Lee Child - First Thrills

I’m confident that no one will ever find the dress before I have a chance to destroy it.

I eye the cold iron stove.

Unlike fabric-and, for that matter, wood-metal cannot absorb telltale stains. But wood and fabric are so easily transformed to ashes, and ashes tell no tales.

I stood over that blazing stove yesterday morning, sweat pouring down my face with salty tears-not tears of grief, but of sheer relief.

It seemed to take forever to incinerate that wooden handle, its top freshly splintered, and all the while I was aware of father lying there on the sofa in the next room, Abby upstairs, Maggie in her third-floor quarters…

I knew that at any moment all hell could break loose.

It did-but on my terms: when the wooden handle had been thoroughly cremated.

I’m certain fabric will incinerate in no time at all.

I’ll burn the blue dress tomorrow.

Today, wearing funereal black; I must attend to other things.

In the cemetery over on Prospect Street, two freshly dug graves wait in the family plot beside the dead mother I don’t remember and the dead sister I never met.

They’re better off there, I have often thought.

“When you came along, you healed your mother’s grief,” Uncle John told me once, years ago. “She adored you. So did your father-still does, as far as I can tell,” he’d added.

Those words made my stomach churn, yet I said nothing. Neither did my sister, who was there. She didn’t even look at me; there were some things we would never dare to discuss, close as we were.

But she knew. Of course she did. So did Abby, whom my father married not in spite of the fact that she was a fat, dour recluse, but because of it. He correctly assumed she was so grateful to have been spared an old maid’s fate that she’d overlook his miserly flaws; forgive him anything.

I, on the other hand, have never forgiven him. Or her .

Nor would I pretend to; that isn’t my style.

Thus, it’s no secret around town that ours is hardly a warm, cozy house hold. My father and Abby and my sister and I went about our daily business, merely co-existing under the same roof.

Until yesterday morning.

The night before had been sleepless, as so many are. I lay in my bed, cloaked in a quilt and a high-necked gown despite August heat as oppressive as my own familiar dread. When I was a girl, I would dress in layers and pile on the bedding, in a futile, pathetic attempt to shield myself. I’ve long since realized that was impossible, yet old habits die hard.

Waiting for the creak on the stairs that last night, I wondered whether he would come to my door this time, or to my sister’s.

That I fervently wanted it to be her turn is perhaps the most shameful part in all of this. Yet I can make no apology for my feelings; they are what they are. I suppose it simply means that my hatred for him is even stronger than my love for her.

That night, it was my door he unlocked with the master key he kept in his black overcoat that reeked of sweet tobacco and sour sweat. There he stood, silhouetted in the doorway for a terrifying moment before he crossed the threshold and, as always, locked the door again behind him.

Even now, the memory of the key turning in the lock makes the biscuit churn with burning bile in my gut.

Every night…

Every single night, for as long as I can remember: the heavy tread of his boots on the stairs, the key in the lock…

I picture my sister waiting in the dark, praying he wouldn’t come to her-or, more likely, that he would, because she’s the better person and would want to spare me.

Then again, when faced with such unspeakable horror, is anyone really capable of such noble behavior? Maybe she was relieved to hear him enter my room and know that she was safe for that night.

I picture her with her head buried beneath her pillow, trying desperately to block out the repulsive sounds that would pierce the thin wall separating our bedrooms and a useless puff of goose down.

Useless no more, I remind myself, thinking of the blue dress as I leave the kitchen.

The first-floor rooms are dim, yet slats of golden sunlight fall across the rugs wherever draperies hang slightly parted.

Outside, wagon wheels rattle along Second Street. Voices rumble faintly from curious bystanders and gleeful ghouls.

Earlier, I peered through an upstairs window at the throng that’s grown steadily since the news broke. The crowd is held at bay not just by our sturdy wooden fence, but by the police officers stationed around the property.

“Why do you think they’re here?” I asked my sister last night.

“ To keep the murderer out, should he reappear, I suppose.”

Or perhaps, I thought to myself, to keep the murderess in, should she try to escape.

They must suspect.

Then again, even if they do…

Even if they were to find the broken-off hatchet head I so carefully wiped clean of any trace of blood, or the stained dress hidden deep in my pillow…

Even knowing what they know about our family, and my open contempt for my miserly father and for Abby, whom I haven’t called “mother” in years…

They will never grasp the truth.

I am, after all, a woman.

A temperamental, sharp-tongued, spoiled woman trapped in a miserable, miserly house hold…

But a woman nonetheless.

No matter how damning the circumstantial evidence, should any of it come to light, they’ll be sure to look beyond it. They’ll be certain that things cannot possibly be as they seem. They believe, as my father did, that nothing ever is.

Fools.

I wander into the parlor and stop short, seeing a figure silhouetted before the sofa. In this faint light, I can’t see the splotched upholstery and spattered wallpaper, but I know they’re there.

“Maggie,” I say, and she jumps, startled, whirling to look at me.

The room is too dim to betray the knowing flash in her eyes, yet it’s palpable as bloodstain.

Will she hurtle an accusation?

If so, I’ll deny it-just as I did yesterday, when the house was crawling with police wanting to know where I was when my stepmother and father were hacked to death so viciously that one of his eyeballs was flung from its socket.

Never again will I see that terrible glint in his brown gaze, betraying his hideous plans for the wee hours.

Never, never again.

The nightmare is over; at last, I am in control.

For a long time, Maggie just looks at me.

Perhaps she, too, suffered sleepless nights. Perhaps she, too, lay awake, listening in dread for the creak of a heavy masculine step on the stairs. Perhaps she, too, fantasized about making it stop.

“My name,” she tells me in her soft brogue, “is not Maggie.”

No, it isn’t. But it’s the only thing my sister Emma and I have ever called her. It was easier that way; the maid before her had been Maggie.

I look her in the eye. “I’m sorry… Bridget.”

She nods, clearly satisfied.

No fool, Bridget Sullivan. She grasps what so many do not: that things are often exactly as they seem.

“I accept your apology, Miss Borden. Old habits die hard, I know.”

At long last, I smile.

“Please,” I tell her, “call me Lizzie.”

The bestselling author of more than seventy novels, WENDY CORSI STAUBhas penned multiple New York Times bestselling adult thrillers under her own name and more than two dozen young adult titles, including the current paranormal suspense series Lily Dale, which has been optioned for television. Her latest thriller, Live to Tell, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and launches a suspense trilogy that will include sequels Scared to Death and Hell to Pay . Under the pseudonym Wendy Markham, she’s a USA Today bestselling author of chick lit and romance.