There were lots of clips. The top-rated one was a six-minute compilation titled HE’S BAD, HE’S REALLY BAD. Several hundred thousand people had viewed it. There were scenes from three movies, but the one that transfixed her was the first. It was black-and-white, it looked on the cheap side… but it was definitely one of those movies. Even the title told you so: Kiss of Death.
Tess watched the entire video, then returned to the Kiss of Death segment twice. Widmark played a giggling hood menacing an old lady in a wheelchair. He wanted information: “Where’s that squealin’ son of yours?” And when the old lady wouldn’t tell him: “You know what I do to squealers? I let em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time, thinkin’ it over.”
He didn’t shoot the old lady in the belly, though. He tied her into her wheelchair with a lamp cord and pushed her down the stairs.
Tess exited YouTube, Binged Richard Widmark, and found what she expected, given the power of that brief clip. Although he had played in many subsequent movies, more and more often as the hero, he was best known for Kiss of Death, and the giggling, psychotic Tommy Udo.
“Big deal,” Tess said. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
“Meaning what?” Fritzy asked from the windowsill where he was sunning himself.
“Meaning Ramona probably fell in love with him after seeing him play a heroic sheriff or a courageous battleship commander, or something like that.”
“She must have,” Fritzy agreed, “because if you’re right about her sexual orientation, she probably doesn’t idolize men who murder old ladies in wheelchairs.”
Of course that was true. Good thinking, Fritzy.
The cat regarded Tess with a skeptical eye and said, “But maybe you’re not right about that.”
“Even if I’m not,” Tess said, “nobody roots for psycho bad guys.”
She recognized this for the stupidity it was as soon as it was out of her mouth. If people didn’t root for psychos, they wouldn’t still be making movies about the nut in the hockey mask and the burn victim with scissors for fingers. But Fritzy did her the courtesy of not laughing.
“You better not,” Tess said. “If you’re tempted, remember who fills your food dish.”
She googled Ramona Norville, got forty-four thousand hits, added Chicopee, and got a more manageable twelve hundred (although even most of those, she knew, would be coincidental dreck). The first relevant one was from the Chicopee Weekly Reminder, and concerned Tess herself: LIBRARIAN RAMONA NORVILLE ANNOUNCES “WILLOW GROVE FRIDAY.”
“There I am, the starring attraction,” Tess murmured. “Hooray for Tessa Jean. Now let’s see my supporting actress.” But when she pulled up the clipping, the only photo Tess saw was her own. It was the bare-shoulders publicity shot her part-time assistant routinely sent out. She wrinkled her nose and went back to Google, not sure why she wanted to look at Ramona again, only knowing that she did. When she finally found a photo of the librarian, she saw what her subconscious might already have suspected, at least judging by Tom’s comments on the ride back to her house.
It was in a story from the August 3 issue of the Weekly Reminder. BROWN BAGGERS ANNOUNCE SPEAKING SCHEDULE FOR FALL, the headline read. Below it, Ramona Norville stood on the library steps, smiling and squinting into the sun. A bad photograph, taken by a part-timer without much talent, and a bad (but probably typical) choice of clothes on Norville’s part. The man-tailored blazer made her look as wide in the chest as a pro football tackle. Her shoes were ugly brown flatboats. A pair of too-tight gray slacks showcased what Tess and her friends back in middle school had called “thunder thighs.”
“Holy fucking shit, Fritzy,” she said. Her voice was watery with dismay. “Look at this.” Fritzy didn’t come over to look and didn’t reply—how could he, when she was too upset to make his voice?
Make sure of what you’re seeing, she told herself. You’ve had a terrible shock, Tessa Jean, maybe the biggest shock a woman can have, short of a mortal diagnosis in a doctor’s office. So make sure.
She closed her eyes and summoned the image of the man from the old Ford pickup truck with the Bondo around the headlights. He had seemed so friendly at first. Didn’t think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?
Only he hadn’t been green, he’d been a tanned hulk of a man who didn’t ride in his pickup but wore it.
Ramona Norville, not a Big Driver but certainly a Big Librarian, was too old to be his sister. And if she was a lesbian now, she hadn’t always been one, because the resemblance was unmistakable.
Unless I’m badly mistaken, I’m looking at a picture of my rapist’s mother.
- 29 -
She went to the kitchen and had a drink of water, but water wasn’t getting it. An old half-filled bottle of tequila had been brooding in a back corner of a kitchen cabinet for donkey’s years. She took it out, considered a glass, then nipped directly from the bottle. It stung her mouth and throat, but had a positive effect otherwise. She helped herself to more—a sip rather than a nip—and then put the bottle back. She had no intention of getting drunk. If she had ever needed her wits about her, she needed them about her today.
Rage—the biggest, truest rage of her adult life—had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn’t like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. Clearer since she’d had the tequila, actually.
She paced a series of rapid circles around the kitchen, head down, one hand massaging the ring of bruises around her throat. It did not occur to her that she was circling her kitchen as she had circled the deserted store after crawling out of the pipe Big Driver had meant for her tomb. Did she really think Ramona Norville had sent her, Tess, to her psychotic son like some kind of sacrifice? Was that likely? It was not. Could she even be sure that the two of them were mother and son, based on one bad photograph and her own memory?
But my memory’s good. Especially my memory for faces.
Well, so she thought, but probably everyone did. Right?
Yes, and the whole idea’s crazy. You have to admit it is.
She did admit it, but she had seen crazier things on true-crime programs (which she did watch). The ladies with the apartment house in San Francisco who had spent years killing their elderly tenants for their Social Security checks and burying them in the backyard. The airline pilot who murdered his wife, then froze the body so he could run her through the woodchipper behind the garage. The man who had doused his own children with gasoline and cooked them like Cornish game hens to make sure his wife never got the custody the courts had awarded her. A woman sending victims to her own son was shocking and unlikely… but not impossible. When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.
“Oh boy,” she heard herself saying in a voice that combined dismay and anger. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”
Find out. Find out for sure. If you can.
She went back to her trusty computer. Her hands were trembling badly, and it took her three tries to enter COLEWICH TRUCKING FIRMS in the search field at the top of the Google page. Finally she got it right, hit enter, and there it was, at the top of the list: RED HAWK TRUCKING. The entry took her to the Red Hawk website, which featured a badly animated big rig with what she assumed was a red hawk on the side and a bizarre smiley-head man behind the wheel. The truck crossed the screen from right to left, flipped and came back left to right, then flipped again. An endless crisscross journey. The company’s motto flashed red, white, and blue above the animated truck: THE SMILES COME WITH THE SERVICE!