The May Day Murders (41 page)

Ann stood frozen on the landing,
uncertain of what to do next. Rankin was halfway up the stairway by
now, a sinister grin on his face and eyes that meant murder. Ann
glanced further up the staircase at the hatch leading to the loft
and knew she had no choice but to ascend the stairs further and
pray she could get through the hatch before Jerry Rankin caught up
with her.

Ann bounded up the stairs, taking two
at a time. reached the top, pushed with all her might on the hatch
door using both hands and her shoulder. The door was incredibly
heavy but finally gave way with a creaking twang of springs. Ann
suddenly felt a hand snatch her by the ankle. She glanced down at
Rankin and saw that he had reached through the stairs and grabbed
her. She screamed and jerked her ankle away from his clasped hand
as a sudden jolt of adrenaline kicked in then managed to climb up
the rest of the way into the loft—

It was pitch dark …

She grabbed the edge of the hatch door
and slammed it shut just as Rankin reached the top. Ann could see
the faint outline of the door where light shone through the edges
and hopped onto it, praying that Rankin would be unable to force it
open. As she felt the door pressing upward against her weight, Ann
groped around in the darkness for a latch of some kind to secure
the door.

“
Open this fucking door,
bitch!” Rankin screamed in rage.

His voice sounded different for some
reason—so different that Ann actually wondered it were really Jerry
Rankin on the other side of the door.

With her heart nearly bursting out of
her chest, Ann scraped along the edge of the door with her fingers
like a blind person who had just dropped his last penny on the
floor. Suddenly she felt something cold and hard. She traced her
fingers along it. A latch! She grasped the nub of the bolt and slid
it home, tearing a pair of her fingernails in the
process.

She was safe!

At least for the moment.

She heard Jerry’s muffled profanities
through the thick door as he pounded on it repeatedly with his
fists. Ann could smell the pungent odors of paint thinner and
linseed oil as she stood up and looked around the dark room. Her
eyes eventually adjusted to the weak light somewhat as she noticed
several rectangular shapes silhouetted against a large
window.

His paintings, she thought.

She could just make out the vaulted
ceiling as she recalled seeing a small balcony jut out from the
third floor of the A-frame during their tour. Maybe that could be
her ticket to escape.

She felt totally disoriented in her
panicked state in the darkness.

She needed some light.

Once she could see, she would head for
the balcony and pray that she could get away from Jerry
Rankin.

Ann realized she was trembling from
head to toe as she began inching her way toward the window, her
hands swatting in the darkness before her. She came upon an object
and touched it gingerly. It was a huge canvas board mounted on an
easel. She sidestepped the painting and continued. In another few
steps she bumped into a heavy object—a table. She groped around on
the tabletop and could feel tubes of oil paint, a tin can and the
base of what felt like a table lamp. Jerry was screaming at her
unintelligibly and still pounding on the door as she ran her hand
up the lamp until she felt the gooseneck that terminated at a light
fixture. She felt the bulb inside the housing and ran her finger
along the housing until it hit home. With a grateful sigh she
pressed the button.

The room became bathed in light. The
first thing she saw was the table and all of the scattered paint
tubes and brushes upon it.

The next thing she saw caused her to
scream and made the hair on her neck stand on end—

An enormous oil painting on an
easel.

And unlike the rest of Jerry Rankin’s
paintings, this was no abstract study.

Instead, it was a traditional rendering
of three nude women, lying side by side, flat on their backs in
identical positions. All three were evidently dead and had “May
Day” inscribed across their breasts in what appeared to be bright
red lipstick. Ann gasped in horror when she spotted the vial of
lipstick shoved up into the vagina of the middle woman’s spread
eagle legs.

A woman who bore a stunning
resemblance to Marsha Bradley!

Ann stood with her eyes transfixed and
mouth agape, oblivious to the fact that Jerry Rankin was no longer
screaming and beating on the door. She felt her stomach muscles
tighten as she studied the image of the woman lying to the left of
Marsha. Although she hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, Ann was
almost certain that the woman was Sara Hunt. And when she looked at
the woman on the right, Ann began to shiver. The woman bore an
uncanny resemblance to herself, only with blonde hair!

And then she spotted something else,
placed on the lip of the easel. Three Polaroid prints lined up in a
row …

Shots of the nude bodies of Marsha
Bradley, Sara Hunt and the blonde woman who resembled
herself.

Jesus Christ!
she thought as she
felt the bile rise in her throat …

Stanley Jenkins!

Jerry Rankin was Stanley
Jenkins!

But how could he be? It was
impossible!

Suddenly, she heard a whooshing noise
coming from her left. Her eyes shot past the half dozen or so
paintings to the sliding doors that led to the balcony just as
Jerry Rankin was entering the loft.

“
You’re going to die!” he
hissed, springing toward her. Ann let out a shriek and ran for the
hatch door. But Jerry Rankin was too quick. He caught her before
she even had a chance to open the latch.

He was so enraged that he punched Ann
hard in the face and forced her to the floor, jumping on top of her
and pinning her down.

“
I should kill you now,” he
spat, his face only inches away from hers. “But not quite
yet.”

Ann screamed hysterically and wrestled
with him, but to no avail. He doubled up in laughter. “Don’t even
try it, Ann. You’re no match for me!”

His voice had taken on the hillbilly
twang again.

“
Who are you?”

He glanced over at the painting then
back at her and Ann could see his face clearly now. His left eye
was green, but his right eye was brown.

Apparently, his other green contact
lens had fallen out into the Jacuzzi when she’d slashed him with
her wine glass.

Stanley Jenkins, she vaguely recalled,
had brown eyes.

A hideous grin came to his face and
instead of replying, he merely eyed her body for a moment and then
stared at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to answer her own
question.

Ann already knew the answer, despite
the utter inconceivability of it. Her mind flashed back twenty
years to the last time she could recall ever seeing or hearing
Stanley Jenkins. She recalled his voice, a sort of whiney, nasal
twang—just the sort of voice one would expect to hear from a nerdy
egghead …

“
Well, Ann? Who am
I?”

Ann felt her heart bursting out of her
rib cage. Stanley Jenkins had found her. Stanley Jenkins was going
to kill her. Just as he had killed Marsha and the
others…

She turned her head away from
him.

“
Stanley
Jenkins?”

He grasped her chin in his free hand
and jerked her head back around. He was leering at her as he said
to her in a confidential tone of voice: “It didn’t have to end this
way, Ann. I told you that this room was off limits. But you just
had to come up here anyway, didn’t you? And now you’ve discovered
my little secret.”

“
Why did you kill my friend?
And the others?”

“
Your
friend?”
he
retorted with a smirk. “Marsha wasn’t your friend, Ann! She
deceived you! She went behind your back and played a trick on you.
She and that deplorable Sara Hunt bitch!”

Ann’s eyes widened in absolute shock.
“What in the world are you talking about?”

Stanley loosened his hold on her and
shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? You have absolutely no
idea what happened, do you? I’m very disappointed, Ann. Hell,
you’re every bit as naive as these other stupid women! Now you’re
probably going to disappoint me even more and tell me that you
don’t remember my asking you out to the Prom our senior year.
Please, Ann! Don’t let me down. Tell me that you at least remember
that; or was it so fucking insignificant that it has slipped your
mind after all of these years?”

“
I—I remember,” she
stammered.

“
I’m impressed! You were at
a basketball game, cheering the team on in that cute little mini
skirt that showed your ass so nicely. I was watching you from the
bleachers, doing your splits and getting tossed in the air so high
that I could see the crotch of your red panties as clear as day! I
never got tired of watching you, Ann. You were so beautiful, so
damn classy! I never failed to get excited whenever I watched
you—it didn’t make any difference what you were doing—studying,
watching television, taking a bath—it never failed to give me a
hard-on! It didn’t take too long to realize that I wanted you more
than anything else in the world. You became my only reason to exist
for quite a while, in fact. I dreamt about you every night, after I
went to bed, I dreamt of someday having you all for myself. To hold
you and touch you and have wild, kinky sex with you. God, you were
all I could ever think about! And I made a vow to myself that
someday I would have you.”

Ann stared up at him as he spoke, as
intrigued as she was mortified by these disturbing revelations. He
paused just long enough to climb off of her and re-situate himself,
kneeling on one knee as she remained lying flat on her
back.

“
I had it all figured out,
Ann. My plan was to put you under surveillance and learn all I
could about you without your ever knowing it. I started following
you home from school and at night, hanging around your house and
spying on you. Your house was perfect—lots of windows and neat
places to hide without being seen by any of the neighbors. You
lived alone with your mother and she went out a lot, too, which
really helped. Anyway, I did this for practically our entire senior
year, and in that time I’d discovered a lot of interesting things
about you. Besides the obvious fact that you had the most luscious
body I’d ever seen, that is.”

He winked and grinned impudently at her
when he said this, sending a cold chill down Ann’s spine. She
looked way from him and found that what he was telling her was
simply too hard to believe.

“
I never had much luck with
girls at school, as you no doubt recall. They all thought that I
was some kind of nerdy do-gooder and even I know they thought I was
uglier than sin. I couldn’t change my looks any—mother wouldn’t let
me—so I figured that if I could somehow attract you in a spiritual
way, I might have a chance. My plan was to show you how well I knew
you and that I understood what made you tick, Ann. I thought you’d
be impressed and would go out with me, because you were different
from the others. You had a heart. I snuck into your house once and
read your diary. I discovered by reading it that you had compassion
for others less fortunate than yourself. You felt sorry for your
mother because your father had died when you were so young. You
felt sorry for your friends for various reasons: one got knocked up
by her boyfriend, another got jilted by hers, and so on and so on.
But you never felt sorry for yourself. You cared for others more
than you cared for yourself—you were a true “giver.” I thought that
was so classy! I had myself convinced that if I played my cards
right and approached you at just the right time to ask you out on a
date that you’d do it. And you probably would have, if it hadn’t
been for your so-called friend, Marsha Stillner.

“
That bitch fucked me up at
that basketball game, Ann. She and Sara Hunt were sitting together
and called me over to them. I asked them what they wanted and your
dear friend Marsha told me that you wanted me to ask you to the
prom. I didn’t believe her at first, of course, but Marsha was such
a great actress! She kept a straight face and insisted that she was
telling the truth. Sara Hunt then gave an Oscar winning performance
as best supporting actress. She looked at me right in the eye and
said, ‘Ann knows that you have the hots for her, Stanley, and she
thinks you’re really cute. She’s been waiting for months for you to
ask her out, but she’s afraid you won’t have the nerve to do
it.’

“
I flipped out when she told
me this. All of a sudden I started thinking that maybe you knew I’d
been spying on you all this time and that you were letting me watch
you through the window because you enjoyed entertaining me! Like,
you were being coy with me. I got all excited, thinking that this
was turning out even better than I’d dreamed it would and I thanked
Marsha and Sara for the tip. I went down near the sideline and
watched you a little longer, trying to get my nerve up. Then, just
to be on the safe side, I quickly looked up at where Marsha and
Sara were sitting, half expecting to see them doubled up in
laughter over their little joke. But they weren’t laughing at all.
In fact, they were watching the game and seemed oblivious to
anything else.