Ginny perked up. “What? How? Just tell me what I gotta do.”
“We’ll wire you up. You arrange a meeting with Dinchara, and we’ll use his own statements to nail him to the wall.”
EIGHTEEN
I SAW MY BROTHER TODAY.
He was at the movie theater, three rows ahead of me, arm around a pretty girl with straight blond hair that hung like a silk curtain down her back. I was eating popcorn, but the minute I spotted him, I started to cough, then had to duck down quickly when he looked back in annoyance at whoever was making such a racket.
I stayed for a while on my hands and knees on the sticky theater floor. I didn’t know what to do, couldn’t figure out how to react.
So after a bit, I decided to do what I did best—nothing at all.
I returned to my seat. I put my popcorn on my lap. And I watched the slasher film, one chainsaw after another. They didn’t get any of the details right. Hollywood doesn’t know jackshit about real blood.
The blond girl liked my brother. Every time the movie soundtrack grew ominous, she’d snuggle against him, her head tucked against his shoulder. Except soon she didn’t bother to lift her head anymore. Just kept it there, against his chest, while his hand curled tighter around her and they both giggled at something that had nothing to do with the bloodbath on the screen.
She had a nice giggle, bubbly fresh, like a summer’s day.
In my mind, I gave her that name. My older brother was dating a girl named Summer. I bet they walked under moonlit skies, went necking in the back of my parents’ borrowed car, attended the prom with her perky little breasts covered in a giant corsage.
It wasn’t fair, I thought sullenly. It wasn’t fair that I had died and he still got to live.
I ate more popcorn, drank thirty-two ounces of Coke, and brooded through the end of the film.
Lights came on. My brother and his girlfriend finally rose. He had a letterman’s jacket—of course he had a letterman’s jacket. He draped it over Summer’s shoulders and she giggled again, clutching the front with her hands, curling it around her.
My brother had inherited my father’s wiry build. Not tall, but solid. I was guessing he’d lettered in baseball, maybe the star pitcher with the clean-cut jaw, short-cropped dark hair. Then he smiled again, a dimple appearing in his left cheek, and in an instant, I remembered exactly what my mother looked like, and the pain of seeing her face after all these years drove me to my knees.
I gasped, but didn’t make a sound. I tried to breathe, but no air would reach my lungs.
So I folded over, quiet, limp, a puddle of dark trench coat on a stained floor.
I watched my brother’s feet head up the aisle. I heard his baritone ask Summer what time she needed to be home.
“I still have an hour,” she replied.
“Perfect,” my brother said. “I know where we can go.”
I followed my brother. It wasn’t so hard. He drove a truck now, a giant, extended cab four-wheel-drive vehicle that probably belonged to our father. A bumper sticker declared “Alpharetta Raiders.”
My family had moved. It made sense. I had moved at least two dozen times. Why shouldn’t they?
He turned down a dirt road. I recognized it as a lovers’ lane I’d heard other kids talk about. Not that I knew a whole lot, never being allowed to go to school and all that. No letterman’s jacket for me. No prom, no pretty blond girlfriend. Nope, I was just the crazy loner who turned up in his Army surplus gear at various rec centers, pale face, shaggy hair. The local freak show. Every town had one.
And for no good reason, I wondered about Christmas. Did my family still hang my stocking up on the mantel, the one with the patched-up toe and my name scrawled across the top in silver glitter? Did they set a place at the table, wrap a gift just in case?
If they had moved, that meant I didn’t have a room anymore. What had happened to my stuff? My books, my clothes, my toys? Boxed up, given to Goodwill? Maybe my brother had a two-room suite now. One room to sleep, another room to sprawl.
Probably had his own futon, TV, entertainment system. Had friends over, including giggly blond cheerleaders like Summer. I wondered if he was popular, if the kids at school admired him, the boy who had survived the Burgerman.
Or maybe he was the tragic hero. Lost his brother when he was young, but just look at him now.
And just when I was working up a good head of steam, ready to hate him, out necking with perky little Summer, I thought of my mother again and the pain returned like a knife thrust beneath my ribs.
I wondered if he made my parents proud. I wondered if looking at him helped my mother sleep at night.
I pulled over on the dirt road, jumped out of my little rust bucket and made it behind a tree just before my bladder burst. I pissed thirty-two ounces of Coke and then some. I pissed for goddamn near forever, and when I came back out, my brother’s truck had appeared on the dirt road.
There was no time for me to retreat. I could only hope he wouldn’t notice me.
No such luck. The truck slowed. The driver’s side window came down. My own brother glared at me.
“Hey, aren’t you the same creep from the movie theater? What the hell are you doing? Are you following us?”
I didn’t say a word.
His frown deepened, he looked on the verge of climbing out. Then I heard the girl’s voice from inside the cab. “Come on, babe. Don’t do this. He isn’t worth it. Besides, I have curfew.”
“Yeah,” my brother said reluctantly. “Yeah, guess you’re right.”
I saw his hand move on the steering column, putting the truck in gear. And suddenly I was sprinting toward the truck, my long black trench coat flapping, my steel-toed boots eating up the dirt. I had a tree limb in my hands. I don’t know how it got there.
“Hey,” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “HEY!”
“What the fuck—”
“Don’t let the Burgerman get you!”
And then I was pounding on the truck door. Hit it hard enough the tree branch shattered. The girl screamed. My brother ducked, covering his head with his hands. I went to town, working on the headlights, the front grill, smashing, smashing, smashing with the short, splintered tree limb, and kicking out with my boots and yelling at the top of my lungs.
And there were tears on my cheeks and snot pouring from my nose and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. Because I loved my brother so damn much that I hated him. I loved him for being alive. I hated him for not being me. I loved him for having such a pretty little girlfriend. I hated him for having my mother’s dimple. I loved him because he escaped. And I hated him because I wasn’t his brother anymore and that’s the thing in the world I most wanted to be.
So I beat up his truck. I smashed the living daylights out of glass and steel until I heard the engine gun and had only a second to leap away.
My brother tore down the dirt road, away from the crazy boy wielding a tree limb.
My brother drove away from me.
NINETEEN
“Among the remarkable phenomena occurring in spiders ranks the peculiar behavior associated with mating. These courtship maneuvers are usually started by the male and continued by him, though in some cases the female may also take part after she has reached a certain pitch of excitement.”
FROM How to Know the Spiders,
THIRD EDITION, BY B. J. KASTON, 1978
KIMBERLY GOT HOME LATE. HOUSE WAS DARK, EXCEPT for the usual light in the hallway, and the small pool of illumination on the kitchen desk where Mac had piled her mail and phone messages. No happy face tonight. Instead, the top sticky note displayed a crude drawing of branching lines ending in small ovals. It took her a moment, then she got it: an olive branch.
The picture made her smile even as she felt a sting of tears.
Her husband was such a better person than she was. How had she gotten so lucky?
She should go to him. Tell him she was sorry and ask for his forgiveness. Then again, was it really a
ppropriate to apologize for pursuing a case she had no intention of giving up?
She paced the kitchen, keyed up in that way she always got when starting a new investigation, brain churning, adrenaline pumping. Delilah Rose equaled Ginny Jones. And Ginny Jones equaled…? Victim, accomplice, something worse?
She opened the refrigerator, reached for a beer. Caught herself, sighed, and put it back.
Into the living room now, staring at the darkened shadows of the leather couch, Mac’s recliner, their way-too-big TV. When she was a little girl, she used to practice creeping through the house at night. Not Mandy. No, her older sister was scared of the dark, slept in a room with two nightlights and a lamp blazing at all times. But Kimberly saw nighttime as an adventure. Could she tiptoe from her bedroom on the second story, all the way down to the front door of their four-bedroom Colonial without making a sound?
She would imagine she was stalking bad men. Or, she was outsmarting an intruder who had already entered her house. Nighttime brought monsters and for as long as Kimberly could remember, she wanted to fight them.
Most of the time, her insomniac father caught her in the act.
“Kimberly,” he would say, “what are you doing out of bed?”
And she, embarrassed about being caught, and not wanting to admit to her Super Cop father that she was stalking shadows, would say, “I just wanted a drink of water.”
He would watch her for a while. Silence had always been her father’s best weapon and he had wielded it masterfully. Eventually, he would go into the kitchen and return with a glass of water.
“Third step from the top,” he informed her. “It squeaks.”
And the next night, she would get a little farther into the shadows.
After her father moved out, she roamed the house at will. Her mother slept soundly, and until she was fourteen and discovered boys, Mandy had no use for midnight excursions. Just Kimberly would make the rounds, night after night. Keeping her mother and sister safe. Because Super Cop was gone now and she was all the protection against monsters her family had left.
Until the day she went off to college, and Mandy and her mother had been murdered.
Fuck it. Kimberly went to the bedroom.
Mac appeared to be sleeping, one arm flung up over his head, the other curved over his stomach.
She left him alone. Crossed into the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth, scrubbed her face, combed out her hair. She shed her clothes, found her pajamas, opening lots of drawers and the closet doors along the way. Back to the kitchen for a glass of water, setting it down firmly on the nightstand.
Tossing back the covers. Jumping into bed.
Mac grunted.
“Oh,” she declared brightly. “You’re awake!”
Mac peeled open one eye, then covered it again with his arm.
She thumped his shoulder lightly. “Faker.”
“Am not.”
“Pulleeeze. I’ve seen this act before.”
He didn’t protest anymore, but opened both eyes. For a moment, they regarded each other warily.
“I liked your drawing,” she said softly.
“I’m not a very good artist.”
“Good enough.”
“I don’t like it when we fight,” he said abruptly.
“Me, neither.”
“And I don’t like worrying about you. And I don’t like waking up some mornings, realizing we’re about to be parents and we’ve never even had a puppy. How do we know if we can feed this thing, or bathe it, or keep it alive? You know what I realized for the first time yesterday?”
She shook her head.
“We don’t have a ficus tree. Kimberly, how are we going to be good parents, when our current lifestyle doesn’t even allow for plants?”
“I guess we won’t feed the baby Miracle-Gro.”
He sat up, the covers falling to his waist. With his dark hair sleep-rumpled, his lean face intent, he looked sexy, serious, the man she fell in love with all those years ago. The man who had proposed to her, buck naked, the night before she was to make a ransom drop and the situation was dangerous enough they both knew she wouldn’t wear the ring.
He had let her go the next morning, to do what she needed to do, and she had loved him for that.
She reached over now, touched his face gently. “I saw Delilah Rose,” she said, because there was no other way to do it. “It turns out she’s actually Ginny Jones, kidnapped, she claims, two years ago, and forced into a life of prostitution to stay alive. She alleges her kidnapper killed her mother and is systematically picking off other hookers one by one. She provided no details, physical description, or corroborative information, but Sal believes he has enough to pursue a case. And I’m going to help him. At least until we get enough to put together a full task force.”
“You won’t quit even then,” Mac said.
“I don’t know. Once the baby comes, I’ll have to.”
“You’ll work it from your hospital bed, that’s what you’ll do.”
Her hand fell away. She studied the sheets. “You’re right,” she said shortly. “I’m not a quitter. Not in my marriage, and not in my job.”
He didn’t say anything right away. She sensed she should look at him, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had no problem chasing down an informant on a secluded road late at night, or looking for a hunter’s severed head. But here, in her own house, sitting cross-legged in bed next to her husband, feeling the tension between them, she was afraid.
“Kimberly,” Mac said quietly, “I’ve been offered a promotion. Special agent in charge of the Regional Drug Enforcement Office in Savannah.”
She glanced at him, dumbfounded. “But Savannah…” Savannah was way to the southeast, on the South Carolina border, closer to Hilton Head than Atlanta. The city was large enough to command a respectable GBI presence. A solid RDEO, an excellent promotion. And much too far away to work while living in Roswell.
“Aren’t you going to say congratulations?”
“Congratulations,” she said dutifully.
He wasn’t fooled. “I didn’t say anything right away because I didn’t know what to say. But I’ve been asking around. It’s a great assignment. It would mean a lot for my career.”
She couldn’t speak anymore. She went back to studying the linen.
Beside her, Mac sighed. “You’re not the only one who loves your job, Kimberly,” he said finally. “And you’re not the only one who’s good at it. It just so happens that in the past twelve months, I’ve helped uncover one of the largest meth labs in the state, plus broken up an entire network of dealers. I am making a difference, too, and I like it.”
“I know.”
“The FBI has some regional offices. They’re small, but maybe Savannah could use an extra agent. We could rent a house in the area, try things out. Last time we visited, we both remarked on how charming the place was. Close to the beaches, Hilton Head. It wouldn’t be a bad place to raise a child.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Or,” he forged ahead, “maybe, with the baby coming, now would be a good opportunity to take some time off, maybe a leave of absence. See what we think.”
“I’d stay home, you would work?”
“If you haven’t tried it, Kimberly, how do you know you won’t like it?”
She needed to find her voice. She couldn’t. She felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. One day, they’d been sailing along and now…Now everything was up for grabs. His job, her job, the baby. She couldn’t find an anchor.
“Did you give an answer?” she heard herself whisper.
“You know I wouldn’t do that without talking to you first.”
“And this is our official conversation?”
“I guess so.”
She nodded, picked up the edge of the sheet, twisted it. “Do I have to answer tonight?” she asked.
“No. But probably I need to give them an answer within a week.”
“All right.
”
“All right we can move?” he asked hopefully, but she could tell by his gentle voice that he was teasing.
“All right, we can talk about it for another week.”
“Okay.” His voice grew serious again. “But you know, Kimberly, for us to talk, you’re going to have to actually spend some time at home.”
“Sure,” she said, but they could both tell her heart wasn’t in it.
He sighed again, leaned over, turned out the light.
They hunkered down into bed, her body spooned into his, his hand on her stomach. The happy couple, the two about to become three. A joyous event in the lives of two people who loved each other.
She remained wide-eyed long after her husband had returned to sleep.
One a.m., she crawled back out of bed, into the kitchen. She dialed the number from memory, but got voice mail. She left a message she wasn’t sure she’d ever left in her life.
“Dad,” she said. “I need help.”
TWENTY
“The spider is well adapted to living indoors with humans.”
FROM Brown Recluse Spider,
BY MICHAEL F. POTTER, URBAN ENTOMOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
RITA WAS AWAKE. DID THAT SAVE HER LIFE IN THE end? She would never know.
It was dark out. New moon, so perfect there wasn’t even enough light to form shadows across the far wall. Damn nights were long enough without even a light show for entertainment.
And then she heard it. Scuffling in her yard, followed by the creak of her back door opening.
“Joseph,” she whispered, flat on her back in her old double bed, gnarled hands clutching the edge of the covers. “That you, Joseph?”
But of course it wasn’t Joseph. Since when did ghosts make a sound?
She worked on her breathing, slow and steady, as she heard more noise downstairs. The sucking pop of the refrigerator door opening. The whine of an old drawer grudgingly giving way. And footsteps. Lots of footsteps, light and quick, crossing the kitchen, heading up the stairs.
Breathing again, slow and steady. By gawd, she would not be scared in her own home. By gawd, she would not be spooked from her own bed.