“Then she died,” Jeri said. “In a bathtub.”
Victoria looked at her. “Yes. Two months after my fifteenth birthday. I heard her yell, fall. Her neck was broken. It was so sudden, the most terrible moment of my life. I was miserable, and I hated Jewel. I made a lot of trouble. She had to send me away, back to Edna.
“I hated it here too, in Reno. At the time, I’d never heard of Jonathan Sjorgen or David Milliken. But I was”—she turned and gave me an indescribable smile—“relatively normal, whatever that might mean in this day and age.”
“Does that mean you know you’re not the least bit normal now?” I asked.
She ignored me. “In all the time I’d lived at Jewel’s, all my life, no one ever mentioned my father. Jacoba, of course, didn’t know. I asked Jewel, once I was old enough to realize people had fathers, but she told me she didn’t know, which was absolutely true. She didn’t want to know. She would never have asked Edna. She told me to hold my tongue, not to ask questions about such nonsense. The subject was utterly taboo.
“It was early summer the year I came to Reno. I roamed this house from top to bottom, with no specific purpose at first, other than boredom and loneliness. I missed Jacoba so very much. But in time it occurred to me that she had once lived in this house, that somewhere in here I might learn the secret of who my father was.
“So I began to look. Down here”—she indicated the room with a wave of her hand—“in all the rooms, every closet, through the dust and spiders and heat of this place. Finally, up in the attic, I found a trunk. It was locked. I broke into it with a hammer when Edna was away and inside I found papers, signed confessions. Sjorgen’s and Milliken’s, witnessed by attorneys and their fathers and a few others. In the documents I found the concessions and payoffs that had been made to keep it all quiet, every last detail.”
And then she’d gone nuts. Snapped. Something in that already unsettled mind had torn loose, frayed bloody neurons whipping in the hurricane force of her fury. Jacoba, her beloved mother, had been raped, and she, Victoria, was the result of that rape.
“Raped!” Victoria said, her voice shrill. “By savages!” Spittle flew from her lips. “By vermin, by filth, by sickening, pampered scum.” For a moment she lost it completely. Her eyes jittered. Her hands trembled. She looked down at them and curled her fingers into hooks, then slowly, with much effort, she got herself under control again, more or less.
“I found the two of them,” she said, and the memory seemed to calm her further. “Hunted them. It was the easiest thing in the world. They stayed right here in Reno where they had connections—college educated, untouched by what they’d done. All had been forgotten, buried. Jacoba was dead, but they didn’t know, nor would they have cared if they had. I was alive, but they didn’t know that either, didn’t even know I existed. They’d had their fun, shot their sperm into my mother, and there’d been a moment of trouble, possibly a few days of concern, quietly handled by their daddies, and their lives were perfect again, untainted. Jonathan was a businessman, on the city council. Milliken was a lawyer, a rising star in the district attorney’s office.
“Jonathan was my father, I knew. It was obvious the instant I saw him. I decided to kill him. I made plans to kill him, detailed plans. I very nearly carried them out. It was so close. But then—” Something filled her eyes, a memory perhaps, a feeling. Whatever it was, its reflection in her eyes was a thing of perfect evil—or perfect madness.
“I provided him the opportunity to rape me,” she said. “As he raped my mother.”
“Nutso, schizo, whack job,” Jeri said.
Victoria whirled on her, then turned and glared at Kayla. “Call it inspiration. It seemed so wonderfully fitting. I made myself available. Do you think your father rejected me, Kayla, dear? Do you think he made the slightest effort to put me off, evade me, walk away, tell me no? Me, every bit as much his own daughter as are you?”
Kayla stared at her, horrified.
“Answer me!” Victoria screeched.
“No,” Kayla said.
“No. That is correct. He did not.” Her eyes glittered murderously. “He pursued me, in his way. His eyes hungered for me, swallowed me. I was fifteen. I looked fifteen. I wore a short skirt and smiled at him, spoke to him, stuck out my chest, and he flirted with me right there on the street in front of the old courthouse on Virginia Street, cautiously perhaps, but he unquestionably knew exactly what he was doing. He was in his mid-thirties at the time. He was an adult. With little more than a word I let him know he could have me. He didn’t know who I was, didn’t sense it. Would it have mattered to him if he did? I doubt it. It was dusk. I asked him if he’d give me a ride in his nice new car, and he literally jumped at the chance. In the car he touched my thigh, rubbed it. I let him. There were a few words during which we reached a kind of understanding, then he drove me up to Truckee on I-80, then to a motel in Tahoe City. That vile monster practically tore his clothes off in his eagerness, my clothes too, then he fucked me in the darkness in a cheap room, grunting, sweaty, sick with fear for his precious career, afraid for his life, knowing exactly what he was doing.
“I wanted to tell him who I was right after he climaxed and then kill him—God, how I wanted that! It’s what I’d intended all along. No one knew I was in that room with him. I even had a .38 revolver within
