by Chris Culver
“I thought you were Annette,” she said, opening the door wider. She wore a black and white polka-dot dress and makeup that brought out the blue in her eyes. A tie held her hair back. I looked away.
“Your mom’s downstairs,” I said. “You look nice. Are you going out?”
“Thank you for saying so,” she said, tilting her head to the side and gesturing for me to come into the room. I followed her in, and she shut the door behind us. “I’ve been giving interviews all morning. It’s exhausting, but I’m sure you know what that’s like, being a bestselling author and all.” She turned her head, and winked at me over her shoulder. “Your latest book hit number one on Amazon this morning after the story hit the papers.”
I had only half listened to what she said, so I simply nodded. Tess, like her sister, had her own suite of rooms in the Girard house. The main bedroom was probably five hundred square feet and had a sitting area, a fireplace, and an antique four-poster bed, the headboard of which squeaked every time its occupants moved. In addition to the main room, she had a walk-in closet on the left side of the room bigger than my dorm room in college, and an en suite bathroom with Jacuzzi tub. Nothing had changed from my last visit there many years ago.
“You ever hit number one on Amazon before?” she asked.
I glanced at her and shook my head. “First time.”
“I’m glad I could be here for it, then. Hitting number one, though, I bet you’re selling a lot of books. Think you could forward some of those royalties to me?”
I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not, so I didn’t say anything.
She frowned. “It was a joke. You’ve got to lighten up.”
“Sorry, but it wasn’t very funny,” I said. “I’m here to deliver Annette’s will like you asked. That’s it.”
“Straight to business, then,” said Tess, nodding and walking to the nearest window. She pulled the curtains closed. “Please take off your clothes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Strip, Steven.”
“Is this another joke?” I asked.
She shook her head and walked to the second set of windows, where she again pulled the curtains shut. “No joke.”
“May I ask why you want me to take off my clothes?”
“Because despite our long-standing relationship, I think you’re trying to get me arrested. I don’t like that, so I want to make sure you’re not wearing a wire.”
I began unbuttoning my shirt. “Did you see this in a movie or something?”
“I read it in a really wonderful book,” she said.
I slipped my shirt off and began folding it to minimize wrinkles.
“You look good,” said Tess. “Do you work out?”
“I lift weights.”
She stood up, pulled her hair from the back of her neck, and turned. “Unzip me, please.”
“You don’t need to get undressed.”
“I insist.” I waited for her to change her mind. She began shaking her rear instead. “I can get it myself, but it’s easier with help.”
“Fine,” I said, standing up. The zipper ran from her neckline to just above her hips. I pulled it down and then turned as she slipped the dress from her shoulders.
“You don’t want to watch?” she asked.
I shook my head and stared at the door. “Not really.” I sighed. “I assume you want me to take off my pants, too.”
“Of course.”
As I undid my belt, I felt a shift in the air and breath on my back. She put a black lace bra on my shoulder. I swatted it away and let my jeans fall off my hips. As I turned around, I tried to keep my eyes north of the horizon, but I couldn’t help but see that Tess had progressed further than me in undressing.
“You’re still a little overdressed for this party.”
“I’m not wearing a wire. You’d see it by now”
She looked down again at my boxers and then back at my eyes. “You can take them off or I can. Your choice, but I hope you go for the latter.”
I hooked my thumbs into the top of my shorts and pulled down. Tess sighed appreciatively.
“My, my,” she said. “I forgot what a lucky woman Katherine is.” She looked up at my eyes again. “You’re not feeling light-headed are you? Your blood seems to be rushing south right now.”
I took a step back, held my arms out, and turned around. “I’m not wearing a wire. Can I put my clothes on now?”
“No,” she said, nodding toward one of the doors. “But you can take them to the bathroom. The walls are thick enough to muffle sound, so if you had a microphone in your clothes, it won’t hear what we say out here.”
“Are you truly this paranoid?”
“I prefer the word careful.”
I didn’t argue. Instead, I gathered both of our clothes and took them to the bathroom. There were several hangers on a hook beside the walk-in shower, so I took the envelope holding Annette’s will from my jacket and used the hangers to hang both of our clothes. When I got back to the bedroom, Tess lay on the bed with a pillow between her legs and over her breasts. She patted the comforter beside her as if she wanted me to sit down. I walked near her and tossed the envelope containing the forged will on the bed. She ignored it and put her foot on my leg near my crotch.
“You want to fuck for old time’s sake?” she asked, tossing the pillow that had covered her over the envelope. I turned my head and looked at the bathroom door. “You can look, Steven. Might jog your memory, remind you why you should come with me.”
“I came to deliver that will and to talk. That’s it.”
“Would sleeping with me really be so bad?” I decided not to respond. She began running her foot along the outside of my thigh. “Look at me.”
I hesitated and then looked straight at her face. She held up a hand, her fingers together as if she were giving an oath.
“I swear that what happens in this bedroom stays in this bedroom. I won’t tell Katherine unless you want me to. Who knows? Maybe she’ll even want to join in.”
“I’m pretty sure she’d say no to that.”
Tess lowered her voice and leaned toward me. “If you think she’d say no to a threesome out of hand, I’m guessing you two haven’t talked about your college experiences very much.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, pushing her foot from my thigh. “I brought what you asked for. The will is simple. Ninety percent of your mother’s assets will go to Samantha, and ten percent will go to that charity you asked for. It’s signed and notarized as if it had gone into effect in 2005. I didn’t have a copy of your mother’s signature, so you’re alone on that one.”
“I’ve been signing things for my mother since high school. That won’t be a problem.” She smiled. “You sure you don’t want to have a go while you’re here? It’d be fun.”
I shook my head “Now that you have the will, I want to talk about my options.”
Tess looked thoughtful. “Options, options, options.” She took a breath. “We can do whatever you want, and my only requirement is that you’re gentle. It’s been a while since I’ve been with someone.”
I closed my eyes. “I was meaning my options in reference to your other request.”
Tess scooted so that her back was to the bed’s headrest. Thankfully, she covered herself with another pillow. “I suppose in that case, your options are only limited by your imagination. You should start, though, by considering whether you want to hire somebody or if you want to kill Annette yourself. If it were me, I’d do it myself. You don’t have a lot of time, and it’s hard to find reliable help. Doing it yourself would be more satisfying, too.”
“I’m not interested in killing Annette.”
Tess put up her hands. “Then you’ve answered your own question. Hire somebody. Get to it quickly, though, because you don’t have a lot of time. We all have schedules to keep.”
“I’m not going to do that, either.”
Tess tilted her head to the side and softened her voice. “Sweethe
art, I gave you other options before. I said you could come with me, and we would run away and live the rest of our lives together. We’d be happy. You turned me down, remember? I don’t know what else you want from me.”
I started to ask what else I could do, but she spoke over me.
“We can still do that. We can run away, this afternoon, even. Just you and me. We don’t even have to go right away. Is that why you turned me down before? Do you want to tell Katherine and your friends goodbye?”
I wanted to tell her that I turned her down because she was insane, but I didn’t think she’d appreciate that. I said nothing and watched as the smile slowly slipped off her face.
“If you don’t want to be with me, and if you refuse to take care of my mother, I guess you do have one other option. You can kill yourself. I really don’t want you to do that, though, not when you have other choices you can make. It’s like my guidance counselor in high school said: suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
I shook my head and then crossed my arms. “I’m not going to do that, either. Frankly, I don’t even know why I’m here. Moses is in jail, the police know you’re alive, and any evidence that I was involved in your kidnapping has long since been taken care of. You don’t have anything on me.”
“You are so adorable when you try to be tough.” Tess took a breath. “Okay, fine. I’ll play along, Mr. Tough Guy. Did you find the presents I left at your house?”
“Yes.”
She cocked her head to the side. “What’d you find?”
“The child pornography and Polaroid film wrappings in Ashley’s room, the brooch in Katherine’s jewelry box, the pills taped to my desk drawer, and the journal in my air duct.”
Tess shot me a disappointed look. “It sounds like you didn’t look very hard.”
I tried not to grimace, but I did anyway. “What else did you put in the house?”
She shrugged. “If you had done as I asked, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.”
“I’ve got almost two million dollars in cash in my car. It’s yours if you leave town and leave my family alone. With that much money, you’ll be able to go wherever you want and live in comfort for the rest of your life. You can even give your sister the will. When your mom dies, you’ll still get your money.”
Tess leaned her head back and looked contemplative. “Can I give you a counteroffer?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“How about you give me the two million dollars and then you kill my mom?”
I shook my head. “You’re not getting this.”
“No, I understand what’s going on very well. You’re trying to weasel out of your responsibilities. Like you always do.” She leaned forward, holding the pillow against her chest to cover herself. “When I left my journal out nine years ago, I did it to give you the strength to do the right thing. I understand now that I asked too much of you. You weren’t ready for that. It’s okay. Now, I’m giving you a second chance to be the man you’re supposed to be, the strong, righteous man I know you can be. I want you to take this opportunity and kill my mother. She deserves to die.”
“That’s not our call to make.”
“Truly?” asked Tess, her brow furrowed. “My mother took me on a family trip to Africa, where she let a stranger put his hands all over me. She let him hold me down and fuck me while the rest of the family went on a safari.”
“What happened to you—”
“Kill her,” said Tess, interrupting me. She scooted to the end of the bed and took my hand. “Please. I know the strength you have in you. I’ve felt it. Admit it. When you saw my journal for the first time, you felt your insides go cold, you felt your hands steady, and you felt strong because, for the first time in your life, you knew what you were put on earth to do. Think of all the people we could help if you would only come with me and let me guide you to become the man you are supposed to be.”
I pulled my hand away from her. “No.”
Tess looked at me contemptuously. “You’re deluding yourself if you think Katherine will ever make you happy.”
“How much longer do you think you can keep this up before you get caught? Another day? Two? Our story is going national. Your face will be on newspapers and televisions across the country. You can’t escape that. I’m trying to give you a choice. We can end this now. You take the money, and you go live your life wherever you want in peace. Nobody has to get hurt.”
Tess’s eyes narrowed. “Except that I was hurt. My family used me in the worst possible way, and you, the man who supposedly loved me, who was supposed to protect me, cast me aside like I was garbage. I wish I could forget that, but I can’t. I live it every day. You broke me, and it took me years to put myself back together.”
“If I could take everything back, I would, but I can’t.”
“I wish I could believe that,” said Tess. “I’m going to go to the bathroom, and I’m going to take a shower. When I get out, I want you gone.”
“What about my clothes?”
She crossed the room, retrieved my clothes from the bathroom, and then threw them at me from the doorway.
“I’m not going to kill your mother,” I said, gathering my pants and shirt from the floor. “I don’t care what you do to me. I want you out of my life.”
Tess slammed the bathroom door shut. I shook out my pants and then my shirt, causing my socks to roll across the ground, before walking to the bathroom door and knocking. She turned on the shower, so I tried the knob only to find it locked.
“My boxers are still in there.” I waited outside the door for about a minute, but she didn’t say anything. “Fine. Just keep them as something to remember me by.”
I got dressed sans underwear and left the room. Samantha met me at the foot of the steps. She wore a shapely, probably expensive cotton dress and tasteful makeup.
“You guys were kind of loud up there,” she said. “Everything okay?”
I looked up the stairs and then back to her. “Not really.”
Samantha nodded and blinked. Her eyes looked almost glassy.
“You want to sit down and have a cup of coffee?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I should be here when Tess comes out.”
“Then you don’t have to stay very long.” She stammered something and then looked away and then back at me, her bottom lip trembling and her face growing red. “I checked myself out of the hospital this morning, but I wish I hadn’t. This house is so crazy. I feel like I’m going to explode.”
I softened my voice. “I can stay a few minutes.”
We sat down in the drawing room, but neither of us ever went for that coffee. Truthfully, I think she just needed someone to be with her. Isaac’s mother and father were handling his funeral arrangements, but they were both elderly and in poor health, so Samantha was trying to help out where she could. Mostly, I sat and listened and offered encouragement when I could. When we heard the water stop flowing to the shower upstairs, it was time to go. I hugged her tight and reminded her that I was always only a phone call away, before walking to the front door.
The security company monitoring the neighborhood probably had a golf cart available to drive me to the front gate, but I didn’t want to wait for it. Besides that, the walk wasn’t very far, even in jeans made uncomfortable due to my lack of underwear. As I approached the front gate, the photographers, cameramen, and reporters stood straighter, and two security guards turned, I thought, to look at me. Instead, they seemed to focus behind me.
“Steven, hold up.”
I turned and saw Tess jogging towards me. Water slicked her hair back, and she wore a pair of pink tennis shoes and a thick white robe that she had to hold together. She held something in front of her, and it was only after a wind gust unfurled them that I recognized my boxer shorts.
“You forgot these, sweetheart,” she said, stepping close enough to me that I could feel her breath on my face. I took my underwear from her hand, listening to the
sound of camera shutters opening and closing.
“What are you doing?”
“This,” she said, pressing herself against me. She kissed my lips and then held me tight against her and whispered. “You want options?”
“Yes.”
“Kill my mother, or I’ll slit Ashley’s throat with a box cutter and hire a group of thugs from East St. Louis to gang-rape your wife as she comes home from work.”
Tess started to step back, but I held on to her. “I could just kill you.”
She brought her lips to my ear. “You could try, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like how it ends.”
She laughed and pushed away from me, almost playfully. I slipped my boxers into my pocket and watched as she walked away. When she disappeared into her house and I was sure she didn’t have any more surprises for me, I headed toward the gate while the reporters outside peppered me with questions. One wanted to know what Tess had just told me, while a second asked if she and I were back together. A third wanted to know how I felt about Dominique. I said “no comment” to everything they asked and pushed toward my car, not knowing what else to do.
41
I drove home but slowed when I spotted black-and-white patrol vehicles, uniformed officers, and a police minivan with its doors open in front of my house. Captain Morgan hadn’t brought a warrant on his previous visit, but somebody obviously had one now. I pulled into the nearest driveway, turned around, and parked two blocks up the road, hopefully far enough away that nobody would see my car. As I walked toward my house, one of the uniformed officers walked toward me, speaking into the microphone on his shoulder.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Are you the homeowner?”
I nodded.
“We’re executing a search warrant.”
“I can see that,” I said, crossing my arms. “Can you ask your CO to come out here, please?”