Today the clogs saved her day from disappearing completely into the mundane. She was actually glad she hadn’t bought them yet. Then what would fill her mind? What would fill her mind after she bought the shoes? She wondered if Marty would let her bring Sudoku puzzles to the cash register to work on during idle periods, as long as it didn’t distract anyone or take attention away from customers.
She thought about Sudoku puzzles a while longer, then imagined the red clogs on her feet, fitting snug, feeling fine.
At ten p.m., Marty crashed the sliding doors shut and locked them. Linda felt a small lift. She knew that when she reported to work the next day at two p.m., she would be wearing her prized new purchase. The thought gave her a brief flutter of pleasure.
She went into the back room, which always smelled like rotten food, and traded her purple apron for her orange parka. She engaged in a flat exchange of goodbyes with her co-workers. Marty stood waiting for them at the front entrance with his big ring of keys. He allowed them to slip through a narrow opening one by one, quickly shutting and locking the doors again after each departure, as if a mob waited outside to rush the entrance.
“Goodbye,” muttered Marty as Linda left the store. Whoosh-crash! went the sliding doors behind her. She stepped onto the sidewalk. The cold air chilled her legs and face. She pulled the hood over her head to warm her ears. Her brother had once told her that she looked like a child when she wore the hood. She had a small frame and a soft face. The loose-fitting parka obscured her adulthood. She didn’t care if she looked like a little kid. The parka was warm. Chicago was freezing.
She moved swiftly during the walk to her apartment building. The frenzied activity of the city blurred into three-second glimpses: other pedestrians, walk/don’t walk lights, traffic sliding past, and dimmed storefront displays.
I wonder if the clogs will be noisy on the hardwood floors of my apartment.
I need to buy another Sudoku book.
I’m hungry. When I get home, I’m making soup. Chicken and rice.
I wish my brother lived closer.
I think my right eye is stronger than my left. I need a new prescription for my glasses.
What if they sold the last pair of red clogs in my size?
She walked past Sole Mates, closed and dark. The red clogs remained in the window. She would have stopped for a closer look, but there was a large homeless man near the entrance, leaning against the bricks, barking the same six words over and over, like a tape loop. “Spare change? Good day to you. Spare change? Good day to you.”
Linda frequently saw him around the neighborhood. He was heavyset with deadened eyes and missing front teeth that highlighted his incisors like fangs. He scared her, especially when he lingered near her apartment building. He was certainly crazy and probably dangerous. Occasionally she saw him shouting at traffic, waving a fat fist like a club.
She kept moving, past him and the shoe store, and formulated her game plan for the next day.
I need to get to Sole Mates right when it opens. What if I’ve waited too long? I’m not the only person with size-eight feet. Don’t you remember what happened with the vest that was on sale at Benson’s? After the twenty-four-hour cooling period, it was gone. Sometimes there’s something to be said for impulse shopping.
Linda reached her apartment building. She looked to see if the homeless man was following her. It was one of her fears. He could be a rapist or robber.
But she didn’t see him. Just a few normal-looking people walking on the sidewalk.
She entered the building’s vestibule and tossed back her hood. She flattened her hair with a swipe of her hand. For a moment, her glasses fogged. She took them off, but her naked vision wasn’t much better. When her glasses cleared, she put them back on. She checked the bin under the lineup of mailboxes to see if she had any magazines or catalogues.
None. Somebody named Beth Lawter had received a bicycling magazine. The Polish woman with the long last name had received a scrapbooking catalogue. Without even looking at the labels on the remaining periodicals, she knew they weren’t for her. Sports. Business. Cooking.
At the bottom of the bin, everyone had received a green flyer promoting kitchen and bathroom remodeling services. No doubt those would remain in the bin until someone took the initiative to toss them.
She took out her key chain and used a small, almost toy-like key to open her mailbox. One item, the phone bill, greeted her. She took it and shut the mailbox.
As Linda unlocked and opened the heavy interior door leading to the staircase, someone entered the building behind her. Startled by the noise, she stole a quick glance—and was instantly relieved. It was a young man, handsome and professional looking. He smiled politely at her. She had not seen him before. Then again, she didn’t know many of her neighbors.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she responded. He was coming her way, so she held the door open for him.
“Thanks,” he said.
She headed up the carpeted stairs, her tired thoughts falling back on her top three preoccupations of the moment: soup, Sudoku, clogs.
If the red clogs in her size were sold, would she settle for another color? Navy blue?
Linda reached the third floor and proceded to her apartment. She unlocked her door with a twist of her wrist, resulting in the familiar, hard click of the bolt. She continued to think about the clogs. At that moment in time, nothing else mattered but getting those shoes. She turned the handle and pushed the door open—
Abruptly the door smacked her in the face with a loud thud at the same time that she felt a forceful shove from behind. A blast of air expelled from her lungs. A second blow sent her tumbling into her apartment, the floor rushing up to meet her. She landed on the heels of her hands, skidding on the floorboards.
“Hey!” she shouted, an involuntary exclamation, somewhere between surprise and fear. Dazed, she flipped over on her back to see the source of the blows.
A faceless figure stood in the doorway. He kicked her hard in the legs, sending her farther into the room. He wore a dark green ski mask, erasing his features, except for two eyes, a nose and teeth.
“Move,” he said, and he kicked her again, this time aiming higher, into her ribs. She shrieked and scrambled away from further blows, which gave him the space he needed to shut the door behind him.
He secured the deadbolt with a loud snap.
He stepped toward her.
She started to scream, but the scream cut off as he fell on top of her, his knee digging deep into her stomach.
She thrashed under him, her head bouncing against the floor in the struggle. Her glasses fell askew. Short glimpses of her apartment flashed before her eyes—familiar things, symbols of home and security crashing into a brand-new context as terror spun a web around her.
When she realized she could not escape the crushing weight on top of her, she used her draining energy to exhale words.
“I’ll give you my money please don’t hurt me—”
He yanked the zipper apart on her orange parka, splitting the coat open to place a hand on her breast.
“Don’t, don’t rape—” she said.
The brown eyes stared back at her from inside the green wool mask. The nostrils flared, hissing. The lips curled upward in a smile.
Linda saw a blur of movement and then experienced the worst pain of her life.
Clutching at the fire in her abdomen, she tried to scream but could only choke.
The man in the ski mask stood, removing his weight. The deep stinging continued to electrify her entire body.
He walked across her apartment, evenly spaced footsteps on the hardwood floor, until he stopped at her living room window. He shut the blinds, tugging on the cord with his left hand.
She saw the bloody knife in his right hand.
She began to crawl across the floor and realized she was sliding in liquid—her own blood. She reached the coffee table and used the edge to pull herself up. She could see
the blood pouring from her body. Her breathing turned shallow and rapid. Her face felt cold and sweaty.
When the attacker in the ski mask returned, Linda fought back with the only weapon within her grasp—the television remote. She struck it against the side of his head and it exploded into plastic pieces, the batteries bouncing across the room.
He flinched for a moment, and then Linda’s entire body seized up from a new eruption of pain, a second thrust of the knife blade, followed by a third, and at that moment she realized:
This would not end until she was dead.
The thin lips in the mask moved open and shut, panting, drooling strands of saliva. The eyes stayed wide open, unblinking, even as spots of blood sprayed the mask.
Linda had enough remaining strength for one final action. She removed her hand from where it had been clutching a wound. Her fingers were solid red, as if she had dipped them in paint. She brought the hand to her face and removed her glasses, allowing the terror scene to fall out of focus. The attacker, her blood, her apartment walls and furniture, framed family pictures, the knife’s blade, the twisted mouth…it was all sucked away in a soft fog of color and light.
Linda Geesin’s final sensation was the tip of the blade puncturing the skin beneath her eye, entering the socket, then tugging, as the man in the ski mask stated plainly, “I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry.”
Chapter Fourteen
Let the victims begin.
After reading the final passage, Ellen pushed the notebook to the floor as if it had just burned her hands. She moved off the couch, staring at the red cover. The notebook had undergone a transformation. It couldn’t be the same journal she had been reading every night for the past two weeks.
The voice no longer belonged to Charles, it had been taken over by someone sick and deranged. Yet the handwriting stayed identical to the previous pages. Ellen gasped for air.
Had she just read a murder confession?
Surely these words couldn’t be true? They were merely that…just words.
Why would Charles talk about killing someone? Why would he pretend to be his brother Darren?
This couldn’t be the same young man who had touched her heart with a sensitive examination of his life’s pain and yearnings. This couldn’t be the outcome of a haunted child’s search for love and understanding. Why would someone who had witnessed the most horrible violence imaginable thrive on rekindling those fires?
Could Charles be schizophrenic? Was there an evil side she had not yet seen? Could Darren be a second personality? Did Charles have a brother at all?
Had she just spent a dinner date with both of them? Ellen shuddered. Exactly who was she dating, anyway? Was he dangerous? Had he really harmed someone? Or was it all a sick fantasy?
Why would he write those words?
Damn you, Charles! Ellen stumbled into the bathroom. She fell to the rug in front of the toilet. She convulsed with dry heaves, wanting to throw up, but nothing came out except for tears.
What is real?
Ellen felt consumed by an anxiety attack that bombarded her with punishing physical sensations she had not felt in years. She was sliding back into a horrible place. This was the worst betrayal in a history of betrayals: her father, then George Ravenwood, followed by her fiancé, Jeremy. And now Charles…the one individual she had believed she could count on because they had both suffered so terribly in childhood and spoke the same language…
She screamed out loud at Charles, the intensity of her voice echoing off the tiles and filling her ears. She considered calling the police. She considered calling Charles to confront him. Then she longed to hold him and kiss him and hear his reassurances that the notebook was not based in reality.
She moved away from the toilet, but couldn’t go to bed. Her body buzzed and ached.
She had to return to the notebook and reread those final pages for clues. The whole thing had to be a mistake…a crazy rant…an imaginary persona…pure fiction and delusions.
Ellen returned to the notebook’s final entry by Darren. Then she reread earlier passages and tried to reconcile the two voices. Were they both bogus?
It could just be a strange exercise, she told herself. The declaration of murder could be no more credible than the earlier intentions to commit suicide—the destructive contemplations had just turned outward. Perhaps these writings were nothing more than role play—imaginary characters for his unleashed anger. Could the whole thing be some complex psychological novel? First-person fiction about a man going over the edge?
Or was it true schizophrenia, captured in a diary? Had the Charles side of his brain purposely left the notebook behind to be discovered as evidence to punish Darren?
Ellen exhausted herself analyzing the possibilities. She returned the notebook to her desk drawer, shutting it with a loud slam. She dragged herself to bed.
The clock on her nightstand read two thirty-five a.m. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been up this late. The street outside her window was unusually calm and dark, a foreign landscape. Ellen curled up tight under the covers. She knew she wouldn’t sleep and waited for the morning light.
When she finally started drifting in and out of consciousness, the alarm sounded. She reset it for an hour later. On this morning, she would go straight to work. She had no desire to go to Pacific Coast Coffee. She simply didn’t know what she would do if she ran into him.
Ellen remained awake on the bed, staring at the ceiling, head throbbing with confusion. She grew angry with herself for feeling so much passion for a man she barely knew in the flesh. She had instead fallen for words on paper, and now those words had turned on her.
When Ellen reported for work, punctual but lacking any energy, Peg looked into her eyes and beamed. “You look wiped. Late date night?”
“No,” said Ellen.
Peg read the tension in Ellen’s tone and quickly changed the subject. “Hey, you gotta check out the new display in the children’s section. We made a tower of pop-up books.”
To get through the morning, Ellen drank a cup of the Book Shelf’s french roast, but didn’t like it. As much as she tried, she couldn’t force smiles for the customers.
After a few hours of watching Ellen drag herself around the store, Terri asked to speak with her and brought her into the back room. They stood in an area known as the morgue because it was filled with unsold magazines and mass-market paperbacks waiting for their covers to be torn off and returned to publishers for credit.
“Honey, are you okay?” asked Terri.
“I’m sorry,” said Ellen. “I had a rough night. Personal issues. I didn’t mean to let them get in the way of work.”
“It’s fine. We all have bad days. I just want you to know, if you need to talk, or you need help in some way, let me know. Sometimes I feel like a surrogate mother to you girls, and I don’t like to see you ‘out of place’, if you know what I mean.”
“I appreciate that,” said Ellen. She felt an urge to hug Terri then and wished that Terri really was her mother.
“I know I gab a lot, but I’m a good listener, too. Okay?”
“Yes,” said Ellen. “Thank you. I’m going to be all right. I just didn’t sleep well. It helps being at work. Getting into my routine.”
“If you need to leave, we’ll get somebody to cover for you. We’ll get someone from the next shift to come in early.”
“No. I’m good. I’m fine. Really.”
The door opened a crack. “Hey, Ellen!” cried Peg, poking her head into the room.
“We’re having a private conversation,” said Terri.
“I just wanted to tell her there’s somebody here to see her.” Peg quickly withdrew from the room.
Terri gave Ellen a pat on the shoulder. “Okay. I’m done. Get out there.”
“Thanks, Terri.”
Ellen left the back room. Someone to see me? She walked up the center aisle. She hoped it wasn’t a customer with a problem.
As Ellen walked to the
front of the store, she saw Charles talking to Peg.
Ellen nearly tripped over her own feet in an attempt to slow her pace. She wasn’t ready for this…
Too late. Charles turned, saw her and smiled. “Hi, Ellen,” he said softly.
“Hey,” said Ellen. “Hi.” She couldn’t bring herself to say his name. She immediately felt self-conscious about her rumpled appearance. Her hair looked awful, she wore no makeup…
“So, is this your secret boyfriend?” said Peg with a grin. Ellen wanted to slug her.
Charles chuckled.
Peg continued, “I know Charles. I’ve sold him a lot of books. He’s a total bookworm.”
“I’m a readaholic,” said Charles.
“He buys up all the new mysteries and thrillers,” said Peg. “He likes murder and intrigue. I’d look out for him.”
Charles chuckled again. Ellen didn’t smile.
“Charles says you guys met at a coffee place,” said Peg.
“Pacific Coast Coffee,” said Ellen.
Peg faced Charles and teased him. “Hey, what’s wrong with the coffee here?”
“You guys don’t open until nine,” responded Charles. “I need something earlier than that to get me going.”
“I keep telling Terri we should open earlier,” said Peg, animated, all her attention on Charles. Ellen thought, Is she flirting with him?
Standing side by side, Peg and Charles even looked cute together. Ellen felt a tug of jealousy. Charles wore his long coat, very handsome, with a hint of morning stubble on his finely chiseled cheeks.
Charles turned to Ellen. Ellen saw Peg’s eyes remain on him.
He said, “The reason I came in… Well, it’s twofold. There are some books I’m looking for, but I also wanted to see if you have any plans tonight.”
Ellen spoke without a moment’s thought. “No plans,” she said, alarmed by her automatic response.
Peg stepped back, excusing herself. “I better go help customers,” she said. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
Charles looked into Ellen’s eyes. “I’d like to take you out tonight. Dinner, a movie or a club, whatever you’d like. I’d just like to see you sooner than Saturday.”
Killer's Diary Page 9