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Flowering Judas(10)

By:Jane Haddam


Charlene took her hand away from the posters. She didn’t like touching them. They didn’t feel like Chester’s skin. Nothing felt like Chester’s skin.

“I’ve got to clean the house this week,” she said. “We’ve got to send the curtains out. The ones in the living room.”

“If you want.”

“I don’t want it to look like we live like pigs when we’re on television.”

“We don’t look like we live like pigs.”

“I wonder if it would have made a difference. If there had been television shows like this back when Chester was first missing. Maybe if we’d gotten on one of them, we’d have him back by now.”

Stew got up. He checked the water in the electric percolator.

“Even if we just got his body back, he’d be back,” Charlene said. “You think I expect him to come walking alive through the front door. Well, I don’t. Chester is dead. I know he’s dead. He’s been dead all this time. And she killed him.”

Stew was filling the percolator with water. He had his back to her. The water was running in the sink. “Don’t start that again,” he said.

“There’s no ‘again’ about it,” Charlene said. “She killed him. You know that as well as I do. Killed him and hid the body somewhere, just like she had her own baby killed.”

Stew turned the water off. He brought the electric percolator pot back to the stand and began fiddling with it. He put in a fresh filter. He put in new coffee grounds. The silence went on and on and on. Charlene didn’t care.

Then Stew said, finally, “You don’t know any of that. And don’t start in on me, Charlene. I know all your arguments. I know everything you’re going to say.”

“I took flyers out there this morning,” Charlene said. “She’ll have taken them down before she left for work. I’ve got to be more careful than that. I couldn’t help it this morning, though. I couldn’t go later. I had things to do.”

Stew sat down at the table again. “You shouldn’t have gone at all. The judge said—”

“The judge was overruled by the federal district court,” Charlene said. “I’ve got a free speech right to put my posters up, even in that little bitch’s neighborhood. I can’t go into her house without being arrested and I can’t talk to her and I can’t call her on the phone, but I can put my posters up. Because she killed him, Stew. You know she killed him.”

“I don’t know. And you don’t know she killed a baby, either,” he said. “There’s no evidence—”

“There’s no evidence because nobody went looking for evidence,” Charlene said. “There are tests you can take for that, tests that can tell if you’ve ever been pregnant. There are tests that can tell if you’ve had an abortion, too, at least if you take them close to when you get the abortion. But she never took any of those tests. They never made her take any tests. They just ‘talked’ to her a few times and let her go on her way.”

“There’s no evidence—”

“Chester brought that girl to this house not four days before he died,” Charlene said. “And she looked pregnant enough to me. She looked enormous—”

“But—”

“I know all that,” Charlene said. “All those people she worked with, saying she never looked pregnant a day in her life, saying she never told them she was pregnant. Well, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was hiding it. Maybe she was getting ready to kill Chester even then. But she was pregnant the day she got here, and you know it.”

Stew rubbed his face with his hands. “Maybe we just saw what we wanted to see,” he said. “Maybe we were both so anxious to find a way out of the situation we’d caused that we took any lifeline we could get—”

“Chester wouldn’t come to me and say his girlfriend was pregnant if it wasn’t so,” Charlene said. “She was pregnant. And then, four days later, Chester is gone and so is the baby. She’s flat as a board and saying she was never pregnant in the first place.”

“I don’t think they let them have abortions that late,” Stew said. “She was supposed to be, what, almost due? I don’t think—”

“Oh, you can find an abortionist to kill a baby at any stage of the game, believe me. I know what goes on. I’ll bet he got on to her. I’ll bet he decided to ditch her, and she wanted to get back at him.”

“Chester wouldn’t ditch his own child.”

“He wouldn’t ditch the child, but he’d ditch the mother if he ever found out what she was. It’s the only explanation that fits, Stew. She thought it was going to make everything all peachy keen, a baby, we’d never turn away from a baby, and it wouldn’t matter that we didn’t like her. Chester could marry her and he was the oldest. He’d get the business. And then he found out what she was and he walked out on her, and she got mad. And she killed him. And then she killed the baby out of spite.”