“Are you calling the police?”
“No, I’m not calling the police. I don’t want them involved.” She stares at me. “Now, you tell me where I can find him.”
“He’s not a cop. He’s not dangerous.”
“How do you know that?”
“He’s not my husband.”
Phyllis cocks her head.
“We’d better sit down,” I say.
My words are impulsive, unplanned. As they come out of my mouth, I realize I am ending my career as a police officer.
“I’m here undercover, Phyllis. I am a police officer working for Long Island City homicide. I lied my way in here. We’re trying to solve the murders of three people whose partners were in this shelter. We think you, or someone you know, aided by people you know, killed them. That’s Ronald Steevers, Joey Savone, Derrick Matthews. That man who was outside is not a dangerous husband. He’s part of a sting operation to convince you to hurry along in an attempt to kill him. The plan is to entrap you into trying to kill him. When you set out to do this, we would arrest you for conspiracy to commit murder, and get you to confess to the others.”
Phyllis nods. There is no point in outrage, scenes, or histrionics. “You know what you are doing?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why are you telling me this?”
Before I can answer, there is a knock on the door. Sharon steps in.
“Hi, sorry to interrupt. Is everything all right? I heard there was a disturbance outside. A man. Somebody’s husband.”
“Mine,” I say.
“It’s under control,” Phyllis says. “We chased him off.”
Phyllis lets the silence linger, a signal to Sharon that we want to continue our conversation alone.
“It kinda freaks me out,” she says.
“Understandable,” Phyllis says. “But we took care of it. All’s well.”
Sharon wants more.
“Really, Sharon. We’re safe. We need to be calm. For the children.”
“Yes. I see.”
Take a hint, Sharon. Leave.
“I’m cooking tonight,” Sharon says. “Can I have a count, Phyllis?”
Phyllis closes her eyes and does a mental calculation. I can read her mind; she is thinking, Do I have to do this now?
She takes a breath. “Usual.”
I look at Phyllis and shake my head.
“Lucy, stay for dinner. Spend one more night. You can say good-bye to the children in the morning.”
“You’re leaving us?” Sharon asks.
“Yes.”
“Oh, my. I do envy you,” Sharon says.
“I wouldn’t.”
“Oh.”
“He knows where I am. It’s better that I leave.”
“Where will you go?”
I just shake my head.
Sharon nods sympathetically. “I’ll miss you,” she says.
I think, You’ll miss me? Why? I hardly know you. All I know about you is that I caught you in my room. Maybe I’m a cynical cop and I don’t believe you were paranoid and checking escape routes. Maybe you’re a thief, or maybe I just don’t like you despite your down-home, sweet mama personality.
Sharon goes to the door. “Well, see you all tonight.”
She gets two nods. Phyllis gets up and shuts the door behind Sharon.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“Nothing. That’s the point.”
“You want to tell me why you told me all this?”
“I don’t want you in jail. I don’t want the shelter closed.”
“And these so-called murders, your theory is that I had something to do with them?”
“Yes.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
She says it with a smile.
Chapter 43
Sharon’s dinner is meat loaf, mashed potatoes, biscuits, carrots, and peas. Dessert is apple pie. She brings in slices from the kitchen, three plates at a time; she must have worked as a waitress. There is no mention of Bobby’s intrusion as not to upset the children. The three kids who did see it will boast, exaggerate, and reenact the event for the ones who missed it. Before the children are sent up to bed, I announce that I am leaving tomorrow. I thank everyone for their support, friendship, and love, but since my presence here in the shelter is known to my ex-husband, I don’t want to make life any more dangerous. It’s a lie, but the truth can’t be told. Amanda already knows, and the other children are used to women coming and going.
“I have a new safe place to go where no one can find me.”
“Are you going to hide in Europe?” Tiffany asks.
“How did you know? Now I’ll have to go somewhere else.”
“I won’t tell,” she says.
“I know you won’t.”
We all exchange hugs and kisses. Nobody makes any promises to “stay in touch.”
I help Sharon in the kitchen.
“I’ve always been a clean cook. I like to wash pots as I use them. Less work at the end.”
“I’m the opposite,” I say. “I leave a mess.”
I’m tired. I don’t want to make small or large talk. I just want to go down to my basement and crash. I’ll pack tomorrow.
“Are you all right, Lucy? You look a bit pale.”
“I think I’m beat. It was a hard day.”
“Then you go. I’ll finish up.”
“Thanks. If I don’t see you tomorrow . . .”
“Oh, you will. I’m an early riser. Sweet dreams.”
Chapter 44
My dreams aren’t sweet. They are revelatory. I dream solutions to problems, I solve crimes that have eluded me, I learn who killed my father, I know where Artie Crews’s son’s cat is hiding, I realize I know who McDermott will kill, and I dream about a connection between Afghanistan and Long Island City. I am all-knowing. I make a dream note to remind me that when I wake to be sure I remember my dreams and all that is revealed to me. I won’t because I am dreaming under the influence of a drug I didn’t take. When I wake up, I remember nothing. I am left with only the questions and none of the answers.
And I realize I am not alone. There is someone in the room; another mass occupies my space. It breathes my oxygen, absorbs my heat, and radiates its own. There is a familiar odor; it is the one I smelled last week—sweet, honeyed—and now it is attached to a person. As the odor moves, its intensity swells and fades. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman . . . Cyclops smells Ulysses, Hector smells Ajax, Red Riding Hood smells a wolf. Stop. Concentrate. The odor belongs to a woman, her perfume, her soap, her shampoo, honey pleasant, unlike the nostril-burning industrial smells of my basement home: heating oil, paint, and the Comet that refuses to erase the yellow stains in the sink. I reach for the lamp switch, but my arm won’t move. I try to sit up, but I can’t; my back muscles won’t work. No part of my body can move. No muscle obeys, no nerve feels. Only smell and sound. I hear air inhaled, a breath taken in. I can hear. I can smell, I can feel, I am alive.
“Would you like some light?” The accent, like the smell, is honeyed; a Southern inflection.
Of course it’s Sharon.
“Here you go.”
Like a flare exploding in my face, a powerful beam burns through my eyelids.
“It’s called Rohypnol. I put some in your food. You can’t move. Your muscles are disabled. But it wears off, so I had to tie you down. You won’t be going anywhere.”
I open my eyes. Sharon stands over me. I am her prisoner, her victim, and I cannot speak. There is duct tape across my mouth. I try to move. I can’t. There are restraints around my wrists and my ankles. Smooth, not painful. I glance up to the basement window. Outside it is pitch-black. I have no idea of the time. Sharon, a shadowy presence behind the powerful flashlight beam, sits on the chair next to the cot. She leans in closer, speaks in a low voice. “I know who you are. I know all about you. Let me tell you who I am.”
Yes. Talk. Keep talking. As long as you speak, I am alive. Be Sche
herazade. I try to nod my head. See? I am interested.
“I am a miracle. Anita Turner, my mother, was a sixteen-year-old high school senior in Matthews, Texas, known as ‘The Friendliest Town in the West.’ That’s a matter of debate, ’cause there sure weren’t many friendly people to turn to when she got pregnant by her boyfriend who raped and abandoned her. Mama said he would have come around; the rape was something he wouldn’t ever admit or acknowledge. It happened behind the high school, after a dance. There was too much Lone Star and weed, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer—as he’d learned in movies, if you kiss a girl hard enough sooner or later, she will melt and give in, and if not, just keep going. There will be time to forgive and forget. Mama didn’t forgive, and her periods stopping made it impossible for her to forget. So there.
“I don’t know much about him, this rapist father of mine. I am told I have his nose, his hair, and his temperament, which tended to volatile. He died as young men often do in Central Texas, driving his pickup truck under the influence. Drunk, I guess. Too bad he took a couple of teenagers coming in the opposite direction with him. Since he died before his ambitions were realized, his legends created, and memories deposited in me, his daughter, there’s not much for me to say about him.
“I’d rather tell you about my mama’s family. They came to Texas from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl depression, ran out of gas and money in Matthews. My grandpa found ranch work; my grandma had bookkeeping skills, got a job in the local bank. They made a home, had kids—one was my mother. She was the smart one, read a lot, knew life after high school in Matthews meant minimum wage in fast food—if you were lucky, construction, or a doctor’s receptionist, and, depending on your success in high school, the chance of a Texas state scholarship to a community college, assuming you or your family could afford books and food. Or the military, my mother’s way out. She planned to enlist in the United States Air Force after graduation, and if she couldn’t get into their pilot program, she would learn everything she could about airplanes and then use her saved money and veterans’ benefits to pay for flight school to become a commercial airline pilot.
“Getting pregnant was an obstacle to that plan, but she could overcome that obstacle by having an abortion. Otherwise, she would be a single mother living at home, fair game for men married and not, in a dusty rural hell.
“There was an abortion clinic in Harlington, a hundred miles from Matthews, but those miles weren’t easy for a sixteen-year-old without a car, and whose boyfriend suddenly wasn’t talking to her. Planned Parenthood had clinics in Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas. There was always a bus across the border from Brownsville to Matamoros in Mexico, where she could walk into a pharmacy, buy misoprostol over the counter, and give herself a medically induced miscarriage. But it’s a dangerous and often unsuccessful solution. It was her great-grandmother Caroline Allen who came to her rescue. She handed Mama the ungodly sum of fifteen hundred dollars in a roll of one-hundred-dollar bills that paid for a round-trip bus ticket to San Antonio, a hotel room at the DoubleTree, and an appointment at the Whole Woman Clinic.
“Two days later, according to plan, my mother would, with the help of a doctor, abort and legally murder me. Then, miracle of miracles, God chose me to express his love for the world. I am here and alive because on her way to have me aborted, Mama got in a taxicab driven by Father Martin, a Catholic priest and a volunteer in the Christian Life Society. The hotel desk clerk would tip off Father Martin when women ordered taxis to drive them to the abortion clinic. Instead of taking them to the Whole Woman Clinic, he drove them to the Life Saver Mission, where they would be counseled, prayed over by beautiful women, and persuaded not to have the abortion. In my mama’s case, they were successful. She changed her mind and brought me to birth. If it weren’t for Father Martin and those women, I would not be here. I would not be the loving mother of my two beautiful children, Agnes and Martin, I would be a three-month-old fetus incinerated in the ovens of the Whole Woman Clinic. And thirty-three years later, on the anniversary of my birth and the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, my husband, Clyde Fairbrother, and I burned that building to the ground.”
Clyde Fairbrother. The man I killed.
“We talked about you, whether we should find you or let you find us. We knew you had become a policewoman, we knew you were looking for us, but we never considered you would murder Clyde. We thought you were only concerned with finding him. It was a mistake that cost my husband his life.”
Take this tape off my mouth.
Sharon reads my movements, shakes her head.
“Can’t. I know your questions. You want to know how I found you, how I worked my way into this place, and what do I plan to do to you.”
No, I know everything. I want to find a way to get free, disarm you, and then kill you.
“Clyde didn’t shoot your father—you know that, don’t you?”
Of course I know. Clyde was too smart to do it.
“I did. I was the one who shot him.”
He made you the killer. Like your mother, you were raped, only this time by your husband.
“Clyde taught me. Your doctor father was a murderer. He killed hundreds of babies that could have been like me: miracles. He had to be stopped. Clyde knew they would suspect him, so we decided I would do it. He would have an alibi for the night I shot your father. No one would think I did it. I was home with the children, helping them with their homework, and they would swear it so. We are a family; we all do God’s work. We taught the children what to say: their answer would be, ‘Daddy was racing his car. Mama put us in her bed, and we all slept together.’ Clyde and I worked it out like it was a military operation. Once a week, we would drive downstate in my car, using the back roads, to Grahamsville, hike into the woods, and watch you and your family.”
Cowardly bastards.
“We studied what time you had dinner, where you each sat. We noticed how he always washed the dishes in front of the kitchen window while you kids ate dessert or did homework. That would be our cleanest shot.”
Sammy.
“We picked out the best firing position. We always used the tarp so there would be no clothes fibers on the ground. We wore hospital booties over thick socks so there would be no footprints. We practiced exit routes. Clyde taught me everything about the rifle: how to clean it, how to lock it on the tripod, aim it, adjust the sight, correct for wind and the thickness of the window glass, and pull the trigger.”
My father.
“I learned how to break the rifle down so I could carry it in pieces in my backpack in case anybody spotted me. I was just another hiker. Clyde knew his beans, I’ll tell you that. He turned me into a first-class markswoman, said if I was younger and we didn’t care about being in the news he would have put me up for the Olympics. I was that good.”
My mother.
“And then on that afternoon, I hiked into the woods behind your house in Grahamsville and waited for him to come home, for your mother to cook dinner and your baby-murdering father to stand perfectly framed in front of the kitchen window washing the dishes, facing me. One bullet. Now many more babies will live. Praise God.”
Me.
“I see the fear in your eyes. It is beautiful to me.”
Beautiful?
I see the glint of steel. Sharon is holding a short folding combat knife. I recognize it from a blade weapons lecture at the Police Academy. It’s the Hotshot, a Marine Corps weapon, five inches and razor-sharp out of the box.
“It was Clyde’s. He won it for being best recruit at Quantico. He was so proud of it. I carry it now in his memory.”
She holds the knife in front of my eyes for a closer look.
“What I am going to do now is make two slices in each wrist and let you watch the blood flow out of your veins until you are dead. I am not a cruel person. I think it will be a painless death, but I do want you to die. I want to see the life flow out of you. Then this cycle of death will come to an end. Your father killed babies
, I killed him, you killed Clyde, and now I will kill you. I don’t think there is anyone who loves you enough to come after me. Not your boyfriend. If he does, I will be long gone and impossible to find. You have five minutes left in your disgusting life.”
For all her protestations of miracles and God’s love, Sharon has my hate. We are perfectly matched.
She pulls the blanket down to my waist. My wrists are bound to the metal frame of the cot with plastic zip ties. I struggle. I have enough adrenaline energy to lift a Volkswagen, but the weight of my body keeps me locked to the bed. I have no leverage. I get a smile from Sharon. She is proud of her work.
Fuck you.
She cuts a neat vertical slice on my left wrist.
“There. That didn’t hurt, did it?”
She is right. There is almost no pain; the blood begins to flow. What will I think about in these last five minutes of my life? I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I won’t be joining my parents and brother in Elysian Fields, heaven, Valhalla, or hell. My lifeless body will be discovered when I miss a meal, and then another meal, or Phyllis needs to get something out of the basement.
Sharon will have left the shelter. She will be the suspect, but she won’t get far, no matter how careful or smart she thinks she is. She will have left too many markers behind. There are videos. Her fingerprints are all over the place. It will be only a matter of time before she is arrested. I am a police officer, and nobody gets away with killing one. If she makes it out of Queens, she will be lucky. She thinks she was the clever one—she wasn’t. It was Clyde who planned and carried out the shooting. She just pulled the trigger. I shake my head back and forth, mouthing words unformed, straining against the duct tape. I know I could talk Sharon out of this. She knows it, too, so the tape on my mouth is more for her than for me. She would be vulnerable to mentions of Christian forgiveness, offers of mercy, and threats.
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