“Believing she was only fourteen,” Victoria said, “which is what she told him as soon as he’d entered her. Knowing it was statutory rape, he kept going, finally coming in her with no thought that his sperm might live on, creating new life.”
“Miranda,” I said. The story was recycling itself, becoming as tiresome as it was horrible, Jonnie’s unwitting multigenerational rape of his own offspring, choreographed by Victoria’s insanity.
“Yes,” Victoria said. “Yes-s-s-s, Miranda.”
“Then the two of you went back to Myrtle Beach again,” Jeri said. “Back to your lair, talk about complete raving fucking lunatics, Jesus H. Christ.”
“To have Jonathan’s great-grandchild,” Victoria said.
“Fuckin’ loonies,” Jeri muttered, scanning the walls, yanking on her ropes.
Victoria’s emphasis of the word “great” was an indication of the depth of her psychosis. She’d grown obsessed with Jonnie’s rapes and with the awful, tangled lineage he was creating. Miranda was a living, breathing symbol of Jonnie’s turpitude. Miranda was his daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, all in one. She was Victoria’s sister and her grandchild. In Victoria’s deranged mind it was all Jonnie’s fault. But the endless layering of Jonnie’s genes had finally caught up. Genetically, Miranda was fully seven-eighths Jonnie. She was retarded, but for a vastly different reason than was Jacoba.
“I waited too long,” Victoria said. “We should have come back to Reno sooner, but I’d hoped Miranda would be a little older when we finally went public. At least six years. And Winter was growing more skillful with the foil every day, all the better to deal with Jonnie when the time came, and…well, I simply waited too long.”
“So which was it?” I asked. “What was the big plan? Were you going to expose these so-called rapes of his, or kill him?”
“So-called?” Victoria screeched. Cords stood out in her neck.
“Actual, then,” I said in a caustic tone, fed up with this obscene woman and her sick machinations. “Sure-enough, honest-to-god, boy-howdy rapes, have it your way.”
She stared at me, hands clenching and unclenching, as if trying to decide which of my body parts to cut off first. “We were going to crush him publicly,” she said at last. “Utterly, thoroughly, crush him, the great mayor, so handsome, so admired. DNA tests would have proved what he’d done. Everyone was going to know what kind of an animal he was, and I mean everyone. The entire world was going to look at him in disgust, spit on him. People were going to recoil at the sound of his name. And after he’d acclimated to that, as he would in time, we were going to kill him.”
“But you didn’t do that,” I said. “You didn’t expose him, you didn’t humiliate him. You murdered him right away. And Milliken.”
“We couldn’t. I found out I couldn’t let the world know about him the way I’d intended. The statute of limitations on statutory rape hadn’t run out. Not with Miranda. If his rapes were reported, it was all but certain that Jonnie would’ve gone to prison.”
“Out of reach,” Jeri said.
Victoria nodded. “Yes. And, well…there were other reasons.”
“Like little psycho Winter getting loose one night with a sword and killing a boy not far from where you lived in Conway,” Jeri said. “Exposing Jonnie would have focused national attention on you and Winter. Her fencing skill might have been discovered. She might have been found guilty of murder. You couldn’t risk that.”
“My, aren’t we the quickest little genius on the block?” Victoria said, staring at Jeri.
I stared at her, too. She’d picked that up from the little Kennedy had told us? Or had she somehow put two and two together, being an actual PI while I was just a pretend PI?
“We killed him,” Victoria replied slowly. “Jonathan. We watched him, hunted him, then captured him, let him know what he’d done, then killed him.”
“We didn’t just kill him,” Winter said, speaking for the first time in twenty minutes. Her voice was like arctic wind hissing through old canted tombstones. “And that other guy, Milliken.”
“No,” Victoria responded. “No, we didn’t. It wasn’t that easy for them. Killing is what one does to flies. Death will take us all one day. Jonathan owed us much more than that.
“Grabbing them was no trick at all,” she went on. “Milliken was still a pig, and he lived alone. I took him myself. Nothing could have been simpler. Later that evening, Winter took Jonathan. He didn’t recognize her after all that time, five years, and she wore a wig. She took him to a motel room. He trailed along like a horny ape. I was inside, waiting. He woke up in this room, naked—like you.” Her eyes passed over me. “And every bit as unhappy. We drove their cars to a hotel by the airport and left them there, while Reno’s honorable mayor and district attorney”—Victoria smiled wickedly—“hung around.
“Jonathan found out who we were, Winter and I. He became terribly eager to please us. After all these years he finally called us what we were—daughter and granddaughter.” Victoria paused. “And lover. He called us that too, with a little encouragement.” She smiled at the memory. “We had him recount what he’d done to us in great detail. Made it into a little video. A documentary, if you will. Which will be revealed to the public sometime in the future. I’m still thinking about how to do that. Toward the end, Jonathan shared his thoughts with us, what was going on inside his head as he fondled us, groped us, climaxed inside us, mere children, fifteen years old.
