The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  The new chapters from Ben Lodging had been sitting among the slush-pile queries in my in-box when I’d checked my phone just before leaving the house. They had almost made me back out of Oaklynn’s mini excursion. There was work I could do in the park, of course, but this was different. I wanted to savor it in private. I wanted, if I were honest, to keep it to myself.

  A pretty odd attitude for an agent, I pointed out to myself as I opened the new file and began to read.

  The new section was typical of Lodging—or of the accountant, Carried, around whom the book revolved: meticulously observed but unsettlingly dry and disconnected from the world around him. The first paragraph read as follows.

  I took the bus home from work. Which is to say I took a series of buses to various parts of the downtown and into one of the western suburbs, getting off twice and walking around before taking an entirely different bus that took me to within 420 paces of my apartment building. There were faster ways home, of course, and sometimes I preferred the privacy of my own car, but from time to time, I liked to be among people with nothing to do but watch them. On this particular occasion, there were only nine people on the first bus, seven of whom were women: four of them black, one Latina, the others white. Most of them wore heavier coats than the weather seemed to demand. Perhaps they could not afford anything more suitable? Perhaps it was better to risk being too hot than too cold. Three of them were elderly, which is to say I thought them over sixty-five. It was strange to think that I had more money than any of them, but that was surely true, though I could not assume that that fact alone made them miserable.

  But if it did, if they felt ignored, even abused, too busy making ends meet to wonder why they bothered doing so, would it not be a type of kindness to kill them? Not all of them, perhaps. Not at once. I could make the decision here and now as we all sat together as the bus rolled along Sharon Road, not talking to one another, but all moving in the same direction like fish in a shoal or starlings over a bright field of corn. I could decide to kill each of them in turn simply because we had shared this moment. I doubted any police profiler would ever figure that out!

  The woman in front of me had her gray hair pulled back into tight bunches, so I could see the papery thinness of the skin on her scalp. I could lean forward and tap her with the hammer in my briefcase. One short blow. It would happen before anyone could stop me. Do it right and she wouldn’t even cry out. There was no one sitting behind me, so it was just possible I could do it, get off the bus at the next stop, and no one would even notice.

  That struck me as terrible. Not the killing itself, which might be doing her a favor, but the idea that life would go on as before in spite of her death. Her death would be hailed as a violation of nature, an abomination, but nature itself would do nothing. The world would turn as it always did. There would be no thunderclaps, no lightning bolts, no shouts of outrage and injustice from the cosmos.

  Would other people mourn for her? Perhaps. She might have a husband. Children. But no one on the bus. When the story hit the news, they would gleefully tell their friends that they had been riding on the very same bus, but they would shed no tears for a woman they did not know. People only weep for themselves. So it would be ironic if I then targeted each of them individually. Get on the same bus tomorrow, follow one of them home, night after night.

  That would be suicidal on my part, of course. The police wouldn’t be so stupid as to fail to make a connection among the victims and the bus they all used. But then, that didn’t much matter either. I wasn’t so in love with my liberty or indeed my life that I much cared when it was taken away from me. There would be no thunderbolts for me either. The world would turn.

  Bored with the idea, I got off at the next stop and sat on a park bench, watching the children play . . .

  I closed my laptop with a little shudder, not wanting to read more. For all the casual existentialism of the thing that might make it respectable in a vague, literary sort of way, I didn’t like the way Lodging’s fiction had strayed into my own world. Not his fault, of course, but it bothered me to hear his detached, sociopathic thought processes penetrating my life so precisely. I knew that was the power of the book, of course, its frightening ordinariness, the way it made horror plausible, but his talk of parks and playing children was too near the bone. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to banish Lodging’s calculating voice, then turned my attention back to Grace, who was playing in the sand with Oaklynn as before. I felt a sudden and ridiculous urge to snatch her into my arms and hold her but managed to push such hysteria away. Forcing myself to move slowly and to smile as I did so, I got up and went over to the sandbox so that my shadow made Oaklynn look up.

  “Hi,” said Oaklynn, shielding her eyes from the glare.

  “I’ve come to play,” I said, looking at Grace.

  “You have work to do,” said Oaklynn.

  “It’s OK,” I said, meaning it (and nothing more). “You play with Vron.”

  Her other mommy.

  Oaklynn gave me the briefest of looks, which might have been bafflement and might have just been because the sun was in her eyes. Then she hauled herself to her feet and stomped off to Veronica, calling to her as she walked. In spite of myself, I glanced quickly around the park to see who might be watching, like Ben Lodging’s pathological accountant, his briefcase by his side.

  But Oaklynn had been right. We had the place practically to ourselves. A dog walker strolled by, a maintenance woman in some kind of golf cart emptying trash cans, and another guy muffled against the chilly air cutting through on his way to . . . whatever, then no one. I watched my younger daughter and, eventually, stopped thinking about Ben Lodging and his blank-eyed maybe-killer.

  “Want to see the train?” I said to Grace. Oaklynn had probably shown it to her a dozen times before, but this was my turn. I gathered her up, and we walked over to the great black-and-rust-spotted engine. We marveled at its massive wheels and the pistons that drove them, then climbed up into the cabin, though the firebox was welded shut and there wasn’t much to see there. In truth, Grace was a bit young for it and soon wanted to go back to the sandbox.

  After a quarter hour of Veronica shrieking with delight at the height of the swings, she graduated to the complex of railed walkways, playing some form of chase with Oaklynn. I felt almost sorry for my nanny, watching her lumbering around up there, the metal ringing under her heavy footsteps, watching her wheeze and sweat. In fact, and in spite of her exertion, Oaklynn seemed genuinely happy, so that I grew jealous again, not of her relationship with my daughter but of the way such simple things pleased her. I tried to brush the thought away as condescending, but it wouldn’t go, instead taking root, tunneling into my flesh, my soul, like some ironically supercilious tick. The metaphor amused me for a second, but only a second. Oaklynn laughed and panted and lumbered after my screaming, gleeful daughter, while I—sitting in the sandbox—tried not to think about my work, my career, and what my husband might be doing in New York.

  “Mommy!” yelled Veronica happily as she reached the upper platform of the twirly slide and waved frantically, scared and delighted by her own nerve. “I’m gonna go all the way down super fast! No touching the sides!”

  “Watch your elbows, hon,” said a wheezy Oaklynn, coming up behind her. “Don’t want to get burned.”

  “Burned?” said Veronica quizzically, as if nothing could be more absurd. “I’m not going to get burned! See you at the bottom, Mommy!”

  I waved back, beaming, watching her leave the stairs and crawl into the little cabin at the top, where her commentary became muffled and echoed.

  I took a breath and brushed some of the sand from Grace’s tiny hands before it could get in her eyes or mouth. I had to focus on what I had, on the good things, the truly wonderful things. I couldn’t keep wishing things were different, waiting for happiness to arrive like some rare seasonal bird flying south for . . .

  Veronica’s scream ripped through the air.

 
; She had been laughing and wailing in mock fright as Oaklynn chased her, but the new sound came from an entirely different place. It was a wail of shock and pain.

  I leaped to my feet, expecting to see my elder daughter half sprawled on the lower part of the slide. But she hadn’t fallen off, and for a moment, I was baffled and relieved, as if it had been nothing after all, just her girlish terror of the speed of the descent, which would turn into laughter and a need to do it all again.

  I couldn’t see her. She was inside the plastic tube slide, and though her keening yell had stalled for a second, it came back now, different.

  Worse.

  She fumbled around and finally appeared at the bottom, but the screaming had gone up in pitch and volume, a raw and terrible sound, half pain, half horror.

  Even from here I could see the brilliant redness on the tiny hand that grabbed the rim of the tube as she tried to pull herself out. Then the red on her leg just above the ankle of her sneakers.

  Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

  Veronica emerged, bawling, eyes doe-wide, her mouth frozen in an increasingly breathless Oh. I could see where the blood was running down the polished chute under her. Her favorite yellow leggings were puckered and scarred down the back of her left thigh, but it was her right hand that stopped me cold. I saw the horrible pallor of her skin and the dark red line where the wound opened across her palm. It snaked up and around her forearm in a long, winding gash.

  Oaklynn was already with her, hugging her, screaming, to her breast so that blood smeared her clothes. There was a red handprint, small and perfectly printed on the side of the tube slide where Veronica had touched it. I stumbled in the sand as I ran to them, babbling, “What happened? Baby? What happened?”

  “Owie,” Veronica managed. “In the slide. It hurts, Mommy.”

  I stooped to take her hand, biting back the flinch, the impulse to look away. It was a deep cut. I folded Veronica and Oaklynn into my fierce and firm embrace, even as Oaklynn clamped a wadded handkerchief to my daughter’s hand to stanch the blood flow, even as Grace began to wail in sympathy.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” said Oaklynn, handing Veronica to me.

  The idea terrified me. So did the blood on my hands. I stood there, stunned, as Oaklynn pressed my hand over the handkerchief.

  “Press down,” she said. “Constant pressure.”

  It felt warm and wet, and I couldn’t look directly at it. I turned away at last, but as I did so, my eyes saw that the rivulet of blood that ran down the inside of the tube began from higher up.

  What the hell?

  Suddenly, the brilliance of the sun, the way it made the crimson speckling the mulched ground strident and unavoidable was too much, and I pulled Veronica into the shade beneath the slide as Oaklynn snatched out her cell phone and dialed.

  “Ambulance, please,” she said. “Freedom Park. At the children’s playground. Hurry, please. I have a little girl who is losing a lot of blood . . . A cut on her hand . . . I don’t think so, no, but it’s deep.”

  “Not what?” I mouthed.

  “Not arterial,” said Oaklynn.

  Jesus, I thought. How could this be happening? A moment ago we had been playing and laughing, and now . . .

  “We can walk to the parking lot and meet you there,” said Oaklynn into the phone. “She’s nearly four. My name is Oaklynn Durst. The little girl is Veronica Klein. Her mom is here, too . . . No, I’m just the nanny.”

  Veronica squirmed in my arms. Her face was clammy, white with shock. I turned, hugging her to me, as if trying to shut the rest of the world out, and as I did so, something caught my eye. It was small and bright and round with a cross-shaped slot.

  Phillips-head.

  The name came to me like something looming through fog, unexpected and unwanted.

  It was positioned not in a seam of the slide, where the barrel-like sections joined together, but in the middle of the green molded plastic of the tube. I stared, processing what I was looking at, not quite believing it, hardly able to think above Veronica’s desperate, panting sobs against my neck.

  Someone had driven a screw through the underside of the chute. This thing that had happened to my daughter, this scarlet, screaming horror, had been done on purpose.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Nurse Alysha Taylor did a double take as she took the child’s hand and turned it in the light, dabbing at the dark, accumulated blood so that she could see the extent of the injury.

  “She was in before,” she remarked, eyeing the kid, who seemed to have cried herself out and was now limp and exhausted, looking dazed. “Not for herself. For her sister.”

  “Yeah?” said her colleague, giving her a raised eyebrow.

  “Different kind of case,” said Alysha, shrugging off the implied question but leaning over to whisper, “The mother’s a piece of work. Nanny’s good, though. Speak of the devil . . .”

  The two women were hurrying up to them. The mother was trim, Asian; the nanny heavyset and anguished.

  “How is it?” said the nanny.

  “Just getting her cleaned up so we can see what’s going on,” said Alysha. “How you doing, honey? You hanging in there?”

  The child nodded once but did not open her mouth, as if afraid of what might come out. She winced at every movement, which wasn’t surprising. It was a nasty gash.

  “This is gonna need suturing,” Alysha announced in a cheery voice, “but I think we’re gonna have to wait on that till the doctor has had a good look and made sure everything inside is all connected the way it’s supposed to be. No good closing you up if we’re gonna have to open it up again tomorrow, is there?”

  The child shook her head, wide-eyed, but she looked scared, and her gaze slid back to the nanny.

  “It’s OK, Vronny,” said the nanny. “Miss Alysha is gonna get you all fixed up good as new.”

  “Are you?” said the mom. “I mean, could there be any lasting—”

  “OK,” said Alysha, cheerily rolling over the woman. Some people! The child was already scared enough without Mom talking about lasting damage right there in front of her. “I’m gonna get you a sucker while we finish cleaning this up, and I want you to hold your hand up to your head, OK, like this, and keep your hand open. You think you can do that for me? Mom, why don’t you come give me a hand with that sucker?”

  She moved to the counter, where there was a clear plastic tub of lollipops and fished out a few.

  “Give her a choice of flavors,” said the nurse.

  “And what about—”

  “I’m going to have a specialist take a look to make sure there’s no nerve or tendon damage,” Alysha replied, heading off the rest of the question. “I think it looks good, mostly just skin and a little muscle puckering, but it was a sharp edge, and hands are complicated, so I don’t want to take any chances. He’s in surgery right now, so I’m gonna have you folks wait till he’s free to take a look, and then—if he gives us the all clear—we’ll stitch her up, and you’ll be good to go.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Could be a few hours.”

  “Hours?”

  “Like I said, I don’t want to take any chances. We can stop the bleeding and make her comfortable. It might be good to give her a little peace and quiet while we dress the wound.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  She sounded grudging, like she was forcing herself to go along with what she was being told against her better judgment. Alysha took in the woman’s clothes, the designer purse, not to mention the attentive nanny.

  Money, she thought. Used to having everything just so.

  “We’ll take her back, get her prepped for the surgeon to look her over, give her a tetanus shot . . .”

  “A shot?” she replied, all aflutter.

  “Yes, it’s important. While we do that, you can talk to the police officer about the incident, then run home for a few things. With a bit of luck, by the time you get back, we’ll be ready to discharg
e her anyway, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “And you look after that nanny of yours. She looks about as upset as you.”

  More so, if the truth were told. The big woman looked distraught, ragged. The mom was too much on her tight-assed dignity to give so much away. Maybe she felt it inside, but Alysha liked to be able to see how people were feeling. The woman nodded, mute, and together they returned to her daughter and presented her with a selection of lollipops. The child chose with obvious pleasure. Mom probably didn’t let the child have candy.

  “OK, Mom, now you chat to Officer Randall here, and we’ll get Miss Veronica taken care of.”

  Officer Randall was a tall, clean-shaven, and good-looking black man. Alysha had seen him around before and had remarked to her fellow nurses that he made her crave a little crime around the place. Young, too. Under thirty. Hell, if she were a decade younger . . . She gave the nanny a knowing wink, but the woman didn’t respond and gave her an odd, thoughtful look that made Alysha suddenly self-conscious.

  Officer Paul Randall checked his watch and made a note on his pad. He was used to the hospital and even knew some of the staff, including the nurse who always gave him that grin when she saw him. She did it now, even as she shepherded the mother of the girl over to him.

  “You are Anna Klein?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Officer Paul Randall, Charlotte PD. You say there was a screw driven through the slide in Freedom Park?”

  “One of the slides, yes. There are several.”

  “And you think it was placed deliberately rather than being part of the structure?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time did the incident take place?”

  “A little before nine this morning.”