“You’re sorry?” whispered Susan. “I tried to kill you.”
“Yeah, well.” Alex stroked her hand and smiled. “You were unsuccessful. That makes a world of difference.”
Emma was at Alex’s parents’ house, in Roslyn Harbor. She was fine, and missed her mommy.
“I want to see her.”
“When you’re up and about.… ”
“I want to see her.”
Alex nodded. “Of course. Now you need to rest, OK? When I come back, I’ll bring her. She’s going to be so excited.”
Susan leaned back into the pile of pillows, looked dreamily around at the gleaming whiteness of the hospital room, the row of machines, the drips feeding various fluids into her arms, feeling no pain — and, she realized with a warm gush of relief, feeling no itches.
Her eyes were half closed and Alex was at the door, slowly pulling it closed, when her eyes shot open. The dream — the hammers—
“What about Louis?”
The crime-scene investigators had found Louis King in the second compost bin, his head protruding like a puppet’s from where he’d been buried neck deep in garbage, just as Susan had been, and Jessica before her. His forehead bore a deep indentation, at dead center; the hammer blow had driven the front part of his skull deep into his brain. The newspaper quoted one policeman as reporting that bedbugs were swarming over his forehead and cheeks, more bedbugs were crawling over his eyes.
When those same detectives turned up in the hospital to interview Susan about what happened, they used that same word—“bedbugs,” with an “e”—and she made no effort to correct them.
“So,” said Susan Wendt, on the night of February 12, as she and Alex shared a bottle of wine in the living room of their new 2,050-square-foot home in Montclair, New Jersey. “Theresa?”
Alex looked at her blankly for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Hey, what can I say? It was the most realistic name I could think of, with a knife to my throat.”
“What knife? Who had a knife?”
“Nothing, boo-boo.”
Emma had come prancing down the stairs, naked except for her rain boots and a pair of pink fairy wings. “Is anybody going to give me a bath? Fairies need baths!”
Alex had declared himself on vacation through the winter, turning over GemFlex to Vic, while Susan, on doctor’s orders, was doing pretty much nothing until her legs and skin were healed. They’d been visiting preschools as a family and zeroed in on a place called New Jersey Families, which Alex loved because it sounded like a Mafia-run preschool. Susan thought it was clean, bright, and charming, and Emma deemed the lead teacher, Ms. Jessica, “pretty much amazing, pretty much.”
They new house had a decent-sized yard, so they’d gotten a mutt from the North Shore Animal League, a good-natured squirmy puppy that Susan named Kaufmann.
Every night, before going to sleep, Susan Wendt stood naked before the mirror in her leg casts, examining her body carefully, tracking the progress of her healing. Her many scars were already fading, the welts receding from angry red to pale pink, then away to nothing, as welts are supposed to do. Some nights, when she performed this ritual, studying her flesh inch by inch, Susan allowed herself to believe that it might be over. If The Shadow Species had it right — and so far, unfortunately, it had been right in every detail — then the blight had been lifted with Andrea’s death.
Some nights she believed it, and some nights she didn’t. Every morning, when she woke, she lay in bed for a long time, until she felt ready to check her pillowcase.
Acknowledgements
Special Thanks
To Kate Samworth for teaching me about oil painting, and especially for presenting me with the verb to scumble. Kate’s remarkable paintings, which are neither supernatural nor evil, can be found at KateSamworth.com Thanks to my friend Ed Parrinello, of SquareMoose Photography in Manhattan, for the basics of high-end jewelry and watch photography. And many, many thanks to James at Flash Exterminating in Brooklyn, who was generous with his time during what has become an unending busy season for the industry.
A tip of the hat to the habitués of Bedbugger.com, where I have lurked, bedbuglike, for many hours, gathering insights and then disappearing, sated, into the darkness. What a great and terrifying website.
Thanks, as always, to my fantastic agent, Molly Lyons.
Thanks to Jason Rekulak at Quirk Books, who continues to lead me, Virgil-like, down new paths of adventure. I am fortunate beyond words to be working once again with him as well as with Doogie, Melissa, Eric, Mary Ellen, Robin, Stephen, Dave, Brett — all you lunatics. Thanks, Quirk Books.
Last, and most, thanks to Diana Winters, who told me I should write this book, helped me write it, and made it better when she read it.