“He did the best he could,” he heard his mother say. She didn’t sound as if she really meant it.
His father grunted again. “Some lessons need learnin’ the hard way.”
Jordan knew what the hard way was. His mother would wield the whip while his father watched.
Then his father would—
“See that the tractor’s in the barn and gassed up,” his father was saying. “You got tilling to do tomorrow.”
“He’s got school,” Alice Kray said.
“What’s the point? He ain’t learnin’ anything anyway.”
“Still an’ all . . .”
“You’ll till after school tomorrow,” Jason Kray said to Jordan with finality. “That soil needs breaking.”
“I can till,” Kent said confidentially.
“You got your homework,” his mother said. It was a given that Kent was going to college, either because of his grades or his athletic prowess. He could already run high hurdles in near record time and throw a baseball a mile, and now he was concentrating on basketball.
He should easily be in the Olympics, his family figured. If not that, the major leagues, or professional football, after a great college career. Maybe even pro basketball, if he got much taller. One way or another, his assignment was to make the family rich.
“I don’t mind tilling,” Kent said. He actually liked driving the tractor, listening to the engine roar and watching how the oversized back tires dug into the bare earth while the tiller blades laid open the soil for planting.
“You got other after-school chores tomorrow,” his mother said.
All through this conversation, Jordan’s mind was elsewhere. He liked to learn; he just didn’t like school. And for sure he couldn’t run track, or throw a baseball half as far as Kent. But why should he be able to do those things? He was smaller than Kent. His arms were skinny and his legs were bony. He wasn’t built to be an athlete, even though he lifted weights in the barn.
It wasn’t that he was weak.
He didn’t want them to know how strong he was. It seemed to him that if they did know, they’d figure out a way to use it against him.
Nora spilled her juice and began to cry. Strained peas dribbled from her mouth.
“Shut up the rug rat,” Jason Kray said. He shoved his chair back so hard it turned over as he stood up and strode into the living room. Jordan and Kent’s little sister, Nora, didn’t quiet down that easily. She’d have to learn, and was almost old enough to be taught.
Hard lessons, not easily forgotten. That’s what this family was about. What all families should be about. Hard lessons, and weathering storms inside and out.
Kent followed his father into the living room. They would sit on opposite ends of the couch and watch a replay of last night’s baseball game between the Red Sox and Cleveland Indians.
Jordan, still seated in the kitchen, didn’t have to be told to help his mother clear the table. Women’s work, according to his father.
As Jordan worked, he became fascinated by the magnifying glass his mother used instead of glasses to help her read. She had magnifiers all over the house, but the biggest one was on the kitchen windowsill, where it was handy for her to use while reading food labels or recipes. She watched her calories and carbohydrates. Jason had told her what would happen if she let herself get fat.
The way she had the magnifier tilted up against the window was interesting to Jordan. He had read in various outdoors magazines how it was possible to start a fire with a magnifying glass. The sunlight and heat streaming through the curved glass could be focused to a tiny flammable dot.
He’d almost started a fire that way once himself. One of the magazines had a story about a guy in Alaska who’d used a single lens from his glasses to start a campfire that kept him and his sled dogs from freezing to death. Jordan didn’t know if the story was true, but he saw how such a thing could have happened.
It was fascinating, the way so many things had more than one purpose.
Like a belt that would keep your pants up, or be used for something else altogether.
In the morning, when it was ten minutes past time to get up and start getting dressed for school, Jordan’s mother shook his bed as if an earthquake had struck.
“I was you, I’d make sure I wouldn’t miss that school bus this mornin’,” she said. “You got no room to misbehave.”
“Where’s everybody?” he asked, though he could hear his father snoring.
“They’re sleepin’ in. I’m gonna give you a note that says Kent’s got a stomachache. You take that to school and give it to his teacher. Or to the principal or somebody in the office.”
“Why can’t I stay home and sleep in, too?”
“It wouldn’t look right, the both of you being sick at the same time.”
“I don’t know. It seems—”
“Just get up and get dressed afore that school bus arrives at the end of the road. Unless you want more of what you got last night.”
“No,” Jordan said. “No more.” He wasn’t sure if it was pain or embarrassment that was making his cheeks flush.
He managed to climb out of bed and stood swaying. His buttocks and the backs of his thighs were on fire, and it seemed that every joint in his body ached.
“Get movin’,” his mother said. “A hot shower’ll fix you up. I’ll put out some cereal for you, then I’m goin’ back to bed.”
Nude, he stumbled toward the bathroom.
The one thing he surely didn’t want was to miss the bus.
He skipped his shower and got dressed in a hurry. He decided to skip breakfast, too.
His curiosity was nagging. More than nagging. Raging. Instead of eating the bowl of stale Cheerios his mother had put out for him, he slightly adjusted the magnifying glass on the windowsill, propping it over some crinkled tissue and wadded newspaper from the trash.
Near the kitchen curtains.
18
New York, the present
He’d drugged her. Margaret was sure of it. But why?
And where . . . ?
She knew where without having to open her eyes. But, hoping against hope, she did open them.
Margaret was in her apartment’s bathroom, nude and in the bathtub in lukewarm water. She was on her back, leaning back, her head tilted up for a view of the ceiling and to keep her face dry. She couldn’t close her mouth—something was jammed into it. It felt to her probing tongue like a rubber ball. One of those things sadists used to silence their victims.
She inhaled and made noises, not loud and certainly not understandable.
She felt so weak....
Why so weak? Tired? A faint trickling sound was so restful.
Movement on the periphery of her vision . . .
There was Casey—no, Corey—standing above her near the foot of her bathtub. The warm water—that must be the trickling sound she heard, a faucet running slightly, slowed to a gradual ticking. The warmth of the water felt so good . . . Was this some kind of kinky sexual experience he’d dreamed up?
I don’t even know this man!
He moved closer and she saw what looked like a scalpel or some other kind of sharp knife in his right hand. In his left was a U-shaped saw with a whipcord-thin and taut serrated blade strung between its arms.
A jigsaw.
The bathwater turned cool with her knowledge. Margaret remembered her childhood and her father’s basement woodworking shop, his various kinds of saws and what they could do. She made another small, animal noise, raising her right hand to plead with Corey—with the Gremlin. She was shocked by the scarlet, almost black color of her arm. And she knew the liquid in the tub wasn’t water, it was blood.