“Oh, yes,” Gloria says, jumping to her feet. “He’s prolific. Someone broke in a few months ago and stole most of the work I’d brought home, but let me show you what I have left.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary—” he starts, but she’s already gone, in another part of the house, in one of the bedrooms, he can hear her rustling around, sifting through boxes and papers. Weber leans over to grab a cookie, and the toe of his shoe hits something. At first he thinks it’s the coffee table, but it’s instead a wood frame with a canvas stretched over it, a painting, shoved under the table. He slides it out and holds it up.
“Oh my God,” Weber says. He was expecting a landscape, or a few dancing clowns, not this. The subject of this painting is a nude woman, lying on her side with her arms curled up beside her head, her hair spilling over the floor—mermaid hair, he thinks—and the woman might be sleeping, or she might be dead, because there’s blood, there are two fingers missing on her left hand and they’re spouting smears of red paint. Finally, he looks at the woman’s face—she’s beautiful, even with her eyes closed, and she looks familiar, like someone he knows—
“It’s Samantha Peterson,” Gloria says. She’s standing, other canvases under her arm, watching him, for God knows how long. “She and my husband were involved, once. Jacky might’ve been in love with her.”
Weber looks at her, shocked, then again at the painting. It is Sammie, he sees it now.
“You know, he’s never once painted me,” Gloria says, sitting down. She’s sad, and jealous, he can’t blame her. This woman has stood behind her husband for so long, through everything, and he’s obsessed with another. “He likes to paint her. He made that one a long time ago, and I’ve hung on to it. All this time, I’ve kept it with me.”
“I’m sorry,” Weber says, it’s a stupid thing to say, but nothing else comes to mind.
Gloria makes a choking sound, low in her throat, and he half rises from the sofa, concerned; she looks like she’s having a great shock, a stroke or a heart attack, an aneurysm, although he wouldn’t know the difference. Her mouth is slack and her eyes open so wide he can see the red pools surrounding the whites, and he then he catches a flicker of movement in the mirror and glances up, and at first none of it seems to make sense, because there’s a man standing behind him, it’s the man from the gas station, the one who’d recognized him, and he’s holding a golf club with both hands, raised over his head like an ax, and that seems so ridiculous that Weber smiles, he feels his cheeks creaking up as if they were made of stiff leather and sees his reflection do the same, and then he hears the man say something—or maybe it’s his imagination, some nonsense about birds—and then the man brings the club down, with enough effort that the tendons in his neck are standing out like ropes, and the metal head of the club comes down with a scream and buries itself into Weber’s skull with a crunch.
If this were a movie, the screen would now be fading to black.
ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT
GLORIA
“Time to wake up.”
Gloria moans, tries to pull back from the hand stroking her face, but she’s pinned, and when her eyes flutter open it’s Jacky, a few inches away from her face. She tries to scream, but a hand clamps down over her mouth, and another pinches her nose shut, cutting off her air flow, and she struggles, tries to break free, but she can’t. He’s too strong. He always was. “Wake up, sweetie-pie.”
She nods frantically, because she needs a breath, the darkness is already creeping in around the edges of her vision. And he’s as good as his word. Once she stops struggling he lets her go, and she takes a long gasp of cool air. She can also smell Jacky—the manly, excited sweat of him, but that doesn’t matter so much. The only thing that matters is that she can breathe.