After the Darkness by Sidney Sheldon

“Whaddaya think, Lucy?” he’d ask hopefully, his face alight with pride and anticipation, like a little boy’s. The tragedy was, Pete Connors loved his wife. He needed her approval so badly. If she’d given it, just once, perhaps things would’ve turned out differently. But her response was always the same.

“How much d’you blow this time?”

“Jeez, Lucy. Give me a break, would you? I’m an idea man. You knew that when you married me.”

“Yeah? Well, here’s an idea for you, Pete. How about we make our mortgage this month?”

Mitch’s mom used to say that the only thing his father could ever economize on was the truth.

By Mitch’s sixth birthday, they’d moved out of the Monroeville house. The new place was a condo in Murraysville. Next it was Millvale, an area full of old millworkers’ tenements. By the time Mitch was twelve, they were in the Hill District, Pittsburgh’s Harlem, a boarded-up, drug-riddled hell bordering the prosperous downtown. Too poor to divorce, his parents “separated.” Within a month, his mom had a new boyfriend. Eventually they moved to Florida, to a nice house with palm trees in the front yard. Mitch decided to stay with his dad.

Pete Connors was excited. “This is great, Mitchy! It’ll be like old times, just the two of us. We’ll have poker nights. Sleep late on Sundays. Get some pretty girls over here, huh? Shake things up a bit!”

There were girls. Some of them were even pretty, but those ones were paid for. Pete Connors’s Frank Sinatra days were long gone. He looked like what he was, a tired old roué long past his sell-by date. It broke Mitch’s heart. As Mitch grew older, his father began to get jealous of his son’s good looks. At seventeen, Mitch had his mother’s blond hair and blue eyes and his father’s long legs and strong, masculine features. He’d also inherited Pete’s gift of gab.

“I’m just home for the summer, helping out my old man. I’m off to biz school in the fall…

“My car? Oh, yeah, I sold it. My little cousin got sick. Leukemia. She’s only six, poor kid. I wanted to help out with her medical bills.”

Women lapped it up.

Helen Brunner was different. She was twenty-five years old, a redheaded, green-eyed goddess, and she worked for a veterans’ charity that provided impoverished ex-servicemen with meals and helped them out at home. Mitch never knew how his father had convinced Helen’s charity that he’d been in the navy. Pete Connors couldn’t even swim. Pictures of boats made him nauseous. In any event, Helen started showing up at the apartment three times a week. Pete was crazy about her.

“I bet she’s a virgin. You can tell. Just thinking about that untouched ginger bush makes me horny.”

Mitch hated it when his dad spoke that way. About any woman, but especially about Helen. It was embarrassing.

“Twenty bucks says I fuck her before you do.”

“Dad! Don’t be stupid. Neither of us is going to fuck her.”

“Speak for yourself, kiddo. She wants it. Take it from someone who knows. They all want it.”

Helen Brunner didn’t want it. At least, not from a drunken alleged ex-midshipman old enough to be her father. Mitch, on the other hand…now, he was something else. Helen had been raised a Christian. She believed in abstinence. But Mitch Connors was testing her faith to the limits.

Lead me not into temptation. Watching Mitch move around the cramped apartment, feeling his eyes surreptitiously sweep over her body as she did the dishes or made the beds, it seemed to Helen that the Lord had led her right into temptation. Mitch felt the same way. He started to make lists.

Reasons not to sleep with Helen:

She’s a nice girl.

You’ll probably get struck by a thunderbolt halfway through.

If God doesn’t smite you dead, Dad will.

Then one day Helen walked into the laundry room to find Mitch standing in his boxer shorts.

Helen said a silent prayer. Deliver me from evil.

So did Mitch. Forgive me, Father, for I am about to sin.

The sex was incredible. They did it on top of the washing machine, in the shower, on the floor in the living room and, finally, in Pete Connors’s bed. Afterward, Mitch lay slumped back on the pillows, replete with happiness. He tried to feel guilty but he couldn’t. He was in love.

Helen sat bolt upright.

“Don’t tell me you want it again?” Mitch groaned.

“No. I heard something. I think it’s your father!”

Helen was in her clothes in a flash. Rushing into the kitchen, she started scrubbing pots. Mitch, whose lower body suddenly seemed to have developed advanced Parkinson’s, stumbled around the bedroom in blind panic. The front door opened.

“Mitch?”

Shit. There was nothing else for it. Stark naked, Mitch dived into the built-in closet, pulling the door closed behind him. At the back of the closet, against the wall, was a trapdoor leading into a crawl space in the roof. Mitch had barely managed to squeeze his six-foot frame through it when he heard Pete Connors’s footsteps in the bedroom.

“MITCH!” It was a roar. The old man wasn’t stupid. The combination of Helen’s flushed, guilty face and the rumpled sheets must have given them away. Mitch heard the front door open and close. Helen, sensibly, had made a run for it. How Mitch wished he were with her!

The closet door opened. A shaft of light appeared under the trapdoor to the crawl space. Mitch held his breath. There was a pause. Shirts being ruffled on hangers. Then the closet door closed.

Thank you, God. I swear I will never screw a woman in my father’s bed ever again.

Pete Connors’s footsteps receded. Then, suddenly, they stopped. Mitch’s heart did the same. Hey, c’mon, God! We had a deal!

The closet door opened again. Then the door to the crawl space. As Pete Connors looked down at his naked son, an unmistakably fishy waft of sex hit him in the face.

“Hey, Dad. I don’t suppose you know where I could find a towel?”

Two minutes later, Mitch was out on the street. He never saw his father alive again.

“I WANT TO GET MARRIED, MITCH.”

Helen and Mitch had been living together for three years. Now almost twenty-one, Mitch was making good money tending bar. Helen had cut back on her charity work to do three days a week as a trainee librarian, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was pushing thirty and she wanted to have a child.

“Why?”

“Why? Is that a serious question? Because we’re living in mortal sin, that’s why.”

Mitch grinned. “I know. Hasn’t it been fun so far?”

“Mitchell! I’m not kidding around. I want to have a baby. I want to make a commitment, to start a family, to do this right. Isn’t that what you want, too?”

“Sure it is, baby.”

But the truth was, Mitch didn’t know what he wanted. Growing up watching his parents rip each other apart had put him off the idea of marriage for life. He loved Helen, that wasn’t the problem. Or maybe it was the problem. Being with someone so good, so perfect, made him feel uneasy. He had too much of his father in him. A natural-born scammer, flirting was in Mitch’s blood. Sooner or later I’ll let her down. She’ll learn to hate me, to despise me for my weakness. Helen was the mother ship, but Mitch needed lifeboats: other girls who he could keep as backup should Helen see the light and realize she could do a whole lot better than a barman from Pittsburgh.

“Next year,” he told her. “Once Dad’s come around to the idea.” He said the same thing the following year, and the year after that. Then, in the space of a month, two seismic events took place that were to change Mitch’s life forever.

First, Helen left him.

Then his father was murdered.

TWO WEEKS AFTER HELEN BRUNNER WALKED out on Mitch, Pete Connors was stabbed to death outside his apartment. He lost his life for a fake Rolex watch, a cheap, nine-karat gold wedding ring and twenty-three dollars in cash. Mitch’s mom flew in for the funeral. Lucy Connors looked glamorous and suntanned and not remotely grief-stricken. Then again, why should she?

She hugged Mitch tightly. “You okay, sweetie? No offense, but you look like hell.”

“I’m fine.”

I’m not fine. I should have been there. I abandoned him, and now he’s dead, and I never got to say I was sorry. I never told him how much I loved him.

“Try not to be too upset. I know it sounds harsh, but if this hadn’t happened, the booze would have gotten him soon enough.”

“It does sound harsh.”

“I saw the autopsy report, Mitch. I know what I’m talking about. Your father’s liver was like a pickled walnut.”

“Jesus, Mom!”

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