“Marino, let go of me. You’re hurting me. Let’s go sit back down in the living room.” She tries to sound unafraid, her arms painfully pinned behind her. He presses hard against her. “Marino. Stop it. You don’t mean this. You’re very drunk.”
He kisses her and grabs her, and she turns her head away, tries to push his hands away, struggles and tells him no. The motorcycle key clatters to the floor as he kisses her and she resists him and tries to make him listen. He rips open her blouse. She tells him to stop, tries to stop him as he tears at her clothes. She tries to push away his hands, and tells him he’s hurting her, and then she doesn’t struggle with him anymore because he’s somebody else. He isn’t Marino. He’s a stranger attacking her inside her house. She sees the pistol in the back of his jeans as he drops to his knees, hurting her with his hands and mouth.
“Marino? This is what you want? To rape me? Marino?” She sounds so calm and unafraid, her voice seems to come from outside her body. “Marino? Is this what you want? To rape me? I know you don’t want that. I know you don’t.”
He suddenly stops. He releases her, and the air moves and is cool on her skin, wet from his saliva and chafed and raw from his violence and his beard. He covers his face with his hands and hunches forward on his knees and hugs her around her legs and begins to sob like a child. She slides the pistol out of his waistband as he cries.
“Let go.” She tries to move away from him. “Let me go.”
On his knees, he covers his face with his hands. She drops out the pistol’s magazine and pulls back the slide to make sure there isn’t a round in the chamber. She tucks the gun in the drawer of a table by the door and picks up the motorcycle key. She hides it and the magazine inside the umbrella stand. She helps Marino up, helps him back to the guest bedroom off the kitchen. The bed is small, and he seems to fill every inch of it as she makes him lie down. She pulls off his boots and covers him with a quilt.
“I’ll be right back,” she says, leaving the light on.
In the guest bath, she fills a glass with water and shakes four Advil tablets from the bottle. She covers herself with a robe, her wrists aching, her flesh raw and burning, the memory of his hands and mouth and tongue sickening. She bends over the toilet and gags. She leans against the edge of the sink and takes deep breaths and looks at her red face in the mirror and seems as much a stranger to herself as he is. She splashes herself with cold water, washes out her mouth, washes him away from every place he touched. She washes away tears, and it takes a few minutes to get control of herself. She returns to the guest room where he’s snoring.
“Marino. Wake up. Sit up.” She helps him, plumps pillows behind him. “Here, take these and drink the entire glass of water. You need to drink a lot of water. You’re going to feel like hell in the morning, but this will help.”
He drinks the water and takes the Advil, then turns his face to the wall as she brings him another glass. “Turn off the light,” he says to the wall.
“I need you to stay awake.”
He doesn’t answer her.
“You don’t have to look at me. But you must stay awake.”
He doesn’t look at her. He stinks like whisky and cigarettes and sweat, and the smell of him reminds her and she feels her soreness, feels where he has been and is nauseated again.
“Don’t worry,” he says thickly. “I’ll leave and you won’t ever have to see me. I’ll vanish for good.”
“You’re very, very drunk and don’t know what you’re doing,” she says. “But I want you to remember it. You need to stay awake long enough so you’ll remember this tomorrow. So we can get past it.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I almost shot him. I wanted to so bad. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Who did you almost shoot?” she says.
“At the bar,” he says in his drunken gabble. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Tell me what happened at the bar.”
Silence as he stares at the wall, his breathing heavy again.
“Who did you almost shoot?” she asks loudly.
“He said he’d been sent.”
“Sent?”
“Made threats about you. I almost shot him. Then I come over here and acted just like him. I should kill myself.”
“You’re not going to kill yourself.”
“I should.”
“That will be worse than what you just did. Do you understand me?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look at her.
“If you kill yourself, I won’t feel sorry for you and I won’t forgive you,” she says. “Killing yourself is selfish, and none of us will forgive you.”
“I’m not good enough for you. I never will be. Go on and say it and get it over with once and for all.” He talks as if he has rags in his mouth.
The phone on the bedside table rings, and she picks it up.
“It’s me,” Benton says. “You saw what I sent? How are you?”
“Yes, and you?”
“Kay? Are you all right?”
“Yes, and you?”
“Christ. Is someone there?” he says, alarmed.
“Everything’s fine.”
“Kay? Is someone there?”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ve decided to stay home, work in the garden, ask Bull to come over and help.”
“You’re sure? You sure you’re okay with him?”
“I am now,” she says.
Four o’clock in the morning, Hilton Head. Crashing waves spread white foam on the beach as if the heaving sea is frothing at the mouth.
Will Rambo is quiet on the wooden steps, and he walks the length of the boardwalk and climbs over the locked gate. The faux-Italianate villa is stucco with multiple chimneys and archways, and a sharply pitched red barrel-tile roof. In the back are copper lights, and a stone table with a clutter of filthy ashtrays and empty glasses, and not so long ago, her car key. Since then, she has used the spare, although she drives infrequently. Mostly, she goes nowhere, and he is silent as he moves about, and palmetto trees and pines sway in the wind.
Trees waving like wands, casting their spell over Rome, and flower petals blowing like snow along Via D’Monte Tarpeo. Poppies were blood-red, and wisteria draped over ancient brick walls was purple like bruises. Pigeons bobbed along steps, and women fed feral cats Whiskas and eggs from plastic plates among the ruins.
It was a fine day for walking, and the tourist traffic wasn’t heavy, and she was a little drunk but at ease with him, happy with him. He knew she would be.
“I would like you to meet my father,” he said to her as they sat on a wall and looked at feral cats, and she remarked repeatedly that they were pitiful stray cats, inbred and deformed, and someone should save them.
“Not stray but feral. There’s a difference. These feral cats want to be here and would rip you apart if you tried to rescue them. They aren’t something discarded or hurt with nothing to look forward to but darting from garbage can to garbage can and hiding under houses until someone catches them and puts them to sleep.”
“Why would someone put them to sleep?” she asked.
“Because they would. That’s what would happen once they’re removed from their haven and end up in unsafe places where they are hit by cars and chased by dogs and constantly endangered and wounded beyond repair. Unlike these cats. Look at them, all alone, and no one dares go near them unless they allow it. They want to be exactly where they are, down there in the ruins.”
“You’re weird,” she said, nudging him. “I thought so when we met, but you’re cute.”
“Come on,” he said, and he helped her up.
“I’m too warm,” she complained, because he had draped his long, black coat around her and made her wear a cap and his dark glasses, even though the day wasn’t cold or sunny.
“You’re very famous, and people will stare,” he reminded her. “You know they will, and we can’t have people staring.”
“I need t
o find my friends before they think I’ve been kidnapped.”
“Come on. You must see the apartment. It’s quite spectacular. I’ll drive you there because I can tell you’re tired, and you can call your friends and invite them to join us, if you like. We’ll have some very fine wine and cheeses.”
Then darkness, as if a light went out in his head, and he woke up to scenes in brilliant broken pieces, like brilliant broken pieces of a shattered stained-glass window that once told a story or a truth.
The stairs on the north side of the house haven’t been swept, and the door leading into the laundry room hasn’t been opened since the housekeeper was here last, almost two months ago. On either side of the stairs are hibiscus bushes, and behind them through a pane of glass he can see the alarm panel and its red light. He opens his tackle box and withdraws a saddle-grip glass cutter with a carbide tip. He cuts out a pane of glass and sets it on the sandy dirt behind the bushes as the puppy inside his crate begins to bay, and Will hesitates, quite calm. He reaches inside and unlocks the deadbolt, then opens the door and the alarm begins to beep, and he enters the code to silence it.
He’s inside a house he has watched for many months. He’s imagined this and planned it at such great length that finally, the act of doing it is easy and perhaps a little disappointing. He squats and wiggles his sandy fingers through the spaces in the wire crate and whispers to the basset hound, “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”
The basset hound stops baying, and Will lets the dog lick the back of his hand, where there is no glue and no special sand.
“Good boy,” he whispers. “Don’t worry.”
His sandy feet carry him from the laundry room toward the sound of the movie playing again in the great room. Whenever she smokes outside, she has a bad habit of leaving the door open wide as she sits on the steps and stares at the black-bottom pool that is a gaping wound, and some of the smoke drifts inside as she sits there and smokes and stares at the pool. The smoke has permeated whatever it touches, and he smells the stale stench and it gives a flinty edge to the air, a hard, gray matte finish like her aura. It is sickly. A near-death aura.
The walls and ceiling are washed with ocher and umber, the colors of the earth, and the stone floor is the color of the sea. Every doorway is an arch, and there are huge pots of acanthus that are limp and brown because she hasn’t been watering them properly, and there is dark hair on the stone floor. Head hair, pubic hair, from when she paces about, sometimes nude, ripping at her hair. She’s asleep on the couch, her back to him, the bald spot on the top of her head pale like a full moon.
His bare, sandy feet are quiet, and the movie plays. Michael Douglas and Glenn Close are drinking wine to an aria from Madama Butterfly playing on the hi-fi. Will stands in the arch and watches Fatal Attraction, knows all of it, has seen it many, many times, has watched it with her through the window without her knowing. He hears the dialogue in his head before the characters are saying it, and then Michael Douglas is leaving, and Glenn Close is angry and rips off his shirt.
Ripping, tearing, desperate to get at what was underneath. He had so much blood on his hands he couldn’t see the color of his skin as he tried to tuck Roger’s intestines in, and the wind and sand blasted both of them and they could barely see or hear each other.
She sleeps on the couch, too drunk and drugged to hear him come in. She doesn’t feel his specter floating near her, waiting to carry her away. She will thank him.
“Will! Help me! Please help me! Oh, please, God!” Screaming. “It hurts so bad! Please don’t let me die!”
“You’re not going to die.” Holding him. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here.”
“I can’t stand it!”
“God will never give you more than you can bear.” His father always saying that, ever since Will was a boy.
“It isn’t true.”
“What isn’t true?” His father asked him in Rome as they drank wine in the dining room and Will was holding the stone foot of antiquity.
“It was all over my hands and my face, and I tasted it, tasted him. I tasted as much of him as I could to keep him alive in me because I promised he wouldn’t die.”
“We should go outside. Let’s go have a coffee.”
Will turns a knob on the wall, turns up the surround sound until the movie is blaring, and then she’s sitting up, and then she’s screaming, and he can barely hear her screams over the movie as he leans close to her, puts a sandy finger to her lips, shaking his head, slowly, to hush her. He refills her glass with vodka, hands it to her, and nods for her to drink. He sets the tackle box, flashlight, and camera on the rug and sits next to her on the couch and looks deeply into her bleary, bloodshot, panicky eyes. She has no eyelashes, has pulled all of them out. She doesn’t try to get up and run. He nods for her to drink, and she does. Already she’s accepting what must happen. She will thank him.
The movie vibrates the house and her lips say, “Please don’t hurt me.”
She was pretty once.
“Shhhhh.” He shakes his head, hushing her again with his sandy finger, touching her lips, pressing them hard against her teeth. His sandy fingers open the tackle box. Inside are more bottles of glue and glue remover, and the bag of sand, and a black-handled six-inch double-edged wallboard saw and reciprocating saw blade, and various hobby knives.
Then the voice in his head. Roger crying, screaming, bloody froth bubbling from his mouth. Only it isn’t Roger crying out, it’s the woman begging with bloody lips, “Please don’t hurt me!”
As Glenn Close tells Michael Douglas to fuck off, and the volume vibrates the great room.
She panics and sobs, shaking like someone having a seizure. He pulls his legs up on the couch, sits cross-legged. She stares at his sandpaper hands and sandpaper bottoms of mangled bare feet and the tackle box, the camera on the floor, and the realization of the inevitable seizes her blotchy, puffy face. He notices how unkempt her nails are and is overwhelmed by that same feeling he gets when he spiritually embraces people who are suffering unbearably and he releases them from their pain.
He can feel the subwoofer in his bones.
Her raw, bloody lips move. “Please don’t hurt me, please, please don’t,” and she cries and her nose runs and she wets her bloody lips with her tongue. “What do you want? Money? Please don’t hurt me.” Her bloody lips move.
He takes off his shirt and khaki pants, neatly folds them, places them on the coffee table. He takes off his underwear, places it on top of his other clothes. He feels the power. It spikes through his brain like an electric shock, and he grabs her hard around the wrists.
Chapter 11
Dawn. It looks like it might rain.
Rose gazes out a window of her corner apartment, the ocean gently lapping against the seawall across Murray Boulevard. Near her building—once a splendid hotel—are some of the most expensive homes in Charleston, formidable waterfront mansions she has photographed and arranged in a scrapbook that she peruses from time to time. It’s almost impossible for her to believe what’s happened, that she’s living both a nightmare and a dream.
When she moved to Charleston, her one request was that she live close to the water. “Close enough to know it’s there” is how she described it. “I suspect this will be the last time I’ll follow you anywhere,” she said to Scarpetta. “At my age, I don’t want a yard to bother with, and I’ve always wanted to live on the water, but not a marsh with that rotten-egg smell. The ocean. If only I could have the ocean at least close enough to walk to it.”
They spent a lot of time looking. Rose ended up on the Ashley River in a run-down apartment that Scarpetta, Lucy, and Marino renovated. It didn’t cost Rose a penny, and then Scarpetta gave her a raise. Without it, Rose couldn’t afford the lease, but that fact was never mentioned. All Scarpetta said was that Charleston is an expensive city compared to other places they’ve lived, but even if it wasn’t, Rose deserved a raise.
She makes cof
fee and watches the news and waits for Marino to call. Another hour passes, and she wonders where he is. Another hour, and not a word, and her frustration grows. She’s left several messages for him saying she can’t come in this morning and could he drop by to help her move her couch? Besides, she needs to talk to him. She told Scarpetta she would. Now’s as good a time as any. It’s almost ten. She’s called his cell phone again, and it goes straight to voicemail. She looks out the open window, and cool air blows in from beyond the seawall, the water choppy and moody, the color of pewter.
She knows better than to move the couch herself but is impatient and irked enough to do it. She coughs as she ponders the folly of a feat that would have been manageable not all that long ago. She wearily sits and loses herself in memories of last night, of talking and holding hands and kissing on this same couch. She felt things she didn’t know she could feel anymore, all the while wondering how long it can last. She can’t give it up, and it can’t last, and she feels a sadness so deep and dark that there’s no point in trying to see what’s in it.
The phone rings, and it’s Lucy.
“How did it go?” Rose asks her.
“Nate says hello.”
“I’m more interested in what he said about you.”
“Nothing new.”
“That’s very good news.” Rose moves to the kitchen counter and picks up the television remote control. She takes a deep breath. “Marino’s supposed to come by to move my couch, but as usual…”
A pause, then Lucy says, “That’s one of the things I’m calling about. I was going to drop by to see Aunt Kay and tell her about my appointment with Nate. She doesn’t know I went. I always tell her after the fact so she doesn’t go crazy worrying. Marino’s bike is parked at her house.”
“Was she expecting you?”
“No.”
“What time was this?”
“Around eight.”
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