Oringinally published to AO3 on November 29, 2020.
Content warnings: emotional/psychological abuse, consent issues, references to past child abuse, violence, child death.
The half open door was a test. It was hard to read it any other way.
Freddy had repeatedly reminded her not to go in his workshop. A man needed private spaces in his life, he said. Spaces kept separate from his wife. She had never once disagreed with him on that point, but he felt the need to keep reminding her of it anyway, because he knew that it secretly made her unhappy. He liked to play little games like that with her; it was a quirk of his that she had learned to endure long ago. She was proud of herself for being able to weather his teasing longer than most women would.
She should have known that the game wouldn’t end there. He had been stoking her curiosity for months, all in preparation for this: a temptation, an easy end to all her doubts, which she would either have to turn her back on and refuse, or confront in spite of his express orders.
Her damp hands tightened around the jar of jam she held, her reason for coming down into the cellar in the first place. She had a pretty good idea of what was going on; she’d read about this sort of thing in magazine advice columns, in tearful letters from jilted housewives. There were men who took pictures of their mistresses and developed them in makeshift darkrooms in their homes, right under their wives’s noses. It seemed like just the sort of thing that Freddy would do, just to get a rise out of her.
She wasn’t as naive as he thought she was. She knew that he was getting bored of her, and that his late hours weren’t just due to working overtime.
Well, if he thought she was going to take the coward’s way out and ignore this, he was wrong. She was going to look the facts right in the face, keep a cool head, and then they were going to talk it out like two grown adults.
Mind made up, she clutched the jar to her chest and walked through the door.
All thoughts of cheating immediately fled from her mind.
It took her a minute to really register what she was seeing—gloves with various types of knives affixed to the end, some crusted with red, some as yet untested; newspaper clippings with headings like “Springwood Slasher Strikes Again” pinned high on the wall in a place of honor; tacked up under that, pictures of children, separated into two columns, more in column A than column B. She didn’t let herself look too closely at their faces.
Loretta stood in the center of the room, not touching anything. She thought a long while.
Upstairs, the kitchen timer went off. If she left it too long, the edges of her casserole would get tough and chewy. Freddy always hated it when that happened.
Loretta walked out of the room. Closed the door behind her. Climbed the cellar steps up into the house. Her feet were heavy, like she was walking in a dream.
She managed to get the casserole out of the oven, somehow, even though her hands felt slack and numb. She stared at it blankly for a minute and then, almost absently, placed her forearm on the hot metal. The pain broke her out of the fog; and with it, came fear.
She turned and looked out the window, at the back yard. Freddy was playing with their daughter. She watched as he reached down, handed her a ball, ruffled her hair. He caught her looking at them and smiled. She forced herself to smile back, then put her oven mitts to the side and opened the window.
“Dinner’s almost ready. Why don’t you two come in and wash up?”
Kathy pouted. Freddy bent down and whispered something in her ear, which made her giggle. He gave Loretta an exaggerated wink.
“All right. We’re ready.”
*
The next morning, after she dropped Kathy off at preschool, Loretta parked outside the police station and stared through the glass double doors. The secretary at the front desk, an old woman with gray hair and glasses on a chain who had probably worked there since before Loretta was born, was distracted, chatting with a young mother who stood shifting her wailing baby from arm to arm. On the corkboard behind her head were photographs of missing children. Within a week, their bodies would turn up on someone’s lawn, eyeless and bloody.
Loretta chewed her cuticles until the skin tore. The savory taste of sweat and blood filled her mouth. It was summer, nearing the time when all the schoolchildren would be freed and left to roam the town, and hot as an oven in the car.
They had met on a day like this.
*
It had been toward the end of her junior year of high school. It was a Friday, the air conditioning on campus was broken, and as soon as classes were over, the rest of the student body had rushed home to stick their head in an icebox or stand under a cold shower.
But not Loretta. It was payday. When she got home, her father would be drunk, belligerent, and on the hunt for a punching bag. Usually she spent Fridays in the library, but today she found the press of bodies inside unbearable. The usual students who sat there with her in the afternoon, each with their own private reasons for not wanting to go home, had been joined by a loud group cramming for exams, and it was barely more tolerable inside than out.
After wandering the halls for a bit, she found herself in the biology room.
By an unfortunate coincidence that teacher had planned a fetal pig dissection for that day and, rather than put up with the scent of rotting meat all afternoon, everyone else in the building had agreed to give up their fans to him. When Loretta turned off all the lights, closed the blinds, and got them all running at full power, the room almost felt cool.
It was probably because of the low lights and the roar of the fans that it took her a minute to notice him standing in the doorway.
It was the janitor, Mr. Krueger. He wasn’t that much older than her—20 to her 17—but it was hard for her not to think of him as a mister, no matter how many times he told the kids to just call him Freddy. There was something knowing about him, something secretive. Sometimes, when she saw him reach up to change a lightbulb, or knock down a cobweb, she caught scars peeking out of his shirtsleeves. There were rumors that he’d gotten into a lot of fights when he was a student. Maybe that should have scared her, but it only made him more mysterious in her eyes. Besides, that was all in the past, as far as she could tell. She’d never seen him be anything but easygoing.
When he saw the surprise on her face, he gave her a smile and nod of greeting. She blushed. Was it just her imagination, or did his smile widen at that?
“Should I come back later?” he asked.
She noticed the bucket and mop at his side. She blushed even harder. Of course he wasn’t here just to gawk at her; he was just waiting for her to get out of his way so he could get on with his job.
She quickly stood up and tried to stammer out an apology. He just laughed, holding up a hand, and waved her back to her seat.
“Stay put. You looked so relaxed sitting there, it’d be a shame to make you move.”
She sat back down. He turned on the lights. The chair wasn’t so comfortable anymore. She was suddenly conscious of how strange she must look, sitting in a circle of fans that weren’t even supposed to be in this room. Maybe he thought she had dragged them in there herself.
“Sorry. It’s just that it was so hot everywhere else, and then I remembered the pigs, and I thought it would be okay if I just...”
She gestured at the fans.
His eyes glittered with amusement. He had dragged the mop in with him, but hadn’t started with it yet. She wished he would, so he wouldn’t keep looking into her eyes.
“Why don’t you just go home, then, if it’s so hot here?”
She swallowed. God, he must think she was stupid.
“Well...” She cast about for an excuse. “My father...”
Her tongue stumbled over the word father, and she halted, realizing that she wasn’t a good enough liar to come up with anything that wouldn’t echo the truth. She put her face in her arms. Daddy was right about one thing: she really was slow-witted.
To her surprise, she heard him walk across the room and take a perch on the desk beside her.
“You don’t have to explain. I won’t tell anyone you’re here. Just point a few of those fans out at the rest of the room for me, yeah?”
Maybe his fingers ghosted across the back of her head. Maybe it was just a draft. She shivered. He slid off of the desk. When she looked up again, he was mopping. She turned the fans out for him and slunk back to her desk. He gave her a quick smile of thanks, then turned back to his work.
With a twinge of disappointment, she realized that maybe that was all the conversation he expected of her. But then:
“So, what do you all do for fun around here these days?”
She talked more in that one afternoon than she had ever talked to anyone.
He asked her what favorite tv shows were (she wasn’t allowed to watch them), what movies she had seen recently (Psycho had terrified her. Had he seen it? Yes, but he regretted to say that the lead wasn’t half as pretty as her), if she liked to read (oh, yes sir, very much), etc. Before she knew what was happening, Loretta found herself explaining the whole plot of Wuthering Heights to him. She could tell that he wasn’t really interested, but he made all the right noises of encouragement as she blundered toward the end and, at last, blushingly described the romantic (or so she thought at the time) ends of Heathcliff and Cathy, joined together in death.
At some point he had stopped mopping and sat down on the desk again. By the time that she got to the end of her spiel, the floor was dry. He watched her excitement wind down with an amused expression. After unloading so much on him, she found that she was shy again.
“Um,” she said, swinging her legs under her desk, where she too had taken a perch, mirroring him. “Can I see you again next week?”
“Sure.” He hopped down from his seat and stood in front of her. “Same time, same place?”
“Yeah. I mean, if you want to. You don’t have to. But—but I’d like it if you could.”
She bit her lip, realizing that she’d said too much again. He laughed quietly.
“You really are a little worrywart, aren’t you?”
He leaned in close to her, and for one terrifying, thrilling second, she thought he would kiss her.
“You’ve got a flyaway,” he said, and gently plucked a sweaty strand of hair from her forehead.
And with that, he left.
It was the first kindness a man had ever shown her.
*
Loretta looked up from her bloody fingers. The mother and child had left. The secretary was peering at her through the glass doors with a curious expression.
She turned the key in the ignition and drove away.
*
On Fridays, Freddy went to a dive bar near the power plant to drink and smoke with his coworkers. Often, he wouldn’t come back until closing time around one o’clock in the morning. She usually spent those nights desperately trying to distract herself with television while Kathy acted out silent dramas with her teddy bears on the living room floor; she had long since accepted that Loretta was unreachable on nights like these.
But tonight she was too agitated to do even that. She sent Kathy to bed early and pulled up a chair next to the window. She set an ashtray on the windowsill, opened a pack of cigarettes, and lit one with the silver cigarette lighter Freddy had gotten her for their anniversary. Then she settled back in the chair to wait.
A pack of teens wandered through the orange strip of light under the streetlamp at the end of their driveway. The one in front walked backwards, hands in his pockets, a goofy smile plastered on his face. Too old to fear the dangers of the night, too young to feel responsibility for its victims. He tripped over the curb and stumbled against their mailbox. The rest of the teens laughed at him. He shrugged it off, still grinning—what about, she couldn’t begin to imagine—and spun out of the cone of light. The rest of the teens passed into darkness with him. She heard one more whoop of laughter; then silence.
Had she ever been so carefree? She couldn’t remember.
Loretta got a beer out of the fridge and sat back down. The clock chimed; it was nine. She nursed the beer, smoked a few more cigarettes. Cars came and went. None of them were Freddy’s. The clock chimed; it was ten. She tossed the empty beer bottle in the trash.
Screw it.
She picked up the phone and dialed the bar’s number.
“Hey. Whaddya need?”
The man’s raspy voice was almost impossible to hear over the clamor of the bar. Loretta pressed the receiver closer to her ear.
“I was wondering if Freddy was there. Freddy Kruger.”
Silence for a few seconds. In the distance, she heard slurred shouting followed by the sound of breaking glass, which the man ignored.
“Who wants to know?”
“His wife.” She quickly cast around for an excuse that wouldn’t make it sound like she was asking him to snitch. “We’re almost out of milk and I need him to pick some up. If you could just pass that on to him…?”
“Ah, gotcha.” He sounded mollified. “Gimme one second.”
There was a clunk as he set the receiver down. He yelled a question at someone outside her range of hearing. A moment later, he picked the phone up again.
“No one’s seen him tonight. He’s probably still at work. I heard him say something about needing to put in some extra hours the other day.”
A headache was starting to form behind her eyes. She rubbed her forehead.
“Okay. Thank you.”
He hung up.
She already knew what the answer would be if she called the power plant, but she had to do it anyway. The secretary was a woman she’d talked to a handful of times, so they got to the point a lot quicker.
“Oh, hey, Loretta. No, he clocked out about five hours ago. Probably out with the guys by now, I’d imagine. You know how it is.” The secretary expected her to laugh. When she didn’t, she cleared her throat awkwardly. “Uh. Do you want me to take a message in case he comes back?”
“No, that’s fine,” Loretta said faintly. “I’ll try the bar.”
She slid to the floor and put her face in her hands.
When she got up again, it was still only half past ten. She couldn’t stand to wait for him any longer. She drew the blinds, sank onto the couch, and closed her eyes.
*
The rasp of Freddy’s key in the door tore her out of a half-dreaming fugue at a quarter past one. She kept her eyes closed. She didn’t know how to look at him. Maybe he already knew about her suspicions. Maybe he would slit her throat and save her the trouble of finding a way out of this.
The couch dipped slightly as he sat down on the other end. She heard the twin thumps of shoes dropping as he unlaced them and let them fall to the floor.
She lay with her head on the armrest, curled-up knees angled toward him. He uncurled them and positioned himself between her legs. He kissed her calf.
“I know you’re awake,” he murmured. His mouth traveled upwards, brushing against the inside of her knee. “You didn’t have to wait up for me.”
Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.
Green irises. Blond curls, slightly crusted by sweat, brushing against her stockinged knees. That unique face of his that she still found so charming.
Her heart ached.
“Freddy—”
He stopped kissing her.
“Yes?”
“I need to talk to you about something.”
He gave her an irritated look, but backed off. He stood up and made his way to the minibar off to the side of the room, pointedly turning his back on her to show his displeasure.
“Fine,” he said impatiently, bringing out a bottle of whiskey. “What is it?”
She got up, intending to follow him, but thought better of it. She stood a few paces behind him, ringing her hands.
“I just want you to know that you can tell me anything. If there’s something wrong, I’ll be here for you, no matter what.”
He still wasn’t looking at her. He poured out a finger of whiskey and took a sip of it.
“What are you insinuating?”
“I just mean...if, for example, there was someone else—”
He looked back at her. The lines above his brow smoothed. He put down his drink and laughed.
“That’s what you’re worried about? Baby—” She tried to step away, but he grabbed her by the shoulders. “Baby, no. You’re the only one for me. You can rest easy about that.”
Loretta blushed. She stared at a speck of dirt on her white shoe, and forced herself to keep speaking.
“But if there was someone, we could talk about it. I wouldn’t be angry, I promise. I could never be angry at you. Not about anything.”
She watched his shoes come toward her own. There was a long scrape along the side of one, as if it had gotten caught on a thorn, or a piece of barbed wire. She made a mental note to rub some boot polish on it later.
“Silly.” He stroked her hair. “Such a silly girl.”
He tilted her chin up and kissed her.
In spite of everything, she couldn’t help herself: when she tasted whiskey on his tongue, she melted.
*
They were due for dinner at a neighbor’s house the next day. It was a standing engagement; Loretta couldn’t think of a way to wiggle out of it without sounding suspicious. So, she whipped up a bowl of potato salad, ironed Freddy’s khakis and Kathy’s favorite blue dress, and showed up at six o’clock sharp, her family neatly dressed and smiling.
Their neighbors also had a child, a boy named Daniel, who was a year younger than Kathy. The dinner itself passed without incident; the hot topics were too hot to talk about in front of the children, so the conversation stayed light and bland, and it would suit Loretta just fine if they kept it that way.
When their plates were clean, they sent the children to the living room to watch cartoons while they drank whiskey sours. Loretta had come prepared for this; Kendra, the wife, had recently started up a home sewing business, and she knew that she could go on about it for hours if prompted. This, much to Freddy’s annoyance, she did, and soon Kendra was happily ranting and waving doilies in their faces.
Just as she was starting to relax, thinking that she had avoided the subject that was on all of their minds for this night, at least, Kendra abruptly stopped. She was in several drinks too deep and rambling about what embroidery did to your eyes, long-term, her aunt had actually gone blind (Kendra had told them this story many times), not just legally blind, she actually (even greater stress on actually as if they still didn’t understand) couldn’t see—and here she had paused, and Loretta had seen her drunken mind wandering, and realized too late what it was wandering toward.
Kendra glanced toward the living room. She put her elbows on the table and leaned toward them, lowering her voice.
“They found another body this afternoon, in a school bus parked inside the old bus barn downtown. No eyes. No guts either. Sick bastard put the kid in the driver’s seat.”
Loretta choked on her drink. Freddy gave her a sympathetic look and slung an arm around her shoulders.
“Where’d you hear that?” he asked.
“Got a friend in the sheriff’s office.”
Loretta wiped her lips with a trembling hand.
“Are you sure it’s true?”
“Mhm. He told me it must’ve happened last night, from the state of the body.”
Last night. He had really done it. Then he had come home and kissed her, while the body was cooling. And she had suspected everything, and still craved it.
Loretta let out a low groan. Freddy, his expression completely unbothered, simply took a neat bite out of his cherry and shook his head.
“I can’t believe that they still haven’t caught the bastard,” he said.
“I know,” grumbled Kendra’s husband. “How many has it been now? Six? Unbelievable.”
Kendra bobbed her head angrily.
“It’s an outrage. What are we supposed to do? Keep our kids locked inside all day?”
“That’s what we’ve been doing. Loretta hardly ever lets Kathy out of her sight.” He skimmed his fingers through her short hair. “Isn’t that right, you worrywort?”
She felt his fingertips ghost against the back of her neck. Bile rose in her throat. Abruptly, she stood up.
As soon as she wrenched the toilet lid open, her stomach ejected its meager contents into the bowl. For once she was glad that she didn’t have much of an appetite these days.
There was silence in the kitchen. Then she heard the plink of Freddy spitting a cherry pit into his glass, followed by the reluctant scrape of his chair as he got up to see what was wrong with her.
Calloused hands rubbed circles into her back.
“What is it this time?”
“The bourbon didn’t agree with me. I’m sorry.”
“Poor sensitive Lo,” he murmured. “Do you want to leave?”
“Yes. Please.”
He rubbed her back for a minute more. She resisted the urge to throw up again.
“All right,” he said at last. “Let’s go.”
“Thank you.”
He helped her up, flushed the toilet, and led the way back to the kitchen. Their hosts, having already guessed what was happening, had cleared away the glasses and fetched Kathy from the living room.
“Loretta’s sick,” Freddy said. “I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this another time.”
They made all the appropriate noises of disappointment—we have ginger ale, are you sure you couldn’t stay for a little longer?—but Loretta sensed that they were eager to get their vomiting guest out of the house. The couple showed them to the door, and Kendra took Loretta’s hands and patted them consolingly.
“You know, it might be a psychosomatic problem. We’re all under so much stress right now. You all ought to take a vacation and get away from all this for a while.”
Freddy gave the pair of them a crooked smile.
“I’ll have to see how many sick days I have saved up,” he said. “Though with our luck, I’m sure that’d be the one week the murderer decided to take a vacation, too.”
*
Later that night, Freddy slipped into bed behind Loretta and wrapped his arms around her. He pressed his nose into her hair. The feeling of his breath brushing hot against the nape of her neck, once one of her biggest turn-ons, now made her heart pound with fear. All she could think of was a predator looming over its prey, taking in the scent of fear as it decided where to take the first bite.
“All that talk of murder must have really gotten to you. I’ve never seen you so upset before.”
“I told you, it was just the liquor.” She brought a hand up and stroked one of the arms that held her. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Loretta. Stop lying to me.”
Freddy had never hit her. Not once. But there was a certain tone of voice he used sometimes—firm, quiet, intense—that reminded her of her father at his angriest. When Freddy used this voice, she knew that if she didn’t do what she was told, he would forget to give her a shopping allowance the next week, or accidentally drop one of the china plates left to her by her mother, or select one of the dozens of other petty revenges in his repertoire.
She squeezed her shoulders together, trying to make herself smaller.
“I’m sorry, Fred. I just really, really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“It used to be all you could talk about.”
“I just think—” She swallowed. “I just think...there’s nothing I can do, so why keep talking about it? Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. It’s useless. All it does is upset me. I don’t want to talk about it, not with you, not with anyone. I don’t even want to think about it, if I can help it.”
“Not even with me, huh?”
“Unless you need me to. I know this must be weighing on you as much as it is on me.”
“No, I agree.” He sighed. “It’s best not to dwell on it.”
She relaxed a little.
“So you won’t bring it up anymore?”
“Maybe,” he said. Then, with no change in tone: “If you promise to stop calling everyone in the neighborhood when I’m not home by ten.”
She went stiff. How had he heard about that already?
“Bruce called while you were out getting groceries this morning,” he said, as if hearing her thoughts.
Bruce. One of his drinking buddies. Probably the one the bartender had shouted for when she called.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was just afraid that you might be...you know…”
She colored, remembering their conversation from last night. Freddy snorted.
“Just don’t do it again,” he said. “You’ll only make a fool of yourself.”
“I won’t,” she said meekly. “Now, do you want to...?”
She slid her leg between his in invitation. Makeup sex was his favorite; he loved it when she came crawling to him for forgiveness, asking for it in the way that suited her best. She knew he wouldn’t be able to resist.
The distraction worked. With a low hum of approval he rolled her onto her back and began unbuttoning her top.
She lay still and let him do what he would, relieved to have gotten off so lightly.
*
Two weeks passed. It was a Sunday morning. They were planning to get out of town for a bit that afternoon and take a dip in a nearby lake—but first, she had housekeeping to take care of.
She walked into the master bedroom, a basket full of freshly cleaned laundry balanced on her hip. Through the open door to the bathroom, she could see Freddy standing in front of the mirror, shaving his face with a straight razor. She had once asked him, in one of her occasional paroxysms of anxiety, why he preferred that to the safer, modern alternative; he had answered, with a wry smile, that this was the way his step father had taught him to do it. She knew enough about his past to drop the issue.
He was a bit too deft with the knife for her liking. She turned her back on him and started to put away the laundry.
Everything was spotless, until she got to the bottom of the hamper.
There was a rust-colored stain on the toe of one sock. As if he had stepped in a puddle of blood, and not noticed as it seeped into his shoes.
Her hand tightened around it. She knelt over the hamper and clawed desperately through the rest of the pile, looking for its twin.
It was stained too—no more than a faint smudge, something she would have hardly noticed if she wasn’t looking for it. She held the two socks next to each other and tried to imagine how they had gotten that way. Big stain, little stain. One foot forward, the other behind. Freddy leaning forward, weight on the first foot, peering at a small body in a growing pool of blood. Empty eyes ringed by pale, delicate eyelashes. Round cheeks white and already cooling.
This was the first time that the image of him in the act had shone so clearly in her mind. She found it impossible to imagine his face, or what he was feeling.
There was no one way that he hadn’t known, that he hadn’t felt the blood soaking through to his skin. He had never slipped up like this before. Had he done it on purpose? Why? How did he expect her to react?
She was suddenly aware of the shadow that had fallen over her. Freddy had finished shaving and come up behind her without making a sound.
She stood still. The socks were clenched tight in her fist. She felt unable to let them go; if she did, they might vanish into thin air, leaving her with no anchor, adrift from the reality of what her husband had done.
Freddy put his hands on her shoulders, fingers splayed across her clavicles, dangerously close to encircling her throat.
“Ready to go?”
She could feel the pulse in her neck throb against his fingers. She swallowed.
“Almost.”
A pause. The bloodstain was clearly visible. She could feel him looking at it, but still he said nothing. Like he was daring her to bring it up first.
When she didn’t take the bait, he simply reached around her, grabbed the socks, and tossed them into the open drawer.
“There. Now you’re done.” He kissed the corner of her jaw—the image of a vampire flashed through her mind—and released her. “Let’s go.”
*
The drive was an hour long. Freddy was unusually silent, forcing her to fill the air with inane chatter that made her feel more foolish with each passing second. She could still feel the rough pads of his fingers on her neck. They seemed to press in deeper the farther from town they got. By the time they arrived at the lake, all sound had been squeezed out of her. She watched Freddy unload their things from the car, hands hanging limply by her sides, silent, passive. He crunched across the gravel parking lot to the picnic tables without bothering to acknowledge her. Kathy, too excited to notice her mother’s anxiety or her father’s coldness, skipped after him. Loretta had no choice but to follow behind.
Freddy sat across from her. Kathy took his side, as usual—she always preferred her father’s company when she could get it. From the instant she had been old enough to show it, Kathy’s disinterest in her mother had been clear, but that had never really bothered her. He wasn’t home as often. He was a novelty. Of course he would be the more interesting of the two, to a child. She was sure that she had been the same, when her mother was alive.
But now, as she watched the free, easy way her husband and daughter talked to each other, she felt a pit of despair growing in her stomach. He was good with kids. Luring them away from their parents must have been no problem for him. And, when it came down to it, she knew that if she asked Kathy to run away with her, she wouldn’t do it. She would stay with her father.
Freddy cut up an apple with his pocket knife. Kathy watched, impatiently swinging her legs under the table.
“Why can’t I do it?”
“Because you’ll cut yourself.” Freddy stole a sly glance across the table. “Maybe I’ll teach you when you’re older. Daddy knows lots of neat knife tricks.”
He expertly twirled the knife between his fingers and gave Loretta a wink. Kathy clapped.
“Do it again!”
Loretta fed her sandwich to the ants.
*
Kathy ran off to the lake with Freddy in tow as soon as she was done eating. Loretta didn’t join them. Instead, she spread out her towel on the shore and pretended to doze, watching miserably through half-closed eyes as Freddy led their daughter into the water.
There were very few other people at the lake. A huge, noisy family had replaced them at the picnic table up the hill; snatches of their laughter filtered down to her through the trees. On the other side of the lake, two lanky teens lazily drifted along in a canoe, passing a joint back and forth. Above it all, the sky was a searing blue, only interrupted by a few puffy white clouds, cartoonish in their plushness.
Her eyes drifted back to Kathy and Freddy. They were deep enough now that they both had to tread water.
When Freddy saw her looking, he smiled and gave her a wave. She waved back. He swam closer to Kathy and whispered something in her ear. She giggled and nodded.
Freddy slipped under the water. A few seconds passed.
Suddenly, Kathy let out a shriek and went under.
Loretta sprang to her feet and ran into the lake.
Kathy was a good swimmer. When she was four, Freddy had tossed her into the middle of a swimming pool, told her “sink or swim,” and she had taken to it immediately. Even Loretta, with all her many and varied anxieties, had never once considered that her daughter might die by drowning.
Her clothes weighed her down, made her sluggish. By the time that she got to the place where they had gone under, they were gone. Freddy had pulled Kathy off to another part of the lake.
Loretta looked around for help. The stoned teens, who had started making out in the bottom of their canoe sometime during the past few minutes, briefly stopped sucking face and looked up when she shouted at them. When all they saw was a fully dressed woman standing by herself in the middle of the lake, clearly freaking out about nothing, they ignored her and resumed their business.
Her chest tightened. No one was coming to help. Not now, not ever.
Something brushed her legs. Loretta started back. Without warning, Kathy surged up out of the water. When she saw the horrified look on Loretta’s face, she broke into giggles.
“We got you! We got you good!”
Freddy rose up out of the water behind her and started laughing too.
Loretta stared at the two of them, panting. Her sundress was completely soaked, and in spite of the warm weather, she was shaking with cold.
Kathy ran out of merriment before Freddy did. She bounced off the lake bed and spun to face him, pouting.
“You held me under too long. I almost ran out of breath.”
“Sorry, kiddo. I forgot that your little lungs can’t hold as much as mine.”
He smoothed back her wet hair. His hand, when spread, was bigger than Kathy’s face. He could push her back under and hold her there with just one arm, easy.
“Let’s go back to shore. I think mommy’s had enough fun for one day.”
His smile, next to Kathy’s, was not playful. It was sharp, and when he tilted his head to the side, it glinted at her like a knife.
Loretta got his message loud and clear.
*
It was time to be practical. There was, at least, one concrete issue she knew how to solve: his socks. If he was going to keep slipping up, he would need darker ones to hide the stains.
She waited until late in the evening to give them to him. He was always in high spirits after he watched her read Kathy a bedtime story—something that she now recognized as a perversity, a glee that came from getting to play the adoring father while someone else’s child rotted under the ground. He went into the kitchen, humming, and Loretta followed behind. She got a cold beer out of the fridge, cracked it open, and handed it to him with a smile. While she busied herself with the dishes, he drank and watched. She would have called the silence comfortable if she wasn’t so aware of the task she was putting off.
Finally, she ran out of dishes. She puttered around the kitchen for a minute, then shot a quick glance at Freddy. He was nearly done with his drink. She took a deep breath and wiped her hands on her apron.
“I’ve got something for you.”
“Oh?”
He followed her to the living room. She took the socks from where she had stashed them behind the couch and handed them over.
Freddy raised his eyebrows. She could see him mentally calculating just how hardheaded he was going to be about this.
“Aren’t the socks I already have good enough?”
“Well...It’s just that white is so impractical, it stains so easily...you never know what could happen.”
She wrung her hands. Her cheeks burned, as if she was the one who had done something wrong, just by brushing against the truth.
He gave her a flat look of contempt and tossed the socks onto the coffee table.
“You’re really never going to say anything about it, are you?”
“About what?”
He laughed. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the room where Kathy was sleeping.
“What would you do if I were to tell you outright, I wonder?”
“Please…” Loretta could feel herself teetering on the edge. She took a shaky breath. “Please don’t.”
She started to cry. The hard look in Freddy’s eyes softened a bit. He sighed, sat down on the couch, and patted his thigh.
“Come here.”
She took a hesitant step forward. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her into his lap. She leaned her face against his shoulder, sniffling.
“Shhh,” he said. “There’s no need for all that.”
They sat like that for a minute, Freddy rubbing her back, murmuring soothing nonsense, until her tears subsided. When they did, he gently pushed her head up from its resting place and looked into her eyes.
“You really aren’t curious at all?”
“No. I don’t care. I love you, I love you so much—whatever it is—it doesn’t matter—” She felt lightheaded, on the verge of hysteria. “I love you, I love you, I love—”
“Shut up,” he said fondly.
He stroked her chin. She went still under his soothing touch, and sighed, closing her eyes. He let out a huff of laughter against her face.
“You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? Look at me.”
She opened her eyes. He bared his teeth in a smile.
“Crazy bitch.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe she was crazy. She found herself nodding in agreement. Suddenly, the smile dropped. He shoved her to the floor. Before she could get up, he straddled her waist and pinned her wrists against the carpet.
“Don’t think this means that I trust you now.”
She looked up at him with stinging eyes, biting her lip to hold in a sob. He shook his head and gave her a woeful look.
“Oh, honey, it’s not that I don’t want to. But I just can’t. If you were in my position, you would understand.”
He easily gathered her thin wrists up in one hand. The other, he put around her throat.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with you for a long while, Lo, and I just can’t seem to make up my mind. It’s hard, having to keep track of such an unstable variable.”
“I’m not unstable. With you—I’m steady.”
He laughed. She pressed her head upward, desperately, as much as she could with his grip on her.
“Fuck me. Please. You can do it any way you want. Let me prove myself to you.”
“Oh, please. You know that isn’t going to work.”
His hand tightened around her neck. She wheezed.
“It’s not like that. I really do want you. I swear.”
“Why?”
“You’re all I have,” she whispered. “No one looks at me like you do. Even now...even now you can see me. I know you do.”
His lips curled up in a mocking smile.
“And you think that you can finally see me, too.” He tsked. “I always knew you were a romantic, but this is bad...”
“Fuck me. Then you’ll see how bad I want you.”
His eyes roamed her body, considering.
“You’ll really let me do anything to you? Anything at all?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t scream? You won’t beg me to stop?”
“No. I promise.”
“Well.” He slipped two fingers under the waistband of her skirt; she felt a spike of pain as he pressed his nails into the sensitive skin above her clit; she writhed, but didn’t make a sound. “We’ll have to put that to the test, won’t we?”
*
Freddy let her sleep in the next morning. She woke to find the house silent and empty.
She turned on the shower and sat on the tile floor. The water thudded on the marred skin of her shoulders. The ache was delicious; her head was blissfully empty.
A new cut ran up her side, from hip to breast. She traced her fingers along it.
“Good girl,” she murmured; those had been Freddy’s last words to her, as he carried her to bed and laid her down. There was probably blood on the sheets. They would have to be more careful about that, next time.
She felt pleased, she realized—pleased to know that there was something between her and Freddy now that neither of them could ever take back. A connection deeper than he would have with anyone else.
She didn’t know what to do with the feeling, other than wish that she didn’t have it.
*
The day after that, she got up early. She woke Freddy and Kathy with the smell of pancakes and bacon.
While Freddy read the morning paper, she poured him a second cup of coffee. She saw today’s headline over his shoulder: “Body Count Continues To Rise: 10th Child Found Outside Abandoned Auto Parts Store.”
The bruise on her hip throbbed. Her arm stayed steady.
She didn’t spill a drop.
*
Kathy had grown close to Daniel over the past month. Like all young children, her attachments were subject to whim, ebbing and flowing faster than Loretta could keep track of. One day, a girl named Tiffany was her best friend; the next, she had climbed in the car when Loretta picked her up from school and immediately announced that Daniel was her best friend now. Since that day, Daniel had come over to play with her almost every afternoon.
At this point, Kendra was almost as paranoid about letting her child out of the house as Loretta had been—but she trusted her.
“I don’t know about some of the other parents,” she had once said, sitting by Loretta in their backyard, watching the two kids chase each other through the flowerbeds. “But you—I know you’ll never let Danny out of your sight. I never worry about him when he’s here.”
Loretta had let out a weak little laugh and taken a long sip of her lemonade, looking anywhere but at her friend’s face.
She knew she didn’t deserve to hear that. But sometimes, when she watched the two of them run carefree around her yard, she had a strange thought:
The safest place to hide from the lion isn’t the jungle; it’s his own den.
*
That was a nice thought. But it was wrong.
Although Freddy wasn’t home to see their afterschool playdates, Daniel’s increasingly frequent presence in his domain didn’t go unnoticed. One Sunday he came running in the front door behind Kathy, still in his church clothes, grass stains on the knees of his white pants. Freddy watched with a faintly amused expression as they dashed past him through the living room. Once they had disappeared into Kathy’s room, he turned to Loretta with a raised eyebrow.
“That kid’s been hanging around here a lot lately.”
“Yeah. They’re joined at the hip now, it seems.”
“I don’t know that I like her hanging around boys so much.”
Loretta smiled.
“We’ve got a while before she gets interested in boys like that. You don’t need to play the overprotective father just yet.”
“Hm. I suppose so.”
Loretta didn’t think much of that exchange at the time, but gradually she became aware that Freddy didn’t treat Daniel like any of Kathy’s other friends. He appeared to actually take an interest in him; he asked about his favorite kinds of sweets, and his favorite places to play, and what his mommy and daddy liked to do on weekends, when they left him home alone with only the neighbor’s teen daughter to watch over him. She stood by and did nothing as Freddy coaxed him into admitting that sometimes she left him for just a little while, to go grab a snack from the gas station around the corner.
One evening the boy was in their living room, sprawled out on the floor next to Kathy, oblivious to all else as he concentrated on filling in a coloring book picture of a horse with purple crayon. Loretta was rolling out dough for a peach cobbler, Freddy was cleaning knives over the sink. He was distracted; every once in a while he’d look up from his work and stare at Danny, eyes heavy-lidded and thoughtful.
The third time she caught him doing it she cleared her throat and, not looking at him as she poured sugar into a bowl of sliced peaches, said:
“It looks like the killer hasn’t managed to grab anyone in a while.”
Freddy paused and glanced up at her. He looked surprised, for just a second, and then his expression smoothed over and he went back to drying off a knife.
“That certainly seems to be what the papers are implying,” he said mildly.
She waited for him to continue. There was a cartoon bang! blam! from the TV in the next room, followed by canned laughter. No more response seemed to be forthcoming.
“I suppose,” she said at last, “That he’s finding it a bit hard to get on with things, given how paranoid everyone’s gotten.”
“Yes. I imagine so.”
He looked at Daniel, then at Kathy, then back at her.
“I’d hate to think what a man like that might do, if he got desperate.”
Loretta’s throat tightened.
“Me too,” she whispered.
*
Freddy and Loretta had gotten married in the tiny Baptist church her mother used to attend. She had never been much of a believer, but it had felt important to do it the right way. Not many people had shown up—just a couple of Freddy’s ruffian friends and an aunt from her mother’s side who had always been concerned about her in a distant, useless sort of way.
The two of them had always been alone, it seemed, until Kathy came along and people began to trust that Freddy had really left his rough days behind him and settled down. There was a part of her, she was coming to realize, that missed their loneliness. That might want to help it come back, even.
She desperately needed someone to dissuade her.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. The church was as empty as it had been back then. She sat in the dark in one of the front pews and, feeling a little foolish, clasped her hands together and bowed her head.
She found exactly what she had been hoping to not find.
In Sunday school, they had told her that there was a piece of God in everyone, nestled inside your heart. Somewhere along the way, after she’d received one beating too many, that piece had fallen right out of her. Until today, she had thought that that place was still empty.
But there he was, curled up snug and warm: Freddy, right where God was supposed to be. She didn’t know how long he’d been there, but the more she looked, the more she was sure. She felt for him all those things that you were supposed to feel for the Old Testament God: Fear and love in equal measure, inextricable, two sides of the same coin.
The weight of her certainty made her head spin. She stood up, trembling, head still bowed, fists clenched at her sides.
It was always going to end here. She had made her choice long ago, the instant she had decided to pull away from the police station. If there was ever a point at which her heart could have changed, it would have been then.
The damage had been done. Her course was set. There was nothing left to do now but live through the aftermath.
*
That evening she watched Freddy smilingly lead Danny to the door and make small talk with his mother. When he shut the door he found her leaning against the sofa, arms hugging her middle, pale and sweating.
He put his hands in his pockets and gave her a long-suffering look.
“Something on your mind?”
She swallowed the bile building in her throat.
“You know, Danny keeps asking about your job. He’s such a curious little guy.” That was a lie. He wasn’t curious at all. That was why he was always following Kathy around like a little lamb. That was why she knew this was going to work. “I was thinking...what if I took him to visit the place? After everyone was gone for the day, I mean. On Friday. So you could show him around yourself. I’m sure he would like that.”
Freddy gave her a slow, reptilian smile that made the ancient, animal part of her brain scream at her to run.
“I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
He spent the rest of the evening in the basement. When she paused at the top of the stairs, she could hear him whistling.
Snips and snails
And puppy-dog tails,
That's what little boys are made of.
*
A part of her hoped that by some merciful twist of fate, Daniel would decide to stay home that day—but there he was at five o’clock on Friday afternoon, ringing her doorbell. He had a grubby soccer ball under one arm. He peered around Loretta’s legs, looking for Kathy, who always came to greet him. When he didn’t see her, he scrunched up his nose in confusion.
“Kathy’s at another friend’s house today,” she explained.
His face fell.
“But she promised we could play ball this afternoon.”
“I know.” She’d purposefully sent Kathy somewhere else, so she didn’t have to bear witness to this. Suddenly, it seemed very important that his last memory of Kathy was a good one. She knelt down and put a hand on his shoulder. “She really wanted to play with you. But then she remembered that she’d made the same promise to that other friend first. She said to tell you that she’s really sorry, and that she’ll make it up to you tomorrow. For sure, this time.”
“Okay,” he mumbled.
He looked down and scuffed his shoe against the peeling corner of the welcome mat. He’d always been like that; never one to kick up a fuss and scream and cry. When he was upset, he would just go to his room and sulk. Kendra had often complained about the things she had to do to coax him back outside again.
A vision of him all grown up came upon her, clear and complete: he would be bookish and shy; other kids would mistake his reticence for arrogance; he would be bullied for a short time before they quickly grew bored of him. What she saw as dull-wittedness in his child self would evolve into stubbornness, a patience that could endure any amount of torment. He would move out of Springwood as soon as he was able, and go to college, and forget about all of them completely.
Her hands tightened around his shoulders and, before she could stop herself, she pulled him into a hug. When she let him go, his expression was baffled. She gave him a shaky smile.
“That was from Kathy, too. Come on inside. I’ve got some pie I think you would like.”
He hesitated for a moment, perhaps instinctively sensing that something about her was off, but since it was an adult speaking to him, he followed her inside without another question.
While he ate his pie and ice cream, she sat across from him and drank coffee. She didn’t have the knack for speaking to children that Freddy had, but Daniel didn’t seem to mind. By the time that he was done eating, his earlier reluctance was forgotten, and he followed her to the kitchen, seeming willing to go along with whatever she had in mind.
“Your mom called a little while ago, before you showed up,” she said as she rinsed out his bowl. “She wants me to drop you off at your grandma’s. Your babysitter is busy today.”
“Okay.”
She turned away from him to dry her hands on a dishcloth and let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. This was too easy.
“All right. Let’s not keep her waiting, then.”
*
The coffee had been a mistake.
She kept glancing back at him in the rearview mirror, catching his eye, glancing away again. All the lights were yellow. She blew through an intersection just as one turned red, and spent the next three blocks terrified that a police car would appear out of nowhere and pull her over. The silence in the car was unbearable, but she feared that the instant she opened her mouth, she would start crying.
And then they were at the power plant. Although the car ride had seemed interminable, it still felt like there were there too soon.
She pulled into a parking space. It was five-thirty. All the day workers were gone, and the lot was almost empty.
She wiped her sweaty palms on her thighs and turned to face Daniel. At some point during the back half of the drive he had nodded off. She gave his knee a soft pat and he blinked awake, looking crusty-eyed and disoriented.
“Are we there yet?”
“Almost. I just need to get out and do something real quick.”
She went around to his side of the car and helped him out. He kept hold of her hand as he stared up at the massive, foreboding old building.
“It’ll only take a minute,” she reassured him. “Come on.”
Her heart was in her throat as she led him to the back entrance. This part of the building was unused; Freddy had taken her there to neck once, when she was a teenager—it only made sense that this was where he would be waiting.
A shadow detached itself from the wall by the dumpster. Freddy flicked the cigarette he was smoking to the dirty ground and snuffed it out with his shoe.
“Hey, doll,” he said to her. Then, to Daniel, with a Cheshire grin: “Hey, kid.”
Daniel’s eyes widened; he tried to run; Freddy snatched the back of his shirt and banged his head against the wall, stunning him. He deposited the limp bundle between them.
“You really did it,” he said.
There was a glimmer in his eyes that she had never seen before. A sort of understanding; maybe even a mote of respect.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “I did.”
He reached out and cupped her face with both hands.
“I knew I was right to pick you,” he said, and kissed her.
At their feet, Daniel whimpered.
Loretta didn’t hear a thing.
*
The world kept spinning. Summer changed to fall. Loretta took Kathy’s white fleece coat down from the top of the closet, the one that Freddy always said made her look like a lamb. When he came home from work he would scoop her up and spin her around, singing “Freddy had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb,” and Kathy would shriek with outrage and delight until he agreed to put her back down.
But that would happen later. Now, they were heading to the park to meet Kathy’s new friend, Cynthia.
The other parents watched their children like hawks. Cynthia’s mother hovered near her at all times, ready to carry her off at the first sign of danger. She needn’t have worried, though. Freddy had agreed to leave Cynthia alone. She was a waifish, sickly child; there would be little pleasure in killing her.
Another girl caught her eye, though. Red hair in twin braids, freckles all over her, a blue gingham dress pulled straight from The Wizard of Oz. Maybe she would tell Freddy about her. Or maybe not. She didn’t feel like striking up a conversation and learning her name. She was enjoying herself too much, just sitting here in the clear morning light.
A gust of chill wind blew through her sweater. She watched the fallen leaves dance across the ground. A brilliant one landed at her feet; a huge, red maple, the color of the setting sun. Then, just as suddenly, the wind carried it away from her.
Loretta leaned back against the park bench and closed her eyes.
Maybe they would catch him one day. Or maybe he would decide to kill her first. Either way, the future was out of her hands.
She was free.
“Mom!”
Kathy stood at the top of the tallest slide, waving.
Loretta’s returning smile was brilliant.
It was going to be another beautiful day.