Sweetheart

by Chelsea Cain

  He heard, from somewhere far away, his wife say, “You’re hurting me.”

  And then he came. His whole body shook with it, his back muscles spasmed. All the rage and stress and grief he kept bottled up was screwed up on his face. And he opened his eyes.

  “Jesus Christ, Archie,” Debbie said. She was trembling, her eyes huge.

  Archie pulled out of her and rolled off her onto the bed. He could taste, in his mouth, a faint trace of peppermint. “I’m sorry,” he said, disgusted with himself.

  Debbie was quiet for a long time, sitting on the bed. She held the sheet tight around her torso, her knuckles white where she gripped it. “You see your therapist,” she said finally. “Tomorrow.” She got up and headed into the bathroom, taking the sheet with her. She turned on the faucet and looked in the bathroom mirror at Archie’s reflection, as Archie stared back at hers. “Or I will fucking drag you to her myself.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  Are you smoking?” Susan asked.

  It was dark in the room. Susan had been asleep until the smell of cigarette smoke had wrenched her from a perfectly lovely dream in which she and Archie Sheridan were having an adventure in a city that looked a lot like Atlantis. Susan lay there for a few minutes, inhaling the damning evidence of her mother’s midnight smoke break.

  “Mom?” she said.

  Her mother didn’t answer.

  Susan reached over and flipped on the bedside lamp. It cast a triangle of light that revealed Bliss hunched over the side of her bed, her naked back to Susan, holding a cigarette just below the edge of the mattress to hide the telltale glowing tip.

  Bliss’s blond dreads were tied back in a jumble that fell almost to her waist. She glanced back at Susan. “Just a puff,” she said, holding up her cigarette. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  Susan sat up. “No,” she said. “You can’t smoke in here. It’s no smoking. You’ll set off the fire alarm. Hold it out the window.”

  Bliss drew the cigarette to her mouth and took a drag. “The windows don’t open,” she said.

  Susan threw her head back in frustration. “Mom,” she groaned.

  Bliss sighed and stretched across the bed to grind the cigarette out in an empty glass on the bedside table. She was wearing black cotton underpants and red-and-orange striped knee socks. “You are such a cop,” she said.

  Susan glanced at her watch. It was just past three A.M. This could be her chance to get the hell out of there. She got out of bed and crept toward the door to the hall. She was wearing her I SMELL BULLSHIT T-shirt and underpants. Not exactly escape clothes, but this was recon. She opened the door a crack and peered out. Bennett looked up instantly from his chair and waved.

  Fuck, that guy never went home. He didn’t even nod off.

  Susan waved back, trying not to look too disappointed. “Can’t sleep,” she explained. Then she ducked back into the room and flung herself back onto her bed.

  “I may get fired,” Susan said. “That girl I was writing about, Molly Palmer. She’s dead. That was her body they found Saturday in the park.”

  Bliss looked up, interested. “How did she die?” she asked.

  “They don’t know,” Susan said. “They thought it was an OD. But the senator’s dead. And Parker. Again, tragic accident. But it’s got to be connected. And the Herald doesn’t want to run the story. Ian said it was because Castle had just died and they wanted to wait a few days to attack him. And now he says they can’t run it without Molly to verify her story.” Susan had promised Molly that everything would be all right. She had promised her a lot of things. She would have said anything to get her to talk. “I think he’s getting pressured,” Susan said.

  “You have notes?” Bliss asked. “Tapes of interviews?”

  “I gave all my story material to Archie,” Susan said.

  Bliss raised an eyebrow. “You gave the only evidence you have to support your story to the police?”

  Susan bit her lip. She hadn’t really thought of it that way. “Yeah,” she said.

  Bliss reached over and turned off the bedside light, throwing the room back into darkness. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think all those protests I took you to as a kid didn’t teach you anything at all.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  Is all this really necessary?” Sarah Rosenberg asked. She had agreed to see Archie first thing in the morning and her hair was still wet from a shower, a tangle of brown curls that left dark stains on the shoulders of her gray turtleneck. No makeup. A mug of coffee sat on a coaster on an end table next to her striped chair. The mug had a big red heart on it and the words WORLD’S GREATEST MOM.

  Archie took a sip of his own paper cup of coffee. Henry was sitting outside the door to Rosenberg’s home office. Two squad cars were parked out front. A patrol cop was on the porch. “It’s in case you try to murder me,” he said. The green velvet curtains were drawn. He couldn’t see the cherry trees.

  Rosenberg’s eyebrows knitted in concern. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  There was no faking it. He’d seen himself in the mirror that morning. His skin looked like paraffin wax. There were dark circles under his eyes. His hands trembled. “No,” Archie said.

  “How is your family?” Rosenberg asked.

  Archie glanced at the grandfather clock. Still three-thirty. Someday he was going to pay to get that clock fixed himself. “Just giddy,” Archie said.

  Rosenberg was quiet for a moment. She picked up the mug with the heart on it, took a sip, and put it back down. Tea, Archie realized from the smell. Not coffee. “I read about what happened at the school,” Rosenberg said. “That must have been difficult for you.”

  He didn’t want to believe that Gretchen would kill his children. Terrorize them, yes. But would she be able to actually murder Archie’s own flesh and blood? “She killed a little boy once,” Archie said softly. “It was notable because she’s only killed a couple of children.” Who was he kidding? “That we know of.” He put his elbow on the arm of the chair and rested his chin in his hand. Rosenberg sat, spine and neck erect, watching him. “Ten years old,” Archie continued. “He disappeared on the way home from playing at the park near his house. She made him drink drain cleaner and then she skinned him with a scalpel.” That had been in Washington State. He’d driven up for the autopsy. “Then she left his body, hog-tied, in his own backyard for his mother to find.”

  Rosenberg’s posture didn’t change. “You’ve seen a lot of violence,” she said simply.

  Archie took a sip of his coffee. It was a long time after his ten days with Gretchen that he could swallow anything without it burning his damaged esophagus. “It’s hard to drink drain cleaner,” he said. “You end up vomiting a lot of it back up. For the amount in his system, she would have had to hold him down, to force it down his throat.” Archie got out the pillbox. He didn’t even try to hide it. He opened the box and tapped a couple of pills into his hand. “I was lucky,” he said, putting the pills in his mouth. “She only fed it to me a few teaspoons at a time.”

  “You weren’t lucky, Archie,” Rosenberg said. “And you didn’t do anything to deserve it.”

  That was just it, though. He had.

  “I need to catch her,” Archie said. He couldn’t make his family happy, but he could keep them safe.

  “How?” Rosenberg asked.

  Archie smiled, remembering the engraving over the entrance to Ben and Sara’s school. “ ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire,’” he said.

  Rosenberg didn’t say anything.

  “Yeats,” Archie said.

  “I know who said it,” Rosenberg said. “I’m just not sure how it applies.”

  “She’ll keep killing,” Archie explained. He was growing more and more comfortable with his plan, convincing himself that it wasn’t mad. “She can’t stop herself. She burns everything she touches. How do you put out a fire? You feed it, and let it burn itself out.”

  “O
r you run as fast as you can, and call nine-one-one,” Rosenberg said.

  “Or that,” Archie said.

  CHAPTER

  39

  Debbie Sheridan answered the door in a white terry-cloth robe with the words ARLINGTON CLUB stitched in gold thread on the breast. Susan’s room hadn’t come with a robe. Her room hadn’t even come with shampoo.

  “Archie isn’t here,” Debbie said.

  Susan tried to crane her neck past Debbie to see if the box she’d given Archie was still where she’d left it. She could hear the kids’ voices inside. “I gave him a box of notes that I need to look at,” Susan said.

  Debbie seemed unimpressed by Susan’s predicament. “You’ll have to come back later,” she said, closing the door.

  Susan blinked at the closed door four inches from her nose. “Okay,” she said. She was going to go back to her own room, but as she brushed her fingers against the doorknob, she reconsidered and turned and headed for the door to the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” she heard a voice call. Bennett.

  Susan turned back to face him. “Do they ever give you time off?”

  “I volunteered to work double shifts,” Bennett said. He was sitting in the chair. He didn’t even look tired. “Where are you going?”

  “Out?” she said.

  Bennett stood up, carefully marked his place in the magazine he was reading and set it on the chair, and walked over to her. “You’re supposed to stay upstairs,” he said, eyes narrowing.

  Susan splayed her fingers in agony. “I need to have a cigarette,” she said.

  “Bad habit,” Bennett said.

  Susan smiled. “Have you ever been profiled? I could write a story about you. For the paper.” She fluttered her eyelids. “Something heroic.”

  “I have one assignment,” Bennett said, crossing his arms. “To sit here in this hallway and make sure you and Detective Sheridan are safe.”

  Susan reached into her pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes and wiggled them. “I could share,” she said.

  “I don’t smoke,” said Bennett.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” Susan asked.

  Bennett reached into his own pocket and pulled out a weathered-looking pack of Big Red. “Gum?”

  “Archie’s not here,” Susan told Bliss when she got back into the room.

  “It took you long enough. Where did you get the gum?”

  Susan’s phone rang. It was the Herald. She picked it up.

  “Just met with editorial,” Ian said. “They’re excited about the blog.” He paused dramatically. “I’ve got the headline—SAFE HOUSE DISPATCHES. You have content yet?”

  “Is the paper under pressure to bury the Molly Palmer story?” Susan asked.

  Ian was quiet. She listened to him get up and close his office door. Finally, he said, “Yes.”

  “Are you fighting for me?” Susan asked. “Behind the scenes?”

  “I know you won’t believe it,” Ian said. “But yes.”

  She believed him. Not because he wasn’t an ass, but because he was a journalist first. And then an ass. “I’ll do the dispatches,” Susan said. “But I want print. No more of this Web bullshit. And I’m only doing it because I want you to run the Castle story.”

  “More people look at the Web site than read the paper,” Ian said.

  “Oh,” Susan said. “I’ll post something in the next half hour.”

  It was dark by the time Susan posted that day’s final blog. The police had determined that Gretchen had been having an affair with B. D. Cavanaugh, the guard who’d killed himself. And Gretchen had killed the female transport guard and taken off with the male one. If he was still even alive. Since Susan was sequestered she had to do all her legwork over the phone and by e-mail. With her mother on the bed next to her watching daytime TV. Bliss didn’t have a TV in the house on principle, and whenever she was around one she was completely transfixed.

  Of course there were constant TV news updates about the manhunt for Gretchen. The way the TV newsies talked about it, you’d think they wanted her to get away.

  Susan closed her laptop. Gretchen Lowell on the loose. Archie Sheridan just down the hall. There she was in the thick of the biggest story of the year. Her blog had gotten over a million hits. She should have been thrilled. But she couldn’t get Molly Palmer out of her head.

  Susan slid the laptop onto the bed. Her legs were still warm from it.

  “You’re going to get thigh cancer from that thing,” Bliss said, her eyes still trained on the TV news.

  Susan stretched. “There’s no such thing as thigh cancer,” she said.

  “Not yet,” Bliss said.

  Susan felt stiff and tense and a little stir-crazy. “I need a cigarette,” she announced. “Will you distract Nurse Ratched?”

  Bliss flicked her attention off the screen to Susan. “Who?” she asked.

  “The cop in the hall,” Susan said.

  “How?” Bliss asked.

  Susan pulled on her sweatshirt. “Talk to him,” she said.

  Bliss’s face creased with concern. “What should I say?” she asked.

  Susan shrugged. “Ask him about windows,” she said.

  Charlene Wood was yammering away on the television, as the screen showed images of the Beauty Killer’s victims.

  “Are you sure it’s safe for you to go out?” Bliss asked.

  Susan stowed her cigarettes and a lighter in the pocket of her sweatshirt. “Keep an ear out,” Susan said, pulling up her hood. “If Gretchen Lowell tries to get me, I’ll scream.”

  It wasn’t even hard. Bliss went out and talked to Bennett and Susan was able to slip right down the stairs. Bennett was too engrossed to notice. Maybe he’d heard about the peace sign.

  Susan was free and she had nothing to do. She didn’t have her notes. Ian wanted her at the Arlington for the blog, and as long as he had power over the Castle story, she wanted to keep Ian happy.

  Susan lit a cigarette and inhaled. That first drag was the best. Her whole body relaxed a little. It was a bit like sex that way, always a relief. She tried to tell herself that she smoked because she liked smoke breaks—those forced little interludes of solitude and contemplation—but the truth was, she liked the nicotine.

  The downtown ornamental streetlights had just come on and a couple of seagulls that had wandered in from the coast were squawking in the park. Portland was an hour from the Pacific, and Susan didn’t know why the gulls came so far inland, but they were always there, padding around the river, shitting on the esplanade, wandering the parks. A kid covered in tattoos and piercings flew by on a skateboard and the gulls barely gave him a glance.

  It was in the high sixties, warm for evening, and pretty. The nighttime Pacific Northwest sky was a blend of pastels. There were lights on in some of the downtown buildings, late-night workers or cleaners or clandestine office affairs.

  Susan took another drag off the cigarette. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the second drag was the best.

  Molly had smoked Kools. Susan wondered if her estranged family was going to have a funeral service. If they did, Susan pledged to herself that she would bring a pack of Kools and put it in the casket.

  A voice said, “You can’t smoke here, ma’am,” and Susan looked up to see the ghoulish Arlington Club concierge moving toward her waving his hand like a fan.

  She glanced behind her to see if he was talking to someone else. Susan was, after all, standing outside. On a public sidewalk. Not bothering anyone at all. And she’d told him not to call her “ma’am.”

  The concierge kept waving his hand. “Ma’am?” he said.

  Susan took another drag off the cigarette. “Why not?” she asked.

  “You’ll disturb the guests,” he said, as if it were obvious.

  She gestured, with her cigarette, to the dark brick façade of the building, its green awning, the park, the cars on the street. “I’m outside.”

  “But they have to pass you,” he said. He ope
ned the big glass doors to illustrate. “Coming and going.”

  Susan looked down at her cigarette. It needed ashing. But she was afraid to ash on the sidewalk in front of this guy. He’d probably make her clean it up. “Where am I supposed to go?”

  He pointed across the street to the park.

  Susan relented and ducked across the street and found a wooden bench that faced the Arlington. That part of the park had a decorative public water fountain and a low concrete wall with a medallion bearing Simon Benson’s profile on it. The fountains, so-called Benson Bubblers, were all over downtown Portland. The story was that Simon Benson, a turn-of-the-century Portland lumber baron, had the bubblers installed to discourage his workers from drinking beer in the middle of the day. Susan didn’t know if his plan had worked, but a hundred years later there were signs all over the park warning that alcohol was prohibited.