The Bone House - Brian Freeman [50]
KILLER.
While the paint dried, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and took it out to the screened three-season porch at the rear of the house. He sat down in the wrought-iron chaise, which squealed under his weight. Before he drank, he realized he was still wearing the white painter's mask. He peeled it from his face. He tilted the bottle and took a long swallow. His neck was tired and sore, and he rubbed it with his fingers.
That was when he felt the small bump of two scabs on his skin. Scratches.
Mark closed his eyes and felt a cold sweat of fear form on his body. 'Son of a bitch,' he murmured.
He remembered Glory on the beach and felt the girl hanging on to him as she wrapped her hands around his neck. Her long nails drove into his skin, hurting him. Leaving a mark.
He knew what that meant.
The police in Florida had gathered skin cells from inside his mouth with a cotton swab and bagged the sample and labeled it. They would hunt under Glory's dead fingernails and find skin there, and analyze the tissue, and match it. One name would come out: Mark Bradley.
They'd know he had been there. On the beach. With Glory.
Mark put the bottle down. His taste for beer was gone. He stared through the dormant trees at the gray water of the harbor a hundred yards away. In two months, when the leaves unfurled, the beach would be invisible behind the birches. He couldn't help but wonder if he would be here to see it, or if they would have arrested him by then.
They can prove you were there. They can't prove you killed her.
He wasn't convinced the distinction would sway a jury if it came to that. When a teenage girl died, everyone wanted to see someone pay the price.
Mark felt a wave of anger. It was happening to him more and more now. Moments of rage. He was naturally claustrophobic, and when the walls began to close in, he beat on them and tried to fight his way out. If he couldn't find an escape, he wanted to punish the ones who had put him there.
His phone rang on the table beside him. It was Hilary, and he relaxed when he heard her voice. Sometimes she had a sixth sense for when he needed her.
'I'm in Northport waiting for the ferry,' she told him. 'I'll be home in an hour or so.'
'Good.'
'How's it going?' she asked.
'Better. The house is looking better.'
She listened to his voice. He could feel her divining his mood. 'You OK?'
'Not really.'
'What's up?'
'Not on the phone,' he said. He was already paranoid, wondering if the police were listening in on their calls.
'Let's go out for dinner tonight,' she suggested.
'Are you sure? You know what it'll be like.'
He was reluctant to go out anymore in the midst of other people from the island. He was sick of the dark stares and muttered hostility from people around them.
'Screw everybody else,' Hilary told him. 'We can't let them stop us from living our lives.'
He smiled. 'Damn right.'
'See you soon.'
She hung up. He picked up his beer again and continued drinking. He reminded himself, as he did on most days, how lucky he had been to find Hilary Semper. Some men weren't secure enough to marry a woman who was smarter than they were, but he'd had plenty of experience with women who only wanted him to show him off to their friends. He'd even married one when he was twenty-five, a bubbly brunette who had stalked him on the pro tour and seduced him into bed and then into the courthouse. He was young; she was young. She talked a good game about loving all the same things he did, when all she really wanted was a ring and a husband who made her girlfriends jealous.
It had lasted two long years. When he divorced her, he'd sworn to himself: never again.
Not long after the split, he'd had ten beers too