The Keepsake

She had rented a house there, and it stood isolated on a large and weedy lot. It was infested with mice and she heard them at night as she lay in bed, listening for sounds far more ominous than rodent invaders. She didn’t relish returning there tonight, but she drove on anyway, and in her rearview mirror, she glimpsed a car’s headlights tailing her.

The lights followed her all the way to Milton.

When she let herself in the front door, she smelled the old-house smells of dust and tired carpets, with maybe a few mold spores thrown in. She’d read that mold could make you sick. It could cripple your lungs, turn your immune system against you, and eventually kill you. The last tenant who’d lived here was an eighty-seven-year-old woman who’d died in this house; maybe the mold had finished her off. She felt herself inhaling lethal specks of it as she walked through the house, checking, as she always did, that the windows were closed and locked, and she found some irony in the thought that her obsession with security sealed her inside with air that could poison her.

In the kitchen, she brewed strong coffee, the real stuff. What she truly wanted was a stiff vodka and tonic, and her craving was as ferocious as a junkie’s. Just a sip of alcohol would calm her nerves and dispel the sense of dread that seemed to pervade every corner of the house. But tonight was not the night for vodka, so she resisted the urge. Instead she drank the cup of coffee, just enough to sharpen her mind yet not make her jittery. She needed her nerves to be steady.

Before going to bed, she took a last peek out the front window. The street was quiet, so perhaps tonight was not the night. Perhaps she had been granted another reprieve. If so, it was only a temporary one, much like waking up every morning in a death row cell, not knowing if today was the day they would walk you to the scaffold. The uncertainty of one’s appointment with doom is what can drive a condemned prisoner insane.

She headed down the hallway to her bedroom, feeling like that condemned prisoner, wondering if tonight would pass as uneventfully as had the last ten nights before. Hoping that it would, yet knowing it would only postpone the inevitable. At the end of the hall, she looked back toward the foyer, one last glance before she switched off the hallway light. As the foyer fell into shadow, she glimpsed the flicker of passing headlights through the front window. The car moved slowly, as though the driver was taking a long, close look at the house.

She knew it, then. She felt the chill, like ice crystallizing in her veins. It will happen tonight.

Suddenly she was shaking. She did not feel ready for this, and she was tempted to once again turn to the strategy that had kept her alive for nearly three decades: ru

She walked into the darkness of the bedroom, where the curtains were far too filmy. If she turned on the lights, her silhouette could easily be seen in the window. If she couldn’t be seen, she couldn’t be hunted, so she kept the room dark. There was only a flimsy button-lock on the knob, and an intruder could get past it within a minute, but that was one precious minute she might need. She locked the door and turned toward the bed.

And heard a soft exhalation from the shadows.

The sound made every hair stand up on the back of her neck. While she’d been busy locking the doors, checking every window, the invader was already waiting inside her house. Inside her bedroom.

He said, calmly: “Move away from the door.”

She could barely make out his faceless form in the corner, sitting in a chair. She didn’t have to see it; she knew he was holding a gun. She obeyed.

“You’ve made a big mistake,” she said.

“You’re the one who made the mistake, Medea. Twelve years ago. How did it feel to shoot a defenseless boy in the back of the head? A boy who never hurt you.”

“He was in my house. He was in my daughter’s bedroom.”

“He didn’t hurt her.”

“He could have.”

“Bradley wasn’t violent. He was harmless.”

“The company he kept wasn’t harmless, and you knew it. You knew what kind of creature Jimmy was.”

“Jimmy didn’t kill my son. You did. At least Jimmy had the decency to call me the night it happened. To tell me Bradley was gone.”

“You call that decency? Jimmy used you, Kimball.”

“And I used him.”

“To find my daughter?”

“No, I found your daughter. I paid Simon to hire her, to keep her where I could watch her.”

“And you didn’t care what Jimmy did to her?” Despite the gun pointed at her, Medea’s voice rose in anger. “She’s your own granddaughter!”

“He would have let her live. That was my agreement with Jimmy. He was supposed to let her go after this was over. I only wanted you to die.”

“This doesn’t bring back Bradley.”

“But it closes the circle. You killed my son. You have to pay for it. I’m only sorry Jimmy couldn’t take care of it for me.”

“The police will know it’s you. You’d give up everything, just to have your revenge?”

“Yes. Because no one fucks with my family.”

“Your wife’s the one who’ll suffer.”

“My wife is dead,” he said, and his words dropped like cold stones in the darkness. “Cynthia died last night. All she wanted, all she dreamed about, was seeing our son again. You stole that possibility from her. Thank God she never knew the truth. That’s the one thing I could protect her from-knowing that our boy was murdered.” He took a deep breath and exhaled with calm inevitability. “Now this is all that’s left for me to do.”

Through the darkness she saw his arm come up, and she knew that his gun was pointed at her. She knew that what happened next was always meant to happen, that it was set in motion on a night twelve years before, the night Bradley died. This gunshot tonight would be only an echo of that earlier one, an echo twelve years delayed. It was a bizarre form of justice all its own, and she understood why this was about to happen, because she was a mother, and if anyone hurt her child she, too, would demand her revenge.

She did not blame Kimball Rose for what he was about to do.

She felt strangely prepared as he pulled the trigger, and the bullet slammed into her chest.

THIRTY-EIGHT

This is where it could all end, I think, as I lie on the floor. My chest is on fire with pain, and I am scarcely able to breathe. All Kimball has to do is take a few steps closer to me and fire the killing shot into my head. But footsteps are pounding up the hallway, and I know he hears them, too. He is trapped in this bedroom, with the woman he has just shot. They are kicking at the door-the door I so stupidly locked, thinking it would keep me safe from an intruder. I never anticipated that it would be my rescuers I was locking out, the police who have followed me home, who have watched over me this past week, waiting for this attack. We have all made mistakes tonight, perhaps fatal mistakes. We did not expect Kimball to slip into my house while I was gone; we did not expect he would already be waiting for me in my bedroom.

But Kimball has made the biggest mistake of all.

Wood splinters and the door crashes open. The police are like charging bulls. They rush in with shouts and pounding feet and the sharp smells of sweat and aggression. It sounds like a rampaging multitude, but then someone flicks on the light switch and I see that there are only four male detectives, their weapons all trained on Kimball.

“Drop it!” one of the detectives orders.

Kimball looks too stu