Deathwatch - Final Read online

  I laid her softly against the worn carpet in the library, scarcely aware of the chill rising from the floor.

  “Stuart, ah Stuart. Gently, gently now,” I heard her whispering plea against the lobe of my ear.

  And yes, yes, I wanted to take her sweetly, slowly. If I’d been too rough before, too hurried, I wanted now to initiate her, to bring her to the brink with tenderness. She loved me. I knew it, and I wanted her to find her own depths knowing I loved her and cared, too.

  And yet, yet, I found myself ripping at her clothes, pressing a pair of urgent lips against hers, groping with all the finesse of some potentate ravishing a slave from his concubine.

  I took her gasps for pleasure, and I took mine, until she cried out and I saw on her thighs, the marks of my greedy fingers.

  Then I heard Regina’s shrill laugh in my ear. “I like it hard and fast, and I like it more than once,” she crooned huskily. I drew away, and for one heart-stopping second, I thought I saw Ellie’s round adoring eyes peering into mine. It was more than any man could conjure in a fantasy, like having all three of them at once. If I’d been an artist, I suppose I’d have seen the swaying bodies of Botticelli’s three Graces in my mind. Separate and united in their eternal dance. And yes, I’d have sworn, the body bucking in time beneath mine was pushing itself side to side—one hip rising higher—the result of the amputation. But before I could draw back, look down, I heard the library doors pulled wide.

  Andrew slammed them immediately. There was no doubt this time he’d seen.

  - 21 -

  “Jesus Christ!” I drove myself to my knees, snatched at the rucked folds of my black wool trousers. My thighs were suddenly cold. I struggled to my feet.

  A hand flailed, clutching at my wrist. “Let him go,” Regina hissed. “He’ll drink himself into a stupor.” She shrugged. “If he remembers it at all, he’ll think it was some disordered dream: a nightmare and nothing more.”

  Her eyes were very smoky, like the dull fern-green of a misty swamp on a hot southern day.

  “Don’t go,” she said.

  I thought of Abby, Ellie, Regina, merged and writhing beneath me. And I let myself fall inside her embrace.

  Regina always had her way with me. I only wish I’d understood it wasn’t me she was wanting at that moment. I was merely an inconvenience to be taken care of. She didn’t want me to spoil her plans. She didn’t want me to interfere. If I’d gone to Andrew right then, we might never have had the argument that led him to go on a sodden two day binge. Regina wanted him pig-drunk.

  Drunk, he would be so much easier to kill.

  - 22 -

  “How many times have you fucked her?” Andrew screamed so loud, spittle flew from between his lips. His face and throat had gone purple with rage. The veins and tendons in his neck stood out like ship’s rigging.

  I’d finally gotten the nerve up to leave the library and face him. We were in the long upstairs hall; now, seeing his rage, I tried to back away from the confrontation. I kept walking, moving past the silent wooden slabs of the bedroom doors, edging towards the huge bay window. The unused toy sheep was flotsam bobbing against the sea of the carpet strip….

  “Come here, Ellie,” he barked sharply.

  The nursery door opened behind me. I heard the creak of the wheels, stifled a moan thinking how much better we’d all have been if the surgery had never happened, if the whining rattle I heard was the old whir of their toy’s wheels.

  “I want you to look at her, look her right in the eye. I want you to look at this helpless crippled girl,” he said, “and then I want you to tell me how it feels to impregnate a child?”

  My eyes brushed over her thick figure, the image of her clinging to me like a barnacle rose in my brain. Once. It was only once, I told myself, and it was more illusion than reality. A kind of fever disordered me, but I saw the swollen waist, the rising breasts hidden in her slouch, her loose dress. Impossible! Not in the half hour that had passed since I left Regina. I shook my head.

  “Big man, think you’re a man!” He moved clumsily towards me, his fists swinging in roundhouse arcs. Broken sobs poured from his heaving chest with the hollow sound of someone beating on an empty steel drum. “You betrayed me,” he wept.

  He staggered blindly, lurching. His feet suddenly went out from under him, he was deadfalling toward the window.

  “Papa!” Ellie shrieked.

  The glass shook in its frame, I heard a loud crash like the concussion of fireworks, but I caught him; my own heart was thudding in my chest, my mouth filled with the sharp metallic tang of fear.

  There was a spiral of bloody red cracks floating in the glass. The skin of his scalp had given way under the blow.

  “It’s just a split. I wasn’t cut. The glass isn’t even broken.” He felt his forehead, then wiped the dripping blood from his forehead and cheek. “But, you should have let me fall, Stuart,” Andrew said raggedly.

  And as he said it, I had the sinking feeling he was right.

  - 23 -

  “You want revenge? You’ll have it, Andrew! Over and over! Forever!”

  I was cowering in my narrow bed: Regina’s crackling voice came to me like the sound of rats scratching in the walls. For nearly a day and half, Andrew had been rampaging drunkenly through the house, shouting, smashing furniture.

  “The only revenge,” his voice went deep with terrible rage, “I want is to send you back into—”

  “Hell? I’m going to be your hell! Hahaha!”

  I heard the sound of scuffling, heavy tramping feet.

  “Break it, break it!” she shrieked.

  There was gargling, a rasping choke.

  In my mind’s eye, I imagined Andrew’s fingers pressing the flesh of her slim throat.

  “Bitch, bitch,” he panted.

  “Go ahead. Snap it and send your daughter to her death!” Regina hissed.

  “Papa! Papa! ” came the plaintive wail.

  Andrew began to weep, and I knew she’d suddenly withdrawn leaving the terrified man gazing into Abby’s or Ellie’s fear-hunted eyes.

  A second later, her vicious laugh rang out again, tormenting, confusing him, and he screamed—inarticulate cries—over and over, until he was hoarse.

  Then his voice trailed off into a broken whimper. “She’s not real.She can’t be.” I heard him arguing with himself. “Get a grip, man. She’s a pink elephant. You have the D.T.‘s.” I imagined him holding up the spread fingers of a badly quaking hand, watching the waves of the tremor. Instead, I heard the festive pop! of a cork, and I knew he was drinking again.

  Later, there was a dreadful quiet, their venom spent. In those moments, I got up from my sour, unmade bed and held my breath. I padded across the room, stood listening at the door, my head hanging, my ear cocked. No sound, nothing.

  I could imagine her hand lighting on me when I sneaked down the staircase, her screaming glee. I felt the sweat breaking out hotly under my arms, stinging. I crept into the kitchen for scraps of food.

  It was like a siege in some war-torn city, but by dusk of the second night, it seemed Andrew had finally been overcome by drink and his own exhaustion. His bedroom door slammed shut a final time and then, the drawn-out stillness of the house lay like a palpable thing—heavy, brooding, malignant.

  Was Regina biding her time? Laying a trap?

  I finally found my nerve, and oozed softly down the hallway to look in on the dark nursery.

  Both girls slept like felled oaks.

  - 24 -

  I was sure that when Regina murdered Andrew the twins’ personalities were entirely submerged, that they were no more than vehicles—empty vessels Regina filled with herself. I’m not so certain anymore. But they say evil is dull and repetitive, so perhaps that’s why Regina chose the same means she’d used for her own suicide—a drug. She couldn’t force him to eat it, so she injected him.

  I imagine her only regret was that drunk as he was, he was unaware and no pain—no death agony—showed in
his face.

  I found him the next afternoon around five o’clock. He was lying on his side in bed, a small brownish pool of vomitus under his gaping lips. His gray eyes were wide and staring.

  I’d spent the day convincing myself he was finally sleeping off the combined effects of his fury and a hangover, although the growing dread I felt in the center of my chest told me I was doing a poor job at self-deception. When I couldn’t stand any more of the gnawing silence, I went to his room, tapped hesitantly at the door, opened it.

  Even then, in the dim shadows, my first thought was that he was only asleep. The room was close. I smelled the reek of sour wine, the cheesy odor of his stomach contents.

  “Andrew,” I said, moving toward the bed. I heard a tinkling noise; something I half-trod on snapped, then rolled away.

  I saw the cracked hypodermic, the steel needle slightly bent, shining against the wooden floor, and I knew the whole story at once as clearly as if I’d seen it.

  I stooped down, pocketed the evidence, my mind flashing on the coroner, the undertaker I would have to call. Then I screamed for Regina to come.

  I could hear her soft laughter springing around me, like water bubbling from a hidden well. It seemed to play against the very walls of Andrew’s dark room. I turned, expecting to see her tall nimble figure moving through the doorway. But there was nothing—only the thin spray of her laughter, shifting and tossing, higher, softer, louder.

  “Regina, Regina!” I shouted; then stopped, suddenly realizing it was useless. She would not come, Andrew was dead. It was up to me to take care of the arrangements, do whatever I could to hide his murder.

  He’d been dead for about eight hours, I guessed. I saw his corpse was in the first throes of rigor mortis: His lower jaw and the back of his neck had gone hard. When the flow of circulation had stopped, the force of gravity had drained the blood downward, so his face and throat were waxy pale. I knew that stagnant, pooled blood purpled one ear, the side of his chest, and left buttock. There did not seem to be any visible needle marks in his arms. I checked his scalp, and there was a dot that was probably a mole between two of his middle toes, but nothing more. I couldn’t find the spot where Regina injected him, so I hoped the examiner would overlook it, too.

  Wincing a little, I unbuttoned his stale shirt. Andrew was known to be a drinker; I put my hands together, fingers pressing downward, gently palpating his liver. It was like massaging hobnailed glass. No one—not even a novice in the medical field—could mistake such grandiose symptoms of cirrhosis.

  Still, at the thought of calling in the coroner, I felt a buzzing at the nape of my neck as if my brainstem was an angry, swollen hornet’s nest. I would hitch up Saunders’s horse, go soon. But first, I thought, rubbing my aching forehead, I had to see the girls.

  ***

  I should have known Regina had released them: During the day I’d caught glimpses of them through my window playing out in the gardens. Now from the library, I saw Abby strolling on the graveled path, then suddenly chasing a late white butterfly she caught between her hands. She ran to put the delicacy between her sister’s. I watched Ellie smile; she held it, felt it tickle her palms. I watched her let it go. It flew around her red head, then lighted once on her shoulder before it took itself off.

  The smile disappeared completely as, empty-handed, I approached her and Abby, my feet first crunching over the bluish pebbles, then whispering over the grass. They were both sitting in a small grove of locust trees, the sun slanting through the pale leaves.

  “Where’s tea?” Ellie demanded. “It’s nearly six, and I saw the baker’s boy knocking at the back door three hours ago. I want tea and biscuits or cake.”

  I only shook my head. “I didn’t think,” I began.

  Ellie had gained a lot of weight, some 25 or 30 pounds, I guessed, and her face looked too round, sullen. Her lips seemed to sag under the extra flesh. Her midriff was thick, the bubble of her pregnancy was clearly exposed, but even her fingers had the tallowy look of suet. Some was the result of eating haphazard meals and snacks, of sitting depressed in the wheelchair. Food was one of her pleasures.

  “Tell my father we’ve got to hire a regular woman, someone who’ll cook real meals, serve us. I can’t do for myself, you know. Abby’s no better at cooking—even if she can walk. How are we to live? And what about my baby?”

  I stooped down and picked up a blade of grass, not knowing what to say, what to do. I put off the news. Foolishly, I said, “Did anyone ever show you how to make a kind of whistle with grass? You need a long wide piece. You wet it,” I said, putting it briefly inside my mouth, “and hold it like this.” I cupped the grass blade between the thick humps at the base of my thumbs, blew a short staccato blast. “Try it,” I said, handing her a weedy looking dark green snip.

  She threw it back in my face. “Who’s going to take care of us, Stuart? I heard Ruth telling you to ask my father to send us to school.” She began to pant a little with her anger. “She’s gone now,” Ellie shouted at me, “and I can’t go to school and you know that my father drinks. You came here to help us, why don’t you help?” Her eyes were rolling slightly; they’d gone the dark blue gray of granite and she fixed them on me.

  “Your father’s dead.” It came out unexpectedly, not the way I’d have chosen to tell the news at all. And certainly, given the training I’d had—scant as it was—nothing like the consoling way one was supposed to take on with families of the deceased. And certainly not twelve-year-old girls. Abby gasped.

  “What! What?”

  I was still hunkered down, seemingly glued to the spot. “Regina gave him—I don’t know—some drug. One or another.”

  “That’s impossible Stuart!” Abby put in. “Ellie and me we’ve been together every minute.”

  “He’s dead,” I said again.

  “Besides, Abby said, “after they stopped that horrible argument, we made a pact to fight her off.”

  Her eyes met mine; I shrugged. The facts contradicted her.

  “Maybe she doesn’t need us to come through anymore,” she said slowly, her voice tinged with bitterness and fear.

  “What’ll you do, what’ll you do,” Ellie said, clasping her small hands together. “They’ll think you did it!”

  Something in her voice, something in the way she averted her eyes, or the way she’d been so aggressive when I’d come on them in the garden. Something. I looked at her sharply. Her round, heavy moon of a face was hidden in her hands, but I had a quick mental vision of Ellie suddenly ‘coming to’ in her father’s bedroom, the horror of his death sinking in, the needle dropping from her trembling hands, her body tumbling forward. In my mind’s eye I saw her catch herself by snatching at the bedcovers. I heard Regina whispering darkly in her mind, Mother’s here, don’t worry, darling. They won’t suspect you. They’ll think it was him.

  I’m glad he’s dead, Ellie had said fiercely. He made me a cripple—he and Stuart.

  Calmer now, Ellie dragged her near-dead weight to the wheel chair, its polished wooden seat and caned back glaring at her from the corner of the room where Regina had left it.

  I thought about Ruth’s warning. Some people can’t live with unrequited love. Was this Ellie’s way of paying me back? I felt my stomach cramp.

  Ellie was conjuring her mother, and whatever pact the girls made, she ignored it.

  - 25 -

  Impossible. We’ve been together every minute. Abby’s word’s percolated through my mind, and on the way to fetch the coroner, I wondered about it. Much of my own day had been “lost” to me. I remembered waking in a kind of mental fog, and could not recall such simple motions as getting out of bed to pee, dressing myself, or shaving. The only thing I remembered was finding myself at the window two or three times looking out at the twins. If I couldn’t account for my actions, maybe Abby had lost track of time, too. Or maybe, I thought anxiously, she was right, and Regina no longer needed either of the girls to come through.

  I slowed the hors
e two blocks in from the main street, stopping in front of a tall brick house with a shabby wooden porch. Ewing Eberhardt, the coroner, met me at the front door.

  “Trouble over to Saunders’s?” he asked, one hand lightly riding the door jamb. He knew me by sight—the result of the small town errands I’d run in Ruth’s place over the last six months. His face said I was better known by reputation as the freakish twins’ schoolmaster.

  “Andrew,” I nodded.

  “Just give me a minute to get my bag and we’ll go back together. You can tell me the details on the way.”

  “There’s not much to it,” I said.

  He gave me a hard look, then disappeared down the dark throat of the hallway. I stayed on the porch mentally collecting the fragments of my scanty story.

  He followed me to the buggy and as he climbed in on the opposite side, his black leather bag in hand, I saw something I’d never noticed about him before. He was missing the ring and pinky fingers of his left hand. Now with the sun winking off it, I saw that he wore his plain gold wedding ring on the right. Wing cleared his throat, waiting for me to begin. He was a quiet man given to slow, deliberate movements, and I wondered if he was continually compensating for whatever accident had cost him the missing flesh.

  “Andrew’s lying in his own bed,” I said. “There’s an empty bottle—”

  “I know he was a drinker,” Wing said, “but a man his age, you’d more likely find him tumbled at the bottom of his cellar steps.” His eyes met mine again, and I found myself simultaneously wishing I’d thought of staging just such an accident and hoping my face hadn’t registered the thought.

  “He had cirrhosis—I’m sure of that.”

  Wing shrugged and went on. “Pretty hard to kill yourself drinking—even on a bender.”

  “Sometimes he fiddled with the drugs in his supply cabinet,” I lied, suddenly pulling the syringe from my coat pocket and handing it over. “I didn’t want the girls to catch on—it’s bad enough as it is….”