Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

‘And when you came to know this man, contempt killed what feelings you had for him. Am I right?’

‘Yes. But you will never have contempt for Mallory -it’s not the same. My contempt was for his weakness. She has a terrible strength that’s not quite in the normal scheme of things, and frightening sometimes, isn’t it? You’re lost, Charles. I was better off than you. It’s better to have a definite end to the loving.’

‘In the end, it was only the child you cared about.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why then, did you ask to have the child cut away from you?’

‘He lied to me.’

Her footsteps made less noise now, as she walked along beside a lonely man who cast one shadow for both of them. He had gone to no trouble to create her this time, and this should have worried him, but he was oddly glad of her company.

‘Do you know why she gave you my manuscript?’

‘So I could give it a thorough read, maybe find something of value to the investigation.’

‘You know she read every page before she gave it to you.’

‘Of course she did.’

‘It was the love of the child she couldn’t fathom. She couldn’t understand how I could want to build plans for a lifetime around the future of an unborn baby.’

‘But Mallory was a much loved child. Helen and Louis were devoted to her.’

‘Yes, after the damage had been done to her out on the street. What about Mallory’s own mother? How was a child so quick, so beautiful left wandering the streets? She was the child women pray for. How was she let go? If you’re still looking for the link to the boy, it might lie in her history. What do you really know about her early days?’

Charles sighed. ‘Mallory is an intensely private person. Her history was never open to discussion.’

‘If you could bend your mind outside the parameters of fact and logic, you might reach the conclusion that Mallory’s mother is dead, perhaps murdered.’

‘I think that’s a bit far-fetched, Amanda.’

‘Is it? She’s predicting violence in the Riccalo family. You see a link between her and the boy. They’ve both lost their mothers. Doesn’t it make you wonder? What sent her into the street, a small child on the run? What was she running from?’

‘Perhaps she was abused as a child?’

‘By her mother? No. She loved Helen on first sight. Someone taught her to trust women like Helen Markowitz the nurturer, healer of scraped knees, lover of children. Suppose Mallory saw her mother killed?’

‘Oh, this is absolute rot. There are no facts to support that line of reasoning. Next you’ll be telling me that Justin saw his mother die, and that’s the common bond, as though Mallory could read that in his mind.’

‘Maybe they read one another’s eyes. Don’t they both have the look of damage? Justin doesn’t behave much like a child, does he? He doesn’t have a child’s conversations. There’s another commonality. Mallory was the same way, wasn’t she?’

‘The purpose of creating you was to find out who killed you.’

‘Yes, but was that your idea? She only gave you my manuscript when she realized that once you had this intimate piece of me, you could do the succubus illusion.’

Could she be that convoluted? Mallory? Certainly. All those prompts about Malakhai? What else could that have been about? He’d been had.

Amanda nodded her understanding and walked ahead of him.

‘And what about you, Amanda?’ he called after her. ‘Who killed you? How could you be killed that way and why?’

‘He lied to me.’

He was too tired to sustain her and thus restrain her. Unable to keep her with him, he watched her go into the shadows. She was of such frail substance, she was killed by the first patch of darkness she encountered.

To be abandoned by two women in one day.

He stared at his shoes for a moment as he walked on, in and out of the light. Lost for a while in thoughts of Mallory, he meandered south and east for too many blocks into territory he was unsure of, unsafe in. When, at last, his eyes were looking outward again and he realized this, he found he didn’t care. And he was only dimly aware that the time was passing from Christmas Eve into Christmas morning.

He shuffled through the pile of newspapers close to the brick of a building wall, and then he went sprawling. The cement came up to meet his face with a hard hello. Something small and alive was squirming out from under his splayed legs.

She was standing in front of him now, and wearing a little red coat.

Oh, dear God, he had tripped over the body of a child. She must have been sleeping under the newspapers. He was staring into the smudged face of a little girl with matted hair and the biggest eyes he’d ever seen. She might be six or seven. The child was extending a cup to him. It was torn and jingled with change. It took him a moment to grasp the idea that the little girl was begging for money, that she was thin and shivering.

‘Where’s your mother? Why are you – ’

Now the child was backing away from him. Bright eyes, quick with intelligence, had sized him up for a non-donating type, and maybe an authority type, and possibly even a cop, or worse, a social worker. As quickly as he realized all of this was going on behind her eyes, he was watching the back of her as she slipped away in the dark.

He found his feet and gathered himself up to a stand and ran after her, pounding down the sidewalk, in and out of the black and bright zones of street lamps, intact and broken. In one of these dark patches, she had disappeared. He stopped to listen for her soft footfalls.

Silence.

Now a jingle.

He looked up to see her straddling the top of a chainlink fence, and he held his breath as she monkeyed down the links with amazing speed. He came up to the fence in time to see the small red coat flapping around a corner in the distance.

And now the child was altogether gone, and with her, a ghost of Mallory’s Christmas past.

Oh, fool.

His head bowed into the cold metal of the fence. His eyes closed tightly. His heart was breaking.

Fool.

Her eyes were not a Christmas green, nor the green of living things, but cold and, just now, eerie. The lights from the dashboard made them glitter in the shadows. They seemed lit from within, as though Mother Nature had thought to do something different with the makings of Mallory – to break up the monotony of stereotypes and throw an occasional scare into Riker.

‘You know, Mallory, if I thought you had a heart, I’d think you were worried about me offering myself for the holidays.’

Yeah, right, said the dip of her mouth on one side and no words necessary.

He closed the passenger door of her small tan car. ‘I won’t be a minute – just a few things to pick up for breakfast.’ He turned and walked toward the dim glow behind the plate-glass window of the bar. He peered in and waved one hand. Peggy leaned her broom against the bar and waved back to him. He ambled toward the front door.

The beer he’d already put away had numbed him. He was only dimly aware of the teenage boy thirty yards to his right. Now he looked casually toward the boy. The kid was looking in all directions, probably waiting for someone. Riker looked back to Mallory, who was lost in the darkness of the car. The bartender opened the door, and he walked in.

‘Who’s your friend, Riker?’ asked Peggy, looking over his shoulder.

Riker slowly turned his head to see the teenager behind him. Peggy was not so slow, not drunk at all, and she was backing up to the bar where she kept her shotgun. Too late for that now.

He was watching the boy reaching into his jacket, hand closing on the gun in his belt. Riker wondered if it would be the fast reflexes of youth that would kill him, or could he put it down to his own slowed reaction time – too much booze? Either way, the young thief would have him. All this was calculated in the second it took for the boy’s hand to pass into his jacket, just another second out of sixty.