to tell her something?
He won’t give you room to grow
, she heard her mother say.
Her beautiful mother, she thought slowly approaching Rick Ferguson’s body and kneeling over it, hearing her knees crack, wondering if her body was about to break apart. Her eyes quickly passed over the gaping wound in the middle of his back, as she tried to ignore the sickly sweet odor of death that was straining, like a mask soaked in ether, to cover her nose.
“I love you, Jess,” Don was saying. “No one could ever love you the way I have all these years. I could never let anyone come between us.”
The kaleidoscope in Jess’s mind refocused, the last of the pieces falling into place, arranging themselves in front of her eyes with startling clarity, and suddenly she knew exactly what else he was capable of.
Jess swiveled around on her haunches, found herself staring up at her ex-husband, whose brown eyes reflected only his love for her. “It was you all along,” she said, her voice an alien force that had invaded her body, pushing out thoughts she didn’t know she had. “You killed my mother.” As soon as the words touched the air, Jess understood with absolute certainty they were true. Slowly, she rose to her feet. “Tell me,” she said, as she had said earlier, the alien’s voice low, barely audible.
“You won’t understand,” he told her.
“Make me understand,” she said, forcing her voice into a gentle caress. “Please, Don, I know you love me. I want so much to understand.”
“She was trying to keep us apart,” Don said, as if this was all the explanation necessary. “And she would have succeeded. You didn’t know that. But I did. As she was always pointing out, I was a lot older than you. I had a lot more experience. You were so hooked into her, I knew she’d eventually wear you down, convince you that you should wait until you graduated. And I knew that if we waited, there was a chance I might lose you. It was a risk I couldn’t take.”
“Because you loved me so much,” Jess said.
“Because I loved you more than anything in the world,” he qualified. “I didn’t want to have to kill her, Jess. Believe
it or not, I actually liked the woman. I kept hoping she’d come around. But she never did, and I gradually came to understand that she never would.”
“So you decided to kill her.”
“I knew it had to be done,” he began, “but I was waiting for the right moment, the right opportunity.” He shrugged, the gesture filled with ironic innocence, as if everything that had happened had been beyond his control. “Sort of like what happened with Rick Ferguson, I guess.” He shrugged again, and the innocence fell away. “And then one morning, you called and told me about the fight the two of you had had, about how you’d stormed out of the house, told your mother to find her own way to the doctor’s. I could hear the guilt in your voice. I knew that you were already regretting the fight, that if the lump in her breast proved to be malignant, you’d agree to postpone the wedding. I recognized that if I didn’t move quickly, it would be too late.
“So, I drove to your house, told your mother you’d called and told me what happened, explained how sorry you were, said I didn’t want to be the source of any more problems between you, that I’d back off, talk you into postponing our wedding until after you graduated.”