Stay close.'
When she entered the women's lavatory, she seemed to be alone. The doors on all three stalls were slightly ajar, not fully closed and latched.
The sound of rain swelled louder here, not merely an insistent drumming on roof shingles, but a more intimate gurgle, plink, and splash.
The double-hung window featured panes of frosted glass. The lower sash had been raised, opening the room to the night.
Choruses of rain danced on the windowsill, drizzled off the edge, and formed a shallow puddle on the floor.
The water reflected the ceiling light but didn't appear to be luminous in its own right. It seemed to have no peculiar odor, either, so perhaps the storm had entered a new phase.
Considering what a leak had spawned in the janitorial closet in the men's room, however, Molly moved directly to the window to close it.
As she reached for the bottom rail to pull down the lower sash, she was shaken by the conviction that something lurked in the night just beyond the window. Something waited that she could not see through the doubled panes of frosted glass, a hostile presence that would reach inside and seize her and drag her out into the dark wet or, with razored claws, would slash her open, groin to breast, and eviscerate her where she stood.
So intense and specific was this fear that it had the impact of a paranormal vision, rocking her backward. She stumbled, nearly fell, regained her balance, and chastised herself for allowing Derek to reduce her to the condition of a frightened child.
As she stepped toward the window again, a familiar voice spoke behind her, one that she hadn't heard in many years but that she instantly identified: 'Do you have a little kiss for me, sweetheart?'
She turned and discovered Michael Render, murderer of five children and father of one, standing hardly more than an arm's length away.
24
IN RAIN-SOAKED GRAY COTTON PANTS AND MATCHING shirt, Render looked not storm-battered but storm-refreshed, as if this downpour that had been conjured and concocted to nurture alien vegetation had also nurtured him.
He appeared to have thrived in twenty years of sympathetic custody. Freed from the worries of work and self-support, granted leisure greater than that of pampered kings, with the services of an institutional nutritionist and the use of a well-equipped gym, he had stayed slim at the waist, had added muscle, and had acquired no lines at the comers of his eyes or mouth. At fifty, he could pass as a man still shy of his fortieth birthday.
Pleased by the effect that his surprise appearance had on Molly, he smiled and said, 'For heart-rending emotion, nothing quite equals a father-and-child reunion.'
Molly found her voice and was relieved to hear no tremor in it, no reflection of the fact that her thundering heart boomed hard enough to rattle bone on bone in her knees. 'What are you doing here?'
'Where else should I be but with my only remaining family?'
'I'm not afraid of you.'
'I'm not afraid of you, either, sweetheart.'
The 9-mm pistol nestled in her raincoat. She slipped her right hand into that pocket, closed it around the checked grip, and hooked her index finger on the trigger guard.
'Going to shoot me again?' he asked, once more with a note of amusement.
Render was handsome now, as he had always been; and once he had been uncannily charming, too, sufficiently winning in his ways that her mother, who even as a young woman had a keen insight into people, had been seduced by him and swept into marriage.
Thalia had soon learned the consequences of her naivete. She'd mistaken Render's possessiveness for love. She discovered that what had seemed to be an admirable male desire to cherish and protect had in fact been an almost demonic need to control.
Rain-slicked, rain-beaded, Michael Render stood here in his true persona, reveled in it. But there was something different about him, too, a disturbing change that Molly could sense but not define. His seductive gray eyes had a luster to rival the luminosity of the early rain, as if the storm had filled him to the brim and pooled now within his skull.
'I've given up guns,' he assured her. 'They're effective but so impersonal. Between the idea and the reality, the thrill is lost, and murder by gun fades in memory too fast. In a year or two, reliving it doesn't even stir an erection.'
By the time Molly was two years old, her mother had endured enough of Render's intimidation, his irrational jealousy, his self-pitying tantrums, his threats, and finally his violence. Choosing freedom at the cost of poverty, she had taken nothing from their marriage except her most personal possessions and her daughter.
'And let me tell you, Molly, dear, when a virile man is confined to solitary accommodations in a sanitarium for the criminally insane, even in one of the progressive institutions with all its comforts, he is denied the satisfaction of women, and to achieve relief, he really needs all of the erotic memories he can get.'
During and following the divorce, Render had initially pursued sole custody of his child, then joint custody. When the legal system proved slow enough to try his short-fuse patience and when judges admonished him for his behavior in their courtrooms, he argued his case in personal confrontations with Thalia, often in public places, red- faced and shouting threats, which resulted in the issuance of restraining orders that diminished his chances of obtaining joint custody. Contempt for the restraining orders had landed him in jail for thirty days and had put an end to even his supervised visitation rights.
'After a year of isolation,' he said now, 'I'd all but forgotten the feel of your mother-the taste of her mouth, the weight of her breasts. I had cheap whores who stayed in memory better.' A smile, a shrug. 'Your mother was a boring porcelain bitch.'
'Shut up.' Molly couldn't summon any volume, only a whisper. As always, Render insisted on dominance, and to her chagrin, Molly was unable to assert herself, as though twenty years had dropped out from under her, plunging her into childhood again. 'Shut up.'
'After two years, the memory of your head-shot, gut-shot little playmates didn't do it for me anymore, either. A bullet is just too impersonal. A bullet isn't a blade, and a blade isn't bare hands. I've found that strangulation stays vivid in the memory. It's much more intimate than merely pulling a trigger. I stiffen even now at the thought of it.'
Molly drew the pistol from her raincoat pocket.
'Ah,' he said with evident satisfaction, as though the intention behind his visit to the tavern had been to taunt her into precisely this confrontation. 'I've come a long way through bad weather to ask you a few questions- but first to tell you a little story, so you'll better understand your dear old dad.'
The moment was increasingly surreal. Claustrophobic. Paralytic. Emblematic.
She stood at the vise point between the jaws of the past and the future, both pressing hard and insistently upon her, constraining her breath, denying her mobility, pinching her voice in her throat.
'I've spent twenty years under lock and key. Internal darkness, deprivation. At least you owe me a friendly ear for a moment. Just one little story, and then I'll go.'
Twenty years earlier, when he destroyed his last hope of winning legal custody of Molly, Michael Render resorted to the instrument of persuasion that he now claimed to find unsatisfactory: the gun. He had come to her elementary school to take her from her classroom. Having asked to see his daughter on some pretense that the principal had found unconvincing, Render realized that he'd aroused suspicion, whereupon he pulled a pistol and shot the principal dead.
'After five years of treatment,' he told her now, 'I was sent to a facility with lower security standards. They had large, lovely grounds. The best-behaved patients who had made the most progress in their therapy, who were judged to have reached a point of remorse on a journey to contrition, were encouraged to work in the various gardens if they wished.'
