At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(45)
“It’s him,” he called quietly.
Penny turned the car off then deftly pulled her wheelchair out from behind the seat and set it up beside her on the pavement. In one neat motion, she slid out of the driver’s seat of the Porsche and into the chair. Then she wheeled herself up to the grave beside Verraday.
For a long moment, neither one spoke. They just stared at the gravesite and tombstone. Then Penny broke the silence.
“David Robson, because of you I will never get to see my beautiful, sweet mother laugh ever again, or hold her close and tell her that I love her. I have not been able to do so for the last thirty years. Because of you, I will never get to see my parents’ golden anniversary. You took away my freedom and my childhood. You caused me to suffer terrible physical and emotional pain. You put me in this wheelchair. You wounded my father to his core. He was never the same after you took my mother’s life. And now you’ve taken your own life. You acknowledged none of the terrible things you’ve done. I want to forgive you. But I can’t. And you’ve done that to me too.”
She closed her eyes. The night was still, and in the darkness, Verraday could hear her breathing in the formalized way she’d learned through meditation: in through her nose to a count of five, holding it for a couple of seconds, then releasing it through her mouth to a count of five.
Verraday checked to make sure Penny’s eyes really were shut. Then he turned his back to her slightly and undid his fly. Penny’s eyes snapped open as she heard a tinkling sound on the freshly turned earth, like a sudden shower on a summer afternoon.
“Jamie, what are you doing?”
“Do you disapprove?” he asked.
“No,” she said thoughtfully. “Not if it helps give you closure.”
In another ten seconds, he was done. He zipped up his fly, then looked around at Penny.
“Okay, I’ve done what I’ve come here to do. We can leave.”
“Well, good for you. But I’m not done yet,” said Penny. “There’s one last thing on my agenda.”
Penny reached into her purse and took out a small, delicate vial with Japanese lettering on it. She began sprinkling the contents on Robson’s grave.
“What is that?”
“It’s a Japanese Kobyo vase. It’s said to hold the nectar of compassion for Kannon, the god of forgiveness.”
“Kannon? That’s an ironic name for a god of forgiveness. So what’s that liquid? Some kind of Buddhist holy water?”
“No,” replied Penny, sprinkling out the last of the liquid. “It’s urine. Mine. I told you I needed to use the bathroom before we came here.”
Verraday thought he’d heard wrong until Penny began to laugh. It was a laugh that built in momentum from somewhere deep inside her until her ribs shook.
Verraday began to laugh along with her now too, almost uncontrollably, a conspiratorial kind of laugh they hadn’t shared since they were children keeping a mischievous secret together. Their laughter echoed off the tombstones and through the graveyard, and it subsided only when they finally had to catch their breath. Even in the dim light, Verraday could see tears glistening on Penny’s face, running down toward her broad, toothy smile. He tasted a salty tear on his own lip and felt another one rolling down his cheek. He wiped it away, still laughing.
CHAPTER 21
By the time Verraday had gotten home from his outing with Penny, he was too tired to do any work on the midterm or any reading for his next paper. He checked his e-mails and saw from the addresses that it was mostly the usual stuff: half a dozen or so from his students, which he decided to put off reading until the morning.
One e-mail caught his eye, however. The subject line promised that new preview material had been added on the Bettie Page MoMA exhibit website. Verraday opened it and saw a color picture of Bettie wearing a leopard-print bikini, striking a claws-out cat pose. It was pure kitsch, not the sort of thing that excited him. Just like the serial killers, he realized, he had a specific range of things that turned him on and things that did not. This did not. However, there were three new thumbnail photos of Bettie.
Like the shots in the previous e-mail, the thumbnails were ones he had never seen before and were taken with much greater artistry than the standard Bettie photos. He clicked on the first one, which showed Bettie from the midriff down, wearing knee-high, black leather boots, seamed stockings, and a cinched corset that peeked into frame. The next shot was of Bettie’s chin and teeth, smiling seductively as she bit into a leather whip. The final photo was a view of Bettie from behind, lying on a bed, wearing nothing but a black bustier, fishnet tights, and stiletto heels.
He remembered when he had felt passionate enough about a woman to create photographs like these. With Nikki. He had taken the time to learn about exposure, depth of field, and lighting. He’d even made his own prints so that no eyes other than his own would ever see the erotic images he created of her. He’d kept them despite his conflicted feelings. The photos of Nikki were the most artistic thing he had ever created, technically accomplished and, he had to admit, extremely erotic. But he could never look at them without being reminded of his own naiveté, his misplaced belief back when he’d clicked the shutter that he’d found the love of his life.
That last thumbnail on the web page of the MoMA exhibit had triggered a memory of one of those photos. He knew he shouldn’t take out the images of Nikki to check, but his curiosity got the better of him. The last time he’d looked at the photos of her was four years earlier, when he’d bought this house and was packing up his apartment. At the time, he had thrown them into the garbage as part of the past that he was casting off. Then at the last minute, he had retrieved them, not quite able to break the connection. He took a key out of his desk now, went over to his filing cabinet, and unlocked it. He pulled the drawer out and at the very back, filed behind mortgage information and tax records, he found the folder containing the photos of Nikki.