Читать книгу Depraved Heart - Patricia Cornwell - Страница 14

I know my niece. I can tell when she trusts that whatever she’s saying and doing is private and unmonitored.

She believes her conversation with Carrie is between the two of them. It isn’t. I can’t imagine how Lucy would feel if she knew that in a sense I was inside that room with them. I may as well have been there then because I am now, and I feel disloyal. I feel I’m betraying my own flesh and blood.

“How was the gym?” Carrie’s eyes move around the room, finding cameras Lucy can’t see. “Crowded?”

“You should have done weights while you could.”

“Like I told you, I had things to take care of including a surprise.”

Carrie is in the same running clothes but there’s no sign of the machine gun. There’s no time stamp on the recording, only a run time of almost twenty minutes now, and I watch her open the small refrigerator.

“I brought you a present.” She grabs two St. Pauli Girls, pops off the caps and hands one of the green bottles to Lucy.

She stares at it but doesn’t take a sip. “I don’t want it.”

“We can have a drink together can’t we?” Carrie brushes her fingers through her peroxided buzz-cut hair.

“You shouldn’t have brought it here. And I didn’t ask you to.”

“You didn’t need to ask. I’m very thoughtful.” Carrie picks up the Swiss Army knife from the top of the refrigerator, resting the thick red handle in the palm of her hand, flipping open a blade with her thumbnail, and stainless steel flashes.

“You shouldn’t have done it without asking.” Lucy strips down to her sports bra and bikini briefs, and she’s sweating and flushed from exertion. “I get caught with alcohol in my room and I’m fucked.” She drops her clothing into a bamboo hamper I bought for her, grabs a towel and begins drying off.

“You’d better hope they don’t find out you have a gun in here,” Carrie says somberly and for the effect as she studies the knife blade shining thinly, sharply. “A very illegal one.”

“It’s not illegal.”

“Maybe it’s about to be.”

“What have you done? You’ve done something.”

“Well it would be a crime if it’s missing. But what the hell is legal anyway? Arbitrary rules invented by flawed mortals. Benton’s more or less your uncle. Maybe it’s not stealing if you took it from your uncle.”

Lucy walks over to the closet, opens the door, looks inside. “Where is it? What the hell did you do with it?”

“Have you learned nothing in the time we’ve been together? You can’t stop anything I want to do and I don’t need your permission.” Carrie looks directly into a camera and smiles.

I watch Lucy sit on a corner of the desk inside her dorm room, her tan muscular legs dangling. She’s getting visibly upset.

Light seeping around the edges of the closed blinds is different, and just seconds ago Lucy had her running shoes and socks on. Now they’re off. She’s barefoot. The video has been edited heavily, skillfully, and I wonder what has been deleted and stitched together for purposes of Carrie’s propaganda and manipulations.

“You always manage to take whatever you want,” Lucy is saying to her. “You’re always trying to make me do things that are wrong, that are bad for me.”

“I don’t make you do anything.” Carrie walks close, strokes her hair, and Lucy jerks her head away. “Don’t rebuff me.” Carrie is inches from Lucy’s face, almost nose to nose, staring into her eyes. “Do not rebuff me.”

She kisses her and Lucy doesn’t react. She sits stoically, stiffly like a statue.

“You know what happens when you act like this,” Carrie says with an edge that hints of what she’s capable of. “Nothing good and you really must stop blaming everybody for your behavior.”

“Where’s the fucking gun!” Lucy gets up from the desk. “You’d like to get me in trouble, wouldn’t you? You’d like to deliberately set me up for it. Why? Because if you discredit me then no one will believe what I do or say. I won’t get anything I’ve earned and deserve. Not ever. That would be a horrible way to live.”

“How horrible? Do tell.” Carrie’s eyes are bright silvery blue.

“You’re sick,” Lucy says. “Go to hell.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll hide the evidence, carry out the empty beer bottles and get rid of them.” Carrie takes a swallow of the German lager. “So you don’t get sent to the principal’s office.”

“I don’t give a shit about the beer! Where’s the gun? It doesn’t belong to you.”

“You know what they say about possession being nine-tenths of the law. It’s fixable you know. That MP5K is going to shoot so sweet.”

“Do you understand what could happen? Of course you do. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Everything you do in life is about creating leverage, finding dirt that can give you an advantage, and that’s been your MO from the start. Give me the gun. Where is it?”

“In due time,” Carrie says in a syrupy, patronizing tone. “I promise it will turn up when you least expect it. How about a massage? Let me dig my fingers into you. I know exactly how to cure what ails you.”

“I’m not drinking this.” Lucy retrieves the bottle of St. Pauli Girl from the desk.

She pads barefoot into the bathroom and there’s a hidden camera in there too. I watch her on video pour out her beer. I hear it splashing into the sink, and when she glances into the mirror her keenly pretty face is a mixture of sad, hurt and angry but mostly sad and hurt. Lucy loved her. Carrie was her first love. In some ways she was Lucy’s last.

“I don’t trust anything you give me, anything you do.” Lucy raises her voice as she turns on the water full blast, washing the beer away.

She looks in the mirror again and her face is so young, so childlike, and her eyes are teary. She’s trying to be brave, to control her volatile emotions, and she splashes water on her face and dries off with a towel. She walks back into the bedroom as I realize that Carrie must have set up a network of motion-sensitive recording devices that she programmed to override each other when someone moved from room to room. I could see what Lucy was doing in the bathroom but I couldn’t see Carrie. Now I can. I’m watching both of them again.

“That was wasteful. It was ungrateful.” Carrie touches the tip of her tongue to the opening of her St. Pauli Girl bottle, lightly tracing the beveled rim.

She stares into a camera and slowly licks her bottom lip. Her eyes are glassy. They’re almost Prussian blue, changing like her moods.

“Please leave,” Lucy says. “I don’t want to fight. We need to end this without a fucking war.”

Carrie bends over to take off her running shoes and socks. “Can you hand me the lotion, please?” Her ankles are unnaturally pale with prominent blue veins, the skin almost translucent like beeswax.

“You’re not showering here. You need to go. I have to get ready for dinner.”

“A dinner I’m not invited to.”

“You know exactly why that is.” Lucy retrieves a camouflage toiletry bag from the top of the dresser.

Rummaging for an unlabeled plastic bottle, she tosses it to her. Carrie snatches it out of the air like a touchdown pass.

“Just keep it. I don’t use it, no way I would.” Lucy returns to her perch on top of the desk. “The long-term side effects of rubbing copper peptides and other metals and minerals into your skin is unknown. In other words fucking untested. Look it up. But what is known is that too much copper is toxic. Look that up too while you’re fucking at it.”

“You sound just like your annoying aunt.” Carrie’s eyes darken, and it continues to jar me when she refers to me as if I’m not the one watching this.

“I don’t,” Lucy says. “Aunt Kay doesn’t say fuck nearly as often as I do. And while I appreciate you mixing up a batch of your bullshit collagen-producing vanishing cream for me …”

“Vanishing cream? Not hardly.” Carrie’s arrogance puffs her up like a Komodo dragon. “It’s a skin regeneration preparation.” She says it condescendingly. “Copper is essential to good health.”

“It also encourages the production of red blood cells, and that’s the last thing you need help with.”

“How touching. You care about me.”

“Right now I don’t give a shit about you. But why the fuck would you rub copper into yourself? Did you ask a physician if someone with your disorder should apply a topical lotion with copper in it? You keep using shit like that and you’ll have blood pudding sluggishly moving through your veins. You’ll drop dead of a stroke.”

“God you’re becoming just like her. Little Kay Junior. Hello Kay Junior.”

“Leave Aunt Kay out of it.”

“It’s really not possible to leave her out of anything, Lucy. Do you think if you weren’t blood kin you might be lovers? Because I could understand it. I could go for her. Definitely. I would try it.” Carrie touches her tongue to the beer bottle, inserts it into the opening. “She’d never go back. I can promise you that.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m just speaking the truth. I could make her feel so good. So alive.”

“Shut up!”

Carrie sets down the beer as she unscrews the cap from the lotion, sniffs the fragrance, swooning. “Ohhhh soooo nice. You sure? Not even a little bit in those hard-to-reach places?”

“For the record?” Lucy swipes ChapStick on her lips. “I’m sorry I ever met you.”

“All this because Miss Beauty Queen was running the Yellow Brick Road the same time we were. A coincidence. And you go nuclear.”

“The hell it was a coincidence.”

“It really was. I swear, Lucy.”

“Bullshit!”

“I swear on the Bible I didn’t tell Erin we’d be out there at three o’clock. And voilà.” Carrie snaps her fingers. “She happens to show up.”

“Running out there all by her lonesome and there we are and she joins us. Ignoring me like I wasn’t there. Focused only on you. Right. What a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Just like she’s happened to show up everywhere else the two of you have fucked each other, Carrie.”

“You want to talk a health threat?”

“You mean you?”

“Jealousy. It’s toxic.”

“How about lying, which is all you ever do. Over and over again.”

“You need to start putting this on every time you go out, even on overcast days in the dead of winter.” The viscous translucent lotion Carrie dribbles into her palm looks like semen. “And you say fuck too much. Vulgarity is inversely proportionate to intelligence and facility with languages. Profuse swearing is generally associated with a low IQ, a limited vocabulary and uncontrollable hostility.”

“Are you listening to me? Because I’m not kidding.” Lucy seems to vibrate with emotion, with fury and pain.

“How about a back rub? I promise you’ll feel better.”

“I’m done with your lying! Your cheating and stealing credit!” Lucy is crying. “Every shitty thing you do! You don’t know what it is to love anybody. You aren’t capable of it!”

Carrie is completely calm no matter what is happening or said, her attention flicking from one concealed camera to another like an exotic reptile reading the air with its forked tongue.

“You’re a cheater-whore!”

“Someday I’ll remind you what you said. And you might wish you hadn’t.” Carrie holds up her hand with a dollop of lotion, smiles brightly.

“I’m scared.” Lucy glares at her, the veins standing out in her neck.

Carrie begins rubbing the lotion on herself, slowly, salaciously on her face, her neck. She clicks her tongue at Lucy as if she’s a dog, waving the bottle of lotion at her as if it’s a bone.

“Come. I’ll put it on you. I’ll rub it in the way you like.” She rapidly rubs her palms together. “I’ll warm my hands and drive my magic potion into your skin. Sort of an improvised nanotechnology.”

“Stay away from me!” Lucy furiously wipes tears with the back of her hand, and suddenly the video stops.

I try to rewind it but I can’t. I can’t replay it. I can’t do anything to it at all.