Labeck
began, “We’re here to fix—,” but a frenzied yapping set up in the hallway
behind Purvis and suddenly a tide of snarling fur balls engulfed us, growling,
snapping, and clearly stating in dog language:
We’re going to tear you to
kibble and gnaw your ears like they’re dried apricots.
These were the
fiends from hell—Vanessa’s venomous shih tzu-bichon frises. Their names
were Muffin, Tufty, and Snookums, kittenish names for creatures with the
volatility of land mines and the temperament of wolverines.
Tufty sank
his fangs into my heel.
I
yelped in pain.
“Bad
dogs!” Purvis, who was hard of hearing, apparently hadn’t picked up on my
voice. She aimed a kick at Tufty. If Vanessa had witnessed this sacrilege,
Purvis would have been sacked on the spot, forty years of service or not. “Go
lay down now! Down!” She scooped up Tufty and Snookums, who squirmed around and
tried to bite her, but she was too wise to them; she held their muzzles
squashed against her watermelon-sized boobs. Labeck nabbed Muffin, locking the
creature’s vicious little snout in a hand vise.
“I
apologize,” Purvis said. “Those dogs never got trained. They’re like animals—they
need that Dog Whisperer.”
I’d
have whispered to them all right.
Go play fetch on the freeway, you little
furry turds! Go pick a fight with a pit bull.
“The missus
home?” Labeck asked.
“Nope.
She left a couple hours ago. Didn’t say when she’d be back.”
Purvis
was not exactly the loyal old family retainer. She and Vanessa waged an ongoing
war over the kitchen, Purvis believing the room was her sacred turf, while
Vanessa, who cooked as a hobby and baked as a religion, trespassed in the
kitchen whenever she felt like it, probably to whip up new varieties of
poisoned pastries. She left her dirty dishes for Purvis to wash, messed up
Purvis’s alphabetically arranged spices, and put the utensils away in the wrong
drawers, offenses that sent Purvis into muttered rants and fits of cabinet
slamming. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Vanessa ended up facedown on the
kitchen tiles one day, the duck boning knife sticking out of her back with
Purvis’s fingerprints all over it.
“Glad you’re
here. We haven’t been getting any cable at all lately,” Purvis said. Labeck
shot me a smug look. “Since Saturday, if I recollect. It stopped just like
that. You think you can get it fixed today? I don’t like to miss my programs.”
“Ho-kay.
Just point me toward the nearest TV set and I’ll take it from there,” said
Labeck. Holding Muffin at eye level, he spoke sternly. “You gonna behave?”
Muffin
spiked out his fur, bared his teeth, and snarled. Purvis peeled him off Labeck
and steamed away with the squirming bundles in her arms, looking as though she
intended to toss them lock, stock, and collar into the microwave. Us cable guys
swaggered into the living room. The room stretched the width of the house, with
floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a stunning view of Lake Michigan. The
décor didn’t live up to the view, though; the furnishings looked as though
they’d been lacquered in place during the Eisenhower era and never moved since.
Olive green brocade sofas and matching wing chairs perched atop vine-patterned
carpets. Prissy vases, figurines, and silk flowers were arranged on end tables
like museum exhibits. Frankly, my cell at Taycheedah wasn’t this depressing.
Labeck
found the massive cabinet that housed the television set, squatted down and
started messing around with a screwdriver. He actually looked like he knew what
he was doing. He was even displaying the repair guy’s butt crack.
“Fifteen
minutes and out,” he warned.
With pounding
heart, dry mouth, and wire spooling out behind me, I scuttled up the stairs. I
eased cautiously into Vanessa’s bedroom. The dill pickle color motif lived on
here in the bedspread and curtains. Hands shaking, I rummaged through drawers,
hoping to find a secret side to Vanessa—movies with titles like
Porking
Polly,
a gorilla-sized dildo, a cat-o’-nine-tails . . . actually, the whip
wasn’t all that far-fetched. Vanessa’s lily of the valley scent hung heavily
over the room, making my insides go all squishy with fear. I’d been scared of
Vanessa when she was my mother-in-law; now that I was breaking and entering her
house, I was nearly gibbering in terror.
Convinced
that the video wasn’t here, I tiptoed down the hall to Kip’s boyhood bedroom.
The day he’d introduced me to Vanessa he’d given me a tour of the house, which
had ended with him dragging me onto his boyhood bed for a reenactment of an
adolescent fantasy. Kip had the finish line all to himself that day. The
thought of his mother bursting into his room and finding us naked cast an icy
wet blanket over my libido.
It was hard not
to feel sorry for Kip, growing up an only child in this house. His dad had died
when he was ten, leaving him at Vanessa’s mercy. Considering how she
alternately bullied and spoiled him, it was amazing that he hadn’t turned out
to be more screwed up than he was. Now, gazing around at the model airplanes,
the sports trophies, the bed with its plaid spread, everything preserved as it
had been when Kip was a teenager, I realized that Vanessa would never have left
the videotape of her son’s murder in this room.
I
was about to let myself out when my eye lit on Kip’s bedside lamp, a heavy
glazed ceramic pot whose base screwed on and off over a hollow interior. Kip
had showed it to me that day we’d made whoopee on his bed. When he’d been a
teenager, he’d stashed his dope and emergency cash in the lamp base, safe from
his mother’s prying eyes.
Maybe his stash
was still there! Even fifty bucks would keep a desperate fugitive alive for a
couple of days. The screws holding the lamp base in place loosened with a twist
of my fingers. I pulled aside the base and groped inside. A baggie of graying
hash fell out and—yes!—a baggie of bills! I was about to rip open
the bag and count the money when an icy chill jagged up my spine and my nape
hair stood on end.
Vanessa was
here.
There was no way I could have known it, but I did. My heart began to
thump in ragged beats. Every system in my body went on red alert. Had I just
heard raised voices, a shout, from the first floor? The dogs were barking up a
storm. Maybe they’d treed Labeck atop the television cabinet. But I didn’t
really believe that.
She
was here, and
she
was hunting me.
Ramming the
baggie into my pants, I blazed for the door, ran out into the hall, and hurtled
toward the stairway. Too late. Footsteps on the stairs. Someone was coming up,
moving fast. It wasn’t Labeck; he would have called out. Frantically I looked
for a place to hide. The linen closet! After Vanessa walked past, I’d sneak out
of the closet and streak down the stairs. Inside, the closet was dark and
stuffy. It smelled like rubber vacuum hose and had shelves that jutted into my
spine.
The footsteps
reached the top of the stairs. A pause, then a heavy tread down the hall.
Whoever it was knew this house well. The person halted in front of the closet
door. The scent of lilies of the valley wafted to my nostrils. The knob turned.
The door opened. Light flooded the closet.
Vanessa
Vonnerjohn stood there, wearing a triumphant, terrible smile. She was holding a
gun. She raised it until it was pointing directly at my heart, and I saw my own
death in the barrel’s small, round hole.
“I knew you’d come back,” she crowed. “I
haven’t slept a wink since you escaped. I left the doors unlocked at night, I
turned off the burglar alarms, I drove away from the house every morning hoping
you’d sneak in. And you did! You fell right into my trap, you stupid little
tramp!”
Her
eyes glittered and her hands shook. Vanessa is tall, with wide shoulders, flat
boobs, and the long, muscular legs of a tennis player. She has an outthrust
jaw, vodka on the rocks eyes, and a small, tight mouth. Her hair is shoe polish
black, teased and sprayed into a bullet-deflecting helmet that looks as though
it might harbor poisonous spiders. Her taste in clothes fossilized forty years
ago. Today she was wearing a shin-length corduroy skirt, a puffy-sleeved
blouse, a frilly apron, and orthopedic running shoes. She accessorized with
said gun.
“Walk,”
she ordered, gesturing with the gun barrel toward the stairs leading to the
third floor.
She wouldn’t shoot me while Purvis was in
the house, I told myself. Purvis hated Vanessa even more than she hated the
dogs; if she heard shooting, she’d call the police.
“Don’t
think that old fool Purvis is going to save you,” Vanessa sneered. My bowels
turned to icy mush; I’d always had the eerie feeling that my mother-in-law
could read my mind. “I sent her out for groceries. While she was gone, you
broke into my house. You attacked me. I shot you in self-defense.”
“Nobody
will—”
“Hush,
Jezebel!” She lunged at me, whacking the gun barrel against my skull,
staggering me against the wall, then yanking me upright by my hair. She was
amazingly strong, as though she worked out with anvils.
“Do
you recognize this gun?” she crooned in my ear. “You ought to. It’s my son’s
gun, the one you used to take him away from me.”
She
shoved me forward, keeping the gun snugged against my spine. Terrified that the
slightest movement would jar the trigger, I allowed her to bump and bully me up
the narrow, uncarpeted stairway that led to the servants’ quarters on the third
floor. The ribbed corduroy of her skirt made scritching noises like insects
rubbing their legs.
No
fancy carpets or hand-carved woodwork up here. Worn linoleum and unpainted plaster
walls were considered good enough for the servants who’d once lived here. Iron
beds stood in empty, dormitory-like rooms. The air was stale, underlaid with
mildew.
“Get
in there.” Vanessa thrust me into the servants’ bathroom. A bathtub was filled with
water and a space heater was set out on the floor, plugged in and turned on.
Uh-oh.
“You
should have gone to the electric chair,” Vanessa hissed. “But those bleeding
heart legislators outlawed the death penalty. While my son lay cold in his
grave, you went on living with your three meals a day, your free dental work,
your bowling, your stinking
rights
!” Her lips curled back from her
teeth.
“Vanessa,
listen to me! I didn’t—”
“Oh, I know how
cushy you scum have it in prison these days with your pedicures, your poetry
readings, your self-esteem therapy sessions—”
“That’s
completely—”
“And of course
the prison psychiatrists tell you that your crime wasn’t
your
fault. No,
it was society’s fault, boo-hoo-hoo. Well, guess what? I, for one, am not
buying it. I intend to see that you get what’s coming to you.”
“If you’d give me
a chance to—”
“Get. In. The.
Goddamn. Tub. Or I’ll shoot your kneecaps off.”
Looking
into the icicle eyes, I knew she would do it. I was wearing the shoes Labeck
had lent me—a pair of his old Nikes, ludicrously large, along with three
pairs of athletic socks to achieve a semi-fit. I put one jumbo foot in the
bathwater. Vanessa impatiently waved at me and I lifted the other foot in.
Water sloshed over onto the tile floor. Did she intend to drown me?
I
opened my mouth to yell for Labeck.
Vanessa
sneered. “Don’t think that repairman is going to rush in to save you. He’s
locked in the basement. I’ll decide what to do with him after I deal with you.”
The
water was frigid. I had to set my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.
“Take
a bath, you dirty pig—all the way in!”
When
I just stood there, Vanessa aimed at the wall above the tub and pulled the
trigger. Instinctively I dived into the tub, creating a small tidal wave. A
chunk of tile above my head exploded. The noise was deafening. I clapped my
hands to my ringing ears as shards of tile rained into the tub. On the first
floor, the dogs went insane, barking and yowling.
“When
I tell you to do something, do it!” Spit flecked Vanessa’s lips. She looked
down at me, crouched in the water, my arms flung protectively over my head.
“Are you frightened?”
“Y-yes.”
“Good.
You ought to be.”
She
pulled out the St. Christopher medal she wore on a chain around her neck.
Vanessa was an old-style Catholic who went in for novenas, scapulars, prayer
books, and lighted candles. If she’d lived five centuries ago she’d have been
an enthusiastic rack-turner for the Inquisition. The Christopher medal was in
honor of Kip’s patron saint. She brought it to her lips and kissed it. “When
Kip was killed, I lost my faith in God. But I was wrong. I was wrong and beg
God to forgive me. I should have known that in His all-beneficial mercy God
would hear my prayers. God arranged that tornado to deliver you to me.”