Full Dark, No Stars, Page 21

  "I don't know what I'm thinking, either," she said, but this was not quite true.

  Up ahead was the US 47 intersection, and the Gas & Dash. She signaled, turned in, and parked with the Expedition's nose centered between the two pay phones on the side of the building. She saw the number for Royal Limousine on the dusty cinder block between them. The numbers were crooked, straggling, written by a finger that hadn't been able to stay steady. A chill shivered its way up her back, and she wrapped her arms around herself, hugging hard. Then she got out and went to the pay phone that still worked.

  The instruction card had been defaced, maybe by a drunk with a car key, but she could still read the salient information: no charge for 911 calls, just lift the handset and punch in the numbers. Easy-as-can-beezy.

  She punched 9, hesitated, punched 1, then hesitated again. She visualized a pinata, and a woman poised to hit it with a stick. Soon everything inside would come tumbling out. Her friends and associates would know she had been raped. Patsy McClain would know the story about stumbling over Fritzy in the dark was a shame-driven lie... and that Tess hadn't trusted her enough to tell the truth. But really, those weren't the main things. She supposed she could stand up to a little public scrutiny, especially if it kept the man Betsy Neal had called Big Driver from raping and killing another woman. Tess realized that she might even be perceived as a heroine, a thing that had been impossible to even consider last night, when urinating hurt enough to make her cry and her mind kept returning to the image of her stolen panties in the center pocket of the giant's bib overalls.

  Only...

  "What's in it for me?" she asked again. She spoke very quietly, while looking at the telephone number she'd written in the dust. "What's in that for me?"

  And thought: I have a gun and I know how to use it.

  She hung up the phone and went back to her car. She looked at Tom's screen, which was showing the intersection of Stagg Road and Route 47. "I need to think about this some more," she said.

  "What's to think about?" Tom asked. "If you were to kill him and then get caught, you'd go to jail. Raped or not."

  "That's what I need to think about," she said, and turned onto US 47, which would take her to I-84.

  Traffic on the big highway was Saturday-morning light, and being behind the wheel of her Expedition was good. Soothing. Normal. Tom was quiet until she passed the sign reading EXIT 9 STOKE VILLAGE 2 MILES. Then he said, "Are you sure it was an accident?"

  "What?" Tess jumped, startled. She had heard Tom's words coming out of her mouth, spoken in the deeper voice she always used for the make-believe half of her make-believe conversations (it was a voice very little like Tom the Tomtom's actual robo-voice), but it didn't feel like her thought. "Are you saying the bastard raped me by accident?"

  "No," Tom replied. "I'm saying that if it had been up to you, you would have gone back the way you came. This way. I-84. But somebody had a better idea, didn't they? Somebody knew a shortcut."

  "Yes," she agreed. "Ramona Norville did." She considered it, then shook her head. "That's pretty far-fetched, my friend."

  To this Tom made no reply.

  - 27 -

  Leaving the Gas & Dash, she had planned to go online and see if she could locate a trucking company, maybe a small independent, that operated out of Colewich or one of the surrounding towns. A company with a bird name, probably hawk or eagle. It was what the Willow Grove ladies would have done; they loved their computers and were always texting each other like teenagers. Other considerations aside, it would be interesting to see if her version of amateur sleuthing worked in real life.

  Driving up the I-84 exit ramp a mile and a half from her house, she decided that she would do a little research on Ramona Norville first. Who knew, she might discover that, besides presiding over Books & Brown Baggers, Ramona was president of the Chicopee Rape Prevention Society. It was even plausible. Tess's hostess had pretty clearly been not just a lesbian but a dyke lesbian, and women of that persuasion were often not fond of men who were non -rapists.

  "Many arsonists belong to their local volunteer fire departments," Tom observed as she turned onto her street.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Tess asked.

  "That you shouldn't eliminate anyone based on their public affiliations. The Knitting Society ladies would never do that. But by all means check her out online." Tom spoke in a be-my-guest tone that Tess hadn't quite expected. It was mildly irritating.

  "How kind of you to give me permission, Thomas," she said.

  - 28 -

  But when she was in her office with her computer booted up, she only stared at the Apple welcome screen for the first five minutes, wondering if she was really thinking of finding the giant and using her gun, or if that was just the sort of fantasy to which liars-for-profit such as herself were prone. A revenge fantasy, in this case. She avoided those kinds of movies, too, but she knew they were out there; you couldn't avoid the vibe of your culture unless you were a total recluse, and Tess wasn't. In the revenge movies, admirably muscular fellows like Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone didn't bother with the police, they got the baddies on their own. Frontier justice. Do you feel lucky, punk. She believed that even Jodie Foster, one of Yale's more famous graduates, had made a movie of this type. Tess couldn't quite remember the title. The Courageous Woman, maybe? It was something like that, anyway.

  Her computer flipped to the word-of-the-day screen-saver. Today's word was cormorant, which just happened to be a bird.

  "When you send your goodies by Cormorant Trucking, you'll think you're flying," Tess said in her deep pretending-to-be-Tom voice. Then she tapped a key and the screen-saver disappeared. She went online, but not to one of the search engines, at least not to begin with. First she went to YouTube and typed in RICHARD WIDMARK, with no idea at all why she was doing it. No conscious one, anyway.

  Maybe I want to find out if the guy's really worthy of fanship, she thought. Ramona certainly thinks so.

  There were lots of clips. The top-rated one was a six-minute compilation titled HE'S BAD, HE'S REALLY BAD. Several hundred thousand people had viewed it. There were scenes from three movies, but the one that transfixed her was the first. It was black-and-white, it looked on the cheap side... but it was definitely one of those movies. Even the title told you so: Kiss of Death.

  Tess watched the entire video, then returned to the Kiss of Death segment twice. Widmark played a giggling hood menacing an old lady in a wheelchair. He wanted information: "Where's that squealin' son of yours?" And when the old lady wouldn't tell him: "You know what I do to squealers? I let em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time, thinkin' it over."

  He didn't shoot the old lady in the belly, though. He tied her into her wheelchair with a lamp cord and pushed her down the stairs.

  Tess exited YouTube, Binged Richard Widmark, and found what she expected, given the power of that brief clip. Although he had played in many subsequent movies, more and more often as the hero, he was best known for Kiss of Death, and the giggling, psychotic Tommy Udo.

  "Big deal," Tess said. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

  "Meaning what?" Fritzy asked from the windowsill where he was sunning himself.

  "Meaning Ramona probably fell in love with him after seeing him play a heroic sheriff or a courageous battleship commander, or something like that."

  "She must have," Fritzy agreed, "because if you're right about her sexual orientation, she probably doesn't idolize men who murder old ladies in wheelchairs."

  Of course that was true. Good thinking, Fritzy .

  The cat regarded Tess with a skeptical eye and said, "But maybe you're not right about that."

  "Even if I'm not," Tess said, "nobody roots for psycho bad guys."

  She recognized this for the stupidity it was as soon as it was out of her mouth. If people didn't root for psychos, they wouldn't still be making movies about the nut in the hockey mask and the burn victim with scissors for fingers
. But Fritzy did her the courtesy of not laughing.

  "You better not," Tess said. "If you're tempted, remember who fills your food dish."

  She googled Ramona Norville, got forty-four thousand hits, added Chicopee, and got a more manageable twelve hundred (although even most of those, she knew, would be coincidental dreck). The first relevant one was from the Chicopee Weekly Reminder, and concerned Tess herself: LIBRARIAN RAMONA NORVILLE ANNOUNCES "WILLOW GROVE FRIDAY."

  "There I am, the starring attraction," Tess murmured. "Hooray for Tessa Jean. Now let's see my supporting actress." But when she pulled up the clipping, the only photo Tess saw was her own. It was the bare-shoulders publicity shot her part-time assistant routinely sent out. She wrinkled her nose and went back to Google, not sure why she wanted to look at Ramona again, only knowing that she did. When she finally found a photo of the librarian, she saw what her subconscious might already have suspected, at least judging by Tom's comments on the ride back to her house.

  It was in a story from the August 3 issue of the Weekly Reminder. BROWN BAGGERS ANNOUNCE SPEAKING SCHEDULE FOR FALL, the headline read. Below it, Ramona Norville stood on the library steps, smiling and squinting into the sun. A bad photograph, taken by a part-timer without much talent, and a bad (but probably typical) choice of clothes on Norville's part. The man-tailored blazer made her look as wide in the chest as a pro football tackle. Her shoes were ugly brown flatboats. A pair of too-tight gray slacks showcased what Tess and her friends back in middle school had called "thunder thighs."

  "Holy fucking shit, Fritzy," she said. Her voice was watery with dismay. "Look at this." Fritzy didn't come over to look and didn't reply--how could he, when she was too upset to make his voice?

  Make sure of what you're seeing, she told herself. You've had a terrible shock, Tessa Jean, maybe the biggest shock a woman can have, short of a mortal diagnosis in a doctor's office. So make sure.

  She closed her eyes and summoned the image of the man from the old Ford pickup truck with the Bondo around the headlights. He had seemed so friendly at first. Didn't think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?

  Only he hadn't been green, he'd been a tanned hulk of a man who didn't ride in his pickup but wore it.

  Ramona Norville, not a Big Driver but certainly a Big Librarian, was too old to be his sister. And if she was a lesbian now, she hadn't always been one, because the resemblance was unmistakable.

  Unless I'm badly mistaken, I'm looking at a picture of my rapist's mother.

  - 29 -

  She went to the kitchen and had a drink of water, but water wasn't getting it. An old half-filled bottle of tequila had been brooding in a back corner of a kitchen cabinet for donkey's years. She took it out, considered a glass, then nipped directly from the bottle. It stung her mouth and throat, but had a positive effect otherwise. She helped herself to more--a sip rather than a nip--and then put the bottle back. She had no intention of getting drunk. If she had ever needed her wits about her, she needed them about her today.

  Rage--the biggest, truest rage of her adult life--had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn't like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. Clearer since she'd had the tequila, actually.

  She paced a series of rapid circles around the kitchen, head down, one hand massaging the ring of bruises around her throat. It did not occur to her that she was circling her kitchen as she had circled the deserted store after crawling out of the pipe Big Driver had meant for her tomb. Did she really think Ramona Norville had sent her, Tess, to her psychotic son like some kind of sacrifice? Was that likely? It was not. Could she even be sure that the two of them were mother and son, based on one bad photograph and her own memory?

  But my memory's good. Especially my memory for faces.

  Well, so she thought, but probably everyone did. Right?

  Yes, and the whole idea's crazy. You have to admit it is.

  She did admit it, but she had seen crazier things on true-crime programs (which she did watch). The ladies with the apartment house in San Francisco who had spent years killing their elderly tenants for their Social Security checks and burying them in the backyard. The airline pilot who murdered his wife, then froze the body so he could run her through the woodchipper behind the garage. The man who had doused his own children with gasoline and cooked them like Cornish game hens to make sure his wife never got the custody the courts had awarded her. A woman sending victims to her own son was shocking and unlikely... but not impossible. When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.

  "Oh boy," she heard herself saying in a voice that combined dismay and anger. "Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy."

  Find out. Find out for sure. If you can.

  She went back to her trusty computer. Her hands were trembling badly, and it took her three tries to enter COLEWICH TRUCKING FIRMS in the search field at the top of the Google page. Finally she got it right, hit enter, and there it was, at the top of the list: RED HAWK TRUCKING. The entry took her to the Red Hawk website, which featured a badly animated big rig with what she assumed was a red hawk on the side and a bizarre smiley-head man behind the wheel. The truck crossed the screen from right to left, flipped and came back left to right, then flipped again. An endless crisscross journey. The company's motto flashed red, white, and blue above the animated truck: THE SMILES COME WITH THE SERVICE!

  For those wishing to journey beyond the welcome screen, there were four or five choices, including phone numbers, rates, and testimonials from satisfied customers. Tess skipped these and clicked on the last one, which read CHECK OUT THE NEWEST ADDITION TO OUR FLEET! And when the picture came up, the final piece fell into place.

  It was a much better photograph than the one of Ramona Norville standing on the library steps. In it, Tess's rapist was sitting behind the wheel of a shiny cab-over Pete with RED HAWK TRUCKING COLEWICH, MASSACHUSETTS written on the door in fancy script. He wasn't wearing his bleach-splattered brown cap, and the bristly blond crewcut revealed by its absence made him look even more like his mother, almost eerily so. His cheerful, you-can-trust-me grin was the one Tess had seen yesterday afternoon. The one he'd still been wearing when he said Instead of changing your tire, how about I fuck you? How would that be?

  Looking at the photo made the weird rage-serum cycle faster through her system. There was a pounding in her temples that wasn't exactly a headache; in fact, it was almost pleasant.

  He was wearing the red glass ring.

  The caption below the picture read: "Al Strehlke, President of Red Hawk Trucking, seen here behind the wheel of the company's newest acquisition, a 2008 Peterbilt 389. This horse of a hauler is now available to our customers, who are THE FINEST IN ALL THE LAND. Say! Doesn't Al look like a Proud Papa?"

  She heard him calling her a bitch, a whiny whore bitch, and clenched her hands into fists. She felt her fingernails sinking into her palms and clenched them even tighter, relishing the pain.

  Proud Papa. That was what her eyes kept returning to. Proud Papa. The rage moved faster and faster, circling through her body the way she had circled her kitchen. The way she had circled the store last night, moving in and out of consciousness like an actress through a series of spotlights.

  You're going to pay, Al. And never mind the cops, I'm the one coming to collect.

  And then there was Ramona Norville. The proud papa's proud mama. Although Tess was still not sure of her. Partly it was not wanting to believe that a woman could allow something so horrible to happen to another woman, but she could also see an innocent explanation. Chicopee wasn't that far from Colewich, and Ramona would have used the Stagg Road shortcut all the time when she went there.

  "To visit her son," Tess said, nodding. "To visit the proud papa with the new cab-over Pete. For all I know, she might be the one who took the picture o
f him behind the wheel." And why wouldn't she recommend her favorite route to that day's speaker?

  But why didn't she say, "I go that way all the time to visit my son?" Wouldn't that be natural?

  "Maybe she doesn't talk to strangers about the Strehlke phase of her life," Tess said. "The phase before she discovered short hair and comfortable shoes." It was possible, but there was the scatter of nail-studded boards to think about. The trap. Norville had sent her that way, and the trap had been set ahead of time. Because she had called him? Called him and said I'm sending you a juicy one, don't miss out?

  It still doesn't mean she was involved... or not knowingly involved. The proud papa could keep track of her guest speakers, how hard would that be?

  "Not hard at all," Fritzy said after leaping up on her filing cabinet. He began to lick one of his paws.

  "And if he saw a photo of one he liked... a reasonably attractive one... I suppose he'd know his mother would send her back by..." She stopped. "No, that doesn't scan. Without some input from Ma, how would he know I wasn't driving to my home in Boston? Or flying back to my home in New York City?"

  "You googled him," Fritzy said. "Maybe he googled you. Just like she did. Everything's on the Internet these days; you said so yourself."

  That hung together, if only by a thread.

  She thought there was one way to find out for sure, and that was to pay Ms. Norville a surprise visit. Look in her eyes when she saw Tess. If there was nothing in them but surprise and curiosity at the Return of the Willow Grove Scribe... to Ramona's home rather than her library... that would be one thing. But if there was fear in them as well, the kind that might be prompted by the thought why are you here instead of in a rusty culvert on the Stagg Road ... well...

  "That would be different, Fritzy. Wouldn't it?"

  Fritzy looked at her with his cunning green eyes, still licking his paw. It looked harmless, that paw, but there were claws hidden inside it. Tess had seen them, and on occasion felt them.