Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  It’s not terribly hard to take a life. Or anyway, not as hard as you’d imagine. There are those who would tell you I was not in my right mind, that I had dissociated from reality, from myself, on the night I made this discovery. But I’m not so sure. In my memories I am quite willing. Of course, all I did was leave the gate open. But that was enough, wasn’t it?

  I don’t remember feeling anything, less than a week later after the night out in the woods, as I walked the drive on the horse farm to open that gate. I was basically sleepwalking.

  Marlowe told me to wait until the house was quiet, to get to the gate before midnight. I wasn’t afraid of the long road or the errand before me. And as I let the gate swing open before I walked back to the stable, where I was supposed to meet Marlowe, I didn’t feel any anticipation or excitement or dread—I just felt empty. Even when a black sedan passed me with its lights off, slow and deadly like a shark through dark water, I observed it with detachment.

  All the lights in and around the house were off, and a heavy quiet blanketed the night; even my soft footfalls seemed to echo. In the stable the horses were restless in their stalls again. I heard them shuffling, exhaling loud breaths from their nostrils. But Marlowe was nowhere in sight. The black sedan, a Lincoln I recognized as belonging to one of the protesters, was parked to the side of the barn, its engine clicking as it cooled.

  Something about that sound brought me into the reality of what we were about to do. I felt as though I’d been startled awake. That’s when I noticed a flickering orange glow in the windows that had been dark just moments before. The scent of burning wood began to fill the air. I started running toward the house, my legs feeling impossibly slow and heavy, the house seeming so far away. As I burst through the door, the air was already thick with smoke.

  “Mom!” I yelled, grabbing the banister and racing up the stairs. I covered my mouth and nose with my arm, but the smoke was insidious, burning my eyes, clawing at the back of my throat. By the time I got to the top landing, I was coughing and light-headed.

  I found my mother alone in her bed, passed out cold, oblivious to the fire raging through the house. I don’t know what I thought would happen to her in all this, but I couldn’t leave her to die. I shook her but couldn’t rouse her. Finally I dragged her until she stumbled from the bed, leaning her full weight on me.

  “What’s happening?” she muttered.

  “There’s a fire!” I yelled, struggling to get to the door. “Where’s Frank?”

  But she didn’t seem to hear. “Ophelia,” she slurred, “let me sleep.”

  I dragged her into the hall, where through the smoke I saw two figures on the staircase, one long and lean, the other smaller by far but holding a gun. The taller was Frank, halfway up the stairs, probably headed up to get my mother. Where he’d been, I had no idea. But he’d stopped and turned to face the figure behind him. As I moved closer, I recognized. There was a wild look to Janet Parker, desperate and so, so sad. She doesn’t care what happens to her, I thought. Her whole body was rigid, as though it took the strength of all her muscles to hold that gun steady.

  “You’re making a mistake, ma’am,” Frank said soothingly. He had one hand lifted as if to deflect the shot. His eyes fell on us.

  The scene seemed to sober my mother a bit. “What’s happening?” she said, groggy and confused. “Frank, what’s going on?”

  “You let my wife and her daughter leave the house,” he said to Janet Parker. “They’re innocent here.”

  I heard a crash come from behind us, and the shattering of glass. My mother let go a little scream.

  “Let them leave,” Frank said again. “They’ve got nothing to do with any of this.”

  Janet Parker nodded at us, barely seeing us, and I grabbed my mother’s arm, dragged her toward the staircase.

  “What are you doing?” my mother yelled as we moved past Frank down the stairs. My mother reached for Frank, and he clasped her to him, then pushed her away.

  “Go,” he told her.

  I saw then that they truly loved each other, and it shocked me. I’d seen them as these sick, damaged people who had formed an insane union. It never occurred to me that they’d actually cared for each other.

  “The only peace I had was knowing you’d burn in hell for what you done!” Janet Parker yelled when we reached the bottom of the stairs. These were almost exactly the words she’d said at the trailer park.

  “I didn’t kill your child, ma’am. I’ve never killed anyone. I swear it.” He sounded so sincere I almost believed him.

  “Frank!” my mother shouted as I dragged her out the door and away from the house. I could see the flames coming out of the roof now, and as we watched, my bedroom window blew out, raining glass onto the ground below. I stood staring, disbelieving my own eyes. The house was burning. Where was Marlowe?

  My mother broke away from me then and ran. I chased after her, but she moved back through the front door before I could stop her. I heard her screaming, a terrible howl of protest, and I came up behind her just in time to see Frank’s chest exploding as Janet Parker shot him dead center. He spun and seemed to pause in midstride, as though he’d decided to walk away from her but changed his mind. Then he fell flat and hard onto the stairs and slid down like a plank.

  I looked up at Janet Parker, and for the first time I saw her smile. Then she turned the barrel and stuck the gun into her own mouth and pulled the trigger. I saw an awful spray of red.

  My mother was wailing as I pulled her away from Frank’s body, and as we moved through the door, two more windows burst upstairs. She threw herself to the ground outside and wept as the fire raged. I stood beside her staring. The world seemed to lose all its sound, the ground was gone from beneath my feet and I was spinning. Regret and fear cut a valley through me. What did we do? Oh, my God, what did we do? The things I’d seen had changed something within me, like one bright red sock in a white wash. Everything in my world was a different color now.

  I saw him then, standing beside the barn, just another shadow in the darkness, licked by the orange light of the flames. He might have been laughing, he might have been crying. I don’t know—I couldn’t see his face. That was the thing about Marlowe, you could never see his face. I walked to him as if he’d called me. He’d cast and directed us all; we’d each played our roles for him perfectly. That was his gift.

  I got into the passenger side of the Lincoln and watched him climb behind the wheel. He looked at me as he started the ignition, didn’t say a word as we started down the long, dark drive. My mother didn’t even raise her head from the ground. She never noticed I’d gone.

  “Are you okay?” It’s Gray standing in our doorway.

  I am sitting on the edge of our bed in the dark, staring at the wall as though my memories are playing on a screen there.

  “I’m fine,” I tell him. “Just tired.”

  I don’t want to share my memories with him; I’m not sure why.

  “Look,” he says, “we’re going to find out what’s happening and put an end to it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go see Harrison, find out what he wants, and give it to him.”

  He has come to sit beside me and is holding my hands in his. I’m surprised by what he’s saying. It sounds like a desperate move. It’s not like him. “Always operate from a position of strength”—that has been his motto as long as I’ve known him. It sounds to me now as if he’s waving a white flag.

  “Whoever came to see your father, whoever was on the beach, whatever happened to your psychiatrist—these are unknowns. Maybe you were right, maybe it’s all part of the same problem. I don’t know. But Harrison is a threat we can deal with. Buy him off, he goes away. Who knows? Maybe everything else goes away, too.”

  I feel a glimmer of hope, that maybe we just have to write a check and all of this disappears. I can go back to being Annie Powers and Ophelia can slip back into the darkness where she belongs. Maybe it’s r
eally that easy.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I’ll be home soon,” he says, kissing me softly on the mouth. I reach for him, pull him to me, and hold on tight. He leaves me, and I listen to him on the stairs and then watch as his car pulls from the drive. I get up quickly and grab my keys.

  “I’m going to run out for a second,” I tell Esperanza as I pass by the family room on my way to the garage. “Gray’s gone, too.”

  “It’s late,” she says.

  “I won’t be long,” I say. “Victory’s sleeping.”

  I don’t hear what she says as I leave. At the end of our street, I just catch a glimpse of Gray’s taillights as he makes a left. I’m following him. I don’t know why.

  27

  “He was gone most of the time,” Gray said of his father. “And when he was home, he was this brooding presence. Sullen, staring at the television or angry at my mother for something she’d bought or had done to the house while he was gone. I hovered around him, wanting and fearing his attention. Occasionally I’d get these quick pats on the back or we’d try to play catch or build a tree house, something that fathers and sons might do together. But it was never quite right. We always walked away feeling like we’d failed at something indefinable. We just couldn’t connect, not really. Not ever.”

  He used to spend time talking to me like this, even when he thought I might not be able to hear him or that I didn’t care. He’d sit in my room at the psychiatric hospital in New Jersey where he’d admitted me as Annie Fowler and talk. I’d stare off into space, not responding. I wasn’t exactly catatonic, but I’d sort of lost my will to exist. I didn’t speak, barely ate, just stared at the window in my room watching the leaves fall from the trees, the clouds drift past. I didn’t know why he’d talk to me, a stranger, like this. What does he want from me? Why doesn’t he just leave me here?

  “My mother was just so damned sad, all the time. She was clinically depressed, I realize now. But then, she was unsupported, didn’t even know she needed treatment. She never recovered from the loss of her daughter, my sister who I never knew. I suppose my father never recovered, either. Maybe that’s what happens to you when you’re born to parents who’ve lost a child. You just never fit somehow.”

  He’d talk, sometimes for hours, as though he’d been holding it in all his life, waiting for some silence where he could safely release the words. Maybe, in a way, I was his first safe place, someone in no position to judge him for his sins and loss of faith.

  “After high school I joined the navy. Everyone was pleased, proud. But I just wanted to get away from them. It seemed like the right thing to do. It was what my father did. I had no idea what I was doing, not really. Maybe I’m more like my mother than my father. I wasn’t cut out for the things that lay ahead.”

  I found myself listening even though, during that time, I hated him. He was six feet of muscles and hard places, scars and dark looks. I found him ugly, too harsh around the eyes and mouth. He smelled strongly of Ivory soap and sometimes alcohol. I couldn’t decide whether he was the person who’d rescued me or destroyed me. He’d killed Marlowe, the first person I’d ever loved. He’d saved me from a killer, brought me to this hospital, and stayed with me, came every day with books and magazines, candy and little gifts that sat in an untouched pile in the closet by the bathroom.

  He told me how a few years after the First Gulf War he was honorably discharged from the Navy SEALs. He left sick with rage and disillusionment with the military and the government. He was angry at his father for pushing him into a career he was never sure he wanted, angry at himself for not knowing any other way to live. He drifted from New York to Florida, drinking too much, doing some odd private-investigator work here and there.

  “I’d done and seen some truly heinous things,” he told me. “They didn’t seem to have any meaning or purpose. Nothing good ever came from the bad, not that I could see. It was making me sick back then. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, how long I could carry all the baggage I had.”

  I cooperated with my admittance to the hospital and with my name change because I knew I didn’t have any choice. It was that or prison. The truth is, I didn’t have anywhere else to go; I knew that neither of my parents would help me. But more than that, I was eager to be rid of Ophelia and the things she’d done—what I could remember, anyway. Gray and I were alike in that respect, coming to terms with past deeds that seemed right at the time but under the glare of reality revealed themselves as dead wrong.

  “When I found you, I thought maybe you were the one who makes all the wrong things right,” he said one night about a month after I’d been in the hospital. “I thought, if I can do right by her, maybe it gives meaning to everything else.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said, finally answering him. I didn’t want to be his penance. I didn’t want to be the one who made things right for him. “That’s not the way life works. There’s no balance sheet.”

  “No?” he said, sitting up in the chair where he’d been slouching. “Then how do we move on from our mistakes?”

  “We don’t get to move on,” I said, resting my eyes on him for the first time.

  He leaned his head back and gave a mirthless laugh. “So we just languish in regret until we die?”

  “Maybe that’s what we deserve,” I said, turning away from him again.

  He let a beat pass. Then, “I hope you’re wrong.”

  Tonight I stay far enough away from Gray’s car that he can’t see me but close enough not to lose him. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Someone like Gray instinctively knows when he’s being tailed. Maybe that’s because he’s usually doing the tailing. Takes one to know one. And, of course, if he sees my car in the rearview mirror, he’ll know right away that it’s me. I’m not sure how I’ll explain myself, since I have no idea what I’m doing.

  He’s moving fast, crossing the causeway and pulling on to the highway. He’s not stopping at the police station. He’s headed into the city, which seems odd. I never thought to ask him how he knows where Harrison lives. He has his methods.

  “I was in a bar in the East Village once, a place called Downtown Beirut. You know it?” Gray asked me one night at the hospital. Our relationship had improved by this time, but I didn’t answer. I almost never did. I don’t think he minded. He knew I was listening.

  “A real dump, the biggest dive you ever saw—what a shithole. I used to drink there a lot. Just find a corner and pound them back until I could barely get myself home to my apartment on First Avenue. It wasn’t every night that I’d get drunk like this, only when I couldn’t sleep, when it was all too much with me. My mother passed after I was discharged, a stroke. I blamed my dad. I blamed him for almost everything. Sometimes my anger felt like a physical pain in my chest. You ever felt like that?”

  Yes, I’d felt like that, for most of my life, in fact. But I didn’t say so. That night he’d brought flowers—daisies, if I remember correctly—and some doughnuts in a box. They both sat untouched on the table beside me.

  “Anyway, I was sitting there one night, well on my way to oblivion, when an old wreck of a guy, an aging biker covered with tats and a mess of long gray hair, pulled up a chair.”

  I heard him shift in his chair, crack his neck.

  “I told him I wasn’t looking for company. He told me he wasn’t looking for company, either. He was looking for his daughter. A friend we had in common told him I could help.”

  I turned to look at Gray. He was sitting in the same chair he’d been sitting in most nights for a month. His feet were up on the windowsill, his head back as if he were talking to the ceiling. He wore jeans and a black sweater, army-issue boots. His jacket, a beat-up old denim thing, was on the foot of my bed. He had a big scar on his neck; his hands were square and looked as hard as boulders.

  I think I saw him for the first time that night. Outside my window it was snowing, fat flakes glittering under the streetlamps, tapping at the window
like cold fingers. I saw the strong line of his jaw, his full red lips, the snaking muscles of his shoulders and arms. He took his eyes from the ceiling and fixed me in their cool gray stare. I felt a little shock at their lightness; there was something spooky about his gaze.

  He knew he had my attention and kept talking. “The old guy said, ‘I’ve failed this girl in every way a father can fail his daughter. I left her for the wolves, you know. If I fail her now, nothing else in my life means much. I got some money if you got some time and need the work. My buddy said you have a talent for finding people who don’t want to be found.’”

  “My father,” I said, incredulous. Gray nodded.

  “I had the time and I needed the work,” he went on. “He asked me to fix Marlowe Geary and take care of you, whatever that meant.”

  “He paid you?”

  “At first, but after a while we became friends. It became more than a job to me.”

  “I know. You were looking to atone for your sins.”

  He shrugged. “That was part of it. Yes.”

  I see Gray pull off the highway before the downtown exits and into the slums that surround the city. I follow him through a neighborhood where the streetlamps are shot out and bulky forms hover in doorways and huddle on corners. Houses are dark, but the blue light of television screens flickers in windows. I stay back far, about one turn behind, following more on instinct sometimes than on being able to see his car. Where is he going? I know for sure Harrison doesn’t live here.

  The residential neighborhood yields to an industrial area, warehouses with gates drawn, the highway up above us now. I can see he’s headed to the underpass. I stop my car and watch through the overgrowth of an empty lot as he, too, comes to a stop. We both sit and wait.