Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance

by Lee Child

  June had bristled, but inside, she understood that Richard had always known everything about her. Perhaps not the dropped chicken or the ugly shirt she’d gladly sent to the town dump, but he could see into her soul. He knew that her biggest fear was dying alone. He knew what she needed to hear in order to make this transaction go smoothly. He knew, above all, how to turn these things around so that she believed his lies, no matter how paltry the proof, no matter how illogical the reasoning.

  “I’m a good man,” he’d kept telling her. Before the trial. After the trial. In letters. On the telephone. “You know that, June. Despite it all, I am a good man.”

  As if it mattered anymore. As if she had a choice.

  The secret that horrified her most was that deep down, part of her wanted to believe that he was still good. That he cared about her, even though the hatred in his eyes was so clear that she often had to look away. She could snatch the truth from the jaws of a tenth-grader at twenty paces, but her own husband, the man with whom she’d shared a bed, created a child, built a life, remained an enigma.

  June turned her head away now, stared out the window. The curtains needed to be washed. They slouched around the window like a sullen child. Her hands still remembered the feel of the stiff material as she had sewn the pleats, and her mind conjured the image of the fabric store where she had bought the damask. Grace had been eight or nine then. She was running around the store, in and out of the bolts, screaming, so June had finally given up, quickly buying a fabric she wasn’t particularly fond of just to get the annoying child out of the store.

  And then came the horrible realization that the annoying child would be in the car with her, would come home with her and continue screaming the entire way. Outside the store, June had sat in the blazing-hot car and recalled stories of mothers who’d accidentally left their kids unattended in their cars. The children’s brains boiled. They died horrible, agonizing deaths.

  June had closed her eyes in the car, summoned back the cool interior of the fabric store. She saw herself browsing slowly down the aisles, touching bolts of fabric, ignoring the prices as she selected yards of damask and silk. No child screaming. No clock ticking. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but please herself.

  And then her eyes popped open as Grace’s foot slammed into the back of the seat. June could barely get the key in the ignition. More shaking as she pressed the buttons on the console, sending cold air swirling into the car, her heart stopping midbeat as she realized with shame that it was not the idea of killing her child that brought her such horror, but the thought of the fallout. What the tragedy would leave behind. Grieving mother. Such a sad story. A cautionary tale. And then, whispered but still clear, How could she…

  Every mother must have felt this way at one time or another. June was not alone in that moment of hatred, that sensation of longing for an unattached life that swept over her as Grace kicked the back of her seat all the way home.

  I could just walk away, June had thought. Or had she said the actual words? Had she actually told Grace that she could happily live without her?

  She might have said the words, but, as with Richard, those moments of sheer hatred came from longer, more intense moments of love. The first time June had held little Grace in her arms. The first time she’d shown her how to thread a needle, make cookies, decorate a cupcake. Grace’s first day of kindergarten. Her first gold star. Her first bad report card.

  Grace.

  June came back to herself in her dank bedroom, the sensation almost of falling back into her body. She felt a flutter in her chest, a tapping at her heart; the Grim Reaper’s bony knuckles knocking at the door. She looked past the dingy curtains. The windows were dirty. The outside world was tainted with grime. Maybe she should let Richard take her outside. She could sit in the garden. She could listen to the birds sing, the squirrels chatter. The last day. The last ray of sunlight on her face. The last sensation of the sheets brushing against her legs. The last comb through her hair. The last breath through her lungs. Her last glimpse of Richard, the house they had bought together, the place where they had raised and lost their child. The prison cell he had left her in as he went off to live in one of his own.

  “ ‘A house on Taylor Drive was broken into late Thursday evening. The residents were not at home. Stolen were a gold necklace, a television set, and cash that was kept in the kitchen drawer…’ ”

  She had loved sewing, and before her life had turned upside down the second time, before the detectives and lawyers intruded, before the jury handed down the judgment, June had thought of sewing as a metaphor for her existence. June was a wife, a mother. She stitched together the seam between her husband and child. She was the force that brought them together. The force that held them in place.

  Or was she?

  All these years, June had thought she was the needle, piercing two separate pieces, making disparate halves whole, but suddenly, on this last day of her life, she realized she was just the thread. Not even the good part of the thread, but the knot at the end—not leading the way, but anchoring, holding on, watching helplessly as someone else, something else, sewed together the patterns of their lives.

  Why was she stuck with these thoughts? She wanted to remember the good times with Grace: vacations, school trips, book reports they had worked on together, talks they had had late at night. June had told Grace all the things mothers tell their daughters: Sit with your legs together. Always be aware of your surroundings. Sex should be saved for someone special. Don’t ever let a man make you think you are anything but good and true. There were so many mistakes that June’s own mother had made. June had parented against her mother, vowing not to make the same mistakes. And she hadn’t. By God, she hadn’t.

  She had made new ones.

  We didn’t raise him to be this way, mothers would tell her during parent-teacher conferences, and June would think, Of course you did. What did you think would happen to a boy who was given everything and made to work for nothing?

  She had secretly blamed them—or perhaps not too secretly. More often than not, there was a complaint filed with the school board by a parent who found her too smug. Too judgmental. June had not realized just how smug until she saw her own smirk reflected back to her at the beginning of a conference about Grace. The teacher’s eyes were hard and disapproving. June had choked back the words We didn’t raise her this way and bile had come into her throat.

  What had they raised Grace to be? A princess, if Richard was asked. A perfect princess who loved her father.

  But how much had he really loved her?

  That was the question she needed answered. That was literally—and she used the word correctly here—the last thing that would be on her mind.

  Richard sensed the change in her posture. He stared at her over the paper. “What is it?”

  June’s brain told her mouth to move. She felt the sensation—the parting of the lips, the skin stuck together at the corners—but no words would form.

  “Do you want some water?”

  She nodded because that was all she could do. Richard left the room. She tilted her head back, looked at the closed closet door. There were love letters on the top shelf. The shoe box was old, dusty. After June died, Richard would go through her things. He would find the letters. Would he think her an idiot for keeping them? Would he think that she had pined for him while he was gone?

  She had pined. She had ached. She had cried and moaned, not for him, but for the idea of him. For the idea of the two of them together.

  June turned her head away. The pillowcase felt rough against her face. Her hair clung to wet skin. She closed her eyes and thought of Grace’s silky mane of hair. So black that it was almost blue. Her alarmingly deep green eyes that could penetrate right into your soul.

  “We’re almost out of bendy straws,” Richard said, holding the glass low so that she could sip from the straw. “I’ll have to go to the store later.”

  She swallowed, feeling as if a rock were
moving down her throat.

  “Does it matter to you if I go before or after lunch?”

  June managed a shake of her head. Breathing, normally an effort, was becoming more difficult. She could hear a different tenor in the whistle of air wheezing through her lips. Her body was growing numb, but not from the morphine. Her feet felt as if they were sliding out of a pair of thick woolen socks.

  Richard placed the glass on her bedside table. Water trickled from the straw, and he wiped it up before sitting back down with the paper.

  She should’ve written a book for wives who wanted their husbands to help more around the house. Here’s my secret, ladies: twenty-one years in a maximum-security prison! Richard cooked and cleaned. He did the laundry. Some days, he would bring in the warm piles of sheets fresh from the dryer and watch television with June while he folded the fitted sheets into perfect squares.

  June closed her eyes again. She had loved folding Grace’s clothes. The tiny shirts. The little skirts with flowers and rows of lace. And then Grace had gotten older, and the frilly pink blouses had been relegated to the back of the closet. What had it been like that first day Grace came down to breakfast wearing all black? June wanted to ask Richard, because he had been there too, with his nose tucked into the newspaper. As she remembered, he had merely glanced at June and rolled his eyes.

  Meanwhile, her heart had been in her throat. The administrator in June was cataloging Grace the same way she cataloged the black-clad rebels she saw in her office at school: drug addict, whore, probably pregnant within a year. She was already thinking about the paperwork she’d have to fill out when she called the young woman into her office and politely forced her to withdraw from classes.

  June had always dismissed these children as damaged, halfway between juvenile delinquents and adult perpetrators. Let the justice system deal with them sooner rather than later. She washed them out of her school the same way she washed dirt from her hands. Secretly, she thought of them as legacy children—not the sort you’d find at Harvard or Yale, but the kind of kids who walked in the footsteps of older drug-addled siblings, imprisoned fathers, alcoholic mothers.

  It was different when the errant child, the bad seed, sprang from your own loins. Every child had tantrums. That was how they learned to find their limits. Every child made mistakes. That was how they learned to be better people. How many excuses had popped into June’s mind each time Grace was late for curfew or brought home a bad report card? How many times did June overlook Grace’s lies and excuses?

  June’s grandmother was a woman given to axioms about apples and trees. When a child was caught lying or committing a crime, she would always say, “Blood will out.”

  Is that what happened to Grace? Had June’s bad blood finally caught up with her? It was certainly catching up with June now. She thought of the glob of red phlegm that she’d spat into the kitchen sink six months ago. She had ignored the episode, then the next and the next, until the pain of breathing was so great that she finally made herself go to the doctor.

  So much of June’s life was marked in her memory by blood. A bloody nose at the age of seven courtesy of her cousin Beau, who’d pushed her too hard down the slide. Standing with her mother at the bathroom sink, age thirteen, learning how to wash out her underpants. The dark stain soaked into the cloth seat of the car when she’d had her first miscarriage. The clotting in the toilet every month that told her she’d failed, yet again, to make a child.

  Then, miraculously, the birth. Grace, bloody and screaming. Later, there were bumped elbows and skinned knees. And then the final act, blood mingling with water, spilling over the side of the bathtub, turning the rug and tiles crimson. The faucet was still running, a slow trickle like syrup out of the jar. Grace was naked, soaking in cold, red water. Her arms were splayed out in mock crucifixion, her wrists sliced open, exposing sinew and flesh.

  Richard had found her. June was downstairs in her sewing room when she heard him knocking on Grace’s bedroom door to say good night. Grace was upset because her debate team had lost their bid for the regional finals. Debate club was the last bastion of Grace’s old life, the only indication that the black-clad child hunched at the dinner table still belonged to them.

  Richard was one of the debate-team coaches, had been with the team since Grace had joined, back in middle school. It was the perfect pursuit for two people who loved to argue. He’d been depressed about the loss, too, and covered badly with a fake bravado as he knocked, first softly, then firmly, on her door.

  “All right, Gracie-gray. No more feeling sorry for ourselves. We’ll get through this.” More loud knocking, then the floor creaking as he walked toward the bathroom. Again, the knocking, the calling out. Richard mumbled to himself, tried the bathroom door. June heard the hinges groan open, then heard Richard screaming.

  The sound was at once inhuman and brutally human, a noise that comes only from a mortal wounding. June had been so shocked by the sound that her hand had slipped, the needle digging deep into the meat of her thumb. She hadn’t registered the pain until days later when she was picking out the dress Grace would be buried in. The bruise was dark, almost black, as if the tip of June’s thumb had been marked with an ink pen.

  The razor Grace used was a straight-edge blade, a relic from the shaving kit that had belonged to June’s father. June had forgotten all about it until she saw it lying on the floor just below her daughter’s lifeless hand. Grace didn’t leave a suicide note. There were no hidden diaries or journals blaming anyone or explaining why she had chosen this way out.

  The police wanted to know if Grace had been depressed lately. Had she ever done drugs? Was she withdrawn? Secretive? There seemed to be a checklist for calling a case a suicide, and the detectives asked only the questions that helped them tick off the boxes. June recognized the complacency in their stance, the tiredness in their eyes. She often saw it in the mirror when she got home from school. Another troubled teenager. Another problem to be dealt with. They wanted to stamp the case solved and file it away so that they could move on to the next one.

  Washing dirt off their hands.

  June didn’t want to move on. She couldn’t move on. She hounded her daughter’s best friend, Danielle, until Martha, the girl’s mother, firmly told June to leave her alone. June would not be so easily deterred. She called Grace’s other friends into her office, demanded they tell her every detail about her daughter’s life. She turned into a tyrant, firing off warning shots at anyone who dared resist.

  She studied her daughter’s death the way she had studied for her degrees, so that by the end of it all, June could’ve written a dissertation on Grace’s suicide. She knew the left wrist was cut first, that there were two hesitation marks before the blade had gone in. She knew that the cut to the right wrist was more shallow, that the blade had nicked the ulnar nerve, causing some fingers of the hand to curl. She knew from the autopsy report that her daughter’s right femur still showed the dark line of a healed fracture where she’d fallen off the monkey bars ten years before. Her liver was of normal size and texture. The formation of her sagittal sutures was consistent with the stated age of fifteen. There were 250 ccs of urine in her bladder, and her stomach contents were consistent with the ingestion of popcorn, which June could still smell wafting from the kitchen when she ran upstairs to find her daughter.

  The lungs, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas were all as expected. Bones were measured, cataloged. The brain was weighed. All appeared normal. All were in the predictable margins. The heart, according to the doctor who performed the autopsy, was unremarkable.

  How could that be? June had wondered. How could a precious fifteen-year-old girl, a baby June had carried in her womb and delivered to the world with such promise, have an unremarkable heart?

  “What’s that?” Richard asked, peering at her over the newspaper. When she shook her head, he said, “You’re mumbling a lot lately.”

  She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was annoyed or co
ncerned. Did he know that today was the day? Was he ready to get it over with?

  Richard had always been an impatient man. Twenty-one years in an eight-by-ten cell had drilled some of that out of him. He’d learned to still his tapping hands, quiet the constant shuffling of his feet. He could sit in silence for hours now, staring at the wall as June slept. She knew he was listening to the pained draw of breath, the in-and-out of her life. Sometimes she thought maybe he was enjoying it, the audible proof of her suffering. Was that a smile on his lips as he wiped her nose? Was that a flash of teeth as he gently soaped and washed her underarms and nether regions?

  Weeks ago, when she could still sit up and feed herself, when words came without gasping, raspy coughs, she had asked him to end her life. The injectable morphine prescribed by the doctor seemed to be an invitation to an easy way out, but Richard had recoiled at the thought. “I may be a lot of things,” he had said, indignant, “but I am not a murderer.”

  There had been a fight of sorts, but not from anything June had said. Richard had read her mind as easily as he could read a book.

  He’d as good as killed her two decades ago. Why was his conscience stopping him now?

  “You can still be such a bitch,” he’d said, throwing down a towel he’d been folding. She didn’t see him for hours, and when he came upstairs with a tray of soup, they pretended that it hadn’t happened. He folded the rest of the towels, his lips pressed into a thin line, and June, in and out of consciousness, had watched his face change as if she were looking at it through a colored kaleidoscope: angry red triangles blending into dark black squares.

  He was an old man now, her husband, the man she had never bothered to divorce because the act would be one more reason for her name to appear beside his in the newspaper. Richard was sixty-three years old. He had no pension. No insurance. No chance of gainful employment. The state called it compassionate probation, though June guessed the administrators felt lucky to get an old man with an old man’s medical needs off their books. For Richard’s part, June was his only salvation, the only way he could live out the rest of his life in relative comfort.