Chapter Thirty
Portland, Oregon, 2012–2015
“What a first year we’ve had together, huh?”
Henry waited for his wife to respond, but as usual, since she got injured, she sat mutely in her wheelchair staring blankly at nothing in particular, her mouth twisted into a pinched, angry circle. Henry sighed. Eventually she’d accept what had happened to her and be grateful for this opportunity to start fresh. And they were starting fresh. A year ago they had met in a dive bar in Bushwick (even though the place had great wings) and now they were one month short of their first year anniversary and sitting together in the backyard of their custom-built house in Portland, Oregon. Henry had even planted a garden. If things went well they’d be eating their own freshly grown tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, and strawberries later this summer.
It really had been a crazy, wild year, especially the last eight months. With the time that had passed, that bizarro night when Sheila got hurt seemed more like a bad dream than anything that really happened, especially now that they’d moved to the other side of the country. The months that followed that night, though, were difficult ones, as Henry was wracked with worry over his wife’s health and whether the police would discover that Sheila had been the Skull Cracker Killer. Oddly, he never worried that he’d been seen entering that man’s house or that the police would arrest him for killing that man and cutting off his head. He had somehow deleted that part of it from his own mind and had convinced himself that all he’d done that night was protect his wife from a man who had grievously injured her. The fact the man had hurt Sheila only during a desperate attempt to save his own life never occurred to Henry.
No question that Sheila had been grievously injured that night. The doctors told them the paralysis was permanent. The internal damage, especially to her heart, was worse than what the doctors had first feared. But they had also told them Sheila could still have a reasonably good quality of life. With dedicated physical therapy, she could strengthen her left side, and if she could control her stress and eat well there was no reason she couldn’t live into her seventies.
So all of that was a relief for Henry. But there was still the fear that the police would somehow connect Sheila to the dead man in Queens. After all, Sheila had picked him up in that bar. But it turned out she’d been careful not to be seen with him, just as she had been with Henry at the bar in Bushwick. If the police were ever suspicious that there was a connection between the man’s death and Sheila’s injuries, they never talked to her about it. Instead, they seemed to fully believe that she had been assaulted on a sidewalk blocks from Central Park West where Henry had left her.
The media had a field day with Sheila’s supposed assault, plastering her picture on TV and in the newspapers every day for a week, which scared the bejesus out of Henry. He was sure someone from the Queens bar would recognize her and come forward, but it didn’t happen. Instead, there was an outpouring of public outrage over the city not having fixed the broken streetlight that Henry had left Sheila under since there had been another assault at the same location a month earlier. When a lawyer approached them about suing the city, Henry wanted no part of it. First, the idea of it seemed ridiculous, second, he just wanted Sheila to get healthy enough so they could pack up and leave New York before the police wised up, and third, he had discovered after that night that Sheila was far wealthier than he could’ve imagined. They didn’t need the money, and they didn’t need the risk of staying in New York a day longer than they had to, but Sheila wanted to sue and he was afraid it might look funny to the lawyer if he tried arguing against it. He could barely believe it when the lawyer was able to arrange a three-point-four-million-dollar settlement with the city (after his fees) less than two months later.
* * *
Henry let out a grunt and, with some effort, maneuvered his bulk off the lounge chair, stretched, and worked a kink from his back. He gave Sheila a quick look and noted her angry, sullen expression, and how twisted and thin her body looked. She must’ve dropped twenty-five pounds since the accident, and probably weighed at most a hundred and twenty. That was too light for her. Now that they were in Portland, things would change. They were only half a mile from downtown. He’d roll her to different healthy restaurants each day. They were going to become part of the community and make friends and enjoy their life here. New York would become nothing more than a faint memory. Only a whisper that they would ignore. Given enough time, they’d both believe those murders never happened—both the man Henry had killed and the ones Sheila did. This was going to be the start of a new day.
Henry squinted and shielded his eyes as he glanced up at the sun.
Yes, sir, the start of a new day.
* * *
Henry had been gone no more than an hour, and he blinked several times not quite believing his eyes when he saw that Sheila was smiling at him. Well, half smiling since the right part of her mouth stayed weighted down and only the left side was curled upward. This was only the second time since her injuries that he had seen her smile; the first time being after their lawyer told them what the city was offering for a settlement. Henry was about to comment about how he knew that the kitten he had bought his wife two weeks earlier would cheer her up when he saw the animal’s small, fluffy body lying on the floor next to Sheila’s wheelchair. Given how the animal’s body was positioned and the way his little tongue lolled out of his mouth there was no question that the kitten was dead.
Henry grimly noted to himself how he’d been right about the kitten cheering up his wife, just that he’d been completely wrong about how the poor thing would do so.
“I see your left hand must be getting stronger,” he said.
The left side of Sheila’s lips twisted upward a tiny sliver more. She was obviously pleased with herself, but otherwise didn’t bother to respond.
Henry picked up the dead kitten and brought it outside to their backyard. He left the kitten’s body in the dead patch of weeds where he had tried planting tomatoes the first year they were there and retrieved a shovel from the shed. For two years he had tried growing vegetables with miserable results before finally accepting that instead of a green thumb, he was the kiss of death for plants. Worse than cyanide. He dug a hole for the kitten and buried the poor little thing.
Things hadn’t worked out in Portland as he had hoped. He enjoyed the downtown area when he was able to go there, and he had little trouble shooting the breeze with strangers and making casual friendships, but his wife had been resistant from day one. After six months of seeing her mood only deteriorate, he tried to get her to see a psychiatrist, but she flatly refused. He tried talking sense into her, explaining that her depression was worsening but that it didn’t have to be that way.
“If you send me to see someone, I’ll tell him,” she finally said in that painfully drawn-out manner that she had, as if it exhausted her to push out each individual word.
Henry felt the short hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “What would you say?” he half-heard himself ask her, knowing full well what she would say.
“About all of them I killed. About being the Skull Cracker Killer.”
“He wouldn’t believe you. Or she wouldn’t believe you since the psychiatrist I made you an appointment with is a woman.”
“She’ll believe me. I’ll tell her things to make her believe me.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Henry said. “Doctor-client privilege. She wouldn’t be able to tell anyone since you’re no longer a threat.”
“I’ll tell her about you. How you cut off Black’s head after catching the two of us alone. That you injured me and left me on that sidewalk. She’ll believe me, and there will be no doctor-client privilege to stop her from calling the police on you.”
Tim Black was the man Sheila had picked up in Queens that night and tried to make one of her Skull Cracker victims, except that she didn’t inject enough succinylcholine into him to fully paralyze him right away and he was able to fight back when she started to break apart his skull. Henry tried to decide whether she was bluffing or if she’d really tell a psychiatrist that lie. Or really half-lie. He wasn’t sure, but he ended up cancelling the appointment, and he didn’t bring up therapy or psychiatrists again, and over the next year and a half Sheila’s mood darkened further. It was almost as if her mood had grown as twisted as her body had become.
It was three months after the kitten incident that Henry caught his wife looking at him in a way that caught him off guard. There was no dark anger or bitter resentment pinching her mouth. Instead she looked more the way she did before her injuries. There was almost a serenity to her features. Almost as if she were looking at him with the same kind of fondness he used to catch glimpses of during their early days together.
“Why?” she asked.
This confused Henry as he didn’t know what she was asking. “Why what?”
“Why haven’t you killed me yet?”
That shocked him. “Why in the world would I do that?” he asked incredulously. “You’re my wife!”
“With my money you could get yourself another wife. Someone not crippled. Someone not insane.”
“You’re not insane,” Henry insisted. “You had a rough patch, that’s all. Besides, I married you for better or worse. We’ve had some of the worse, we’ll have some of the better again. I’m sure of it.”
Henry meant every word that he said. Actually, he understated it. Sheila wasn’t just his wife, but the woman he was meant to share his life with. He knew that unconditionally. There was a reason why she’d spared his life in Bushwick, just as there was a reason he’d followed her to that home in Queens so that he could save her. Things might not be perfect right now, but having her in his life left him with a certain and undeniable contentment, and the thought of losing her left him paralyzed with fear.
“You really do love me,” she said after a long while.
“Of course I do,” he said. “And I know you love me also. I read your diary entries.”
Her mouth pinched again into a tight, angry oval. “I told you not to read it,” she complained.
“Too bad. I read it anyway. I know how you feel about me.”
They stared at each other for several minutes, her mouth pinching into an angrier, smaller circle while Henry maintained a placid expression. He could’ve told his wife that he still had those pages from her diary, and that whenever he was feeling down he’d read those last entries she wrote about him, and it would give him hope for the future, but he kept that to himself.
Their staring contest ended as Sheila’s pinched mouth softened and relaxed as whatever resentment she’d been feeling bled out of her. Once again she was looking at him with something approaching tenderness.
“I felt a connection with you from the start,” she admitted. “I didn’t realize it then, but that’s why we walked out of that alley together. Not because I was trying to fool the FBI like I wrote in my diary.”
“I know.”
“And I do love you. Even if I don’t show it.”
“I know.”
“I can’t stand it, Henry. The pressure has gotten so bad. Like I’m being suffocated. It’s so bad I can’t even think. When I was killing them, it would make the pressure better, and I’d be able to breathe again. But now it’s just awful.”
Henry was tongue-tied, not knowing how to respond to that. A tear leaked from his eye and wormed its way down his cheek.
“I want to die, Henry. That’s how bad it is.”
“Don’t say that. Please.”
“If you love me like you say you do—like I believe you do, then you’ll help me.”
More tears leaked out of his eyes. Even Sheila’s eyes had become liquid. “I’m not killing you,” he said.
“Then kill them for me,” she said.
He blinked at her stupidly, not quite understanding what she was saying at first. Then he involuntarily shook his head.
“If you really love me, you’ll do that.”
“You can’t ask me to do something like that,” Henry stammered out. “That’s not fair. We’re in Portland, Oregon, the center of the universe for alternative healing. Let me please try to help you that way.”
For a long moment Henry was afraid she’d close up again, but Sheila surprised him by nodding.
“No psychiatrists,” she insisted. “No therapists.”
Over the next four months they tried crystal therapy, cranial massage, Reiki, and flower essences. Henry brought his wife to see acupuncturists, naturopathic doctors, and shamans. Nothing seemed to change her mood, and at the end of those four months Sheila refused to see anyone else, and then she stopped eating. Henry brought a nurse home to teach him how to force-feed her, but his wife was rapidly losing weight. Over the next two months, she became so skeleton-thin that Henry could see her skull shining through her scalp. He broke down sobbing in front of her, convinced that he was going to lose her.
“Please,” he begged her. “Don’t do this.”
Her voice was weak and barely a whisper as she forced out, “Kill them for me.”
Henry rubbed a thick hand under his nose trying to wipe away some of the wetness. He felt so icy cold then. Like death.
“You’ll eat if I do this?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“One person?”
“Three. I choose them.”
“Then it’s over? You won’t ask me to do it again?”
“I promise.”
There was no decision for Henry to make. He would lose his wife if he didn’t agree to this, and he couldn’t lose her.
“Not here in Portland,” he said. “It’s too small here. They’ll suspect us if I kill them here.”
He knew that was true. While he had made acquaintances and casual friendships, his wife hadn’t, and he’d heard kids in the neighborhood calling her a witch. But there was more to it than that. He liked the area, and he liked the house, and he wanted to move back there when this was all done.
“Los Angeles,” Sheila said.
Henry thought about it, and it made sense for that to be their killing ground. He made a phone call, and after arranging for a nurse to take care of Sheila during his absence, he bought a plane ticket for Los Angeles so he could find a house for them down there.