by Erin Healy
“Thank you for protecting me during the trial. And Molly.”
“I did it because I love you.”
Lexi gripped her hands like a prayer, wishing this meeting were over, wondering if she should walk out.
He repeated, “I did it because I love you. Do you still love me, Lexi? I think you do, on some level, even though you’ve tried to bury it. I think you’ve stayed here in Crag’s Nest because you can’t move past me. Is it true?”
Panic fluttered in her chest. It wasn’t true, was it?
“If you can’t tell me you love me, tell me you hate me. Say it out loud and I’ll leave you alone.”
Lexi’s confidence faltered. “I’ve already said that. In the ICU.”
“No, no. You were shocked to see me. I understood that. Forgive me? Please? We never had the chance to talk about what happened.”
She couldn’t reply.
“Of course you would feel as angry as you did. It’s only natural, especially if you’ve kept our connection bottled up all these years.”
“Only a shrink would say that.”
“But it didn’t kill everything, did it? Please, if you’d only forgive me.”
What did that mean, exactly? That she could say sure and they’d get a do-over? Was his request even an apology? And if it was, could she accept it? Offense made her sneer. How could he think of patching this up like that?
He said, “I believe your love is still—”
“Stop it. Please, stop.”
“You never ended our relationship because you didn’t want it to die.”
Lexi hadn’t consciously examined her love for Norman since the day of his sentencing. She had wrapped it up in a bundle of resentment and buried it deep in an untouchable cavern of her soul. Was it still there, thunking rhythmically like a man buried alive, desperate to be saved before the oxygen ran out?
No. It absolutely was not.
She shoveled as much dirt onto the open grave as quickly as she could.
“You have one minute to tell me why you asked me to come here today”— she pointed to the door—“and then I will leave and never speak another word to you.”
Norm’s breath came out in an airy laugh. He sing-songed, “I just called . . . to say . . . I love you.”
Lexi’s palms broke out in a sweat. She stood so quickly that the chair scraped the cold floor and bumped the wall in the close quarters. She took two steps toward the door and raised her fist to beat it.
“Molly,” Norman said, his voice level again.
She turned around.
“I asked you to come here because I know how you feel about Molly. You might love me or love me not, but you would do anything for your little girl.”
“Spit it out.”
“I hear Grant is back in town, that he wants to have a piece of her.”
Her arms folded themselves across her chest.
“You’re not going to let him have her, are you?”
“No court will, either.”
“Just because a man’s an ex-con doesn’t necessarily mean he loses his rights to play daddy when he wants to. Not in this state anyway.”
“I’m not worried about Grant. Why are you?”
Norm’s good eye darkened as he shifted it to look at Lexi in the poor lighting. “How much longer do you think he’ll be patient, before he swoops in and takes her right out from under you? What does he have to lose?”
She shivered.
“What do you have to gain?”
“Love, Lexi. True love.” He lowered his voice and beckoned her to come closer to the bed. She allowed her feet to return. “You need your knight in shining armor.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I know something about Grant. He’s the one who killed Tara.”
“Don’t insult me.”
“Okay, I’ll say it as plainly as I know how. Grant wasn’t just a dealer, he was a crooked dealer.”
“What other kind is there?”
“I went to him for the meds I needed to take care of this precious little organ of mine.” He tapped his skull with an index finger. “I knew what was wrong. I knew I was a danger to everyone but you. You, Lexi, are my only true stimulant.”
Lunch churned in her stomach as if it had begun to ferment. Norm’s easy manner, his precisely cut words, belonged to a stranger. The man she’d had an affair with was never so cocky. She wondered if it was the medications or the illness that had sharpened his edges.
“He told me I was getting the cocktail I asked for—a cocktail to take the edge off my mood swings. Extra elastic to keep my mind from snapping.” He clapped both hands together and Lexi flinched at the sharp sound. “You know what I really got for my good greenbacks? Placebos. Sugar pills. Snake oil.”
At first Lexi didn’t want to draw this line between Grant and her sister’s death. Then she immediately wondered if it would absolve her own guilt. Then her guilt deepened because of the thought.
“I wasn’t of sound mind the day your sister asked me to meet her.”
“That much has been public for a long time.”
“The truth, though, is that it wasn’t my fault. I thought I was okay, that we’d have a pleasant adult conversation, but . . .” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. “These things come on without warning. I don’t even remember the moment.”
Lexi gripped the rail of his bed.
“All I needed was the right medicine. But your husband needed a few extra bucks.” He wagged his head. “Grant is not a man you want around Molly.”
“Noted,” she murmured.
“I don’t think you’re hearing me. I’m only going to say this once. Warden says you’ll come Friday, speak on my behalf at the hearing. You’ll do that, won’t you?”
Their eyes locked together.
“Tell them you’ve met me and seen for yourself that everything my doctors are going to say is true: I’m not the man who killed your sister. I’m reformed. I’m . . . a fine, upstanding, medicated citizen. Do that for me. Give our love a second chance. When I’m out, I’ll take care of Grant. He won’t cause you this confusion any more. It’s his turn to be punished.”
“You’ll take care of . . .” Whatever she had thought Norman might promise, it was not this. Even in his right mind, he was murderous. She stepped away from the bed.
“I won’t. I can’t do that. In fact, I’ll tell them what you’ve—”
“You do that and I’ll make the affair public. I’ll tell them everything, including that you were in partnership with your dear old man. I hear that you have carried on without him.”
Warden’s planted drugs flashed in Lexi’s vision.
“I’ll implicate you in Tara’s death,” he continued. The muscles that ran from his jaw to his ear flexed. “I’ll give them a very compelling reason why I needed to protect you all these years. And I’ll tell them you still operate. What do you think that’ll do to your stupid efforts to give Molly a good life?”
She gasped. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I can. And because I have support. Warden’s got designs on Molly too, doesn’t he?”
“But why? I don’t understand. You . . . we . . .”
“Have changed in the last seven years,” he said.
She struggled for words. “They’ll never believe you,” she finally cobbled together. “This is about Grant. Why me? What did I ever do to make you turn on me?”
“You turned on me first, didn’t you? Just walked away from what we had.”
“You murdered my sister!”
“Don’t try me in this, Lexi. I have always been a man of my word. It’s one of the reasons you fell in love with me in the first place.”
Lexi spun and hit the door with her entire body, and she pounded on it with both hands until the guard set her free.
{ chapter 24 }
The off-balanced Volvo took Lexi straight to the Mental HealthAssistance Residence, a mere five miles away. Not to her father, but to Angel
o. It wasn’t quite six o’clock. She thought he should be close to getting off his shift. The winter sun had set behind the mountains moments earlier, turning the world into purple and gray shadows.
Lexi doubted that love would be a part of any solution Angelo might offer for this latest dilemma. She laughed aloud in the car. She was about to tell a man she was interested in all the ways in which she had wrecked every relationship that ever mattered to her. Lexi doubted that Angelo would be interested in her crisis-filled life much longer, but who else could she turn to?
When would she have to tell her mother she’d had an affair with the man who killed Tara? What would happen when Grant and Molly found out?
When. Not if, but when.
The realization that she feared what Grant might think gave her pause.
It didn’t matter that the extramarital relationship was short-lived and had happened almost a decade ago. Lexi had hoped this moment of reckoning would never come. Prison had separated Norman and her; his mental illness had overruled their bond. She had no proof he had ever been of sound mind, or was even now. How could he blame anything on her?
A rhetorical question.
Her regrets over the affair blossomed.
Molly. Molly. Molly. Her daughter’s name was the only prayer Lexi was capable of. She trusted God knew exactly what she was begging for.
Angelo might not have any idea what she should do. She wouldn’t blame him if he hightailed it out of her broken family circle as suddenly as he had entered it. She would regret it, though. He made her feel safe. But if he wasn’t going to be a permanent fixture in her life, she thought it would be best to know sooner than later.
Could one ever be sure of these things? Did it matter, considering her marriage was still legally sound, if not otherwise shattered?
God hated divorce, she’d been told, and for Lexi that truism was a twisted justification for her inaction against Grant, and a repellent to more relational disasters. It protected her from everything she never wanted to face.
Including her easy attraction to Angelo. She drove into the Residence’s parking lot. His truck hulked at the end of the lot near a bare ash tree. She decided to park next to it.
Was she a glutton for punishment? That must be it. She pulled into the slot and gripped the steering wheel in both hands as if it could direct the course of her life and she could actually control it. Then she let go.
The fear that Angelo had triggered in her the first time she saw him came to mind. That might have been something instinctive, or spiritual. A warning.
Lexi ignored it and got out of the car. She beat it off the back of her mind as she traversed the dim parking lot, making for the lights of the Residence.
The sprawling facility, a monument to insurance dollars and mentalhealth lobbyists at work, was built on an eye-poppingly gorgeous, densely wooded property. It had been donated to the state by an elderly man who’d lost his wife to dementia back in the day when her only care options were more medieval than modern. The building that served as the visitors’ entrance had once been their home.
She approached the main walkway, a broad swath of cobblestones.
A tiny grunt, the kind a pitcher might exhale when he released a baseball, caught her ear and she turned her head toward the pink line of horizon west of the building. A black orb aimed for her head triggered all Lexi’s reflexes: She gasped. She threw up her hands. She averted her eyes.
“Ow!”
She didn’t see the projectile that hit her cheekbone until after it fell to the pavement and rolled to a stop several feet away. With one hand on the side of her face—it was wet and sticky, but not bloody—she bent and saw a small apple, with a white bite cut out of its side. The skin near this had split from the impact of hitting her, sheassumed.
Someone had thrown an apple at her?
A wandering resident. That was her first thought. The shadows didn’t give up a human form.
She groped for her book bag and pepper spray, but she’d been so upset by her visit with Norman that she’d left them both in the Volvo.
Keeping her head turned in the direction of the apple’s launch, she moved in the direction of the building, which seemed farther away than it had a second ago. The sky’s blue had darkened to purple. If there ever was a time for Angelo to have made an unexpected appearance, she thought, this would have been it.
After two quick steps, she collided with a body. A treelike, lanky body attached to one of the ugliest heads ever to crawl out of a gene pool. His face was the shape of a light bulb. The eyes, squinty and mean; the nose, small and piggish; the cheeks, bony and sunken.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, lifting her hands to separate them.
He gripped her arm with fingers that were strong talons. His touch was fiery, hot through the sleeve of Lexi’s jersey shirt like a terrible fever, and sweaty. With his free hand he crammed another apple into her lips, grinding them against her teeth. “Eat,” he said. She struggled but couldn’t break his hold.
When she wouldn’t open up for the fruit, he started banging it on the top of her head while holding her upright. The pounding should have hurt, but the apple was soft, as though the heat of his palms had baked it.
“Help!”
“Eat, eat, eat, eat . . .” he chanted. Her thrashing hands tangled in his greasy hair. Her fingernails scraped his face. After a dozen hits, the juice started running onto her scalp, and the bruised flesh slipped out of his fingers. She heard it hit the asphalt of the parking lot.
He released her arm and grabbed the hair at the nape of her neck in a split-second motion. Her head snapped back involuntarily, following the pain. He lifted Lexi so that she had to stand on her toes. She tottered.
Somehow he had another apple and she imagined the pockets of his oversized army field jacket full of them. She grabbed his collar, as much to balance herself as to hold him off. He held the fruit close to her mouth and nose as he leaned over her face.
“We leave each other alone,” he muttered. Lexi shut her eyes against his hot breath, his terrifying displeasure and babble. “Alone to be. Me, myself. No interference. That’s all I ask for, to do my work in peace. But he can’t stay out of anything. The only us is I and mine, which you are not. He is not.”
What was he talking about? Lexi was gagging on her own breath, hyperventilating around the close, sweet-scented fruit. His grip on her hair paralyzed her neck. She raised a knee into his groin but he didn’t seem to notice. Her supporting ankle wobbled.
“You’re not my subject, as he was not his subject. We don’t interfere in each other’s work. Eat. Eat!”
“Help!”
She coughed and gasped, opening her mouth enough for the man to jam the tennis ball–sized apple into her mouth. She swiped at it. He blocked her arm and her teeth snagged the fruit unwillingly. She spit it out, jerked her head, and felt hairs release at the top of her spine.
He pinched Lexi’s jaw, tucking the flesh of her cheeks between her molars.
“He has to go. If I remove you, he’ll have to go.”
When he released Lexi’s head and face, he shoved, and she fell backward, tailbone hitting first, then the heels of her hands, bracing her from going over. He snatched one of her wrists out from under her, twisting her shoulder. She turned into it protectively, then rolled as he dragged her, screaming for help, across the asphalt. The rough surface tore into the skin of her hip. His scalding fingers were bony handcuffs.
“Shut the apple trap,” he ordered.
Lexi’s body bounced over a curb and met dry winter grass. The parched branches of a shrub snatched her hair and scratched her face. With a free hand, she tried to ward off abrasions. Her forearm burned from scrapes. Grass came loose as he pulled her over it and packed itself down into the waistband of her jeans.
She kept screaming.
Darkness came quickly in the mountains, and the lunatic hauled her into the deeper darkness of an evergreen stand on the east side of the Residence. T
wisted bristlecone pine trees and ponderosas crouched like old, bored men. Snow from a fall of two weeks ago still lay under the trees; the sun didn’t shine there even during the day.
He let go of Lexi and the side of her head caught a rock, sending streaks of red and purple behind her eyes. She slid off it, coming to rest in a patch of ice that brought a brief, strange relief. She rolled onto her back, gasping and crying, clawing at the ground. He towered over her, straddling her ribs, fishing in his pockets. Dropping his knees down onto her arms, he pinned her to the dirt. If he’d weighed a few pounds more he might have broken her bones.
God, please help me.
He clamped a hand over her lips and withdrew a handful of something from his pocket. More apples?
No, something smaller. Hard and spiney, inedible gobstoppers. He gripped them in a fist and a sound like a popcorn kernel landing in oil passed through his fingers. The objects in his grip started hissing.
One of them cracked. Then another.
He pinched her nose and, when she struggled for air like a gaping fish, he began stuffing the spiderlike shells in. They cut into the tender lining of her cheeks.
“I and me and mine and not him, no, not him or you . . .”
Lexi flopped her head from side to side, trying to keep him from putting the shells in her mouth. He hit her in the temple, the same place struck by the rock, stunning her into stillness. Her lungs convulsed, needing to cough. She couldn’t breathe. She would inhale and slice up her throat on the strange rocks.
They were hot and dry.
“‘If you’re lucky, he’ll live,’ he says. If you’re lucky. Well I’m lucky. Luckier. And smart enough to know when you have to kill them. You’ll die slowly while my man lives slowly. Justice.”
Lexi’s lungs demanded air. Her head buzzed as if it was about to shut down. Instead, the weight came off her chest. Her attacker was lifted off of her. Not pushed or tackled or yanked, but lifted. Levitated. A rush of cold air swooped in over her clothes, cooling all signs of his body.