Full Dark, No Stars, Page 25

  She parked by the back door, turned off the engine, and got out. She carried the gun in one hand. The door was unlocked. She stepped into a shed that smelled of beer and spoiled food. A single sixty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling on a length of dirty cord. Straight ahead were four overflowing plastic garbage cans, the thirty-two-gallon kind you could buy at Walmart. Behind them, stacked against the shed wall, were what looked like five years' worth of Uncle Henry's swap guide. To the left was another door, up a single step. It would lead to the kitchen. It had an old-fashioned latch rather than a knob. The door squalled on unoiled hinges when she depressed the latch and pushed it open. An hour ago, such a squall would have terrified her into immobility. Now it didn't bother her in the slightest. She had work to do. That was all it came down to, and it was a relief to be free of all that emotional baggage. She stepped into the smell of whatever greasy meat Little Driver had fried for his supper. She could hear a TV laugh-track. Some sitcom. Seinfeld, she thought.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" Lester Strehlke called from the vicinity of the laugh-track. "I ain't got but a beer and a half left, if that's what you came for. I'm gonna drink up and then go to bed." She followed the sound of his voice. "If you'da called, I coulda saved you the tr--"

  She came into the room. He saw her. Tess hadn't speculated on what his reaction might be to the reappearance of his last victim, carrying a gun and wearing the hat Lester himself wore when his urges came over him. Even if she had, she could never have predicted the extremity of the one she saw. His mouth dropped open, and then his entire face froze. The can of beer he was holding dropped from his hand and fell into his lap, spraying foam onto his only article of clothing, a pair of yellowing Jockey shorts.

  He's seeing a ghost, she thought as she walked toward him, raising the gun. Good.

  There was time to see that, although the living room was a bachelor mess and there were no snowglobes or cutie-poo figurines, the TV-watching setup was the same as the one at his mother's house on Lacemaker Lane: the La-Z-Boy, the TV tray (here holding a final unopened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bag of Doritos instead of Diet Coke and Cheez Doodles), the same TV Guide, the one with Simon Cowell on it.

  "You're dead," he whispered.

  "No," Tess replied. She put the barrel of the Lemon Squeezer against the side of his head. He made one feeble effort to grab her wrist, but it was far too little and much too late. "That's you."

  She pulled the trigger. Blood came out of his ear and his head snapped briskly to the side. He looked like a man trying to free up a kink in his neck. On the TV, George Costanza said, "I was in the pool, I was in the pool." The audience laughed.

  - 41 -

  It was almost midnight, and the wind was blowing harder than ever. When it gusted, Lester Strehlke's whole house shook, and each time Tess thought of the little pig who had built his house out of sticks.

  The little piggy who had lived in this one would never have to worry about his shitty house blowing away, because he was dead in his La-Z-Boy. And he wasn't a little piggy, anyway, Tess thought. He was a big bad wolf.

  She was sitting in the kitchen, writing on the pages of a grimy Blue Horse tablet she had found in Strehlke's upstairs bedroom. There were four rooms on the second floor, but the bedroom was the only one not stuffed with junk, everything from iron bedsteads to an Evinrude boat-motor that looked as if it might have been dropped from the top of a five-story building. Because it would take weeks or months to go through those caches of the useless, the worthless, and the pointless, Tess turned all her attention on Strehlke's bedroom and searched it carefully. The Blue Horse tablet was a bonus. She had found what she was looking for in an old travel-tote pushed to the very back of the closet shelf, where it had been camouflaged--not very successfully--with old issues of National Geographic. In it was a tangle of women's underwear. Her own panties were on top. Tess put them in her pocket and, packrat-like, replaced them with the coil of yellow boat-line. Nobody would be surprised to find rope in a rapist-killer's suitcase of trophy lingerie. Besides, she would not be needing it.

  "Tonto," said the Lone Ranger, "our work here is done."

  What she wrote, as Seinfeld gave way to Frasier and Frasier gave way to the local news (one Chicopee resident had won the lottery and another had suffered a broken back after falling from a scaffolding, so that balanced out), was a confession in the form of a letter. As she reached page five, the TV news gave way to an apparently endless commercial for Almighty Cleanse. Danny Vierra was saying, "Some Americans have a bowel movement only once every two or three days, and because this has gone on for years, they believe it's normal! Any doctor worth his salt will tell you it's not!"

  The letter was headed TO THE PROPER AUTHORITIES, and the first four pages consisted of a single paragraph. In her head it sounded like a scream. Her hand was tired, and the ballpoint pen she'd found in a kitchen drawer (RED HAWK TRUCKING printed in fading gilt on the barrel) was showing signs of drying up, but she was, thank God, almost done. While Little Driver went on not watching TV from where he sat in his La-Z-Boy, she at last started a new paragraph at the top of page five.

  I will not make excuses for what I have done. Nor can I say that I did it while of unsound mind. I was furious and I made a mistake. It's that simple. Under other circumstances--those less terrible, I mean--I might say, "It was a natural mistake, the two of them look almost enough alike to be twins." But these are not other circumstances.

  I have thought of atonement as I sat here, writing these pages and listening to his television and to the wind--not because I hope for forgiveness, but because it seems wrong to do wrong without at least trying to balance it out with something right. (Here Tess thought of how the lottery winner and the man with the broken back evened out, but the concept would be difficult to express when she was so tired, and she wasn't sure it was germane, anyway.) I thought of going to Africa and working with AIDS victims. I thought about going down to New Orleans and volunteering at a homeless shelter or a food bank. I thought about going to the Gulf to clean oil off birds. I thought of donating the million dollars or so I have put away for my retirement to some group that works to end violence against women. There must be such a society in Connecticut, perhaps even several of them.

  But then I thought of Doreen Marquis, from the Knitting Society, and what she says once in every book...

  What Doreen said at least once in every book was murderers always overlook the obvious. You may depend on it, dears. And even as Tess wrote about atonement, she realized it would be impossible. Because Doreen was absolutely right.

  Tess had worn a cap so that she wouldn't leave hair that could be analyzed for DNA. She had worn gloves which she had never taken off, even while driving Alvin Strehlke's pickup. It was not too late to burn this confession in Lester's kitchen woodstove, drive to Brother Alvin's considerably nicer house (house of bricks instead of house of sticks), get into her Expedition, and head back to Connecticut. She could go home, where Fritzy was waiting. At first glance she looked clear, and it might take the police a few days to get to her, but get to her they would. Because while she had been concentrating on the forensic molehills, she had overlooked the obvious mountain, exactly like the killers in the Knitting Society books.

  The obvious mountain had a name: Betsy Neal. A pretty woman with an oval face, mismatched Picasso eyes, and a cloud of dark hair. She had recognized Tess, had even gotten her autograph, but that wasn't the clincher. The clincher was going to be the bruises on her face (I hope that didn't happen here, Neal had said), and the fact that Tess had asked about Alvin Strehlke, describing his truck and recognizing the ring when Neal mentioned it. Like a ruby, Tess had agreed.

  Neal would see the story on TV or read it in the newspaper--with three dead from the same family, how could she avoid it?--and she would go to the police. The police would come to Tess. They would check the Connecticut gun-registration records as a matter of course and discover that Tess owned a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver
known as a Lemon Squeezer. They would ask her to produce it so they could test-fire it and do comparisons to the bullets found in the three victims. And what was she going to say? Was she going to look at them from her blackened eyes and say (in a voice still hoarse from the choking Lester Strehlke had given her) that she lost it? Would she continue to stick to that story even after the dead women were found in the culvert pipe?

  Tess picked up her borrowed pen and began writing again.

  ... what she says once in every book: murderers always overlook the obvious. Doreen also once took a leaf from Dorothy Sayers's book and left a murderer with a loaded gun, telling him to take the honorable way out. I have a gun. My brother Mike is my only surviving close relative. He lives in Taos, New Mexico. I suppose he may inherit my estate. It depends on the legal ramifications of my crimes. If he does, I hope the authorities who find this letter will show it to him, and convey my wish that he donate the bulk to some charitable organization that works with women who have been sexually abused.

  I am sorry about Big Driver--Alvin Strehlke. He was not the man who raped me, and Doreen is sure he didn't rape and kill those other women, either.

  Doreen? No, her. Doreen wasn't real. But Tess was too tired to go back and change it. And what the hell--she was near the end, anyway.

  For Ramona and that piece of garbage in the other room, I make no apologies. They are better off dead.

  So, of course, am I.

  She paused long enough to look back over the pages and see if there was anything she had forgotten. There didn't appear to be, so she signed her name--her final autograph. The pen ran dry on the last letter and she put it aside.

  "Got anything to say, Lester?" she asked.

  Only the wind replied, gusting hard enough to make the little house groan in its joints and puff drafts of cold air.

  She went back into the living room. She put the hat on his head and the ring on his finger. That was the way she wanted them to find him. There was a framed photo on the TV. In it, Lester and his mother stood with their arms around each other. They were smiling. Just a boy and his mum. She looked at it for awhile, then left.

  - 42 -

  She felt that she should go back to the deserted store where it had happened and finish her business there. She could sit for awhile in the weedy lot, listen to the wind ticking the old sign (YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU), thinking about whatever people think about in the final moments of a life. In her case that would probably be Fritzy. She guessed Patsy would take him, and that would be fine. Cats were survivors. They didn't much care who fed them, as long as the bowl was full.

  It wouldn't take long to get to the store at this hour, but it still seemed too far. She was very tired. She decided she would get into Al Strehlke's old truck and do it there. But she didn't want to splatter her painfully written confession with her blood, that seemed very wrong considering all the bloodshed detailed within it, and so--

  She took the pages from the Blue Horse tablet into the living room, where the TV played on (a young man who looked like a criminal was now selling a robot floorwasher), and dropped them in Strehlke's lap. "Hold that for me, Les," she said.

  "No problem," he replied. She noted that a portion of his diseased brains was now drying on his bony naked shoulder. That was all right.

  Tess went out into the windy dark and slowly climbed behind the wheel of the pickup truck. The scream of the hinge when the driver's door swung shut was oddly familiar. But no, not so odd; hadn't she heard it at the store? Yes. She had been trying to do him a favor, because he was going to do her one--he was going to change her tire so she could go home and feed her cat. "I didn't want his battery to run down," she said, and laughed.

  She put the short barrel of the .38 against her temple, then reconsidered. A shot like that wasn't always effective. She wanted her money to help women who had been hurt, not to pay for her care as she lay unconscious year after year in some home for human vegetables.

  The mouth, that was better. Surer.

  The barrel was oily against her tongue, and she could feel the small nub of the sight digging into the roof of her mouth.

  I've had a good life--pretty good, anyway--and although I made a terrible mistake at the end of it, maybe that won't be held against me if there's something after this.

  Ah, but the night wind was very sweet. So were the fragile fragrances it carried through the half-open driver's side window. It was a shame to leave, but what choice? It was time to go.

  Tess closed her eyes, tightened her finger on the trigger, and that was when Tom spoke up. It was strange that he could do that, because Tom was in her Expedition, and the Expedition was at the other brother's house, almost a mile down the road from here. Also, the voice she heard was nothing like the one she usually manufactured for Tom. Nor did it sound like her own. It was a cold voice. And she--she had a gun in her mouth. She couldn't talk at all.

  "She was never a very good detective, was she?"

  She took it out. "Who? Doreen?"

  In spite of everything, she was shocked.

  "Who else, Tessa Jean? And why would she be a good one? She came from the old you. Didn't she?"

  Tess supposed that was true.

  "Doreen believes Big Driver didn't rape and kill those other women. Isn't that what you wrote?"

  "Me," Tess said. "I'm sure. I was just tired, that's all. And shocked, I suppose."

  "Also guilty."

  "Yes. Also guilty."

  "Do guilty people make good deductions, do you think?"

  No. Perhaps they didn't.

  "What are you trying to tell me?"

  "That you only solved part of the mystery. Before you could solve all of it--you, not some cliche-ridden old lady detective--something admittedly unfortunate happened."

  "Unfortunate? Is that what you call it?" From a great distance, Tess heard herself laugh. Somewhere the wind was making a loose gutter click against an eave. It sounded like the 7Up sign at the deserted store.

  "Before you shoot yourself," the new, strange Tom said (he was sounding more female all the time), "why don't you think for yourself ? But not here."

  "Where, then?"

  Tom didn't answer this question, and didn't have to. What he said was, "And take that fucking confession with you."

  Tess got out of the truck and went back inside Lester Strehlke's house. She stood in the dead man's kitchen, thinking. She did it aloud, in Tom's voice (which sounded more like her own all the time). Doreen seemed to have taken a hike.

  "Al's housekey will be on the ring with his ignition key," Tom said, "but there's the dog. You don't want to forget the dog."

  No, that would be bad. Tess went to Lester's refrigerator. After a little rummaging, she found a package of hamburger at the back of the bottom shelf. She used an issue of Uncle Henry's to double-wrap it, then went back into the living room. She plucked the confession from Strehlke's lap, doing it gingerly, very aware that the part of him that had hurt her--the part that had gotten three people killed tonight--lay just beneath the pages. "I'm taking your ground chuck, but don't hold it against me. I'm doing you a favor. It smells spunky-going-on-rotten."

  "A thief as well as a murderer," Little Driver said in his droning deadvoice. "Isn't that nice."

  "Shut up, Les," she said, and left.

  - 43 -

  Before you shoot yourself, why don't you think for yourself?

  As she drove the old pickup back down the windy road to Alvin Strehlke's house, she tried to do that. She was starting to think Tom, even when he wasn't in the vehicle with her, was a better detective than Doreen Marquis on her best day.

  "I'll keep it short," Tom said. "If you don't think Al Strehlke was part of it--and I mean a big part--you're crazy."

  "Of course I'm crazy," she replied. "Why else would I be trying to convince myself that I didn't shoot the wrong man when I know I did?"

  "That's guilt talking, not logic," Tom replied. He sounded maddeningly smug. "He was no innocent lit
tle lamb, not even a half-black sheep. Wake up, Tessa Jean. They weren't just brothers, they were partners."

  "Business partners."

  "Brothers are never just business partners. It's always more complicated than that. Especially when you've got a woman like Ramona for a mother."

  Tess turned up Al Strehlke's smoothly paved driveway. She supposed Tom could be right about that. She knew one thing: Doreen and her Knitting Society friends had never met a woman like Ramona Norville.

  The pole light went on. The dog started up: yarkyark, yarkyarkyark. Tess waited for the light to go out and the dog to quiet down.

  "There's no way I'll ever know for sure, Tom."

  "You can't be certain of that unless you look."

  "Even if he knew, he wasn't the one who raped me."

  Tom was silent for a moment. She thought he'd given up. Then he said, "When a person does a bad thing and another person knows but doesn't stop it, they're equally guilty."

  "In the eyes of the law?"

  "Also in the eyes of me. Say it was just Lester who did the hunting, the raping, and the killing. I don't think so, but say it was. If big brother knew and said nothing, that makes him worth killing. In fact, I'd say bullets were too good for him. Impaling on a hot poker would be closer to justice."

  Tess shook her head wearily and touched the gun on the seat. One bullet left. If she had to use it on the dog (and really, what was one more killing among friends), she would have to hunt for another gun, unless she meant to try and hang herself, or something. But guys like the Strehlkes usually had firearms. That was the beauty part, as Ramona would have said.