“What’s the matter?” Fury and shame made her cruel. “Can’t you even get it up?”
“I’m trying.”
“You little asshole. You twisted fuck.”
“Hey, shut up.”
“You can’t do it ’cause you’re queer.”
“I’m not!'
“Maybe you could do it with a boy. You want me to find you a boy?”
“I hate you.”
“Faggot.”
“Bitch.”
“Fag, fag, fag!'
She escaped from his bed. For long minutes he heard water running in the bathroom pipes.
Meredith never baby-sat for him again. He told his parents he was too old for a sitter, and they agreed.
He no longer touched his penis. He had no more erections. It was as if a switch had been thrown, shutting off his sexuality.
Until his freshman year of high school, when a dark-haired, green-eyed girl who looked nothing like Meredith seduced him, almost against his will.
No humiliation this time. He was not a queer, not a faggot. Meredith had lied.
The sudden revelation of his sexual potency was the explosive rupture of a dam. Years of suppressed urges burst like floodwaters through the levees and restraining walls he’d built. He needed sex; he could not get enough.
Speedily he acquired expertise in the game of seduction. He possessed all the requisite assets: good looks, skill at manipulation, and a chilly brazenness that passed for charm.
He kept score of his conquests. In one memorable year he bedded thirteen of his classmates, two girls from other schools, and his young math teacher, Miss Chamberlain.
He had redheads, brunettes, girls with raven hair. No blonds, however. No Merediths.
Blonds, he told his envious friends with a shrug, were not his type.
In a deeper sense, though, they were his type, his only type. It was Meredith who obsessed him as he lay in bed in the unforgiving dark. It was Meredith he could not forget. Meredith, who had deceived and insulted him. Meredith, who had tried to make him less than a man.
He waited until August of 1978 before taking revenge.
“Bitch,” he whispered as he held her underwater and let chlorinated water flood her lungs. “Fucking bitch.”
Though he had killed her, she’d never truly died. She survived in every woman who reminded him of her. In Laura Westlake of San Antonio and Dorothy Beerbaum of Dallas and Veronica Tyler of Phoenix and all the others.
And now, Kirsten Gardner.
The others had paid for Meredith’s crime. Kirstie would pay also. And after the hell she had put him through tonight, how he would savor her death. Oh yes. She would be his best Meredith yet.
The trees thinned out. The dense hammock gave way to a clearing speckled with darting swallowtails. An oval of open sky spread a pale lucent wash over thickets of bottlebrush and rustling stargrass.
Half hidden in the grass, almost lost amid the star-shaped blossoms, lay Kirstie’s other sandal.
“Well,” Jack said aloud. “Well, well, well.”
He knelt and picked it up. The sole was caked with mud. She had been here after leaving the swamp.
Carefully he examined the grass. Tufts of green leaves, trampled by hasty footsteps, had not yet sprung upright.
Couldn’t have been very long ago when she passed through.
She was close.
His gaze traveled slowly over the clearing. A thin streak of glitter-something fine, threadlike-was strung along the garish spikes of a bottlebrush plant.
Spider web? No.
A strand of fabric, snared by the shrub.
He plucked the thread free, held it taut between two fists. Though it was ragged and flecked with dirt, its original color was still recognizable.
Yellow. The color of Kirstie’s tank top.
He followed the line of flattened patches in the grass. At the edge of the clearing he found a second yellow thread, fluttering in the beaklike flowers of a bird-of-paradise. Just beyond it, a third.
The tank top, unraveling, had left a loose strand every couple of yards. Even outside the clearing, in the comparative gloom of the canopied forest, he could pick out new threads now that he knew what to look for.
The hunt was nearly over.
He would have her soon.
44
Kirstie lay supine on the bunk in the musty darkness, fighting hard for breath.
The poison had done something to her respiratory system. She couldn’t seem to get enough air. Twice in the woods she’d sunk to her knees in a swoon; only by lowering her head had she saved herself from a blackout.
She lifted her hand to her throat and felt for the carotid artery. Her pulse had been frighteningly weak and fluttery the last time she’d checked. Now she detected no pulse at all.
Dead, then. I must be dead.
The thought was meant as a joke, but she didn’t smile.
Thirst choked her. She wished she had water.
There was water in the house, and the house was not terribly far away. The old Kirstie could have walked there in five minutes. But this was the new, pathetically debilitated Kirstie, the Kirstie locked in a losing battle with whatever witches’ brew of toxins had been unleashed on her system; and this Kirstie could not walk another five feet.
It had required all her energy merely to take refuge in this one-room shack, part of a line of ramshackle row houses on the eastern end of the island. The shacks, she recalled Steve telling her, had been erected in the early part of the century, when a lime tree plantation had flourished on Pelican Key.
Two bunks, upper and lower, were built into one wall. There was no furniture, no lighting, no kitchen or bath; the one window long ago had been boarded up. The plantation workers had been housed like prisoners, two to a cell, without even a toilet of their own.
Hard to imagine how anyone could have lived in this filthy hole. But dying here-that was a different story. She was beginning to develop a disturbingly vivid picture of what that would be like.
Something whined in the dark. Mosquito, shut in with her. A tickle on her shoulder; the bug had alighted to feed. She was too weak to brush it away.
Well, let the goddamn thing drink its fill. Maybe the snake venom would kill it.
Distantly, the slam of a door.
She stiffened.
Had it been the wind? Had one of the row-house doors blown open and shut?
Another slam. Closer.
A brief pause, time enough for her to realize that she could feel her heartbeat now, its rhythm strong and fast, and then a third door banged shut, nearer still.
Someone was methodically checking the shacks, one at a time.
Absurdly she was seized with the impulse to fight. Crazy; she had no weapons, no strength.
But to lie here immobile and let death take her-to put up no final resistance, simply cower like a beaten animal…
