Her stomach tightened, then turned over and over inside her.
Her lungs felt filled with ice water.
Her hands curled into fists and her fingernails dug hard into her palms until they nearly broke through the flesh.
Her brain felt on fire inside her head, as if the flames might be shooting out her ears, as if her smoking hair might be singed from the roots up.
She returned to Kendra’s homepage with a click of the mouse.
She pressed her hands flat on the desktop and stood gradually. She walked very slowly out of the bedroom and down the hall to the kitchen. She went to the living room and looked at Kendra. She was still asleep on the couch. Anna turned back and went into the kitchen. She took the large knife from the counter, the knife with which Kendra had cut herself. She slid the blade down into her shorts on her hip, pulled her T-shirt down over the handle that stuck up from the shorts’ elastic band. She slipped her bare feet into flip-flops and left the trailer.
Anna walked slowly down the road to unit five, the flip-flops slapping against her heels. She knocked on the door. It opened a moment later and Steven Regent smiled widely down at her.
“Hey, baby, how’s it going?” he said. He pushed the screen door open and she went up the steps, into his trailer.
Behind her, he closed the screen, then the door, and turned to her. “You come back for some more, honey?” he said.
She stepped up to him and put her left hand to the back of his neck, pressed her body to his, and gave him a long, deep kiss. When she pulled back, just a little, he said breathlessly, “Whoa, you really did come back for some more, huh, Kitten?”
She did not smile as she looked at him. When she spoke, her voice was low, but clear and crisp. “How did my daughter get on your fucking website?”
His smile faltered a little. “Wha… what?”
As she replied, she reached down with her right hand and removed the knife from her shorts. “I said, how… did my daughter… get on your fucking website?”
“Your… daughter? I don’t understand, Kitten, whatta you mean, your – “
She plunged the blade into his stomach. It made a wet sound going in.
Steven gagged and gurgled and his tongue jutted from his mouth as his eyes bulged.
“You filthy fucking bastard,” Anna growled as she pulled the knife out.
Blood gushed from the wound.
Steven’s mouth hung open and his eyes rolled around in their sockets.
She sent the knife in again, to the hilt, her teeth clenched. This time, she twisted the blade inside him.
Steven released a pathetic gurgle and went down. He fell backward, pulled away from the blade, and hit the floor heavily.
“How dare you,” Anna said. “How dare you!”
She knelt beside him, and with Kendra on her mind – her innocent, retarded daughter, her little blonde baby girl – she stabbed him again, and again, and again. She held the knife in both hands and brought her arms up and down, up and down. She did not notice the blood splashing up from Steven’s body, getting on her arms and the front of her T-shirt and shorts, even spattering her face. She kept stabbing him long after the final death rattle escaped his lungs and he lay dead and staring up at the ceiling with wide milky eyes. After awhile, her hands appeared to be wearing wet, red gloves up to her elbows.
She stopped, sat back on her lower legs, dropped the knife, and heaved with sobs. They shook her entire body. She lifted her hands and held them at each side of her face without touching it. She looked at them – first the left, then the right – and saw all the blood on her, and only sobbed harder. Blood dribbled down her cheeks, down her arms. It was everywhere, all over her. Steven was a mass of blood before her. She could smell it, and it was sickening. She could smell the blood and shit from his dead body.
Anna sobbed until she could sob no more, until she was empty, exhausted, blasted out inside. Her sobs subsided and became small whimpering sounds. At first, she didn’t realize the sounds were coming from her and she looked around for their source.
She almost collapsed. She wanted to lie down beside him and sleep. But she couldn’t do that. She did not know what to do next. All she knew was that she had committed murder.
She had killed a man.
And she did not know what to do next.
Kendra straddled Reznick in his recliner. She was naked.
“You’re hard,” she said as she massaged the bulge in his pants. She smiled as she moved forward and kissed him. Her hair fell forward in drapes on either side of them.
He felt her breasts press against him, warm and pliant.
Then she pulled back and began to unbutton his shirt.
He lifted his hands and put them on her breasts. He squeezed them gently, ran his thumbs over the nipples until they became hard and puckered.
“Kendra,” he whispered, just to say her name.
She smiled as she ran her hands over his bare chest, dragged her fingernails lightly over his skin, over his nipples.
She moved back a little, reached down and unbuttoned his shorts.
Someone knocked on the door.
Kendra unzipped his shorts and reached in to find his erection.
“Wait,” Reznick said when the knock came again.
But Kendra ignored the knocking and wrapped her fingers around him.
“No, wait, there’s somebody at – “
The knock at the door sounded again.
When he looked at Kendra again, she was Victoria. She held a gun in her right hand. She put the gun to her temple as her left hand fondled Reznick’s erection.
He heard the gun explode as he jerked awake with a small cry.
“Marc?” someone said. “Marc? I need some help.”
He recognized Anna’s voice.
Reznick’s hands trembled and his heart hammered as if he had just gone for a long run, something he hadn’t done in ages. He straightened up in the recliner, wide awake now, and stood unsteadily. He felt weak and shaky all over.
“Marc, please.”
“Anna?” he said as he turned to the door. He walked over and opened the screen. “What’s up?” He flipped on the porch light, and what he saw made him gasp.
“I don’t know if I should come inside,” she said. “I’m kind of a mess.” She laughed, then – a high, abrupt, breathy laugh that sounded on the verge of hysteria. He’d heard it before, that laugh, and it caused him great concern.
“Are you hurt?” Reznick asked as he came down the front steps.
“No, no, not me, not me, it was someone else who was hurt, and I hurt him.” Another of those spooky laughs. She held her hands out before her, fingers apart.
“Is that blood that’s all over you?”
“Yes, yes, it’s blood.”
“You must be dripping it all over the place. Where did you come from?”
“Unit five.”
“The new trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I killed him, Marc, I killed him, stabbed him to death for what he did to my little girl.”
“You… you just killed someone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Here in the park?”
“Yes.”
“And you came straight over here?”
“Yeah.”
Dripping blood like that, he thought, looking around to see if anyone was watching, seeing. He saw no one.
Reznick thought fast. “Okay, look, here’s what I want you to do. Walk across the road to that trailer over there, okay? Right through the trees to that trailer over there.”