I was stunned, unsure of how she had seen it since she’d been in front of me the entire time. “Yes.”
“Planning on shooting somebody?”
“It’s strictly for protection.”
Apparently she found my answer amusing because her face hinted at a smile, but it left her quickly. Slowly, she turned her attention to the trees behind us, as if searching for something hidden there, watching. “Come on,” she said softly, cocking her head toward the house. “Let’s get out of the sun.”
CHAPTER 25
The interior of the cottage was the disaster area I’d anticipated it to be. There was an undersized kitchen; an equally small living room and a dark jog of a hallway I assumed led to a bathroom and bedroom. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust after crossing from bright sunshine into this cave of sorts. What little light existed seeped through the two open windows in the living room, but in the kitchen area, which we had walked into through the back door, the windows were closed and covered with cheap green canvas pull-shades. A musty smell hung in the air, and everything was covered in a thin film of dust. I stood awkwardly near the door, watched Claudia cross to an ancient refrigerator. The door opened with a clang and light from within punctured the room. She reached in, pulled out an unlabeled brown bottle and held it up. “Want one?”
“No,” I said. “But thanks.”
She closed the door, leaned back against it. Her throat was slick with perspiration. “It’s only root beer.” She twisted off the cap and casually tossed it into the nearby sink, which was brimming with filthy dishes and hundreds of swarming ants.
I moved closer to a table in the center of the room, noticed a suitcase sitting in the doorway to the living room.
Claudia saw me looking at it and said, “I just got back last night, haven’t had a chance to unpack. Or clean up, obviously.” She drank from the bottle, gulped loudly.
“I came by a little while ago but—”
“Yeah, you woke me up with all that knocking.”
“Sorry.” I smiled uncomfortably and pulled one of the chairs out from the table. “Mind if I sit down?”
Claudia motioned to the chair with the bottle. “Been in rehab for a while. Had a meth problem. It was fucked up but, man, so is this. No more drugs, no more booze. All I got left is nicotine, sugar and caffeine. Figure one of these days I’ll kick butts too, but one step at a time, that’s what they say. I beat heroin and coke a few years back—so I figure I can do this. Least that’s what I keep telling myself. You got to play these little head games with yourself, it’s fucking sick but it works. This one counselor told me I had what’s called an addictive personality. I was like: Yeah, no fucking shit, Kreskin.” She let slip a genuine, very pretty smile. Her teeth were a bit too large for her mouth, and there was a noticeable gap between the two in front, but like the rest, they were straight and bright and lit up her entire face.
“You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Claudia.”
The smile crept away. “That what you think I’m doing?”
“I don’t know.”
She finished the root beer, pushed away from the refrigerator and placed the bottle on the counter. “I’ve been on my own since I was twelve years old. I’ve lived most of my life like a fucking animal. Worse. Animals have standards. They’re better than us. All that superior species hype’s a bunch of bullshit. We’re the fucking mistakes, man. We’re the deformities, the abominations of evolution. Any fool knows that. But I don’t apologize for nothing and I don’t explain myself to nobody. Know why? Because I didn’t make the fucking rules and I don’t owe anybody a goddamn thing, that’s why.”
The level of natural intelligence she possessed was surprising, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she might have accomplished had her life been different. “I didn’t mean to infer—”
“‘Course not.” She walked slowly along the front of the counter, her eyes never leaving me, the heels of her boots clacking on the tile floor. “I’ve been a junkie and a whore and a whole lot of other things you don’t want to know for so long it doesn’t seem real for me to be anything else. But I am. I am something else now. It’s still a fucking mess but I’m working on it. And I’m leaving soon.” She pointed at a tattered and stained poster on the wall advertising Florida, a bathing suit clad couple with their backs to the camera running hand in hand across a beautiful stretch of sand toward the ocean beyond. “Never been, always wanted to go. Now I’m gonna do it. This time I’m really gonna do it.” She eyed the poster for a few seconds. “Ever been there?”
“On my honeymoon, a long time ago.”
“Does it really look like that?”
“In parts, yeah.”
“Gonna get some stupid waitress job or something, and every day off I’m gonna lay on the beach and go swimming and all that shit. It’s all about the forgetting now.” Claudia snapped out of her dream and leaned back against the counter. “Point is, I ain’t gonna be around here much longer. I been where you’re going—and like I told you, I don’t want nothing to do with it anymore.”
“I understand.”
“This conversation and the one we’re gonna have never happened. You were never even here, got it? And if you go to the cops I’ll—”
“I won’t.”
“You do and—”
“I won’t. For Christ’s sake, I have to trust you too. You could just as easily go to the police after I tell you what I know.”
“Yeah, well, you know us junkie whores.” She grabbed the front of her shirt, pulled it away from her chest and blew down between her breasts. “We ain’t too reliable.”
“I’d say you’re taking less of a risk in trusting me than I am in trusting you,” I told her. “We are what we are, right?”
“Oh, that’s fucking deep, Plato.” Claudia let her shirt go. I followed it to the curved tops of her breasts. “Only problem is most people don’t have clue-one about who they are. They know even less about the world they’re living in. All sunshine and picket fences and ice cream and roses, right? Cockeyed motherfuckers. I’ve seen the shit out there no one ever wants to see. I’ve been treading water in swill since I was a kid, and I’m still here. I’ve seen and done things, and had things done to me you couldn’t believe even if I proved them. Your mind couldn’t get around them. You think you know what hell is? I’ve fucking lived it, and through it all, I’m still here…what’s left of me anyway. You want to put your trust in something? Put it in that.” She dug her cigarettes from her pocket. “You want to know what I know? Fine. You first. I ain’t saying shit until you tell me what you know.” Like a cloud slipping past the moon, a condescending look appeared, rolled across her face and was gone. “What you think you know.”
“I knew Bernard from the time we were little kids,” I heard myself say with a fondness that made me uncomfortable. “Since he died I’ve done nothing but think about things, back on things, and none of us ever suspected him of anything because we didn’t take him seriously. One thing you never did with Bernard was to take him seriously. He was always kind of weird, but—but we were used to it—it’s just the way he was, the way he always was, so none of us ever gave it much thought. What might have been red flags for most people didn’t mean anything when it came to Bernard. He used to lie a lot. He’d exaggerate everything and always make himself out to be something he wasn’t. At least that’s what we thought. You never really knew what was true and what wasn’t. He’d make so much shit up you never knew for sure, but it—as strange as it sounds—it didn’t matter. Bernard was just Bernard. I always thought he told his stories and went on and on because in reality he had nothing. In reality he was alone and hadn’t accomplished much of anything with his life. We got good at letting things go, at looking the other way when it came to him. We were all different, Donald and Rick and Bernard and me, but in a lot of ways we were the same, too. None of us were perfect, who the hell were we to judge Bernard or think less of him for being himself, for stretching the
truth now and then or making a fantasy world for himself where he wasn’t the brunt of jokes, the weak one, a person no one other than his friends would ever give a second look or thought to?”
Claudia nodded. “If you want to sweeten it up while you walk down memory lane, that’s your problem. But remember, I knew him too. Maybe the side I saw was different, but it was just as real. He was a lying sack of shit most of the time, but the thing with Bernard was that he’d tell just enough truth to make you think, to make you wonder if what he was saying was real. He’d lie and lie and lie and then throw in a truth, but you never knew which was which. And the few times I questioned him, I was wrong and he had been telling the truth. He’d prove it. You want to still make excuses for him, go ahead, but Bernard was a trickster, and he’d been one for years. He was evil.”
“He was human,” I said softly.
“Partly.”
What bothered me most was that she meant it. “Partly?”
She dismissed me with a look. “You were saying?”
I ignored the smells hanging in the stagnant air as I took a deep breath and tried to organize my thoughts. “Not long after he died, I started to think back about things, like I said, and some things from the past I hadn’t thought of in years came back to me and took on new meaning. One of those memories led me to a woman who lived in Potter’s Cove with us when we were kids. I found out that Bernard raped her while he was still in his teens. It destroyed this woman, and she’s been in and out of institutions ever since. She claimed there was more to Bernard than met the eye even then.” The look of disgust on Claudia’s face made me think there was a response coming, but she remained silent. “God knows what else he did before that. Later, after high school, we thought Bernard had joined the Marines,” I continued. “He came back saying he’d torn up his knee in a fall during basic training, and that he’d been discharged, but we found out after he died that the entire thing was a lie. He’d never been a Marine and went to New York City instead. He claimed…He didn’t exactly come right out and say it but he claimed he had started killing women there.”
“You said you found this out after he died?” she asked.
“Yes.” Although I had promised Donald and Rick I’d keep the subject of the tape between us, I felt at that point I had no choice but to trust Claudia with the information. If I had any chance of gaining her trust in return, I’d have to put all my cards on the table and risk it. I calmly explained about the tape being sent to Rick, how we had all listened to it together, and the specifics of what had been on it. I then explained how Donald had researched crimes in New York City during that time and how he had found two unsolved homicides that were strikingly similar to the murders in Potter’s Cove.
She gave no reaction until I’d finished. “So you know he was a liar and a sick little boy who liked to torture and rape and who knows what else.”
“Yes.”
“And you think he killed these women?”
“I know he did.”
“Then what more do you need? Isn’t that enough?”
“It would’ve been,” I said, “if it hadn’t been for the dreams.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Donald, Rick and I all had an identical recurring nightmare. We’re still having it.” I described the dream for her in detail. “And then I started to experience worse things. Hallucinations—or visions or whatever the hell they are—of this woman and her child. Horrible visions. They started subtly, but they were so real, and eventually I had them while I was on a job. This woman in the vision, she lured me to an old condemned factory down in the south end and I saw…I saw some things down there. If there is a Hell, these things she showed me came straight out of it.”
“If,” Claudia scoffed quietly.
“I saw other things I can’t explain or even fully remember down there. I don’t know for sure if I want to remember them. It’s the same when I think back to when Bernard and all of us were kids. The memories are scattered, you know? But there are huge pieces I can’t remember that come back to me now in scraps and blurs. Maybe it’s the same thing and I don’t want to remember them more clearly either. Maybe if I do it’ll unlock something else, something worse.” Everything I was saying sounded absurd to me, like I was completely out of my goddamn mind. “And besides the visions, sometimes I hear things—whispers or—or I just feel something.” I explained the experiences with the woman and child in as much detail as I could. “It’s like all of this is stalking me somehow, together with my memories and nightmares of Bernard. I lost my job, my wife…maybe my mind. And it still won’t stop. I need it to.” A rush of emotion suddenly welled in the base of my throat. “I need it to stop.”
Claudia finished her cigarette with a succession of repetitive drags then tossed the butt into the sink with the dishes and the ants. It rolled behind a plate, disappearing into the clutter, and I heard a soft hiss as ember hit water. “My childhood lasted about ten minutes,” she said through a sigh. “Kids like me grow up quick, you know? But one time, when I was still a kid, before the world got a hold of me, I was talking to this priest. My grandma used to take me to church, dress me up in little dresses and hats, gloves—the whole bit. She died when I was twelve, but before that she was this all-star Catholic, used to go to the rectory and help out the priest with dishes and cleaning and shit like that after mass. One day I was at the rectory waiting for my grandma to finish, and I started talking to the priest. Father Naslette was his name. Old bastard, looked like a bald eagle with glasses. My grandma used to have National Geographic magazines at her house, and one time I saw these natives in like New Guinea or some shit, and I started wondering, you know, the way little kids do? Anyway, Father Naslette used to tell me that if you didn’t believe in God and obey His laws, you’d go to Hell. So I asked him what about the natives in National Geographic? They didn’t even know what a Catholic church was, so how come they were going to Hell?” She scowled like she’d suddenly tasted something bitter. “And you know what he told me? He told me that only people who had the knowledge were responsible for it. He said that if you didn’t know about God then it was OK and wouldn’t nobody blame you for that. Those natives, they didn’t know, they were innocent so they wouldn’t be punished. Hell was only for those who knew and fucked up or didn’t obey. So sometimes it’s better to not know, because whether you believe in that shit or not, once you have knowledge, you’re responsible for it. Well I got news for you. God ain’t the only one who works that angle.”
The only emotion I felt now was growing anger. “Look, the woman I told you about, the one Bernard attacked when they were teenagers, she acted the same way you do. Like there’s some big fucking secret everyone knows except me, and I’m sick and tired of it. I want to know what’s happening. I want to know what all this means. And I don’t give a shit what kind of strings are attached to it, you understand me?”
“Oh, I understand,” she said. “You just better hope you do.”
Claudia lingered near the counter and folded her arms across her chest, crushing her breasts together in a swell that revealed a considerable amount of cleavage and created the illusion that she was bustier than she was. The pose, and its result, were executed in a wholly blasé manner and had not been intended as a means of affecting me. She clearly could not have cared less if I took notice or not.
“That’s the problem with people like you,” she said in her throaty voice. “You want and think everything’s out in the open—explained and seen and safe. Things are only like that on the surface. The real world is the one underneath. The one I moved in for years. The one Bernard moved in. That world’s different. It’s shadows.”
I nodded. “Then show me the shadows, Claudia.”
She grimaced but quickly masked it, as if specters of what lived in those shadows had suddenly flashed before her. “I got into drugs real early in life, had a lot of problems,” she said. “I lived with my grandma, she always took care of me. She was the only one who
ever gave a shit about me. When she died I was only twelve, and I pretty much been on my own ever since. Met my mom a few times when I was a kid, but never really knew her. Wouldn’t know my father if I fell over him. My mom died when I was nine. Somebody strangled her and threw her in a dumpster in Fall River. I found out later she was a drug addict and a hooker, my mom. Apple don’t fall far from the tree, right? I had nothing, no family, only the system, and when you’re a kid going through that—foster homes, shelters and halfway houses—all that bullshit—you can just slip away and let the world take you. And nobody cares. See, unless you kill somebody, try to kill yourself or do something real bad, the system can’t be bothered. It’s not about helping people, only punishing them, so until you do something the system thinks needs punishing, they got nothing for you. Thing is, there’s so many runaways, lost and fucked up kids, and so many real crimes and shit that the cops can’t cover it all. Half the time they don’t even go through the motions, and kids like me just fade away. We either die or we survive. Period. Either way, it ain’t pretty.
“So I’m my mother’s daughter, right?” she continued a moment later. “It don’t take long. The streets love girls like me, swallow them right up. One fucking gulp and you’re gone. And it’s like a maze, you know? You go a little ways before you get stuck, only there’s always somebody there to take you by the hand…or the hair or the throat…to take you to that next level. And on and on. ‘Cause they never tell you the only way out of that maze is death or fucking insanity, and that’s only if you get real lucky, because the deeper you get, the meaner and darker those shadows get. And the Devil, he gets closer. So close you can feel him. It’s his game, his maze. That’s how he works. Devil don’t want you to fear him until it’s too late to get out from under him. Like a trap, you know? No cheese, no motherfucking mouse.” She looked at me with a hard stare. “It’s tough to understand if you’re a mark. No offense, but—”
The Bleeding Season Page 27