After Midnight, page 19
She looks like me.
The thought sprang into her head unbidden and she shuddered. She was well aware of the link between her own physical deterioration and the family tragedies she had endured, and it broke her heart to see the same thing happening to Caitlyn.
I’m going to fix this, she thought. She wanted to scream it to her beautiful child but didn’t. Instead, she rushed forward, keeping her gaze focused on Caitlyn and Caitlyn only. She wrapped her arms around her daughter in a bear hug and squeezed her eyes shut, ignoring as best she could the throng of travelers bumping and jostling them as they passed.
Cait’s chest heaved and Virginia realized she was sobbing. “We’ll get through this,” she whispered, wishing she could explain her plan but knowing that for it to have any chance of success—even as minimal as that chance undoubtedly was—her only advantage over Milo was surprise, and she could lose that in a heartbeat.
Caitlyn shook her head in silent rejection of Virginia’s promise. “What have you done?” she said, the words quiet and hollow.
Virginia didn’t understand the question but didn’t care right now; she wanted the hug to go on forever. At last she gave one final squeeze and whispered, “It’s good to see you again.” She felt silly saying it because they had only been apart for a day, but she was only now beginning to understand how precious time was.
After what felt simultaneously like hours and the blink of an eye, Virginia released her grip, stepping back and smiling at Cait. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and began walking briskly toward the terminal’s exit.
* * *
Milo had been caught off guard when Mommy Dearest exited the plane and almost immediately spotted The Evil Bitch in the crowd. He didn’t know why, he should have been expecting exactly that since it was what they had agreed to when they spoke on the phone.
But he was feeling logy, tired, like he badly needed a nap. He recalled the extreme exhaustion that had followed on the heels of his previous trips into Caitlyn Connelly’s head and wondered whether this was the same thing. He had assumed that the elimination of his physical being would eliminate physical sensations like exhaustion, but perhaps that was not the case. Perhaps even though his body was gone and he was now fully an ethereal being, he was still subject to some of the old physical constraints.
Regardless, it was a subject for consideration at another time, because no sooner had Virginia Ayers locked eyes with Caitlyn Connelly than the old familiar rage began to bubble. No matter how hard he tried to control it, no matter how often he told himself to be rational, to think things through, he simply could not contain his hatred for his twin, who had been so fortunate in the genetic lottery at his expense.
His exhaustion receded and he began to contemplate all the deliciously depraved things he would like to do to pretty little Caitlyn Connelly. Should he end her now? Should he get this depressing chapter of his story over with so he could finally move on to bigger and better things?
Mommy Dearest embraced The Evil Bitch and Milo felt sick to his stomach. The fact that he no longer had a stomach to be sick to was irrelevant. These two stupid bitches were the cause of all his pain, and he had been saddled with them—or at least with one of them—irrevocably.
No wonder he was bitter. No wonder he was angry. No wonder he wanted to cut and slice and rend and stab, until Caitlyn Connelly was nothing more than a piece of bloody meat lying dead on the floor of the terminal building, no more recognizable as human than a pile of rotting meat.
This was it.
He would kill her now. He couldn’t wait any longer.
It was an easy decision, really, and he relished the opportunity to end things.
This would be child’s play. Even though they were inside an airline terminal where, ostensibly, weapons were banned, Milo knew that would make little difference. He wouldn’t need a conventional weapon like a gun or a knife. He could make almost anything into a lethal killing device.
And as much as he would have loved the opportunity to carve up sis one final time, for old time’s sake if nothing else, he had grown so sick of her and so tired of her Goody-Two-Shoes act that simply ridding the world of her would be satisfying enough.
He gazed through the tired old eyes of Virginia Ayers, looking for someone to push a suggestion into. Someone to bend to his will.
But the stupid old biddy wasn’t looking around the terminal. In fact, she wasn’t looking at all! Her goddamned eyes were closed as she hugged The Evil Bitch tight and whispered sweet nothings into her ear.
The fury that he had worked so hard to contain built nearly to the exploding point as Milo waited for Mommy Dearest to open her eyes. All he would need would be a few seconds, for Virginia to look around the crowded terminal, and he knew he’d be able to find something—and someone—he could use as a weapon. A blunt instrument.
But she had to open her eyes.
Finally she did and Milo breathed a little easier, although of course he wasn’t really breathing at all. Virginia stepped back and looked into The Evil Bitch’s face. Tears were running down Connelly’s cheeks, smearing mascara and making her look like a fucking circus clown, and Milo would have laughed out loud if he could have.
The old biddy stared at Connelly for what felt like forever and then at last she shifted her gaze elsewhere as she began walking toward the exit. Milo watched expectantly through her eyes, ready to pounce at the first opportunity.
But then the anger began to swell again, building and building and there was nothing he could do about it, no way he could release it. Virginia wasn’t looking at anyone! She stared resolutely at the floor as she walked, locking eyes with no one, not even looking at where she was going.
She bumped into people and murmured apologies but stared at the floor. She nearly tripped over a seeing-eye dog, stumbling and almost falling flat on her face, jostling the blind guy but still refusing to look up. The blind guy swore and Virginia apologized again but kept going, gaze still focused straight down at the tops of her stumbling feet.
Out of the corner of her eye, Milo saw her grab Connelly’s hand. She said, “Lead me to the car,” and when The Evil Bitch asked what was wrong, she said nothing.
Connelly stopped for a moment and the old biddy stopped right behind her. Finally Virginia said, “I’ll explain everything later, but for now, please, Caitlyn, just get us to your car.”
The tension was plain in her voice and for a second nothing happened. Then they started moving again and Milo knew the dried-up old crone was fucking with him. She knew he was inside her head, probably had known it ever since the guard allowed her to escape custody at Bridgewater State Hospital. She had figured out somehow that he could make people do things against their will, and was intentionally stymying him, knowing he would wanted nothing more than to waste Caitlyn Connelly.
Rather than increasing his already simmering fury, this insight actually calmed Milo, if only slightly. If Mommy Dearest wanted to play games, he would play games. She had no fucking idea who she was playing with. Milo Cain had been strategizing and manipulating people in deadly mind games virtually his entire life. He had been living on the street, fucking with innocent victims while she was eating TV dinners and watching Jeopardy! every night, reading romance novels and pretending to have a life.
You want to play, bitch? Bring it on.
She could stare at the floor all she wanted, it wouldn’t do a goddamned bit of good. She could stumble into people and be dragged around by The Evil Bitch until hell froze over and it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference.
Because eventually she would have to look into the face of someone who wasn’t Caitlyn Connelly. Eventually she would interact with someone else—a pizza delivery guy, or a bus driver, or a police officer, or any other fucking person on the planet.
And when she did, Milo would be there. And he would take over then and do what he did best. He would be with Virginia Ayers until her fucking heart stopped, and sometime before then—probably well before then, probably sometime today, in fact—she would give him the opening he needed.
And it would only take a moment.
40
In addition to being caught in the grip of a depression unlike any she had ever experienced, Cait was now confused and afraid. She was in the habit of listening to Tampa’s News Radio WFLA in her car, and on the way to the airport the scheduled broadcast had been interrupted by a special breaking-news report: notorious serial torturer/murderer Milo Cain had been found dead in his bed at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts.
Authorities weren’t releasing any details, but as far as Cait was concerned, they didn’t have to. Suddenly, her mother’s abrupt decision to stay in Boston one extra night made perfect, awful sense.
Virginia hadn’t been going to visit an old neighborhood friend at all. She had been driven to the end of her rope by Milo’s brand of chaos and destruction, exactly as Cait had. But instead of hiding away in her apartment, lost and hopeless, Virginia Ayers had decided to put an end to the madness once and for all.
Suddenly, everything was clear. The extra overnight stay. The obfuscation when Cait had asked her about her plans. The flight into Sarasota instead of Tampa. She had known the authorities would be looking for her almost the minute she left the hospital/prison, so she had crossed them up by flying somewhere other than Tampa to come home.
Cait’s head spun. Virginia had gone to the Bridgewater facility one last time and had killed Milo in his bed.
She had gone against her own moral code and risked her own freedom to save Cait’s life.
Now, Cait would lose not just Kevin, but her mother as well, just a few short months after finally finding her and establishing a relationship. To know her birth mother was all she had ever wanted and now she was going to lose the connection she had given up so much to forge. She wanted to scream, to cry, to grab her mother by the arms and shake her and ask what the hell she thought she was doing.
But she couldn’t do any of that, at least not now and not here.
And Virginia was acting very strangely. After that first intense gaze into Cait’s eyes, her mother had directed her gaze downward, like a shy child, and had refused to look up, not even to see where she was going. When she grabbed Cait’s hand and instructed her to lead the way to the car, Cait had complied mostly out of utter shock.
The last few minutes had been surreal, and that was saying something given the nightmare that Cait’s life had become. They walked through the concrete parking garage, their footsteps echoing loudly in the relative cool of the multi-story structure, moving slowly as Cait was forced to lead Virginia by the hand.
They passed other travelers and Virginia steadfastly refused to look at them.
They walked up a set of concrete stairs and while Virginia released her grip on Cait’s hand to clutch the iron rail as they climbed, she still stared resolutely downward and then grabbed Cait’s hand like a drowning woman reaching for a life preserver the moment they reached the top.
Cait asked again what was the matter and again she refused to answer. “Not now,” she said.
Finally they reached Cait’s car and she pressed the remote to unlock the vehicle. She guided Virginia to the passenger door and helped her inside, then hefted her mother’s suitcase and placed it in the backseat.
When she had slid into the driver’s seat, Cait looked over at her mother to see that she had lifted her head and was looking back at her with red-rimmed, watery eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
* * *
Cait was unfamiliar with the area immediately surrounding Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport, so once they had exited the parking garage, she forced herself to hold off asking any questions. Instead, she concentrated on navigating to I-75.
Virginia sat silently next to her. She had closed her mouth and said nothing more after her tearful apology, and Cait noticed immediately that her mother continued the strange behavior she had exhibited at the airport. She looked either directly at Cait or kept her gaze dashboard-level or below. Never did she lift her eyes to look out the windshield or the side window.
Once they had turned north toward Tampa and merged with traffic, Cait said softly, “You killed Milo, didn’t you?”
Her mother opened her mouth as if to speak. Then she closed it.
She opened it again and breathed in deeply. Closed it again.
When she looked over at Cait, her eyes indicated a hopelessness more complete than any Cait had ever seen. They were haunted. Desolate. “I was trying to save you from this living hell I brought on you,” she said. “It was the only thing I could think of to do.”
The tears that Cait felt had become a permanent part of her reality now welled to the surface once again. “You didn’t bring anything on me. In fact, it was just the opposite. I brought all of this on myself, and on you as well. You knew what would happen if I insisted on pursuing my dream of learning my family history, tried to warn me, in fact. But I wouldn’t listen, and now I’ve destroyed the lives of the very people I wanted to love the most.”
Virginia began shaking her head halfway through Cait’s statement and didn’t stop until she had finished speaking. “No, honey, who in your circumstances would not have wanted to learn her history, to find out why she was given up when she was just a day old? It was my fault for not being stronger and refusing to call you back last summer when Milo was torturing me. A few more minutes and your plane would have been in the air, and maybe everything would have been different.”
“But Milo would have killed you.”
“Maybe that would have been for the best,” Virginia whispered.
The car fell silent for a moment and Cait said fiercely, “It would not have been for the best. Getting to know my mother has been worth every bit of heartache I’ve gone through, but I’ll regret forever what I brought on you and Kevin. But that’s water under the bridge, and all we can do is move forward from here. Milo’s gone now and he can’t hurt anyone ever again.”
“Listen, Caitlyn…”
“Let me finish. I mentioned moving forward, and if we’re going to do so, we have a lot to think about. The authorities either are looking for you now or will be soon, that much is obvious. You’re going to have to turn yourself in because you have no other reasonable option.”
“Please, Caitlyn, let me—”
“I have to say this, Mom. When I’ve said my piece, we can discuss everything, I promise, but right now I have to get this out. So here it is: I know you would never hurt a fly unless you felt you absolutely had no choice. I know you would never end the life of your own flesh and blood—even someone as intrinsically evil as Milo—unless you felt you absolutely had no choice.
“I know you did what you did to save me.
“I’ve been thinking about this nonstop, ever since hearing the radio report about Milo’s death on my way over here. I understand why you did what you did and I think other people will, too, at least to a certain degree. They’ll never understand Milo’s ability to push suggestions while in a coma, or to take up residence in my head, of course. But still, I believe strongly that we can get you out of this. I have plenty of contacts in the legal community. I know several of the best criminal-defense attorneys in the state of Florida, and I’m willing to pay whatever their fees might be to secure their representation for you.
“I can’t begin to imagine the pain you must be feeling, having no choice but to end your own child’s life, but we have to look at this objectively. You didn’t cold-bloodedly murder an innocent child, or even an innocent adult, for that matter. The man whose life you ended was one of the most feared and reviled people in modern American history, and not many—maybe not any—people are going to miss him.”
She looked at her mother and Virginia was staring back, tears running freely down her face. “I’m sorry, Mom, I don’t mean to be harsh. I know I’m talking about your son. He was my brother, too, but he was irreparably broken, both physically and emotionally. You know that better than anyone, probably. And his status as a serial murderer will play a part in any jury’s consideration of the charges you’ll face.
“When that fact is combined with your ill health, I believe there’s every reason to expect you will receive a minimal sentence. With a little luck and the right jury, you might even receive nothing harsher than probation.
“But the important thing to remember is we’re in this together, just as Kevin and I are going to be in it together, too, now that Milo can’t hurt us anymore. I’m going to support you as much as I can for as long as it takes. The three of us are a family and we’ll get through whatever comes next by sticking together.”
Virginia sniffled and opened Cait’s glove box. She removed a tissue and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She sniffled again and said, “Thank you so much for your understanding, honey, I don’t think there’s any way I can express how much it means to me. But there’s something you don’t know, and it changes everything.”
Cait looked across the front of the vehicle at her mother, puzzled. “What don’t I know that could possibly change everything?”
“Milo’s still here.”
41
Milo thought there must have been some occurrence in his life that had been worse than being stuck inside a car with the two people he hated more than everyone else in the world put together, but at the moment he couldn’t imagine what that might have been.
The closest he could come was when The Evil Bitch had shot him in the face at point-blank range. That had been a black day, to say the least. But everything had worked out better than he could possibly have hoped at the time. Not only had he survived the vicious attack, he had come through it even stronger and more powerful than before. Sure, his physical being had been damaged beyond repair, but the trade-off, and what he had gained, had been well worth it.
