Twisted: The Collected Stories (48 page)

“We’ll make sure that happens. Good day to you now.”

When the sheriff had left, Sandra May stood by herself for a long moment, looking at the photo of her husband taken a few years earlier. He was holding up a large bass he’d caught—probably in Billings Lake. Then she walked into the outer office, opened the mini refrigerator and poured herself a glass of sweet tea.

Returning to Jim’s, no,
her
office, she sat down in the leather chair and spun slowly, listening to the now-familiar squeak of the mechanism.

Thinking: Well, Sheriff, you were almost right.

There was only one little variation in the story.

Which was that Sandra May had known all along about Jim’s affair with Loretta. She’d gotten used to the smell of turpentine on her husband’s skin but never used to the stink of the woman’s trailer-trash perfume, which hung like a cloud of bug spray around him as he climbed into bed too tired even to kiss her. (“A man doesn’t want you three times a week, Sandra, you better start wondering why.” Thanks, Mama.)

And so when Jim DuMont drove off to Billings Lake last October, Sandra May followed and confronted him about Loretta. And when he admitted it she said, “Thank you for not lying,” took the billy club and crushed his skull with a single blow then kicked him into the frigid water.

She’d thought that would be the end of it. The death was ruled accidental and everybody forgot about the case—until that man at Billings Lake had come forward and reported seeing a woman with Jim just before he’d died. Sandra May knew it was only a matter of time until they tracked her down for the murder.

The threat of a life sentence—not the condition of the company—was the terrible predicament she’d found herself in, the predicament for which she was praying for help “from the sky.” (As for the company? Who cared? The “bit of insurance money” totaled nearly a million dollars. To get away with that, she would’ve gladly watched DuMont Products Inc. go bankrupt and given up the money Jim had socked away for his scrawny slut.) How could she save herself from prison? But then Ralston gave her the answer when he’d picked her up. He was too slick. She’d sensed a scam and it didn’t take much digging to find the connection to Loretta. She figured they were planning to get the company away from her.

And so she’d come up with a plan of her own.

Sandra May now opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out a bottle of small-batch Kentucky bourbon and poured a good three fingers’ worth into the iced tea. She sat back in her husband’s former chair, now hers exclusively, and gazed out the window
at a stand of tall, dark pine trees bending in the wind as a spring storm moved in.

Thinking to Ralston and Loretta: Never did tell you the rest of Mama’s expression, did I?

“Honey,” the old woman had told her daughter, “a Southern woman has to be a notch stronger than her man. And she’s got to be a notch more resourceful too. And, just between you and me, a notch more conniving. Whatever you do, don’t forget that part.”

Sandra May DuMont took a long drink of iced tea and picked up the phone to call a travel agent.

“H
e’s out there? Again?”

A dish fell to the tile kitchen floor and shattered.

“Gwen, go down to the rec room. Now.”

“But, Daddy,” she whispered, “how can he be? They said six months. They
promised
six months. At least!”

He peered through the curtains, squinting, and his heart sank. “It’s him.” He sighed. “It’s him. Gwen, do what I told you. The rec room. Now.” Then he shouted into the dining room, “Doris!”

His wife hurried into the kitchen. “What is it?”

“He’s back. Call the police.”

“He’s
back
?” the woman muttered in a grim voice.

“Just do it. And Gwen, I don’t want him to see you. Go downstairs. I’m not going to tell you again.”

Doris lifted the phone and called the sheriff’s office. She only had to hit one button; they’d put the number on the speed dialer ages ago.

Ron stepped to the back porch and looked outside.

The hours after dinner, on a cool springtime evening like this, were the most peaceful moments of the year in Locust Grove. The suburb was a comforting thirty-two miles from New York City, on the North Shore of Long Island. Some truly wealthy folk lived here—new money as well as some Rockefeller and Morgan hand-me-downs. Then there were the aspiring rich and a few popular artists, some ad agency CEOs. Mostly, though, the village was made up of people like the Ashberrys. Living comfortably in their six-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, commuting on the LIRR or driving to their management jobs at publishing or computer companies on Long Island.

This April evening found the dogwoods in bloom and the fragrance of mulch and the first-cut grass of the year filling the misty air. And it found the brooding form of young Harle Ebbers crouching in the bushes across the street from Ron Ashberry’s house, staring into the bedroom window of sixteen-year-old Gwen.

Oh, dear Lord, Ron thought hopelessly. Not again. It’s not starting again. . . .

Doris handed the cordless phone to her husband and he asked for Sheriff Hanlon. As he waited to be connected, he inhaled the stale, metallic scent of the porch screen he rested his head against. He looked across his yard, forty yards, to the bush that had become a fixture in his daydreams and the focus of his nightmares.

It was a juniper, about six feet long and three
high, gracing a small municipal park. It was beside this languorous bush that twenty-year-old Harle Ebbers had spent much of the last eight months, in his peculiar crouch, stalking Gwen.

“How d’he get out?” Doris wondered.

“I don’t see what good it’ll do,” Gwen said from the kitchen, panic in her voice, “to call the police. He’ll be gone before they get here. He always is.”

“Go downstairs!” Ron called. “Don’t let him see you.”

The thin blonde girl, her face as beautiful as Lladro porcelain, backed away. “I’m scared.”

Doris, a tall, muscular woman exuding the confidence of the competitive athlete she’d been in her twenties, put her arm around her daughter. “Don’t worry, honey. Your father and I are here. He’s not going to hurt you. You hear me?”

The girl nodded uncertainly and vanished down the stairs.

Ron Ashberry kept his gaze coldly fixed on the figure next to the bush.

It was a cruel irony that this tragedy had happened to Gwen.

Conservative by nature, Ron had always been horrified by the neglect he saw on the part of families in the city to which he commuted every day. Absent fathers, crack-addict mothers, guns and gangs, little girls turning to prostitution. He vowed that nothing bad would ever happen to his daughter. His plan was simple: he’d protect Gwen, raise her the right way, teach her good moral values, family values—which, thank God, people had started talking about again. He’d keep her close to home, insist that
she get good grades, learn sports, music and social skills.

Then, when she turned eighteen, he’d give her freedom. She’d be old enough then to make the correct decisions—about boys, about careers, about money. She’d go to an Ivy League college and then return to the North Shore for marriage or a career. This was serious work, hard work, this child rearing. But Ron was seeing the results of his efforts. Gwen had scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the PSATs. She never talked back to adults; her coaches reported she was one of the best athletes they’d ever worked with; she never snuck cigarettes or liquor, never whined when Ron told her no driver’s license until she was eighteen. She understood how much he loved her and why he wouldn’t let her go into Manhattan with her girlfriends or spend the weekend on Fire Island unchaperoned.

And so he felt it was utterly unfair that Harle Ebbers picked his daughter to stalk.

It had begun last fall. One evening Gwen had been particularly quiet throughout the evening meal. When Ron had asked her to go pick a book out of his library so he could read it aloud, Gwen just stood at the kitchen window, staring outside.

“Gwen, are you listening to me? I asked you to get me a book.”

She’d turned and to his shock he saw she was crying.

“Honey, I’m sorry,” Ron’d said automatically and stepped forward to put his arm around her. He knew the problem. Several days ago she’d asked if she could take a trip to Washington, D.C., with two
teachers and six of the girls and boys from her social studies class. Ron had considered letting her go. But then he’d checked out the group and found that two of the girls had discipline problems—they’d been found drinking in a park near the school last summer. He’d told Gwen she couldn’t go and she’d seemed disappointed. He’d assumed this was what troubled her today. “I wish I could let you go, Gwen—” he’d said.

“Oh, no. Daddy, it’s not that stupid trip. I don’t care about that. It’s something else. . . .”

She’d fallen into his arms, sobbing. He was filled with overwhelming parental love. And an unbearable agony for her pain. “What is it, honey? Tell me. You can tell me anything.”

She’d glanced out the window.

Following her gaze, he’d seen, in the park across the street, a figure crouching in the bushes.

“Oh, Daddy, he’s following me.”

Horrified, Ron had led her to the living room, calling out, “Doris, we’re having a family conference! Come in here! Now!” He’d gestured his wife into the room then sat next to Gwen. “What is it, baby? Tell us.”

Ron preferred that Doris pick up Gwen at school. But occasionally, if his wife was busy, he let Gwen walk home. There were no bad neighborhoods in Locust Grove, certainly not along the trim, manicured route to the high school—the greatest threats were usually aesthetic: a cheap bungalow or a flock of plastic flamingos, herds of plaster Bambis.

Or so Ron had believed.

That autumn night Gwen had sat with her hands
in her lap, staring at the floor, and explained in a meek voice, “I was walking home today, okay? And there was this guy.”

Ron’s heart had gone cold, hands shaking, anger growing within him.

“Tell us,” Doris had said. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Not like that. He just like started to talk to me. He’s going, ‘You’re so pretty. I’ll bet you’re smart. Where do you live?’ ”

“Did he know you?”

“I don’t think so. He acted all funny. Like he was sort of retarded, you know. Kind of saying things that didn’t make sense. I told him you didn’t want me to talk to strangers and I ran home.”

“Oh, you poor thing.” Her mother embraced her.

“I didn’t think he followed me. But . . .” She bit her lip. “But that’s him.”

Ron had jogged toward the bush where he’d seen the young man. He was in a curious pose. It reminded Ron of one of those green plastic soldiers he’d buy when he was a kid. The kneeling soldier, aiming his rifle.

The boy saw Ron coming and fled.

The sheriff’s office knew all about the boy. Harle’s parents had moved to Locust Grove a few months before, virtually driven out of Ridgeford, Connecticut, because their son had targeted a young blonde, about Gwen’s age, and had begun following her. The boy was of average intelligence but had suffered psychotic episodes when younger. The police hadn’t been able to stop him because he’d only hurt one person in all his months of stalking—the girl’s brother
had attacked him. Harle had nearly beaten the boy to death but all charges were dropped on the grounds of self-defense.

The Ebbers family had at last fled the state, hoping to start over fresh.

But the only change was that Harle had found himself a new victim: Gwen.

The boy had fallen into his obsessive vigil: staring into Gwen’s classrooms at school and kneeling beside the juniper bush, keeping his eyes glued to the girl’s bedroom.

Ron had tried to get a restraining order but, without any illegal conduct on Harle’s part, the magistrate couldn’t issue one.

Finally, after Harle had stationed himself beside the juniper bush for six nights straight, Ron stormed into the state mental health department and demanded that something be done. The department had implored the boy’s parents to send him to a private-care hospital for six months. The county would pay ninety percent of the fee. The Ebbers agreed and, under an involuntary commitment order, the boy was taken off to Garden City.

But now he was back, kneeling like a soldier beside the infamous juniper bush, only one week after the ambulance had carted him off.

Finally Sheriff Hanlon came on the line.

“Ron, I was going to call you.”

“You knew about him?” Ron shouted. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us? He’s out there right now.”

“I just found out about it myself. The boy talked to a shrink at the hospital. Apparently he gave the right answers and they decided to release him.
Keeping him any longer on a dicey order like that, there was a risk of liability for the county.”

“What about liability for my daughter?” Ron spat out.

“There’ll be a hearing in a few weeks but they can’t keep him in the hospital till then. Probably not after the hearing either, the way it’s shaking out.”