4.
I got up, set the photo frame straight, and wiped the dust off the glass with my fingertips.
Then I went to the window and lifted one corner of the curtain.
Down below, Denys's headlights came on, and the car I'd paid for shot off like an arrow off the string.
He wasn't heading toward his own neighborhood. He merged straight onto the main road toward the old downtown district, no doubt to put his head together with Chad and figure out how to bleed me dry.
I drew the curtain shut, left the lights off, and sat there in the dark for a long time.
Chad Fox, that parasite. The things he did best in this life were angling, stealing, and taking whatever wasn't his, chewing another person's bones to splinters and still wanting more.
I was certain that once he knew about this, he'd make his move.
A few days later, Denys came over with a bowl of soup he'd made specially for me, smiling that fawning smile, saying he'd learned the recipe himself just to look after me, the greed and calculation in his eyes impossible to hide.
I knew he and Chad were getting ready to act.
Sure enough, at two in the morning.
A faint, faint scrape of metal came from the door lock.
The moonlight was a sickly white, spilling in through the balcony's floor-to-ceiling window like frost laid across the floor.
Two dark shapes, one tall and one short, one fat and one thin, hunched over like a pair of huge, plague-ridden rats, rooting through the living room. Drawers slid open, then shut, with the softest little clicks.
The tall one held a ring of keys that glinted cold in the moonlight.
“Relax, Dad. I put something in that soup. She's out cold by now, dead to the world.”
The short, fat one dropped his voice, seething, that quacking rasp still like a cracked gong after twenty years. “Hurry up and find it! Where does she keep the household documents and the property deed? Damn it, the old woman's got a sly streak.”
It was Chad Fox.
Denys's voice was even softer, breath quick with a thief's nerves as he leaned against the wardrobe. “The wardrobe... no, the nightstand! Dad, I remember she told me once she likes keeping important things by the bed.……”
“Dig,” Chad growled under his breath.
The two figures crept toward my bedroom doorway, their shadows thrown across the wall, twisted and warped, like two ghosts come to collect a life.
I kept my eyes shut, my breathing drawn out long and even, like someone the drugged soup had knocked flat. But my ears were up, every inch of my skin a radar, straining to catch the faintest tremor in the air.
The footsteps stopped.
The two of them stood at the foot of my bed like a pair of demons clawed up out of hell, even their breath carrying an old, rotten stink.
“Ha. Look at her, sleeping like that.”
It was Chad. That cracked-gong voice dropped lower, like a dull saw dragging back and forth over rotten wood, setting my back teeth on edge. He leaned in a couple of steps, never touched the mattress, yet I felt clearly a foul gust of smoke stench, liquor, and old-man body odor breathe straight into my face.
“Twenty years, Hester, and you're still lying there half-dead, same as ever.”
Then he actually stretched out that hand of his, stained yellow-brown with nicotine, the rough pad of his finger like a revolting caterpillar, and scraped it hard down my cheek.
His nail dragged across my cheekbone, a burning sting.
Twenty years ago crashed through my head, that night of pouring rain. Five-year-old Denys burning with fever, his little face flushed red. I'd checked him into the ICU and knelt the whole night through in the hospital corridor, begging every god in heaven to keep him safe, my knees rubbed raw and bleeding.
And Chad had been in the hotel next door, checked into a room with his mistress. Back then, holding that scalding child in my arms, how had I been so blind, thinking he was my one redemption, the only sweetness fate had left me?
“Dad!” Denys clamped a hand on Chad's shoulder, his voice down to nothing but breath, and still edged with complaint. “Go easy! I guessed at the dose. What if she's a light sleeper?”
“Guessed?” Chad sneered, the cracked-gong voice grating against my eardrum. “You're your father's son, all right. Can't do a thing without second-guessing. This old woman thought she was really something down at the county records office back in the day, and now look, lying here like a dead dog. I could slap her twice and she still wouldn't wake up.”
And as he said it, he actually raised his hand.
Under the blanket my body snapped tight, a bow drawn to full, my fingertips gouging into the mattress until even the knuckles went white.
The wind off that hand reached all the way to my face.
