The Girls He Adored

49

The parlor wallpaper was patterned with delicately scrolled dark green vines on a pale pink background the color of flesh. A brass floor lamp with a rosy stained glass shade provided a cozy light. In the corner near the stone fireplace a grandfather clock that had traveled westward from Philadelphia by covered wagon ticked off the seconds; a handmade myrtlewood rocking chair creaked at regular intervals.

After all those hours in Maybelline's trunk, Irene found herself enjoying the gentle, reliable motion of the rocking chair-at least it was under her control. Still she couldn't get Maxwell's words out of her head. Welcome to your new home, Irene.

He'd left her alone in the parlor half an hour earlier, with a chillingly understated admonition: “Stay here, make yourself comfortable. I have some business to take care of, but if you leave this parlor, I'll know.”

So here she sat, though she'd clearly heard the front door slam when he left the house. It was partly because she was afraid of him that she obeyed him, and partly because she was exhausted physically and worn out emotionally, but there was also an element of wanting to please her captor, or at least to avoid displeasing him. Stockholm syndrome, early stages, she told herself-how strange to be able to put a name to one's behavior, to diagnose it clinically, and yet to be unable to alter it.

So she rocked, and waited, and when she heard someone moving around in the kitchen down the hall, Irene congratulated herself on her restraint. Somehow he'd been able to sneak back into the house without her hearing him, she decided. If she had left the parlor, he'd have caught her for sure.

Unless of course it wasn't him. Oh lord. Irene quickly braked the rocking chair with her feet, intent on the sounds coming from the kitchen, though her heart was pounding so violently that the pulse in her ears nearly drowned them out.

Someone was moving around in there, all right. Whisking eggs in a glass or ceramic bowl, boiling water in a whistling kettle, sizzling up some bacon-now she could smell it. Soon she heard footsteps, light, shuffling footsteps, leaving the kitchen, coming down the hall toward the parlor. Irene's chair faced the fireplace. She sensed a presence behind her, heard raspy, tortured breathing in the doorway, but would not, could not, turn around.

Then she heard a silken rustle. Irene kept her eyes fixed resolutely on the round hooked rug at her feet. The skirt of a floorlength black dress entered her field of vision, then a pair of fleshless claws covered with a taut mottled patchwork of shiny pink scar tissue and smooth white grafted skin lowered a supper tray onto the chess table next to the rocker.

And Irene knew somehow, as she steeled herself to look, that the woman was steeling herself to be looked at.

“I thought you might be hungry.” The diction was overprecise, the voice thin and muffled behind a black silk surgical mask cut from the same cloth as the woman's high-necked dress. It was impossible to read her age: the flesh around the edges of the mask resembled melted candle wax, all drips and ridges and runnels, mottled ivory in color, but streaked with blue-black soot, while her eyelids had evidently been surgically repaired, and her glorious strawberry blond hair, though glossy and abundant and apparently made of human hair, was obviously a wig.

You're a doctor, Irene reminded herself, struggling to keep the horror she was feeling from showing on her face. You've seen disfigurements before. “Thank you. I'm Irene Cogan.”

Instead of introducing herself in return, the woman extended one of her gruesome claws as if for a handshake. But when Irene reached out to take it, she snatched it away, grabbed a lock of Irene's frosted blond hair between her skeletal thumb and forefinger, and yanked.

“Ow!” Irene yelped and drew back. “What did you do that for?”

The woman ignored her. “A clever boy, that Ulysses,” she muttered aloud, calmly examining Irene's roots by the rosy light of the stained-glass lamp. “Wicked, but clever. Now finish your supper, and I'll show you to your room.”

Welcome to your new home, thought Irene, scalp stinging, sudden tears blurring her vision.