To this, Ramsey said the only thing he could.
“Huh?”
Abrams nodded, another small, tight smile pinching his thick lips.
“It’s ironic, really. All those jealous rages of yours. The suspicions. The accusations. The paranoia. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, you weren’t being paranoid. Karen was having an affair.”
Ramsey took a step toward Abrams. He was still in shock, but he managed to grate out a slightly more articulate reply this time.
“What?”
“Oh, come on, Bob. What do you need—a syllabus? I’ve been shtupping Karen for a couple of years now. It started not long after you split her lip the first time. It was me who convinced her to move out. Me who suggested going to Katz. Me who said it was time for a restraining order. Me who took those e-mails and letters to the police.”
Ramsey took another step toward the smugly smiling man sitting on his couch. He could feel the old, familiar rage boiling up inside him. He even had a name for it: “The Hulk.” That’s what he called it whenever he was apologizing to Karen. It was something alien, something other, something he couldn’t control.
“Just . . . don’t get me angry,” he would say. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”
“Gee, Bob,” Abrams said to him now, “you’re not about to Hulk-out on me, are you?”
Ramsey clenched his fists so hard his fingernails bit into his palms, breaking the skin.
“Why are you doing this?” he growled.
“So you can see what life’s going to be like for you if you stay. Everyone knows you’re a psycho, Bob. None of your old friends will have anything to do with you. I mean, there’s Cynthia and Jason right on the corner, practically across the street, and have they dropped by with balloons and cake? No. Because you’re an outcast. Totally alone. All you’ll get if you stay is the knowledge that at any minute you could walk around a corner and bump into me and Karen strolling hand in hand. Maybe we wouldn’t call the police, Bob, but it would be our—”
“I am not Bob!”
Ramsey wasn’t even aware of the last few steps to the couch. It was as if those seconds had been snipped from a film he was watching. One moment he was standing, the next he was on the floor, sitting on Abrams’s chest, his hands wrapped around the man’s throat.
“Do I look like a Bob? Is this what Bobs do? If I’m Bob, why am I in Robert’s house? Huh? Do you see what Bob is doing to you? I wish Bob would stop, but what can I do? I’m Robert!”
Abrams flailed, squirmed, kicked. But not hard. Just enough to make Ramsey squeeze more tightly, bang Abrams’s head against the floor with more force, until there was no reason to keep squeezing or banging or anything.
Abrams lay still beneath him.
Ramsey rolled over onto his back, stared up at his hands, sobbed. He didn’t cry long, though. After a couple minutes, he stumbled to the kitchen in a daze and got one of his own beers from the fridge. One slurp sobered him up. By the time he was taking his second, he knew what he had to do.
SATURDAY, 12:01 A.M.
There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door. It was loud, insistent. Maybe it started off soft, but if so Ramsey hadn’t heard it over the sound of running water.
He was in the bathroom washing the dirt from his hands. He turned the water off and waited for the knocking to stop.
It didn’t.
He thought he’d been careful. Karen’s old flower bed was around back, flush against the house, blocked from view by bushes and the tall wooden fence around the yard. He’d worked by the light of the moon, though it was a cloudy night and the world around him had been little more than gray blurs in blackness.
But maybe the neighbors had heard him. There’s not much you can do to muffle the sound of a shovel biting into earth.
Ramsey crept into the hall and peeped at the picture window in the living room, thinking he might see red and blue lights flashing through the blinds. The police would need a warrant, wouldn’t they? They couldn’t just come barging in, no matter what someone had seen or heard . . . right?
But there were no flashing lights, and when Ramsey sneaked to the window and peeked at the street all he saw out front was the old Corolla he’d have to move soon with the key he’d taken from Andy Abrams’s pocket. The porch was out of his line of sight.
And still the knocking didn’t stop.
He had no choice. Whoever it was—nosy neighbors, stoned students trying to get into the wrong house, his former tenants dropping by to tell him what a tool he was for kicking them out—he’d have to shoo them away, fast. He couldn’t let anyone draw attention to his house or the car parked out front.
It occurred to him as he walked to the door that it might be Karen. Perhaps she’d found out that Andy was coming to see him. What a nightmare that would be. Or what an opportunity . . .
The knocking got louder.
“All right! I’m coming!” Ramsey faked a yawn as he reached for the doorknob. “You woke me up in the middle of the most beautiful drAHHHH!”
“Hi, Bob,” Andy Abrams said.
His clothes were dirty and disheveled, and there were clumps of sod in his dark, curly hair. But there were no marks around his throat, and his face had lost the purple-blue hue it had the last time Ramsey had seen it. Which had been, of course, the last time Ramsey had expected to see it.
“Mind if I come in?” Abrams asked. His tone was relaxed, his expression pleasant.
“Uhhhhhh . . . sure.”
“Thanks.”
Ramsey let Abrams move past him into the house. Then he leaned out and scanned the street and the neighboring homes. No one seemed to have noticed the freshly exhumed man standing on his porch.
Ramsey closed the door and joined him in the living room.
“Andy, I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“I know.” Abrams smiled blandly. “Awk-ward!”
“Yeah. Look. I wonder . . . Do you know . . . Is it clear to you that . . . I mean . . . What do you think happened?”
“Oh, I remember everything, if that’s what you’re trying to ask. It’s not like I woke up in the flower bed thinking, ‘Golly, what am I doing here?’ But don’t worry. I’m not mad.”
“You’re not?” Ramsey said.
Abrams gave him an “awww, pshaw” swipe of the hand. Pebbles and dirt slid from his sleeve.
“Perish the thought. I was prodding you, Bob. Testing you. And you simply reacted according to your nature . . . which I think we’ve established pretty solidly now is ‘psychopath.’”
Ramsey gritted his teeth. “I am not a psycho.”
Abrams shrugged. “The proof is in the pudding, Bob. And up until ten minutes ago, it was in your backyard. But as I said—no hard feelings. Just pack up, get out of town, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”
“You really expect me to believe that you wouldn’t tell the cops I . . . You know. Lost my temper?”
“Sure. Don’t look a gift mitzvah in the mouth, Bob. And anyway, what choice do you have?”
Ramsey had been moving across the room as Abrams spoke, pretending to pace nervously. He stopped when his feet began crunching over silvery slivers on the floor—remnants of the frame glass he’d shattered earlier in the evening. He crouched down and picked up part of the beer bottle he’d smashed it with.
The neck.
The edges were jagged, sharp.
“What choice do I have, Andy? What choice do I have? Why don’t I show you?”
Abrams put up his hands and took a step back. “Please. No. Not like that. The strangling, Bob! The strangling wasn’t so bad!”
Ramsey rushed him.
It was a lot messier this time. And louder. But it was more definitive, too. No one was going to wake up from that. And there was an advantage to murdering a man twice in the same night, Ramsey discovered.
You only had to dig the grave once.
SATURDAY, 2:24 A.M.
There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door.
Ramsey opened his eyes and found himself staring up at the ceiling. He blinked and blinked and blinked again. Then he remembered.
He’d collapsed back onto his bed, exhausted, after finishing up out back. He was only going to rest for a minute, he’d told himself. Then he’d get up and move Abrams’s car.
Only he’d fallen asleep instead. And now a dream about a knock on the door had—
There was another knock. Loud and long and very, very real.
It wasn’t a dream. Someone was at the front door.
It couldn’t be, Ramsey thought. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
Yet he couldn’t make himself get off the bed and go check. He couldn’t make himself move at all, except to turn his head to look at the clock.
2:28—still knocking.
2:33—still knocking.
2:37—the knocking stopped.
Ramsey heaved a sigh of relief.
Then someone tapped on the window just above his bed.
“I hope you don’t mind if I lecture a bit here, Bob,” Andy Abrams said. “But it seems like my message just isn’t getting through.”
The window was closed and the blind drawn, thank God, so Ramsey couldn’t see him. But he could picture him. And what Ramsey pictured made him want to puke.
“Do you know what dybbukim are, Bob?” Abrams said. “I assume not. I might have mentioned them to you once, at a party or something, but you probably stopped listening. Jewish mysticism—not your thing, I know. So here’s a little refresher: A dybbuk is a malicious spirit that attaches itself to a living host. Sort of like a psychic parasite. And sort of like you, Bob. What you did to Karen. Haunting her, hurting her, sucking her dry. I thought I’d give you a taste of it. That bad, bad penny that keeps turning up. Not fun, is it?”
Another rap on the glass jolted Ramsey off the bed.
“I hope you’re listening, Bob. I hope you’re taking notes,” Abrams said. “Oh, Karen was never unfaithful to you, by the way. I just made that up to get your goat. And boy howdy, did it! Ouch! Vick’s isn’t going to do a thing for this sore throat, let me tell you. It’s worth it, though. Karen is a very special lady. So smart, so funny. And cute as a button. I do admit I’ve had my eye on her. You had me pegged there. She stirred something in me that had been asleep for a long, long . . . Well. I’ve strayed off topic, haven’t I? Summation time. Listen closely. This will be on the final exam.
“You’ve got to get over this jealous-possessive-crazy thing, Bob . . . because I’m going to keep dropping in on you if you don’t. Go forth and sin no more, that’s my message to you. People can change. It’s hard, it takes time, but it happens. So try. Please. If you find you can’t hack it . . . I don’t know. Maybe castrate yourself. Or at the very least join a monastery. But you’ve got to knock it off with the stalking. Do you hear me, Bob? Hmm? Scream or something so I know you’re listening. Bob? Bob?”
Abrams was leaning in close to the window, listening intently, one ear to the glass. Which is why he hadn’t noticed Ramsey slipping out the back door and coming up behind him.
He didn’t ask to be strangled this time. Didn’t complain about the aluminum softball bat in Ramsey’s hands. He never saw it coming.
Ramsey brought the bat down over Abrams’s head like he was Abe Lincoln splitting a log. The head didn’t act very loglike, though. It was more like a watermelon taking a whack from a mallet. There wasn’t much of it left by the time the body was dragged inside.
Ramsey deposited Abrams on the kitchen floor, then went out to the garage for his power tools and a tarp. When he was done an hour later, he loaded up Abrams’s Toyota and went for a little spin. There were four suitcases in the trunk.
One he left in the woods north of town.
One he left in the lake south of town.
One he left in the quarry east of town.
One he left at the dump west of town.
The car he left at Kroger.
It was a long walk home, made all the longer by the need to keep to alleys and yards and shadows. But at last, at exactly 5:30 A.M., Ramsey was able to collapse back onto his bed and close his eyes and rest.
SATURDAY, 5:31 A.M.
There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door.
MONDAY, 9:41 A.M.
Everyone in the class noticed the woman come in. It was Professor Mossler again. The students who’d seen her last time—who’d resisted the urge to sleep in through Professor Abrams’s Friday-morning lecture—stole quick, nervous glances at her as she took a seat at the back of the room.
They needn’t have worried. There would be no scene, no awkwardness this day.
She wasn’t weeping. She was beaming.
Professor Abrams smiled back at her. It was a big smile, too. A grin, even. Which seemed wrong. Professor Abrams wasn’t a grin kind of guy. Not usually anyway.
He’d seemed perkier all morning, though. Livelier. As if he’d been sleepwalking around campus for who knew how long but had finally awakened.
What the students couldn’t have guessed was this: Abrams already knew the good news Professor Mossler had come to tell him.
That their friends Cynthia and Jason had been keeping an eye on Robert Ramsey’s house.
That the day before, they’d noticed the front door open for hours.
That Ramsey’s car and U-Haul were gone from the driveway.
That when they risked a peek inside, they found the house cleared out, deserted.
That Robert Ramsey had apparently changed his mind about moving back in.
That Robert Ramsey was gone.
Professor Abrams was wrapping up an animated talk about the ibbur—a benevolent spirit, the flip side of a dybbuk—when one of his students raised her hand and asked about Jewish views of the afterlife. Her roommate, a Reform Jew, had told her that she didn’t believe in heaven or hell or immortality of any kind. How could Jews believe in ghosts if they didn’t believe in life after death?
“Things change,” Professor Abrams said with a shrug. “Jiminy Cricket, do they change.”
Well, when did that happen? another student wanted to know. They’d discussed all kinds of immortal creatures from Jewish folklore. Not just spirits like ibburim and dybbukim but angels, the demon-goddess Lilith, the Wandering Jew . . .
“Let me stop you right there,” Professor Abrams said. “Yes, Lilith and the angels and cherubim we’ve discussed. Maimonides, Mendelssohn, Kant, Cohen and the long debate over the soul—all that we’re getting to. The Wandering Jew, on the other hand, we haven’t talked about nor will we. Anyone know why?”
Professor Abrams looked around the room. No one raised a hand.
“‘The Wandering Jew,’” he said, “is the story of a Jewish man who supposedly taunted Jesus when he was on his way to be crucified. As punishment, the man was subjected to a peculiar curse: He couldn’t die. He would roam the earth until Christ returned. He would be immortal . . . if you can be said to be immortal when you’ve got an expiration date.”
The professor paused to see if he’d get a chuckle. Only Professor Mossler obliged him.
“Thank you,” he told her with another grin. “Now. There are two reasons the Wandering Jew isn’t relevant to a class on Jewish myths. First off, it’s not a Jewish story. It’s a story Christians tell about a Jew. Second—”
Abrams stopped and checked his wristwatch.
“Oh, my. Where does the time go? I’ll see you all on Wednesday.”
He headed for the back of the room, still smiling, as his students gathered up their things and left.
He never did say what the second reason was.
VSI
NANCY HOLDER
Nancy Holder is a New York Times bestselling and multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning author, and a short story, essay, and comic book writer. She is the author of the Wicked, Crusade, and Wolf Springs Chronicles series. Vanquished, in the Crusade series, is out now; Hot Blooded, the second book in the Wolf Springs Chronicles, will
be out soon. She has written a lot of tie-in material for “universes” such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf, and many others, and recently won the Scribe Award for Saving Grace: Tough Love, based on the show by the same name. She lives in San Diego.
Birds trilled through Boston, and jocund dawn was on its way. Claire and Jackson had already been well into overtime when their informant placed their fugitive here, now; and in the grab-game, it was arrest while the iron was hot or give the glory to someone else. And so.
“I have her at the door. She’s A and D. She’s going upstairs; she’s out the back door; I am in pursuit!” Jackson told Claire via earpiece. He was laughing.
“What the hell?” Claire shouted into her mic. He’s telling me she’s armed and dangerous and he’s laughing?
Positioned behind a dead apple tree in the weed-choked yard of the duplex, she stepped on a dollop of dog poop—nice—with her service weapon out just as a completely naked woman of a certain age (and size) soared over the balcony railing, which was decorated with a set of jumbo Christmas lights, and landed ten feet away from Claire.
Bingo. Claire would have to thank the police sketch artist who had provided them with Linda Hannover’s likeness. He had captured every nook and cranny of her tired, doughy face.
Ms. Hannover’s landing stuck, although she wobbled. Claire was amazed the woman hadn’t broken an ankle. In her right hand, the suspect clutched a turkey baster. The baster didn’t look loaded but you could never be too sure.
“FBI. Don’t move,” Claire said.
The woman teetered a moment as Claire approached. She was very large, and very naked.
“Oh, Jesus, oh, sweet Jesus,” the woman said, taking in Claire’s FBI vest, helmet, and, presumably, her gun.
“Drop the baster,” Claire said.
Ms. Hannover did not comply. Instead, she wheeled around to an open side gate—Claire’s original ingress—and zoomed through it. Whapping it shut behind her, the suspect took off like a bat out of hell. Claire was astounded. The lady was hauling. She had to be on drugs.
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