Enchanted Again (5 page)

But in spite of her earlier wish and the powerful passion she had felt, Pansy was profoundly relieved when it was over, and in the very next instant she was filled with so much remorse that she burst into tears. She struggled to remove herself from the sword handle, which had suddenly become excruciatingly painful. Jack helped her off the statue and pulled her close to him.

“Hey!” he said, genuinely concerned over her distress, which was nearing hysteria. “Pansy, its okay,” he kept trying to soothe her, but he was at a loss for words. He wrapped her up in his arms and pulled her down onto the bed. He held her pressed so close to him that she had to struggle to breathe. His body remained aroused and hard, but he simply held her. “I’m sorry, Pansy.”

She looked up at him, momentarily shocked out of her grief by his apology. Her surprised expression amused him. He kissed her tenderly, but then more passionately as her arms slipped up around his neck. And then she was lost all over again in her desire for this man she hardly knew, except that he wanted her for whatever reason.

Later, Pansy put her clothes on in silence. She perceived Jack’s annoyance over her obvious regret.

“When can I see you again?” he asked impatiently. It suddenly occurred to Pansy that he was perhaps as unnerved by his desire to see her again as she was by her own.

“I don’t know,” she replied evasively.

“I see,” Jack replied, failing to keep the irritation out of his voice. He was silent for a moment, and then, “I guess if I get bored I’ll always have the videos.”

Pansy stopped dressing and looked at him. “Don’t worry…” He smiled at her. “They’re for my eyes only.”

Pansy stared at him. She felt a wave of nausea so powerful that she could taste the bile in her mouth. When he first mentioned a video, it seemed easy to believe it could have been a joke. Or perhaps it was easy for her to believe that with her desire for him looming over her like a shroud. But now, in the aftermath of that desire, with him bringing it up a second time, it seemed certain.

When the nausea passed, Pansy turned away from him and picked up the last of her clothing, dressing as quickly as she could. Then without a word she walked to the door and turned the knob.

“Pansy, I was kidding,” she heard Jack say. She opened the door and walked out into the hallway. “Pansy!”

She continued walking down the hall and out of the building.

The instant she reached her car, Pansy dissolved into tears.
Why did I do it?
she kept asking herself. She wondered why every decision she ever made in her life had to carry with it such a high price. She continued in this vein of self-recrimination and self-pity until the tears were depleted. Then, once the despair receded she turned to anger.

What right, she raged inwardly, did people have to always take advantage of her? Jack, like Tom, had immediately assumed that because she was amenable she was weak. Why did everyone always have to try to get one over on her? She was filled to overflowing with impotent rage and suddenly Jack’s taunt about the video recalled itself to her mind. In the next instant something peculiar happened. It seemed to Pansy that everything suddenly stopped. It lasted only a second or two, but it definitely stopped, leaving the hairs on the back of her neck tingling with life. The silence of it startled her. Afterward she might have thought she had imagined it, except that Pansy was certain that something had shifted in the interim. She struggled to pinpoint what happened.

Driving home, Pansy slowly realized that she was now looking
in
at herself from the outside, as well as
out
of herself from the inside, both at the same time. It was as if she was seeing her life from two different perspectives. She was suddenly filled with a strange calm as her thoughts began to collect themselves, seemingly of their own accord. All at once she perceived that she had other choices, choices that were already formulating into plans inside her mind. By the time she arrived home she was at ease with her thoughts.

Tom had once again arrived home before her. As on the previous night, he was talking to someone on the telephone in his study. She felt an odd sense of déjà vu that clashed momentarily with the parallel minds that were at war within her consciousness. The sound of Tom’s voice, which usually caused her skin to prickle and twinge was tonight not nearly so bothersome, perhaps due to her preoccupation. She stepped into the doorway of his office and looked inside. A little rush of adrenaline trickled through her when she saw him, and she realized this was a result of the plans that were formulating in her mind.

“How’s the case coming?” she asked him, smiling in secret and snuggling more cozily within her blanket of loathing. Her voice sounded a tad shrill in her state of overexcitedness. She felt strangely disconnected to everything around her as she tentatively sampled the role her parallel mind was creating.

“I’m getting nowhere,” Tom complained with a sigh, scarcely noticing her. “If there isn’t a break in the case soon, that son of a bitch is going to walk.”

“Hmm,” she said, trying to keep the joy out of her voice. “That’s too bad.” She was aware of a sense of being slightly off-kilter, but she was too excited about the drama that was—or was not—unfolding—she was becoming more and more unclear about which of these it was—and the things she would—or would not—do. Even so, to simply play along, for the time being, with these contemplations as they evolved within her consciousness and its parallel minds filled her with giddy excitement. She fairly skipped up the stairs and into their bedroom, where she went directly to her husband’s secret hiding place and reverently pulled out his handgun. The icy steel of the gun, rather than bringing her abruptly to her senses, actually intensified the sense of unreality that was all around her. An alarm did sound in the farther-back reaches of her consciousness, but the madness that had consumed her was stronger, and it seemed to gain strength from the certainty of cold, heavy metal in her hands. A hysterical laugh welled up in her throat as she felt another surge of adrenaline run through her.
This isn’t really happening,
she thought.

Even so, Pansy flipped the cylinder and checked to see if there were bullets inside. There were. Next she noticed the silencer in the gun case and was surprised by how easy it was to attach it to the gun. She pulled out an overnight bag that she kept under the bed, and placed the gun inside it, along with a pair of Tom’s shoes and various articles of his clothing. When the overnight bag was stocked with these things she slid it back under the bed and waited.

“I think I’m going to go downstairs and read for a while,” she told Tom several hours later. They were lying side by side in their bed. Tom was nearly asleep but Pansy was wide awake.

“Sure,” he mumbled from beneath the covers. Pansy quietly slid the overnight bag out from under the bed and took it downstairs with her.

Less than thirty minutes later, she found herself staring thoughtfully at Jack’s house from the inside of Tom’s idling four-wheel drive. She knew for certain now that Jack had made those morning visits to her coffee shop solely for the purpose of seeking her out, for in examining his file on Tom’s desk she discovered that he lived and worked all the way across town, with too many coffee shops in between them to count.

An excess of adrenaline was soaring through Pansy’s bloodstream, giving her an almost supernatural sense of self. She barely noticed any discomfort or awkwardness as she went through the motions like a person in a dream, although everything all around her seemed foreign and unnatural. She had put Tom’s shirt and pants on right over her clothing, and stuffed her feet into his shoes with her own shoes still on. She drove Tom’s car without altering a single thing, not even adjusting the seat, making it so she had to sit on the very edge of it in order to reach the pedals. She performed all of these activities at the direction of her parallel mind, like an actor playing out a role in which the director has every last detail planned out, and she did all this without being fully cognizant of where it all was leading and without knowing if she would actually carry it through to the end.

Pansy pulled Tom’s cap down low on her forehead as she quietly stepped out of his car. In spite of the layers of ill-fitting clothing, she moved as stealthily as a spider across the street and toward Jack’s house. It was dark inside except for a dim light coming from one of the windows. Pansy walked instinctively toward the darkest side of the house, approaching it as if she had been there before. She strode cautiously along that side of it and then around the corner, careful to make her steps consistent and natural. She peered into the windows as she went. When she came upon the back door she reached out a gloved hand, prepared to attempt the lock with a master key she took from Tom’s police key chain, but when she grasped the doorknob and turned, it was already unlocked. She smiled, realizing suddenly that Jack would not bother locking his doors, his reasoning likely being that if someone was determined to get in, they would do so. And, of course, he was perfectly right.

Pansy closed the door soundlessly behind her. She could hear television voices in the near distance. She pulled Tom’s gun out from the waistband of her pants and flipped off the safety switch as she tiptoed through Jack’s house, keeping the gun semi hidden at her side. The adrenaline flooding her system left no room for other emotions, except a lingering sense of unreality for everything around her. She looked around the dark rooms with mild interest as she moved onward, wondering absently what would happen next. She moved in the direction of the sounds coming from the television.

He was asleep. Pansy could see that immediately from the way he was slumped in his chair, even though he was facing away from her. She approached him slowly, expecting him to jump out at her in the next instant. But Jack didn’t move, not even when she stood directly in front of him, staring at him. From deep within her she could feel stirrings of desire, but that was in her other mind. She waited for him to sense her presence and wake up, but he did not.

“Jack,” she whispered at last. When this failed to rouse him she repeated it louder. “Jack!” There was a ringing in her ears. She kept the gun hidden at her side, although she now wished she did not have it. It seemed terribly heavy and burdensome all of a sudden.

Jack jerked awake at the sound of her voice. “Wha…Pansy?” He looked surprised, but not annoyed to see her. He stared at her in wonder. “What are you doing here, Pansy?” His voice was husky from sleep, and Pansy felt another wave of desire. His waking eyes were now taking in the strange clothes and oversize shoes. His expression went from wonder to uncertainty and he started to get up, but Pansy brought the gun from her side and pointed it at him.

Jack actually laughed; a spontaneous burst that lasted only a split second. “Pansy?” His voice was high with disbelief, but the smile was slowly fading from his face. “Is this a joke?”

“You mean, am I
teasing
you?” she asked with meaning. He didn’t have to pretend not to know what she was referring to. Dawning came slowly, but she waited patiently without elaborating.

“Pansy, I swear to you,” he said, completely serious now, “I would never, ever do that. There’s no video.”

“Did you kill your wife?” she asked him abruptly. It was the first time she really thought about it and she was curious. In the bizarre frame of mind she was in, it seemed more relevant than it had been when she was her other self.

“No, Pansy, I did not kill my wife,” he said wearily.

She was becoming painfully aware of her finger on the trigger of the gun, and revulsion was quickly replacing her earlier rush of adrenaline. She realized suddenly that she could not kill Jack after all. In fact, her parallel mind had unexpectedly disappeared and now she was all alone with the horror of her situation. Jack seemed to comprehend some of this from her expression and he sagged back down in his chair in relief, although the gun was still pointed at him.

“Christ, Pansy,” he said weakly. “I would never have said those things if I’d known they’d hurt you so much.” She was staggered by the genuine compassion in his tone. She would have fully expected him to be angry, or perhaps even try to hurt her. Her earlier anger had by now dissolved into nothingness, as did all her previous angers. And yet they still lingered dormant inside her, unrecognized and unavenged. Pansy was immobilized with despair and uncertainty. She looked into Jack’s troubled eyes and she felt a jolt from deep within her that caused her entire body to stiffen, including her finger that had remained on the trigger. The gun suddenly went off with a resounding
thunk.
Without even aiming, Pansy had shot Jack directly in the chest.

For the third time in two days, Pansy cried bitter tears of anguish and remorse, lamenting what she had done and issuing promises into the stifling air around her. One moment she was bemoaning her misfortunes and the next raging against the forces that seemed forever to be working against her. Eventually, as always, her thoughts came back around to Tom; fat, loathsome, useless Tom. Always her grief led her back to him.

But even as she stirred up her ongoing resentment of Tom, it suddenly occurred to her that something was different this time. She came alert with a newborn hope. Was it possible that she had fixed Tom once and for all? Her mind put all the events of the night together neatly and concisely as she quietly drove his car into their garage. It was Tom’s car that had driven to—and quite possibly had been seen at or in the vicinity of—Jack’s house. It was Tom’s shoes that made footprints all around Jack’s house, Tom’s gun that fired the shot into Jack’s heart, and bullets marked from Tom’s gun that ultimately killed Jack. It wouldn’t even be a lie when she told the police that she didn’t know for certain whether or not Tom had remained home that night, having spent the night in the den where she had supposedly gone to read. Even if Jack had taped videos of their affair, which she doubted now, they would only add to Tom’s motive and further explain his hatred for John Foreman. He had been obsessed with the man, and it would not be hard to prove that he had killed him.