At any rate, she’d learned a lot from those DVDs, techniques she’d used over the past year to relax herself, especially before a performance. But right now, she was having trouble centering herself. She couldn’t get those deep, cleansing yoga breaths she craved.
Images of Jazz flashed through what was supposed to be a clear and passive mind. Jazz in the hotel room. Next to her in bed. On the floor. Jazz at the airport, with her father…
It was no good. She couldn’t relax. She blew out a frustrated breath and opened her eyes.
“Whiz!” she yelped. She must have been more relaxed than she’d imagined. Or at least more distracted—her younger brother had managed to sneak into her room without her hearing the door open.
“You are in so much trouble!” Whiz said, with something like awe in his voice. He wasn’t even taking delight in his older sister’s travails. He was just impressed at the sheer level of trouble, like a man reaching a mountaintop only to see a taller peak in the near distance. “I didn’t think you could get in this much trouble!”
“I know,” Connie said, pretending not to care. She couldn’t keep up the pretense for long. “Uh, exactly what have you heard? What did they say while I was gone?”
Whiz scampered over to her bed and plopped down next to her. “Dad was cussing.”
Ouch. Never a good sign. As if Connie needed to know, Whiz proceeded to reel off the exact words Dad had used. Connie blinked. She hadn’t even known Whiz knew some of those words.
“What about Mom?”
“She cried. Not much. Just a little.”
Connie deflated. Her father’s anger was one thing. Bringing her mother to tears was another. She didn’t know why, but those tears touched her more deeply than her father’s anger ever could. In a way, she was glad her parents didn’t know this. Such knowledge would make controlling her almost trivially easy: Don’t do X, Y, or Z, Connie—you’ll make your mother cry.
“Was it worth it?” Whiz wanted to know. “You’re gonna be grounded until, like, you’re eighty years old.”
“They can’t ground me that long,” Connie said.
“But was it worth it? You know”—and here Whiz looked around as if under surveillance and dropped his voice to a near whisper—“S-E-X?”
As much as she wanted to drop-kick Whiz into a garbage chute most days, Connie had to admit she loved the little snot monster, who was simultaneously too grown-up and too childlike. After busting out a plethora of Dad’s four-letter words, he still felt the need to spell out sex.
“We didn’t have S-E-X,” she informed him. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Well, that’s good. ’Cause Mom was really worried about that.”
“Dad wasn’t?”
“Dad was…” Whiz hesitated. “Never mind.”
“Come on. Tell me.”
Whiz shook his head defiantly.
“God, it’s more of his black/white crap, isn’t it? It’s not the nineteen-sixties. It’s not like when his parents were growing up or even when he was growing up. It’s—”
“That’s not it,” Whiz said quietly.
“What’s not it?”
“The black-and-white thing. The racial stuff.”
Connie stared at her kid brother, searching his expression for signs of one of his pranks or tricks. But he was utterly solemn, totally serious.
“What do you mean? Ever since I started dating Jazz, it’s been ‘white men this’ and ‘black women that,’ and ‘Sally Hemmings’ and—”
Whiz shook his head. “He doesn’t care. He said, ‘She can date a whole platoon of white boys, just not that one.’ ”
Connie set her jaw. She knew what was coming next. “How do you know this?”
Whiz rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Connie. I listen to them at night through the air-conditioning vents. Don’t you?”
Actually… no.
“It’s the serial-killer thing.”
Well, of course it was the serial-killer thing. Her father didn’t trust Jazz. So typical. No matter how much Jazz had proven himself—
“And,” Whiz went on, “he told Mom that the idea of you getting hurt scares him so much that he can’t even talk to you about it. And all the race stuff is just the only way he can think of to keep you guys apart without thinking about you…”
Without thinking of me raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered by my own boyfriend. Ah, crap. She couldn’t find it in her heart to stay angry at her dad. Not anymore.
“Jesus, Whiz. Talking to you is better than yoga sometimes.”
“Don’t take—”
“—the Lord’s name in vain. I know. Sorry.”
“It isn’t gonna happen, is it?” Whiz asked.
“What’s that?”
Whiz swallowed. “Jazz isn’t gonna hurt you, is he?”
Aw, man… As big of a pain in the butt as her little brother could be, she knew he loved her in that stunted way little brothers have. It killed her to see the conflicted pain in his eyes as he asked. She saw more than merely her brother’s concern; she saw Dad’s fear reflected there, too. All her life, her father had been so powerful, loomed so large, that she’d never been able to imagine him afraid of anything. Not even Jazz. Not even something…
“No one’s gonna hurt me,” she told Whiz. Seized by a rare impulse, she hugged him to her, pleasantly surprised that he didn’t pull away.
She kissed him on the exact center of the top of his head and said it again, this time louder, loud enough to convince herself, too.
CHAPTER 23
For the first time in recent memory, Jazz had the run of the house. After breakfast, Gramma had fallen into one of her periodic obsessions with Grampa’s grave. Sometimes she believed that he’d risen from the grave—“Like Jesus and Bugs Bunny!”—and could only be persuaded otherwise by a trip to the cemetery. Jazz hated those days; Gramma would spend hours crawling around the headstone, inspecting the dirt and individual blades of grass for some sort of perfidy. It was a lousy way to spend a day.
But Aunt Samantha cheerfully volunteered to take Gramma, meaning that Jazz was alone in the house without having to worry about his grandmother. He almost didn’t know how to act. It was so quiet—true quiet, without the foreboding of a potential Gramma eruption lurking. Maybe I should call Connie and we can fool around in my bedroom for a change.
It was an automatic thought, and it made him pensive almost immediately. He should call Connie. But what could he say to her? Especially after the way he’d treated her father at the airport. Combine that with the hotel-room fiasco and he’d be surprised if she ever wanted to speak to him again.
Oh, you could make her talk to you….
No. Shut up, Billy. Not Connie. I don’t do that to Connie.
He meandered around the house, straightening things here and there. Inspired, he started throwing away some of the old junk that his grandmother had accumulated over the years. The serial-killer pack-rat tendency ran strong in the Dent genetics, and Gramma would never tolerate Jazz throwing things away while she was around. But with her gone for the day, he could do some cleaning and she’d be none the wiser. It’s not like she was lucid enough to memorize her piles of crap.
He thought about Connie as he roamed the house with a garbage bag. He’d been unfair to her, he knew, but how to fix that unfairness was beyond him. He relived the night in the hotel room, running it through his damnably perfect memory over and over. Waking from the dream. Pressed deliciously and deliriously against Connie. Her turning to him, eyes wide and full and dark. Reaching for each other. Familiar touches gone explosively unfamiliar, explosively craved.
And then… pushing her away, falling backward onto the floor, lust twisted to panic, to fear.
Yeah. How could he fix that? How could he erase in Connie’s mind the memory of her boyfriend fleeing from her in terror?
He hauled the garbage outside and set it by the mailbox for pickup, then returned to the house, where he wheeled his suitcase in
to the spare room. He didn’t blame Samantha for not wanting to sleep here. The room had lain unused for close to two decades, its surfaces gray and textured with dust. More than that, though, the room seemed to vibrate, ever so slightly out of sync with the rest of the house, the rest of the universe, really. As though something fundamental and primitive and crucial had broken here, and never been patched.
Billy’s room. Billy’s bed. Jazz didn’t have to wonder what Billy had dreamed and fantasized, lying awake at night. He knew all too well—Billy had written his fantasies in the blood and screams of innocents from Nevada to Pennsylvania, from Texas to South Dakota. No secrets remained.
He dusted a bit, then unpacked. He needed clean clothes, so he went across the hall to his room. True to her word, Samantha had hung a sheet over the wall of Dear Old Dad’s victims. Jazz found himself liking his aunt more and more. Wouldn’t most people seeing them for the first time—most normal people—have taken down the pictures? Connie thought they were morbid. G. William thought they were a disturbing tie to the past. Howie thought they were a buzzkill.
Gramma thought they were Santa’s elves.
He fired up his computer and checked his e-mail. Other than the usual spam and porn links from Howie (delete, delete, delete…), there was nothing, which meant that no one had figured out this e-mail address yet. Good.
On the desk lay two sheets of paper. Photocopies of evidence from the sheriff’s office. The first one was the letter Billy had left at Melissa Hoover’s house:
Dear Jasper,
I can’t begin to tell you what a pleasure it was to see you at Wammaket. You’ve grown into such a strong and powerful young man. I am so proud of what you will accomplish in this life. I already know you are destined for great things. I dream of the things we’ll do together. Someday.
For now, though, I have to leave you with this. Never let it be said your old man doesn’t know how to repay a debt.
Love,
Dear Old Dad
PS Maybe one of these days we’ll get together and talk about what you did to your mother.
The PS still stabbed at him, cored him. When Jazz had point-blank asked Billy “Did you make me kill my mother?” Billy had just laughed. Later, he had said, “You’re a killer. You just ain’t killed no one yet.”
Which statement was true? Was it all Billy screwing with his mind?
Well, of course it was Billy screwing with his mind. That’s what Billy did. Dear Old Dad had a PhD in mind screwing. The question was, was it just Billy screwing with his mind?
He shook his head and actually said “Stop it!” out loud to himself in his strongest voice. What had happened? How had Janice Dent died? By Billy’s hand, or by her son’s?
That’ll be the first thing I do. The next time I see him, the first thing I do will be to ask him that.
And the second thing?
He remembered Special Agent Morales leaning toward him. She wore no perfume. Her face was smooth and unblemished by makeup, and her grin had revealed big, strong teeth. “You want to do more than find him, don’t you? You want to kill him,” she’d said. “Well, I can help with that.”
The second thing—he would figure that out when the time came.
The other piece of paper was the letter found on the Impressionist. It was two pages long, but the sheriff’s department had reduced it to fit both pages on one sheet. Handwritten in a careful, neat, and unfamiliar hand. Most of the letter was a listing of the major characteristics of Billy Dent’s first victims, with notations as to possible doppelgängers for the Impressionist to use in his harrowing of Lobo’s Nod. But there was an appendix at the end, one that still mystified Jazz:
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO
GO NEAR THE DENT BOY.
LEAVE HIM ALONE.
YOU ARE NOT TO ENGAGE HIM.
JASPER DENT IS OFF-LIMITS.
He stared at the letter for a while, willing the letters to rearrange themselves into something that made more sense, then gave up, grabbed some clean clothes and the letters, and headed to his temporary quarters. He figured he’d delayed the inevitable long enough.
Sitting on the floor, his back against his father’s childhood bed, Jazz called Connie.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said back.
Neither of them said anything. Jazz ran through his options. Pretend nothing had happened? Apologize immediately? The nuclear option: break up. He’d written and rewritten the speech in his head a million times: I know you love me and I love you, but I’m broken, Connie. I’m defective. I’m the toy you got for Christmas that’s missing pieces, and even if it was complete, no one bought the batteries to go with it.
“Before we talk about anything else, I need to say I’m sorry,” Connie said.
“Excuse me?”
“I shouldn’t have pushed you. I know you have… issues with sex. I get it. And, I mean, don’t get me wrong. I totally think we’re ready, but I went about it wrong. It wasn’t cool. So I’m sorry.”
Jazz closed his eyes and thumped the back of his head against the bed. “Con… it’s not… you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me. It was me. And then with your dad… I just…”
“I know. And we’ll talk about that in—look, you don’t have to… In New York. I just thought that with me, it might be okay. It might be safe. For you.”
He sat upright. “What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I know that your dad never… never prospected any African Americans. Right?”
Jazz’s heart thrummed. What?
“And I always figured that that maybe meant that I wouldn’t… that I couldn’t…” She blew into the phone, exasperated. “I know what you’re worried about. You’re worried that he somehow, like, programmed you to be a serial killer. And that there’s all this crazy lurking under the surface—”
“It’s not just under the surface,” he said seriously.
“I know. But anyway, there’s this stuff buried in you, and you’re afraid it’ll erupt if you have sex. Like, sex is the trigger, right? But Billy never killed any black women. It’s like he just skipped over us. Almost deliberately. Like we don’t exist to him. So I thought maybe that made me safe for you.” She paused. “Didn’t you ever think that?”
Jazz held back a laugh of commingled relief and horror. His big secret! His hidden fear! That Connie would someday find out why he’d first dated her. How long had he been terrified of telling her this, only to learn that not only did she know but she was okay with it and thought it was a good idea.
“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I was just sitting here thinking how I needed to apologize to you—”
“For what? For freaking out?” She said it like it was no big deal.
“For that. For the way I freaked out. And now, I guess, for the way we first started dating. Which seems pretty racist, now that I think about it.”
Connie laughed. “Jazz, if you liked—I don’t know—blond girls or girls with big boobs—”
“Your boobs are pretty big.”
“Anyway. If you had a thing for one of those girls and saw her across a crowded room and went and introduced yourself, would that be a bad thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do—the answer is no. So, in my case, you saw a really foxy-looking black girl across a crowded room—”
“It was the Coff-E-Shop and it was close to closing, so no one was there.”
“—and you were like, ‘I like black girls, so I’m going to introduce myself.’ No big deal.”
“Yeah, but what if the reason I like black girls is because they’re, you’re, safe—”
“So what? Who knows why anyone likes what they like? Guys who are obsessed with, like, redheads. Why? Because they’re rare? Because they had a redheaded babysitter? Because they watched too many Emma Stone movies? Beats me. Who cares? I mean, why do I like white boys?”
“I’m the only white boy you’ve
ever dated.”
“And I’m the only black girl you’ve ever dated. So there.”
“So, we’re good?”
“We’re beyond good.”
“Is your dad gonna come at me with a shotgun the next time I come over?”
“Probably.” She waited for a moment. “You went too far, you know. At the airport.”
“I know.”
“You crossed the line.”
“I know.”
“It’s one thing to mess with a teacher’s head to get out of detention or to charm that girl at the police station to get you some file you shouldn’t have, but—”
“I know.”
“—this is my dad, Jazz. He’s my father. And you were, like, like, waving a cape in front of a bull.”
“It was totally wrong.”
“And you know what they do to the bulls, right? And that’s how you were treating my dad.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.” Nah, Billy whispered, you ain’t sorry. You just know sayin’ it gets you what you want.
Jazz shook Billy away. He was sorry.
He was, like, 99 percent sure he was really sorry.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I’ll apologize to your dad right now.”
Maybe 98 percent.
“That is not a good idea. He’s still on fire. He’s so pissed it’s ridiculous. He just now stopped lecturing me. If you’d called five minutes ago, he would have grabbed the phone and you’d be talking to him instead.”
Ouch.
“But anyway,” she went on, “every couple has their thing, you know? My dad doesn’t like you. And your grandmother thinks I’m the spawn of Satan. We’ll deal.”
“What about…” He didn’t even want to bring it up, but he had to. It was in the open now. “What about sex?”