With an Extreme Burning

hands, taking her time, thinking that there might be something in the medicine cabinet she could use as a weapon, a packet of Dad's razor blades or something. Could she reach up and open it without him seeing? No. Shit. The bathroom was too small and she could see him in the mirror, which meant that he could see her, too. And his eyes were on her again.

Back in the living room she said, “It's cold in here. There's plenty of wood—I could make a fire.”

“No, no fire.”

“We'll freeze once the sun goes down.”

“Isn't there some kind of heater?”

“There's a space heater, but it's old and it doesn't work too well. We always just make a fire.”

“Well, we'll just have to find other ways of keeping warm.”

Oh-oh, she thought. “How long are we going to be here?”

“A while,” he said.

“All night?”

“A while. Several hours at least.”

“Doing what all that time?”

“Getting to know each other better,” he said. “Isn't that what we talked about, Amy? What we planned?”

A little fear wiggled back into her. But mostly what she felt was determination. And the hate, like a wad of something in her throat, choking her. “When do you want to start? Now or later?”

“There's no point in waiting.”

“Whatever you want.” In her mind were pictures of things she would do to his private parts, if she just had the chance. She could endure anything for that chance. “You won't have to rape me,” she said, and began to unbutton her blouse.

They were in the rented car again, moving through the wet afternoon toward Highway 101. Freezing in there after the warmth of Martin Delaney's house; Cecca reached out automatically to turn the heater up. It was already on as high as it would go. She pressed her hands between her thighs.

“Jerry,” she said. “My God.”

“You didn't look surprised when Delaney described him.”

“No. I thought at the library it had to be Jerry.”

Dix nodded and said bitterly, “Mr. Congeniality. The guy who'd do anything for you, give you the shirt off his back. All an act contrived to win our friendship and trust.”

“I can't imagine a mind that could conceive of such a … a hideous revenge.”

“I can, at least up to a point. What I can't imagine is that much hate. He killed someone I loved—in cold blood, not by accident—but I don't hate him nearly as much as he must hate us. Do you?”

“No,” she said, “not that much.”

“Ironic as hell, isn't it? Before the accident, he wasn't much different from you, me, any of us—a more or less normal person with a family, a job, an average middle-class life. It was the hate that pushed him over the edge.”

“But the accident was his fault.”

“Transference,” Dix said. “If he'd accepted culpability, he'd have been a monster in his own eyes. He couldn't bear that. So he made you three the monsters instead.”

“How could he live so close to us for so long and never let any of it show?”

“Force of will. Four years is a long time to us, but not to a man like him. His family was his whole life; without them he has nothing left except revenge. Just killing each of you wasn't enough for him. It would've been over too fast and then he'd have no more reason to live. He had to savor his revenge, make it last. Get to know you first, get as close to you as he could. Katy was the driver that night, Katy was his primary target. He set out to seduce her and he probably didn't care how long it took. You can't get any closer to a woman than inside her body.”

I almost let him inside my body, too, Cecca thought. Came nearer than I ever want to admit.

Dix said, “Hard to tell if he murdered Katy on some sort of timetable or if something happened—the trophy business, maybe—to make him do it before he wanted to. Once he committed himself, though, he was driven to go after the rest of us.”

“Our families … we took his, he'd take ours.”

“ ‘One's pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.’ Yeah, that was part of his plan all along.”

“But why go after you once Katy was gone?”

“Maybe he meant to kill me first, and blames me because he couldn't do it that way. Or his hate for Katy was so great, it included me: guilt by association. Or he'd decided all family members have to die no matter what. One thing I'm fairly sure of: Ted and his sons were the targets at Blue Lake, not Eileen. He knew about her evening walks, counted on her being away from the cabin when the timer set off the propane. The whole idea was for her to see her family destroyed by explosion and fire, as his was.”

“Sick, so sick …”

“He had it all planned like that, in detail. To him it must all make perfect sense, fit some kind of pattern of retribution. His mind has to be deteriorating though. The things he's done since Katy have been progressively more bizarre and disconnected.”

Cecca watched the rain slant against the side window. After a time she said, “He must have loved his own children. How could he justify harming Bobby, Kevin, Amy? Innocent young lives.”

“They're not innocent young lives to him. None of us is even human to him anymore, if we ever were. This is a grim analogy, but I'll bet it's reasonably accurate: In his mind we're like germs, the source of all his torment. You don't look at germs as individuals. Don't think twice about killing germs that have infected you.”

“Germs,” she said.

“Prevalent psychology today. Gang wars, freeway shootings, mass murders … the ones who commit those atrocities are exterminators of objects, bugs, germs, not people. Get in their way, hurt them somehow, and they feel they have every right to destroy you.”

Again Cecca watched the rain form its teardrop patterns on the window glass. “It makes me feel so damned helpless,” she said. “The idea of a man none of us ever met or saw, a man we barely knew existed, plotting our deaths from hundreds of miles away—and then moving to our town, making friends with us and a whole new life for himself just so he could destroy us from within. If that kind of thing can happen …”

“I know,” Dix said.

An uneasy silence built between them. Hiss of tires, clacking of the wipers, rush of wind and water as trucks and cars passed—all external sounds. Then Cecca realized they were approaching a town. A roadside sign materialized through the misty rain: Neskowin.

She sat up. “Where are we going?”

“Back to Portland. We ought to be able to make the five o'clock flight to SFO.”

“We should've stopped in Pelican Bay,” she said. “We'd better stop here.”

“What for?”

“To call St. John.”

“You think he'd listen? Act without proof? All we have to give him are sketchy facts and supposition. We can't even prove to him quickly that Jerry Whittington and Gordon Cotter are the same man, and even if we could, there's no evidence to link Jerry with Katy's death, the explosion—any of it.”

“There has to be something at his house.”

“Yes, but St. John can't get at it without a search warrant. And he can't get a search warrant without probable cause.”

“He could talk to Jerry, couldn't he? Let him know we're on to him. And least that might stop him from doing anything else.”

“Would it? I don't think so,” Dix said. “I think it would have the opposite effect. He doesn't care what happens to him, Cecca. His whole focus is revenge—finishing what he started.”

“… You want to go after him yourself, don't you?”

“I don't want to, no. I don't see any other choice.”

“Use that gun you bought? Shoot him down like a dog?”