Chapter Fifty
New York, 2010
“Excuse me, but you didn’t use soy milk for my vanilla latte like you were supposed to. I know skim milk when I taste it.”
The young blonde woman’s words to the barista might’ve seemed relatively polite, but her tone was petulant and nasty enough to draw Sheila’s attention. Up until that moment Sheila hadn’t noticed her, but the woman could’ve been a dead ringer for Penelope. Even the same dull-eyed stare!
This time it was no accident. Sheila was in Brooklyn only because she was looking for a Penelope substitute. She knew that she needed a do over with her sister to complete the cycle, and that once that was done she’d be able to close the door forever on her past and start fresh with a clean slate. As she eavesdropped on their conversation, she heard the barista patiently explain that he used soy milk, and the Penelope look-alike insist that he was a liar, and that she could tell the difference between soy and skim milk.
“Unless you want this dumped all over your counter, you better give me what I asked for,” the blonde threatened, her voice so eerily like Penelope’s that it gave Sheila goose bumps.
The chastened barista made her a new vanilla latte, and after she took a sip of it she told him she’d be taking her business elsewhere in the future. “Someplace where the employees aren’t so braindead that they have to argue with customers,” she added, her eyes an angry dull-eyed squint.
Sheila shivered as she heard this, realizing how perfect this was going to be. She’d been careful over the last several minutes to watch this Penelope look-alike out of her peripheral vision so she wouldn’t be caught staring at her, and after the woman left the coffee shop, Sheila forced herself to remain seated for another minute before leaving the shop to follow her.
She caught sight of the Penelope look-alike before she had made it to the next block. The blonde was walking at a fast clip, and Sheila had to do likewise so that she could stay within a half a block of her, but she was able to follow her for several blocks to Thirty-third Street without the woman realizing it. When the Penelope look-alike turned to go into one of the four-story brick apartment buildings lining the street, Sheila started sprinting. She made up the distance between them quickly, and was able to reach the glass security door before it had completely closed. She was breathing hard as she slipped into the building, but she could still hear the blonde’s high heels clacking on the wooden steps above her. Sheila was wearing sneakers, and she raced up the staircase and caught sight of Penelope’s doppelganger as the woman unlocked the door to one of the apartments and went inside of it.
Sheila had no idea whether this woman lived alone, had a roommate, a significant other, or even kids, but none of that mattered. She needed this do over as badly as she needed her heart to pump blood through her body, and she didn’t care how many other people she’d have to slaughter if it came to that. The young blonde woman in that apartment was hers.
She waited until she had her breathing under control, and then took the hypodermic needle from her bag and held it as if it were a switchblade. Then with a great sense of calm washing over her, she walked over to the blonde’s door and knocked on it. When the woman answered and saw it was Sheila, recognition glimmered in her eyes.
“I know you,” she said, her mouth moving about as much as if she were working a ventriloquist’s dummy. “You were in that coffee shop. What the hell are you doing following me?”
Sheila jabbed upward with the needle, sticking it into the blonde’s throat. Before she could inject the succinylcholine, the blonde had grabbed Sheila’s arm and had swung her hip out so that Sheila went flying over her. A loud oomph escaped from her as she landed heavily on her back, her wind knocked out. As she struggled to get up she heard the clicking sound of the door being closed shut, and then she was grabbed by her hair and forced back to the floor. The next thing she knew the blonde was sitting on her chest, her knees pinning her arms down. The woman’s eyes seethed with fury as she pulled the needle from her throat.
“You dumb psycho bitch,” she said, her breath sour in Sheila’s face as she leaned forward. “Who sent you here?”
Sheila started crying. She couldn’t help herself. She had been so close to reclaiming her life, and now it was like she was twelve years old again with Penelope sitting on her chest so that she could torment her.
“You’re crazy, is that your story? Guess what? I don’t care what your problem is. Let’s see about this drug you wanted to inject me with so badly.”
At that moment the blonde was no longer simply a Penelope look-alike to Sheila, but the real thing, and Sheila couldn’t let it end this way, not after all the years of torment and abuse she had suffered. Summoning up every ounce of strength she was capable of, she wildly bucked her body and was able to free her left arm. The blonde missed as she tried to grab at Sheila’s freed arm, and Sheila poked her in the eye.
“You crazy bitch,” the blonde cried out as she grasped at her eye with both hands. Sheila used this opportunity to push the woman off of her, and to scramble for the hypodermic needle that she had dropped. She was still clutching at her injured eye when Sheila stabbed her in the shoulder with the needle and injected a full dose of succinylcholine into her. Almost instantly the woman’s body went slack.
Sheila lowered herself to the floor and lay motionless next to this paralyzed woman until the thumping in her chest subsided. Once she felt as if she had recovered enough, she stripped herself naked and had her long awaited do over with Penelope, because as far as she was concerned this woman was Penelope.