Secret Prey

THIRTY

At ten minutes after midnight, Audrey was still packing. The cops had gone, taking a small box of miscellaneous junk with them. It wouldn’t amount to anything, she thought. Tape? Everybody had tape-though she wished she’d taken a minute to clean those doors after killing O’Dell. But she’d never even thought of it.

On the bright side, she had thrown away the glass cutter. It was lying somewhere on the shoulder of I-94, gone forever. On the down side, she hadn’t thrown it away after she bombed the Bairds. She’d thrown it away after she hit Karkinnen, but only because she hadn’t thought she’d need it again. She hadn’t thought about evidence.

She hadn’t thought about it since the cremation of her mother. With all the other killings, if she’d been caught, she would’ve been caught, and that would have been that. There hadn’t seemed any point in worrying about evidence, except in the most gross ways-don’t leave any fingerprints, don’t buy any guns.

She’d have to start thinking.

She’d gotten to Wilson’s sweaters. He’d spent a fortune on sweaters, though they made him look the size of an oil tanker. He thought they made him look like a football lineman; in fact, they made him look even fatter than he was. "Three hundred dollars for a sweater. I remember when you told me that, I couldn’t believe it. Three hundred dollars. And it’s not just the three hundred dollars; if we’d saved it, if we’d put it in Vanguard, it would have tripled by now."

Lights in the driveway. She froze. Cops again? She drifted for a few seconds: She hated the police: that Davenport, he was the devil in this deal. A year from now, if she could find a gun, she’d take care of him, all right. Give it a year or a little more, and then one night, maybe in January, when people’s doors were shut and windows were closed, she’d wait by his house. If she could find a gun like the one she’d used on Kresge: now that was a wonderful gun. Wonderful…

And snapped back. A car in the driveway. She hurried to the window, looked down, and saw Helen walking across the driveway toward the front door. Helen? She hadn’t called.

A thought stuck her. Helen had been talking to Davenport again. She turned and hurried toward the stairway, as the doorbell rang downstairs.

Helen looked strange: ordinarily neat, her hair was in disarray, her face pinched, her mouth tight. She didn’t take off her coat, but simply stood in the entryway.

"I don’t really know how to ask you this, Audrey. I’ll just tell you what Chief Davenport told me. He thinks you killed Mom and Dad. Poisoned them. I told him I didn’t think you did, and then I thought about it all evening and finally thought I better come over."

"Mom and Dad? Mom and Dad? Do you think I killed Mom and Dad?" Audrey was horrified, even as the small kernel in the back of her brain hardened around her secret knowledge.

"I… don’t think so," Helen said, but her eyes drifted away. When they came back, she said, "Chief Davenport thinks that’s why they were cremated. To cover up."

"That’s ludicrous," Audrey snapped. "Davenport is all tied up with Wilson’s father; they’re trying to keep me from the money. Wilson’s money will go to his father, you know, if they decide I’ve committed a crime. That’s all it is: it’s about money."

Helen looked at her for another moment, a little too coolly, Audrey thought, then said, "Okay. I just had to ask. Chief Davenport asked me not to talk to you, so please don’t mention it-but I had to come over and ask you."

Audrey turned away, and started wandering back toward the kitchen, as though disoriented, as though saddened by this sisterly betrayal. "You must talk to him all the time," she said.

"Only three times," Helen said. "He doesn’t seem like a bad man."

Audrey spun: "Oh, snap out of it, Helen," she snarled. "You never figured out how things work. You sit down there and sort your little auto parts and the world just goes by. You should ask yourself someday, ‘What happens when I get old? What happens when I’m trying to live on Social Security, when nobody wants me anymore?’ Helen, you just don’t have any idea."

Helen turned to the door. "Don’t worry about me; just worry about yourself, Audrey… By the way, after Mom died-did you know this? I think you did-I took a lock of her hair to put with her picture on the piano. Chief Davenport took it with him. He’s going to have it analyzed by the laboratory."

"Well: I’m sorry to see you lose your precious lock, but at least it’ll show she wasn’t poisoned," Audrey snapped.

"I hope so," Helen said. "Audrey, when all this is done, we’ve got to sit down and talk. So much stuff happened when I was a kid, I never got it straight."

"I’ll set you straight," Audrey said. "Come back when it’s done."

Helen left, the heavy door wheezing shut behind her: Wilson had insisted on the special door, three inches thick, saying, "It’s the first thing people will know about us." Two thousand dollars for a door…

"Fuck," she said aloud, wrenching her mind away from Wilson. A lock of hair! Could it really be analyzed, or was it a game that Davenport was playing with her? Was there any way to find out?

Maybe the Internet, though it seemed far-fetched. She went to the library, waited impatiently to get on-line, brought up the Alta Vista search engine, and typed in: "ARSENIC HAIR."

Almost immediately, she got back a list of articles, and her heart sank. The first one was, improbably, on Napoleon. She opened it, and it referred to arsenic content in Napoleon’s hair. Shit. She went to the next one, something to do with analysis, and it also mentioned arsenic in hair. Hair.

She punched the off button on the computer, and the computer’s fan moaned as it closed down. The computer didn’t like that, she thought. Didn’t like to be up and running, and then cut off.

Fuck the computer.

Arsenic and hair. She had to do something, and do it quickly.