His shoes scraped on the track as he followed her. The sky remained starless and moonless.
Of course believing he could read her thoughts was a paranoid fantasy. But he had known she would be out here. He must live close enough to observe her movements. Had he watched her for weeks? Months? Sitting by his living room window, binoculars trained on her loft, waiting for her to emerge. Suited up and ready to run the minute her front door opened. She’d never been aware of him following her to the track. He always showed up after she’d started. He allowed her to think she was safe.
He was close to her elbow again. She twisted to the side, swinging her arm at him. She missed and lost her balance.
He giggled. “Three and a half years. That’s how long it’s been. Wife—gone. Kids—turned against me. If I want to see them now, I need supervision. My own sons. I did consulting for a while, and now they won’t even hire me for that. I’m too out of touch or too needy and slow and not delivering at the caliber that’s required. I have a Master of Business Administration degree. Fat lot of good that did.”
“I’m sorry for your misfortune. But your life is nothing like mine, and I want you to stop bothering me. I’m serious.”
“Ohhh. You’re serious. Well, that changes everything.” He giggled again. “Avalon doesn’t give a shit about you and your career. Everything will slip through your fingers and you’ll be one step from sleeping on the sidewalk, your beautiful hair snarled until you look like a freak, your skin—”
“How do you know where I work?” She stopped running. She heard his breath, calm compared to hers, even after jogging several laps. “How do you know?”
She swallowed. She shouldn’t have confirmed it.
Something touched her cheek. She swatted at it. His fingers, stroking her skin. She flailed, trying to grab his forearm, groping at nothing. She stumbled backward and he moved closer, his form ghostly thin. The smell of wet earth wafted off his skin. He bent toward her and the surprisingly silky strands of his beard brushed across her face. She screamed and flung her arms out, trying to free herself as if she were caught in an enormous cobweb, sticky stuff clinging to her sweatshirt and hair.
They tussled. Their feet skidded on the track and gravel crunched beneath their shoes. After a moment, she was able to separate from him, gasping for fresh air. She turned and ran across the track, onto the lawn. Her heel skidded on wet grass but she maintained her balance and jogged to the tangle of shrubs. It took only a few seconds for him to catch up. He grabbed the hood of her sweatshirt.
She tried to pull away but his grip was too strong. “What do you want?!”
“I’m you. You’re me. You aren’t going to get where you think you’re going. It’s too late. If there was something remarkable about you, if your destiny was at the top of the food chain, you’d already be there. You wouldn’t be living in a pretentious loft in a middle-class suburb. You’d be running at a private track.”
“Get away from me.” Her voice had an uncontrolled, hysterical sound that filled her with self-loathing. “Why are you doing this?”
The sobbing stopped suddenly as if a fist had slammed into her throat. She turned and grabbed his beard.
He screamed, his voice like a young girl’s, so sharp and piercing that surely people in the surrounding homes would come out to see what was happening. But the houses remained dark. If they heard, no one wanted to know.
He pinched her wrist until she released her grip on his beard. She whimpered.
“The reason talented, educated men like me see their careers go up in flames is because women are taking over. There haven’t been enough new jobs to double the workforce over the past fifty years. But you’ll be punished too. Just wait. No woman really succeeds. You’re too weak.”
Something popped inside her brain. A tiny snap in a cranial nerve, exploding with microscopic sparks, spreading across the entire organ with white, burning light. The heat raced through her veins, tightening her muscles.
She grabbed his beard and pulled. The sound of hair tearing out of the skin, his shriek, were immensely satisfying. Inflicting pain increased the heat shooting through her body. She yanked harder. His head was close to hers now, his wet, clogged breath, pierced by shrieks, the only sound.
She kicked his ankle. He teetered on one foot, trying to regain his balance. Turning, she slammed the heel of her shoe against his good ankle. As he stumbled and fell to his knees, more hair ripped out of his chin. The long strands tore at her palms and the rest of the beard slid out of her grip. He fell forward, weeping.
She pushed him flat and slammed her foot onto the small of his back. His cries were bleeding into one another. The sound fueled her rage. The disaster of his life was not a harbinger of what might happen to her. She was nothing like him. He’d sunk into the dregs because he was a loser. Workplace reductions ferreted them out.
There were no similarities between her career and his. He knew nothing about her. If he’d been watching, stalking, he still knew nothing, and she wasn’t going to allow him to behave as if he had some kind of supernatural insight into her future. It was nothing but the mad ramblings of a man who fucked up his own life.
She squashed him into the mud under the shrubs like the cockroach he was. You couldn’t let up on those creatures for even a second. If you pulled your foot away too soon to determine whether it was dead, the thing sped along the pavement, sometimes dragging pulverized limbs, never giving up. Hard and so nasty-looking it made her skin crawl.
She placed her foot on his neck. She lifted her other foot off the ground, driving her full body weight through her right leg. He thrashed, flinging specks of mud into the air. They landed on her face and the backs of her hands, like thick, solid raindrops. The cartilage in his neck snapped as if she were stepping on dried tree branches. Another, louder cracking sound followed.
Immediately, his thrashing stopped.
At the same moment, the searing that had consumed her blood vessels dissolved. Her arms and back were limp. She wasn’t sure what she’d done. Certainly not why. Except that his presumptions reached into some place in the deepest, hidden crevices of her brain and turned her into something else for a moment.
The sky was a deep charcoal gray with the barest hint of light seeping behind the clouds. The scratching of a squirrel or other rodent came from the thicker part of the shrubs, but the birds were silent despite the lightening sky. The strength and ferocity that had overtaken her was like something out of a dream, fading as quickly as the light spread, parts appearing senseless, the imagined scene of a mind that had slipped loose from its moorings. Either he was dead, or in very bad condition.
She knelt on the muddy ground and turned his head toward her. A shudder raced down her spine and she yanked her hand away. He was dead.
How many people had seen her running here? A handful, maybe more, at one time or another. Although never this early. This would destroy her career. His prophecy would come true, but not for the reasons he’d said. She stood and lifted her right foot and studied the bottom of her shoe. She needed to get rid of these and purchase a new pair. Just in case. With cash. At a store out of the area.
She was stunned by her analytical focus.
She’d killed a man. Stomped him to death in a brutal rage. Yet she was calm. The extraordinary strength and the white blinding surge of desire to shut him up, to be rid of him, had come out of nowhere and returned to the same place.
Now she ticked through a list of things to cover her mistake. The first being, she needed to get the hell out of here. In the dull light, there was no way to look for hairs that might have fallen out. Her hair was tied up and she’d had her hood draped over her head, but not secured, since she’d yanked out the string. She felt in her pocket. The cord was still coiled safely at the bottom.
What else? She studied her hands. Except for specks of mud on the backs, they looked normal. Her footprints would be the main thing. So getting rid of the shoes. She’d call Brent and Vanessa to te
ll them she had a doctor’s appointment. But if anything came of this, they’d check. Instead, she’d tell them she had a headache. She’d take a drive to the East Bay to be rid of her shoes.
She clawed her way through the shrubs. The opening in the fence was suddenly elusive. She might be experiencing shock at a deeper level, clouding key parts of her brain. She tripped over a root. She landed on one knee, planting her palm to her right to keep from falling flat. Pain shot through her knee and her hand skidded across something thick and soft.
She crept forward and recognized that she’d landed on the edge of a sleeping bag. It must belong to the monster. She could drag him over and stuff his body inside, delay the discovery of what she’d done. But then she risked other joggers arriving at the track. She crept forward a few more feet, curious about his belongings—a large backpack and some clothing protruding from beneath a thin pillow.
The backpack was the type used by campers who spent weeks in the wilderness. The flap lay open on one of the compartments. She stuck her hand inside, hoping she wasn’t greeted with insects or a rat, but anxious to know what objects he’d wanted close at hand.
Her fingers closed around cold metal. She knew immediately what it was and pulled it out. A handgun. Also in the pouch was a cardboard box of ammunition, a small towel, and a knife with a leather case protecting the blade. She spread the towel on the ground, placed the gun and knife in the center, folded the towel over the weapons, and shoved the bundle up inside her sweatshirt. She pushed herself to her feet and turned.
The opening of the fence was directly in front of her. She bent her head to keep the branches from scratching her face and pushed her way through. The only thing she would think about right now was walking with solid, casual determination.
The coldness of her thoughts continued to shock her, yet they shouldn’t have. She was used to taking care of things, cleaning up messes. The world was better off without that guy. He was definitely fighting a severe mental disability. And now, the things she’d found in his pack. If she hadn’t killed him, he would have killed her.
15
Vanessa
NOT A SINGLE person had stopped by Vanessa’s cube all morning. An unusual situation, but she wasn’t going to complain. Hank was at a sales meeting in San Francisco. His empty office was dark one minute, flooded with light the next, as clouds,—still gray with rain—moved across the sky.
The heavy silence was broken by the sound of footsteps moving toward the end of the hallway. She looked up. Laura stood in front of the counter. “I’m all better.”
Vanessa nodded.
“My headache. It’s gone.”
“Thanks for letting me know.” Vanessa studied the expense reporting tool displayed on her screen. She clicked on the button to enter a line for a new receipt.
She was afraid to let her eyes meet Laura’s. The vague smirk that Vanessa had seen on Laura’s face when she’d stood near the entrance to the deli floated ghost-like across the computer screen. Laura wore that expression a lot—her lips partially curved, her eyes unblinking, not afraid to stare directly into the eyes of others, waiting for them to look away first.
There’d been nothing to indicate whether or not Laura had seen Vanessa slip the chocolate bar into her purse, but something told Vanessa she had.
Vanessa glanced up. Laura’s hair, normally silky, wafted out from the sides of her face, each strand alive with static that made it want to stand up on its own. “What happened to your hair?”
Laura shook her head. Rather than falling back from her face, her hair flew up even more. “I forgot to put in conditioner.”
“How’d you forget?”
Laura leaned on the counter. “There’s a lot going on. Where’s Hank?”
“At an all-day meeting.”
“For what?”
“Sales review.”
Laura nodded. Crazed strands of hair danced alongside each other. She didn’t seem to be aware of the unruly cloud surrounding her scalp.
“I expect I’ll have my other interviews soon,” she said.
“I don’t know the status,” Vanessa said.
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
Vanessa wheeled her chair closer to the desk. She cupped her hand over the mouse and moved it gently to the side. The disk at the side of her mail icon told her seven new emails had arrived. If she started reading them, Laura would walk away. Or not.
“Remind me who else is interviewing me,” Laura said.
“I need to double-check with Hank before I work on that.”
“Why do you stonewall me like this? I understand you’re careful to do what Hank wants, but you and I are friends. Women should stick together.”
“I don’t think we’re friends.”
“Work friends.”
“Not really.”
“Well, we should be. Women need to have each other’s backs.” Laura’s eyes were glassy. The tip of her nose was a bright red bloom. There was an aura of panic coming off her. If she didn’t calm down, if she allowed Hank to see how desperate she was becoming, she’d sabotage her chances without any assistance from Vanessa.
The stolen candy bar niggled at the back of her mind. Was that what Laura was referring to? Some kind of implied blackmail, before she put forth her own demand?
Laura leaned her forearms on the counter. She glanced to her left. “Where’s the candy?”
“I told you, I’m not doing the candy anymore.”
“I thought that was temporary until the ants were under control.”
“This isn’t a hostess stand.”
“It was a nice touch.”
“No one needs candy.”
“It was friendly.”
Vanessa shrugged. Every one of Laura’s words seemed to drip with an underlying message—candy, women sticking together…It had been a huge mistake to take something at a shop so close to the Avalon campus. It was one of her rules that proved she was smarter than everyone else. She hadn’t even eaten the chocolate. It was still in her purse, probably smashed and broken by now.
“We really should go to lunch sometime,” Laura said.
“What do you want, Laura? I have things to do.”
“I just think I’ve misjudged you. Knowing you were sleeping with Hank made me—”
“I’m not sleeping with Hank.”
“Any more?”
“Ever.” She felt like a child, called into the school office for lying. “And if women are going to stand up for each other, they shouldn’t be spreading lies.”
“There’s a connection between you and Hank. Everyone feels it.”
“I have work to do.”
“So you don’t deny it.”
“I’m starting to think you have a thing for him,” Vanessa said.
Laura tossed her head back and laughed. The tendons in her neck quivered as she giggled.
“Why else would you come over here all the time? Waiting to trap him when he doesn’t want to meet with you? Speculating about his sex life. You’re projecting.”
Laura snapped her head forward. “That’s ridiculous. He wants to meet with me. I’m the best candidate for that position and he knows it.”
“You’re different around him. Flirty, anxious.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Look how upset you’re getting. You like that rumor about him and me because you like imagining him having sex.”
“You’re crazy,” Laura said.
“Am I?” The thought had arisen out of nowhere, but maybe there was some truth to it. Either way, it diverted Laura from talking about candy and hinting that Vanessa needed her back protected. In all likelihood, Laura was referring to her own back. “You don’t even like me, but you hang out here all the time.”
“I’m not hanging around because I want to do the nasty with him.”
Vanessa smiled. Laura’s voice was tighter. She scooped her hair back, trying to tuck the floating strands behind her ears, but was unsuccessf
ul.
A small thrill surged through Vanessa. This was almost as good as lifting something off a store shelf and dropping it into her bag. She was winning. Laura was getting more upset. “Then why do you come by and talk to me all the time?”
“This interview process isn’t being managed correctly.”
“Do you want to mention that to Hank?”
“No.” Laura twisted her fingers together.
“It’s handled the way he wants it handled. Let me give you some career advice.”
“I don’t need career advice.” Laura laughed. “I’ve had far too much of that today. And you don’t exactly have the credentials to provide it.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I had a bad morning, okay? And I’m getting annoyed that this interview process is dragging on for so long.”
Vanessa picked up the giant paperclip she kept on her desk for the rare occasions she had papers to secure. She pressed the inner curve of the metal, sliding her finger around the outside. It was such a clever device—entertaining with its extreme size, but useful. “You’re very confident.”
“Everyone knows the job is mine.”
“Do they?”
“Of course.”
“Does Hank know you think that?”
“I know he tells you things. You two have lots of secrets, don’t you?”
Vanessa smiled. She put the paperclip on the desk and lined it up along the side of her mouse pad.
“What did he tell you? Did he say anything about me?”
“I don’t think it’s good to be overconfident.”
“I’m not overconfident.”
“I have work to get done. Is there something I can do for you?”
“You can stop being so smug and using sex to cloud his thinking.”
“I’ll let him know.”
“Look, I had a bad morning. Something really shook me up and…well, I had that headache. I just came by to check the status. You don’t need to start gossiping to him about me and putting me in a bad light. I mean it—women need to stick together.”
The Assistant: A gripping psychological thriller with a nerve-shredding ending Page 14