A mile or so after passing the Colewich sign, Tess began to hear a low, rhythmic thudding that seemed to come up from the road through her feet. Her first thought was of H. G. Wells’s mutant Morlocks, tending their machinery deep in the bowels of the earth, but another five minutes clarified the sound. It was coming through the air, not from the ground, and it was one she knew: the heartbeat of a bass guitar. The rest of the band coalesced around it as she walked. She began to see light on the horizon, not headlights but the white of arc sodiums and the red gleam of neon. The band was playing “Mustang Sally,” and she could hear laughter. It was drunken and beautiful, punctuated by happy party-down whoops. The sound made her feel like crying some more.
The roadhouse, a big old honkytonk barn with a huge dirt parking lot that looked full to capacity, was called The Stagger Inn. She stood at the edge of the glare cast by the parking lot lights, frowning. Why so many cars? Then she remembered it was Friday night. Apparently The Stagger Inn was the place to go on Friday nights if you were from Colewich or any of the surrounding towns. They would have a phone, but there were too many people. They would see her bruised face and leaning nose. They would want to know what had happened to her, and she was in no shape to make up a story. At least not yet. Even a pay phone outside was no good, because she could see people out there, too. Lots of them. Of course. These days you had to go outside if you wanted to smoke a cigarette. Also…
He could be there. Hadn’t he been capering around her at one point, singing a Rolling Stones song in his awful tuneless voice? Tess supposed she might have dreamed that part—or hallucinated it—but she didn’t think so. Wasn’t it possible that after hiding her car, he’d come right here to The Stagger Inn, pipes all cleaned and ready to party the night away?
The band launched into a perfectly adequate cover of an old Cramps song: “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog.” No, Tess thought, but today a dog certainly did my pussy. The Old Tess would not have approved of such a joke, but the New Tess thought it was pretty goddam funny. She barked a hoarse laugh and got walking again, moving to the other side of the road, where the lights from the roadhouse parking lot did not quite reach.
As she passed the far side of the building, she saw an old white van backed up to the loading dock. There were no arc sodiums on this side of The Stagger Inn, but the moonlight was enough to show her the skeleton pounding its cupcake drums. No wonder the van hadn’t stopped to pick up the nail-studded road litter. The Zombie Bakers had been late for the load-in, and that wasn’t good, because on Friday nights, The Stagger Inn was hopping with the bopping, rolling with the strolling, and reeling with the feeling.
“Can your pussy do the dog?” Tess asked, and pulled the filthy carpet remnant a little tighter around her neck. It was no mink stole, but on a cool October night, it was better than nothing.
- 14 -
When Tess got to the intersection of Stagg Road and Route 47, she saw something beautiful: a Gas & Dash with two pay telephones on the cinder-block wall between the restrooms.
She used the Women’s first, and had to put a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry when her urine started to flow; it was as if someone had lit a book of matches in there. When she got up from the toilet, fresh tears were rolling down her cheeks. The water in the bowl was a pastel pink. She blotted herself—very gently—with a pad of toilet paper, then flushed. She would have taken another wad to fold into the crotch of her underwear, but of course she couldn’t do that. The giant had taken her underpants as a souvenir.
“You bastard,” she said.
She paused with her hand on the doorknob, looking at the bruised, wide-eyed woman in the water-spotted metal mirror over the washbasin. Then she went out.
- 15 -
She discovered that using a pay telephone in this modern age had grown strangely difficult, even if you had your calling-card number memorized. The first phone she tried worked only one-way: she could hear the directory assistance operator, but the directory assistance operator couldn’t hear her, and broke such connection as there was. The other phone was tilted askew on the cinder-block wall—not encouraging—but it worked. There was a steady annoying under-whine, but at least she and the operator could communicate. Only Tess had no pen or pencil. There were several writing implements in her purse, but of course her purse was gone.
“Can’t you just connect me?” she asked the operator.
“No, ma’am, you have to dial it yourself in order to utilize your credit card.” The operator spoke in the voice of someone explaining the obvious to a stupid child. This didn’t make Tess angry; she felt like a stupid child. Then she saw how dirty the cinder-block wall was. She told the operator to give her the number, and when it came, she wrote it in the dust with her finger.
Before she could start dialing, a truck pulled into the parking lot. Her heart launched itself into her throat with dizzying, acrobatic ease, and when two laughing boys in high school jackets got out and whipped into the store, she was glad it was up there. It blocked the scream that surely would have come out otherwise.
She felt the world trying to go away and leaned her head against the wall for a moment, gasping for breath. She closed her eyes. She saw the giant towering over her, hands in the pockets of his biballs, and opened her eyes again. She dialed the number written in dust on the wall.
She braced herself for an answering machine, or for a bored dispatcher telling her that they had no cars, of course they didn’t, it was Friday night, were you born stupid, lady, or did you just grow that way? But the phone was answered on the second ring by a businesslike woman who identified herself as Andrea. She listened to Tess, and said they would send a car right out, her driver would be Manuel. Yes, she knew exactly where Tess was calling from, because they ran cars out to The Stagger Inn all the time.
“Okay, but I’m not there,” Tess said. “I’m at the intersection about half a mile down from th—”
“Yes, ma’am, I have that,” Andrea said. “The Gas & Dash. Sometimes we go there, too. People often walk down and call if they’ve had a little too much to drink. It’ll probably be forty-five minutes, maybe even an hour.”
“That’s fine,” Tess said. The tears were falling again. Tears of gratitude this time, although she told herself not to relax, because in stories like this the heroine’s hopes so often turned out to be false. “That’s absolutely fine. I’ll be around the corner by the pay telephones. And I’ll be watching.”
Now she’ll ask me if I had a little too much to drink. Because I probably sound that way.
But Andrea only wanted to know if she would be paying with cash or credit.
“American Express. I should be in your computer.”
“Yes, ma’am, you are. Thank you for calling Royal Limousine, where every customer is treated like royalty.” Andrea clicked off before Tess could say she was very welcome.
She started to hang up the phone, and then a man—him, it’s him —ran around the corner of the store and right at her. This time there was no chance of screaming; she was paralyzed with terror.
It was one of the teenage boys. He went past without looking at her and hooked a left into the Men’s. The door slammed. A moment later she heard the enthusiastic, horselike sound of a young man voiding an awesomely healthy bladder.
Tess went down the side of the building and around back. There she stood beside a reeking Dumpster (no, she thought, I’m not standing, I’m lurking), waiting for the young man to finish and be gone. When he was, she walked back to the pay phones to watch the road. In spite of all the places where she hurt, her belly was rumbling with hunger. She had missed her dinner, had been too busy being raped and almost killed to eat. She would have been glad to have any of the snacks they sold in places like this—even some of those little nasty peanut butter crackers, so weirdly yellow, would have been a treat—but she had no money. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have gone in there. She knew what kind of lights they had in roadside convenience stores like Gas & Dash, those bright and heartless fluorescents that made even healthy people look like they were suffering from pancreatic cancer. The clerk behind the counter would look at her bruised cheeks and forehead, her broken nose and her swollen lips, and he or she might not say anything, but Tess would see the widening of the eyes. And maybe a quickly suppressed twitch of the lips. Because, face it, people could think a beat-up woman was funny. Especially on a Friday night. Who tuned up on you, lady, and what did you do to deserve it? Wouldn’t you come across after some guy spent his overtime on you?
That reminded her of an old joke she’d heard somewhere: Why are there three hundred thousand battered women each year in America? Because they won’t… fuckin… listen.
“Never mind,” she whispered. “I’ll have something to eat when I get home. Tuna salad, maybe.”
It sounded good, but part of her was convinced that her days of eating tuna salad—or nasty yellow convenience-store peanut butter crackers, for that matter—were all over. The idea of a limo pulling up and driving her out of this nightmare was an insane mirage.
From somewhere to her left, Tess could hear cars rushing by on I-84—the road she would have taken if she hadn’t been so pleased to be offered a shorter way home. Over there on the turnpike, people who had never been raped or stuffed in pipes were going places. Tess thought the sound of their blithe travel was the loneliest she’d ever heard.
- 16 -
The limo came. It was a Lincoln Town Car. The man behind the wheel got out and looked around. Tess observed him closely from the corner of the store. He was wearing a dark suit. He was a small, bespectacled fellow who didn’t look like a rapist… but of course not all giants were rapists and not all rapists were giants. She had to trust him, though. If she were to get home and feed Fritzy, there was no other option. So she dropped her filthy makeshift stole beside the pay phone that actually worked and walked slowly and steadily toward the car. The light shining through the store windows seemed blindingly bright after the shadows at the side of the building, and she knew what her face looked like.
He’ll ask what happened to me and then he’ll ask if I want to go to the hospital.
But Manuel (who might have seen worse, it wasn’t impossible) only held the door for her and said, “Welcome to Royal Limousine, ma’am.” He had a soft Hispanic accent to go with his olive skin and dark eyes.
“Where I’m treated like royalty,” Tess said. She tried to smile. It hurt her swollen lips.
“Yes, ma’am.” Nothing else. God bless Manuel, who might have seen worse—perhaps back where he’d come from, perhaps in the back of this very car. Who knew what secrets limo drivers kept? It was a question that might have a good book hidden in it. Not the kind she wrote, of course… only who knew what kind of books she might write after this? Or if she would write any more at all? Tonight’s adventure might have turned that solitary joy out of her for awhile. Maybe even forever. It was impossible to tell.
She got into the back of the car, moving like an old woman with advanced osteoporosis. When she was seated and he had closed the door, she wrapped her fingers around the handle and watched closely, wanting to make sure it was Manuel who got in behind the wheel and not the giant in the bib overalls. In Stagg Road Horror 2 it would have been the giant: one more turn of the screw before the credits. Have some irony, it’s good for your blood.
But it was Manuel who got in. Of course it was. She relaxed.
“The address I have is 19 Primrose Lane, in Stoke Village. Is that correct?”
For a moment she couldn’t remember; she had punched her calling-card number into the pay phone without a pause, but she was blanking on her own address.
Relax, she told herself. It’s over. This isn’t a horror movie, it’s your life. You’ve had a terrible experience, but it’s over. So relax.
“Yes, Manuel, that’s right.”
“Will you want to be making any stops, or are we going right to your home?” It was the closest he came to mentioning what the lights of the Gas & Dash must have shown him when she walked to the Town Car.
It was only luck that she was still taking her oral contraceptive pills—luck and perhaps optimism, she hadn’t had so much as a one-night stand for three years, unless you counted tonight—but luck had been in short supply today, and she was grateful for this short stroke of it. She was sure Manuel could find an all-night pharmacy somewhere along the way, limo drivers seem to know all that stuff, but she didn’t think she would have been able to walk into a drugstore and ask for the morning-after pill. Her face would have made it all too obvious why she needed one. And of course there was the money problem.
“No other stops, just take me home, please.”
Soon they were on I-84, which was busy with Friday-night traffic. Stagg Road and the deserted store were behind her. What was ahead of her was her own house, with a security system and a lock for every door. And that was good.
- 17 -
It all went exactly as she had visualized: the arrival, the tip added to the credit card slip, the walk up the flower-lined path (she asked Manuel to stay, illuminating her with his headlights, until she was inside), the sound of Fritzy meowing as she tilted the mailbox and fished the emergency key off its hook. Then she was inside and Fritzy was twining anxiously around her feet, wanting to be picked up and stroked, wanting to be fed. Tess did those things, but first she locked the front door behind her, then set the burglar alarm for the first time in months. When she saw ARMED flash in the little green window above the keypad, she at last began to feel something like her true self. She looked at the kitchen clock and was astounded to see it was only quarter past eleven.
While Fritzy was eating his Fancy Feast, she checked the doors to the backyard and the side patio, making sure they were both locked. Then the windows. The alarm’s command-box was supposed to tell you if something was open, but she didn’t trust it. When she was positive everything was secure, she went to the front-hall closet and took down a box that had been on the top shelf so long there was a scrim of dust on the top.
Five years ago there had been a rash of burglaries and home invasions in northern Connecticut and southern Massachusetts. The bad boys were mostly drug addicts hooked on eighties, which was what its many New England fans called OxyContin. Residents were warned to be particularly careful and “take reasonable precautions.” Tess had no strong feelings about handguns pro or con, nor had she felt especially worried about strange men breaking in at night (not then), but a gun seemed to come under the heading of reasonable precautions, and she had been meaning to educate herself about pistols for the next Willow Grove book, anyway. The burglary scare had seemed like the perfect opportunity.
She went to the Hartford gun store that rated best on the Internet, and the clerk had recommended a Smith & Wesson .38 model he called a Lemon Squeezer. She bought it mostly because she liked that name. He also told her about a good shooting range on the outskirts of Stoke Village. Tess had dutifully taken her gun there once the forty-eight-hour waiting period was up and she was actually able to obtain it. She had fired off four hundred rounds or so over the course of a week, enjoying the thrill of banging away at first but quickly becoming bored. The gun had been in the closet ever since, stored in its box along with fifty rounds of ammunition and her carry permit.
She loaded it, feeling better—safer —with each filled chamber. She put it on the kitchen counter, then checked the answering machine. There was one message. It was from Patsy McClain next door. “I didn’t see any lights this evening, so I guess you decided to stay over in Chicopee. Or maybe you went to Boston? Anyway, I used the key behind the mailbox and fed Fritzy. Oh, and I put your mail on the hall table. All adverts, sorry. Call me tomorrow before I go to work, if you’re back. Just want to know you got in safe.”
“Hey, Fritz,” Tess said, bending over to stroke him. “I guess you got double rations tonight. Pretty clever of y—”
Wings of grayness came over her vision, and if she hadn’t caught hold of the kitchen table, she would have gone sprawling full length on the linoleum. She uttered a cry of surprise that sounded faint and faraway. Fritzy twitched his ears back, gave her a narrow, assessing look, seemed to decide she wasn’t going to fall over (at least not on him), and went back to his second supper.
Tess straightened up slowly, holding onto the table for safety’s sake, and opened the fridge. There was no tuna salad, but there was cottage cheese with strawberry jam. She ate it eagerly, scraping the plastic container with her spoon to get every last curd. It was cool and smooth on her hurt throat. She wasn’t sure she could have eaten flesh, anyway. Not even tuna out of a can.
She drank apple juice straight from the bottle, belched, then trudged to the downstairs bathroom. She took the gun along, curling her fingers outside the trigger guard, as she had been taught.
There was an oval magnifying mirror standing on the shelf above the washbasin, a Christmas gift from her brother in New Mexico. Written in gold-gilt script above it were the words PRETTY ME. The Old Tess had used it for tweezing her eyebrows and doing quick fixes to her makeup. The new one used it to examine her eyes. They were bloodshot, of course, but the pupils looked the same size. She turned off the bathroom light, counted to twenty, then turned it back on and watched her pupils contract. That looked okay, too. So, probably no skull fracture. Maybe a concussion, a light concussion, but—
As if I’d know. I’ve got a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Connecticut and an advanced degree in old lady detectives who spend at least a quarter of each book exchanging recipes I crib from the Internet and then change just enough so I won’t get sued for plagiarism. I could go into a coma or die of a brain hemorrhage in the night. Patsy would find me the next time she came in to feed the cat. You need to see a doctor, Tessa Jean. And you know it.
What she knew was that if she went to her doctor, her misfortune really could become public property. Doctors guaranteed confidentiality, it was a part of their oath, and a woman who made her living as a lawyer or a cleaning woman or a Realtor could probably count on getting it. Tess might get it herself, it was certainly possible. Probable, even. On the other hand, look what had happened to Farrah Fawcett: tabloid-fodder when some hospital employee blabbed. Tess herself had heard rumors about the psychiatric misadventures of a male novelist who had been a chart staple for years with his tales of lusty derring-do. Her own agent had passed the juiciest of these rumors on to Tess over lunch not two months ago… and Tess had listened.
I did more than listen, she thought as she looked at her magnified, beaten self. I passed that puppy on just as soon as I could.
Even if the doctor and his staff kept mum about the lady mystery writer who had been beaten, raped, and robbed on her way home from a public appearance, what about the other patients who might see her in the waiting room? To some of them she wouldn’t be just another woman with a bruised face that practically screamed beating; she would be Stoke Village’s resident novelist, you know the one, they made a TV movie about her old lady detectives a year or two
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