She was impressed by the obsessive lengths he’d gone to. No wonder he hadn’t been caught. If she hadn’t stubbed her toe on that damned carton “None of them had any relation to me or my business. Either of my businesses. That would be very bad. Very dangerous. But I travel a lot, and I keep my eyes open. BD—the BD inside—he does, too. We watch out for the snooty ones. You can always tell. They wear their skirts too high and show their bra straps on purpose. They entice men. That Stacey Moore, for instance. You read about her, I’m sure. Married, but that didn’t keep her from brushing her titties against me. She worked as a waitress in a coffee shop-the Sunnyside in Waterville. I used to go up there to Mickleson’s Coins, remember? You even went with me a couple of times, when Pets was at Colby. This was before George Mickleson died and his son sold off all the stock so he could go to New Zealand or somewhere. That woman was all over me, Darce! Always asking me if I wanted a warm-up on my coffee and saying stuff like how ’bout those Red Sox, bending over, rubbing her titties on my shoulder, trying her best to get me hard. Which she did, I admit it, I’m a man with a man’s needs, and although you never turned me away or said no… well, rarely… I’m a man with a man’s needs and I’ve always been highly sexed. Some women sense that and like to play on it. It gets them off.”
He was looking down at his lap with dark, musing eyes. Then something else occurred to him and his head jerked up. His thinning hair flew, then settled back.
“Always smiling! Red lipstick and always smiling! Well, I recognize smiles like that. Most men do. ‘Ha-ha, I know you want it, I can smell it on you, but this little rub’s all you’re going to get, so deal with it.’ I could! I could deal with it! But not BD, not him.”
He shook his head slowly.
“There are lots of women like that. It’s easy to get their names. Then you can trace them down on the Internet. There’s a lot of information if you know how to look for it, and accountants know how. I’ve done that… oh, dozens of times. Maybe even a hundred. You could call it a hobby, I guess. You could say I collect information as well as coins. Usually it comes to nothing. But sometimes BD will say, ‘She’s the one you want to follow through on, Bobby. That one right there. We’ll make the plan together, and when the time comes, you just let me take over.’ And that’s what I do.”
He took her hand, and folded her limp and chilly fingers into his.
“You think I’m crazy. I can see it in your eyes. But I’m not, honey. It’s BD who’s crazy… or Beadie, if you like his for-the-public name better. By the way, if you read the stories in the paper, you know I purposely put a lot of misspellings in my notes to the police. I even misspell the addresses. I keep a list of misspellings in my wallet so that I’ll always do it the same way. It’s misdirection. I want them to think Beadie’s dumb-illiterate, anyway—and they do. Because they’re dumb. I’ve only been questioned a single time, years ago, and that was as a witness, about two weeks after BD killed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired. Told me to give him a call if I remembered anything. I said I would. That was pretty rich.”
He chuckled soundlessly, as he sometimes did when they were watching Modern Family or Two and a Half Men. It was a way of laughing that had, until tonight, always heightened her own amusement.
“You want to know something, Darce? If they caught me dead to rights, I’d admit it—at least I guess I would, I don’t think anybody knows a hundred percent for sure what they’d do in a situation like that—but I couldn’t give them much of a confession. Because I don’t remember much about the actual… well… acts. Beadie does them, and I kind of… I don’t know… go unconscious. Get amnesia. Some damn thing.”
Oh, you liar. You remember everything. It’s in your eyes, it’s even in the way your mouth turns down at the corners.
“And now… everything’s in Darcellen’s hands.” He raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed the back of it, as if to emphasize this point. “You know that old punchline, the one that goes, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’? That doesn’t apply here. I could never kill you. Everything I do, everything I’ve built… modest as it would look to some people, I guess… I’ve done and built for you. For the kids too, of course, but mostly for you. You walked into my life, and do you know what happened?”
“You stopped,” she said.
He broke into a radiant grin. “For over twenty years!”
Sixteen, she thought but didn’t say.
“For most of those years, when we were raising the kids and struggling to get the coin business off the ground-although that was mostly you—I was racing around New England doing taxes and setting up foundations—”
“You were the one who made it work,” she said, and was a little shocked by what she heard in her voice: calmness and warmth. “You were the one with the expertise.”
He looked almost touched enough to start crying again, and when he spoke his voice was husky. “Thank you, hon. It means the world to hear you say that. You saved me, you know. In more ways than one.”
He cleared his throat.
“For a dozen years, BD never made a peep. I thought he was gone. I honestly did. But then he came back. Like a ghost.” He seemed to consider this, then nodded his head very slowly. “That’s what he is. A ghost, a bad one. He started pointing out women when I was traveling. ‘Look at that one, she wants to make sure you see her nipples, but if you touched them she’d call the police and then laugh with her friends when they took you away. Look at that one, licking her lips with her tongue, she knows you’d like her to put it in your mouth and she knows you know she never will. Look at that one, showing off her panties when she gets out of her car, and if you think that’s an accident, you’re an idiot. She’s just one more snoot who thinks she’ll never get what she deserves.’”
He stopped, his eyes once more dark and downcast. In them was the Bobby who had successfully evaded her for twenty-seven years. The one he was trying to pass off as a ghost.
“When I started to have those urges, I fought them. There are magazines… certain magazines… I bought them before we got married, and I thought if I did that again… or certain sites on the Internet… I thought I could… I don’t know… substitute fantasy for reality, I guess you’d say… but once you’ve tried the real thing, fantasy isn’t worth a damn.”
He was talking, Darcy thought, like a man who had fallen in love with some expensive delicacy. Caviar. Truffles. Belgian chocolates.
“But the point is, I stopped. For all those years, I stopped. And I could stop again, Darcy. This time for good. If there’s a chance for us. If you could forgive me and just turn the page.” He looked at her, earnest and wet-eyed. “Is it possible you could do that?”
She thought of a woman buried in a snowdrift, her naked legs exposed by the careless swipe of a passing plow—some mother’s daughter, once the apple of some father’s eye as she danced clumsily across a grammar-school stage in a pink tutu. She thought of a mother and son discovered in a freezing creek, their hair rippling in the black, ice-edged water. She thought of the woman with her head in the corn.
“I’d have to think about it,” she said, very carefully.
He grasped her by the upper arms and leaned toward her. She had to force herself not to flinch, and to meet his eyes. They were his eyes… and they weren’t. Maybe there’s something to that ghost business after all, she thought.
“This isn’t one of those movies where the psycho husband chases his screaming wife all around the house. If you decide to go to the police and turn me in, I won’t lift a finger to stop you. But I know you’ve thought about what it would do to the kids. You wouldn’t be the woman I married if you hadn’t thought about that. What you might not have thought about is what it would do to you. Nobody would believe that you were married to me all these years and never knew… or at least suspected. You’d have to move away and live on what savings there are, because I’ve always been the breadwinner, and a man can’t win bread when he’s in jail. You might not even be able to get at what there is, because of the civil suits. And of course the kids—”