Pretty Baby: A Gripping Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Mary Kubica

  “Why?” I asked, and then, “Where?”

  “There’s a bag,” he said, “by the front door. A suitcase. It has everything you’ll need.” And he pulled on my hand and led me down the hall, through a house that was nearly silent, the door to Joseph and Miriam’s bedroom pulled closed. I cringed as I passed that bedroom door, fearful of what was or wasn’t on the other side.

  I couldn’t decide what was worse: what was there or what I imagined to be there, though there was no way to know for sure.

  “But what about Joseph?” I asked, though I knew, between the blood and the closed door, by the fact that Matthew and I were moving freely down the wooden steps—making no effort to mute the sounds of the squeaky floors—that Joseph was dead.

  That the scream had belonged to Joseph.

  That the blood on the knife was his.

  He clutched me by the hand on the bottom step and forced me into him. He whispered into my ear, “I know what he did to you,” and I felt my legs give, knowing he knew my secret. Knowing he knew Joseph’s secret. Somehow it was a weight off, the fact that I no longer had to carry that baggage alone. I imagined, all those years, Joseph welcoming himself onto the bed beside me, and Matthew, on the other side of the wall, listening. I clung to Matthew there, at the bottom of the steps, not wanting to go, though he said again, “You have to go, Claire. You have to go now,” and unclasped my hands from the small of his back.

  “Where?” I asked, my voice anxious and scared. I’d never been on my own before in my whole entire life.

  “There’s a cab,” he said, “outside. Waiting. He’ll take you to the bus station,” and it was only then that I noticed the headlights of a car parked at the curb.

  “But I don’t want to go,” I cried, my eyes darting to Matthew, ambiguous in the blackness of the night. “I want to stay with you.” And I clung to him like Velcro, wrapping my arms around his back and for a second he let me, just a split second, before he unclamped my fingers and pried me away. I was crying, this heaving cry that came from somewhere deep within. “Come with me,” I begged, weeping so hard that I had to force the words out between breaths. Come. With. Me. Matthew was the only person I had in the whole wide world. Momma had left me. Lily had left me. And now Matthew was leaving me, too.

  “Claire.”

  “Come with me,” I pleaded like the child I was. I stamped my foot and threw my arms across myself with a pout on my face. “Come with me, come with me,” and I tried pulling on his arm and dragging him to the door, toward that front door that stood open, the window to the side of the door smashed in, shards of jagged glass strewn upon the floor.

  I froze solid for a second and stared.

  This is how Matthew had found his way in.

  “You have to go, Claire.” Matthew jammed money into my hand, a stack of cash, and hurried to grab the leather suitcase from the floor, towing me behind him by the hand. “Go now,” he said, “before...” but he didn’t finish. “Just go,” he said, but as he did, he pulled me close, absorbing me in his arms. He was shaking; he’d broken out in a cold sweat. He didn’t want me to go any more than I wanted to go. I knew that. And yet he thrust that suitcase into my fickle hand and pushed—actually pushed—me through the door, as I carefully stepped over the broken glass on my way out.

  I looked back once, only once, to see him standing in the doorway, the knife hidden behind his back, his face bound in wistfulness and melancholy. He, too, was sad.

  I remember that the night was crisp, something only my brain perceived, not the rest of me. There was the knowledge that it was cold—like someone told me or something—but I never felt that it was cold. Like I was sleepwalking or something, in a dream. I could hear myself sobbing like I was watching it on TV. An observer, not a participant. I don’t remember telling the driver—a short, shadowy man, nothing more than a muddled voice to me, a pair of eyes in the rearview mirror—where to take me. It was as if he knew. I got in the car and he sped off, down the choppy street, driving fast and jerky, and I remember thinking that he must have heard Matthew say to hurry or something because he was going so fast. Matthew must have told him. I clung to the door handle and braced myself for every turn, wondering if this is what it felt like when Momma died, when that Datsun Bluebird started spinning somersaults down the road.

  The building that the driver pulled up to was short and gray, the word Greyhound written across the brick in big blue letters. It was on the corner of some street, a city street that was all but abandoned at this time of night. Outside, an older woman stood, with her sparse gray hair, puffing on a cigarette, her free hand thrust deep in the pocket of a flimsy coat.

  “Seventeen dollars,” the cabdriver said with a grating voice, and sitting like a birdbrain in the backseat of that cab, I asked, “Huh?”

  He pointed to the stack of money in my trembling hand and said again, “Seventeen dollars,” and I counted out the fare from the cash Matthew had handed me, and carried that leather suitcase inside, watching the woman as I passed by.

  “Spare some change,” she said to me, but I folded up that money and squeezed it in my hand, real tight so she wouldn’t see.

  Inside I found a vending machine, and the first thing I did was slip in a dollar and press the red button. A soda dropped down, faster than expected, and I took it and sank sideways into the rows of empty chairs. Out the window, it was still dark, the first whiff of daylight creeping up from the bottom of the sky. A grumpy old man sat behind the ticket booth, counting dollar bills into a register, grunting all the while he did so. I could hear a TV, though I didn’t see it, the sound of early morning news, traffic and the day’s weather.

  I didn’t know what I was doing here. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to go. It hadn’t sunk in yet: the fact that Joseph was dead. Tears clung to my cheeks, my eyes feeling fat and puffy from crying. My heart hadn’t slowed its pace, a relentless gallop that made my head start to spin. Tucked beneath the sweatshirt, on a white undershirt, were splotches of blood that had spattered me when Matthew came tearing into my room.

  Joseph’s blood.

  I was sure of it. I tried hard to piece the bits and pieces together: the broken glass, the knife, the guttural scream that awoke me from sleep. Matthew appearing in the door, his words: Go now. Before... Before what? I sat there and wondered. Before the police arrived. Before Isaac appeared. It had yet to really hit me: the fact that I was on my own. That I no longer belonged to Joseph. That he would no longer be coming into my room.

  I sat there for I don’t know how long. Taking slow sips of my soda, listening to the TV. It was warm in the bus station, and bright. I stared for some time at a fluorescent light flickering on the ceiling and watched as a man came into the station in jeans and a tattered T-shirt, a Huskers cap on his head. I thought that he should’ve been cold with just the T-shirt on, but he didn’t look cold. He looked at me, out of the corner of his eye, trying to make it seem as if he wasn’t staring. But I could tell he was. He carried an overstuffed duffel bag in one hand, too much stuff inside to zip it clear shut.

  He nodded, kind of a half nod, as if saying I see you, and then walked, smack dab to a chart on the wall, and when he got there he just stood and stared. I saw the words on the wall above that chart.

  Departures.

  Arrivals.

  The bus schedule.

  I waited until he purchased a ticket to Chicago from the grumpy man behind the booth and then sulked into a hard chair on the other side of the station, and pulled that cap over his eyes and appeared to sleep. I slid from my chair—wiping my eyes with the back of a sleeve—and wandered to that chart on the wall, staring at so many words and numbers it made me dizzy. Kearney. Columbus. Chicago. Cincinnati.

  And then I saw it, two words so unexpected, I knew they were meant to be: Fort Collins.

  Fort Collins. The same words that I’d seen time and again on the return address labels of those letters Big Lily sent me from her home in Co
lorado. My Lily, little Lily, lived in Fort Collins, Colorado.

  It was time to go to her. To see my sister again.

  HEIDI

  Graham stands three feet away in the darkened room, watching with gluttonous eyes as I lower my undergarments to the ground, the pale pink bra falling upon the kitten heels and pink panties, beside sheer nylons now wadded into a ball and cast aside.

  His eyes look me up and down deliberately, unhurriedly, coming to a standstill on the diagonal scar, red and ever-present, running from my belly button down, its tail end lost amid pubic hairs. A constant reminder.

  I dismiss that scar, telling myself it simply isn’t true, reminding myself of the baby, sound asleep on the pink fleece blanket next door.

  Graham says nothing as his warm hands come to rest on my waistline and he leads me to the bed, setting me down on a gray duvet that slips halfway to the bedroom floor, beside pillows that have yet to be replaced since morning. I stare past him, at a ceiling fan—brushed nickel with cherry blades—blowing papers one by one from a dresser and onto the floor, Graham’s latest work in progress, though he’s so caught up in the moment he fails to notice, fails to notice how the breeze of the ceiling fan spawns gooseflesh upon my bare arms, my legs, my chest.

  He stands at the end of the bed, slipping an undershirt up over his head and as he does so, as I lean in to run my hands down the oblique and abdominal muscles that line his torso, the faint, fair hair, the alcove of a belly button, the antique brass button that affixes his jeans, I hear it.

  I hear the baby cry.

  Louder than the blare of a car horn, an unexpected peal of thunder, the roar of a steam engine.

  I stand up quickly, gathering my clothing from the bedroom, the living room floor; Graham, deaf to the baby’s cry, begs me not to leave. “Heidi,” he says, his voice placating in a way that I bet makes it impossible for women to say no. “What’s wrong?” His eyes stare at me, at my eyes, as I step into the dress, clinging to the nylons, the panties in my hand. I secure the buttons up my back—mismatched and irregular.

  “It’s just—” I say, feeling flushed, unable to let go of the sensation of Graham’s hands, his eyes, on my body, staring at me in a way Chris no longer stares. “I forgot there was something. Something I needed to do.”

  I hear the crying when I am still in Graham’s doorway, loud, wretched crying, and I begin to run, the frantic clamor of kitten heels pounding on a wooden floor, as Graham calls to me by name.

  “Heidi.”

  But he doesn’t follow.

  When I come into my home, there she is, the baby, sprawled across a pink blanket, on the floor.

  Sound asleep.

  It is not what I imagined.

  What I expected to find was the blanket folded over her like the edges of an omelet, a handful of fleece stuffed in her angry hand. Her skin cardinal red, her cry thorny, like goose grass, rasping, scratchy, as if she’s been crying for days, weeks, more.

  Instead, she is silent, save for the delicate inhalation and exhalation of air. She lies inert on the pink blanket, her features calm and composed while I stand there in the doorway, gasping for breath.

  She is asleep, I tell myself, finding it utterly impossible, for I was certain—as certain as I live and breathe—that I heard a baby cry.

  I run to the child and sweep her tiny figure from the floor, up into my arms, waking her from her daze.

  “There now,” I croon quietly into her ear. “Mommy is here. Mommy won’t ever leave you again.”

  WILLOW

  Matthew had given me near everything I could possibly need inside that suitcase: money, and lots of it, some food: candy bars and granola bars and cookies. I didn’t know for sure how he happened upon the money. I settled into the bus, clutching it close to me, the only possession in the world that was mine. As the bus crisscrossed rural Nebraska, the sun making its ascent into the late-winter sky, I laid it upon my rickety lap and opened the clasp to reveal a book like all those he’d slipped into my bedroom when I was a kid: The Fifty States. I skimmed through it, seeing that he’d left messages for me in messy black ink, smudged between the slippery pages of the thick book. Beside Alaska: Too cold. Nebraska: No way. Illinois: Maybe. A guidebook to my future: that was Matthew’s intent.

  Montana: A good place to hide.

  I wondered if that was what I needed to do: find a place to hide. Would someone be looking for me? Joseph, maybe, or maybe the police. No, I reminded myself. Not Joseph. Joseph was dead.

  I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep didn’t come easily. All I could see were Matthew’s deranged eyes as he tore into my room, the watery blood—colorless in the darkness of the room—on the knife. I heard Joseph’s scream over and over again, a ringing in my ears, and tried hard not to imagine what had happened when I left, to wonder where Matthew was right then and there, and whether or not he was okay.

  I had this suspicion that everyone was looking at me, that everyone knew. I sunk low into the seat and tried to hide, refusing to make eye contact with anyone, refusing to force out a stale hello, even to the man who sat on the other side of the aisle, in his own teal chair, in a black suit and clerical collar, leafing through a worn copy of the Bible.

  Especially not the man on the other side of the aisle.

  I closed my eyes and tried hard to pretend that he wasn’t there, that he couldn’t detect my sins, sniff them out like a bloodhound on a scent trail.

  Sometime after noon I started to recognize the scenery out that tinted window: gigantic green signs with town names I knew, their names written in bold white letters: North Platte and Sutherland and Roscoe. A plaque lining the road: Entering Keith County. Familiar whitewashed barns and cattle fencing, an abandoned wooden farmhouse sloping so far in one direction I was certain, even eight years ago, the last time I laid eyes on it, it would slide right over onto the yellowing grass and collapse. I found myself sitting upright, my nose pressed to the frigid glass, hearing Momma’s voice against the drone of the bus’s engine: I love you like pigs love slop.

  And then that bus veered off the road toward Highway 61, signs leading the way to Lake McConaughy where I built many a sandcastle as a kid, Momma waking up with the urge to go on the brightest of summer days and loading Lily and me into the Bluebird for the short drive to the lake. She never remembered the sunscreen, and we always burned to a crisp, all of us, comparing freckles and pink noses later in the day, pressing on the tips of our noses until they turned white. I stared out the window while that bus pulled right on into the Conoco parking lot, right there beside the Super 8 and the Comfort Inn, just across from the Wendy’s where Momma and I ate so long ago it was like another life. The Pamida was there and the truck stop; just like I remembered. I remembered it all. The bus was passing through Ogallala on the way to Fort Collins. This was Ogallala.

  I was home.

  When the bus came to a stop and passengers unloaded and headed into the Conoco to use the restroom and grab a snack, I had the strongest urge to snatch that suitcase and run. My heart was thumping loud and heavy in my chest, arms and hands quivering. I went so far as to push past the handful of new riders who were boarding the bus for the next leg of the trip. “Excuse me,” and “Pardon me,” I muttered as I pushed the suitcase ahead of me, lumbering down the narrow aisle in a clumsy manner. I got more than one dirty look. A girl with longish hair the color of pralines parroted, “Excuse you,” as I passed by too close, stepping on her fancy shoe. But I didn’t care.

  I convinced myself that I had the tiniest inkling how to get home, to the prefab house, though chances were good I didn’t know how to do it when I was eight years old. But it didn’t matter. I could’ve laid down in a roadside ditch somewhere in Ogallala and it still would’ve felt like home. I could feel it in my blood and in my pores. Ogallala. Home. And wrapped up in all that: Momma and Daddy. There was this silly thought filling my mind: maybe Momma was still here. Maybe it was just a whole big misunderstanding. I’d walk back t
o the prefab home, and there Momma would be with Daddy and baby Lily, who was not Rose, who did not have a sister who was not me. And all of a sudden, walking through the rasping screen door, I’d be eight years old again and it would be as if time hadn’t happened. Time had stood still. Momma was alive, her energy and enthusiasm filling the flavorless rooms of that tiny home as it used to do. The house would be exactly the same as we’d left it. There would be no other family living there, no little girl sleeping in my bed. And I’d never have heard of a man named Joseph. Just a mistake, I told myself as I climbed down those enormous bus steps and onto the Conoco parking lot. The cold air startled me—begged me to change my mind—but I ignored it. I started off, across the parking lot, toward the street, a look of defiance streaked across my face. A refusal to believe what I knew inside me to be true. Just a whole big misunderstanding.

  Momma is alive. Daddy is alive. My feet pounded on the pavement, fast and determined. The suitcase was awkward, smacking my right leg with each and every step I took.

  What I found out was that I did remember how to get to that prefab house. Maybe my mind didn’t know, but my feet certainly did ’cause they carried me right on out of that parking lot, down Prospector Drive. The suitcase didn’t bother me, nor did the blustery air. I was on autopilot, or cruise control as Daddy used to say about driving the truck when I asked how come he didn’t get tired with all that driving. My mind was stuck on Momma and this expectation that she was still alive as I trudged past the old brick buildings I remembered from when I was a kid, under leafless trees that spotted First, Second, Third and Fourth Streets, beside the carbon copy white homes and low-lying telephone wires. In time the trees and the homes began to multiply, the small, nearly deserted town drifting away. And then onto Spruce Street with its mobile homes and open land and billboards, nearly a mile’s walk with cars soaring by at speeds that made the hair whirl around my head.