The Girls He Adored (43 page)

“She did—she said he ought to consider finding himself a girlfriend. Said a healthy young boy like him had needs. He thought she was teasing him at first, but she was serious. I think she knew she couldn't keep him penned up forever. She said if he brought another one back, he could keep her—that as long as it was a strawberry blond, and as long as he didn't get too attached, she wouldn't interfere.

“Looking back, I can't honestly tell you whether I knew what they had in mind—really,
really
knew. If I did, I was in denial about it, at least consciously. I found myself in the body. I knew I was supposed to pick up a girl, and I knew she had to be a strawberry blond. But subconsciously I must have known that once I brought her to the ridge, she wouldn't be leaving, because I didn't even bother trying to pick up any girls in Umpqua City, or even down in Medford, or over in Roseburg. Instead I stocked the freezer with enough food to last Miss Miller a week or two, then drove all the way to Eugene.

“I stayed in a cheap motel, hung around the University. I fit in pretty good, sat in on a few lectures—it was summer session. Sandy Faircloth was a secretary in Human Resources. Not much of a looker, except for her hair. But that didn't bother me. I figured it would help my chances. The prettier they were, the more likely they already had a boyfriend.

“Seducing her was a snap. It's a talent I didn't even know I had until I used it. I start off pretending I'm falling in love with the girl. Then after a while, I really do. Fall in love, I mean. Even though on some level I know I really don't. Does that make any sense?”

Irene lobbed the question back to him. “Does it make sense to you?”

“I'm not sure. But it happens every time. And then they fall in love with me. The hard part is maintaining a low profile, staying away from their friends and families. One thing about a girl in love, she wants to tell the world about it. I got better at it later. I'd tell them I had a stalker, or I was with the FBI. That's another thing about a girl in love—she'll believe anything.

“With Sandy, I didn't even bother making up a story. She had a week's vacation coming to her. I told her she could come home with me, see my place, but it had to be our secret, that she had to just trust me.

“And she did—not the brightest star in the firmament, my Sandy. I brought her back here, installed her in the guest bedroom, and screwed her brains out every night for a week—me or one of the others. Miss Miller, she laid low.

“Eventually the time came for Sandy to get back to Eugene. But by then, we were hooked. Not on Sandy—on sex. I personally couldn't imagine going back to the way things had been before. I tried everything. I told her I was in love with her, that I'd kill myself if she left. I even proposed marriage. No good—she was frightened
by then, and maybe not quite as head over heels as she'd been before. She said it was over—no more sex, time for Sandy to go home now.

“I didn't know what to do, how to handle it. So Max took over. She freaked on him—he smacked her around. First time for that, for him. He liked it—it turned him on. He locked her in the drying shed when he was done. From then on the die was cast. We couldn't exactly let her go, could we?”

“I see,” said Irene, making a promise to God that if she survived, she would never say
I see
to a patient again.

“Long story short, we kept Sandy another few months. Everybody got to take their turns with her—even me, I'm ashamed to say. Sometimes Miss Miller would watch. Sandy didn't like
that
at all. Eventually she stopped taking care of herself, stopped talking, even stopped begging. We had to force-feed her, wash her. Sex wasn't much fun. She'd just lie there—it was like fucking a hole in the mattress. Didn't make me feel very good about myself, I can tell you. After a while I gave up on it, personally, but for Max and the others it didn't seem to matter.

“Then one night the two of them, Miss Miller and Max, were in the parlor playing chess. Max asked Miss Miller what she wanted for Christmas. Another wig, she said—Mary was starting to fade, so she wanted another long beautiful head of strawberry blond hair, just like the girl in the drying shed.

“Of course Max knew she wasn't talking about him
buying
her another wig. So on Christmas Eve Max washed Sandy's hair, and harvested it with an electric razor. On Christmas morning Miss Miller got her present, and so did Kinch.”

So little remorse, even for his own actions, thought Irene. It was almost as if Christopher were trying to paint himself in the least favorable light. Perhaps he was trying to test her. If so, she was determined to pass. She opened her arms to him. He leaned forward, put his arms around her in return. They rocked together awkwardly for a moment, then he lay down with his head in her lap. She stroked his brow.

“The third one's name was Ann Marie Peterson,” he began.

I can do this, Irene told herself. I can do anything I have to do.

P
ENDER NEARLY KNOCKED
his Stetson off again entering the Old Umpqua Pharmacy. It felt like going back in time, to the drugstore on the corner of Clinton and Main, in Cortland, in the early fifties. Wooden floors, ceiling fan, white-jacketed pharmacist behind a high marble counter decorated with antique apothecary jars. Pender would have bet a week's salary that the old fellow was known as Doc to the townspeople. The only thing missing was the soda fountain where you could buy a cherry phosphate for a dime.

“Good afternoon,” said the pharmacist. “What can I do for you?”

Pender identified himself, flashed his tin, and slid Maxwell's mug shot across the counter. “Seen this fella lately?”

“Can't say I have.”

“Does the name Max ring a bell?”

“ 'Fraid not.”

“Christopher? Lee? Lyssy?”

“Nope, nope, and nope.”

“He was in the news about ten, twelve years ago—a fire, maybe a scandal?”

“Sorry—I only moved down from Portland five years ago. Always had a dream of owning a place like this.”

Pender switched from the official to the conversational mode. “So how's it working out?”

“It was working out pretty well, up until they built that Rite-Aid across town.”

“Happening all over the country, from what I hear. Damn shame, too. Listen, Doc—do they call you Doc?”

“Some do.”

“Well, Doc, this fella here, I know he was in here around a year ago. My witness said he disguised himself to look older—maybe he was wearing a gray wig.”

“Oh,
him
.”

Oh-
ho!
Two little words, and the universe undergoes a paradigm shift.

“That's Ulysses Maxwell. Caretaker for a woman named Julia Miller. They live way out on Scorned Ridge. He first came in to get her prescription for morphine ampoules refilled not long after I bought the place. Of course I couldn't do it, just give out morphine sulfate to a third party like that. It's a Schedule Two narcotic. I told him he had to get some paperwork filled out. Oh my, if looks could kill!

“But he came back the next day with all the forms. Comes in regular, now, every month or so.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday afternoon, around two o'clock. Picked up Miss Miller's refills and a bottle of Lady Clairol—Strawberry Blonds Forever, as I recall.”

Oh-ho.
Oh
-fucking-
ho. “Do you happen to have an address on file?”

“Sure do. Hold on, I'll find it for you.”

Just as the pharmacist disappeared into the back room, the bell over the door tinkled, and an elderly woman entered. Pender tipped his hat to her. He'd never worn a cowboy hat before—he found he enjoyed tipping it to people. Especially now that he was high as a kite on adrenaline and a sense of destiny.

Because while the extraordinary run of luck Pender had been enjoying for the last three days—Anh Tranh to Big Nig to Caz Buckley to Doc to a live address—wasn't unprecedented in his experience (and long overdue when you considered he'd gone several years without a single damn break in the case), the way the pieces were falling into place, Pender was ready to believe that destiny, or fate, or God, or whatever you wanted to call it, had selected him for this particular job.

Once again he glimpsed that mental image of the strawberry blonds waiting for him in the darkness. And although thus far Ed Pender had never seen much evidence of order to the universe (an occupational hazard), much less the hand of a micromanaging God, it now occurred to him that perhaps his whole life had been leading up to this day.

T
UESDAY MORNING'S SESSION
stretched on into the early afternoon. When Maxwell suggested they take a picnic break down by the river, Irene was leery, but agreed. Her bathing suit (or rather, she now knew, Mary Malloy's, Sandy Faircloth's, Ann Marie Peterson's, Victoria Martin's, Susan Schlade's, Zizi Alain's, Gloria Whitworth's, Ellen Rubenstein's, Dolores Moon's, Tammy Brown's, or Donna Hughes's bathing suit) was still on the line from Sunday's swim. She took it up to her room to change, while Maxwell packed their lunch.

White meat chicken sandwiches with Grey Poupon, a bottle of white wine, chocolate-dipped ladyfingers for dessert. Maxwell doublewrapped the sandwiches and cookies, first in foil, then in baggies, remembered to pack napkins, plastic cups, and a corkscrew, and went down to the wine cellar to select a bottle of wine to cool in the creek while he and Irene swam.

He switched on the cellar light and trotted down the stairs, past the display of strawberry blond wigs mounted on mannequin heads in a glass-fronted case in the dark cellar to keep the color from fading. Only a few were still acceptable to Miss Miller, but they retained one from each of the gals for sentimental reasons.

The wine rack was behind the display case. He settled on a nice Ventana Chablis. It was a Monterey County wine—Irene would be bound to appreciate that. Maxwell slipped the bottle into his backpack, crossed the cellar to the fuse box, unlocked it, switched off the power to the electric fence.

And he was in a good mood as he climbed back up the cellar stairs. A little therapy, a refreshing swim, a picnic lunch, a little alfresco sex—
a lot of alfresco sex—with a woman still in the head-over-heels-with-Christopher stage: who could ask for anything more?

A bracing swim, a delicious lunch, a short nap on the mossy riverbank, one last swim. When he made his move, Irene wasn't surprised. She'd known it was coming—she just hadn't known when or how, or, despite all she'd told herself, whether she would be able to go through with it.

When
was during that last swim.
How
was, he came paddling up to her from behind, rested both hands on her shoulders, and began kissing the nape of her neck. And at first it seemed as if she
would
be able to handle it, even after he stripped her bathing suit down to her waist and began to fondle her breasts from behind.

It's a movie, she told herself—an attempt at deliberate dissociation. Her nipples were already pebbled from the cold water. He's my leading man, and it's a movie. She started to turn toward him, but he held her in place. Until then, she hadn't really appreciated how strong he was. He seized her wrist and drew her hand behind her, down to his crotch. His penis was flaccid and shrunken—from the cold, she thought at first. He wanted her to masturbate him. It was uncomfortable, reaching down and behind her like that—it hurt her shoulder. Again she tried to turn around in the water. Again he prevented her.

And then she knew. Not Christopher, but Max. Max all along. Max performing another of his devastatingly accurate impressions—this time of Christopher. Max whose hand she had held, Max whose eyes she had gazed into, Max whose red lips she had kissed, and worst of all, Max with whom she'd discussed his own betrayal.