The Obsession

by Nora Roberts

  Then others began to catch her eye—catch her by the throat.

  She knew those roads. She knew that truck. When he veered off into the woods, bumping over a rough trail, she felt that crushing weight in her chest.

  Scenes flashed—the root cellar, the photographs, a woman bound on the mattress, eyes full of terror.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Flash to a house near the edge of the woods. And it was their house. God, God, their house. A long-legged girl, thin with long hair, looking out the window on a hot, storm-waiting night.

  Quick splice to the family in church—father, mother, gangly girl, little boy. And the next of the girl reaching for the lock on a rough wood door.

  She couldn’t watch. The popcorn fell out of her hand, spilled everywhere; the soda landed with a wet slap as she jumped up. Her friends called out:

  Hey, watch it!

  What the hell, Naomi!

  But she was bolting for the doors.

  She heard the announcer blare behind her.

  A story of depravity. A story of courage. Daughter of Evil. Coming November.

  Her knees buckled as she stumbled into the lobby. She fell on all fours while the room spun and her chest burned.

  She heard Mason’s voice, miles away, as he shook her.

  “Get up. Come on, Naomi, you have to get up.”

  He pulled her up and half dragged, half carried her out into the hot, heavy air of September, the too-bright lights of Times Square.

  “Look at me. Look at me.”

  He was nearly as tall as she was, and he had their father’s eyes. A deep golden brown. They held both worry and shock.

  “Can’t breathe.”

  “Yes, you can. You are. Just take it slow.”

  “It was—”

  “Don’t say it. Don’t say it here. Anybody asks, you got sick. You felt sick, and we went home. Let’s walk. Come on.”

  She managed two shaky steps, then had to stop, brace her hands on her knees and lean over, afraid she would be sick. But the queasiness passed, the dizziness eased.

  “Did you know? Did you?”

  He took her hand in a firm grip, pulled her down Broadway. “I knew they were making it. I didn’t know they’d finished everything or that they’d show the damn preview during Spider-Man.”

  “That was our house.”

  “They filmed a lot of it on location.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I look stuff up sometimes. I just thought it would take longer to get out, but it’s already getting, you know, buzz from the critics and online.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He stopped, shot her a cool look of disdain only a sibling can manage. “Because you don’t want to hear it. Nobody talks about it, nobody tells me anything. So I look shit up for myself. I read Simon Vance’s book.”

  Now she felt hot and sick all over again. “We have to put it behind us. It’s been four years.”

  “Have you? Have you put it behind you?”

  “Yes. Most of the time. A lot of the time.”

  “Mama hasn’t. Remember when she said she was going for a weekend with that friend of hers? To some spa deal? She didn’t. She took the bus and went to see him, in prison.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged, then pulled her inside a coffee shop, wound through to a table. “She’s done it before. When the rest of us went to Hilton Head for a week, and she said she had a stomach virus? She went to see him then, too. I found the bus tickets in her purse, both those times, and one other.”

  “You went through her purse?”

  “That’s right.” He didn’t miss a beat. “Two Cokes, please,” he said with remarkable ease to the waitress. “And I go through her room, so that’s how I know she’s been writing to him. She has letters from him that come to a P.O. box.”

  “You can’t disrespect her privacy,” Naomi began, then covered her face with her hands. “Why is she doing this?”

  “She’s submissive and dependent—he’s dominated her the whole time. It’s like emotional abuse and battering.”

  “Where do you get that?”

  “I look shit up, like I said. He’s a psychopath, for Christ’s sake, Nome. You should know. And he’s a narcissist. That’s why he gives the cops another name and location every couple years. Another victim, and where he buried her. It keeps him in the news, keeps getting him attention. He’s a liar and he manipulates Mama. He twists her up because he can. Remember when she OD’d?”

  “Don’t say it like that, Mason.”

  “It’s what happened. Thanks.” He sent the waitress a quick smile when she set their drinks down. “He’d talked her into giving more interviews to Vance—the writer. I don’t know how he got in touch with her right off, but he talked her into that, and when the book came out, she couldn’t handle it.”

  “He knows where we are.”

  “I don’t know, but he sure as hell knows we’re in New York.” Then Mason shrugged. “He doesn’t care about us, and never did. Mama’s his target.”

  “He cared about you.”

  “I don’t think so. Do you think I wanted a buzz cut every freaking month? If he made it to one of my Little League games I could feel his eyes on my back when I came up to bat. I knew if I struck out, fouled out, he’d give me that sneer—that I’m raising a pussy sneer.”

  “But . . .”

  “He watched me for signs of ‘Carson blood.’ That’s how he put it. When I was eight he told me if I ever showed any fag tendencies, he’d beat the fag out of me.”

  Shocked, she grabbed Mason’s hand. “You never told me.”

  “Some shit you don’t tell your sister. At least when you’re eight. He scared the crap out of me—you, too. We just got used to being scared of him, like that was normal.”

  “Yes.” She let it out on a shaky breath. “Yes, what kind of mood will he be in? Will he be in a good mood? Everything circled around him. I’ve gotten some of that out of therapy. I just didn’t know you felt that, too.”

  “Same house, same father.”

  “I thought . . . I thought it was different for you because he wanted a son. It was so clear he wanted a son more than a daughter. More than me.”

  “He wanted himself, and I wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” Naomi murmured.

  “For what?”

  “I was jealous because I thought he loved you more. And it’s horrible to think that, feel that, because he’s . . .”

  “A psychopath, a sexual sadist, a serial killer.”

  Each almost-flippant term made Naomi wince.

  “He’s all that, Nome. But he’s still our father. That’s just fact. So forget it. I guess I was jealous some, because he let you be more. You were Mama’s deal; I was his. Anyway. Mama talked to the movie people, too. He pushed her into it, just kept asking and making it like it was the best thing for us—you and me.”

  They kept their hands linked, leaned toward each other over the table now. “Why would he want it?”

  “The attention, the fame. He’s right up there with Bundy, Dahmer, Ramirez. Serial killers, Naomi. Pay attention.”

  “I don’t want to pay attention. Why do they want to make a movie about him? Why do people want to see it?”

  “It’s as much about you as him. Maybe more.” He turned his hand over, gripped hers harder. “The title’s you, not him. How many eleven-year-old kids stop a serial killer?”

  “I don’t want—”

  “True or false? He’d have killed Ashley if you hadn’t gotten her out.”

  Saying nothing, she reached for the pendant Ashley had given her on top of the world. Nodded.

  “And when he’d finished with her, he’d have gotten another. Who knows how many he’d have killed.

  “I look like him a little.”

  “No, you don’t! Your eyes are the same color. That’s all.”

  “I look like him some.”

  “You’
re not like him.”

  “No, I’m not like him.” And the determination, the bright intelligence in those eyes spoke as truly as the words. “I’m never going to be like him. Don’t you be like Mama. Don’t let him twist you up. He tried to do that to us all our lives, just like with her. It’s praise and punish. It’s how they get you to do what they want, how they train you.”

  She understood it, or some of it. And yet. “He never hit us.”

  “He’d take things away—promise something, then if we didn’t do something just the way he said, he’d say how we couldn’t go or couldn’t have. Then he’d show up with presents, remember? He put up the basketball hoop for me, brought you that American Girl doll. I got that brand-new catcher’s mitt, you got that little heart locket. Stuff like that. Then if we did anything even a little out of line, he’d take what he’d given us away. Or we couldn’t go to a party we’d been counting on, or the movies.”

  “He said we were going to Kings Dominion, and we were so excited. I didn’t get my room picked up all the way, so he said we weren’t going because I didn’t respect what I had. You were so mad at me.”

  “I was seven. I didn’t get it wasn’t you. He didn’t want me to get it wasn’t you. Maybe we’d give Mama a little sass when he wasn’t around because we knew she wouldn’t tell him, but we never bucked him. Never. We lived by his moods, just like you said, and that’s how he liked it.”

  She’d never left so much as a pair of socks out of place in her room after that, she remembered. Yes, he’d trained her.

  “What are you reading to come up with all this?”

  “A lot of books in the library on psychiatry and psychology. A lot of stuff online, too. I’m going to study and be a psychiatrist.”

  From her vast advantage of twenty-three months, she smiled a little. “I thought you were going to be a pro basketball player.”

  “It’s what Seth and Harry, and Mama, need to hear now. And I like basketball. I’ll play my ass off if it helps me get into Harvard.”

  “Harvard? Are you serious?”

  “They don’t have scholarships, but they have like incentive programs. I’m going to get into Harvard, study medicine, get my degree. And maybe I’ll use it to get into the FBI, into behavior analysis.”

  “God, Mason, you’re fourteen.”

  “You were three years younger when you saved a life.” He leaned forward, those golden brown eyes intense. “I’m never going to be like him. I’m going to be somebody who helps stop people like him, who learns to understand so they can. You stopped him, Naomi. But he’s not the only one.”

  “If you do all that, you’ll never put it behind you.”

  “You put something behind you, Nome, it’s got its eyes on your back. I’d rather keep it in front of me, so I can see where it’s going.”

  —

  It scared her, what he’d said, and more the coolheaded logic behind it. He was her baby brother, often a pain in her butt, regularly goofy, and a slave to Marvel comics.

  And he not only had aspirations, he had lofty ones he spoke of as if he’d already checked them off a list.

  He’d spied on their mother. Naomi could admit to watching her mother—and closely. Living with Susan was like carrying around something delicate. You watched every step so you didn’t stumble, drop the delicate so it shattered.

  She could admit to herself, and now to Mason, a huge sense of disappointment with their mother. Mixed in with the sincere effort to make some sort of a life had been lies and deception. And over a man who’d taken lives, ruined others.

  Was it love that drove her? Naomi wondered.

  If it was, she didn’t want any part of it.

  She’d try sex, because whatever the books and songs and movies said, she knew one didn’t have to walk arm in arm with the other. She considered the best way to go about it, knew there was no way she’d discuss birth control with her mother. And as much as she loved Seth and Harry, such a conversation would be mortifying.

  So the next time she went to the doctor, she’d ask. Then when she decided to have sex, she’d be prepared.

  Maybe Mason was right, and if she put it, or tried to put it, all behind her, it meant the whole ugly business could rush up to nip at her heels anytime it wanted.

  Like with the movie.

  So as fall came to New York, she set it aside. She didn’t like the idea of keeping it straight in front of her—couldn’t you just trip over it then? But setting aside seemed like a good compromise.

  And for right now her mother got out of bed every day, got dressed, went to work. Naomi kept busy with school, her yearbook and school paper assignments, and considering which boy it made the most sense to have sex with when the time came.

  But she made it a point to get her uncle alone and speak to him about the movie.

  “It’s coming out in just a few weeks now.”

  “Honey, I know. Harry and I planned to talk to you and Mason about it.”

  “But not Mama?”

  “I’ll talk with her. I hate having to. She’s doing so well right now. But the movie doesn’t change anything. Your lives are here now. That part of your lives is over.”

  “Not for her. You need to talk with Mason.”

  “Why?”

  “You need to talk with him. It’s his to tell.”

  Naomi didn’t know what her uncle said to her mother, but after a couple of dark days, Susan came out again.

  She took Naomi shopping for a new dress for homecoming, insisted on making a day of it. A rare thing.

  “Anything looks good on you, honey, you’re so tall and slim, but don’t you want something with some color?”

  Naomi turned in the dressing room, checked front and back on the short black dress with its cinched waist and square-necked bodice.

  “I’ll be taking pictures more than dancing. The black’s better for that than the pink.”

  “You ought to have a date,” Susan insisted. “Why aren’t you going out with that nice boy anymore? Mark.”

  “Oh.” Naomi just shrugged. Her mother wasn’t the type you told a boy hadn’t been satisfied just touching your breast. “He’s all right, but I didn’t want a date for homecoming.”

  “Well, when I was your age, having a date for homecoming was the most important thing in the world. So maybe you’re smarter than I was. But I just love the pink, and it has that sparkle on the skirt.”

  “I don’t know if I’m a sparkle-pink girl.”

  “Every girl deserves some sparkle pink. You want the black, that’s fine. Gosh, you’re so grown-up it takes my breath. But we’re getting the pink, too.”

  “Mama, you can’t buy both.”

  “I can. You can wear the black since you’ll be taking pictures, and save the pink for something special. I haven’t given you and Mason enough special.”

  “Sure you have.”

  “Not nearly enough, but I’m going to. We’re going to buy those dresses, and have a fancy lunch. Then we’re going to hunt up the perfect accessories.”

  Naomi laughed, happy to see some sparkle—not on the pink but in her mother’s eyes. “My camera’s my accessory.”

  “Not this time. You’d probably be better off with Seth and Harry there, but we’ll find just the right things. Shoes and a bag, and earrings. I know you wanted to go shopping with your