“You’re in Oregon?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s not so far, is it?”
“It’d take a while on a bicycle,” she said. “Rita, it’s not far, not really, and anyway I wouldn’t have to take a bike. I know how to drive. But first there are things I have to tell you, and the only way this is going to work is if you just listen and don’t interrupt. And then when I’m through you can ask anything you want, or say anything you want. Or just tell me you don’t want to have anything to do with me, and hang up, and I’ll have to live with that.”
“My God, Kimmie.”
“So here goes.”
Long pause. “Kimmie?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I’m just having a little trouble getting started.”
It was very difficult to get started, and not much easier once she did. She couldn’t say anything without worrying about the way it would be received. But she forced herself to keep going, and there was a point where she stopped being concerned by Rita’s reaction.
She’d asked Rita not to interrupt, and she didn’t, not even with an occasional sharp intake of breath. She found herself entertaining the notion that Rita wasn’t listening at all, that she’d put down the phone and left the room, that her own carrier had dropped the call.
None of that mattered. She was speaking of things she had never confided to anyone, and it was as if all those words had been dammed up somewhere within her, and the effect of releasing them was surprisingly powerful.
All those years of being the good little soldier, and you couldn’t say they’d ended when she killed her parents. That just gave her another secret to keep.
She’d shared bits and pieces with some of the men she’d been with, just before or after she killed them. And she’d told a bit of her story to Angelica while she got the woman to tell her where the money was stashed, and while she slipped the Hermés scarf around her neck.
Maybe those brief confidences had been an attempt to break the dam, to let it all out and relieve the pressure. But this was vastly different, and somewhere along the way she slipped into an altered state, as if she were a trance medium channeling her own thoughts.
When she stopped, when the words ran out, she couldn’t have guessed how much time had passed. Nor would she have been able to say what incidents she’d recounted and what ones remained unreported. All she knew, really, was that she was done, that she’d said all she needed to say.
She was waiting for a response from Rita, but Rita was silent herself. She knew she was still on the line, though. Her breathing, while shallow, was audible.
When it was clear Rita wasn’t going to speak, she said, “That’s it. You can talk now. Or not, if you don’t want to.”
“I wasn’t sure you were done.”
“Oh, I’m done.”
“I never would have guessed any of that, Kimmie. Except—”
“What?”
“Well, you know. Thinking you were a secret agent. I wondered if you ever had to kill anybody.”
“And what did you decide?”
“That you probably had to, and that you were probably good at it.”
“Because I’m a heartless bitch.”
“Because you’re the strongest human being I’ve ever met in my life.”
“I guess you don’t get out much.”
“I mean it, Kimmie. Should I be calling you that? That can’t be the name you started out with.”
“I like it.”
“Really?”
“I like it when you say it.”
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, I was just thinking. I like when you say Kimmie almost as much as you like it when I say cunt.”
“Kimmie, you’re awful!”
“I’ve killed more men than I can remember and saying a yummy word like cunt makes me awful?”
“It is a yummy word, isn’t it?”
“Delicious.”
“If you were here—”
“If I were there what?”
“If you were here, I’d grab you like a bowling ball with two fingers up your ass and my thumb up your cunt, and I’d suck on your clitty until your bones melt.”
“You didn’t just come up with that, Rita.”
“No, it’s one of a few hundred things I think about all the time. All. The. Time.”
“But now that you know what I am—”
“You’re my Kimmie, that’s all I need to know. I love you.”
“Oh God.”
“I do, I do. I love you and I’m in love with you. And I don’t have to be jealous of any of the guys you’ve been with because they’re all dead. Not that I was ever jealous anyway, because what do I care what you do with men? What has any of that got to do with us?”
“Nothing. I love you, too.”
“I know you do.”
“You want to know something awful about me? I love that you killed them. Kellen Kimball, I liked the idea that you were going to fuck him, that we’d have him in common.”
“You said it would be a threesome with an interval.”
“And I thought he was a pretty nice guy, even if he wouldn’t go down on me. Did he go down on you?”
“He didn’t want to.”
“But he did, didn’t he?”
“Well, see, he did want to, really. He wanted to do you, too, but he had this fidelity issue. Once I got him to see that he was my proxy bridegroom Sidney, not some lucky girl’s fiancé, well, he got into the spirit of things.”
“That is so great. And he’s dead, and you killed him.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess I’m crazy, because on the one hand I liked him a little, and at the same time I’m really glad you killed him. That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” she said. “But I’m not sure I’m the best person to say what’s weird and what isn’t.”
And, a little later:
“I know you can drive, but I bet you don’t have a car. What I could do, I could drive down and pick you up.”
“I’ll take the train.”
“Are you sure? I swear I don’t mind driving.”
“Amtrak takes a little over five hours and costs all of sixty-five dollars. I’ll get to watch the scenery, and I won’t have to worry about keeping my hands off the driver.”
“You already checked this out.”
“Yes.”
“You were planning on coming.”
“Or leaving you alone forever, depending on what you wanted.”
“Well, you know what I want.”
“It sounds like we both want the same thing.”
“Oh, God.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “There are a couple of things I have to do. Pack my stuff, tell my boss to find someone else to sell plangent coffee.”
“Plangent?”
“Long story. There’s a train at two in the afternoon, gets to Seattle at a quarter after seven.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I could take a cab.”
“Yeah, right. Or maybe my bike’s still there where you left it. You never know.”
“It still bothers me about the bike. Just abandoning it like that.”
“Well, get over it,” Rita said. “I’ll be there when your train gets in. And Kimmie? I love you.”
Her morning appointment took longer than she’d thought. She’d packed first and stopped en route at the Bean Bag to pick up her pay and tell Will she was leaving, then found her way to the salon. She’d found their ad in the local alternative newspaper, and the operator wore spike heels and a lot of leather; if she wasn’t a dominatrix, she needed a new agent.
She had one more stop to make after the Leather Girl finished with her, but it didn’t take long. When she left her suitcase was heavier, but not too heavy, and she wound up catching her train with ten minutes to spare. She grabbed a window seat, plopped her bag onto the aisle seat beside her, and hoped no one would make her move it. A lot of people got on in Portland, but they all walked past her bag and found seats somewhere else, and the seat beside hers remained empty all the way to Seattle.