“Then, a few years later, something else happened. Something worse. Say Mom helped him to cover it up—”
“Don’t forget the younger brother,” Fritzy said. “Lester. He might have been in on it, too.”
“Don’t confuse me with too many characters, Fritz. Al I know is that Al Fucking Big Driver raped me, and his mother may have been an accessory. That’s enough for me.”
“Maybe Ramona’s his aunt,” Fritzy speculated.
“Oh, shut up,” Tess said, and Fritzy did.
- 32 -
She lay down at four o’clock, not expecting to sleep a wink, but her healing body had its own priorities. She went under almost instantly, and when she woke to the insistent
strange and depthless gold which seems the exclusive property of late-fal afternoons in New England.
Her nose was better—the pain there down to a dul throb—but her throat was stil sore and she hobbled rather than walked to the bathroom. She got into the shower and stayed in the stal until the
bathroom was as foggy as an English moor in a Sherlock Holmes story. The shower helped. A couple of Tylenol from the medicine cabinet would help even more.
She dried her hair, then swiped a clear place on the mirror. The woman in the glass looked back from eyes haunted by rage and sanity. The glass didn’t stay clear for long, but it was long enough for
Tess to realize that she real y meant to do this, no matter the consequences.
She dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and black cargo pants with big flap pockets. She tied her hair up in a bun and then yanked on a big black gimme cap. The bun made the cap bulge a little
behind, but at least no potential witness would be able to say,
She went down to the basement where her kayak had been stored since Labor Day and took the reel of yel ow boat-line from the shelf above it. She used the hedge clippers to cut off four feet, wound
it around her forearm, then slipped the coil into one of her big pants pockets. Upstairs again in the kitchen, she tucked her Swiss Army knife into the same pocket—the left. The right pocket was for the Lemon Squeezer .38… and one other item, which she took from the drawer next to the stove. Then she spooned out double rations for Fritzy, but before she let him start eating, she hugged him and
kissed the top of his head. The old cat flattened his ears (more in surprise than distaste, probably; she wasn’t ordinarily a kissy mistress) and hurried to his dish as soon as she put him down.
“Make that last,” Tess told him. “Patsy wil check on you eventual y if I don’t come back, but it could be a couple of days.” She smiled a little and added, “I love you, you scruffy old thing.”
“Right, right,” Fritzy said, then got busy eating.
Tess checked her DON’T GET CAUGHT memo one more time, mental y inventorying her supplies as she did so and going over the steps she intended to take once she got to Lacemaker Lane. She
thought the most important thing to keep in mind was that things wouldn’t go as she hoped they would. When it came to things like this, there were always jokers in the deck. Ramona might not be at home.
Or she might be home but with her rapist-murderer son, the two of them cozied up in the living room and watching something uplifting from Blockbuster.
She burned the DON’T GET CAUGHT memo in the fireplace, stirred the ashes apart with the poker, then put on her leather jacket and a pair of thin leather gloves. The jacket had a deep pocket in the
lining. Tess slipped one of her butcher knives into it, just for good luck, then told herself not to forget it was there. The last thing she needed this weekend was an accidental mastectomy.
Just before stepping out the door, she set the burglar alarm.
The wind surrounded her immediately, flapping the col ar of her jacket and the legs of her cargo pants. Leaves swirled in mini-cyclones. In the not-quite-dark sky above her tasteful little piece of
Connecticut suburbia, clouds scudded across the face of a three-quarter moon. Tess thought it was a fine night for a horror movie.