The Stalker

  Sally Spencer

  © Sally Spencer 2016

  Sally Spencer has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.

  This edition published by Lume Books in 2018.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: The Fall

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Part Two: Redemption

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Prologue

  He watches her whenever he gets the chance. On cold winter evenings, when she hurries from her car to the house – and blows on her hands before fumbling in her purse for her keys – he is there. On spring weekend afternoons, as she busies herself in her small garden, pulling up the weeds and talking softly to her roses, he follows her every move. On hot summer nights, when she sits on her front porch, her kids playing at her feet, he feels a warm glow flow through his whole body.

  But it’s the fall when he likes her best. As she rakes up the dried brown leaves, an expression of regret comes to her face which makes her purse her pretty forehead, and she becomes so vulnerable – so in need of help and protection.

  He knows all about her. Knows she was a track star in high school; that she started playing the violin when she was in sixth grade, but had switched to electric guitar by the tenth; that she could have been Prom Queen if she’d really wanted to be; that her sister lives across town, and her parents live in Florida …

  He knows all about her, but she knows nothing of the effect he has on her life. And it’s only proper that she shouldn’t know. The love he feels for her is a love which should – which has to – keep its distance.

  He’s her guardian angel, and that is enough for him.

  Sometimes, when he thinks about the others who’ve preceded her, he’s filled with dreadful misgivings that she, too, will let him down. Then he persuades himself he’s only being foolish, that this time he has made the right choice, and there’ll be no need to transform himself from an angel of mercy into an angel of wrath.

  Part One: The Fall

  1

  The first flash of lightning bathes the bedroom in its pale eeriness at around four o’clock in the morning, and is followed, a couple of seconds later, by the almost deafening crash of thunder. Beth turns, uneasily, in her sleep, and reaches automatically across the queen-sized bed for the warm body which has not lain there for over two years.

  Another flash of lightning.

  More rolling thunder.

  Awake now, Beth strains her ears to listen for the sound of disturbance from one of the other bedrooms – a frightened sob from Mike, a disturbed moan from Lizzie. But the kids, it seems, are still wrapped up in peaceful sleep.

  The lightning explodes across the sky for the third time, and suddenly there is the noise of rain falling heavily on the shingle roof over her head. Beth shifts slightly, searching for a more comfortable position, but there is little comfort to be found in a lonely bed.

  As she lies there, her half-awake-half-asleep mind drifts back to scenes from the past – or to one scene, anyway.

  A cool spring morning. The grass by the side of the road was still heavy with dew and the sun had not yet vanquished the morning mist. As she climbed heavily – oh, so heavily – out of the back seat of the police car, a young cop took hold of her elbow.

  ‘I can manage without help,’ she said.

  But the young cop did not release his grip, and Beth realized that she was glad he hadn’t.

  Ahead of them was a red three-year-old Mazda 323, surrounded by yellow tape which announced itself as a police line that must not be crossed.

  ‘That’s his car,’ Beth said, telling herself, as she had been for the last hour, that all this had to be some kind of mistake.

  The cop steered her gently to the front of the Mazda. Slumped in the passenger seat was a brown-haired not-quite-handsome man of around 27. His open eyes were lifeless , and snaking across his left shoulder was a length of rubber tubing.

  ‘You want to get a closer look?’ the cop asked sympathetically.

  Beth shook her head. ‘No, that’s him.’

  She was amazed at how cool she sounded; how unemotional – now that her worst imaginings had been confirmed – she actually felt. But she knew this was just temporary, that shock had built up a dam to hold back her grief, and that sooner or later the dam was bound to burst.

  ‘I’ll take you home now,’ the cop said.

  She gestured vaguely towards the Mazda. ‘What about—?’

  ‘Don’t you worry, ma’am. We’ll take care of all the details.’

  The details! she thought.

  As if that was all they were!

  As if turning her life – and her children’s lives – upside down, could be dealt with just by following the correct procedures.

  Beth turns over again, still in search of that elusive, comfortable spot. It is raining even harder now – so hard it seems as if it will wash away the whole world.

  *

  She hears the dripping sound the moment she enters the living room, and at first she thinks it is coming from somewhere outside. Then she sees the oval stain on the ceiling, and the steady stream of water droplets falling from it onto the blue carpet below.

  Beth shakes her head in disgust. It can’t be more than a year since she last had it fixed, and now the damn roof is leaking again.

  She crosses the hallway to the kitchen, tears off some paper towel, and picks up a plastic pail. Back in the living room, she mops up the puddle, rolls back the carpet, and places the pail on the bare boards under the leak.

  If it keeps on raining, the pail is going to fill up eventually, she thinks, but aside from emptying it before she leaves for work, there isn’t a great deal she can do about that.

  “Is it time to get up yet, Mom?” says a sleepy voice from behind her.

  Beth turns around. Mike is standing in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. He is just six, with blue eyes, a button of a nose and a mass of unruly hair which he is so attached to that taking him to the barber’s shop is never anything less than a battle. Up until about a year earlier, he was average height for his age, but then he’d suddenly started to grow, which is why the cute blue pajamas he is wearing are riding high above his ankles and wrists.

  She is really going to have to buy him some new ones soon, Beth thinks. And not just pajamas – the kid needs a whole new wardrobe.

  “Are you all right, Mom?” Mike asked, in that worried-protective way he has about him.

  “Roof’s sprung a leak,” Beth says.

  Mike walks over to her, glancing first at the stain and then at his mother. “Can we get it fixed?”

  “Yeah, we can get it fixed,” Beth said, adding mentally that the only problems are going to be finding the time to call a builder and the money to pay him. She runs her hand through her son’s hair. “Go and wake your sister up.”

  The phone rings, and Mike gave Beth a lopsided, sympathetic grin.

  “That’ll be grandma,” he says.

  “Yeah,” Beth agrees, because who else would it be at this time of the morning? She picks up the receiver and says: “Hello, Mom” with something like resignation.

  “Is everything all right?” her mother asks anxiously.

  Beth looks at the pail, and the water which is falling into it.

  Drip … drip … drip.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said.

  “It doesn’t sound fine.”

  Beth sighs. “Mom, is this important because I have to—”

  “Do you know how long it is since your dad and I have seen our grandchildren?” her mother asks.

  “It’s kinda difficult for us to get down to Florida right now,” Beth says. “Things are pretty stacked up at the office. How about you and dad coming to visit with us for a while? Lizzie can move in with me, and you can have—

  “You know your dad doesn’t like the city,” her mother interrupts.

  “For God’s sake, he lived here for over 30 years, Mom,” Beth points out.

  “Which he now thinks was 30 years too long,” her mother replies. “Listen, is it a question of money? Because if it is—”

  “It’s not money,” Beth lies, knowing from past experience that financial help from her parents has about as many strings attached to it as an IMF loan to a banana republic. “I really am busy right now, and—”

  “You always did put your work before your family, Elizabeth,” her mother says. “Maybe if you’d given Jack a little more of your time …”

  She doesn’t say any more. She doesn’t have to!

  Thanks Mom! Beth thanks. Thanks one hell of a lot!

  “We’re not Jewish, Mom,” she says aloud. “You do know th
at, don’t you?”

  “I don’t understand,” her mother tells her.

  “We’re not Jewish, so there’s no need for you to play the classic Yiddish mamma every time you call.”

  There is a gasp on the other end of the line. “Well, that’s a nice thing to say to your mother. A real nice thing!”

  “I have to go. I’ll call you later,” Beth says, and before her mother has time to deliver a final thrust, she hangs up.

  Beth checks her watch.

  Seven-thirty!

  The hassle with the leak – plus her mother’s call – has put her about 15 minutes behind schedule, and she knows from experience that 15 minutes isn’t easy to catch up on. She has to wash, dress – and feed – the kids before she delivers them to school. Then there’s the drive into the city, which in the rain is going to take longer than usual. What all this adds up to is that – if she’s lucky – she just might be able to snatch half an hour’s preparation time in the office before she goes to the courthouse. And maybe – just maybe, if she’s really lucky – she’ll steal a couple of minutes off something else to call a builder.

  *

  It is Lizzie who comes to the breakfast bar first. She’s a year older than her brother, and whereas his hair is merely fair, hers is dazzlingly – unashamedly – blonde. She shares her mother’s blue eyes and long slim nose. She’s always been a child who people stopped to look at, and although she’s only in the 2nd Grade, she already has a bunch of small admirers who are prepared to lay down their lives for her.

  Beth pours her daughter’s cereal into her special blue and white bowl. Lizzie normally has a healthy appetite, but this morning she picks up her spoon and does no more than moodily move her cereal around.

  Beth watches her for maybe half a minute, then says: “Want to talk about it?”

  Lizzie rests her spoon against the side of the bowl.

  “Yesterday, in class, Miss Thomas asked us to talk about what our dads do for a living,” she says.

  Beth’s heart begins to beat faster.

  Well, screw you, Miss Thomas, she thinks.

  “And what did you tell her, honey?” she asks Lizzie.

  Her daughter shrugs. “I said Daddy was dead.”

  She doesn’t mean to, but she’s made it sound like it’s Beth’s fault.

  Grandmother and granddaughter both!

  Is this some kind of conspiracy?

  “Lots of people live in one-parent families nowadays,” Beth says brightly.

  “Not in my class,” Lizzie counters.

  No, not in Lizzie’s class.

  Probably not in Lizzie’s school.

  Because if you live in a conventional, stolid, suburb like Dashwood, you have the right to expect to be surrounded by conventional, stolid families with a mom, a dad, and 2.2 children.

  “Do you still miss him?” Beth asks.

  Lizzie stirs her cereal some more, as she’s giving the matter her serious consideration.

  “Not much,” she says finally. “He’s been gone so long I can hardly remember him.”

  So long! Beth repeats silently.

  Dear God, it’s only two years – and sometimes it doesn’t even feel like that. Sometimes it seems like it was only yesterday.

  “I don’t miss Daddy,” Lizzie says, “but I … you know … I miss not having a dad.”

  “They’re not something you can pick up at Walmart,” Beth says, trying her best to steer away from the dangerous topic which she can see looming on the horizon.

  “You don’t even date!” Lizzie accuses her.

  “I don’t have time for dating,” Beth tells her.

  But that isn’t true – not really. She couldn’t go out every night of the week, but there is the occasional evening when she’s free. The weekends could be hers, too, if she wanted them – Margaret, her older sister, has told her time and again that she’d be quite happy to have the kids sleep over on Saturday nights. And there isn’t a lack of offers from men, either – there’s the good-looking Assistant DA who goes dreamy-eyed every time she’s near him, the young doctor who treated Lizzie’s measles, the Deputy Principal of the kids’ school …

  Hell, there are enough men interested in her to make up a football team – including reserves.

  So she has the means and the opportunity, as she might say in court. All she’s lacking is the motive. Because though she sometimes hates Jack for leaving them like he did, she still loves him as much as when they were first married.

  Mike enters the room, the flap of his shirt hanging out of the back of his pants, and one shoe-lace undone.

  “I wish I had somebody to take me to the Little League games,” he says.

  “I do take you,” Beth responds, in her own defense.

  “No, I mean a guy,” Mike says – and Beth wonders if he’s been listening at the door.

  *

  It is still raining, though maybe not as fiercely as it was earlier. Beth swings her five-year old Toyota Corolla away from the school parking lot, and heads out for Highway Three. As the windshield wipers swish hypnotically in front of her, she finds herself meditating on the place where she lives.

  Dashwood is located on the south side of the city. The majority of the houses are single-storey wood-framed buildings, with front porches and generous back yards. Some of the owners have installed swimming pools, but that isn’t really Dashwood’s style, and most families are perfectly content with a brick barbecue and a rubber paddling pool for the kids. There isn’t much crime in the suburb, though now the city’s ghetto areas are expanding southwards, it’s not uncommon to see cars full of gang members – some Hispanic, some white – using its streets as a short-cut to Tuckerville. Still, as long as they continue to do that – just drive through – the residents of Dashwood don’t see any real cause for concern.

  Left to herself, Beth would have lived in the city, in a duplex maybe, with a view of Jackson Park – a duplex with a roof that didn’t leak, and plumbing that wasn’t going to have to be completely overhauled soon.

  But she isn’t a free agent, and whichever way she looks at it, if you have kids, then Dashwood is a pretty good place to raise them.

  *

  From behind the wheel of his stolen car, the Angel watches the Toyota Corolla pull out of the school parking lot. It would be nice to follow her all the way from her home to her office, he thinks, but on the quiet suburban streets there’d have been too much of a chance of her spotting him. So he has to content himself with this – picking her up where the traffic is thicker and the possibilities of detection consequently less.

  As he eases the stolen car out into the road, he notes that Beth has taken the bad weather conditions into account, and is driving cautiously. He approves of that. He approves of everything about her.

  But then it always starts out like that with the women he takes care of, he reminds himself.

  Pushing such unpleasant thoughts to the back of his mind, he imagines her in court.

  He can picture it all clearly.

  The way she walks across the room, her high-heeled pumps clicking.

  The way she turns to the jury when she knows that they know she’s scored a point.

  The way she sometimes brushes her beautiful blonde hair back, when she’s thinking.

  He is three cars behind her as she drives down Bullock, towards the intersection with Fairfax. He sees the stop light at the corner of Bullock turn green, and is not surprised when Beth accelerates slightly.

  The dark blue Pontiac Firebird traveling along Fairfax comes out of nowhere, its horn honking, its lights flashing wildly. There is a piercing screech as Beth hits the brake pedal, and the Corolla skids to a halt, its hood almost hitting the newspaper vending machine on the sidewalk.

  The cars behind the Corolla have had to brake, too, but not as dramatically as Beth. Now they wait for her to straighten up and carry on with her journey.

  Beth turns the ignition key, and the Corolla coughs in protest. The two cars behind her indicate, pull out and overtake. The Angel does the same. As he passes Beth, he risks a quick glance at her. She is very pale, and he can see that she is trembling.

  The Angel turns onto Fairfax in the wake of the Pontiac.

  The driver should never have done what he did – not to Beth – he thinks.

  The man is going to have to be taught a lesson.