a newer kitchen addition thrusting toward the shore.
She found it, between the Nagel place and Chris Johnson’s. She squinted, straining her eyes. She had never been in the house and could only guess at how the rooms were laid out. Some people liked their kitchens facing the water; others, herself included, liked the living room on the lakeside.
“Mom?”
Cassie turned and saw Teddy standing behind her. He’d washed his face and changed into a fresh T-shirt. She brushed a dark curl of hair from her eyes and studied him. “Is anything wrong?”
“Ah, no…”
“Don’t worry about that snotty little girl, honey. We’ll fix her.”
Teddy shrugged. “Only reason she knocked me down is I slipped on the snow.”
“I know. They pick on you…”
“Mom,” he said with a slight edge of irritation in his voice, “I want some lunch.”
After lunch she let him ride the ATV around the backyard to take advantage of this last snowfall. She was tidying up the kitchen when she noticed the crumbs from Teddy’s tuna-melt sandwich on the linoleum under his chair. Must have missed them when she cleared his plate and loaded it into the dishwasher. She immediately stooped, plucked up the crumbs, and then wiped down the area with a dish rag and lemon-scented 409. When she was finished, she took the soiled dishrag and some towels into the laundry room. That’s when she saw Teddy’s shirt on the floor under the laundry chute.
With the blood on it.
The sensation that she was being watched came slowly as she methodically took the shirt to the sink, poured Shout on the stain, and worked it into the material. The red stain foamed up and covered her fingers. Got under her nails. Grimacing, she flung the shirt into the washer, put the dial on hot/hot, added Tide, and turned it on. When the rush of steaming water poured into the washer drum, she thrust her hands into it, blasting away the scum of foam.
But a tiny residue resisted the scalding water and still clung under her fingernails, and the sensation was coming stronger now, almost a glow in the walls. When it got bad like this, she actually believed that a presence inhabited the house. She could even smell it sometimes, no matter how hard she cleaned. A smell like old Tommy Klumpe’s lingering pipe tobacco smoke that permeated the walls.
The presence shifted around in her mind. Sometimes it was old Tommy himself, sitting at the kitchen table, telling Jimmy straight out, right in front of her, like she didn’t count.
Other times it got weirder. And she felt she was under scrutiny by a vague judgmental figure who demanded to be pleased. Sometimes she pictured this presence as a bizarre nexus between Martha Stewart and Jesus Christ.
One night this watchful presence had chosen to speak through her husband. Jimmy didn’t even know he was the vessel of an angry house god; he was just being Jimmy, half loaded, making one of his nasty passive-aggressive cuts. But his spiteful voice had echoed like thunder in Cass’s ears: “
It had started again; the bad carnival ride that turned the big dump they lived into a fun house with distorted mirrors, eyes in the walls; the craziness getting ready to jump out of where it nested in the bathroom closet…
Cassandra Bodine always tried to fight the crazy.
Dutifully, she filled her bucket with hot water, grabbed the Comet cleanser, her scrub brush. She carried the bucket up the stairs and down the hall to the unused storage room past the master bedroom. Went in. The shades were pulled. A throw rug filled most of the floor space. She could hear the engine on Teddy’s ATV grinding in circles in the snow below the window as she rolled back the rug, kneeled, and began to scrub.
Jimmy had put in a new floor.
Didn’t matter. It was still there.
An hour later Teddy was back in his room playing Doom instead of doing his homework. Cassie squatted naked in the tiled corner of the shower stall. The master bath was Jimmy’s one concession to fixing up the place. Didn’t help. She cringed under the stinging needles of hot water.
She was boxed.
The trap they had built for themselves was so cunningly designed that there was nobody she could really talk to. Except the one person who built the box. No other way to go. Because they were out there planning to hurt her son. Hurt them all.
She stood up, turned off the shower, stepped from the stall, and took a fresh towel from the wall rack. She wiped the steam away from the broad vanity mirror and, seeing her compulsively trim body, got a flash of the loathing that drove the young girls to cut themselves.
Her eyes traveled around the bathroom, every surface sparkling, the towels arranged just so. No matter how hard she scrubbed, she couldn’t stop the crazy. It whispered to her now from its hiding place in the closet next to the sink, where it nestled, waiting, among the carefully folded towels and washcloths. Like church back when she tried that; like communion. An altar call. Her hand trembled as opened the closet door and snuck through the clean folded cotton until she felt the dirty crumple of tinfoil. She withdrew her hand and studied the way the foil winked dirty silver gray in the soft vanity mirror lights…
…like a lump of anti-meteorite that had not fallen from the sky…
That had blasted up from hell.
Carefully she peeled back the foil, expecting a chunk of yellowish crystal the size of her thumbnail. Aw, man, musta lost track. Nothing left but a few pebbles, some dust. And there was only one place for her to get it now… and he never gives me enough……and it never came easy. Always the old undercurrent.
Carefully, Cassie shook the residue of the crystal meth into her mouth, then probed the fissures in the wrinkled foil with her tongue, licking up every last speck.
Not enough.
Still, like a catechism, she recited the ground rules: Just never smoke the stuff.
Nibble a little, to keep your weight down, to zoom through housework on jet afterburners. Smooth out the day.
To turn down the volume on the loud goddamn world…
Cassie swallowed the last dot of crystal, sat down at her vanity table, and tried to concentrate, putting on fresh eye shadow. Could tell by the way her fingers shook.
Wasn’t going to be a real boost. Waiting. C’mon. Then…
Get more.
The sensation clamoring now. Flushed, her face out of balance, with a streak of the makeup breaking down her cheek like a black crack, she jerked the towel around her. She paced down the hall, passed the sounds of cyber carnage on the other side of her son’s door, then went into the grim bedroom with its turgid blue wallpaper. Christ, the room where old Tommy and Adele made Jimmy. At least they got a new bed before…
She sat on the bed and stared at the phone. Caught herself digging nervously at her cheek with her fingernails.
Only one way to make it stop. And for that she needed more than Keith, her guardian angel. She needed her guardian devil.
Jimmy wouldn’t like it. But then Jimmy just got knocked on his ass. She’d lost the last hope of the mini rush, so it was with faint nausea that she picked up the phone and called her brother. It was her brother, after all, who had taught her to keep an eye out for people who didn’t fit.
Especially now.
Chapter Five
“Okay, Cassie; calm down,” Gator Bodine said as he patiently listened to her lament about how little Teddy had been mistreated at the hands of a girl with a red ponytail.
