Red - Jack Ketchum [41]
Good god.
She walked back to the kitchen and sat down in front of her salad.
“Wrong number,” she said.
~ * ~
Genevieve hung up the phone and wondered if she should try again. She’d heard the message on the machine — it was the father’s voice. Somebody had heard hers too. Somebody had hung up on her.
She was still wondering when she returned to the bar and her french fries.
Andrew set a fresh Dewars rocks in front of her.
“You’re up to your buy-back,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He leaned toward her and cocked his head.
“Well?”
“No answer.”
He just looked at her for a moment, expressionless.
“I should let it lay, right?”
He shrugged.
“I should.”
Below the phone number was the Cleek address, written in her neat loopy script. No, she thought. Not a good idea.
She crumpled up the scrap of paper in her fist. Andrew smiled. She pushed it away toward him across the bar.
Then she thought about Dorothy again. And something told her she should close no doors on this. Not yet.
So that when his back was turned to her she retrieved the ball of paper and slipped it into her purse.
PART THREE
TWENTY-ONE
Cleek could not have said later what got him out of bed that night and saw him padding down the stairs in his boxers and t-shirt and slippers. It could have been any number of things which woke him. A dog barking. A tree branch scraping the window in a gust of summer breeze. It could have been anything that kept him awake. Concern that she’d escaped somehow or hurt herself trying. The urge to see her once again in that Mennonite dress. To touch her wooly hair. Anything.
~ * ~
Belle knew what woke her. Cleek did. A creak on the stairs and an empty space beside her on the bed. She listened. Heard the front door open and close again. Felt her eyes pool with angry tears. The silence of the house deafening until filled with her own wracking sobs against the feather pillow.
~ * ~
Brian had never slept at all. So that when he heard his father’s footsteps in the hall and then on the stairs and heard the sounds of his mother’s muffled crying it took no leap of logic to determine that his father had not gone downstairs for a drink of water or a late-night snack but for other reasons entirely and when he heard him open and close the door his intuitions were confirmed. Lighter on his feet than his father — and quieter — he followed.
~ * ~
The two girls slept. Peg’s sleep mercifully dreamless at the moment though that would change by morning as now it always did. Darlin’s sleep filled with children. Children who liked her. Children who wanted to be kissed.
TWENTY-TWO
Now that he’s here he knows exactly why he’s here. It’s no mystery to him at all and shouldn’t have been from the start. He flips on the light and sees that she’s wide awake and staring at him in that watchful cautious way of hers. He sees her in that dress. He loves that dress. Belle did a fine job there. Damn fine job. Mennonite, Mormon — what’s the difference? They’re all good to their menfolk right?
Respectful.
Not like some.
Some women, all they think about is fi-nances. Don’t know the bold strokes. Worry that financial stuff like a dog worries a bone. Can’t see the forest for the trees. Don’t know the wheel from the deal.
He doesn’t remember doing it — he’s been stuck in his own mind here for a second or two he guesses — but he’s practically on top of her now. Close enough to reach out and touch. She doesn’t look all too worried about that. Could be she’d like to be touched. Seemed to like it this afternoon. That pat on the head.
But he’s thinking that maybe it’s not his hand she wants this time.
He’s thinking it’s cock. Cock-co-cock-co-cock-co-cock. Cockadoodledoo. Anycock’lldo.
Slut, he thinks.
You bit my fucking finger off.
~ * ~
Brian sees it all through his peephole. His father, the lawyer, upstanding citizen, Christopher fucking Cleek, PTA, Rotary and Kiwanis, with his hand on the woman’s collarbone, stroking her collarbone and then moving down to her breasts, the woman and his father standing