Heartsick

CHAPTER 50

Archie called the prison from the cab, so by the time he paid his $138 fare and made his way through security, Gretchen had been rousted and placed in the interview room to wait for him. She was sitting at the table when he came into the room, hair loose, no makeup, yet still somehow put together. Like an actress made up to look unkempt.

“It’s four in the morning,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting across from her. “Were you in the middle of something?”

She glanced warily over her shoulder at the panel of two-way glass. “Is Henry here?”

“I’m alone. There’s no one behind the glass. I told the guards to wait on the other side of the door. So it’s just you and me. I took a cab.”

“From Portland?” Gretchen asked skeptically.

“I’m a hero cop,” Archie said wearily. “I have an expense account.”

She gave him a slow, sleepy smile. “You must have caught him.”

Archie could feel himself finally relaxing. It was more of a surrender, really. He used up so much energy keeping up appearances, and with her it didn’t matter. She knew exactly how damaged he was. So he could let his muscles loosen, his eyelids fall heavy, his voice thicken. He could scratch his face if it itched. He could say what came into his head without worrying if it shed too much light on what he was really thinking. “A sharpshooter plugged him in the head about three hours ago. You would have enjoyed it.” He raised an eyebrow in reconsideration. “Except that he died instantly.”

“Well, aren’t you the serial killer bloodhound? Did you come to brag?”

“I can’t drop by and say hi without an ulterior motive?”

“It’s not Sunday.” She cocked her head and examined him, and a tiny little line formed between her eyebrows. “Are you okay?”

He laughed at the ridiculousness of the question. He was definitely not okay. He has an exhausting, stressful, rewarding day at work, and where does he go? The state pen. Because what could be more calming than spending quality time with a woman who repeatedly drove a nail into your chest? “I just wanted to see you.” He rubbed his eyes with his hand. “How fucked up is that?”

“Do you know the origin of the term Stockholm syndrome?” Gretchen asked sweetly. She reached out her manacled hands and laid her palms flat on the tabletop so that the tips of her fingers were inches from where Archie’s right hand lay on the table. “In 1973, a petty criminal named Janne Olsson walked into the Kreditbanken bank in Stockholm with a machine gun. He demanded three million crowns and that a friend of his be freed from prison. The police released the friend and sent him into the bank, and he and Olsson held four bank employees hostage in a vault for six days. The police finally drilled a hole into the vault and pumped in gas, and Olsson and his friend surrendered.” She slid her hands across the table, closer to Archie. Her hands were smooth, the nails cut short. “All the hostages were freed, unharmed. Their lives had been threatened, they had been forced to wear nooses around their necks, and yet to a person they defended Olsson. One of the women said that she had wanted to run off with him. Olsson served eight years in prison. You know where he is now?” Gently, slowly, she brushed Archie’s thumb with her fingertips. “He runs a grocery store in Bangkok.”

Archie looked down at where their hands touched, but he didn’t move a muscle. “They should consider stiffer sentencing in Sweden.”

“ Stockholm is lovely. The Bergianska botanical garden has a greenhouse that has plants from every climate zone in the world. I’ll take you there one day.”

“You’re never getting out of prison.”

She raised her eyebrows noncommittally and drew a tiny circle on the crook of his thumb with her finger.

“It’s funny,” Archie said, watching her finger on his thumb. “How Reston waited ten years to start killing. Anne says there must have been a trigger.”

“Oh?”

Archie looked up. “How did you meet him?”

Gretchen smiled. “Meet him?”

“ Reston,” Archie said. He threaded his hand in hers. It was the first time he had ever made an effort to touch her, and he thought he saw a flicker of surprise in her eyes. “He was one of your accomplices. Maybe one you were training,” he said, letting himself enjoy the heat of her hand in his. “He was there that day. He was the second man who lifted me into the van. And then you went to prison. And he festered. And it set him off. How did you meet him?”

She looked at him, and in that moment Archie realized that Gretchen had never told him anything, never let him see anything that she didn’t want him to know. She had always been in control. She had always been one move ahead.

“I picked him out, just as I did all the others,” she explained happily. “His on-line profile was perfect. Long divorced.” She smiled. “I like the divorced ones because they’re lonely. He didn’t have any hobbies, passions. High IQ. Middle-class.” She gave a dismissive little roll of her eyes. “He tried to pass a Whitman poem off as one of his own. Classic narcissism.” She leaned forward. “Narcissists are easy to manipulate because they’re so predictable. He was depressed. Obsessed with fantasy.” A smile spread on her lips. “And he liked blondes. We dated. I told him that I was married and that we had to keep our love a secret, and I gave him what he wanted. Power. Submission. I let him think he was in control.” Sound familiar? thought Archie. “Once I’d gotten him to tell me about his little teen lust, it wasn’t hard to help him express his rage.”

Archie threaded his fingers even deeper between hers, so that their hands were tightly entwined. His mouth felt dry. He could barely look at her, but he didn’t want to let go. It was all becoming horribly clear. “You let me think I’d come up with bringing Susan in. But Reston had told you about her. You recognized her byline. You planted the idea. Stopped giving me bodies. Dropped her name. You set us all up.” Archie shook his head and chuckled. “And then you sat back to watch.” It sounded absurd even as he was saying it, paranoid, the delusions of a drug addict. “I just don’t think I can prove it.”

She smiled at him indulgently. “The important thing is that you’ve gone back to work,” she said. “Gotten out of that apartment.”

Henry would believe him. He knew what Gretchen was capable of. But then what? Henry would make sure that Archie never saw Gretchen again.

“You should be grateful to Paul,” Gretchen continued wickedly. “He donated two pints of blood to you.”

Archie turned his head, nauseous. The image of Reston on the AstroTurf green carpet, head bloody meat, flashed in his head. “Do you really like Godard?” Archie asked her.

“No,” she said. “But I know that you do.”

He was starting to wonder if there was anything left that Gretchen Lowell didn’t know about him.

“Now you answer a question for me,” she said. She placed a hand on top of the hand she was already holding, so that he was entirely in her grasp. “Were you attracted to me, that day we first met? When I was the psychiatrist writing a book?”

“I was married.”

“So cagey. Be honest.”

He had already betrayed Debbie utterly. Why not this, too? “Yes.”

She pulled her hands from his and sat back. “Let me see it.”

He knew what she meant, and hesitated only briefly before reaching up and slowly unbuttoning his shirt. Then, when it was open, he pulled the shirt apart so she could see his ravaged torso.

She leaned forward over the table, her knees on her chair, perched on her elbows on the table, so she could see. He didn’t move, didn’t flinch, as she reached forward and ran her fingertip over the heart she had carved on him. But he wondered if she could see the pulse in his neck quicken. He could smell her hair. Not like lilacs anymore, some industrial prison shampoo, harsh and fruity. She moved her fingers to the vertical scar that divided his chest, and Archie felt the muscles in his stomach, and lower, tense.

“Is this from the esophageal surgery?” she asked.

He nodded.

Then the fingers danced to the midline scar that divided his lower torso.

“This isn’t my incision.”

He cleared his throat. “They had to open me up again. There was a little bleeding.”

She nodded and moved her fingers over the smaller scars now, from the X-Acto knife she had used to doodle on him. Her fingers traced the half-moon scars along his scapula, then across his nipples, then down to the hash-mark scars in the tender skin of his flank. It had been more than two years since he’d been touched. He was afraid to move. Afraid of what? That she’d stop? He closed his eyes. He would give himself this one brief moment of pleasure. What could it hurt? It felt good. And he hadn’t felt good in longer than he could remember. Her fingers skated lower. Blood rushed to his groin. She was unfastening his belt now. Fuck. He opened his eyes and grabbed one of her hands by the wrist and held it there.

She looked up, eyes shining, cheeks pink. “You don’t have to pretend to be good with me, Archie.”

He held her hand there, centimeters from his hard-on.

“I can make you feel better,” she said. “Just let my wrist go. No one has to know.”

But he held on to her. Every cell in his body begged him to let her touch him. But what was left of his mind knew that if he did, it would be the last thing, that she would have some last part of him. It would be over. She would own him entirely. She was amazingly good. She could torture him without even touching him. He laughed at that, and pushed her hands away.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You’ve done one hell of a job fucking me up,” he said. He got the pillbox from his pants pocket, opened it, and dumped a handful of pills into his hand. Then he popped them into his mouth one at a time and swallowed them.

“You’re already high,” Gretchen noted.

“Careful,” Archie said. “You sound like Debbie.”

“You have to watch the pills. The acetaminophen will kill you. Do your kidneys hurt yet?”

“Sometimes.”

“If you experience fever, jaundice, or vomiting, you need to get to an emergency room before your liver gives out. Are you drinking?”

“I’m fine, sweetheart,” Archie said.

“There are easier ways to kill yourself. I’ll do it for you.” She caught his eye. “If you bring me a razor.”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “You’d kill me, and the first three guards who came in after me. Don’t let my erection confuse you. I still know what you are.”

She reached out and touched his face. Her hand was warm and gentle, and he turned into it almost by instinct. “Poor Archie,” she said. “I’m just getting started with you.”

She really was beautiful, Archie thought through his pill haze. There was something delicate about her. The luminous skin. The perfect features. Sometimes he could fool himself into thinking that she was almost human. He turned his cheek, and her hand fell away. “How many men like Reston do you have out there?” he asked. “How many time bombs?”

Gretchen leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Including you?”

Archie felt the room slip around him. “You had it planned all along. To call nine one one. To save me. To turn yourself in.”

“If you lived,” Gretchen said matter-of-factly. “If you had died, I would have dismembered and buried you.”

It was hot in the room. Archie felt the moist burn of sweat under his clothes. Gretchen looked cool and calm. Maybe it was just the pills. He cracked his neck and wiped the sweat off his upper lip. He could feel the heart scar throb under his shirt, his real heart beating underneath it. “It was a good plan,” he managed. He planted his hands on the table and stood. “Except that I’m not like Reston and the jackasses you got to murder for you. I know what you’re capable of.” He looked around the room, the cinder-block tomb they met in every week. She had manipulated him again and again. They had manipulated each other. But he had one power. The card she thought he wouldn’t play. “You made one other miscalculation,” he said. “You got yourself locked up.” He raised an eyebrow and lifted his hands off the table. “And you can’t fuck with me if I’m not here.”

Gretchen was unimpressed. “You’ll stay away a few weeks. But you’ll need the bodies.” She tilted her head at him and smiled, radiant. “You’ll need me.”

Probably, Archie thought. “Maybe,” he said.

She shook her head sympathetically. “It’s too late. You won’t feel better.”

Archie laughed. “I don’t need to feel better,” he said. His tone turned cold. “I just need you to feel worse.”

She leaned forward, her blond hair brushing her shoulders. “You’ll still dream about me. You won’t be able to touch another woman without thinking of me.”

He put a hand back on the table and lifted the other to his throbbing temple. “Please, Gretchen.”

She smiled wickedly. “You’ll think about me tonight, won’t you?” she said. “When you’re all alone in the dark. Your cock in your hand.”

Archie hung his head for a moment. And then he laughed to himself, looked up, and walked around the table to her. She glanced up, surprised, as he stood over her and reached out and touched her hair, the blond slick beneath his fingers. She started to speak and he put a finger on her mouth and he said quietly, “You don’t get to talk yet.” And he cupped her face in his hands and leaned down and he kissed her. He moved one hand behind her neck in her hair as their tongues met, the heat of the kiss momentarily overwhelming him. In that kiss he could taste the bitter pills, the salt of his own sweat, and in her mouth a sweetness almost like lilacs. He had to force himself to disentangle his fingers from her hair, wrench himself away, his lips moving from her mouth, across her smooth cheek, finding her ear. “I think about you every night,” he whispered.

Then he straightened up and he said, “It’s over.”

He hit the buzzer by the door with the heel of his fist. The door opened and he walked through it.

“Wait,” she said, her voice faltering.

His heart was pounding in his chest, the taste of the kiss still in his mouth. It took everything he had not to look back.