Tommy’s first words to me were, “Good thing you were there to intercept the package.” He lifted up one of the ends of the spring and revealed a cap with some twenty razor blades embedded in it. “The perp put this device on both ends. Damn thing wouldn’t have killed Stephanie, or whoever opened it. Sure could’ve caused major cosmetic surgery, though.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“Tell me again how you found this?”
“It was by the front door. Tiffany actually found it. That’s all I can tell you. Listen, Tommy, this has been a long, strange day, and my husband’s already mad at me. I’ve got to get home. Okay?”
He let me go, and I drove home, my heart pounding.
As soon as I arrived, Karen and Nathan ran to meet me at the garage door. “Mommy!” Karen cried. I gasped as I saw what she was holding. “This package was by the door.” I swept it out of her hands and stumbled back against the wall as she continued happily, “Nathan and I wanted to open it, but Daddy said we had to wait for you. So can I open it now?”
The package was identical to Stephanie’s.
Chapter 14
Lose the Big White Fish
“The package was addressed to Ms. Molly Masters,” I said to Lauren. “The other one was to Mrs. Preston Saunders. What does that tell you?”
Lauren stared into her coffee mug for a moment, then met my eyes. She tilted her head a little, a gesture that was her own unique shrug. Her round, pretty face looked pale, her soft brown eyes rife with worry. “The person who sent it knows your first name, but not Stephanie’s?”
“Or wants everyone to think so.”
My brain refused to relinquish the image of Karen holding that hideous package. Over half an hour ago, Jim had taken the box away from me, not wanting me to handle it once I told him about Stephanie’s package. He drove off, saying he was taking it straight to Sergeant Newton himself. Seeking comfort and adult companionship, I then went to Lauren’s house, bringing Karen and Nathan, who were currently playing upstairs with Rachel.
For the hundredth time I rose to glance out the window to see if any lights were on at my house, indicating that Jim had returned. He hadn’t, so I sat back down at Lauren’s kitchen table. Our kitchens had identical white-pine cabinets, wood-grain Formica countertops, and brick-pattern linoleum floors, but her house was a mirror image of mine. Long ago I had adjusted to everything being in the exact opposite direction. But now I felt disoriented to the point of dizziness.
“Whoever did this is sick,” Lauren said. “Imagine having razor blades springing out at—”
“Stop.” I held up both palms. “My children almost opened that thing. I don’t want to think about it.”
She winced slightly in an unspoken and unnecessary apology. “What are you going to tell Jim when he gets back?” she asked gently. “Are you going to leave immediately for Florida?”
I shook my head. “I know he’ll never understand this, but I just can’t do that. This maniac almost hurt our children. I’ll be constantly looking over my shoulder, regardless of how far we run, till the creep’s locked up. Now he or she is after Stephanie, too. I can’t help but feel it’s my fault.”
“Your fault? Preston’s the one that got you involved by printing your cartoon. Then Stephanie asked you to look for the killer.”
“I realize that. But even if it isn’t rational, I feel that if only I had stayed out of the investigation, Preston’s death would’ve been the end of it. Plus, if the person wanted to hurt Stephanie, maybe Tiffany was the real target that time we both got shot at.”
Lauren leaned on her elbows and met my eyes. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You feel you’ve endangered the Saunders family by doing what Stephanie asked you to do. That by trying to catch the guy, you’ve actually only egged him on. Therefore, you’re going to stay and egg him on further. Is that right?”
I sighed and checked out the window again. My house was still dark. I returned to my seat. “I know it’s stupid, Lauren. The point is, though, I really believe I can outsmart this horrid person and get him or her behind bars. I’m giving myself till Saturday morning, when I’ve got the flight reservations.”
Lauren raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
“I can’t even tell you how desperately I don’t want to be visiting my parents at this particular time. Here I’ll suddenly be, arriving with their grandchildren and no husband because someone’s supposedly trying to kill me as a result of my cartoon being in a porno mag. They’re going to think they raised a complete ditz.”
“Your parents know you, Molly. It’s not like your personality’s going to shock them at this juncture. Come on, Molly. What’s really going on with you?”
I dropped my face into my hands for a moment, then met her eyes and said, “Having you know me this well isn’t always such a pleasant experience.”
She smiled a little, but waited patiently for me to answer her question. “It’s the prospect of my running away from Carlton again when the going gets tough. It’s you dating Tommy. It’s the—”
“Oh my gosh,” Lauren interrupted. Her face had paled a little. “You’re worried about what happened between you and Howie. That’s ancient history. And Howie was largely to blame.” She reached across the table and put her hand on top of mine. “How many times can I tell you I’ve forgiven you until you’ll believe me?”
My heart was pounding. I hated rehashing this, but it was bothering me and wouldn’t go away on its own. “I know you’ve forgiven me. But I can’t forgive myself. Howie was your fiance. And I was flirting with him at our graduation party. I’d like to blame it all on Howie and the alcohol, but on some level I was aware of what I was doing. You two broke up because of catching me and him making out in his car that night.”
She laced her fingers and leaned on her elbows. With the bright overhead lighting of her brass chandelier, I could see the tiny lines in her face. “Yes, that’s why we broke up. That was all very painful, and I hurt over it for a long time. But, Molly, my wounds have been healed for a much longer time, and it’s got nothing to do with what’s happening to you now.”
“Right. Except that it’s shaped my self-image. I don’t get to be a person who never broke up her best friend’s wedding. I don’t get to be someone who never left her hometown without so much as a return visit for seventeen years. But now, I do get to be a thirty-five-year-old woman who stays and fights back when I get threatened. Who encourages her two dear friends from high school to date each other, and who would never make the same mistake. I need to do this thing. I need to be able to fix how I think about my past. I need to stay.”
The doorbell rang. “That’s probably the pizza,” Lauren said quietly, rising.
But when Lauren opened the door, I heard Jim’s voice. I rushed to the front of the house to greet him and gave him a sustained hug.
“I’ve been checking,” I told him, “but I didn’t see you come home.”
“I figured you’d be at Lauren’s and came straight here,” he said. His chest vibrated against the side of my face as he spoke.
“What was in the box?”
“Same type of spring,” Jim answered, still holding me against his body and rubbing my back. “Sergeant Newton says you can buy one of those at more than a dozen stores in the area, but he thinks he can trace the box.”
“The box?” I pulled away to meet his gaze.
“Both boxes had unusual metal reinforcements on the seams and on the tops and bottoms. Otherwise the razor blades would have cut right through the cardboard, of course.”
“Of course,” I repeated, though I hadn’t thought of that before.
Hank Mueller! He was in the shipping business. If only I’d asked what the name of his company was. Unless they had some obvious name in the phone book, such as Mueller’s Mailers, I’d have to get it from another source. I could ask Chase Groves during my dental appointment in the morning.
Provided I wasn’t on an airplane by then.
> The moment we got the kids tucked in bed, I pulled out all the stops with my husband. I told him we needed to talk, and we locked the bedroom door behind us. He sat on the edge of the bed. So that he couldn’t avoid looking at me, I knelt in front of him, rested my arms on his thighs, and said, “Jim, I can’t leave for Florida this way. It’s like…the sermon last Sunday, how the priest talked about Jesus telling his followers to ‘look at the log in your own eye before you look at the speck in your brother’s or sister’s eye.’ I can’t—”
“We’re talking about you being shot at and receiving spring-loaded razors,” Jim interrupted. That’s hardly a speck in someone’s eye.”
“I know. But I can’t run away from Carlton like I did before, when I assumed everyone hated me for breaking up Lauren and Howie.”
“But that…”
“Don’t tell me it’s not the same thing. I’m well aware of that. The biggest difference is that now I have you and the children. And I desperately don’t want to lose you. But if I leave now, if I let myself feel I’ve been driven from this town one more time, I’m afraid I’ll lose myself. I’ve given my past so much power over my present and my future. I feel as if I’m reliving one of the worst times of my life.” The very worst time, we both knew, had been during my miscarriage. “Please, Jim, this is just too hard to face alone.”
Jim caressed my face and said softly. “Okay. I’ll take some time off work. I won’t leave your side.”
I pulled his hand down and wove my fingers through his. “Thank you. But the hard part is I’ll have to. I’ll have to leave your side to solve this thing.”
Jim closed his eyes in frustration for a moment. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“Be there afterward, when I work it out for myself.”
He stared at the wall beyond my shoulder and shook his head. “Let you risk your life. Then welcome you back. with open arms if you live through it.” He sighed, then looked at me. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Can you try? Please?”
We left the question dangling and made love.
It rained on Wednesday morning, the perfect weather for a dentist appointment, and I was in Chase Groves’s office in downtown Schenectady as scheduled. The dental chair was especially comfortable. If it weren’t for the dental assistant’s hands in my mouth as she cleaned my teeth, along with my concentrated efforts to prevent her from sucking my tongue into that damned spit vacuum of hers, I’d have been downright comfy.
As I sat there, my thoughts, unlike my tongue, wandered freely. Jim and I had compromised that I wouldn’t leave until Saturday morning. Jim convinced me that if I were to stay beyond that, he’d wind up with bleeding ulcers. He also took the rest of the week off to keep an eye on me.
Okay, so I didn’t tell him my dental appointment was with a key suspect in the case. Nor did Jim know of my plan to visit Hank Mueller’s Mailers or whatever his business was really called. My plan had to do with a cartoon I’d drawn for a friend in Colorado.
I’d received a letter from my friend, back before I’d ever heard of Between the Legs. Was that really just two weeks ago? I’d been so carefree and innocent then. At any rate, my friend was depressed because the book she’d written had been rejected by editors at two different publishing houses. The editors had written personal replies, stating why they felt her book didn’t “quite work.” In both cases, their reasons were just plain stupid. I knew that, because, seemingly unlike the editors, I’d read her book.
To cheer up my friend, I had drawn a cartoon of a man sitting in an editor’s office. The editor hands him a thick stack of manuscript pages, titled Moby Dick. He stares at the editor in dismay as she tells him, “Lose the big white fish, Mr. Melville. Make it a purple dinosaur. Then we’ll talk.”
Originally I had planned to email my cartoon to her, but I now needed an excuse to use Hank Mueller’s shipping company. Although it felt ostentatious to do so, I had taken it to a frame shop first thing this morning. My theory was that it would be at least marginally reasonable for me to ask to speak to Hank Mueller personally, about special metal-reinforced packaging to protect the glass of the frame. Then I could ask him one-on-one about his relationship with Preston.
It also occurred to me that just as soon as this murderous maniac was behind bars, I was going to sit down and ponder how, if I’d spent half as much energy being kind to my dear husband as I did finding devious ways to circumvent his desire to protect me, our marriage might be stronger. But it was already Wednesday morning. Right now I had only three days to catch this person, and I intended to devote my mental faculties to that, and that alone.
The hygienist/dental assistant finally finished cleaning my teeth and Chase Groves reentered the room, carrying my X-rays. When I’d first arrived, he had briefly examined my teeth and gums, then laid the standard not-flossing-quite-regularly-enough guilt trip on me.
He said quietly to his assistant, “Go ahead and get that thing taken care of. I can handle everything here myself.”
“Are you sure?” Though she was standing behind me and I couldn’t see her face, her voice sounded incredulous.
So was I! Why was he sending her away?
“It’s fine,” Chase answered her. “Just be back in time for my next appointment.”
I was going to be alone with him? I’d never so much as heard of any dentist being completely alone with a patient. Wasn’t there some sort of governing American Dental Board to insist that dentists always have witnesses? It’s not like patients can see for themselves what’s going on in their mouths, for heaven’s sake!
He gave me a smile and sat down. The two of us were alone now with his numerous pain-inflicting instruments. From my vantage point, he looked like a gigantic defensive lineman turned dentist. He put on a pair of rubber gloves. His hands were huge, his forearms strong. He could crush my face with one squeeze.
“Turns out it was lucky you managed to get an appointment on such short notice. Looks like you’ve got a cavity.”
“I’ve got a cavity?” It hadn’t even been a year since my last appointment. My real dentist hadn’t said anything about a burgeoning cavity. “Are you sure?”
“‘Fraid so,” he said, showing me one of the inch-square pictures of my teeth. “See that little spot there?” He pointed.
I looked, but all I could see was that my teeth looked truly unattractive lipless and with translucent gums. “Not really.”
“Well, it’s there, all right,” he said, taking the x-rays away. “Don’t worry. It’s just a small one. Besides, you’re lucky. Normally you’d have to make a second appointment, but the cancellation slot you fit into this morning happened to be for ninety minutes. I can get you taken care of right now, and save you the inconvenience of a second office visit.”
“Oh, goody,” I replied.
“Do you want nitrous-oxide gas, or Novocain?”
“Gas,” I repeated in dismay. My real dentist never offered to asphyxiate me.
“Very well, I’ll—”
“No! That was a question, not an answer.” I couldn’t allow myself to be slipping off into la-la land while trying to question him. “I said ‘gas’ because I was surprised. But I like Novocain.”
“You like it? That’s a first.” He held up a foot-long needle.
Though I felt faint, I replied, “Oh, I think needles and pain are one of those small steps we take to build moral character, don’t you?”
“Mmmm,” he murmured, slipping on his mask. It was one of those disposable masks sold in hardware stores. The white paper contrasted sharply with his dark skin. “Open wide.”
I eyed the syringe. For all I knew, that could be full of poison. This was, after all, the same man rumored to have recently gotten so out of control that personnel at his golf course considered calling the police.
“Wait!” I cried. “I, uh, can’t do this right now. I just remembered. I have to…eat soon. The Novocain will numb my mouth.” I tried to push away the tray su
spended over my chest so I could scoot out of the chair, but Chase put a restraining hand on my shoulder.
“Relax, Molly. Maybe we should use nitrous oxide after all.”
“No! It’s not just that, it’s—”
“Cold feet.” He sat back and lowered his mask, letting it rest against his neck. “I understand. You weren’t expecting to have a cavity drilled today.”
“Exactly.” I felt a surge of relief, surprised that I’d escaped this threatening situation so easily. “I’m not mentally psyched up for it.”
He nodded. “It’s a small cavity, so you can schedule another appointment anytime within the next month or two.” He studied my eyes. “Or would you rather I recommend another dentist? One whose office is closer to Carlton?”
He was graciously giving me an “out.” He realized I didn’t trust him to drill my tooth. He seemed like such a nice person. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with guilt for having scheduled this appointment with the lone intention of investigating him.
“On second thought,” I heard myself say, “I may as well get it out of the way.”
“You’re sure?” he asked, putting his mask on again.
I nodded. Please. Dear God. Don’t let him be a homicidal maniac! Of all the ways I didn’t wish to die, death by dental work was right at the top of my list.
Even if he’d killed Preston, surely he wouldn’t give me a poisonous injection. That would be impossible to get away with. Nonetheless, I had to dab away a sweat mustache. I opened my mouth, wondering if I was about to die. “You’ll feel just a slight pinch.” Then he jabbed me with the needle.
Death Comes to Suburbia (Book 2 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 17