Tossing the tasteless pizza back into the box, I looked to the end table, where a red light glowed at the base of the cordless telephone.
I should call her. Convince her at least to loan me the documents . . .
I started to reach for the phone—only to jump as it seemed to anticipate me, ringing shrilly in the silence. “Hello?” I grumbled, assuming that Dad was calling, as usual, to advise me not to wait up. However, it wasn’t my father’s baritone on the other end of the line. It was a soft, scared, but determined soprano asking, “Can you come over, please, Tristen? I need your help. Now.”
Although Jill had abandoned me earlier that night, I found myself hanging up and getting into my car without even questioning what was wrong.
My primary motive was to get that box while I was inside her house. That, I told myself, was the main reason I jumped so quickly at her summons. However, if I had been honest with myself as I drove through the rainy night, I would have admitted that there was something—someone—else in that house that I was starting to want, too.
Chapter 24
Tristen
“THANK YOU for coming, Tristen.” Jill swung open the door almost simultaneously with my knock, as though she’d been watching at the window for me. I saw raw anxiety in her eyes and in the way she licked her nearly white lips. “I know you probably don’t feel like you owe me anything after the way I left you,” she added. “But I just didn’t know who else to call.”
I stepped into the foyer, following Jill, who was already moving toward the living room. “It’s okay,” I said, overcoming my last lingering trace of irritation. She was scared, and she did sound sorry for leaving me, and the more I thought about it, the less I could blame her. I was a strong, six-foot guy who’d admitted to being half monster, trying to lure a defenseless, tiny girl into a dark, empty school. A girl who’d lost her father to violence. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
I didn’t need to get an answer. As I entered the room, I saw Jill’s mother crouched on the floor, her arms wrapped around herself like a self-imposed straitjacket, rocking slightly.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered, stopping short. “How long has she been like that?”
“About an hour,” Jill whispered, moving to her mom’s side, kneeling and stroking her hair. “I can’t even get her to talk.”
“Jill,” I demurred, “I know I told you that my father is a psychiatrist, but that doesn’t make me an expert in a situation like this.”
“I know, Tristen.” Jill continued to caress her mother’s unkempt hair. “But I’m sure you know something from being around your dad. Enough not to be scared or freaked out, at least. And what I mainly need is your muscle, anyway.”
“My muscle?” I stepped closer and knelt, too, studying Mrs. Jekel’s eyes. Her empty, empty eyes. Then I shifted my gaze, wanting to look anywhere but into that void.
Jill was right—and wrong. I did know a bit about psychiatry, as she’d guessed. But her mother frightened me. Was that my destiny that I saw in the abyss of Mrs. Jekel’s eyes? The madness to come?
“What do you need my muscle for?” I asked, grateful to look into Jill’s very sane, surprisingly steady gaze. She had to be panicking, to see her mother in such a state, but she was mastering it, rising to the occasion.
“I need to get her to bed,” Jill explained. “Could you help, please?”
Jill was talking about me lifting—touching—her mother. “Perhaps an ambulance would be better,” I suggested.
“No,” Jill said firmly. “Mom broke down before, right after my dad died, and I called an ambulance. Our insurance hardly covered anything, and I had to draw from our savings to pay the bills, for nothing. Two nights in a hospital and all Mom did was sleep. She can do that here, under my care.”
I regarded Jill with surprise. She was prepared to take charge of her mother’s care? And perhaps even more impressively, she paid bills? I was fairly independent, but my father still controlled the purse strings. But of course Jill would have had to take control, with her father gone and her mother incapacitated. It wasn’t difficult, really, to picture her sitting at a desk, competently writing checks and mailing them in according to schedule.
“Please, Tristen,” she asked. “Help me get her upstairs.”
“Okay,” I agreed, but reluctantly. Who is the coward now, Tristen? Who wants to run into the night?
“Thanks.” Jill stood and stepped back from her mother, who didn’t seem to notice that her daughter no longer comforted her. Mrs. Jekel just kept rocking and staring.
Rising, too, I bent over Jill’s mother and slipped one arm around her back, wriggling the other beneath her bent knees. She smelled of stale sweat and I again turned my face away, not wanting to breathe her in.
“Let’s go, Mrs. Jekel,” I muttered, straightening and stumbling backwards, she was so unexpectedly light in my arms. Shockingly frail. As I settled her body against mine, her sharp hipbone stabbed at my stomach, and I caught a whiff of her hot breath, which was sour, like the smell of her skin. I exhaled sharply. “Show me her room,” I said over my shoulder, heading toward the stairs.
Jill darted ahead, leading the way upstairs and down the hallway. “Here.” She opened a door near the end of the corridor. “This is Mom’s room.”
I carried Mrs. Jekel across the threshold—a gagging groom with his catatonic bride—and placed her on the bed, which also smelled of sweat. Sweat and . . . insanity, it seemed to me. Would I reek of madness someday, too? Someday soon?
Stepping away, I coughed into the crook of my arm.
“Could you lift her again?” Jill asked. “So I could pull back the covers?”
No. Yet of course I agreed, saying, “Sure, sure,” as I again slipped my arms around Mrs. Jekel’s bony
