One Summer (34 page)

“Johnny does not ‘go off.’ And he would never hurt me.”

“Johnny,” Rob said bitterly. “Rachel, you fool! I was going to marry you!”

Rachel ran her eyes over him from the top of his neatly groomed head to the bottom of his shined wingtips. Her gaze missed nothing on the way. Without regret, she absorbed the maturely attractive face, the conservative suit, the correct tie, the aura of affluence that he emanated. Rob was the very embodiment of the husband she had made up her mind she wanted. Only now it seemed her dreams had changed.

“I don’t think we would have suited each other very well, Rob,” Rachel said, with more gentleness than he perhaps deserved after all his unkind remarks about Johnny. But it was not Rob’s fault that under Johnny’s tutelage she had discovered a wild, hedonistic, uninhibited side of herself that she had never suspected existed. It was not Rob’s fault that he talked of golf and the stock market and his day at the drugstore, when what she wanted to talk about was the meaning of life and the writings of William Blake. It was not Rob’s fault that his idea of a fun evening at home was a sweet little woman to cook his meals and clean up the kitchen afterward while he sat and watched football on TV. It was not Rob’s fault that they were fundamentally incompatible. Indeed, he had had no reason to even suspect such a thing, when she had never let him see beneath the conventional veneer she showed the world to the dream-filled romantic that she truly was underneath.

“Apparently not.” There was anger in Rob’s voice now,
anger in his controlled stance and his narrowed eyes. “I’ve been mistaken about you, Rachel, and I can only say I’m glad I discovered your true nature before it was too late.”

“So am I,” she agreed, perhaps too cordially for his taste.

Her reply seemed to infuriate him. His face reddened, and she could almost hear him grinding his teeth. (It was a habit of his when he was annoyed that she was just now discovering she truly despised.)

“You’ve changed,” he said. “It’s Harris who’s changed you. You are having an affair with him, aren’t you?”

“We’re soulmates,” Rachel said, meaning to be flippant. Only as her words reached her own ears did she realize they were true.

Rob snorted.

“Ready to go, Rachel?”

Rachel almost jumped at Johnny’s quiet voice behind her. She turned to discover that he was looking at Rob, his gaze hard and steady. Johnny’s hand, as it took her arm, was proprietary. Feeling it grip the soft flesh just above her elbow, Rachel was conscious of a sudden rush of joy so strong, she nearly smiled. She loved the idea that he was staking a public claim. She had had enough of creeping around backstairs to last her a lifetime.

“You’re crazy, Rachel,” Rob said harshly, his gaze moving from Johnny to fix on her face for a single sizzling instant. His lips tightened when she didn’t reply, and he brushed past them. Rachel, watching him go, saw Dave and Susan Henley fall in behind him. Left with her and Johnny were Becky, Kay, Chief Wheatley, and the two young police officers who had watched this byplay impassively from a few feet away.

Fortunately the room had emptied. Sam Munson and his men were the only ones who remained, hovering discreetly around the coffin, which would only be removed to the waiting hearse for transportation to the cemetery after
everyone was gone. The family still had the burial to endure, but for everyone else the funeral was over.

Rachel, ashamed of her own sudden happiness in this place of grief, bowed her head and allowed Johnny to steer her from the building.

36

A
t Glenda Watkins’s funeral, the watcher went through the motions of normalcy, but underneath a tumult of emotions struggled for supremacy. For the first time, the dominant surface personality beneath which the watcher dwelled had begun to sense, inside its own body, the presence of the monstrous soul that was the watcher. The surface personality, the everyday personality that knew everyone and was known to all, was as different from the watcher’s as it was possible to be. The everyday personality was pleasant and likable, concerning itself with the thousand and one small tasks that make up day-to-day life. The watcher was ageless, genderless, and pure evil. He seethed with rage and hatred, and those emotions drove him to kill.

Until this past hour, the everyday personality had had no inkling that it had had a hand in the killings of Marybeth Edwards and Glenda Watkins. But the sight of those four bereaved children—particularly the older boy, whom the watcher had glimpsed on the night of the Watkins murder—triggered a memory of that night in the surface personality. The memory seemed so real: blood everywhere, the look and feel of it—and the smell. The surface personality grew dizzy with horror and fear. But the surface personality did not want to remember. It
fought against remembering. Confronted with a kaleidoscope of the sights, sounds, and smells of that night, it rejected them utterly.

The watcher and the surface personality became allies in inducing sweet amnesia. The watcher, wary of what might happen once the surface personality became aware of his existence, shut down. For a brief period, it was as if the watcher’s independent thoughts and feelings and memories ceased to exist.

The surface personality concentrated on reality: the sharp edge of the seat against the backs of tensed legs, the comforting cadence of the preacher’s voice, the warmth of the bodies of the friends who sat on either side. The hideous, whirling images that must have been conjured up from some long-forgotten horror movie receded. Thankfully, reality won.

Moments later, with the surface personality lulled, the watcher once again, very carefully, came to life. Peering out through the body’s eyes, the watcher experienced with satisfaction the funeral service of the woman he had murdered. But before the mourners filed out the door, the watcher was once again filled with rage. Because it seemed that the Watkins woman’s killing, like the one before that, had been in vain.

Johnny Harris had found a new paramour. And the watcher was now presented with a new quarry to hunt down and destroy.

He seethed with the need to do that.

But first, the surface personality must be given time to lock that errant memory of the Watkins murder firmly away. Then the small threat that had so unexpectedly reared its head had to be removed.

The boy had seen something in the dark, had he? The watcher was suddenly filled with black humor.

Wait till he got a closer look.

37

D
espite Rachel’s obvious reluctance to leave him, Johnny sent her off with her sister and their friend for the afternoon. Then he took off on his motorcycle, which now sported a new set of tires. There were things he had to do and think about. Glenda’s face and the faces of her kids haunted him. He kept thinking that he could have done, should have done, something to prevent what had happened. He had not killed Glenda, just as he had not killed Marybeth, but somehow he felt guilty, as if the deaths were in some way his fault.

The why of it he had not yet figured out, or the who of it, as in who had done it. But he felt, with a deep, dark instinct that he could not properly explain, that the murders were linked in some inexplicable fashion to him.

He thought back, way back, all those years ago to Marybeth. She’d been a pretty little thing, slender and blond and petite, as he had always preferred his women to be. Her folks were affluent members of the country club and pillars of the community. Marybeth, as their youngest child, had been spoiled to death. Anything she had wanted, Marybeth had gotten—until she wanted Johnny Harris.

For the first time in her life, he guessed, her parents had
told her no. Marybeth had refused to take no for an answer.

She’d been a sweet girl, very young and silly, her head full of dreams of becoming an actress or a model or even an airline hostess (which to her way of thinking was almost as glamorous as the other two). At the time, Johnny had been overwhelmed by her prettiness, her willingness to sneak around behind her parents’ back to see him, and her innocent, ardent sexuality, of which he had taken full advantage with the utter self-centeredness of youth.

Looking back, it was easy to see that he’d been her first rebellion against her parents’ velvet-gloved control. Such a typical adolescent rite of passage should not have cost her her life—but for some reason it had.

Glenda, now, was different. He had never at any time fancied himself in love with Glenda, nor had she been in love with him. They’d been friends, playmates as kids, buddies through grade school and early high school, casual lovers in their junior and senior year when both of them got an itch and there was no one else available to scratch it. When he got out of prison, they’d been friends and casual lovers again. She’d been as lusty as he was himself, but there had never been any delusions of love between them. Still, he had cared for her in his own way, and she for him.

Like Marybeth, Glenda had not deserved to die. Those children had not deserved to be robbed of a mother.

So what were the facts? There were two dead women, murdered by the same killer. A killer who’d struck twice in eleven years. The years in between the murders were the years he had spent enjoying the hospitality of the state. What had the two women had in common that he knew of? He had been sleeping with both at the time of their deaths. At the thought Johnny’s blood ran cold.

Because now there was Rachel. Rachel, for whom he would have raked the moon from the sky and bagged up the stars and harnessed the sun. Rachel, who was more
than he had ever dreamed she would be. His adolescent sex fantasy about making it with his pretty teacher had been a fantasy, but Rachel was real, a kind, gentle, courageous, loyal-to-a-fault woman who enchanted him even as her love unlocked the cold prison of his heart.

Rachel loved him. Those three words were the most beautiful poetry he had ever heard.

Was she in danger now because of that? Was there a loony-tune out there who killed the women he cared for? Or was there some other link between the victims, of which he was unaware? The whole thing was so impossible, so nightmare-crazy, he couldn’t figure it out.

But at the thought of Rachel in danger he nearly turned his motorcycle around and hightailed it back to her side like a buck deer who has heard the hunter’s gun in the woods.

Logic alone stopped him. It had been eleven years between murders. Another one was not likely to occur within a week of the second. Perhaps there would never be another one. Perhaps Marybeth had been killed by a wandering psychopath (Rachel’s pet theory) and Glenda’s was just a good copy of the first. Maybe Tom Watkins was smarter than he looked. Or perhaps—God, who knew? The possibilities were endless.

No, he did not
really
think Rachel was in danger. But he had been wrong before. And life had taught him to be wary.

If he was the link, who outside of her family knew about himself and Rachel? There was Rachel’s mother, whom he knew basically as a disembodied, disapproving voice on the other end of the phone, and her sister, Becky, who’d been the most popular girl in her class at school. Becky was little, like Rachel, but more vivacious, more sure of her own attractiveness, more the kind of woman who would appeal to a cross-section of men. He’d always admired Becky from afar—her physical attributes, which she shared with her sister, were of the type that had always
appealed to him—but it had been Rachel he’d lusted after even then. Between himself and Rachel, there had always been an awareness, an indescribable spark.

Soulmates. That’s what they were. Johnny’s lips lifted wryly as he considered that. How hopelessly romantic—and stupid—that sounded. He’d always heard that love brought strong men to their knees and turned their brains to mush. Maybe he’d better think twice about getting his hair cut.

He acquitted her mother and sister of wishing harm to Rachel. They were a thousand times more likely to murder him than her.

Besides, Glenda had been tall and strong for a woman. To murder her so quickly and viciously would have required an enormous amount of strength.