A String of Beads by Thomas Perry
To Jo, as always,
with thanks to Otto Penzler and to Paul Williams
A STRING OF BEADS
1
Nick Bauermeister sat in the stained, threadbare armchair in the front room. Chelsea’s mother had dragged the chair out to the curb because it wasn’t brand-new, but he had taken it home because it was much better than any other place he had to sit, and he couldn’t do much better than free. He aimed the remote control at the television set, and saw that Chelsea had left it on the channel where they always showed girls buying wedding dresses.
For a girl who hardly ever wanted anything to do with a guy anymore, she sure was interested in stuff about weddings and honeymoons or some woman getting to pick one from a bunch of bachelors. He had to click the channel button several times to get to the basketball game. He adjusted the sound, but kept his thumb on the little Mute button.
Nick was mostly pretending to watch the game. What he was really watching was Chelsea. Usually he liked watching Chelsea because she was the perfect embodiment of what a girl was supposed to look like. Even now, as she walked around in the kitchen picking up plates from the table and taking them to the sink, he couldn’t help thinking about how incredible she was. She seemed unaware of the way she looked—couldn’t see the way her shorts neatly hugged her thin waist and, in the back, defined her ass nearly as well as if she were naked. Her blouse had worked another button open since they’d finished dinner and she’d begun scrubbing dishes. The femaleness of her body was a force of nature too strong for her clothes.
But tonight he wasn’t watching her in a friendly way. He was just watching. Nick was pretty sure that Chelsea had been cheating on him. He had no idea who the guy was, because anybody would sleep with her if she wanted him to. That information might not be available until he caught her at it.
He had noticed that she had begun sitting far away from him in the evenings lately, rapidly texting back and forth with somebody. “Who’s that?” he had asked. She would answer, “My mom.” Her mother was a woman who would never have had the patience to sit around sending texts. She liked to talk, and when she called she always used the chance to tell everybody what she thought of everything they were doing or weren’t doing. You couldn’t do that with a text message. And sometimes Chelsea would just pull a name out of the air. The last two times he’d asked her she had said she was texting Carrie or Chloe. Both of them worked as waitresses in the evening, and probably would have been fired for standing around texting their friends.
The only times he’d actually seen her talking on the phone lately was when he walked in unexpectedly and she was lying on the couch talking on her cell phone, laughing and playing with her long, blond hair. As soon as she saw him her voice would go flat. “Got to go,” and she’d stand up, put her phone in her pants pocket, and get moving. She’d do something to distract him, to force him to think about something besides her phone call. She’d offer him a beer, go to the kitchen to get it, and come back already talking about something that was wrong with the car or the sink. Two days ago he had gone into her computer and noticed that she had erased about a month of e-mails.
Everything had changed on the night when he had been in the fight with the big Indian in Akron. She had been quiet for a couple of days after that, and pretended to be busy all the time—busier than anyone could possibly be. Then, when she would come home, she would always be too tired. She didn’t show any signs of caring how bad he had been hurt in the fight, in spite of the fact that he had been unconscious and woke up with a broken nose and four cracked ribs.
The fight might have been his own fault, like she’d said, but losing so badly hadn’t been his fault. He’d been drunk, and the Indian wasn’t drunk at all. How was that a fair fight? Ever since then, Chelsea had been cold and distant, so cold that he was sure she was getting ready to leave him. But in order to do that, she would need two things—a place to live, and a new guy. Women were like frogs, jumping from one lily pad to another. Before Chelsea jumped, she would have to be sure the next lily pad was going to be there. She was nearly ready. He could feel it.
He kept his face turned toward the television set, but his eyes moved with her. Wherever she stepped, he watched. At some point there would be that peculiar twinkly sound her phone made when she got a text message, and he would be up in a second like a big cat, snatch it out of her hand, and read it. If he heard instead the buzz it made for a ring, he’d take it and say, “Who’s calling?” If the man hung up instead of answering, he’d find out his name from her. Once he’d caught her like that, she couldn’t deny it. If he had to, he’d beat the name out of her.
She walked across the front room without even glancing in his direction. He muted the TV so he could hear her. He heard her go down the hall, and then heard a door close quietly.
He turned the television up again to cover his movements, and stood to follow her down the hall. He would fling open the door and grab the phone. All he had to do was keep the sound of his steps quieter than the television set. He began to walk very slowly. One step seemed quiet enough, so he began the next.
The metal-jacketed 180 grain bullet that was already spinning through the night air at 2,800 feet per second smashed through the glass of the front window, pounded into the back of his skull, and burst out the front, taking with it bits of bone, blood, brain, and thirty-four years of accumulated jealousy, disappointment, and anger. Nick was dead before his knees released their tension and his body toppled to the floor.
Chelsea ran out of the hallway yelling, “Nick! What the heck are you—” before she saw his body and the window pane behind him. She cut off her mother’s phone call, dropped to her belly, and dialed 911.