Liquid fear

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“These are the same pills,” Roland said, avoiding looking around Wendy’s apartment because he was afraid of how much she’d changed without him.

“How the hell do you know?” Wendy said. “A green pill is a green pill. Unless you want to have the cops run a test.”

“Be cool, Wendy,” Alexis said. “If this is what we think it is-”

“No. If we go down that road, we don’t come back.”

Alexis, sitting on the sofa beside Wendy, took a tight grip on Wendy’s forearms and pulled her hands from her face. “We can’t hide anymore.”

Wendy was nearly in tears, and Alexis was afraid if the dam burst, there would be no patching the pieces back together. The friends had drifted apart after Susan’s death, but that had been an instinctive act of survival, not a conscious decision.

They had all stayed aware of one another, bound by the understanding that they held a collective fate in their hands. Any of them could break the code of silence at any time. But none of them seemed to remember it in exactly the same way.

Roland, standing by the locked door, shook his head at Alexis. His sudden appearance had served to unsettle Wendy even more. And, just like during the trials, Alexis now felt responsible, as if she’d let things go too far through her own fascination with untapped landscapes of the brain.

“All right, Wendy,” Alexis said, hating herself for lapsing into the cold, academic bitch she knew slept inside her. “Let’s look at the facts. We each got the same vial with the same pills and the same prescription. And you said Anita got them, too. That makes four of us.”

“Where’s David Underwood, then?” Wendy said.

“Right here,” Roland said, and they both glared at him. He fumbled in his back pocket and pulled out his license and flipped it toward Alexis. It knocked over the three pill bottles they had placed on the coffee table.

Alexis retrieved it from the carpet and studied it. Roland’s face and David Underwood’s name.

“He’s back,” Alexis said.

“But why?” Wendy said. “He’s got more to lose than any of us.”

“You know why,” Roland said.

Wendy burst from the couch and lunged at him, delivering a solid slap to his cheek. He reacted in time to catch her wrist as she began clawing at his eyes.

“Don’t blame me because you fucked him,” Roland said. “I forgave you, remember?”

“Oh, hell, no, you didn’t,” Wendy said, shrieking and kicking. “If you forgive, you’re supposed to forget!”

Alexis hurried to help Roland restrain her, but Wendy seemed to have the strength of ten, just like the drug-war horror stories about arrests of criminals high on angel dust. But Wendy was fueled by an even deeper toxin: her own rage, fear, and shame.

Alexis took an elbow in the abdomen before trapping one of Wendy’s arms, and by then Roland had wrapped her in a bear hug and was carrying her to the bedroom. “Grab something to tie her with, quick!”

Alexis opened the hall closet and found a couple of scarves dangling from a coat rack, along with an Ace bandage on the shelf. She carried them to the bedroom, where a wailing Wendy was now pinned to the bed by her ex, who straddled her and dodged her kicks. Heeding an unspoken command, she secured Wendy’s feet at the ankles with the Ace bandage, then helped Roland bind her wrists.

Wendy let loose a stream of expletives loud enough to be heard outside the apartment.

“You fucking bastard,” Wendy yelled at Roland. “I knew I should have got a restraining order.”

“Like a piece of paper’s going to undo the past?”

“Roland, please,” Alexis said, pissed off at having to be the responsible one. “She’s vulnerable right now and everything’s raw. You know what the trials do.”

“‘Do’? You say that like they’re still going on.”

Alexis ignored him, leaning over Wendy to stroke her hair. “Hush, honey, or we’ll have to use this scarf on your mouth, and we don’t want to do that.”

“Bitch,” Wendy said, and spat.

Alexis wiped the gob of saliva from her forehead, triggering a flash of recollection: Susan, nearly biting her face when Alexis had tried to calm her down.

“Do it,” Roland said. “She’s no help in this condition, anyway.”

Alexis wrapped the scarf around one palm and aimed toward Wendy’s thrashing head. Roland was still perched atop her in an odd position that suggested sexual domination, but Alexis shook the image away and concentrated on her task. Wendy emitted one last scream before Alexis wriggled the impromptu, clumsy gag in place.

“Okay, now get me some duct tape,” Roland said. “Look in her art stuff. She always has some around.”

By the time Alexis had found the roll of gray tape and returned to the room, Wendy was a little more subdued. Roland took the tape from Alexis and held it close to Wendy’s wide, dark eyes. “You know I’ll use this if I have to,” he said, a startling menace behind his words. “I’ve done it before.”

Wendy closed her eyes and fell still, her chest rising and falling rapidly in her exertion.

“God, Roland, it’s all happening again,” Alexis said. “We’re not like this, are we? Please, God, don’t let us be like this.”

“That never happened,” he said, getting off the bed. “No matter what anybody says, we could never commit murder.”

“She fell, didn’t she?”

“Sure. That’s what I heard. What about you?”

Alexis felt herself nodding, although it was the motion of a marionette directed by high, unseen strings. “It was an accident.”

He glanced at his watch. “I’m fifteen minutes past due. Better take my medicine. Or else.”

Wendy’s phone rang in the living room. They both looked at her, restrained on the bed. The trials had barely begun and already she looked a manic wreck.

She might be the next Susan, Alexis thought, relishing a shiver of triumph. Not me.

“Should we answer it?” Roland asked her.

She was pleased at the deference. Despite his male strength and suppressed anger, she was the acknowledged leader. The graduate assistant all over again. The responsible one. She only hoped she could do a better job this time.

“Sure,” she heard herself say. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“And each other.”

She let that one pass.