She grabbed the edge of the hatch door and slammed it shut just as Rankin reached the top. Ann could see the faint outline of the door where light shone through the edges and hopped onto it, praying that Rankin would be unable to force it open. As she felt the door pressing upward against her weight, Ann groped around in the darkness for a latch of some kind to secure the door.
“Open this fucking door, bitch!” Rankin screamed in rage.
His voice sounded different for some reason-so different that Ann actually wondered it were really Jerry Rankin on the other side of the door.
With her heart nearly bursting out of her chest, Ann scraped along the edge of the door with her fingers like a blind person who had just dropped his last penny on the floor. Suddenly she felt something cold and hard. She traced her fingers along it. A latch! She grasped the nub of the bolt and slid it home, tearing a pair of her fingernails in the process.
She was safe!
At least for the moment.
She heard Jerry’s muffled profanities through the thick door as he pounded on it repeatedly with his fists. Ann could smell the pungent odors of paint thinner and linseed oil as she stood up and looked around the dark room. Her eyes eventually adjusted to the weak light somewhat as she noticed several rectangular shapes silhouetted against a large window.
His paintings, she thought.
She could just make out the vaulted ceiling as she recalled seeing a small balcony jut out from the third floor of the A-frame during their tour. Maybe that could be her ticket to escape.
She felt totally disoriented in her panicked state in the darkness.
She needed some light.
Once she could see, she would head for the balcony and pray that she could get away from Jerry Rankin.
Ann realized she was trembling from head to toe as she began inching her way toward the window, her hands swatting in the darkness before her. She came upon an object and touched it gingerly. It was a huge canvas board mounted on an easel. She sidestepped the painting and continued. In another few steps she bumped into a heavy object-a table. She groped around on the tabletop and could feel tubes of oil paint, a tin can and the base of what felt like a table lamp. Jerry was screaming at her unintelligibly and still pounding on the door as she ran her hand up the lamp until she felt the gooseneck that terminated at a light fixture. She felt the bulb inside the housing and ran her finger along the housing until it hit home. With a grateful sigh she pressed the button.
The room became bathed in light. The first thing she saw was the table and all of the scattered paint tubes and brushes upon it.
The next thing she saw caused her to scream and made the hair on her neck stand on end An enormous oil painting on an easel.
And unlike the rest of Jerry Rankin’s paintings, this was no abstract study.
Instead, it was a traditional rendering of three nude women, lying side by side, flat on their backs in identical positions. All three were evidently dead and had “May Day” inscribed across their breasts in what appeared to be bright red lipstick. Ann gasped in horror when she spotted the vial of lipstick shoved up into the vagina of the middle woman’s spread eagle legs.
A woman who bore a stunning resemblance to Marsha Bradley!
Ann stood with her eyes transfixed and mouth agape, oblivious to the fact that Jerry Rankin was no longer screaming and beating on the door. She felt her stomach muscles tighten as she studied the image of the woman lying to the left of Marsha. Although she hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, Ann was almost certain that the woman was Sara Hunt. And when she looked at the woman on the right, Ann began to shiver. The woman bore an uncanny resemblance to herself, only with blonde hair!
And then she spotted something else, placed on the lip of the easel. Three Polaroid prints lined up in a row…
Shots of the nude bodies of Marsha Bradley, Sara Hunt and the blonde woman who resembled herself.
Jesus Christ! she thought as she felt the bile rise in her throat
…
Stanley Jenkins!
Jerry Rankin was Stanley Jenkins!
But how could he be? It was impossible!
Suddenly, she heard a whooshing noise coming from her left. Her eyes shot past the half dozen or so paintings to the sliding doors that led to the balcony just as Jerry Rankin was entering the loft.
“You’re going to die!” he hissed, springing toward her. Ann let out a shriek and ran for the hatch door. But Jerry Rankin was too quick. He caught her before she even had a chance to open the latch.
He was so enraged that he punched Ann hard in the face and forced her to the floor, jumping on top of her and pinning her down.
“I should kill you now,” he spat, his face only inches away from hers. “But not quite yet.”
Ann screamed hysterically and wrestled with him, but to no avail. He doubled up in laughter. “Don’t even try it, Ann. You’re no match for me!”
His voice had taken on the hillbilly twang again.
“Who are you?”
He glanced over at the painting then back at her and Ann could see his face clearly now. His left eye was green, but his right eye was brown.
Apparently, his other green contact lens had fallen out into the Jacuzzi when she’d slashed him with her wine glass.
Stanley Jenkins, she vaguely recalled, had brown eyes.
A hideous grin came to his face and instead of replying, he merely eyed her body for a moment and then stared at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to answer her own question.
Ann already knew the answer, despite the utter inconceivability of it. Her mind flashed back twenty years to the last time she could recall ever seeing or hearing Stanley Jenkins. She recalled his voice, a sort of whiney, nasal twang-just the sort of voice one would expect to hear from a nerdy egghead…
“Well, Ann? Who am I?”
Ann felt her heart bursting out of her rib cage. Stanley Jenkins had found her. Stanley Jenkins was going to kill her. Just as he had killed Marsha and the others…
She turned her head away from him.
“Stanley Jenkins?”
He grasped her chin in his free hand and jerked her head back around. He was leering at her as he said to her in a confidential tone of voice: “It didn’t have to end this way, Ann. I told you that this room was off limits. But you just had to come up here anyway, didn’t you? And now you’ve discovered my little secret.”
“Why did you kill my friend? And the others?”
“Your friend?” he retorted with a smirk. “Marsha wasn’t your friend, Ann! She deceived you! She went behind your back and played a trick on you. She and that deplorable Sara Hunt bitch!”
Ann’s eyes widened in absolute shock. “What in the world are you talking about?”
Stanley loosened his hold on her and shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? You have absolutely no idea what happened, do you? I’m very disappointed, Ann. Hell, you’re every bit as naive as these other stupid women! Now you’re probably going to disappoint me even more and tell me that you don’t remember my asking you out to the Prom our senior year. Please, Ann! Don’t let me down. Tell me that you at least remember that; or was it so fucking insignificant that it has slipped your mind after all of these years?”
“I-I remember,” she stammered.
“I’m impressed! You were at a basketball game, cheering the team on in that cute little mini skirt that showed your ass so nicely. I was watching you from the bleachers, doing your splits and getting tossed in the air so high that I could see the crotch of your red panties as clear as day! I never got tired of watching you, Ann. You were so beautiful, so damn classy! I never failed to get excited whenever I watched you-it didn’t make any difference what you were doing-studying, watching television, taking a bath-it never failed to give me a hard-on! It didn’t take too long to realize that I wanted you more than anything else in the world. You became my only reason to exist for quite a while, in fact. I dreamt about you every night, after I went to bed, I dreamt of someday having you all for myself. To hold you and touch you and have wild, kinky sex with you. God, you were all I could ever think about! And I made a vow to myself that someday I would have you.”