The dolly in the yellow dress wasn’t reported missing for a fortnight, by which time The Mechanic killed three more women, while Samantha watched. He didn’t bring the T-Bird again. He never brought the same car to the woodland twice; he always borrowed his client’s cars. Samantha tried to imagine him picking up one of his women in her father’s car. It wouldn’t be the first time someone other than her mother had sat in the passenger seat. Samantha had known about her father’s affair with his client’s ex-wife since the beginning of the year. Her mother was in hospital recuperating from the flu at the time, and her father left the house once he thought Samantha was asleep, returning a short time later with Lorna Ryan in tow. They spent the next three hours telling each other to be quiet while they made the walls reverberate with their racket.
Her father’s advice rang in her ears as she watched The Mechanic ring the neck of a woman her mother would have classified as a tart. Cutting up Veronica Walsh’s doll and making her wet herself was a start, but she wanted to move on to bigger things, and to do that, she needed a reason. Now she had one.
Physically, Lorna Ryan was thirty going on eighteen, and she knew it. She was every bit as beautiful as Anne Stone, but it was a beauty of a dramatically different kind. Whereas the allure of a woman like Anne lay in the mystery, the unavailability she projected, with Lorna it was quite the opposite. Every swagger of her hips, every toss of her hair was an open invitation to appraise the goods on sale, and although Bill Stone’s taste usually ran to more expensive things, his spending habits of late were based more on need than want.
Having forged her parent’s names on more than one official school document, Samantha could do her father’s signature as well as he could. Her parents had never been particularly affectionate in front of her, and the ooey-gooey things they might have whispered in each other’s ears when they were young was just not worth contemplating, so when it came to penning a realistic love letter she drew inspiration from the way her father conducted himself in everyday life.
Dear Lorna,
I am going to Paris next week. I would like to see you before then. Meet me under the sign at Woodland Park at half past ten on Friday night. Please park your car somewhere else and walk there. Don’t ring me at the house or at work.
Yours,
Bill Stone
That the letter was a touch impersonal didn’t trouble Lorna. Bill didn’t love her, she had known that at the outset. The fantasies she entertained when they launched into this thing, she had long since abandoned. Her marriage had been over before it started, but Bill was as loopy for Anne as he was the day he met her, and it was his unrelenting commitment to her that made him irresistible. Lorna may have had more handsome lovers, certainly ones with greater skill, but there was nothing quite as intoxicating as a good man.
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