Page 46 of Karma
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he shouts. “Did you hit your head?”
Grabbing the tire iron, she does her best to ignore the pain in her face. She may not have a way out, but she has a weapon now. If this helps her get out of this whole thing alive, she’ll forgive it for breaking her nose.
Great, now I’m planning to forgive an inanimate object. Crazy really must run in the family.
“He wanted to lock me up in a mental facility. Can you believe that? I was only four, and he wanted to toss me in, lock me up, and throw away the fucking key.”
Yeah, it makes perfect sense to me. I actually think he could’ve fought a little harder to make it happen.
“I’ve seen those places. The asylums. They want to change the name because asylum has such a bad connotation, but the truth is still the truth. It’s exactly what they are, and I fucking hate his guts for even thinking of putting me in one.”
Bro, you need it. Seriously.
“All those other women before you were just test rats. I wanted to start with women who were just available, but there was no excitement there. If they didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes, it just didn’t do it for me. But we have Nina to thank for bringing us together. And she helped me perfect my plan for you.”
I take back everything I’ve ever said about Zane. I’ll take him and his terror over this. At least when he was going to kill me, it was going to be over pretty quickly. Nothing dragged out like this freak.
“We’re going back to where it started for me. Let me tell you a little story.”
Good God, he really likes to hear himself talk, doesn’t he?
“I was around six, I think, when I found Dad after he left Mom and me. Mom was devastated when he washed my hands of me, and I just couldn’t understand why he stopped coming around. It bothered me for over a year, and that’s when I tracked him down. Hitchhiked to his new house, and I saw my little brother.”
This part of the story makes her pity him a bit. A small child hitchhiking to his father’s house because he didn’t understand why he wasn’t around anymore tugs at her heartstrings against her will.
Did VP even tell him goodbye?
“I went back years later, and Zane was around seven, I think. It was the first time he saw me, and I realized he wasn’t running around playing. He was crying. He told me his mom was dying, and that’s when I saw my opportunity.”
Opportunity? To know Zane?
“I waited over a year to see how her treatment plan turned out, and she was getting better. Margaret wasn’t like our moms. She was dark-haired. I don’t know what color her eyes were, though. By the time I dug up her grave to steal her wedding ring, they were gone. I never researched whether they remove eyes when they prep the body for burial, or if it’s just one of the first parts to deteriorate. Her eyelids were glued shut, though, so maybe they were still in there.”
Jesus, you dug up a body, which is creepy enough, but then wanted to look at her eyeballs? What the fuck is wrong with you?
“Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. The funny thing is, the treatments worked. I’d go out to spy every couple of weeks, and Zane gave me updates. It always amazed me how much we looked alike considering how polar opposites our mothers were. Clearly, we got more of his genes. Unlike you. Which is good because our father would make an ugly woman.”
Where the hell is this going?
“Getting better wasn’t allowed. She didn’t get to live happily ever after with Nash. He didn’t get to have a happy ending. That’s when I swapped her pills out for poison. It was too easy. And everyone just assumed the medication wasn’t working, and the cancer killed her. Even the doctors looked no further.”
Hold up. Did he just say he killed Zane’s mom? Not the cancer?
“No one had a reason to question it. It just looked to everyone like her body was quitting on her, and it probably was when I took the medicine away. I guess it’s a toss-up which killed her. The cancer could have been what got her, I suppose, because she wasn’t taking the medication.”
Oh my God. His own mother wasn’t his first victim. Zane’s mom was, and Phillip wasn’t even a teenager yet. So what’s the real body count?
“I realized he’d been sleeping around with your mom before his wife even kicked the bucket, and that was when it hit me. He’d never feel the pain of a woman dying. Not one who gave him sons, anyway. He just moves on and starts a new family. Then you came along, and he was much more committed to Emma. Maybe his biological clock told him to stop fucking around like he did with the prior two women. Because you may not know it, but your mom wasn’t the first woman he fucked while married.”
If Phillip hadn’t killed Margaret, and her treatments worked, I probably wouldn’t be here. I don’t really know how to feel about this.
“Did you know I tried to kill you once before? I almost succeeded, too.”
Sounds like something you’d do.
“That firefight with the Devil’s Advocates was the perfect cover, but of course, as you do, you moved just in time. I would’ve killed you after that, but Nash shipped you off with your mom to Arizona. He was upset after the two of you left, so I was content. But then you had to come back. And then so did she.”
Well, that’s reassuring. He’s failed once. This should go swimmingly for me now.
