With deliberate casualness, she noted the gun holstered on his hip as he approached her. Somehow, she had to get out of these cuffs and get her hands on that gun. One without the other would not do. To get to Jada, she needed to be free, and once free, she needed a real weapon.
He sat in front of her on the mattress and poured her a cupful of wine, and then poured a serving for himself. A sweet, fruity aroma filled the air. She glanced at the label on the bottle: Arbor Mist, Peach Chardonnay. It was the same brand and flavor of wine her mom enjoyed, on those rare occasions when she indulged in drink.
It also gave Simone an idea.
Leon passed her the cup. “Cheers, ma cherie.”
She took a small sip; it was cold and delicious. “Wow, that’s so good. This is my mom’s favorite wine, too. Hmph. Probably the only thing she and I can agree on.”
Leon lowered his cup, eyebrows arched. “You and your moms don’t get along? You mean to tell me that Clair Huxtable and mommie dearest aren’t best of friends, don’t go shopping together for Blahniks at Bloomie’s and brunch with the Links sisters on Sundays?”
“No.” Simone shrugged, dropped her gaze.
“Whoa, why not, I sense a burden on your heart, a stone, a monkey on your back, something heavy, ease it off, darling, talk to me, come on, all right, unload those weighty feelings on your boy.”
“It’s kind of complicated.”
“All right, do tell, do tell, do tell.” He snickered like a child playing with matches. “Confessions time, this is gonna be good, spill those guts, I can feel it, oh yeah, lay it on me, sister.”
“I don’t know.” She sucked in her bottom lip. “I’ve never told any of this to Corey.”
“Good, good, good.” He poured her more wine, liquid close to running over the rim. “This can be between you and me, baby girl, that’s right, yeah, our little secret.”
“Okay.” She fixed him with a firm stare. “But if I tell you, then you’ve got to tell me something that you’ve never told anyone else, either.”
“You got a deal, sweetheart.” He nodded eagerly. “Spit it out now, lay it on me, my curiosity’s killed the cat and the dog.”
She took another sip, wetting her tongue. “Okay. . well, I was born in Mobile, Alabama. My parents divorced when I was fourteen. My mom moved me and my big brother here to Atlanta, where she had girlfriends.”
Leon watched her, captivated.
“Anyway,” she said, “my mom’s a high school teacher, and she actually taught at the high school I was attending. When I was in eleventh grade-I’d just turned seventeen then-we got a new principal, Mr. Blunt.
“Mr. Blunt was-hell, I’ll be blunt, no pun intended. Mr. Blunt was fine. He had this smooth caramel complexion, this tall, lean physique, this cute little gap in his front teeth that some kind of way made him look smart and sexy at the same time. He was single, too. All my girlfriends and some of the female teachers would swoon over him every time he’d walk in to a room.
“My mom was right up there with them, too, going ga-ga. She’d talk about him over the dinner table with me almost every night. Mr. Blunt is so this, Mr. Blunt is so that, Mr. Blunt, Mr. Blunt, Mr. Blunt. She was completely lovesick.
“Next thing I know, Mom and Mr. Blunt are going steady.”
“For real?” Leon cackled. “She didn’t waste any time, did she, girlfriend moved quick to snap up old boy, huh, like zoom, zoom, zoom!”
“Mom was fast.” Simone paused for effect, and winked. “But. . I was faster.”
Leon threw his head back and erupted into a body-shaking laugh. “Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hold the phone! What? Did I hear you correctly? You were faster? What, what, what?”
“You heard me right.” She grinned. “Mr. Blunt had his eye on me from the first day he showed up at the school. Could you blame him? I don’t want to brag, but umm. . you’ve seen the curvaceous assets yourself, hmm?” She gave him a brief, flirtatious smile. Leon’s mouth hung open; he was literally drooling. “Now, Leon, imagine how luscious I was looking at seventeen, before these juicy hips and thighs had ever carried a child.”
“Wow.” Leon chugged his wine in one gulp, burped, shook his head. “The pictures I’ve got in my mind, the vivid skin flicks you’ve produced in my cerebellum with those words, have damn near rendered moi speechless, sugar pie, honey pie, goddamn, wow.”
“Uh-huh.” She took another sip. “But here’s the best part. My mom was clueless about me and Mr. Blunt, she thought he was her man and hers alone-until she walked in on us in his office after school. She found me riding that tasty thang of his like a cowboy right there in his desk chair, Mr. Blunt moaning and groaning like he was having a stroke.”
“Damn!” Leon shot to his feet, knocking over his cup. “That’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard! Damn! What did Moms do then?”
Simone smirked. “What do you think? She kicked my ass out of the house. I had to go live with her girlfriend until I graduated. To this day, she’s never forgiven me. Women can hold a grudge like you’d never believe, honey.”
“Good God.” He sat down again, laughing, tears running from his eyes. “My dear, you’re something else, you’re a rare one indeed, a red diamond. I never would have imagined Clair Huxtable as a bona fide high school freak of the week. That is classic, in vino veritas, baby girl, straight up and down, no joke.”
Simone merely smiled. The story she had told him, of course, was a total fabrication. She and her mother were the best of friends, her mom wasn’t a teacher, and she had never slept with her high school principal. But Leon seemed to believe her; she had specifically concocted her tale to fit his overall worldview of women as dirty, scheming whores.
Now came the difficult part.
Sipping more of her drink, she nudged his thigh with the tip of her sneaker. “Now it’s your turn to confess, Leon. Tell me about something that happened to you when you were growing up, something you’ve kept secret.”
He rubbed his hands together. “I don’t have any stories that can measure up to that. I didn’t even graduate from high school, mademoiselle. I dropped out at sweet sixteen. I didn’t have patience for homework and schedules and sitting at a desk all day. I was too hot for my teachers to handle, too cold to hold.”
“Any stories about your family?” she asked gently. “Remember, it has to be something you’ve never told anyone. A secret.”
Lips pursed thoughtfully, he poured more wine for both of them, emptying the bottle. He took his cup, swirled it around, inhaled deeply of the aroma.
She kept her foot levered against his leg and stroked back and forth slowly. He glanced at her foot, his eyebrows twitching quizzically.
“Ready?” she asked, voice lowered to a pillow-talk hush.
“I need a cigarette, need that nicotine hit, got to get the synapses sizzling.” Hands jittering like excited birds, he shook a Newport out of the pack in his pocket. He took a deep, luxurious drag.
Simone braced for anything. But she was not prepared for what he said.
“I killed my mother,” Leon said.
61
On her hands and knees, Jada inched through the attic crawl space.
At first, she had tried to stand up and walk, but she had bumped her head against something hard, and the pain made her eyes water. Crawling was safer.
It sort of reminded her of the plastic tunnels you could crawl through at Chuck E. Cheese, or on the playground at McDonald’s. Except neither of those places had tunnels as dark and musty as this one.
A cobweb brushed across her lips. Her stomach churned with nausea, and she wiped the back of her hand over her mouth.
Chuck E. Cheese and McDonald’s didn’t have cobwebs in their play tunnels, either.
The walls and floor of the passage were wooden and smooth, though, and except for the occasional gross spiderweb, and the dust in the air that made her nose itch, it was okay.
She only wished she could hear if she was making a lot of noise. She was tryi
ng to move slowly, trying to be careful not to bump against anything, but there was no way to know for sure how quietly she was going.
But Giant had not come after her yet, and that was good. The tunnel was probably too small for him to squeeze into.
The cell phone bulged in the pocket of her pajama bottoms. She wanted to use it to call Daddy, but she worried that if she turned it on, it would make too much noise, telling Giant or Mr. Leon where she had gone. She had to wait until she was somewhere safe before she turned it on.
But where was she? It was so dark in there she couldn’t see anything. The tunnel sometimes slanted upward a little bit, and sometimes sloped downward some, sometimes curved around corners, and sometimes was straight, and occasionally, a thin trickle of light leaked inside through a small crack in the walls, but it was never bright enough for her to figure out her location in the house.
She hoped she wasn’t going around and around in circles. That would be very bad.
Her heart was beating hard, so hard she imagined it was booming in the space like a drum, letting Giant and Mr. Leon know exactly where she was. She imagined Giant punching his big fist through the wall and grabbing her ankle, and snatching her into the room with him, licking his lips. .
To calm herself down, she imagined, instead, that the tunnel walls were insulated with rubber, soundproofed, and that the passage actually led to her own bedroom closet at home. She would reach the end of it, find a door, push it open, and discover herself in the middle of her closet full of familiar clothes and shoes, and she wander out of it and into her room, and Mickey would greet her with a flutter of wings and a funny comment, and Mom and Daddy would be sitting on her bed, and Daddy would say, Hey Pumpkin, where did you go? We’ve been waiting for you. .
She came around another bend, and found that the passage ended there. The tunnel was closed up with a sheet of wood.
So she hadn’t been going in circles after all.
She traced her fingers across the surrounding walls. She felt what seemed to be a small door, like the one she’d entered through from the bedroom closet in the other room.
Where did it lead?
Sitting on her knees, she grabbed the edges of the hatch, and pulled it open. Cautiously, she looked outside.
She was in a closet that looked exactly like the one in the other bedroom. The door hung open, soft gray light coming inside.
She inched out of the tunnel, into the closet, and out of there, into the room beyond.
No one was out here waiting for her. They must not have heard her crawling around.
The room was empty, and had two windows-there were no boards on those windows, she noted-and there was another, normal-size door just ahead. That door was partway open, and appeared to lead to another room.
Before going any farther, she brushed dust out of her hair and off the front of her clothes, holding back a sneeze. She also made sure she had the cell phone in her pocket and hadn’t dropped it during her journey.
Then, she tiptoed to the door. It led to another bedroom. That one had a window, with no wood on it. A bathroom stood off to her right.
Yet another door stood on the other side of the room, half open. Faint light came from outside.
She crept to the doorway, and found it opened into a long, shadowed hall. Two closed doors stood in the middle of the hallway, one on the right, one on the left. Light came from behind the door on the left. A staircase was at the end of the hall.
She remembered Giant carrying her up some steps when he’d first brought her into the house. That meant Giant was in the room where the light was coming from.
She chewed her lip, thinking.
The tunnel had taken her all the way around to the other side of the house. But to get out, she would have to go down those stairs, and to get to them, she had to pass the room in which Giant was sleeping.
Keeping her eyes on the door, she stepped lightly along the carpet.
Like a ghost, she thought.
She passed by the room, and Giant didn’t come out after her.
Reaching the staircase, she peered over the railing. The stairs ended near the front door. No one was down there from what she could see, but a pale glow came from somewhere out of sight.
Mr. Leon might be down there. He moved so fast she doubted she could outrun him.
She would have to take her chances.
She moved to the far edge of the steps. If they were like the stairs at her house, the far edge was where the steps would make the least amount of creaky noise. Whenever she had to sneak around at home, usually coming down from her room to go to the kitchen to get just a little extra taste of whatever delicious dessert Mom had baked, she would stay way to the far side of the stairs, and Mom never heard her.
Like a ghost, she thought again, and began to creep downward, one hand trailing along the dusty railing. She risked a look over her shoulder, and didn’t see Giant coming.
As she neared the bottom, she peeked over the railing again. All clear.
Finally, she reached the floor.
The light she’d seen came from the end of the hallway. It looked like a kitchen back there. She saw a plastic chair that matched the one Giant had been sitting on, and a big blue cooler standing on the floor, like the one Daddy put in their trunk when they went on family picnics in the park.
There was another short hallway not far from the staircase. It ended at another closed door, and light shone underneath. A big piece of wood lay on the floor in front of the door.
Mom is in there. She could feel it.
Mom would want her to get out, and get help.
She went to the front door. It was locked. She slowly turned the dead bolt, praying that it was quiet.
No one came running after her.
She twisted the knob, and pulled open the door. Cold wind and rain swept inside. She would probably get sick going out there without a jacket, but she figured her mother wouldn’t mind if she did, just this one time.
She carefully shut the door behind her.
Outdoors at last, raindrops on her face, breathing in the cool fresh air, she thought about the shaggy-haired man she had seen from outside the bedroom window, the man with the dogs who had run into the forest as if afraid of her, and she decided that anyone who loved dogs was someone who would help her.
62
I killed my mother.
As Leon’s confession rebounded through Simone’s thoughts, the sweet wine turned sour on her tongue, and her stomach clenched so tightly she feared she might vomit.
But somehow, she maintained a cool facade. She continued rubbing the tip of her shoe against his thigh, and she kept her facial expression interested, nonjudgmental.
“How did it happen?” she asked, pleased that her voice was steady, fascinated.
“I said earlier that she OD’d.” He squinted, tapped ashes onto the floor. “I was being disingenuous, my moms was an addict of various vices, she sucked the glass dick, smoked a joint, did some heroin, hit the bottle, whatever she could get her hands on, that was her thing, you dig, that was her life, her raison d’etre. Your moms spent her days teaching class and fantasizing about white picket fences and two point five munchkins with the principal. My moms spent hers drunk off her ass or doped up, lying in bed like a beached whale, fantasizing about her next hit of whatever she could get off on.
“So one summer afternoon, when I was eighteen, we had a brouhaha, a real battle royale, ’cause she wouldn’t let me use her car. Normally I had my own wheels, did my own thing, but my Cutlass was in the shop at the time, and all I wanted was a little fuckin’ understanding, you know? But Moms’ Saturday-love boyfriend, some popcorn-eating punk named Tyrone, was supposed to be coming to the casa later, and she wanted to have her car for him to drive if he wanted to. Talk about ridiculous, stupid, absurd, right? Tyrone had his own whip, but when he’d come see my mother and then want to go somewhere else afterward on his own, he’d drive her car. He was playing her, probably running the
same lame game on three or four different dumb bitches just like my moms, but Moms couldn’t see it. I had business to handle at the time, big money moves to make, a major score on the horizon, and she wouldn’t let me use her car because of this trifling Negro.
“That did it for me. Eighteen years of dealing with her bullshit boiled over, and I wasn’t gonna deal with her anymore. Next day, when she was out with that punk-ass Tyrone, I dug into her heroin stash, and I laced that shit up with fentanyl, created a combustible mix we called magic, and I hooked it up so potent I knew it would blow up a mushroom cloud in her fuckin’ mind like Hiroshima.
“Later that night, Moms hit it. Within fifteen minutes, she went into seizure. I waited it out a bit and then called 911, for appearances’ sake, but by the time the paramedics got there, she was on a boat floating across the river Styx. They declared her dead by OD.”
Leon took a drag on his cigarette and expelled a column of smoke to the ceiling.
“There you go, darling, true confessions,” he said.
Simone sat still and silent. Stunned. She had heard many disturbing stories in her years of practicing therapy, but never a confession of cold, premeditated murder. She couldn’t come up with adequate words.
Leon glanced at his cup, discovered that it was empty. With a mumbled curse, he flung it across the room.
“Why so quiet?” He turned a hot glare on her. “You scared of me now?”
“How do you feel about what you did?” she asked, finally finding her voice.
“I don’t miss the druggie slut bitch. She deserved what she got for how rotten she treated me all those years. She’s in hell where she belongs. Punching her ticket was the best thing I’ve ever done, it gave me the confidence to go out into the world and become the man I had the potential to be, be all I can be, now that I’m free, I don’t have her steel albatross ass hanging over my head any more, holding me back and cutting me down like Tom Thumb.”
Coldness shuddered through her. No remorse. He’s got no remorse whatsoever. Jesus.
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