St. Agnes' Eve Read online

  The decor in the room was early Addams Family. Nearly everything left in the closet was black. Drawers stood open and rifled. Janis sat up; we embraced. Janis noticed something. Springing up, she crossed the room and inspected Mad’s desk and the empty terrarium. “Her lap top’s gone,” she wailed. “And Samael, too!” Somehow it seemed all the confirmation she needed that Mad wasn’t coming home again.

  One thing confounded me. “Why not just walk downstairs and out the front door?”

  Janis screwed up her face. Her eyes reddened with that stare a woman has when she’s fighting tears. “Because I locked it with a double-bolt the way I do every night to keep her in. I have the only key. She’s been grounded for a month except for babysitting.”

  “I wondered about the bars outside the downstairs windows. You don’t see too many of those outside of East Saint Louis.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of fire?”

  “I’m afraid of eternal fire. For Mad’s sake, that is. Madeleine is headstrong and rebellious. Her flesh is willful and wanton. There’s no one else who can control her. She’s part of me. And now she’s gone.”

  “I can’t figure you out, Janis. All these years I’ve pictured you as a devout Catholic, and yet here we are. It doesn’t fit with what you and I did tonight, you know? Or what we’ve been doing for the past five years.”

  She turned sharply. As she marched out the door, I heard her say in a furious stage-whisper, “Complaining? Why don’t you go home and complain to your wife?” I was about to follow her and apologize when she spun around.

  “You have trouble putting things in perspective, you know, Ricky? Not to mention a few problems with women that would take too long to analyze right now. In case you haven’t noticed, my only child’s been abducted five minutes ago. And now you’re sitting here accusing me of being a hypocrite? Asshole!” There was a butch roar in her voice at the end.

  “Maybe I’d better go.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’d better. The damage is done, isn’t it? The fact is, you tagging along after me upstairs was what made her leave in the first place. But why should that cause you any concern, family man? Why should that disturb your domestic tranquility?”

  I stalked downstairs to the front door and turned the knob. Locked. After a moment I turned to see Janis descending the stairs toward me, the redness of her lips a crime of passion, her hair dark as obsidian.

  “Don’t leave yet, all right?” There was no more threat in her voice, only a contrite tone I figured was her way of making up with me. I drew near enough to seal her apology with a lewd kiss.

  Before I could begin, she gently pushed me away and in a whisper said, “John will be here any moment. I called him as soon as I found Mad missing.”

  I thought of John’s handkerchief still in my pocket, soiled with a telltale smudge of Bitch Lips. John’s finding us together in his spotlight.

  Someone hammered at the front door. Through the peephole, I saw a fisheye view of Diaz, one arm leaning against the doorjamb, turning to have a second look at my car parked on the street in front of Janis’s house.

  “He’s here,” I told Janis, who disappeared momentarily, then returned with a small key. She paused to tie the sash of her robe and smooth her hair before opening the door to him. At that instant I sprang for the empty jewel box. I replaced the lid and stuffed the box into my coat pocket just as Diaz’s spit-shined number twelve’s strode into Janis’s living room. I tried to picture a man about his size leading Madeleine across the snowy lawn and away into the night.

  “Show me her room,” Diaz said, looking strangely at Janis and me. His eyes narrowed their focus on me when I volunteered. I led the way up the stairs, feeling his heavy tread on the steps behind me. Janis followed. “What’s missing?” he asked Janis as soon as we’d entered Mad’s room.

  “Just some clothes, costume jewelry, underthings—well, she never wore any, really—and I guess her suitcase,” Janis replied, turning slowly to inventory the room. “She took her laptop with her, too. And Samael’s gone—that’s her pet snake.”

  “Got a thing for reptiles, huh? Me, I can take them or leave them.” Diaz leaned his big head out the bedroom window and looked at the TV tower that had served as Mad’s elopement trellis.

  “Anybody touch that tower lately?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I’ll go get a print kit out of the car in a minute,” Diaz said. He pointed to the tower. “Those damn things are a home security risk.”

  “Aren’t you going to go put out an APB or something?” I said.

  He paused before saying, “I called in a description of her on the way over. Patrol cars’ll keep an eye out. You never know what you’re liable to spot on routine patrol if you keep your eyes open. Know what I mean?” I decided not to tell him how to do his job anymore.

  “She fool around much online?” Diaz asked.

  Janis shrugged. “No more than any other bright teenager.”

  “That much, huh? Think she could have met somebody in a chat room?”

  Janis’s expression told all of us she had no idea. She rapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I’m so stupid! God! I almost forgot—I have a child identikit CD ROM for her. It has her fingerprints and all kinds of other identifying information. I had it done several years ago, never thinking I’d ever need it.”

  “Great. Better give it to me now.”

  Janis turned to me. “Ricky, you brought her home tonight after babysitting. Did she say anything strange to you at all, anything that might give John a clue?”

  “Babe, you got any coffee in this house?” Diaz asked her. “I got me a sudden jones for some java.”

  “I’ll go make some fresh. It’ll just be a minute.”

  Diaz closed the bedroom door discreetly behind her before confronting me. “What’re you trying for, Counselor—some kind of weird mother-daughter three-way action?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  He gestured toward the door. “I’m talking about her all ready for beddy-bye, you still here shower-fresh an hour later, and the hot-pants daughter packing her things and climbing out a second-story window with everybody too busy to notice. You see any promising clues in any of that? By the way, where’s my handkerchief?”

  I fished it out of my pants pocket and handed it to him.

  “May be some DNA on this,” he said, trying me for a reaction.

  “Janis asked me to stay on for moral support,” I said. “And if my hair’s still damp, it’s because we—Diane and I—went in the hot tub at Kokker’s tonight.”

  At the mention of that name, Diaz shot me a look.

  “Well, I’m here now,” he said. “I’ll give Janis all the moral support she needs. Why don’t you run along home now to the wife? She’s probably all tuckered out from that hot tub party.”

  “I’d better say goodnight to Janis.”

  He moved me toward the door. His hand on my elbow meant business. “I’ll say your goodnights for you.”

  “But I—”

  He spun me around. I thought he was about to cuff me across the mouth. He had a faraway look in his eye I took for a sadistic pre-beating trance. Instead, he said, “I saw my wife die by inches.”

  “I’m sorry, John. It’s been how many years?”

  “It doesn’t get any easier. Janis’s the only person who... can make me forget my wife, you know?”

  “I know you’ll never forget Ellen.”

  His eyes got even wider. “Oh, but I want to sometimes, Ricky. See, that’s the thing. I carry it around like a dirty Polaroid, that mental snapshot of her that last day in the hospital bed with all the tubes pumping poison into her. She looked like an unwrapped mummy. Me telling the doctors they’re giving her too much pain medicine, it’s liable to kill her. And the doctor taking me aside, saying, you know, ‘There’s nothing more we can do, we just treat the pain with higher and higher morphine dosages un
til she goes to sleep.’ Wanting me to go in with him on that, like a co-conspirator. That’s when it hit me. They were finally calling it quits. After all the vomiting from the chemo and all the burns and incontinence from the radiation, they were packing it in. Well, Janis helps me forget all that. The sitting at my wife’s bedside, watching the stuff going into her through a tube, wanting to rip out the needle and the whole works and get her the hell out of there—maybe find another doctor, another hospital, another chance. But instead just listening to the doctors and sitting there, waiting for her to OD. Watching her face muscles relaxing for the last time—her body not writhing in pain anymore, forever. Trying to think up new things to tell her, even though I knew I’d never get the chance. Janis helps me forget my wife.” His voice broke at the last. There were tears in his eyes. I patted him on the arm.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you see, Ricky? I’d give anything to be going home right now just like you, only to Ellen all tuckered out from that hot tub. I hope you never need to forget your own wife like I do. So take my advice: stay away from Janis, before she makes you forget.”

  “You have nothing to worry about from me.”

  His expression told me he wasn’t so sure. He escorted me out without another word. Now wasn’t the time to ask him about Liz Hare. I replaced the gift bag of videos in the trunk behind the spare, fearing Diane’s reaction. It was a feeling I was getting used to.

  Chapter Twelve

  Casual Friday

  I hadn’t expected Janis in the office on the first day after her daughter’s disappearance, but there she was in her glass cage working away when I came in at eight-thirty. Diane and I had finally gone to bed sometime after two A.M. I had kissed her on the corner of her mouth, but she lay there stiffly and didn’t respond. I lay awake for what seemed like hours beside her until she fell asleep. Diane always slept with her eyes open like slits. Anyone who didn’t know her like I did would swear she was lying awake and vigilant, but I recognized her heavy, even breathing. It had not been a pleasant return home.

  “Where in the hell have you been?”

  “Taking Mad home.” My voice trailed off.

  She smelled my breath with all the presumption of a veteran drunkard’s wife.

  “I didn’t stop off at any taverns,” I protested.

  “What, then?” I stood there, silenced by this unaccustomed interrogation at the door. “What, Ricky? I’m listening. I’m your wife, remember? I think I have a right to know what my husband has been doing when he’s been gone more than two hours taking the babysitter home, and after he’s been drinking, to boot. It’s, what, a twenty-minute round trip?”

  “Mad’s gone,” I said. “Run away. We think she’s not alone, either. Somebody helped her.”

  Diane’s expression changed from rage and fear to compassion. “Run away? How? When?”

  “Tonight. I was about to pull away from the curb when Janis came running out in her robe.”

  Diane thought about that for a moment. I bitterly regretted the last three words. “You must have seen Mad leave the house then,” she said at last.

  “No. It was that quick. She must have climbed out her upstairs window while Janis and I were...downstairs, sitting around talking.”

  “I thought you said she was in her robe.”

  “She must have changed while I was warming up the car.”

  “The car had time to get cold? What could the two of you have found to talk about for so long?”

  “You know, stuff at work, office scuttlebutt. That sort of thing.”

  “I still don’t understand what took so long. Didn’t anybody call the police?”

  “Of course we called the police. John’s there now. Can we both sit down, at least? I’m beat.”

  “Maybe you ought to drive around and look for her. She couldn’t have gone far. Gosh, I feel responsible somehow.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past hour and a quarter? I waited at the house until John got there, only because Janis was too hysterical to be left alone.” “Can you blame her?”

  “As soon as John showed up, I started combing the neighborhood, driving around block by block.”

  “That’s the smart thing to do, I suppose. But she must have made some noise. And how could she climb out a second-story window without either of you noticing? And why do you say she had help?”

  So I told Diane about the locks on the doors and bars on the windows, the TV tower, and the two pairs of footprints leading away in the snow. It was like standing up to cross-examination, and I did have something to hide. It seemed to last for hours, and I handled it without resort to Crankenstein.

  Next day as soon as I got to the office, I closed my door and tooted a line up each nostril, telling myself I hadn’t gotten enough sleep and owed the job an alert brain to make it through the day. Sure enough, the very next call I placed elicited a twenty-thousand-dollar offer on a case in Saint Louis County that wasn’t worth fifteen hundred bucks. The rest of the morning I couldn’t miss. By eleven-thirty I had racked up enough settlement offers to clear Mark Kane more than he deserved. Then the intercom beeped.

  “A Mrs. Kokker to see you,” the receptionist announced. I only knew one Mrs. Kokker, and she didn’t have an appointment. Every male associate followed Sandra with his eyes when she came swinging down the hall.

  She was color-coordinated, all black and blue: tarpit-black leather blouse held together by a single button straining to endurance at the base of her sternum, blue leather skirt split to upper thigh, and black spike-heel boots looking like they belonged on a hooker.

  She sat down on one corner of my desk and crossed her legs. Her hip bumped up against the silver-framed family portrait taken last year when the Sears Charge still worked. After I’d cancelled three previous appointments, Diane and the kids had taken it without me. I had missed the sitting—working that day on something so urgently important I could no longer remember what it was. Now the picture looked like an ad for life insurance.

  “Cute kids,” she remarked. “Hope ours will come out that cute.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you, Sandra.”

  “Funny, huh? You weren’t expecting me, but here I am expecting.” She nudged my arm with the toe of her shoe. “Ain’t that the living shits?”

  “Don’t be vulgar.”

  She still stared at the picture, making me nervous. “The little guys both well hung like their daddy? God, I do think about sex all the time, don’t I? You suppose my therapist was right after all? Maybe I am a sex addict.”

  “Sandra, you ever think you might have too much time on your hands? Maybe you should consider doing some volunteer work.”

  “What do you think I’m doing here this morning?”

  Soon the Crankenstein would wear off and the opportunity would be lost. I knew the only way to handle Sandra was to give her what she wanted, and fast. But first, I had to move her off my desk.

  I leaped up, scooped her into my arms in a fireman’s carry and dumped her onto the couch. She squealed with abandon and kicked out both legs. I couldn’t catch my breath. She seized my shoulders playfully and said, “Winded? Here, better bend down and put your head between my legs.”

  Instead, I huffed and puffed my way over to the door and locked it, then shut off the light and drew the curtain. When I turned back around, she had reclined and hiked up her skirt to show me she had nothing on underneath. She put both hands between her legs and made her pussy talk, lip-synching in a squeaky puppet voice: “Know any good divorce lawyers?”

  “I could see your lips move that time,” I said, staring at the huge prawn that was her clitoris.

  “My husband’s too pissed off to fuck me. That means now’s your chance, dude.” Still with the Punch and Judy show delivery.

  All kidding aside, a fear gripped me. Kirk pissed meant my job. She seemed to sense it.

  “Looks like you the man, Ricky. Don’t worry. I can handle Kirk Kokker.”

/>   “I can see that.”

  She pointed one long, red-lacquered nail toward her right eye and the mouse she had tried to hide with concealer. “You mean this? Foreplay. You should see how he looks this morning. I creamed the little shit in a fair fight—gave him the beating of his life. But that’s nothing compared to what we’re going to do to him.”

  “What do you mean ‘we?’”