The Messenger (2011 reformat) Page 6

Oh, Matt, she thought.

  Five years ago. She remembered it had been raining that night; she could hear it pattering on the roof. And she had a headache because it had been a week when she'd tried to swear off coffee. She remembered the door knocker clacking, irritatingly loud, which made the headache worse.

  It was late. The kids were asleep and she'd been lounging on the couch. In spite of the headache, though, she'd felt wonderful. She was happy. She was in love. She had a good job, a beautiful home, and lived in a nice neighborhood. She had a wonderful husband and wonderful children. She had everything she'd ever dreamed of, everything a woman could ever want. She even remembered telling herself that. How did I get so lucky? What did I do to deserve this? Thank you, thank you.

  Her husband, Matt, had just gone to the twenty-four-hour Qwik-Mart store, to get her some instant decaf. Before he'd left, they'd made slow and luxurious love right there on the couch, with the rain pattering in the background. She loved being that close to him, his heat beating into her-the contact, the passion-his touches revitalizing her. She squirmed beneath him, his hands ranging her body, then his mouth covering her, tending to every special spot until she was dizzy. When she couldn't stand it anymore, she'd opened her legs to him and dragged him into her. It didn't take long after that; Jane was already there, she was coming the moment he'd entered her, then more climaxes unreeled when he stepped up his thrusts and came himself. Slow, easy ecstasy. That's the way it always was for her when Matt was with her.

  Afterward, she felt slaked. She couldn't get off the couch if she wanted to; she felt lazy and sleepy and full of his warmth. "I'll have you know," he said, dressing haphazardly in front of her, "I don't run out in the rain to get decaf for just any woman." "Just shut up and hurry," she replied. Her nipples tingled. "When you get back... we'll do it again." Matt nearly stumbled stepping into his loafers and grabbing his keys. Jane had to laugh. Did he have his shoes on the wrong feet? He was gone a moment later.

  Yes, I'm very, very lucky, she remembered thinking. Matt had landed a job with a good advertising firm downtown, which made the neighborhood even more perfect. Her own job was close, and the schools were right here too. She listened to the garage door go up, heard the car leave, then listened to more rain, reveling in the joy of her life.

  The headache was a minor annoyance. She'd quit smoking, too, several years before, and it hadn't been that bad. She drifted in and out of sleep, seeing Matt in snatches of quick dreams, always smiling, his eyes always so full of love for her. And-

  RAP! RAP! RAP!

  Knocking on the door jerked her out of the half-sleep. The headache flared. That's when it all came tumbling down.

  "... very sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Ryan, but it seems that your husband has just been killed ..."

  Killed. The word that had just come out of the state trooper's mouth sounded impossible. He stood there poker-faced in the doorway, his badge dripping, rain slicker glittering. No, he hadn't just said that word, not that word. Killed.

  "Murdered, Mrs. Ryan. I'm very sorry to have to give you this news."

  The next half hour she didn't remember at all. Like a dream that dragged on and on-a very bad dream- with pockets of blackouts that kept her doubting that there was any reality at all to this. She'd been taken away, in the state police car, to the county hospital. Batches of words kept flowing in and out of her attention: "... terrible time for you and your family..." "... need you to come down to the county morgue..." "...will be calling you shortly to ask you some questions...""... crisis counselors are available for you and your children ...""... we need positive identification of the body..."

  Harsh white lights beat down on her, but the light felt cold. She could hear them buzzing overhead. Her raincoat dripped as she looked down.

  A sheet flapped. "Is this your husband, Mrs. Ryan?"

  Jane stared. Just an hour ago, they'd been making love on the couch. His semen was still in her, she could feel it there, still vaguely warm-and now here was the same man. Dead on a morgue slab.

  "The perpetrator escaped from the Danelleton Clinic. It's a private psychiatric hospital just outside of town. Raped a nurse and killed her, then killed two guards and somehow got the time-locked entrance door opened. From there, he escaped on foot. This was about ten o'clock this evening, Mrs. Ryan."

  Jane was barely hearing him, but it was enough. Matt had left the house around eleven ... to get my decaf, she thought, and just wanted to collapse and die right there on the spot.

  "Fortunately the perpetrator was apprehended by the state police at approximately eleven-thirty. But by then..."

  The trooper didn't finish. Jane knew what he meant to say. She finished for him. "By then it was too late. By then, Matt was already dead."

  "I'm afraid so. It appears that your husband had just pulled into the convenience store near the town dock, that twenty-four-hour place. There were no other customers in the store at the time. The perpetrator had already entered and killed the cashier with a hunting knife he'd stolen from another store. Then he just waited for the first customer to walk in."

  "Matt," Jane whispered, her face washed with silent tears.

  "A silent alarm had gone off, and the police had already been dispatched. When they arrived, the perpetrator was attempting to start your husband's car."

  What more need be said? Her entire life had been shattered in the space of an hour. By some psycho with a shoplifted hunting knife. The sheet over Matt's body was black plasticized fabric, not cotton, so there was no evidence of blood. Only his face had been uncovered, which she was grateful for, but a very dark part of herself was wondering: How exactly had he been murdered? Where had he been stabbed? Was it slow or quick, and how much pain had he suffered?

  What had been his final thoughts in life?

  These horrible things ran around Jane's head until she was nauseated. She was barely sentient when she scribbled her name at the bottom of some identification form for the coroner's office, then the state trooper was helping her out of the cold, harshly lit morgue suite. She staggered out, choking on sobs, dreading the horror that awaited, the horror of having to tell Jennifer and Kevin why Daddy was never coming home again. The worse horror was knowing that she'd never see him again, and that her last vision of him hadn't been when they were making love on the couch: It was Matt on a slab, dead, shrouded by a black sheet, his wounds unrevealed. When the trooper was helping her out she took a stray glance to her right and saw something in a clear plastic bag lying on a lab counter. It was a hunting knife-its blade covered with blood.

  And then the memory was over and Jane was sitting at her kitchen table with her children, over food none of them wanted to eat. These kids are to young too have to see murder again.

  Jane forced herself to eat another stalk of fried asparagus, acting as though she liked it, acting as though this were a normal dinner like everyone else in the world was having. "Well, yes, honey? she eventually answered her child's troubled question. "Like the man who killed your father. The man was very sick; he was mentally ill. And sometimes these things happen. Nobody knows why, really. Sometimes people are born that way, and sometimes something happens to them, in their minds, and they start doing really bad things. That's what happened to Marlene."

  She looked at both their faces, hoping her explanation would help them but also knowing that it didn't. It didn't even come close. If anything, she realized, they're just more confused now.

  "Anyway, kids, you both better get started on your chores before it's TV time."

  "Okay, Mom," Jennifer said.

  Kevin jumped up, ran to the other room, and returned a moment later holding a plastic terrarium. "Mel's gonna help me with mine, okay?"

  Jane smiled meekly, glancing at the spiky horned toad. "Sure, honey"

  "Cool! Then we can watch TV!" Kevin said. "I think that guy who wrestles alligators is on at eight!"

  The boys got reptiles on the brain, Jane thought. She smiled after them as they zippe
d out of the kitchen. Thank God I have good kids. She only hoped the whole ordeal with the killings didn't scar them for too long.

  She picked up the dishes, elected to do them later, and meandered into the living room. She collapsed on the couch, then cringed, recalling what it would symbolize on a day like this: the last place she'd made love to Matt. What a mistake coming in here, but how could she get rid of the couch? All the images flooded back to her; they submerged her in the beauty of that night. First Matt's whispers of love into her ear as he kissed her neck, his hands touching very faintly at first, then so smoothly and firmly he could've been making a sculpture, forming every curve and every contour, every inch of her breasts. Desire pushed her nipples out, their tips so aroused they tingled as if pinched by tweezers. His kisses deepened, his heart stepped up as all that love began to surge for her. He was pushing her legs back, opening her first with his mouth, then entering her again, just as he had that night, her bliss reemerging as a crescendo.

  Then the memory crashed.

  It was all a lie. The last thing she saw behind her closed eyes as she lay on the couch was Matt's dead face in the county morgue.

  The smallest gasp of despair escaped her throat.

  Next, her eyes darted; she heard something, lightly at first, then with increasing volume. Pattering on the roof.

  It was starting to rain.

  Chapter Four

  I

  Carlton awoke as he normally did-alone. He hated it after all these years, but by now he was used to it. In fact, the idea of not waking up alone seemed alien. The clock glowed 4:12 a.m., yet it felt as though he'd only been asleep for fifteen minutes. I wasn't drinking last night, was I? he asked himself. The inside of his mouth and his lips tasted awful. His eyes felt like they had sand in them. God, I feel like shit. But he hadn't been drinking, had he? He'd been cutting down at lot lately. Christ, if I was drinking last night, I'd remember...

  Wouldn't I?

  He lay back, muggy in the bed. The air-conditioning droned yet his skin was clammy, stale with sweat. Something nagged at his brain, the notion that something bad had happened, a subconscious terror that cruelly refused to reveal itself, like a hideous face behind a dark veil. Had he dreamed it?

  He fought to remember, gritting his teeth. Then, in visual wafts, like smoke, it replayed in his mind, image by grueling image.

  He'd dreamed about Marlene.

  Oh, God. It was true. How could he feel more ashamed? And the dream itself?

  Carlton felt ill.

  If dreams could have a smell, this dream stank. It made him mentally recoil, just as someone would physically recoil after stepping in wormy road kill on a hundred-degree day. In the dream, he hadn't been making love to Marlene, he'd been fucking her. Using her body as a receptacle for pleasure, not a person, a thing to placate his sex drive. He also knew that he didn't care about Marlene at all in the dream-it didn't matter that he knew her, it didn't matter that they were friends. Carlton discarded all that; in fact, he even hated her in the dream, hated her for being more than simply a luscious physical body with a hole for his needs. The soulless lust and hatred made him think of serial killers who murder the women they raped after they'd had their orgasm. Marlene's hands were at his throat as he thrust into her, and his were on hers. They were strangling each other as they bucked, and when Carlton came and looked down at her-expecting her to be dead-she grinned up at him in lust as perverse as his own. "Do it again," she panted, "do it again. Do it real hard this time, do it to me till I pass out. You can even kill me if you want-I don't give a shit. Just do it to me again." It was awful, it was so wrong, and in the dream part of him knew this-and was repulsed-but it didn't matter. The sexual Mr. Hyde in him had been tapped and was unloading full force-on her. They did it again and again and again, just like that, spending themselves and bringing each other to near-death at the brink of each demented climax.

  Carlton had chuckled after finishing. She'd been on top for the last one, and he simply shoved her off on to the dirt-flecked floor, his handprints throbbing on her throat. Had he actually killed her this time?

  He didn't care. He'd had his fun.

  An even more forbidden idea began to occur to him as she lay there unmoving, but then her puffed eyes opened to slits, and she frowned.

  "You are one dull lay, Carlton, Jesus Christ," she griped, and then she was up in a huff, beads of sweat flying off her flushed skin. Stomping away, putting her postal uniform back on, grabbing her route gear. Carlton particularly noticed her carrier bag, and...

  What appeared to be the wire-stock of a small machine-pistol sticking out of it.

  "Now I'm gonna go have some real fun, you asshole," she said, and left.

  The dream's fringes were throbbing, like the choke marks on her throat, pinkish-blue around the edges. That's when Carlton noticed where the demented foray had taken place: in the basement of the newly reopened west branch.

  Awake now, head thumping as if hungover, he shivered at the nightmare in disgust. How could his mind create such a scenario? Marlene was a friend, a coworker, and I just dreamed about having sex with her. Hardcore sex, like nothing I've ever had or would ever want to have. She'd been married, had a son. She'd been a good person. Carlton had never felt so ashamed in his life. The shame tripled when he made this next observation: He was outrageously aroused.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  A final image nagged him. It was something from the nightmare, but the nightmare had changed. It had changed places. The humid night beat down on him. He was standing outside, and could hear crickets. Mosquitoes buzzed around his head, some landing on his skin to taste his sweat and drink his blood. The moon shone behind him and in its light, when he looked down, he realized where he was.

  A cemetery.

  But not any cemetery. Winter-Damon Cemetery.

  He realized what he was looking at.

  Marlene's gravestone.

  For a moment, just a single moment, he brought his hand to his erection in the most ultimate shame of all. But he stopped at the effort: His hand came away...gritty.

  He jerked himself to one side, hugging the pillow, as if to turn away from all that disgust that his brain had produced. But...

  The pillow felt gritty, too.

  The awful taste in his mouth raged, and when he licked his lips...

  They felt gritty.

  Gritty as if with flecks of soil.

  II

  What a flippin' week, huh, Bobby? Bobby asked himself. He had a way of having conversations with himself, after so many years of first shift. Who's on the mound for the Yanks tonight? Hmm, Bobby, I don't really know but I'd guess it's Mussina. Oh, yeah, I guess you're right. Like that. He was a little screwy. Bobby Weaver wasn't a carrier or anything. He was the maintenance supervisor for West Branch, more title than function, though. Pretty funny, huh, Bobby? You ain't kidding, it's funny. Yeah, like who the flip do we supervise when we're the only maintenance employee in the flippin' building!

  You got that right, Bobby.

  Bobby was typically the first employee in the building. Arrival time? 4:30 a.m. Bobby didn't mind. He made sure all the lights worked, prepped the sorting machines, cycled the circuits, that sort of thing. Not a hard job, but essential in its own way. The first drop-offs usually started coming in around five o'clock, so he had to get ready for that, too.

  No biggie, right, Bobby? Naw, it's a walk in the park.

  He whistled, going down his daily checklist. This building's unfamiliar look comforted him; until very recently he'd worked at the main branch, and nobody would ever forget what had happened there. Yeah, can ya believe that shit, Bobby? Flippin' broad MACHINE-GUNS the main branch! Yeah, but AFTER offing her hubby and kid! No, neither of them could believe that shit.

  Bobby didn't know her, really, he'd just seen her coming in each morning to do her pre-sort. Never saw her when she got off because his shift'd be over by then. Seemed nice enough, though, huh, Bobby? Sure, and a looke
r too. Nice little apple-dumpling cart up front and not a bad bucket in back, either. Cut that shit out, Bobby! The broad's DEAD and you're rapping about her bod for chrissakes! Yeah, sorry...

  Proof that it was a nutty world, though. A sure-fire, whacked-out flippin' world.

  Bobby sighed. The last item on his checklist was always the kick in the tail. Come on, Bobby. Let's go reload ALL the flippin' stamp machines out front. Aw, Christ, I HATE doing that. There's TEN machines out there!

  Tell me about it, Bobby.

  Three-cent, thirty-seven-cent, Priority, Air, dollar stamps, ten packs, twenty packs, and hundred-stamp first-class rolls-all these slots had to be filled, the change removed, the changers topped off. Pretty tedious.

  But there was nothing tedious about the rest of the day when Bobby waltzed into the vending lobby, keys in one hand, sack of packed stamps in the other, whistling Dixie.

  He walked around the counters, passed the first rank of PO. boxes, then stopped cold.

  Dropped his keys.

  Dropped the stamps.

  Then all the blood drained out of his head from the vision of horror that stared right back into his face.

  A woman was standing there in the corner of the vending cove, her arms spread out as if in wait for Bobby. She was naked and very pale. Hair that was a blend of blond and brunette straggled to her shoulders. Bobby thought for sure that some nutty homeless woman must've gotten into the post office, or some drug addict or something like that. What else could explain this woman being here, and in this state? Naked, ragged, pale?

  But then Bobby recognized the woman...

  It was Marlene Troy, who'd been killed by police a few days ago, and who'd just been buried.

  Bullet holes full of clotted blood pocked her torso. Dirt clods hung in her hair, while more grave dirt peppered her skin. The woman was dead but she was standing there on her own. Her eyes were open, mortician's glue unseated, their whites jaundiced by embalming fluid. Bobby knew it was impossible but for a split second it seemed as though she'd blinked.