Chasing Venus (50 page)

“Hardly.
 
I think you’re overrated, as every new
literary sensation is.
 
That was one
point on which Maggie and I agreed.”
 
Annie heard the mattress creak again and realized Charles had stood
up.
 
“Are you trying to engage me in
conversation?
 
To delay the
inevitable?
 
Fat lot of good it will
do you.”
 
She heard his voice grow
fainter, as if he had moved across the room.
 
“I would have thought an admired writer
like yourself would make some effort to avoid the clichéd.”

What was he doing?
 
No doubt making the final preparations
for injecting her with curare.
 
It
was such a vicious poison that very little was required to kill.
 
All Charles had to do was stab her with
some sort of syringe and the curare would flow into her bloodstream and begin
its deadly work.
 
Within minutes,
seconds even, her muscles one by one would paralyze.
 
Yet her consciousness would not fail
until her last breath, and, if the horror stories were true, her heart would
beat even past her suffocation.

Annie felt desperation
claw at her like a drowning man.
 
“You were right about Reid Gardner before, you know.
 
He has been sheltering me.
 
And he knows where I am.
 
He knows I came here.”

“Whether he knows you’re
here or not, he’s engaged in pursuits of his own.
 
That much is clear from what you told me
earlier.”

“My point is you’ll
never get away with killing me.
 
Reid will show up here.
 
And
he’ll have the FBI in tow.
 
They’ll
find what they need to convict you of murder.”

“They won’t investigate
me in any way.
 
They have no cause
to suspect me.
 
Why do you think I
went to the extra trouble of framing you?
 
Even if they do show up, which I seriously doubt, all evidence of you
will be long gone.”

Annie said nothing.
 
She feared her voice would tremble if
she spoke and she was determined to betray no weakness.

“Aren’t you curious
what I intend to do with you after the curare has worked its magic?” Charles
asked.
 
“I plan to dump your
body.
 
Our proximity to the Pacific
is extremely convenient for that sort of thing.
 
And it so happens I have a small
boat.
 
You passed it on the
driveway, hitched to the SUV.
 
I
like to go salmon fishing.
 
Have for
years.
 
No one will think a thing of
it if I go a mile or two offshore.
 
And with your corpse weighted down as it will be, well …”
 
He paused as if to allow fresh dread to
wash over her, which indeed it did.
 
“Let’s just say I’m not concerned that your body will come back to haunt
me, so to speak.”

Annie felt her last
hope slide away from her like a raindrop down a windowpane.
 
She cursed herself for what she had
thought was such a clever tactic, appealing to Charles
Waring
for help.
 
“Why did you tell the
reporters that you didn’t believe I committed the murders?
 
It doesn’t make sense both to frame me
and to argue for my innocence.”

“Oh, I was having a
spot of fun.”
 
Charles’s voice
sounded closer now.
 
Annie realized
with a fresh surge of panic that he stood right outside the closet.
 
“The reporters are as much drooling idiots
as the police.
 
Allow an aging man
his moments of pleasure.”

She had a frantic
moment of wondering whether Charles was referring to his past sound bite for
the TV cameras or the imminent thrill of dispatching yet another victim when
the closet doors began to shudder.
 
He was moving away whatever he had used to jam the door.
 
Her only chance to survive was to keep
him from stabbing her with his deadly syringe.

A second later Annie
knew the door obstruction was gone.
 
She didn’t think; she acted.
 
She hurtled forward and slammed into the door with every ounce of might
she possessed.
 
Pain shot through
her shoulder as she connected with the wood.
 
The door flew outward then ricocheted
off something—Charles? A chair?—and smashed back into her as she
barreled head first out of the closet.

She toppled onto the
hardwood floor, aware of Charles inches away armed with the needle primed to
kill her.
 
She rolled onto her back,
aware she had no time to clamber to her feet.
 
Charles was standing so close to her
kicking ankles, so close … In the silver moonlight filtering through the
bedroom window, she caught a glint of syringe.

The iron she’d found in
the closet felt heavy in her hands.
 
On her ass, scrabbling clumsily backward on the hardwood, she drew upon
all those years she’d pitched softballs from the mound and hurled the iron
upward toward Charles’s head.

Instinctively he raised
his hands to protect his face.
 
The
iron shot through the air, its electric cord trailing like a whip.
 
Annie saw the iron glance off Charles’s
right forearm, inches from the hand that was wielding the syringe.
 
She thought her heart would stop as she
saw the iron crash harmlessly onto the floor.
 
But the sound that arrested her
attention, that stalled her in place, came from Charles.

His face red, his
expression horrified, he whimpered, and stared as if mesmerized at his left
forearm.
 
He staggered
backward.
 
The syringe fell out of
his hand and dropped to the hardwood, where it skittered across the floor.
 
He turned bulging eyes in Annie’s
direction, then took a gulping breath.
 
“You made me stab myself in the arm,” he said.

Annie scrambled to her
feet.
 
She kicked the syringe far
beneath the bed, once again grabbed the iron, and backed several feet away from
Charles.

He looked back at his forearm
and muttered those words again, every syllable bathed in disbelief.
 
“I stabbed myself in the arm.”

Annie kept her
distance, her heart pounding a chaotic rhythm.
 
She wasn’t sure this wasn’t some
trick.
 
Yet Charles seemed beyond
another menacing move.
 
He tottered
another foot or two, then his legs gave way and he collapsed onto the hardwood.

The guest house fell
strangely silent.
 
Outside the
window the moon shed light upon the earth.
 
Annie realized with some amazement that she was still among the living.

Her heartbeat
thundering in her ears, Annie clutched the iron and slowly, very slowly, inched
forward, ready to bolt at any sudden maneuver Charles might make.
 
That seemed less likely by the moment.
 
Now his body was contorted in a fetal
position, and his face reflected a crazy brew of agony, astonishment, and
confusion.
 
A thin breathy whine
escaped his lips.

There was an antidote
to curare, Annie had read.
 
Deep in
the recesses of her memory, she recalled stories of how nineteenth-century
scientists kept curare-stricken animals alive by artificial respiration.
 
The animals could even survive with no
ill effect.

This man on the floor
had butchered Michael, slashed him to death in a burst of malevolence she could
hardly fathom.
 
Maggie, Seamus, Elizabeth,
too, he had killed.
 
He had hunted
Annie for weeks, made her life hell, would have slain her as well if she hadn’t
managed to fight back.
 
Now he lay
dying, a fate he richly deserved.

Annie knew she might
have the power to save him.
 
If she
acted before the paralysis spread to his lungs.

Her decision wasn’t
instant, or automatic, but she chose the path she believed she would not
regret.
 
She flattened Charles out
on the floor, tilted back his head, pinched his nostrils, and forced herself to
put her mouth against his.
 
She
breathed into him, time and again, keeping him alive, pulling away when his
chest was full of air, returning with another deep breath when he needed it.
 
Once she ran to the phone on the bedside
table to call 911, warning the dispatcher of a second case of curare poisoning
at the
Waring
estate.
 
She was fully aware this would summon
the police to her side.
 
Now she was
ready to face them.

In the early afternoon
of a Tuesday in May, hours after Charles
Waring
had
been revealed as a serial murderer, Sheila was out of custody and in Reid’s
home.
 
She stared at the man she
loved across the suburban expanse of his living room and understood that she
had finally, irretrievably, lost him.
 
Not that she had ever had him.
 
Not really.

As of that morning,
Annette Rowell had metamorphosed from serial-killer suspect to hero.
 
Charles
Waring
had transformed from grieving widower to madman killer.
 
Now Reid Gardner leaned forward on his
sofa with his forearms resting on his thighs, restored to his persona of
righteous crime fighter.
 
He had
been right all along about the pretty brunette writer and now everybody knew
it.
 
His golden gut had been
burnished to an even higher sheen.
 
To a less practiced eye, nothing about Reid appeared different.
 
But Sheila, who knew him well, grasped
that something about him had changed, and profoundly so.

She watched him shake
his head as if dumbfounded.
 
“I just
can’t get over what she did.”

He was speaking about
Annette Rowell.
 
Still.
 
As he had been for the last hour.

“Most people would have
let
Waring
die.
 
After what he did?”
 
Reid
raised his head to meet Sheila’s gaze.
 
She had the idea he wanted her to dispute him just so he could continue
arguing the point.
 
Yet she nodded
in agreement.
 
What he said was
undeniably true.
 
“But Annie?
 
No.
 
She gave him effing artificial respiration to keep him alive.
 
I can’t get over it.
 
It’s unbelievable.”

Annette Rowell had been
vilified, and now she was glorified.
 
That was how it went sometimes.
 
Sheila had seen it before.
 
And, she had to admit, the praise was warranted.
 
It was simply that it pained her to
witness such admiration on Reid’s face, in his voice, when he spoke of a woman
who wasn’t her.

Then again, she told
herself, maybe it was a blessing in disguise.
 
Her heart was very stubborn when it came
to Reid.
 
Maybe, to persuade it once
and for all that he would never return her love, what her heart needed was
incontrovertible evidence, evidence so overwhelming her head couldn’t argue it
away.
 
That dazed expression he now
wore while speaking of Annette Rowell might just do the trick.

“When do you expect her
to be free to go?” Sheila asked.

Reid glanced at his
watch.
 
“Lionel told me they should
done with her interview by three.”

Sheila knew what would
happen then.
 
The lovers would be
reunited, the path before them free and clear.
 
Sheila would make sure to be gone from
Reid’s house when that happened.

She rose to her
feet.
 
“I could do with some
coffee.”
 
She pointed toward the
kitchen.
 
“How about you?
 
Shall I go make some?”

He nodded and she
escaped to the kitchen.
 
It was a
whole new sensation, this wanting to be separated from Reid.
 
Maybe it, too, was a good thing.

Sheila busied her hands
with the grinder, the coffeepot, the beans, the filtered water.
 
Reid had already filled her in on the
evidence the police had begun to compile against Charles
Waring
.
 
It sounded like there was plenty to
indict him on multiple murder charges.
 
In the fullness of time, he might well find himself on death row facing
a lethal injection whose course no savior would interrupt.

Annette Rowell, of
course, would be the star witness at his trial.
 
All of her books would vault to the top
of the bestsellers charts, if they weren’t there already.
 
Sheila had no doubt that Rowell’s
personal life would prove phenomenally blessed as well.

Sheila heard Reid move
about in the living room, then tap the keys on his computer keyboard.
 
She remained in the kitchen to watch a
thin line of coffee stream into the glass pot.