Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [119]
It was to Hains Point that Gunn had directed Willowicz and O’Banion.
Who has more fun than I do? Vera Bard thought as she drove into East Potomac Park. Gunn was curled inside the trunk of the Saab. He’d very cleverly rigged a cord that would keep the trunk from popping open yet afford him enough fresh air.
She drove slowly and carefully while her mind turned over the sequence of events and her part in them as Gunn had outlined them to her. She only had to be told once; she was an instant study. This ability would have vaulted her to the top of her class at Fearington were it not for Alli Carson. No matter what she tried her hand at, Alli always did her one better. Though they were roommates and Vera made certain that they became friends, she deeply and irrevocably envied Alli. And, with Vera’s psyche, it didn’t take long for envy to curdle into hate. Of course, she told all this to Gunn, and, at some point—she could not now recall precisely when—he had taken more than a passing interest in her roommate. Then, a week ago, he’d asked her if she’d like an assignment. Intrigued, she’d said yes. That was how Alli’s fingerprints had gotten onto the vial of roofies, the contents of which Vera had taken herself.
Not a problem. She was used to self-abuse, having spent her prepubescent years cutting herself on her inner thighs so as not to be caught. She had had constant weight problems, and self-image discrepancies. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw a fat clown, or worse, a misshapen reflection in a funhouse mirror. She used to have nightmares about the awkwardness of her physicality. Her sleeping mind constructed a haunted house so vast it became an entire world. It was festooned with staircases that went sideways as well as up and down, contained rooms that changed shape and content each time she entered them, foiled her at every turn. She came back time after time. Sometimes it was a school, at other times a hotel, an office, or apartment building, though from the outside it always looked like Norman Bates’s Victorian house in Psycho.
When she was seven, she had spied on her father fucking his protégé in the master bedroom, though neither of them ever knew. All she could think of that night was the woman leaving her intimate spoor on the sheets for Vera’s mother to lie in. She got sick twice. Once she made it to the toilet in time, once she didn’t.
Understandably, then, she cleaved to her mother. When her father complained to his wife of his daughter’s coldness, she replied that it was only natural for daughters to bond with their mothers. To which he’d replied, I wish we’d had a son.
Time passed, but Vera’s nausea at life did not. On the contrary, it grew like an infestation, infecting her with its poison until she had only her mother in whom she could find comfort. Understandably, she hated boys, and she found the girls at school shallow. Friendships with them were, in her opinion, senseless.
Inevitably, she got into trouble, mostly fistfights with girls in her class who teased her, but occasionally boys, too. After her first bloody nose, she befriended a Thai girl who was a kickboxer. Her mother was surprised when Vera brought home the Thai girl, even more so when her daughter asked to take kickboxing lessons. She happily gave her money and her blessing. Six months later, Vera sought out the boy who’d bloodied her nose. She let him pick a fight with her, then nearly stove in the side of his head with her first kick.
That little stunt got her suspended for thirty days and a visit to the school shrink, but it was worth it. No one ever bothered her again. Better still, she got an insight into