The phone rang.
Olivia wanted to whoop for joy.
If she didn’t answer the phone within four rings, they would assume the worst and would be busting down the door within ten minutes.
Lonnie paused. Indecision flickered on his face.
“Who’s that calling?” he asked. “That’s your folks?”
Stall, stall, stall.
The phone rang a second time.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t see the caller ID from here.”
Lonnie cursed under his breath.
The phone rang a third time.
Lonnie lumbered to his feet and hurried to the phone. It rang a fourth time.
He brought the phone back to her. But it had fallen silent.
She contained her excitement.
Lonnie studied the caller ID display.
“Oh, it was only my mama. Must’ve been calling to check up on me.” He grinned. “My mama’s real overprotective.”
Shit!
There would be no last-minute rescue, she realized. She was going to have to find her own way out of this situation.
Lonnie placed the phone on the coffee table behind him. He knelt beside her. He rested his fingers on her thigh again. His hand felt like a piece of cold, dead meat.
“You got real nice lips,” he said. “Can I kiss you?”
Oh, God, I can’t deal with this. This is too much.
But denying him would only infuriate him. When Lonnie White was angry, he could be extremely violent. She remembered the photos she’d seen of his last victim. The woman had required major surgery to reconstruct her face.
“Well ... okay,” she said. A plan had begun forming in her mind.
Lonnie’s face floated above hers like a low moon. He opened his mouth, guided his lips to hers.
She clamped her teeth on his tongue and bit down hard. Warm blood squirted into her mouth.
Lonnie howled. He fell on the floor, holding his mouth, blood spilling between his fingers.
She spat out the tip of his tongue. It landed on the sofa like a giant pink comma.
“How’s that for a tongue kiss, you sick bastard!”
Lonnie was shrieking. He tried to rise off the floor.
Olivia lifted her legs in the air, parted them as much as the ropes around her ankles would allow—and brought them down over Lonnie’s head, like a vise. She had him trapped between the juncture of her thighs, in a scissor hold.
He beat against her legs, but her muscles were strong, the result of months of rigorous training.
She squeezed.
Lonnie emitted a garbled scream.
She rolled onto her side, gaining more leverage. She intensified the hold.
Lonnie’s face was turning blue. His bloody tongue lolled from his mouth.
“How’s it feel?” she screamed, spittle spraying from her lips. “Feel good, fucker?”
Finally, Lonnie’s face went slack. His eyes slid shut.
He had passed out.
Her leg muscles throbbed, but she slipped her thighs over his head. She moved her feet through the clothes on the floor, found the emergency alarm, and pressed it with her foot.
They would be here very shortly.
Olivia lay back on the sofa. She started to cry.
Less than ten minutes later, the front door opened. They didn’t announce their presence by knocking.
Three tall, husky women entered. Two of them were white, and the other, the tallest woman, was black. They wore dark blue sweat suits—they resembled a team of college basketball players on their way to a game.
They quickly came to her. The black woman cut the ropes away from Olivia’s ankles and wrists. The other two busied themselves with Lonnie, who was still unconscious.
“You handled yourself well,” the black woman said. Olivia remembered her from the sisterhood training classes. Her name was Kenya. “Mr. White here’s out cold.”
“Thanks, but it didn’t go quite as planned,” Olivia said.
“Hardly ever does,” one of the white women said. “Doesn’t matter. You got the job done.”
The other woman brought a syringe out of a small black case. She stabbed it in Lonnie’s hip. Lonnie jerked, but did not awaken.
After the injection, he would not wake up, Olivia knew, until several hours later. By then, they would have already transported him to The Garden.
The sisterhood, which bore no name and operated in secret, was composed of female rape victims. Women disgusted with society’s habit of releasing convicted serial rapists back into the general populace, to prey again. Women who had decided to take the law into their own hands. Women who vowed to dispense their own special brand of justice for predators like Lonnie White.
You could spend your life as a victim, or you could do something about it.
When Olivia had been raped, sixteen months ago, by a man much like Lonnie, a member of the sisterhood had contacted her and offered her justice. Olivia had accepted the offer, and never turned back.
That guy who’d raped her had gotten out of jail after only seven months. The sisterhood had located him, and set the bait. He’d taken it—as they always did. They took him to The Garden, too.
No one ever left The Garden alive.
The two white women were transporting Lonnie out of the house. Typically, they parked in the garage and inserted the predator in a secured van.
“Freshen up and hit the road,” Kenya said. “You’ve got to clear out of here, ASAP.”
After a capture, the operative left the house within the hour, leaving behind no trace. The house and all of the utilities were registered under a false identity.
“Good work, girl.” Kenya gave her a sisterly hug. “Until next time.”
“See you then.” Olivia smiled, wiped tears out of her eyes, and went downstairs to get Mimi.
Christina Ray had been living in the Los Angeles apartment complex for two weeks when she became aware that the man was watching her.
The man, named Stan Gee, was a convicted rapist who had gotten out of jail after serving only nine months. A travesty of justice.
Christina lived alone with her dog, a Bichon named Mimi ...
Nostalgia
I saw the house when I was driving home from work late one evening.
I had decided to try a different route from the office to my apartment, because in the five months that I’d been living in Atlanta, I’d been following the same paths to everywhere that I frequented: my job, the Publix supermarket, the barber shop, the bank, the Blockbuster Video store, the bar-and-grill with the cold beer and the hot wings. I felt as though I was already in a rut, like a dog that runs the same dusty trail back and forth across a yard. Five months ago, I had moved here from Illinois to experience something new. But unless I made the effort to see new things, the new would quickly become commonplace. Taking a different route home was one small but meaningful way that I demonstrated my commitment to experiencing a fresh perspective.
When I saw the house, however, I was reminded of the life that I had left behind in Illinois.
It was located on a residential street named Common Avenue. Although the road ran parallel with a busy thoroughfare that carried most of the traffic in the area, the abundance of tall, leafy trees that lined the road enveloped the street in a tranquil oasis. Stylish contemporary homes, with trimmed lawns and shiny autos parked in front of two-car garages, sat on each lot. I saw children playing in yards; a young woman power-walking across the sidewalk, her black Labrador trotting beside her; a man in a gray suit climbing out of a sedan, gripping a briefcase in one hand, his other hand unloosening his tie, no doubt relieved to be home after a long day at work. In the middle of this tableau, perhaps halfway down the block, I noticed the house.
As though my foot had a life of its own, I stamped the brakes. I rocked to a halt. I stared.
I could not believe what I saw, but I could not argue with my own eyes.
Unlike the other homes
on the avenue, which appeared as though they had been constructed within the past ten years, this house looked to be at least forty years old. It was a Colonial model, painted eggshell white, with red shutters. A two-car garage painted the same colors was attached to the house.
It sat atop a slight hill; a wide, blacktopped driveway extended from the garage to the street. The grass was a bit too long, which was especially noticeable since the surrounding lawns were trimmed. An elm towered on the perimeter of the yard.
In every visible respect, the house was the same as the one in which I had lived for the past eight years: my grandmother’s house. I had moved in with Grandma almost immediately after my grandfather had died, charged by my family with the responsibility of doing the “man’s work” around the house, and, even more important, keeping Grandma safe.
Grandma would’ve had a fit if I had let the grass grow that long, I thought. Grandma had been a stickler for numerous things, but nothing rivaled her zeal for having the grass cut. It was something about her that I’d never understood.
Her voice came to my mind with such clarity she might have been speaking into my ear: Lord have mercy, we got the worst-looking yard on the block. If you don’t cut that grass, Rick, I’m gonna have to pay somebody to do it. You know I ain’t got the money for that. I know you busy and all, but that grass—
I shook my head, clearing away those old mental cobwebs. I realized that I had halted the car in the middle of the street. I parked alongside the curb.
I turned back to the house. Although it was half-past seven and my stomach hungered for dinner, I would not be able to leave until I had taken a closer look.
I got out of the car and crossed the street. I stepped onto the sidewalk.
Who lives here? I wondered. Another widowed black grandmother and her grandson? Do Bible studies take place in the basement every Monday night? Is there a Doberman roving around the backyard, kept mainly because Grandma knows a dog will scare away thugs?
I did not see any people moving around in the house, and I did not hear a dog barking. There were no cars parked in the driveway, either. The only indication that someone lived there was a glowing porch light above a storm door that opened into a breezeway.
The light illuminated the numbers on the weathered black mailbox: 2118—2118 Common Avenue.
A chill coursed through me. My grandmother’s house number was 2118. The name of her street was George Avenue, which was hardly similar to Common, but the match of numbers was eerie.
Well, so what? I thought. It’s a coincidence. I had once heard a theory that every human being in the world had a person, somewhere, who looked exactly like him. Why not a house? There were probably several dozen homes across the country that looked identical to my grandmother’s.
But down to the last detail of the landscaping? I wondered. That elm tree looked exactly like the one I used to climb when I was a kid. How could I explain that?
No ready answer came to mind. Slowly, I walked up the asphalt path that led to the front door, searching for a discrepancy, a detail that would differentiate it from Grandma’s place.
As a child, I had spent many lazy summer afternoons playing on her walkway, capturing ants in jars, or riding my bike along it as if it was a motorcycle ramp. Other times, Grandma would emerge from the door and holler that it was time to eat, and my cousins and I would scramble up the path, racing one another to the dinner table.
No, it wasn’t this walkway, I reminded myself. The one I remembered was in Illinois. But I’d be damned if I didn’t see the same slight cracks, lines, and indentations in this pavement underneath me.
I shook my head. This was too incredible. I plodded forward, looking at the ground. I was searching for something. If I found it, I would—
“Oh, shit,” I said aloud. I stopped and knelt. Gaped at the sight below.
On the walkway, beside the garage, I saw the imprint of a child’s shoe. It was embedded in the concrete, like some little kid’s Walk of Fame.
A garage had been added to my grandparents’ house when I was five years old. Shortly after the foundation had been poured, while it was still soft, I had ventured into the area and dabbed my foot in it, ruining my shoe, but strangely proud that I had made my mark. The builders (who were friends of the family) never bothered to smooth over the footprint.
And here, several hundred miles away from that home in Illinois, was an identical footprint, in front of an identical garage, beside an identical house.
Heart pounding, I stood.
I did not understand what was happening, but I was compelled to find answers. I could not drive away and pretend that I had never seen this.
Because two months ago, Grandma’s house had burned to the ground. She had been inside, alone. She had died in the blaze. It was a freak accident, caused by her leaving on the gas burner before she went to bed—something that never would have happened if I had still been living there, because I had always checked the range before turning in for the night. It had been one of my self-imposed responsibilities.
And I have not slept well since.
I have nightmares perhaps three, four times a week. It is always the same haunting dream. I am on the sidewalk in front of Grandma’s house, hugging her good-bye, because the day has finally arrived: I am moving away from home and to Atlanta, a city in which I have no friends and no family, only the promise of a new job and a new life. Stifling tears, I turn away from Grandma, take a step ... And I am instantly upon an airplane that is standing on a runway, seconds before takeoff. Except the runway is the street that runs in front of Grandma’s house. I sit in a passenger seat beside the window, and through the glass I see Grandma on the walkway, waving good-bye. Behind her, the house is on fire—flames and black smoke flapping against the pure blue sky. The airplane begins to roll forward, and still Grandma stands there, waving. I press myself to the glass as we rumble ahead, straining to keep Grandma in sight.... And the last vision I have of Grandma is her walking into the burning house.
I always explode out of the dream with a cry bursting from my lips.
Shaking away a chill, I looked at the house before me. There was no fire, like there was in my dream. If it was not for that glowing porch light, I would have assumed that the home was vacant.
Someone lived here. I had to find out who.
I stepped toward the front door. A closed wooden door stood behind the storm door, so that you could not enter the breezeway without first getting through both barriers. At night, Grandma would lock every possible entryway. She worried constantly about break-ins. Sometimes, my cousins and I had jokingly called Grandma’s house “The Fortress.”
I pressed the doorbell.
If someone answered, I did not know what I would tell them. I hadn’t bothered to think of a story that would explain my visit. Maybe I would tell them the truth.
Hello. Excuse me, but I had to see who lived here. My grandmother’s house in Illinois looked exactly like yours. See, Grandma died in a fire that burned down the whole place, and I had to make sure that, you know, my Grandma wasn’t actually alive and well and living here in Georgia. She never liked the thought of me being far away from her, if you know what I mean.
In spite of myself, I almost laughed out loud.
After a few seconds, no one had answered. I took a few steps back and gazed at the front windows, to see if anyone might be looking outdoors. I didn’t see anyone peering through the curtains. I did, however, notice bright purple petunias blooming in the long flower box beneath the window. The same kind of flowers that Grandma had tended devoutly.
There was coincidence, and then, on a higher level than coincidence, there was Strange Stuff. No doubt, this was Strange Stuff—something that utterly eluded a rational explanation.
I stepped to the doorway again, pressed the bell once more. No response.
I slid my hand to the door handle. Pulled. It was locked.
What would I have done if the door had opened, anyway? I thought
. Walked inside? No matter how much this looked like Grandma’s house, it was private property. Was I crazy?
Asking myself those questions brought my senses back to me. I didn’t know these people who lived here. Whether they were home or not, what would they think of a stranger snooping around their yard? And what about the neighbors? I had probably already invited their suspicion. People tended to pay attention to unfamiliar men who stopped and approached houses in their neighborhood.
My curiosity was not satisfied, but it was time to leave.
I returned to the car.
Before I pulled away, I glanced at the front windows of the house. I saw a gap in the curtains, as though someone was gazing through the glass.
I blinked, trying to see more clearly.
The curtains quickly fell back into place.
I frowned. Had I actually seen them parted, or had I been fooled by the summer twilight?
I peered at the windows again. No one was there.
I rubbed my eyes. They felt grainy. I had been staring at a computer monitor for over eight hours, and after such a long day, I couldn’t rely upon my vision to discern everything clearly, especially as night approached. Most likely, I had imagined the movement in the windows.
Nevertheless, as I drove home, I had the nagging feeling that I would be coming back to 2118 Common Avenue. Soon.
I had always been close to my mother. In the few months that I had been away from home, thanks to daily phone calls, my mother and I had grown closer than ever. I told her about virtually everything in my new life. Seeing the strangely familiar house on Common Avenue was no exception.
I was also counting on Mom to give me some insight. The house fell into the category of Strange Stuff, and Mom had become a self-taught expert on such things: ESP, psychic predictions, astrology, tarot cards, guardian angels, ghosts, haunted houses. She learned what she knew from books, the Internet, and most of all, she insisted, personal experience. Her deep interest in the occult seemed odd to me, but harmless. My own interest was limited to horror flicks and the occasional Stephen King novel.
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