crust.
The droning voice on the radio, a small pink boom box on the counter, said, “Book clubs for kids are a hit with parents, who look to the written word as a place to shelter their children from the gratuitous sexual content and explicit violence that saturate video games, television programs, and movies.”
Jessica’s blouse was torn open to the waist. She wore a lacy peach-colored bra that left the tops of her breasts exposed, and they shuddered and fell with her breath. She bared her teeth—was she grinning?—and they were stained with blood.
She said, “If you came to kill me, you ought to know I’m not afraid of dying. My stepfather will be on the other side to receive me with open arms.”
“I bet you’re looking forward to that,” Jude said. “I get the picture you and him were pretty close. Least until Anna was old enough and he started fucking her instead of you.”
37
One of Jessica McDermott Price’s eyelids twitched irregularly, a drop of sweat in her lashes, ready to fall. Her lips, which were painted the deep, almost black red of bing cherries, were still stretched wide to show her teeth, but it wasn’t a grin anymore. It was a grimace of rage and confusion.
“You aren’t fit to speak of him. He scraped uglier messes than you off the heel of his boot.”
“You got that about half right,” Jude said. He was also breathing fast, but a little surprised by the evenness of his own voice. “You both stepped in a pile when you screwed with me. Tell me something, did you help him kill her, to keep her from talking about what he did? Did you watch while your own sister bled to death?”
“The girl who came back to this house wasn’t my sister. She wasn’t anything like her. My sister was already dead by the time you got through with her. You ruined her. The girl who came back to us was poison inside. The things she said. The threats she made. Send our stepdaddy to prison. Send me to prison. And Craddock didn’t harm a hair on her goddam disloyal head. Craddock loved her. He was the best, the best man.”
“Your stepdaddy liked to fuck little girls. First you, then Anna. It was right in front of me the whole time.”
He was bending over her now. He felt a little dizzy. Sunlight slashed through the windows above the sink, and the air was warm and close, smelled overpoweringly of her perfume, a jasmine-flavored scent. Just beyond the kitchen, a sliding glass door was partly open and looking out onto an enclosed back porch, floored in seasoned redwood and dominated by a table covered in a lace cloth. A gray longhaired cat was out there, watching fearfully from up on the table, fur bristling. The radio voice was droning now about downloadable content. It was like bees humming in a hive. A voice like that could hum you right to sleep.
Jude looked around at the radio, wanting to give it a whack with the tire iron, shut it off. Then he saw the photograph next to it and forgot about taking out the radio. It was an eight-by-ten picture in a silver frame, and Craddock grinned out from it. He wore his black suit, the silver-dollar-size buttons gleaming down the front, and one hand was on his fedora, as if he were about to lift it in greeting. His other hand was on the shoulder of the little girl, Jessica’s daughter, who so resembled Anna, with her broad forehead and wide-set blue eyes. Her sunburned face, in the picture, was an unsmiling, unreadable blank, the face of someone waiting to get off a slow elevator, a look that was entirely empty of feeling. That expression caused the girl to resemble Anna more than anything, Anna at the height of one of her depressions. Jude found the similarity disturbing.
Jessica was squirming back over the floor, using his distraction to try to get some distance between them. He grabbed her blouse again as she pulled away, and another button flew. Her shirt was hanging off her shoulders now, open to the waist. With the back of one arm, Jude wiped at the sweat on his forehead. He wasn’t done talking yet.
“Anna never came right out and said she’d been molested as a kid, but she worked so hard to avoid being asked it was kind of obvious. Then, in her last letter to me, she wrote that she was tired of keeping secrets, couldn’t stand it anymore. On the face of it, sounds like a suicidal statement. It took me a while to figure out what she really meant by it, that she wanted to get the truth off her chest. About how her stepfather used to put her into trances so he could do what he liked with her. He was good—he could make her forget for a while, but he couldn’t completely wipe out the memories of what he’d done. It kept resurfacing, whenever she’d have one of her emotional crack-ups. Eventually, in her teens, I guess, she tipped to it, understood what he’d been up to. Anna spent a lot of years running from it. Running from him. Only I put her on a train and sent her back, and she wound up facing him again. And saw how old he was and how close to dying. And maybe decided she didn’t need to run from anything anymore.
“So she threatened to tell what Craddock did to her. Is that right? She said she’d tell everyone, get the law after him. That’s why he killed her. He put her in one more trance and cut her wrists in the bath. He fucked with her head and put her in the bath and slashed her open and watched her bleed out, sat there and watched—”
“You shut up about him,” Jessica said, her voice spiking, high-pitched and harsh. “That last night was awful. The things she said and did to him were awful. She spat on him. She tried to kill him, tried to shove him down the stairs, a weak old man. She threatened us, all of us. She said she was going to take Reese away from us. She said she’d use you and your money and your lawyers and send him to jail.”
“He was only doing what he had to, huh?” Jude said. “It was practically self-defense.”
An expression flickered across Jessica’s features, there and gone so quickly Jude half thought he’d imagined it. But for an instant the corners of her mouth seemed to twitch, in a dirty, knowing, appalling sort of smile. She sat up a little straighter. When she spoke again, her tone both lectured and crooned. “My sister was sick. She was confused. She’d been suicidal for a long time. Anna cut her wrists in the bath like everyone always knew she was going to, and there isn’t anyone who can say different.”
“Anna says different,” Jude said, and when he saw the confusion on Jessica’s face, he added, “I been hearing from all kinds of dead folks lately. You know, it never did make sense. If you wanted to send a ghost to haunt me, why not her? If her death was my fault, why send Craddock? But your stepfather isn’t after me because of what
“Who do you think you are, anyway, calling
“Take care,” Jude said, hand tightening on the tire iron.
“My stepfather deserved anything he asked of us,” Jessica went on, couldn’t shut up now. “I always understood that. My daughter understood it, too. But Anna made everything dirty and horrible and treated him like a rapist, when he didn’t do anything to Reese she didn’t like. She would’ve spoiled Craddock’s last days on this earth, just to win favor with you, to make you care about her again. And now you see where it gets you, turning people against their families. Sticking your nose in.”
“Oh, my God,” Marybeth said. “If she’s sayin’ what I think she’s sayin’, this is about the most wrong fuckin’ conversation I ever heard.”
Jude put his knee between Jessica’s legs and forced her back against the floor with his bad left hand. “That’s enough. I hear any more about what your stepdaddy deserved and how much he loved all of you, I’m going to puke. How do I get rid of him? Tell me how to make him go away, and we’ll walk out of here, and that’ll be the end of it.” Saying it without knowing if it was really true.
“What happened to the suit?” Jessica asked.
“What the fuck does it matter?”
“It’s gone, isn’t it? You bought the dead man’s suit, and now it’s gone, and there’s no getting rid of him. All sales are final. No returns, especially not after the merchandise has been damaged. It’s over. You’re dead. You and that whore with you. He won’t stop until you’re both in the ground.”
Jude leaned forward, set the tire iron across her neck, and applied some weight. She began to choke. Jude said, “No. I do not accept that. There better be another fucking way, or—Get the fuck off me.” Her hands were tugging at his belt buckle. He recoiled from her touch, drawing the tire iron off her throat, and she began to laugh.
“Come on. You already got my shirt pulled off. Haven’t you ever wanted to say you fucked sisters?” she asked. “I bet your girlfriend would like to watch.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“Listen to you. Big tough man. Big rock star. You’re afraid of me, you’re afraid of my father, you’re afraid of
