Mad River Road

by Joy Fielding

  Brad smiled. “Once or twice.”

  “You’ve been in trouble before.”

  “Once or twice,” he said again.

  “But why did you have to kill her?” Jamie asked.

  “She saw us, Jamie. What else could I do?”

  “You could have run. You could have come with me.”

  “I had to take care of business first.”

  “How … how did you kill her?” Jamie asked.

  “You know how. You heard the news reports.”

  “You beat her to death.”

  “It wasn’t as bad as those reporters made it out to be. I just hit her a few times. It didn’t take much.”

  “With the candlestick,” Jamie said, her voice a monotone.

  “Hey—Mr. Fisher with the candlestick in the bedroom!” Brad laughed. “You remember that game, Jamie? The one where you had to figure out who killed who, where, and with what? What was it called? Clue?”

  “Clue?” Were they really talking about some stupid board game?

  “Yeah, that’s the one. I used to love that game.”

  “You planned on killing her all along, didn’t you?”

  Brad wrinkled his brow and tilted his head to one side, as if seriously considering the question. “I was kind of playing that by ear.”

  “That’s why you brought the candlestick up to her room.”

  “You mean the candlestick with your fingerprints all over it?” he asked mischievously.

  The question hit Jamie like a blow to the head. She gripped the bedspread tightly with her fingers to keep from falling over.

  Brad smiled. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

  He’d set her up. “Why?” she whispered.

  “Why what, Jamie-girl?”

  What did he want from her? “Have you ever killed anybody before?” she heard herself ask.

  There was a pause of several seconds. “Once or twice,” he said, as he had said before.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Hey, now, don’t start freaking out on me again.”

  Jamie fought to keep the scream building in her throat from escaping. She pictured a gold credit card, read the name printed across it. “Grace Hastings?”

  “Whoa! Jamie-girl! Give that girl a gold star. You’re a real little private detective, aren’t you?”

  “Who’s Grace Hastings? What did you do to her?”

  “Hold on. One question at a time.”

  “Who is she?” Jamie asked again, trying not to think of the poor woman in the past tense.

  Brad shrugged. “A friend of Beth’s. Although I always suspected she had a hankering to be more. Hey, Jamie, you ever had a three-way?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “What happened to Grace Hastings, Brad?”

  “Uh-uh. You’ve been asking all the questions. It’s my turn.”

  “Please …”

  “Have you ever had a three-way?” he repeated.

  “No,” she answered. What was the point of protest?

  “Ever been with another woman?”

  “No.”

  “Never been tempted?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Not even a little bit?”

  “No.”

  “Just not your thing, huh?”

  Jamie nodded. What was he thinking now?

  “What about if I told you it excited me, the idea of you with another woman? What if I asked you to? Would you do it for me?”

  Oh, God. “I don’t know.”

  “Something to think about,” Brad said, hunkering down on the bed, extricating a pillow from beneath the bedspread and fluffing it up behind his head. “Beth was the same way. You should have seen how upset she got the first time I suggested it.”

  “So there really is an ex-wife in Ohio,” Jamie said, trying to regain control of the conversation.

  “Sure is.”

  “And a son?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Corey Fisher. He’s five years old.”

  “But you’re not on good terms with Beth, are you?”

  Brad scratched the back of his neck. “Not really. No.”

  “She ran away from you, didn’t she?” Jamie stated, knowing the answer before she posed the question.

  The mark of a good attorney, her sister would say.

  Jamie wondered what Cynthia was doing, if she’d been bothered enough by Jamie’s strange behavior on the phone to investigate further. Except, what could she do? How would she even know where to begin?

  “She took my kid,” Brad was saying. “She should never have done that.”

  “Tell me about her,” Jamie said. “Tell me about your marriage.”

  Brad yawned, as if the story held little interest for him. “Standard boy-meets-girl stuff. We met, fell in love, got married, had a baby. Things were fine in the beginning, although her family never approved of me. I wasn’t good enough for their precious little girl, I guess. She kept telling them I was a ‘diamond in the rough,’ but they weren’t buying it. And her friends, it was the same thing with them. They were nice enough in the beginning, tried killing me with kindness, if you know what I mean, probably hoping I’d go away if they just left well enough alone. Bad enough alone, they’d probably say.” He chuckled at his own play on words. “Except I fooled them. I didn’t go anywhere. And that really ticked them off. Yes, ma’am, that ticked them off something fierce.” His voice trailed off, as if he were following some distant memory into a far recess of his brain.

  “But why did they hate you so much?”

  “You tell me. I mean, I can be a pretty charming guy. Isn’t that right?”

  “You charmed me,” Jamie conceded.

  “Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “What can you do, right?”

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you hit her, Brad?”

  “What?”

  “Is that why they hated you?”

  Brad’s expression soured. “People fight,” he said.

  “Is that why she divorced you?”

  “Who says we’re divorced?”

  “You’re not?”

  He sat up, the muscles in his back rippling with tension beneath his black shirt. “According to her, we are.”

  “And according to you?”

  “Just because she sends me a goddamn lawyer’s letter telling me she’s filing for divorce doesn’t mean I agree to it.” He slid off the bed and walked to the door.

  Where was he going? Was it possible he was going to open the door and walk out? Leave her there?

  But if that had been his intention, he stopped when he reached the door. He turned around, pressed his back against the far wall. “Relax, Jamie-girl,” he said, misreading the look on her face. “I’m a free man.”

  Jamie nodded, trying her best to look relieved. “She sent you a lawyer’s letter?”

  “First she has me locked away, then she files for divorce.”

  “You were in prison?” Jamie held her breath.

  “Better part of a year.”

  “Because you beat her?”

  Brad shook his head wearily, as if he were tired of being so misunderstood. “I never beat her.” He inched away from the door, still shaking his head. “Why would you say something like that.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Women, shit. You always stick together, don’t you?” He shook his head. “It takes two people to make a fight, Jamie. She wasn’t some innocent bystander, you know. She wasn’t some punching bag, just hanging around waiting to get hit. That woman had a mouth on her, I’ll tell you. Once she’d start in about something, there was nothing you could say or do that was gonna shut her up. Sometimes all I wanted was for her to be quiet. You know how that is? When all you want is a little peace and quiet, and your damn kid won’t stop screaming, and your wife’s giving you a hard time about something you said to one of her stupid friends.…”

  “She left you no choice,” J
amie said.

  “It’s not like she just stood there. She threw some pretty good punches herself. Hell, I was as abused as she was,” Brad said with conviction.

  “That must have been awful for you.” Good for her, Jamie was thinking, praying for the opportunity, the strength, the nerve.

  “Yeah, well, what goes around comes around.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means I’m very good at biding my time.”

  Jamie lowered her chin to her chest, stared at a long, torn thread on the quilted bedspread, wondering what would happen if she were to pull it. Would the whole thing unravel and come apart? “Why were you in prison?”

  “Long story,” Brad said, pacing back and forth between the bed and the door.

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  Brad suddenly pulled a chair away from the table and twisted it around, sitting on it backward, his arms leaning on the top of its back, his legs straddling its sides. He gazed at the heavy, mustard-colored drapes as if he could see right through them. Beyond those drapes was Dayton, less than a thirty-minute drive away.

  He’s looking at tomorrow, Jamie thought. She closed her eyes, tried not to see.

  “You’re not gonna like it,” he said quietly.

  “Was it because of what you did to Grace Hastings?”

  “Gracie? No.” He laughed, the thought clearly amusing him. “Trust me—nobody’s ever gonna find old Gracie-girl.”

  “Why were you in prison?” Jamie asked again, too afraid to question him further about Grace Hastings.

  Gracie-girl, she thought.

  Jamie-girl.

  Were they going to meet the same fate?

  “Well, you gotta promise me you’re not gonna get all upset. It was a long time ago, right after I moved to Florida.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was new to Miami, didn’t know anyone,” Brad began. “One night, I’m in a bar, and I meet this fat, middle-aged guy, and we get to talking. He tells me he’s in town for some sort of appliance convention, wife and two kids back home in Philly, the usual crap. So it takes me a while to realize this asshole’s coming on to me. I’m not too thrilled about this, believe me, but I decide to play along. I mean he’s the one buying the drinks, and he has a wad of bills on him this big.” Brad demonstrated how big with his hands. “He had this solid gold money clip. I’d never seen anything like it, before or since.” He shook his head at the memory. “Anyway, a few drinks later, he invites me back to his hotel room, supposedly to show me some catalogs, like I give a shit about a bunch of stovetops and refrigerators, and I’m thinking, not only is this moron cheating on his wife, he’s a goddamn faggot, and somebody’s got to teach him a lesson, right? So I go back to his room, we have another couple of drinks, then as soon as he puts a hand on me, I let him have it.” He shrugged. “Guess I hit him a little too hard.”

  “He died?”

  “Papers said it was a massive brain hemorrhage.”

  “And you were arrested?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There was nothing linking me to what happened. No one knew me. Nobody saw me go into his room. We were very discreet,” he said with a wink.

  “Then how …?”

  “… did I get caught?”

  Jamie nodded.

  Brad’s face darkened. “Never trust a woman,” he said ominously.

  “You told your wife,” Jamie said, suddenly piecing it all together.

  “We’d been fighting all day. Don’t ask me about what. She told me she wanted a divorce. I told her I’d see her rot in hell first. I guess she didn’t believe me.” Brad shook his head in genuine amazement. “She moved out. Next thing I know she’s talking about taking my son and going to California. That’s when I believe I mentioned what happened to that queer in the bar. Kind of as a cautionary tale. Few days later, the police are at my door. They find this guy’s money clip at the back of some drawer. I’d forgotten I even had the damn thing. Anyway, the long and the short of it is I’m arrested and denied bail, they haul my ass off to jail, and I spend over a year in some stinking cell before a judge decides the evidence they have is inadmissible. Turns out it was an illegal search, and the money clip is considered fruit from a poisonous tree. Something like that.” He laughed. “Kind of ironic, isn’t it? I’m arrested because of one fruit, and I get off because of another.” He laughed again, banging his hand on the tabletop for emphasis. “Anyway, they had to let me go.”

  “When was that?”

  “They released me a few weeks ago.”

  He’d gone from a jail cell to her bed in only a few weeks?

  “I came home to find a couple more faggots in my apartment, if you can believe it, and my wife and son vanished into thin air.”

  “How did you find out where she’d gone?”

  “Well, now, that’s where our little friend, Gracie, proved very helpful.”

  “She told you Beth was in Ohio?”

  “I didn’t give her much choice.”

  “I’m sure she called Beth to warn her.…” Jamie heard what she was saying, stopped when she realized how ridiculous those words were. Grace Hastings hadn’t warned anyone. She’d never had the chance.

  He was smiling, as if reading her thoughts. “My turn,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My turn to ask a question. Like in Silence of the Lambs. You remember Silence of the Lambs, don’t you, Jamie?”

  Jamie nodded. Were they really talking about movies? First board games, and now movies?

  “Great movie. Great movie,” he said again, agreeing with his own assessment. “You don’t think so?”

  “I guess.”

  “What do you mean, you guess? Silence of the Lambs was a great movie, no question about it.”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve seen it.”

  “Well, we’ll have to rent it one night, after all this is settled.”

  “After what is settled?”

  “After we pay a little visit to Mad River Road.”

  Jamie nodded understanding. “You’re going to kill her, aren’t you?”

  “That’s the plan,” Brad said easily.

  “And where do I fit into your plan?”

  Brad pushed himself out of his seat, returned to the bed, stroked Jamie’s cheek as he sat down beside her. “You? Why, you’re my girl, Jamie. You fit right beside me.”

  What does that mean? Jamie wondered. What was he saying? “You expect me to help you kill your wife?”

  “I expect you to help me,” he said. “Same way I helped you in Atlanta.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Emma lay on top of her bed, staring at the far wall, watching her childhood play out across its bare white surface, like an old-fashioned home movie. She saw herself as a chubby-cheeked child of three or four, being catapulted high into the air above her father’s head, confident hands extended skyward to catch her, then tossing her across his broad shoulders like a sack of grain, and racing with her back and forth across their expansive backyard, her joyous squeals trailing after them. In the background, she heard her mother’s voice cautioning her father to slow down, be careful, watch where he was going. “No,” she heard the child protest as her father’s booming laugh filled the sky. “Faster. Faster.”

  Next she saw herself tucked inside her twin-size brass bed, listening to her parents argue in the room next to hers. The child brought the pale pink blankets up over her head in an effort to silence their anger, and when she emerged, she was several years older, the once-chubby cheeks now thinner, a newfound wariness filling her big, blue eyes. She heard her mother’s angry voice, followed by a loud noise, and then another, and she jumped from her bed, afraid that the house was collapsing around her. Which, of course, it was, although not in the way she imagined. Emma watched her younger self climb out of bed and hurry to her parents’ room, pushing open the door and catching just a glimpse of a shattered mirror on the floor
beside an overturned chair, as her father, sweat-streaked, dark hair falling into furious, dark eyes, rushed toward her and carried her back to bed. “What’s wrong?” she asked him repeatedly. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine,” he assured her. “Go back to sleep, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Except the next day he was gone, and nothing was ever all right again.

  Emma blinked, watching the sad little girl morph into a shy child of nine or ten, as she bounced a rubber ball off the concrete wall behind the six-story apartment building in a mostly gray part of town, where she and her mother lived. Emma’s imaginary friend, Sabrina, watched from the sidelines, patiently waiting her turn. Sabrina was named after the Kate Jackson character on Charlie’s Angels, which was Emma’s then-favorite TV show. It was on several times a day in reruns, and Emma watched it as often as she could. She’d seen some episodes so many times, she knew the lines by heart and could recite whole scripts word for word. The early episodes were her favorites, the ones with the original angels, although she liked Cheryl Ladd almost as much as she’d liked Farrah Fawcett. And Jaclyn Smith was certainly pretty, although she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, as her mother had pronounced caustically after only several seconds of viewing. While her mother didn’t like her watching so much television, the fact was she was rarely home. In the days following Emma’s father’s desertion and the subsequent foreclosure on their home, her mother had been forced to work two, and sometimes even three, jobs to make ends meet, going from one job to the next without a break, leaving first thing in the morning and sometimes not coming home until Emma was already in bed. Emma was rarely asleep when her mother came home, but she often pretended to be. She didn’t want to talk to the woman she held responsible for all the losses in her life.

  The one friend she managed to make at her new school was a heavyset girl named Judy Rico, who was also new, although that friendship came to an abrupt halt when Judy, in an effort to make herself more attractive to the popular girls at school, announced one afternoon at recess that Emma’s mother was her mother’s cleaning lady. Emma winced at the image of herself pushing Judy Rico to the ground and jumping on top of her, pounding Judy’s face with her fists until blood dripped from her nose and down her white blouse, and a teacher had to come to Judy’s rescue, dragging the still-flailing Emma off her and carrying her to the principal’s office. After that, everyone left her alone. But that was all right. Who needed friends when she had Charlie’s Angels?