Nowhere Safe (10 page)

His heart started a dull pounding. For a few moments he sat with his hands on the wheel, telling himself not to go there. But she was irresistible, and feeling like he was in a dream, he slid open the driver’s door and moved toward her, his eyes scanning the surrounding area. Were there cameras? He didn’t see any, and he was pretty careful about those things. He didn’t want HER car, or anything he was about to do, captured on film.

“Hey,” he said, kneeling down to her.

She was half crying, and when she looked up, her mascara was streaked. It was a complete turnoff, but Graham wasn’t ready to give up, so he reached over and rubbed off the smudge with his thumb. “What are you doing here?” she mumbled.

“Who’s the guy you’re with?”

“Oh . . . Thomas. He’s an
ass
.” She sniffled some more.

“Do you live here?”

“No . . .” She waved an arm and let it slap down to her side.

“Can I give you a ride?”

She gazed up at him and blinked a couple of times. “Would you?”

For an answer he helped her to her feet.

 

 

“What’s this?” Jake asked, picking up the quilt with its blocks framed in lavender from where September had laid it across the back of his couch.

“It’s mine,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the way he held it away from himself and snatching it away from him. “My Meemaw made it for me.”

“Your Meemaw?”

“My grandmother.”

He held up his hands in surrender at her militant tone, then slid a look at the colorful blanket that September had folded over her arms. “Did she choose those colors?”

September looked at the lavender and smiled. “No, that was all me. Third grade I wanted everything lavender, so Meemaw used it as the main color.”

“Hmm.”

“What are you, an interior designer?”

“I just can’t picture you with such girlish tastes.” Jake’s gray eyes sparked with amusement. “You were always a tomboy with scraped knees and a bad attitude.”

“Untrue! I didn’t have a bad attitude. I just was competitive with my brother, and as an extension, all boys. But I liked lavender. And hot pink.”

“And now all you wear is black and gray.”

“Lavender and hot pink just don’t scream authority, if you know what I mean. Besides, by fourth grade I was totally into my tomboy persona and liking army green.”

“Ah, yes. That’s what I remember.”

He drew her into his arms and she closed her eyes and inhaled his scent. They’d shared hamburgers and fries he’d picked up from a local burger spot and had just finished cleaning up the kitchen together. She’d told him Auggie and Liv were on for Saturday’s move, and that’s when he’d looked around and noticed that she’d done some minor redecorating.

As they were settling down on the couch to watch television, his cell phone rang. It was on the counter and September was nearest to it, so she picked it up and looked down at the screen. “Loni,” she read, trying to keep her tone neutral as she handed him the cell.

Jake had been reaching for the phone but now his hand stopped in midair.

“You don’t want to talk to her?”

“No,”
he stressed. “Maybe I’ll just let it go to voice mail.”

They stayed frozen for several more rings, then with a growl of frustration, Jake finally grabbed the cell and pressed the TALK button. “Loni?” He listened a moment, then clicked off. “She hung up.”

Secretly September was glad. She was really trying to be adult about the whole Loni thing, but she’d never liked Jake’s ex all that much when he was dating her, and she wasn’t sure what she felt about her now that she was dating Jake. When she’d learned that Loni had been diagnosed with mental issues—bipolar being the most frequent label, though Jake seemed to think there might be something more at play—September had felt a twinge of regret that she’d had such mean thoughts about her. While she’d always kept her distance from Loni, not that it was a problem since they’d been classmates but never friends, now her relationship with Jake had kind of thrown her back into the ring with her.

She and Jake watched the television in silence together. A comedy with canned laughter was on, and when it ended, September wouldn’t have been able to tell what the plot was about for the life of her, if called upon.

“What do you think I should do?” Jake asked after long minutes had elapsed.

“About Loni? I don’t know.”

“Her mother’ll call me, if there’s a problem. She always does.”

He looked over at her and September gazed into his face and thought about how much she loved him. She didn’t say it. It wasn’t the time. He knew it anyway. But the way his eyes smiled, and the curve of his jaw and the sandpaper feel of his face all combined to fill her with awe at how much he meant to her.

“I’ll call her tomorrow,” Jake decided. “Tonight, I just want this.” The arm that had been draped loosely around her shoulders suddenly tightened.

“Me, too,” September agreed, aware that Jake’s ex was probably desperately missing moments just like these.

“Here,” he said, pulling the quilt down over them both as they stretched onto the couch together with Jake on his back and September half lying on him. Snuggled close to him and under Meemaw’s quilt, September felt secure and safe, but she had to fight a niggling feeling in the back of her head that something awful could happen to steal away her fragile happiness.

I won’t let it happen,
she told herself firmly.

She just wished she believed herself.

As they wound down the long driveway to HER house, Graham looked over at his hot little babe. Not so hot now. Just silent and staring through the windshield and looking about twelve years old. Maybe ten. Or nine, if you didn’t look too closely and just thought about the tightness of her flesh . . .

“Where are we?” she asked, when he’d parked and come around to her door, chivalrously helping her out.

“My place.”

“God, I should go home.”

Graham’s jaw tightened, but he said, “I thought we could have some more martinis . . . vodka. The bar was getting damn loud.”

“The bar . . . ? I was with Thomas. . . .” She was struggling to process. Alcohol had muddled the events of the evening.

“Thomas didn’t look like he was being nice to you.”

“He’s a prick.” She looked like she might cry again, and Graham half walked, half carried her to the back door, through the mudroom and kitchen to the hall bath. “Thought you might want to freshen up while I get the drinks.”

She nodded a couple of times and closed the bathroom door.

Graham quickly went to the liquor cupboard and found the vodka. He grabbed a pitcher of grapefruit juice from the refrigerator and then scavenged HER glassware until he found two martini glasses. Jilly would probably hardly notice the change of mixer, he decided as he poured two drinks, filling hers with vodka and a splash of grapefruit juice, pouring just grapefruit juice into his own glass. Longingly, he threw a glance at the pot of strong coffee still in its stainless steel carafe, leftover from breakfast. There was a cup or two left, but he thought it would be better if he at least pretended they were drinking together.

She came out of the bathroom looking a thousand times better. She’d scrubbed off the makeup and her face looked fresh and young.

“You saved me,” she said on a hiccup as Graham pressed the stem of her glass into her hand and picked up his own.

“A damsel in distress,” he said, clinking the edge of her glass to his. The sharp
tink
as they touched sounded like a promise. She heard it, too, and some of her earlier sassiness returned.

“What do you wanna do?” she asked, sliding him a look out of the corner of her eyes. She sipped at her drink.

Graham thought about what she would look like without her clothes and he felt almost light-headed. “C’mere,” he said, moving into her space. He put her free hand on his hard-on through his pants and she kept on drinking but her eyes sparkled. She reached out to set the martini onto the counter, but the glass hit so hard the stem shattered and most of her drink spilled over the edge and onto the floor.

“Whoops,” she said, eyes wide, but he leaned forward fast and kissed those plump lips, smashing his own mouth down on hers. “Slow down, Daddy,” she mumbled against his lips, but meanwhile she was unbuckling his pants and before Graham could think he was ripping off her clothes and his own and they were on the kitchen floor and he was pounding into her tightness just like he’d imagined, his mouth on her tiny tits.

He came so fast it was almost embarrassing. No little blue pills needed here!

She started giggling and it kinda put him off. “Couldn’t make it to the bedroom, huh?”

He pulled out of her and looked down at her childlike form. It was so good. So tight. Dragging her to her feet, he half walked, half shoved her toward the master bedroom. “Be a good girl. Get on the bed.”

“Like this?” she asked, crawling atop HER bed, her smooth ass waggling in front of his eyes. He had a vision of his semen leaking out of her onto HER comforter and he was instantly hard again. He jumped on the little bitch and took her from behind, one hand running up and down her narrow back. He threw back his head and grunted and groaned. She was so young. He couldn’t get enough.

Finally, he collapsed on her. Vaguely, he realized she wasn’t even breathing hard and a niggling doubt filled his mind. She wasn’t into it, and she should be.

Wriggling beneath him until he was forced to pull out of her, she then flopped over and looked up at him through slitted eyes. “Got a smoke, Daddy?” she asked.

Her drunkenness had passed, apparently. She’d puked up most of her last drinks and had come out sober. And she’d only had a few sips of the martini he’d fixed her before she’d broken her glass.

“No smoking,” he growled, feeling possessive of her. His mind was crowded with all kinds of wild ideas. He wanted to keep her for his very own. To have whenever he wanted. He couldn’t let Daria find out. He wanted to stay here. After he’d lost his money and had to move in with his father, he’d damn near been suffocated by the old drab house and the neediness. Luckily Dad had a part-time nurse now, so he didn’t have to do anything for him.

“I’ve got some smokes in my . . . oh, shit. I bet my purse is in Thomas’s car.” She looked dejected, then suddenly regarded him through eyes that were too knowing. “Or, maybe you’ve got something . . . smoother?”

“Like what?”

Lazily, she lifted one hand and brushed back her hair. “Oh, I don’t know. Cocaine would work.”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“I figured. You never were the type. Although you musta followed me to Thomas’s. That’s crazy, man!” she laughed.

“What do you mean, ‘I was never the type’?”

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked. When he just stared down at her, she said, “Mr. Harding, you were my sixth-grade teacher.”

His whole body went numb. Cold. Frozen with fear. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think! “You must have me mixed up with someone else,” he managed in a tight voice.

“It’s okay. I turned twenty-one last May. No one has to know I’m fucking my teacher!”

And she started laughing like a hyena, braying and braying.

So, he slapped her. Hard.

He hadn’t meant to. It just happened. The laughter ended on a cry and she gazed at him in horror, one hand flying to her injured cheek.

“You hit me,” she said in shock, her eyes wide with sudden fear.

And then she jumped off the bed and
ran
. Graham scrambled off himself, chasing her. She was naked and so was he, but she was screaming now. “Get the fuck away from me! Get
the fuck
away from me!”

He caught at her arm and she jerked away. She ran back through the kitchen to the mudroom but he grabbed her as she tried to yank open the back door. He spun her around and crowded her into the door panels. Her chest rose and fell in short, rapid gasps.

“Don’t hurt me. Please, Mr. Harding.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes were wide. She wanted to believe him. She raised a trembling hand upward and he caught it and held it tight.

“I never want to hurt you,” he gritted out, pushing her hand down toward his dick, which was already at attention again.

And she grabbed hard and yanked with all her strength. He yowled and threw her off him and then she was scrambling past him, running toward the living room, toward the entryway and the front door.

He stumbled after her, slamming a shoulder into the fireplace as he lurched around the corner from the kitchen toward the living room. One hand swept upward, to catch his balance, and he encountered the Maori figurine atop the mantel, a bronze piece of HER favorite aborigine art. Without thinking he snatched it up and ran with it held high. He got her as her hand twisted the doorknob, slamming the figurine into her skull. It made a satisfying
thunk
sound and then she went down in a heap on her back, jerked around for a few seconds, eyes open and staring upward, and then she went still.

Graham stared down at her in shock. Blood began pooling onto the entryway traverse beneath her cloud of dark hair.

Oh. Shit.
Fuck!

He was frozen. Stunned.

“Oh, God . . .”

He didn’t know how long he stood there. A moment. An eternity. But then his mind was working again, and he ran to the mudroom and into the garage, grabbing the tarp on the shelf near the door, the one Daria used to cover the bottom of the trunk every time she went to a nursery and brought home new plants or mulch or whatever for her garden.

In fact . . . Graham slid to a stop at the edge of the kitchen and the nook, casting an eye out the French doors to the backyard and beyond, to the garden. Daria’s raspberry vines stretched outward toward the acreage behind her house. There wasn’t another house for a good half mile or more in that field behind them.

He would bury her. How hard could it be? There were shovels and rakes and hoes and shit in the garden shed. He would bury the little cunt and no one would know.

Quickly, he went to the closet and grabbed his oldest jeans and a dark brown shirt, threw them on. His boots were in the garage and he ran back for them, slipping them on, aware that he was going to have to really clean them before Daria got back because she knew he never used them.

He went back to the entryway and stared down at her. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him, so he closed her eyes. Then, carefully, he wrapped her body in the tarp and hauled it onto his shoulder. He carried it toward the sliding glass door that led to the back, swiveling around to make sure she wasn’t leaving a trail of blood. Nothing. Good. He was safe. The tarp held all the blood.

He toted her out to the yard and the garden beyond, his hair lifting from the wild, spurting wind that seemed to be playing with him. He spent the next hour digging a grave deep enough that Daria wouldn’t find her, then another half hour covering the body and trying to make it seem like the ground was undisturbed. The wind could be a help, he decided, and he moved some other dirt around, trying to make it look as if the top layer of soil had been blown around.

“No one has to know that you fucked your teacher,” he said to the ground where she lay when he was finally finished. He was breathing hard and sweating like he’d been in a cardio workout.

Back inside he washed up in the shower, changed into sweats and a T-shirt, then grabbed paper towels and wiped up the blood on the entryway traverse, examining it closely when he was finished. Was there any trace left? Probably. Worried, he went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of bleach from underneath the sink, then he took the bottle back to the entry and poured a circle onto the tiles. Carefully, paper towels in each hand, he wiped down the small space again, making sure he didn’t get the bleach on the living room carpet that butted up to it. When he was finished he examined that edge of carpet fibers with critical eyes, recalling when he’d slammed the figurine into Jilly’s head she’d gone down by the far wall. There was no blood spatter on the walls, as far as he could see, but he wiped them down, too, just in case.

The figurine was another matter. He took it to the kitchen sink and poured water over it. He wasn’t sure what bleach might do to the finish, so he left that alone. He dried it off, then carefully put it back on the mantel.

Next, he went out back and turned on the hose, rinsing off the boots that he’d left by the sliders. He then wiped them down with more paper towels and put them back in the garage.

What to do with the bloody paper towels? They were the only evidence he needed to get rid of. Daria had a fireplace, but it was never used. In fact, she’d placed candles on a metal framework inside the firebox as fucking art.

He wasn’t going to put them in the trash. No way. He had to get them far away from the house. So thinking, he pulled out a gallon-sized plastic bag and shoved the paper towels inside. He would take them to some public trash can. Take them out of the plastic bag to hasten decomposition, before tossing them in. Better yet, spread them out. One or two at one place, another somewhere else.

No way to trace them back to him.

Letting his breath out slowly, he suddenly felt better. He’d wait until the dead of night, when there was no one about, then he’d hit a couple of parks where people walked their dogs and put all that dog shit they collected in baggies into the trash cans. He’d shove the paper towels in there, too.

With time to kill, he decided to brew a pot of coffee. As he watched the dark fluid drip into the pot, he tried to remember the girl’s full name. Jilly? Short for Gillian? Or, was she just Jill, and Jilly was a nickname? She was twenty-one, so it had been about ten years since she’d been his student. He felt he could almost remember her, but it escaped him. He was sick with relief that he hadn’t left the bar with her. No one could know.

With faintly shaking fingers, he poured himself a large cup of coffee. His mug was the biggest in the house and Daria often teased him about it. As he drank it down, there was a little hum running under his skin, like an engine that hadn’t been shut off. Adrenaline working overtime.

Vaguely, he realized he was recalling the moment that he’d slammed the figurine into her head. Screwing her had been delicious, but killing her had been, well, better. He couldn’t stop thinking of how he’d felt when the statue had connected with her skull, the power that coursed through him as she collapsed. The scenario ran over and over in his mind, and for just a moment, he let himself think about having another girl.... Maybe this one could be just a little bit younger....
Molly!

No, not Molly. Never Molly.

But someone . . . that he could maybe keep around for a while. Just for a while.

His blood ran cold when he thought about what would happen if he were ever found out. Maybe he wouldn’t keep her around after all.

Dead girls told no tales.