After checking Roberta Flisk off her list, Patricia decided she’d had enough of college. Besides boring her brainless, actually attending class and doing the work restricted her time and cut into her focus now that she’d experienced her first kill.
She moved back to Rockpoint and, with a little finagling, in with her grandparents. It thrilled them to have their sweet, considerate, helpful granddaughter under their roof.
She made sure of it because there was no way she’d move back to some crappy rental with her useless whinefest of a mother.
To satisfy her grandparents’ questions about her education, her future, Patricia took some online and community-college courses. They also served as a cover for her research on creating fake identification and credit cards.
She had plans.
She also had the run of her own wing in the dignified old mansion, a BMW Roadster, and already enough skills to skim from their accounts.
With the extra funds, she began to stockpile weapons, and to compile a healthy supply of cash.
She laughed at their jokes, ran errands, drove her grandmother to salon appointments, and made herself indispensable. The vague talk of looking for a job, investing in a career, faded like mist.
They never noticed.
At the same time, she bought and delivered groceries to her mother, made her duty visits, arranged for snow removal from the walk and driveway of the miserable rental.
And kept her head down.
She kept it down for the two years she waited to kill her mother. She considered it a reward for her patience, and her hard work playing the devoted daughter and granddaughter.
Everyone knew Marcia Hobart was a weak and troubled woman. A woman who had never sloughed off the guilt for her son’s actions, or the grief of his death.
Even when she’d turned to God, she’d chosen His most vengeful and punishing form. Her penance—as a Daughter of Eve—demanded a lifetime of suffering and regret.
The only light in her personal darkness came from her daughter (Patricia made sure of it). Surely if she’d given birth to a child of kindness and compassion, a child with a bright mind and a quiet demeanor, that made up, in part, for birthing a monster.
And still, she loved the monster.
Patricia used that love as a stealth weapon in the five years since the DownEast Mall.
She saw to it that articles on the shootings, ugly letters reviling Marcia as responsible, and death threats ended up in her mother’s hand. Some she mailed, others she taped to the front door or shoved under it. The night before she’d left for Columbia, she’d thrown a rock wrapped with a particularly vicious note through the living room window, then rushed inside to huddle screaming behind the sofa.
An anonymous tip had McMullen dogging Marcia—at home, at work. Marcia lost her second job. Though the lawyers would have kept her on, she moved farther away—another miserable rental—isolating herself.
She took pills to sleep, more pills to hold off the constant and increasing anxiety. Patricia planted the seeds with her grandparents of her own worries. Her mother sometimes mixed up the pills, or took a double dose because she’d forgotten she’d taken the first.
They, who’d cut Marcia off for divorcing their asshole of a son, showered Patricia with sympathy.
She planted nanny cams in her mother’s house so she could watch her. She knew just when to call from the drop phone she’d bought, how to wake her groggy mother up out of a Xanax-assisted sleep and whisper her brother’s name.
On visits she’d add an extra pill or two, grinding them into the soup the dutiful daughter prepared, then play old videos from when JJ was a baby.
She tearfully reported to her grandparents about finding her mother in a stupor on the couch with the videos playing. While still in college, she’d asked her instructors and professors—she’d majored in psychology—for advice. She arranged an accidental overdose, placed a frantic nine-one-one call, and held her mother’s limp hand in the ambulance.
She left the trail of a worried, loving daughter with a mother lost in pills and guilt. Even as she attended support groups for children of addicts, she found fresh ways to gaslight her mother.
On the night before her brother’s birthday, she slipped into the house, baked his favorite chocolate cake. Deliberately, she left ingredients scattered on the counter, the mixing bowl and pan in the sink, setting the stage.
Then she blew out the oven’s pilot light.
After waking her drug-addled mother, she led her into a kitchen smelling of chocolate and baking.
“It’s dark.” Marcia shuffled and swayed. “What time is it?”
“It’s time for cake! You baked such a nice one.”
“I did? I don’t remember.”
“JJ’s favorite chocolate cake. He wants you to light the candles, Mom.”
Marcia’s eyes darted around the room. “Is he here?”
“He’s coming. Turn on the TV. There’s the remote.”
Obediently, Marcia picked up the remote, and with Patricia guiding her fingers, hit play. On the TV, a grinning, gap-toothed JJ giggled as his mother lit his birthday candles.
“Light the candles, Mom. For JJ.”
“He was my sweet little boy.” Tears, sentiment, and guilt filled Marcia’s eyes. She took the long butane lighter, lit the candles. “He didn’t mean to be bad. He’s sorry. Look, look, he’s so happy. Why did he stop being happy?”
“You need to take your pills. JJ wants you to take your pills. They’re right there. You need to take your pills.”
“I took them. Didn’t I take them? I’m so tired. Where’s JJ? It’s dark outside. Little boys shouldn’t be out in the dark.”
“He’s coming. You need to take your pills for JJ’s birthday. I think you should take one for each candle.”
“Six candles, six pills. My baby boy is six.” Eyes damp as they stared at the TV screen, Marcia took six pills, one by one, with the wine Patricia had set beside them.
“That’s good, very good. JJ needs more light. He needs more light to find his way home. I think he’s lost!”
“No. No. Where’s my little boy? JJ!”
“You have to light the curtains. If you squirt some of the lighter fluid on them, they make such a bright light. He’ll see it, and he’ll come home.”
Marcia picked up the can of fluid. For a moment Patricia wondered if she saw a kind of awareness in her mother’s eyes. Maybe a kind of relief. Marcia doused the curtains with the fluid, set them to flame.
“See how bright! You need to turn on the oven, Mom.”
“I baked the cake?”
“Just like always.” Taking Marcia’s arm, Patricia led her to the oven. “Turn on the oven.” And guided her mother’s hand to the knob.
“I’m so sleepy. I need to sleep.”
“Just turn on the oven, then you can take a nap.”
“Then JJ will come?”
“Oh, you’ll see JJ soon. Turn on the oven, that’s right. Why don’t you just lie down over here on the couch?”
As her mother collapsed on the couch, Patricia used a second lighter—one she would take with her—to light the already soaked living room curtains.
As she edged toward the door, she watched her mother’s slack face. “Sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to JJ, Mom.”
Her voice slurred, her eyes closed, Marcia tried to sing.
By the time the gas fumes did their work, when they met flame and combusted, Patricia was in her bed in her grandparents’ house.
She slept like a baby.
*
The phone on Reed’s nightstand signaled an alert. He rolled over, scooped it up, squinted at it.
“Ah, hell.”
“Cop stuff?” Eloise Matherson stirred beside him.
“Yeah.” Not directly, he thought, but since he’d followed Essie’s tack with alerts on incidents connected to the DownEast Mall, not one he wanted to ignore, either.
“Sorry.”
“How it goes.” She stirred again. “Want me to take off?”
“No, go back to sleep. I’ll text you later.” He gave her butt an easy pat as he got out of bed.
Their friends with—occasional—benefits status suited them both. Nothing serious, as the friends aspect of the equation remained the priority.