Lying, he thought. That I’m good at. Plenty of experience.
Again he looked at the list. Words were not going to be enough, he knew.
Another wave of nausea threatened his stomach, but he fought it off, put the car in gear, and headed first for the hardware store. He knew, later, perhaps at midnight, he had to make a trip to the airport. He did not expect to sleep much in the hours to come.
It was midmorning, and Catherine and Ashley were the only people remaining in the house. Sally had departed, dressed as she would for her office, other clothing stuffed into her briefcase. Hope, as well, had left the house as if nothing were out of the ordinary, her backpack thrown jauntily over her shoulder. Neither of the two women had said anything to Ashley and Catherine about what the day held.
And both Catherine and Ashley had seen a furtiveness in their eyes.
If Sally and Hope had slept much the night before, it was lost in their tense gestures and short-tempered words. Still, they had both moved with a singleness of purpose that had almost set Ashley back. She had never seen either of the two women behaving with such steel-eyed and iron movement.
Catherine came in, breathing hard. “Something is clearly afoot, dear.” She held her yellow legal paper with instructions in her hand.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Ashley said. “God damn it. I can’t stand being outside, trying to look in.”
“We need to follow the plan. Whatever it is.”
“When has any plan that my parents have come up with ever really worked out?” Ashley said, although she realized she sounded a little like a petulant teenager.
“I don’t know about that. But Hope generally does exactly what she says she’s going to do. She’s as solid as a rock.”
Ashley nodded. “Thick as a brick. After the divorce, my dad used to play that for me on his tape deck and we would dance around the living room. Common ground was hard to find, so he would start blasting all his sixties rock and roll. Jethro Tull. The Stones. The Dead. The Who. Hendrix. Joplin. He taught me the Frug and the Watusi and the Freddy.” Ashley suddenly looked out the window, unaware that her father had recalled the same memory days earlier. “I wonder if he and I will ever dance again. I always thought we would, you know, just the one time, when I got married, when everyone was watching. He would just swoop in and we’d do a turn or two and everyone would clap. Long white dress for me. Tuxedo for him. When I was little, the only thing I wanted was to fall in love. Not a sad, angry mess, like my mother and father. Something more like Hope and my mother, except there would be a really, really good-looking, smart guy involved. And you know, when I would say this to Hope, she was always the first to tell me how great it would be. We would laugh and imagine wedding dresses and flowers and all the little-girl things.” Ashley stepped back. “And now, the first man to say he loves me and truly mean it is a nightmare.”
“Life is strange,” Catherine said. “We have to trust them that they know what they’re doing.”
“You think they do?”
Catherine saw that in Ashley’s right hand she held the revolver.
“If I get the damn chance…” Ashley said.
Then she pointed at the list. “All right. Act one. Scene one. Enter Ashley and Catherine, stage right. What’s our opening line?”
Catherine looked down at her list. “First thing is the trickiest. We have to make sure that O’Connell isn’t here. I guess we’re taking that walk outside.”
“Then what?” Ashley asked.
Catherine looked down at the paper. “Then it’s your big moment. It’s the bit your mother underlined three times. Are you ready?”
Ashley didn’t answer. She was unsure.
They got their coats and walked out the front door together. Ashley and Catherine paused, standing on the front stoop, staring up and down the block. It was all family-neighborhood quiet. Ashley kept her fingers gripped around the pistol handle hidden deep in her parka pocket, her index finger rubbing against the trigger guard nervously. She was struck with the way her fear of Michael O’Connell had made her see the world as so many threats. The street where she had spent much of her childhood playing, as she shuttled between her parents’ two houses, should have been as familiar to her as her own room upstairs. But it was no longer. O’Connell had changed it into something utterly different. He had sliced away everything that belonged to her: her school, her apartment in Boston, her job, and now the place where she had grown up. She wondered whether he really knew how much genius existed in his evil.
She touched the gun barrel. Kill him, she told herself. Because he is killing you.
Still scanning the neighborhood with their eyes, Catherine and Ashley proceeded slowly up the street. Ashley wanted to invite him to show himself, if he was there. Halfway down the block, despite the rain, she removed her knit ski cap. She shook her head, letting her hair fall to her shoulders, before stuffing the hat back upon her head. She wanted, for the first and only time in months, to be irresistible.
“Keep walking,” Catherine said. “If he’s here, he will show.”
They sidled down the sidewalk, and from behind they heard a car start down the street. Ashley clutched the pistol and felt her heartbeat accelerate. She barely breathed in as the sound increased.
As the car drew abreast of them, she pivoted abruptly, swinging the weapon free and spreading her feet as she crouched into the shooting stance that she had practiced so diligently in her room. Her thumb slid over the safety switch, then to the hammer. She exhaled sharply, almost a grunt of effort, and then a whistle of tension.
The car, with a middle-aged man behind the wheel, rolled past them. The driver didn’t even turn; his eyes were checking addresses on the opposite side of the street.
Ashley groaned. But Catherine kept her wits about her. “You should put that weapon away,” she said quietly. “Before some nice stay-at-home mother spots it in your hand.”
“Where the hell is he?”
Catherine didn’t answer.
The two of them continued slowly. Ashley felt utterly calm, committed, ready to pull out her weapon and end it all with a rapid-fire answer to all his questions. Is this what it feels like to be ready to kill someone? But the real O’Connell, as opposed to the ghostlike O’Connell who had lurked just behind her every step for so long, was nowhere to be seen.
When they’d patiently made it around the block and sauntered back to Sally and Hope’s home, Catherine muttered, “All right. We know one thing. He’s not here. He has to be somewhere. Are you ready for the next step?”
Ashley doubted anyone could know the answer to that until they tried.
Michael O’Connell was at his makeshift desk in a darkened room, bathed in the glow of the computer screen. He was working on a little surprise for Ashley’s family. Dressed only in his underwear, his hair slicked back after a shower, techno music pouring through the computer’s speakers, he tapped his fingers on the keyboard in rhythm with the electric chords. The songs he listened to were fast, almost out of control.
O’Connell took delight in having used some of the cash that Ashley’s father had given him in the pathetic effort to buy him off to purchase the computer that replaced the one that Matthew Murphy had smashed. And now, he was hard at work on a series of electronic sorties that he believed would make for significant trouble in their lives.
The first was to be an anonymous tip to the Internal Revenue Service suggesting that Sally was asking her clients to pay her fees half by check and half in cash. There is nothing, Michael O’Connell thought, that the tax people hate more than someone trying to hide big chunks of income. They would be skeptical when she denied it, and relentless as they pored over her accounts.