Hide and Seek (31 page)
I had the gun in my hand. Now what?
Now what?
I backed away from Will as quickly as I could. A lot of fast steps in a hurry.
So did Jennie and Allie.
“C’mon, c’mon. Get out of here now. Jennie, call the police. Call nine-one-one. Hurry. Please. Go!” I told the two of them.
Will looked at me and seemed confused, as if this wasn’t in his playbook. Then he smiled again, the smile I remembered so well, the one that had always been so effective for him. Killer smile, right.
“Isn’t this something,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Not exactly the way I planned it.
But.
A good scorer,
a striker
, has to improvise. I know you never wanted to follow soccer, Maggie, but for a great striker, there’s no team, there’s no win or lose, there’s nothing but the goal.”
“Will,” I said to him, “now
you shut up.”
“Do you know what my goal was tonight, Maggie? Do you really get it?”
“Yes, I do. To kill us.
Jennie
, please go. Allie, go! I mean it.
Now!
Call the police, Jennie.”
“Mom,” Jennie said, and she was talking
very softly
, very slowly, “you come with us. Back out of the door with the gun. Come with us.”
“Do you know the rest of my goal, Maggie?” Will continued to speak to me. “I think I have this figured out.”
I thought I did too. I thought I understood him real well.
“To kill us, and then to kill yourself,” I said.
Will slowly clapped his hands together. Applause from the great man.
“Mom, please come with us,” Jennie begged. “Please.”
Then Will started to walk right toward me.
“Can you do it, Maggie?”
he said. His eyes were pinned onto mine now.
“I can do what I have to do,” I said.
“Mom, please.”
“Can you really do it, Maggie? Can you
start
this nightmare all over again? Or would you rather die? Can you pull the trigger?”
Will kept walking.
The
striker.
Advancing on goal, just as he’d said. No team concept. Just Will—the loner. The ultimate loser.
There was no good answer to his question. There was no easy way out of this.
But maybe there was a way.
Maybe there was.
Will kept walk in toward me. He held eye contact. Then he smiled again.
I fired!
“Mom! Mom!”
He grabbed his leg, and
nearly
went over,
nearly
went down.
“Oooohh!” he moaned. “Jesus Christ, Maggie. You’re quite the tiger, quite the defender.”
Will started to move forward again. It was as though he hadn’t even been hit.
The striker.
The attacker.
The best in the world at this.
Unstoppable once he started toward his goal.
To murder me and the kids, right here in our house.
Will took a knife from his shirt. Big knife, hunting knife. He raised it toward me. He
lunged.
I fired a second time.
S
OUTHERN CONNECTICUT IN early November. Four and a half months after the shooting. Will and I were finally off the front pages of most newspapers and magazines.
There was just one more story to tell.
It was a bright and crisp fall afternoon—high school football weather. Only to me, peering out the tinted Plexiglas windows of my car, it seemed a gloomy day, a day meant for unfinished business.
Norma had come along with me, but I drove. I needed to be in control. I thought that I was. We’d see about that soon enough.
I was trying to be brave, to survive this final test.
I hadn’t done anything wrong—
not ever.
I’d just protected what was important, my family. Sure, I had made mistakes, but who doesn’t. With Will, I’d been a victim for his obsessions. He had lied so brilliantly, right from the start of our relationship.
Norma and I talked everything through again during the drive from Bedford. Finally, I pulled up at the Institute for Living, a Federal-style building in the outskirts of New Heaven that looked like a cross between a college administration building and a prison. It was neither, nothing so benign. It was a mental hospital, supposedly one of the best.
Norma and I hurried across a popular- and maplelined parking area, then into the vestibule, where we approached a receptionist dressed in nurse’s white.
“We’re here to see Mr. Shepherd,” I told her, and if she recognized me she didn’t show it. I appreciated that.
“I’ll have someone take you to his room,” is all she said. An aide eventually materialized to escort us.
Outside Will’s room, I stopped. “Can you wait here?” I said to Norma. “I think I want to see him alone.”
“You’re sure, Maggie? You don’t have to punish yourself, honey.”
“I’m sure. I’m not afraid of him anymore.”
Not too much anyway.
“Good for you then. I’ll be the short, dumpy broad waiting outside. Maybe some guy in here is nuts enough to fall for me.”
The aide unlocked the door and I entered.
I entered.
It was a plain enough room: clean, a made bed, desk, desk chair, easy chair, and standing lamp its only furniture. There was a bookcase built into the far wall holding a few new paperbacks, obviously unread, and a small sink for washing. It reminded me of prison, only it was nicer.
Will was standing by the window. There was no sign that he
ever
sat down. He was looking at me, looking
through
me, I guess I should say.
I’m not afraid anymore. I can do this. Whatever is necessary
, I told myself.
If it was possible, Will was even more handsome than when I had first met him in London. His hair was its natural blond, long and full. It caught the afternoon sun through the heavily screened window.
“Hello, Will.”
Nothing.
His face was clean shaven and pale pink; his body seemed to have the same lithe grace, even standing still, that it always had.
“It’s Maggie, Will.”
He looks like a grown-up little boy
, I thought, remembering Will at the very first Lake Club party, at our wedding, confessing his sorrow and pain,
and all his lies.
I had loved him—because he could make himself seem so lovable. He was a very good actor after all. He had fooled so many people—half the world. He had worked hard to fool me.
He made a strange sound, a high-pitched wail that reverberated in the hospital room. The second shot I’d fired at the estate had struck his head, caromed off bone, but done severe damage anyway.
“Mmahhlah … mmahhlah,” he said to me. He seemed
insistent;
but I didn’t understand.
What was he trying to say?
Was it Maggie? Mother? Was it Mama? What was it?
I sat in a hard wooden chair directly across from him. I forced myself to look at his face.
I’m sorry I did this to you, Will. But I’m not guilty about it. I sleep at night—I sleep just fine. You did this to yourself.
I thought of the murder he’d committed in Bedford Hills; of his terrifying betrayal of me; of what he had done to Jennie and Allie, and what he’d planned to do to us all.
But I couldn’t hate him. Not now. Not the way he was.
“Will, can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The dead stare didn’t change. He couldn’t understand, could he? He had gone to his own world forever.
It’s so sad
, I thought, as I watched him that afternoon at the hospital.
You’re still young. You look so young, so full of promise. But you won’t hurt me ever again. You won’t hurt my children. I’m not scared of you, Will.
A little past five o’clock, the aide returned. He was jangling his keys so I’d hear him come up on us. “Visiting hours are over.”
“Thank you. I’ll just be another minute. Please?”
I stood and walked to the window where Will was still standing. A cloak of solemn gray had already replaced the sunlight outside.
I turned to Will. “I feel so sorry for you,” I said, “but I can’t forgive you either.”
I wanted him to say something. A final few words to remember him by. To explain why he had wanted to kill me. Why he had hurt us. Who was Will Shepherd, really? Did anyone know?
“Okay. Good-bye, Will. I’m sorry for you.”
I gathered myself together, and started to leave the room.
I turned my back on Will.
I wasn’t afraid of him anymore.
S
UDDENLY, WILL SCREAMED with a tremendous force that echoed through the hospital. I whirled around toward him.
He shrieked again, his body rocking violently.
Aides came running down the hallway. A burly male nurse appeared with a plastic-sheathed needle clasped in his fist. I sensed that this had happened before.
“Mmahhlah!”
Will screamed.
I thought that he might be having a stroke. Certainly this was some kind of fit.
“Mmahhlah. Mmahhlah,” he continued to shout. His face and neck were bright red. His veins stood out against his skin.
I stared at Will in horror.
Maggie? Mother? What in God’s name was he trying to tell me?
In his eyes, there wasn’t the slightest comprehension or recognition. He was pushed down firmly onto the bed, and I
felt
his legs shrivel.
The Blond Arrow, shriveling.
I had to get out of there. I nearly ran from the room. There was nothing I could do for him anymore. Norma was waiting for me at the end of the corridor.
“Maggie! My God! What was that? What the hell happened in there? You okay?”
I put my arms around her and held Norma tightly, as though to blot out those screams. Finally, the two of us walked out of the building and onto the black-topped parking area, the trees now ghostly silhouettes.
Halfway across the parking lot I turned. I felt as though someone had just stepped out of a grave.
I had the powerful intuition that something was chasing after me.
Mmahhlah … Mmahhlah
was coming fast, right behind me.
Those lifeless, haunting eyes …
But there was no one looking out from Will’s hospital window. There was no one when I looked back.
I
N HIS BARREN, insular hospital room Will screamed and screamed. Screamed and screamed. Until his throat was raw and felt as though it had splinters in it.
Still, he continued to scream.
As the night-shift aides tried to feed him his dinner, changed him, and put him to bed, he continued to scream. His strength, his stamina, were amazing to all of them. He was still young, and very athletic, and so powerfully strong.
“Mmahhlah! Mmahhlah! Mmahhlah!” He cried over and over.
“Mmahhlah! Mmahhlah! Mmahhlah!
“MMAHHLAH!”
He had
seen
Maggie today. He’d been
aware
of everything. He’d wanted to speak to her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t.
Mmahhlah
was all he could get out.
Why didn’t she understand him? Why didn’t anyone?
“Mmahhlah.”
I’m alive!
I’m alive!
Please don’t leave me like this!
I’m trapped inside this body. Can’t you see that? Won’t you help me?
“Mmahhlah!
“Mmahhlah!”
I’m alive!
I was halfway home to Bedford when it hit me, and I understood what Will had been trying to say to me at the hospital.
He was badly slurring his words, jumbling them together.
Mmahhlah
was
I’m alive.
He could think, and understand. He just couldn’t mouth the words clearly.
It took my breath away.
But I never went to see him again.
I never will.
More James Patterson!
Please turn this page for a bonus excerpt from
Jack & Jill
available now from
WARNER BOOKS.
The Games Begin
I
S
am Harrison swung his agile body out of the silver-blue Ford Aerostar, which he had parked on Q Street in the Georgetown section of Washington.
Horror stories and games are popular for a good reason
, he was thinking as he locked the vehicle and set its alarm.
Not the comfortable sit-around-the-campfire horror tales and games we used to cherish as kids, but the real live horror stories that are everywhere around us these days.
Now I’m living one myself. I’m about to become part of the horror. How easy it is. How terribly, terribly easy to move past the edge and into the darkness.
He had stalked and shadowed Daniel Fitzpatrick for two long weeks. He’d done his job in New York City, London, Boston, and finally, now in Washington, D.C. Tonight, he was going to murder the United States senator. In cold blood, execution-style. No one would be able to figure out why. No one would have a clue that might matter later on.
That was
the first, and most important rule
of the game called Jack and Jill.
In many ways this was a textbook celebrity-stalker pattern. He knew it to be true as he took up his post across from No. 211 Q Street.
And yet, if anyone bothered to look more closely, it was like no other stalking pattern before it. What he was going to do now was more provocative than secretly observing Senator Fitzpatrick downing obscene numbers of Glenlivet cocktails at The Monocle, his favorite bar in Washington. This was the truest form of madness, Sam Harrison knew. It was
pure
madness.
He didn’t believe be was mad. He believed only in the validity of the game of chance.
And then, less than thirty yards across the shiny-wet street—there was Daniel Fitzpatrick himself! Right on schedule. At least close enough.
He watched the senator stiffly climb out of a shiny, navy-blue Jaguar coupe, a ‘96 model. He wore a gray topcoat with a paisley silk scarf. A sleek, slender woman in a black dress was with him. A Burberrys raincoat was casually thrown over her arm. She was laughing at something Fitzpatrick had said. She threw her head back like a beautiful, spirited horse. A wisp of her warm breath met the cool of the night.