Heartstopper (31 page)

And then it was chaos.

Cal Hamilton, whom Kerri had always considered cute in a thuggish sort of way, and Delilah, looking especially lumpish in her unflattering denim cutoffs, had exchanged heated accusations and denials, eventually waking up the sleeping giant that was Rose, who began yelling down from her upstairs bedroom, ordering everyone to shut the hell up. When it came to intimidation, Kerri thought, not without a trace of admiration, no man could hold a candle to her mother.

Delilah and Kerri had raced upstairs as Cal began taking the downstairs rooms apart, tossing heavy furniture aside as if it were weightless, then tearing through the kitchen and the hall closet before bounding up the stairs and bursting into Kerri’s bedroom. She’d managed to shout out only a few words to the sheriff before Cal had furiously slapped the phone from her hand. Hopefully John was on his way. With any luck he’d get here before Cal did any real damage.

Her mother and daughter had locked themselves in Rose’s room, but all it would take was a few swift kicks from Cal’s black leather boots to bring the door crashing down. Unless Delilah had managed to push her mother’s heavy dresser from its place against the wall opposite Rose’s bed to barricade the door. Which was entirely possible. Her daughter was hardly a delicate flower, and all that extra weight should be good for something, Kerri thought, then immediately felt guilty. It wasn’t right to have such unkind thoughts about your own flesh and blood. Although it was hardly surprising. She was her mother’s daughter after all.

“Last time, Kerri,” Cal warned now. “Where the fuck is she?”

“Last time, moron,” Kerri answered steadily. “I have no fucking idea.”

It was then that he hit her, a hard smack across the face with his open palm that sent her sprawling across the top of her billowing white comforter. Kerri didn’t move. She was thinking that she should have seen it coming. She’d been in situations like this before, tense standoffs with drunken men who weren’t above using their fists to win an argument. Her first husband had beaten her so badly when she was pregnant with Delilah that he’d sent her to the hospital with two cracked ribs and a fractured wrist. Six months after their daughter’s birth, another beating had broken Kerri’s nose.

The first of her cosmetic procedures, she thought now, reaching up to feel that Cal hadn’t damaged anything. What was taking John so long? And why wasn’t Delilah coming to her rescue? Surely she could hear what was going on. Surely she knew her mother was in trouble. Surely if she’d actually been able to drag the dresser in front of the bedroom door, she could push it away again.

And then Kerri heard her daughter’s halting, little-girl voice ordering Cal to step back, and miraculously, she felt
him comply. “Hey, girl,” she heard him say. “Don’t do anything stupid now.” And when she turned her head and looked toward the bedroom door, she saw Delilah standing there, her arms extended, a gun at the end of her trembling fingers.

“Get your hands up in the air,” Delilah ordered, and again Cal did as he was told. “Are you all right?” Delilah asked her mother.

Kerri nodded. “Sheriff Weber’s on his way.” Where on earth had Delilah gotten a gun?

“Look, just tell me where my wife is and I’ll get out of your hair,” Cal offered, as if his visit were nothing more than a pesky intrusion.

“How many times do we have to tell you we don’t know where she is?” Kerri said.

“She knows,” Cal insisted, staring at the weapon in Delilah’s hand. “She was there today. My neighbor saw her.”

“What are you talking about?” Kerri glanced back at her daughter.

“I
was
there,” Delilah confirmed. “I was there yesterday too. Just like I was supposed to be. I knocked. I rang the bell. Nobody answered.”

“You’re a lying bitch.”

“What have you done to her?” Delilah asked, her voice so low her words were barely audible.

“What have I done to her?” Cal repeated incredulously, swaying from one foot to the other. “I haven’t done anything to her, you stupid cow. At least not yet.”

“Don’t move,” Delilah warned. “I’ll shoot you if you take another step.” Several tears escaped her eyes to fall the length of her cheek.

Could Delilah do it? Kerri wondered. Could her daughter actually shoot another human being?

Cal’s abrupt laugh answered the question for her. “Who are you kidding, lard-ass? You’re not going to shoot
anybody.” He pushed past Delilah and was down the stairs before the trembling girl had figured out how to remove the safety catch. The front door slammed shut behind him.

“Oh, my God,” Kerri wailed, hearing his car squeal out of their driveway. “Give me that before you kill somebody.” She grabbed the gun from her daughter’s shaking hands. “Where did you get this thing?”

“It’s mine,” Rose announced, suddenly appearing in the doorway, clutching her green chenille bathrobe to her chest. “Give it to me.”

Her mother had a gun? What the hell was going on? “Since when have you had a gun?”

“It was your father’s.”

“Do you have a license for it?”

“How do I know?” Rose asked impatiently.

Kerri dropped the gun into her mother’s outstretched hand. What a night this was turning out to be. First Ian had canceled their date without explanation, then Cal Hamilton had shown up at her door and torn the house apart, then her daughter had turned into John Dillinger, and now her mother was making like Ma Barker. “You’d better hide it before the sheriff gets here.”

“What difference does it make?” Rose said dismissively. “It’s not loaded.”

“It’s not loaded?” Delilah asked.

“Of course not. Don’t be stupid.”

“Just put the damn thing away, will you?” Kerri watched Rose shuffle back to her room. It was amazing that after all these years her mother still had the ability to astound her.

“Are you all right?” Delilah asked. “Did he hurt you?”

“No. He’s not nearly as tough as your daddy was.” Kerri held out her arms. Delilah rushed into them, almost knocking her over. “Thank you, sweetie. You were very brave.” She kissed her daughter’s forehead, tasted the
nervous perspiration that clung to her skin. Delilah’s arms snaked around her, tightening their grip with each breath. Kerri quickly extricated herself from her daughter’s painful grasp, began smoothing down the hair extensions that had become messed during the fracas.

“He killed her,” Delilah whispered. “I know he did.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Kerri protested. “I mean, why would he come over here, tearing up the place looking for her, if he killed her?”

“To throw us off the scent.”

“Dear God. What an imagination you’ve got. You think he killed Liana too?” Kerri joked, trying to laugh. But the laugh died in her throat when she saw the look on her daughter’s face. “I think you’ve been watching too much television,” Kerri said. “You honestly think Cal Hamilton is a serial killer?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he killed Liana to make it look that way.”

The doorbell rang.

“Your knight in shining armor has arrived,” her mother called out from across the hall.

“Did you put the gun away?” Kerri asked as she walked past her room.

“What gun?” Rose asked from her bed.

“I could use a drink,” Kerri said.

“Something you’re not telling me?” John asked as Kerri was walking him to his car some forty minutes later. They’d gone over the events of the evening several times in those forty minutes, and he’d questioned both her mother and daughter about what had happened. Nobody had mentioned the gun. Was that what he was referring to?

“I’m pretty sure we told you everything.”

He nodded, although the expression on his face said he wasn’t sure he believed her. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” Even in the dark, Kerri was aware of the sheriff’s eyes on her body as she moved, and she casually increased the already exaggerated sway of her hips. She knew how John Weber felt about her, that he’d been lusting after her since the sixth grade, even before she
had
hips, for God’s sake. Certainly before she had breasts, she thought, pulling her shoulders back and pushing her twice-augmented bosom forward.

She didn’t even remember what her own breasts looked like anymore. She just remembered her mother’s scalding assessment of their inadequacies. “Flat as a pancake,” her mother had repeatedly pronounced. “You better find a guy who likes pancakes.” There were the constant put-downs, the continual comparisons to her sisters that all but guaranteed their future estrangement. “Ruthie has such lovely breasts,” her mother often said. “She gets them from me. Unfortunately, you and Lorraine take after your father’s side of the family, although at least Lorraine has nice legs.”

Kerri ran her hands along her once-heavy thighs. A lot of lunges and a little liposuction had leveled the playing field rather nicely, although the principal players had long since left the field. Both of Kerri’s sisters had managed to escape their mother: Ruthie had moved to California a decade ago, calling only when she needed money for another stint in rehab. Lorraine had taken the easy way out and died.

Kerri glanced back at the house, saw her mother watching her from her bedroom window. She’s just waiting for us
all
to die and then she can die happy, she thought.

“I’ll station someone out front,” John offered as they reached his cruiser. “Until I get Cal into custody.”

“I appreciate that.” Kerri listened as John phoned in his request for a deputy. He’d always taken such good care of her, she was thinking as he returned his cell phone to the
pocket of his pants. He’d liked her in all her various incarnations: flat or busty, thin or lush-lipped, chunky-thighed or chiseled. And he was a good, surprisingly agile lover. Too bad their timing had always been slightly off, that she’d married three losers, two of them named Danny, that he’d married that witch Pauline. And while Kerri had eventually turfed all her husbands out on their ears, she knew John Weber, for all his ostensible bravado, would never work up the courage to leave his wife.

Why was she even thinking such thoughts? She and John Weber hadn’t been lovers for years. She hadn’t even thought of him in those terms since the night she’d turned on her computer and found herself engaged in suggestively witty banter with a successful, if disenchanted, doctor from upstate New York. Pretty soon they were exchanging photos and phone numbers, then actually meeting in Miami for the first of several trysts. During their second rendezvous, he’d confessed what her mother already suspected: he was married. But her mother, far from chewing her out about the futility of carrying on another dead-end relationship with a married man, was suddenly advising her on how best to get her false nails hooked even deeper inside the doctor’s pliant flesh. “Give him the blow job of his dreams,” she’d pronounced in most unmotherly terms. After their next passionate encounter, the good doctor had announced his intention to relocate to Torrance. Five months after he’d set up his new practice, Rose had told her daughter to pull the plug on their relationship. “One more blow, then out you go,” she’d rhymed with a cold smile, as if she were Johnnie Cochran delivering his final summation to the jury in the O. J. Simpson trial.
If the glove doesn’t fit
… Kerri’s swollen lips had worked one last miracle, then she’d tearfully bid the man of her mother’s dreams adieu. And waited. Six weeks later, Ian Crosbie had walked out on his wife and
family. Rose had assured her it was only a matter of time until he proposed.

“You’re not seeing Dr. Crosbie tonight?” John asked, as if reading at least part of her thoughts.

“Not tonight,” Kerri said, thinking she detected a hint of something in John’s tired eyes, as if he knew something she didn’t. “We’re not joined at the hip, you know.” Where was Ian tonight anyway? she wondered. He hadn’t offered any reason for breaking their date, other than that he’d had a hard day and wanted to get to bed early. Kerri had thought of paying him a surprise visit, but she’d always hated surprises herself. They had a nasty way of backfiring. “So what’s the next step?” she asked, blaming the incident with Cal for her growing sense of unease.

“Think I’ll go pay Cal Hamilton a little visit.”

“You think he went home?”

John shrugged. “Wherever he is, I’ll find him.”

“What do you suppose happened to his wife?”

“Too early to say.”

“You think she ran off?”

“Maybe.”

Kerri shook her head in mounting frustration. When had John Weber become so damned circumspect? One of the things she’d always liked about him was that he was so uncomplicated. “Do you think Delilah could be right about him?” she ventured, reluctant to see him leave.

“Do I think Cal’s a serial killer?”

“Do
you?”

“Guess I’ll have to find out.” He opened the cruiser door, climbed into the front seat, and turned on the car’s engine.

“John …”

The car window lowered with a push of a button. “An officer will be here any minute. You sure you don’t want me to drive you to a hospital?”

“No, I’m okay. I know a good doctor.”

John threw the car into gear. “Get back in the house and lock the door,” he directed. “Don’t open it for anybody until you hear from me.”

“What if you don’t find him?”

“Go on inside,” John said again, pointing toward the upstairs bedroom. “You don’t want to give your mother heart palpitations.”

Kerri sighed, a sigh that said, Don’t be so sure, and John smiled, which made Kerri want to reach in and kiss him, but she didn’t. Rose was obviously watching their every move, and the last thing Kerri wanted was to reactivate her mother’s venomous tongue. Rose had been much less critical of her since she’d started seeing Ian. True, she’d transferred some of that poison to Delilah, but Delilah was somehow able to slough off her unkind remarks in a way that Kerri had never been able to do. Besides, maybe her mother’s harsh barbs were what Delilah needed to spur her on, get her thinking about her weight, her hair, her
everything
, Kerri thought, returning to the house. Didn’t the girl ever want to go out on a date? Didn’t she want a boyfriend? Didn’t she want to have sex? Kerri shuddered. The last thing she needed to be thinking about right now was her daughter having sex.