Futilely trying to decode the e-mails made her almost twenty minutes late when she arrived at Enders and Coil.
That didn’t seem to matter, though, in light of more important events. Word had arrived that Mildred Dash had been terrorized by an intruder last night and had been found by a watchman early this morning in a coma. She was hospitalized and in intensive care.
Associate attorneys were dashing about or yammering on the phone. Jack Enders and Joseph Coil both appeared somber and determined, and totally in control. Jody had never before seen or been part of an event of such urgency at the firm.
She was assigned to continue calling the hospital and family to learn the seriousness of Mildred’s condition. Meanwhile, litigators at Enders and Coil would be busy discussing the legal ramifications of razing her apartment building while her unit was unoccupied.
Here was opportunity, if they seized it.
Hours counted. Maybe minutes.
No one actually came right out and said it would be best if Mildred Dash died, but it was on the tips of a lot of tongues.
Jody was disgusted, but like everyone else at the firm, hanging in suspense. The mood was contagious and oddly, undeniably, pleasurable. She could see it on the faces of her coworkers. They loved being part of the drama.
Suddenly Jody wondered, was this what Sarah Benham had known about when she’d cautioned her at breakfast?
67
Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986
“You’re sure your mother thinks you went to visit your aunt in Milwaukee?” Rory asked Sherri.
“She saw me get on the Greyhound bus. What she didn’t see was when it stopped to pick up more passengers, and let some off, down the road in Grantville. I got off along with some other people. Nobody noticed.”
“So how’d you get back here?”
“Hitchhiked.” She flashed him a wicked grin. “And you know why.”
Rory did. His mother was out of town, in Milwaukee with a new boyfriend, and he and Sherri could make good use of her house. Rory simply had to be home now and then in the evening, so he could answer the phone if his mother called to check on him. And he would be home. With Sherri.
That was the plan.
They were standing now outside Rory’s mother’s Chevy, parked near where Duffy had died and been buried. Where that other girl-the one only Rory and the killer knew about-had been tortured, murdered, and then buried. It gave Rory a kind of chill when he walked holding hands with Sherri and stood kissing her over the dead girl’s grave. It was a feeling he found he liked.
Sherri thought she was having that effect, and kissed him back hard, using her tongue.
Rory almost immediately had an erection. Beneath him was a closely kept secret only he and one other person knew. And the other person-the killer-thought only he knew what had happened here.
Rory remembered how the girl had been bound and gagged, staring straight up at nothing. The expression on her face when the killer began to do things-such small, delicate things at first-to her with the knife. The faint movements she made. Her quivering, unfeeling fingers. The pleading sounds emanating from her taped lips. The way her nude body vibrated near the end. Most of all, her eyes… her eyes…
What really got him was that she looked something like Sherri. Same type, anyway. Different hair, but definitely the same type.
“… Take one,” Sherri was saying. “They’ll definitely make you feel good.”
He looked down and saw that she was holding those same pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet.
“I feel good already,” Rory said. If you only knew…
“Don’t be such a pussy,” Sherri said, and pushed the vial of tablets toward him.
His manhood having been questioned, Rory shoved them away, causing several to spill out onto the ground.
Sherri punched his shoulder, a glancing blow, but it hurt. “Now look! You dickhead! You spilled them!”
She was angry with him. How angry will she be when she figures out I killed her precious dog? Rory knew she was smart. She would eventually find out about Duffy.
He bent down and began picking up the small white tablets, digging some of them out from beneath dead leaves.
“Get them all!” Sherri demanded.
When he had all or most of the dropped tablets in his cupped hand, Rory straightened up and threw them out toward the deeper woods.
“What the fuck, Rory?” She came at him in anger, batting at him, and the nail of her little finger scraped the corner of his left eye. The sharp pain enraged him.
He slapped her face hard, thinking about the girl beneath them in the earth, how she’d died. When she’d died.
How she’d died.
When Sherri, stunned, bent over to spit out blood, Rory brought up his knee and drove it into her midsection. He caught her to break her fall.
He hadn’t actually planned any of this. It was simply a sort of alternate sequence of things he could do. A work of imagination, really.
But damned if that imagined sequence hadn’t begun. And he knew he would let it play out. It was like it was meant to be.
If it wasn’t meant to be, why had he prepared for it without even thinking about it?
Maybe it had something to do with what he’d seen in the clearing, the god, and the girl in the ground.
Maybe he now had the secret knowledge and was acting on it. Nothing in this world really mattered compared to this.
The girl in the ground, she didn’t matter anymore. All she was now was memory. Secret memory.
He went to the Chevy and opened the trunk, got the rope he’d brought, and the roll of thick electrician’s tape.
It had only taken seconds, and Sherri was still curled on the ground, still struggling to catch her breath.
Rory stood over her, listening to her labored, gasping breathing, thinking about the dead girl. He bent down, lashed her ankles together, and cut the long end of the knotted rope with his pocket knife. Odd that he didn’t recall taking the knife from his pocket and opening it. He maneuvered Sherri’s body around on the leaves and tied her wrists tightly behind her back. Hurts? Too bad. He yanked her up and adjusted her body so she was kneeling, then ran a rope between the knotted ropes on her ankles and wrists. Thinking about the dead girl. He pulled that rope tight, bending back Sherri’s body like the dead girl’s had been. She’d almost recovered enough to scream, so he picked up the tape he’d gotten from the trunk, reeled off a long strip, and wrapped it firmly over her mouth, around to the back of her neck, thinking about the dead girl.
Rory used his knife to cut away Sherri’s clothes. He watched her dark and desperate eyes, thinking about the dead girl. Then he straightened up and looked around. The moon was almost full, and there was plenty of light in the clearing. But no one around to see what he was doing. Not out here in this desolate part of town, on this remote road.
He moved around in front of Sherri and looked intently into her face, seeing the terror and incomprehension there. She stared back, pleading. He smiled, thinking about the dead girl.
He stood where she could see him wipe the knife’s blade on the thigh of his jeans and then test its sharpness with his finger. He rolled her forward, onto her stomach, and began using the knife on her back as he’d seen the killer do to the dead girl. Sherri made the same horrified, muted noises the dead girl had made.
