Woman in Black (47 page)

The thought did nothing to calm her nerves.

After trying Phoebe's cell and getting only her voice mail, she decided to phone Kent. It was unlikely that Phoebe would be with him, since their daughter had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with either him or his girlfriend, but it wouldn't hurt to check.

“It's me,” she said when he picked up. “I just got home and Phoebe's not here. Is she with you?”

“No. Was she planning on coming over?” Abigail pictured him frowning in puzzlement. He had to be thinking the same thing she was—that if Phoebe was on her way over to see him, their real daughter had been kidnapped by aliens and the one headed his way was merely a clone.

“I don't know. She didn't say.”

“Is something wrong? You sound worried.”

“I'm sure I'm overreacting,” Abigail hedged, not wanting him to think she was turning into one of those abandoned wives who cling to their kids as a means of coping. “It's just that it's getting late and she hasn't phoned. I thought she might have gone over to your place.”

Your place
. How strange it felt to say that about somewhere other than this house.

Kent sighed. “I wish. But I'm afraid I'm radioactive right now as far as she's concerned.” He spoke ruefully but didn't sound overly concerned. His tone was that of a father confident enough in his relationship with his daughter to know she'd come around eventually. “I wouldn't worry, though. She's probably out with Neal or one of her friends.”

His calm demeanor that used to drive Abigail crazy was balm to her ragged nerves now. “You'll let me know if you hear from her?” In the background, she could hear the clinking of dishes and a light female voice over the sound of running water. She must have caught them in the midst of making supper. Abigail pictured them seated around the table chattering away as they ate—Kent and Sheila and her son—and felt something tighten inside her.

“Sure thing,” he promised. “You do the same. Call me when she gets in so I know she's okay.”

As soon as she hung up, Abigail headed back downstairs, grabbing her purse and keys on her way out the door. Brewster tried to follow, no doubt thinking it was time for his evening constitutional, but she shooed him back inside. “No, boy, not now. I have to find Phoebe.”

Crossing the side yard on her way to the garage, she made a mental list of all the places that her daughter might be if she wasn't with Neal. The public library? The Beanery, where she often met her friends for coffee? The school—some event that had slipped her neglectful mother's mind? She began to feel a little foolish for being such a worry-wart, telling herself there was nothing more going on here than a case of shattered nerves.

Still …

Something scratched at the back of her mind, like the dog whining to be let out. Something Phoebe had said to her the other day. Shouted, rather.
Don't worry, Mom; I won't be around much longer to make your life miserable
. Abigail had assumed it'd had to do with her going away to college. But now she wondered if there had been a darker meaning. Suppose Phoebe was planning to do something stupid like skip college to bum around the world, as she'd once threatened to do? She could well afford to. She had some money saved up, and when she turned eighteen next year, she'd come into the trust fund that Kent's parents had set up for her.

Abigail felt her heart lurch at the thought. Phoebe could be on her way to the airport at this very minute, for all she knew.

Something else occurred to Abigail, far worse than her daughter's heading off into parts unknown. What if the Delgado woman had had something to do with Phoebe's absence? Abigail wouldn't soon forget those burning eyes. There had been Concepción's vaguely threatening words as well. And God only knew how long she'd been lurking about before Abigail had shown up.

Abigail jumped into her BMW, thinking the woman couldn't have gotten far on foot. If she was on her way to the train station, Abigail would soon catch up to her. Moments later, she was shooting down the drive in a spray of mud and gravel, her foot pressing down hard on the accelerator.
What have you done with my daughter?
she mouthed silently.

The answer came to her in a sickening flash:
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
.

“
So, are we
good to go?” Phoebe, seated on the bed in her room, her hands folded demurely in her lap, gazed up at Neal with an expression of calm resolve.

She looked amazingly serene, he thought, for someone about to kill herself.

He gave a tight nod as he stood there holding the glass of water he'd fetched from the bathroom. Then he set the glass down on the nightstand and lowered himself onto the bed. It wasn't just talk anymore. They had the means now: several vials of prescription drugs purchased from a guy he worked with at the deli who moonlighted as a drug dealer—they'd just come from Chas's house on the other side of town. They also had the opportunity: His mom was out, and so was Phoebe's.

It would be several more hours before his mom returned—she was having dinner with Karim—but he didn't know how long Phoebe's would be gone. She kept late hours, so presumably she was still at work, though he was less certain of that than he'd like to be, despite Phoebe's reassuring him that the coast was clear. He'd seen a black BMW the same model as Abigail's flash by, headed in the opposite direction, as he and Phoebe had been making the turn onto Swann's Road on their way here. Also, when they'd gotten to the house, he'd noticed mud tracked across the kitchen floor. Nervous about it, he'd suggested to Phoebe that they postpone their plans, thinking that her mom had merely stepped out and would be returning soon, but she'd brushed off his fears, insisting that the BMW he'd seen could have been anyone's—half the people around here drove black Beamers, she'd said—and that the muddy tracks on the floor were no doubt Brewster's.

Now Neal sat contemplating the enormity of what they were about to do.
It's the only way
, he told himself. He'd examined every other route, and they all led back to this one: the one his father had taken. Some might have seen it as the coward's way out, he knew, but to Neal it was more like the answer to a tricky equation in algebra that, once arrived at, seemed so simple you wondered why you hadn't seen it all along. And, as with algebra, for every problem there was only one solution.

Still … the thought of his mother kept snagging at his resolution, like a burr on a freshly honed blade. He knew how devastated she'd be, especially after having lost his dad the same way. Was it fair to put her through all that again? Just when she was starting to make a new life for herself?

Then Neal reminded himself bitterly that she'd still have her new best friend, Karim. His mother had billed tonight's date as just “a couple of friends getting together for dinner,” but Neal didn't buy that. He'd have to be blind not to notice the way they looked at each other, like they wanted to rip each other's clothes off. However disgusting the thought, it was only a matter of time before they did just that, if they hadn't already. If anything was holding his mom back, he thought, it was her problem son.
Who won't be a problem much longer
.

He and Phoebe had weighed the various methods before deciding on this one. It seemed the most painless. Also the least messy. No blood or blasted bits of brain tissue; no bloated bodies to be fished out of the river. They'd researched it online so there wouldn't be any fuckups. It was amazing what you could find on the Internet. If he were a terrorist, he'd have all the information he needed to build a bomb, or if he were a serial killer, all the ways to off someone. Figuring out the best way to commit suicide had seemed almost ridiculously prosaic in comparison, like logging on to MapQuest for directions. Except there was no map for where they were going.

“What are you waiting for?”

Phoebe's voice broke into his thoughts. He looked over at her, noting the tiny crease between her brows. She was impatient to get on with it. He envied her, in a way. He wished that he could be as crystal-clear about this as she was, with no troubling thoughts to muddy the waters.

“What's the rush?” he said. “It's not like we have to be somewhere.”

When they'd arrived home to find the power out, it had seemed the perfect metaphor for what they were about to do. As though observing some sort of pagan ritual, they'd lit candles and placed them throughout the house. Now, as he gazed fixedly at the fat, scented candle flickering on the nightstand, which was making an eerie but beautiful phantasmagoric display of the tumbler of water beside it, it had a strangely hypnotic effect.

From the flapped pocket of his army jacket, he withdrew the vials of pills and dumped their contents onto the bedspread. Carefully, he counted them out, dividing them evenly into two piles. Phoebe was scooping one of the piles into her palm when the dog began scratching at the door, whining to be let in. Neal saw her hesitate, frowning. The only real emotion she'd shown tonight had been when they'd first walked in and Brewster had come running to greet her, tail wagging. She'd knelt down and put her arms around him, burying her face in his shaggy ruff. When she'd brought her head up, there had been tears in her eyes.

Neal stared down at his pile of pills—half of them pink, the other half white—which looked so innocuous scattered over the flowered bedspread. He thought of his uncle Vaughn, fighting for his life. It seemed unfair somehow that his uncle had to suffer so while
he
was taking the easy way out, like getting a free ticket instead of having to pay. But life wasn't fair. Hadn't that been made abundantly clear to him already?

He reached for the glass of water on the nightstand. The pills were like a lover's kiss as they left his palm, lingering for an instant on his tongue before sliding down his throat. He watched closely as Phoebe swallowed hers, looking for any signs of uncertainty. There were none. She might have been downing a handful of vitamins. It wasn't until afterward that she acknowledged the seriousness of what they were doing by saying, with a funny little smile, “No turning back now.”

In the candlelight, her eyes were bottomless pools in which he could see twin points of flame reflected. He wondered what kind of life she would have had if she'd lived into old age. But when he tried to picture her with wrinkles and gray hair, it was as strange and improbable as trying to imagine his mother married to someone other than his dad.

They lay down together on the bed, fingers entwined. The drugs were starting to take effect. Neal's limbs felt heavy, and his head had somehow become unhitched from his body.

“
Romeo and Juliet
. That's what they'll think when they find us,” Phoebe murmured thickly.

“We should take our clothes off to make it look more convincing.” Neal was feeling loopy, like when he'd had too much to drink at parties.

She giggled. “You want to see my tits again, DeVries, you'll have to wait until we get to wherever it is we're going.”

Neal fell silent, pondering that. “You believe in heaven and hell?” he asked after a bit.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Any chance we'll get into heaven, you think?”

“We'll know soon enough, won't we?” she said. He frowned at her in annoyance, and she added more philosophically, “Look, if there's such a thing as heaven, it's only because life here on earth sucks. Anything would look good in comparison.”

“Thanks for the lesson in theology.” He felt angry at her for some reason. But it was a once-removed feeling, like listening to muffled shouting in another room. Mainly what he felt was … high. Pleasantly so. Like an astronaut at zero gravity, weightless, suspended in space.

Phoebe was quiet for so long that he thought she must have drifted off to sleep, but when he looked over at her, he saw her staring up at the ceiling with a look of such fixed concentration that it gave him a jolt: He might have been looking into the sightless eyes of a dead person.

A thick fog rolled into his brain, and he surrendered to it, losing himself in its velvety gray folds. Soon his eyes were drifting shut.
This isn't so hard
, he thought.
All you have to do is …

… let go
.

Minutes later—or was it hours?—he was roused by the acrid smell of smoke. In his foggy state, he was only distantly aware of it, like when he was asleep and had to pee. But, like the pressing of a full bladder, it grew increasingly insistent until at last it forced his eyelids open.

He could see it now, in the moonlight slanting in through the blinds: thin, pale rafts of smoke floating up near the ceiling. He felt a pulse of alarm, but it was muted, like the sirens he'd grown so used to, living in the city, that they'd been little more than white noise. It wasn't until he drew in a lungful of smoke and began to cough that it hit him: The house was on fire!

Christ. If they didn't get out, they'd be burned alive. It didn't occur to Neal, in his drugged state, that they would have died anyway. Apparently the will to live, which unbeknownst to him had been humming away in some remote sector of his brain, superseded all else.

He struggled into an upright position. “Phoebe!” He shook her, but her head only lolled on the pillow, her eyelids fluttering without opening all the way. “Phoebe!” he croaked again. “Come on … wake up. We gotta get out of here.” His tongue felt thick and foreign in his mouth, like when he'd been to the dentist, making it hard to get the words out.

No response.

He tried hoisting her into a sitting position, but she only flopped back down again. With rising panic, he realized he had no choice but to leave her while he went in search of help. But even that seemed an impossible feat. He didn't see how he was going to propel himself past the bedroom door, much less down the stairs. And even if he could manage that, it might be too late by then. The smoke was thickening, making it harder to breathe with each passing second—not pleasant-smelling smoke like that from a wood fire but the smoke of burning refuse, oily and choking. He coughed again, violently this time, and somehow the act served to catapult him off the bed and onto the floor, where he landed with a thud.