Black Lightning (36 page)

CHAPTER 52

G
len picked up the phone in the front hall, instantly recognizing Gordy Farber’s voice.

“How’s it going, Glen?” the heart specialist asked, keeping his voice casual despite the worry he was feeling. Obviously, the fear he’d seen in his patient when Glen had come in the day before yesterday had not been alleviated, since now it had infected Anne Jeffers as well, though he suspected that Anne’s fears stemmed much more from the events next door than from what might be happening inside her own home. Still, he’d intended to check on Glen today anyway. “What’s happening? Any more of those blackouts?”

Glen suddenly remembered his intention of calling Gordy this morning. Why hadn’t he? He glanced at his watch. Almost an hour had passed since he’d finished cleaning up the kitchen and …

And what? He couldn’t remember! Another hour gone out of his life! Shit!

“Actually, I was going to call you this morning, Gordy,” he said. “I’m starting to feel like I have Alzheimer’s instead of a heart problem. Yesterday—” Before he could finish the sentence, the doorbell rang. “Hang on, Gord—someone’s at the door.”

Laying the receiver on the table, Glen crossed to the front door and opened it to a heavyset woman clad in a shapeless dress, who smiled uncertainly at him. In her early sixties, he thought, and wearing too much makeup. Her dyed-black hair was piled up on her head in an attempt at a French twist. Though he was certain he’d never met her, she still looked somehow familiar.

“Mr. Jeffers?” the woman asked. “I’m Edna Kraven.”

Even as he stared at her, the same dizziness that had struck him earlier washed over him again. He took a step backward, fighting the blackness that was already closing around him.

He could do nothing, though, to battle the ever-strengthening presence that rose inside him.

The furious presence …

“Don’t let them, Mama! Please don’t let them!”

“Now, you be Mama’s brave little boy. They’re not going to hurt you. They’re going to help you.”

But Richard Kraven knew they weren’t going to help him. They were going to hurt him, just like they had last time, just like his father had hurt him. Now their hands were reaching out to him, and even though he was trying to hang on to his mother, she was prying his fingers loose, working herself free from his clinging arms.

One of the white-clad figures bent down to pick him up, but Richard shrank away, struggling against the tears that threatened to overwhelm him. He knew all too well what happened if he cried. His father had taught him that long ago.

Despite his attempts to escape, the tall man in the white coat picked him up, pinning his arms to his sides. “Now you just take it easy,” he heard the man say. “You don’t want us to have to put you in the jacket again, do you?” Richard shook his head, terror filling his heart. Last time his mother had brought him here, when he’d tried to tell her what his father had been doing to him and she hadn’t believed him, he’d gotten really angry, and finally they’d put him in a coat with sleeves that tied at the back so he couldn’t move his arms at all. He’d been scared then—more scared than he’d ever been before, even when his father took him down to the basement—but the jacket hadn’t been the worst part.

Even the ice-cold baths they’d made him lie in hadn’t been the worst part.

The worst part was he knew what they were going to do today, because his mother had told him about it. “It’s for your own good,” she’d explained. “And it doesn’t really hurt at all.”

But that wasn’t true. It hurt more than anything he could ever remember, even more than the shocks his father gave him.

Once again he looked up at his mother, but instead of helping him, she only smiled blandly, as if nothing was wrong at all. “Now you be a good boy, Richard. You be Mama’s perfect little boy, just like you always are.”

She turned around and walked through the doors, leaving him with the big men in white clothes, never even looking back at him.

That day he didn’t cry at all. He didn’t cry when they took him into the room where they kept the hard bed with the thick straps they held him down with.

He didn’t cry when they attached the wires to his head.

He didn’t even cry when he felt the jolts of electricity shoot through him and thought he was going to die.

In fact, he never cried again.

And he always did his best to be his Mama’s perfect little boy.

But the anger—the dark, cold fury he always took care to hide—began to build.

Every day, every week, every month it built.

Every year the rage grew larger, more monstrous.

And his mother never knew it was there.

Always, no matter what happened, she kept believing that he was her perfect little boy, who loved her as much as she said she loved him.

But he knew better. No matter what she said, he knew she didn’t love him—knew she’d never loved him. If she’d loved him, she would have protected him from his father, and from the men in the white clothes with the terrible machine that was even worse than his father’s electric cords.

No, she didn’t love him. She hated him, as much as he hated her.

“Won’t you come in?” The words issued from Glen Jeffers’s mouth, but it was Richard Kraven who asked the question, holding the door wider to let his mother step into the foyer. “I was on the telephone, but if you’ll just give me half a second?”

Courtly, Edna Kraven thought as she nodded her agreement to Mr. Jeffers’s question. Courtly, just like Richard was. “I do hope I’m not bothering you?”

He held up a gently dismissive hand. “Of course not,” he said. Picking up the phone, he spoke briefly into the receiver. “Gordy? I’m afraid something’s come up. I’ll call you later.” Without waiting for a reply from the doctor, he placed the receiver back on the hook, then gently took his mother’s elbow and steered her into the living room. “How nice of you to come,” he said.

Edna lowered herself nervously onto the edge of the sofa, surreptitiously eyeing the furniture in the room. Some of it, she decided, was almost as nice as the things Richard had had. Probably those were things Mr. Jeffers had chosen. Surely that terrible woman he was married to couldn’t have such good taste. Now, as her eyes returned to her host, she felt her heart flutter. Though he didn’t look anything like Richard, there was so much about him that reminded her of her son. His voice, of course. The wonderful, gentle way he spoke. And his eyes, too. They weren’t really the same color as Richard’s had been, but they had the same depth—that quality of looking right inside someone—that Richard’s had.

“I just got to thinking,” she said, her fingers twisting at one of the large buttons on her dress. “You were so nice to me on the phone this morning, I just thought maybe I should talk to you instead of your wife. If I could just make you understand about Richard. You just don’t know how it hurts me when your wife writes those terrible things about him.”

He smiled. “But I do understand,” he said gently. “Believe me, I understand exactly how you feel.”

Edna Kraven brightened. “Oh, I just knew I was right about you. I just
knew
it! Do you know, you remind me of Richard. It happened the minute I heard your voice this morning. And I just had to come and meet you.”

“I’m so glad you did,” he said softly.

He studied his mother carefully. She was four years older than she’d been the last time he’d seen her, but she hadn’t changed much. The same cheap polyester clothes she’d always worn, her hair still done in that silly style she wrongly thought was so sophisticated. In combination with her heavily made-up face, it gave her the look of those over-the-hill entertainers who scraped out livings in the seedier bars in downtown Las Vegas. With the perfect analytical detachment to which he’d long ago disciplined his mind, Richard Kraven tried to analyze what it could have been about this numbingly boring woman that had inspired such love—even adoration—in his brother.

Perhaps, he thought, it was because they were so much alike.

Or perhaps it was something else entirely—perhaps there was some emotion that people of the inferior intellectual status of Rory and Edna felt that was simply foreign to someone at his own level.

“You have no idea how much it means to me that you’ve come,” he said now. “The pain you must be feeling …”

Edna reached out with doughy fingers to take the hand of this wonderful man. “You have no idea,” she breathed, her voice breaking. “You just have no idea at all. I miss my Richard so much. We used to do things together, just the two of us.” Her eyes went briefly to the front window. “That wouldn’t be your motor home out there, would it?” she asked on a wistful note. “My Richard had one, you know. He used to take me up to the mountains sometimes. Just the two of us.”

A tiny smile played around the corner of his lips. “Did he?” he asked. “Well, as it happens, that
is
my motor home out there. And just before you arrived, I was just thinking it might be fun to go up to the mountains and do a little fishing. Perhaps you’d like to go along?”

Edna Kraven flushed scarlet. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean—Well, I couldn’t possibly impose on you that way. I just—”

“But of course you’ll come with me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He stood up. “I only have a few more things to put in, and we’ll be off. We can make a picnic of it.”

While Edna Kraven waited nervously in the living room, the man who had become Richard Kraven went down to the basement. He picked up the last of the boxes he’d been transferring to the motor home.

The motor home he’d rented yesterday afternoon, using Glen Jeffers’s driver’s license and credit card.

The box already contained a gas can and a box of matches, and now he added a few more objects to it.

The Makita saw.

The electrical cord with the stripped ends, with which he’d attempted to defibrillate Heather Jeffers’s cat.

The roll of plastic he’d bought yesterday morning, just before he’d visited Rory.

With the box now packed full with everything he would need, he started back up the basement stairs. How many years had he thought about using his mother as the subject for one of his experiments? But of course it had been out of the question.

After all, he only experimented on strangers.

Circumstances, though, had changed.

Now he could see no reason not to make her his subject.

“Ready?” he asked as he paused in the foyer.

Edna Kraven, thrilled at the prospect of spending the day with this charming man who was so very much like her eldest son, heaved herself off the sofa. “One of these days, I’ve just got to lose some weight,” she trilled as she moved toward the front door.

“Not at all,” he said. “I think you’re perfect the way you are. Just perfect.”

As she walked ahead of him down the steps to the motor home waiting on the street, Richard Kraven was already planning the first cut he would make.