Last to Know: A Novel(65)

Do not give Lacey credit for this. It was I who took the stand against it. I always had a sense of my own worth, and an idea of how to go about realizing that, and it wasn’t just some cheap hustle in Las Vegas along with all the other harlots feeling lucky if they got five hundred for an hour giving some fat creep head and letting him have his ugly way. Not for me. I was much more into the Harry Jordan mode. In fact if a creep like that had so much as touched me I might have killed him. Instead, I killed my mother. I considered it a much better deal.

And now I was rich, or would be when the insurance paid up on the burned house (accidental, of course) and on my mother’s life policy, which was much trickier due to the knife in the eye. I should have resisted that impulse but the bitch was running, hair aflame, polyester dress stuck like hot molten lead on her body, screaming my name, and that I had done it. I had to silence her. Immediately.

Don’t you love that word “immediately”? It stops you right in your tracks. “Stop your wife from doing this, immediately,” the sour mistress says to her married lover. “Stop doing that immediately,” the exhausted mother tells her child. “Stop immediately or I’ll shoot.” That’s what Jordan and the other detective yelled at me when I was running from Jemima’s body. It was a pity they caught up so quickly, I had so little time to admire my handiwork, to gloat over the blood sliding silkily from the thin line I had carved on Jemima’s throat. Such a lovely red, like no other, really. Of course it’s not as pretty when it begins to congeal and gets that rusty look, the color of old plush cinema seats. Same texture too.

By now of course you understand that I love what I do. I live for what I do. And other people must die so that I can live. As I mentioned earlier, I am not a vampire, I simply am in love with the power of the kill. The ultimate control over another person. That moment when I know I have her, is it.

How many, you might be asking, have I killed. Not counting Lacey, I believe it must be five by now. A couple of schoolgirls who got on my nerves; a woman tending bar on a Florida beach who refused to serve me a mojito because I was underage; an older woman in some cheap hotel who tried to get into my bed. She never slept another night in a bed, or with another woman, after that. And the others I’ve mentioned.

A sordid life, you might say, but my own. All that will change now. Now that I am rich. And now I can take care of the lovely Rose, the woman who has it all, who is every man’s ideal, every child’s best mom in the world. She rejected me and I can’t allow that. Had she only taken me in as she’d said she would, had she only let me be part of her life, a member of her family, she might have saved herself. Not now. I am jealous of Rose and I’ve never been jealous of anyone. I want to be Rose.

Of course I am not going to kill her yet, that’s way too risky right now. No, I’m going for the emotional jugular. Her child. Diz will disappear. “Into thin air,” they’ll say, puzzled. “Kidnapped,” they will add, afraid. All pedophiles in the area will be rounded up, all potential crazies locked up, all past child offenders brought in for questioning.

And I will be the one who brings Diz home. I will find Diz. I will rescue him, return him to his grateful family. To Rose, whose gratitude will be such she will forgive me the past and welcome me into her home. Where, let me tell you now, I will take over. Within months I will be in command. I will have all of them eating out of my gentle hand.

I will be Rose, and then when she is emotionally wrecked I’ll think about what to do with her.

*

I’ve been keeping my eye on Diz, I know his routine at Evening Lake well by now. He’s a curious kid, always with his binoculars, out on his tree at night looking for owls or maybe just spying on his family, who, God knows, had little to hide up to this point other than Wally’s descent into drugs. Pity the kid didn’t catch on to that earlier, I guess he knows nothing of drug culture other than what he sees on TV or his iPad games, which come to think of it is probably quite a lot. Not enough to see me coming though, and I suspect what he’s really looking at through those binoculars is me. Diz is suspicious and so am I, and I have to get him before he gets me.

It’s important Diz does not see me, he must not recognize me as the “abductor,” because later I am to be his “savior,” the one who will return him to his ever-grateful mother, all credit to me.

I know that a few hours after they realize he’s gone, the search will be on. We shall all join in, all those Evening Lake regulars who know the kid and the family. It will take a while, maybe a day, perhaps even two before I “find” him, and every clue will point to abduction by a stranger. There are plenty of them, hikers and such, rambling round our lake, our hills. In fact I’d better watch out for them, don’t want any of them seeing something they shouldn’t. Not that anyone comes this far. Almost no one other than Len Doutzer even knows this place exists, so hidden is it among old growth and matted brambles. No, I’m betting the first place the family, then the police, will search, will be the lake. The boy is always out there on his own. “Drowned kid in lake,” will be immediately what they will suspect. And you know what, if things go wrong, they might be correct.

With practice, though in fact it is also my nature, I have become silent as any cat, which enabled me to catch Diz from behind. I struck a blow to his head with the oar. He cried out, put up a hand, then crumpled to the ground. I stood for a second looking down at him: all he was was a bunch of old clothes, grubby old shorts, dusty sneakers, a Grateful Dead T-shirt that was too big and probably belonged to his older brother.