A Secret Rage

by Charlaine Harris

  Over Theo’s shoulder I saw Barbara stir – she wasn’t dead, then – look around dazedly, and begin crawling in the direction of our struggling heap. I wanted to shout, to tell her to arm herself, but with my mouthful I couldn’t, and, as it turned out, Barbara had a neater solution than a knife.

  She crawled on top of Theo and pinched his nostrils shut, then put her other hand over his mouth. I heard her hiss as he bit her, I felt him writhe to get free, but I didn’t loosen arms or teeth, even when the pressure of his weight on top of me – I’d felt that before – and of Barbara’s body lying across my locked arms began to make me dizzy. Barbara, I thought fleetingly, we were on the right track all along. I gave up too soon.

  With the respite Barbara afforded her, Mimi scrambled halfway up and knelt on Theo’s knife arm, and after a few seconds he had to let the knife go. I spied Mimi’s hand snaking out after it as it slid to the linoleum.

  Theo wasn’t struggling so vigorously, now. Barbara was making sure he didn’t get any air. He was on the receiving end of death, and he must have known it.

  We would have let him die, I think, if only out of fear that if any of us let go he could attack again. But Cully came in the door at that moment to find three women and a suffocating monster in a heap in the middle of the kitchen floor, the Thanksgiving turkey upended under the breakfast table.

  I didn’t know it, but Theo was turning a strange color by that time. I could hear the funny noises, but I wasn’t sure who was making them. The weight of two bodies was rendering me semiconscious at best. I was only capable of praying desperately that some end to the situation would come soon, and of keeping my grip around Theo’s body and in his neck. I didn’t even know Cully was there until I heard him say, ‘Mimi! Mimi! You can get off now.’

  That didn’t sink through clearly. I didn’t think it was safe to relax our attack yet. I tightened my hold with all my remaining strength.

  ‘Barbara, he’s dying,’ I heard Cully say quietly. ‘Let go.’

  ‘No,’ said a voice I barely recognized as Barbara’s.

  ‘Mimi, call the police, if you can.’ But I heard Mimi already at the phone before he’d finished speaking.

  ‘Barbara,’ Cully tried again, urgently. ‘Nickie’s being crushed.’

  ‘Oh,’ Barbara said in a dazed voice, and at last I felt a weight shifting. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said, and I didn’t know if she meant Theo or Cully.

  ‘Nickie, are you all right?’ Cully asked in a careful voice that irritated me immensely.

  I had to unclench my teeth from Theo’s nasty neck to answer. ‘I’ll tell you right now,’ I said viciously in a trembling voice, ‘I’m not letting go till the police are here.’

  ‘Nickie. He’s unconscious. I think maybe he’s dead, or almost.’

  ‘Good.’

  Mimi’s face appeared, in my limited field of vision. There was a smear of someone’s blood on her cheek. ‘He really is, Nick,’ she told me expressionlessly. ‘I think it’s really okay for you to get up.’

  I trusted Mimi’s judgment more than Cully’s. Mimi had no mercy either.

  ‘How?’ I asked practically.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, with the slow diction of complete exhaustion. ‘Well. Cully’s holding the knife on him,’ she explained carefully, ‘so I’ll just kind of shove him off.’ She tried. ‘Nick.’ She bent down to me again. ‘You have to let go, first.’

  Reluctantly, painfully, I unclenched my hands, then straightened my arms. I heard a shuffling noise as Barbara came to Mimi’s aid. Slowly the weight toppled off me. I felt as if my pelvis had been crushed. I drew in great draughts of air and tried to pull my knees up. My legs trembled, but I managed. I raised my hand and rubbed it across my mouth, which was completely numb. My fingers came away smeared with blood.

  ‘You look a sight,’ Mimi said, and a smile twitched across her face.

  ‘I reckon I do.’ I absorbed that face, then slid my eyes over to Barbara’s. I made my stiff lips move upward.

  ‘Vampire,’ Barbara said succinctly. She tried to answer my smile, but couldn’t manage. ‘We were right, Nickie. We would have had him in one more week.’

  They were helping me up when the police came through the door like a cavalry. When they pulled off Theo’s gloves and I saw the network of nearly healed scratches on his wrists, I thought of Alicia, who’d fought all alone.

  14

  NONE OF US quite felt up to eating the turkey, so we ended up having ham for Thanksgiving. And we held the feast in the evening instead of at noon. After being up almost all night, we had slept late.

  Cully had to do most of the cooking, since Mimi, Barbara, and I were too sore; besides, Mimi’s arm gash was bandaged, and so was the bite on Barbara’s hand. Charles was pretty incompetent as a chef’s aide. He turned up about one o’clock and made a laudable attempt to be useful, but it became obvious he’d never chopped an onion before.

  Before he got there – while Barbara was still asleep in the upstairs guest bedroom and Cully was rattling pots and pans – Mimi finally explained about Charles. She had been aware all along, of course, of my bewilderment at her shift in attitude. As it turned out, she’d had some hurt and confused feelings of her own to handle.

  ‘I really was just being hysterical that morning he came to the door,’ she said through stiff lips. ‘I infected you with it.’ She was curled up at the end of my bed along with Attila the Hero. ‘I did finally talk to him when he came by my office at the college, and we had a long showdown on the phone.’ I remembered that evening; I’d had to wait for her to help with the dishes.

  Mimi took a deep breath. ‘Because of our weird behavior the morning he came by, he thought I already knew what he was going to confess to me; otherwise I guess he never would’ve told me . . . This is going to sound like a soap opera, Nick. Charles thought I was so upset with him not because of the tussles in the car but because I’d somehow found out he’d slept with Sally, the woman whose party you and Cully went to last night.’

  Oh dear, oh dear. Right after Richard’s defection to the woman in Albuquerque. Mimi’s pride.

  ‘Of course I didn’t know anything about it. But when he asked me to forgive him, he also told me which night he spent with Sally; it was the night Alicia was killed. So he was guilty of screwing another woman, but he wasn’t guilty of something far worse. Sally’s husband was on a hunting trip, and she invited Charles over – she’d dated him years ago – and things just went from there. He was mad at me when he went to see her. For various reasons.’

  Uh-huh. Mimi wouldn’t go to bed with him. And that must have been an extremely thorough confession, because that was how Mimi knew about the picture on Sally’s bedside table.

  ‘I was hurt and disappointed. I’m still not over that. We’re going to have to have a few more talks,’ Mimi said grimly.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked bluntly.

  ‘I just couldn’t. I knew you were thinking some kind of awful thought, I knew you were upset, but you know how critical you’ve always been of the men I’ve dated. I just couldn’t face your saying, “I told you so.” I knew you didn’t like Charles anyway.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to keep my mouth shut on that one.’

  So that little mystery was cleared up; not exactly to my satisfaction, but at least to my understanding. I couldn’t feel fond of Charles, but I promised myself on the spot that I’d try to like him better. He had arrived like a shot the night before when Mimi had called him, and had wanted to sleep across the door to her room to guard her! It was a good thing the police had taken Theo away before Charles arrived. I had never seen anyone more ripe for violence. Mimi had finally gotten him to go home, but with a great deal of difficulty.

  ‘You know, Mimi,’ I said to change the subject, ‘the day Charles was over here, the day we were so scared? And we thought Theo’s coming saved us?’

  ‘We let the wolf in.’

  ‘He ca
me to get you, Mimi.’

  ‘I thought so. I remembered that day, when I was trying to go to sleep last night.’

  ‘He had gloves on when he came in. He only took them off when I answered the door and asked him to have coffee with us in the kitchen – when he knew there were two of us here.’

  ‘But in broad daylight?’

  ‘Right after Alicia, he must have felt pretty powerful. When he failed that day, and he saw Cully’s things here – remember what a prude we thought he was? – he must have realized he had to plan better. He probably had to scramble to think of an excuse for stopping by at all. And he came up with two. The committee meeting Alicia missed, all the stuff they’d passed. And coming to tea with Sarah Chase.’

  Mimi nodded as I pulled myself up straighter in the bed and reshuffled the pillows behind me. She said, ‘Last night I also recalled Theo telling me that same morning that Sarah Chase hadn’t been able to call me because their phone was out. But when we went to tea, Sarah Chase was telling Barbara she’d called her apartment Saturday morning. It was such a little thing, I can’t believe I wondered about it even for a second. I was about to tell you when that Scottie ran in front of the car, and it just went out the other side of my mind.’

  ‘He almost made a big mistake that day, Mimi. I can’t believe he thought he could just walk in here on the spur of the moment.’

  ‘Well, he did. We let him in, didn’t we? I don’t think he planned it at all. You know what I think? I think he said, “I just got that bitch Alicia, here I am driving by Mimi Houghton’s house, let’s see if she’s alone. I’ve fooled everyone so far, they’ll never catch me.” He was drunk with power. That’s how I see it.’

  ‘He failed. So he tried again.’

  ‘Ugh, ugh, ugh. I can’t talk anymore now.’ Mimi, though covered in a blanket, was shivering. ‘I think I’m going to go climb in a hot tub and soak. Barbara’ll want to bathe when she gets up, so I better get in and get out.’

  I slept for another hour after she left. I was only vaguely aware of Cully coming in the room, looking down at me, and pulling the covers up higher around my shoulders. His long thin fingers touched my cheek. I smiled and slept.

  * * * *

  Our little group was quiet over the ham and sweet potatoes. I think we were all preoccupied with our own thanksgivings of one kind and another, and, more prosaically, we were very hungry after the excitement.

  When we’d all settled in the living room with glasses of wine in hand, Barbara said, ‘Well, I guess we should talk about it.’

  ‘I’d like to know,’ I said, ‘what happened before I got here last night.’ I hadn’t heard Barbara and Mimi give their statements to the police. I’d been too busy giving my own.

  Mimi pursed her lips and launched into her account. I remembered her telling the story about Heidi Edmonds the night I’d arrived in Knolls, so long ago.

  ‘We were just fiddling around in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘We got the sack of giblets out of the turkey and put the brace back on the legs. I boiled the sweet potatoes and mashed them; Barbara put in the cinnamon and raisins and found some marshmallows. Attila was on top of the refrigerator waiting to see if he could get some turkey when we weren’t looking, and Mao was asleep on the couch in the living room.’ Just where the little cat had been, still asleep, when the whole thing was over.

  ‘I guess Theo was outside looking in the windows only after I sent Barbara upstairs to look for some Kleenex. She was sneezing – she’s allergic to cats – and the box I keep down here had run out.’

  ‘So he didn’t know Barbara was here,’ Charles said.

  ‘No,’ Mimi answered. ‘He thought I was alone.’

  I felt Cully twitch beside me.

  ‘He rang the doorbell, the kitchen doorbell, not the front. I looked through the peephole Cully put in last week, but a fat lot of good that did me. Because when I saw it was Theo, I let him in.’

  Alicia had let him in, too. After all, it was Theo. Good old bureaucratic Theo, who was actually on our list but whom we still didn’t seriously suspect!

  ‘He looked funny, but I didn’t pay any attention at first,’ Mimi continued. She barely knew we were there. Her hands were still, for once, clenched in her lap. ‘He asked if Nickie and Cully had gone to the party. Remember?’ she asked me. ‘He heard that when we were leaving his house that day we had tea. But he didn’t hear me ask Barbara over for Wednesday night, because I asked her when we were outside in the driveway.’

  I wondered how it had felt to Theo, to see two of his victims and a third potential one sitting in his living room with his wife. He must have enjoyed it. I recalled his pleasure.

  ‘Fool me; I said oh yes, that Nickie and Cully had left at least an hour and a half ago. I assumed he’d been working late at the college, like he did often, to clean up something before he and his family left for Thanksgiving. I kept waiting for him to bring up some point he wanted to talk about but he didn’t . . . I began to get uneasy then, I think. I hadn’t really worried earlier, because it was still early in the evening and all the other attacks were pretty late; except for Heidi Edmonds, and she was in such an isolated place. But I did feel a little funny. I went on and turned away to pour him a glass of wine, at the kitchen counter, and he came up behind me. And grabbed me. And put the knife to my throat.’

  Mimi took a deep breath. Charles put his hand on hers, but she shook her head very slightly and he removed it. I put my own hand over my eyes to cover them. I felt Mimi’s fear.

  ‘Of course then I knew what he was,’ Mimi said, and fell silent. Cully rose to refill our glasses. When he sat down again he put his arm around me.

  ‘Even his voice was different,’ Mimi said very coldly. ‘He whispered. He told me what he was going to do to me. It was as nasty as you can imagine.’

  Barbara and I could imagine. Barbara and I knew. A couple of tears wetted Barbara’s face and she made no move to wipe them off.

  ‘And he told me why,’ Mimi continued.

  I leaned forward. I wanted to hear.

  ‘It was because we were successful,’ Mimi said to me directly. Then she flicked her eyes in Barbara’s direction. ‘Successful,’ she repeated.

  ‘He said that?’ Barbara asked incredulously.

  ‘Successful,’ I whispered.

  ‘That was what it boiled down to,’ Mimi said. ‘What he actually told me was that we were arrogant women who had everything in the world and needed to learn a lesson; the world would go better, he thought if all these damned bitches learned a lesson,’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Because of his daughter – Nell – being so sick, do you think?’ I asked. I knew I must look as dazed as the others. Charles’s mouth was hanging open.

  ‘That was probably part of it,’ Cully said. ‘And you told me his wife comes from an academically prominent family. He hasn’t gone very far for someone his age – to them. Stuck as a registrar at a little southern college, with a dying daughter and a wife he knew could perceive exactly how he was situated on the ladder.’

  ‘But she loves him,’ Barbara protested. ‘You know Sarah Chase would never say anything to him about—’

  ‘But she knew,’ Cully interrupted. ‘Even if she never said anything, he may have been convinced he knew what she was thinking.’

  ‘Oh, sweet Lucy,’ Charles said disgustedly.

  ‘And the added pressure and grief of Nell in the process of dying,’ Cully went on. ‘While all of you were going on with your lives, your rich lives. Alicia was loved and prominent, Nickie is beautiful and talented, Mimi is prominent and respected and pretty. Barbara had just gotten tenure, and she was in love. And that little freshman girl, that first one . . .’

  ‘A little one, to practice on,’ Charles said with more acuity than I’d given him credit for.

  ‘Exactly – the girl who’d done everything in high school, right, Mimi? The girl who had a future in anything she chose, an
achiever of the highest promise.’

  ‘But he was always so polite to everyone, the women who worked for him thought he was great,’ Mimi said. ‘I can’t understand how he could . . .’

  ‘The women who worked for him were under him, had no ambitions to go anywhere else or do anything else but clerk in the registrar’s office until they retired,’ Cully explained. ‘It was easy to be courteous. They were never going to top him. They weren’t stealing his daughter’s future. And it was easy to be polite to you all, too. Look at the power he had over you, just by knowing what he’d done.’

  ‘I’ll never understand it,’ Charles said simply. ‘Even if I heard him talk about it, I wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Barbara retorted instantly. ‘I don’t want to even begin to comprehend a mind that sick.’

  ‘That was all speculative, anyway,’ Cully the psychologist said cautiously.

  I’d been thinking. ‘Mimi, he planned to kill you too, last night,’ I said out loud. ‘Or he wouldn’t have let you see him. He must have found out he enjoyed killing women even more than seeing them walk around with his mark on them.’

  Mimi nodded once. Charles took her hand, and this time she didn’t shrug him off.

  ‘What happened after he grabbed you?’ Charles asked when the hush became too oppressive.

  ‘Oh.’ Mimi pulled herself out of a grim reverie. She looked at Barbara.

  ‘I guess he was so involved in cursing Mimi that he didn’t hear me come down the stairs,’ Barbara said obligingly. ‘And I hadn’t heard the doorbell because I had my head stuck in the closet looking for Kleenex.’ She sneezed right after she said the word, and we all laughed weakly. ‘I clumped down the stairs, as usual, but he didn’t hear me until I came into the kitchen. I was just saying “Mimi, I found them” and pulling one out to blow my nose, and I looked up and saw—’ Words failed her then. Only the reminiscent shock on her face told us what she had felt when she saw a trusted friend and coworker holding a knife to Mimi’s throat.