When Sharon arrived at Joyce Thornton's house that afternoon, she found the back door unlocked, just as the parole officer had said it would be. She undressed, as Joyce had ordered her to do, collected the cleaning implements from the broom closet, and went upstairs to the guest room.
Joyce had been right about one thing at least, she reflected as she struggled to pull the drop cloths away from the furniture pushed together in the middle of the room. No matter how much a girl might glory in her naked body at any other time, being forced to do hard, menial work in the nude did make her feel degraded. It did make her feel like a slave – just as Joyce had told her it would. Even with no one else there to see her, she felt that way, and she was suddenly consumed with shame and frustration. How much longer must she submit to such indignities? How much longer could she?
She glanced about the room, wondering how many other young girls had been forced to work for Joyce this way. How many had known the burn of the velvet whip on their bare buttocks? How many had been sent back to prison to satisfy a sadistic whim of the twisted monster who held unlimited power over them?
It was, when she was tugging one of the chairs to a corner of the room that she noticed the bullet hole. It was in the door frame, on a level with her eyes, and it caught her attention only because it was the only mark or blemish anywhere on the walls or woodwork. Even so, she thought at first it was a nail which someone had driven below the surface of the wood and then forgot to cover with putty and paint – as had once been the case with some work she and Vickie had had done in their apartment.
But then she had seen that the hole was a bit too large to have been left by a nail, and she had made a closer inspection. It had been a bullet hole, all right; the lead slug was embedded in the wood a half-inch from the surface.
Sharon dismissed it from her mind. She had enough troubles of her own without speculating about the presence of a bullet in Joyce Thornton's immaculate woodwork.
She began to clean as fast as she could, hoping to work off some of her shame and anger, as she had done the last time she had been in this room. But later, as she was hurrying along the wall with the half-filled pail of sweepings, she lost her footing for an instant and the pail swung hard against the fresh white plaster, scarring it.
She dropped the pail and stared at the wall with dismay, knowing what the penalty for her carelessness would be. And then she jumped back in alarm as the rats in the wall squealed in anger. Carl Martin had told her there were dozens of the beasts in there, but judging from the sound of them, there were hundreds.
She started to back away in disgust, then paused, looking at the dent the pail had made in the plaster. When Carl Martin had struck the same wall with the heel of his hand, to stir up the rats, it had given back a dull thud. And yet, when the pail had slammed against it, it had sounded as if it were hollow – the way a wall of this kind would normally sound.
And now she recalled that Carl had said he had filled in a hole in the wall, which Joyce Thornton had told him she had had someone else knock out to make a doorway to the next room.
Why, Sharon wondered, would Joyce have one man knock a hole in the wall, and then have another man cover it up? And why would Joyce have changed her mind about making a doorway?
And, most puzzling of all, why should the wall sound hollow in one place and not in another? Sharon walked to the spot where Carl had struck it, took off her shoe, and hit it a sharp blow with the heel. It gave back the same dull thud Carl's hand had made. It sounded the way it would sound if there was something inside it.
She turned slowly, almost against her will, to stare at the bullet hole in the doorjamb.
There shouldn't be a bullet in that otherwise unmarked woodwork. There shouldn't be so many rats in the wall. There shouldn't have been a change of mind on Joyce's part about that doorway to the next room. There shouldn't have been a necessity to make Carl fill in a hole made by another man. And there shouldn't be one kind of sound at one place in the wall and a different kind of sound at another.
Was it possible? Sharon wondered. Had there been other bullets? Were they now in someone's body, and that body sealed in the wall? Had Joyce Thornton killed someone, and, taking advantage of a ready-made hiding place, put his body in the hole she had had someone make for a doorway?
Was that why the wall sounded the way it did?
Was that why there were so many rats?
And in any case, what had she to lose? She was going back to prison, anyhow. Joyce would take one look at the long ugly scar on that fresh white plaster and her rage would be instant and terrible. She would have Sharon back in a cell before another day had passed.
But if she was right – if she was right! – she would be free of Joyce Thornton forever.
With nothing to lose, and everything to gain, she really had no choice. There was a chance she was right, and she had to take it.
She walked to Carl Martin's toolbox, took out a hatchet, and began chopping at the same place on the wall where his hand and the heel of her shoe had given back the dull thud.
It was hard work for someone who had never wielded a hatchet before, and the flying bits of plaster stuck to her moist bare skin and stung her eyes. But at last she had chopped away enough of the plaster and lathing to be able to see down inside the wall.
But as she stepped close, she knew it was no longer necessary to look. The odor that came from the opening could have only one meaning.
Dropping the hatchet, she ran to the window, threw up the sash, and thrust her head, and shoulders outside, drawing in great lungfuls of air.
There was the soft whisper of a shoe sole on the floor behind her, and she whirled around.
It was Joyce Thornton, reaching down to pick up the hatchet. The parole officer's eyes were narrowed to glittering green slits, her lips peeled back from her teeth in a silent snarl. Holding the hatchet in front of her, she advanced toward Sharon, step by slow step.
"You've just signed your death warrant, Sharon," she said. Surprisingly, her voice was cool, almost expressionless. She spoke with no more emotion than if she had been telling Sharon the time of day. "You really should have used better judgment, you know."
Sharon felt a scream rise in her throat, but she could not force it past her lips. She stood as if paralyzed, eyes riveted on the bright crescent along the cutting edge of the hatchet.
Joyce paused for a moment, studying Sharon thoughtfully, then suddenly raised the hatchet over her head and sprang forward.
And now the frozen scream burst from Sharon's throat, and she instinctively dropped to her knees and tried to throw her body to one side to escape the descending hatchet. As she rolled away, Joyce, unable to check her forward momentum, caught her foot in the crook of Sharon's knee, tripped, and plunged head-first through the open window.
It had all taken place so quickly that for a long moment Sharon couldn't believe it had really happened. Only seconds ago, she had expected to have her head cleaved open with the hatchet; now, she was all alone in the room, exactly as if Joyce had never walked into it.
She scrabbled to her feet and put her head out the window and looked down. Joyce lay sprawled like a rag doll on the wide flagstone walk below, staring up at nothing, a ribbon of blood flowing from the side of her mouth.
Sharon ran downstairs, let herself out the side door, and knelt by Joyce's body. When she saw she was still breathing, she rushed inside and called for an ambulance.
It wasn't until she heard the first wail of the siren that she realized she was still completely nude, and ran inside to put on her clothes.
As chance would have it, the detectives who took Sharon home in the unmarked police car that night were the same two who had arrested her more than a year ago for complicity in the robbery of the jewelry store. And just as had been the case on that terrible, long-ago night, the older heavyset detective did all the talking while his younger, sandy-haired partner said nothing at all.
"It's all almost too good to be true," Sharon said as they neared her apartment house. She was sitting in the front seat between them, amused by the way both men took the opportunity to glance surreptitiously at her legs every time the car passed under a street light. "I'm afraid I'll wake up and find out it was all just a wonderful dream."
"It's no dream, Miss," the heavyset detective said. "A dying declaration will stand up anywhere, anytime."
"But she wasn't really dying."
"No, she wasn't. But she thought she was, and that makes it exactly the same thing." He paused. "She wanted to clear the slate."
"When she finds out she's going to be all right, she may change her mind."
"Let her. What counts is what she said when she thought she was going to die." He glanced down at her legs again, and took a deep breath. "When she cleared you of having anything to do with that robbery, she cleared you for keeps. All the officials involved in what happened to you a year ago will do everything in their power to make it up to you. Including my partner here and me. That means we'll go to bat with the governor. Offhand, I'd lay ten to one that you'll have a full pardon inside of two weeks."
"That's wonderful," Sharon said. "Just wonderful." She felt so warm toward these two big men that she shifted her position slightly so that her skirt rode up above her pussy. The next time the car passed under a street light, they'd see more than they expected to.
"As for Mark Haley," the detective said, "he got just about what he asked for. Somebody ought've told him Joyce Thornton knew more judo than he'd ever learn. But no, he had to go over there and pull a gun on her and tell her she had ten minutes to come up with the money he figured she'd beat him out of on that jewelry heist." He looked down at Sharon's legs again, and suddenly the car swerved so far to the right that it almost struck a car parked at the curb.
"What's wrong?" Sharon asked innocently, scooting down a little further in the seat so that her skirt would ride up even higher.
"Uh… nothing," the detective said.
"And she actually took the gun away from him?" Sharon said.
"She sure did," the detective said, stealing another look from the corner of his eye. "And that was all for Mr. Mark Haley. How long he'd have stayed in that wall if you hadn't got your brainstorm is anybody's guess. We pulled one out of a wall in the North End the other day that'd been there almost a hundred years."
"That's my building, there on the right," Sharon said, pointing.
Sharon and Vickie didn't finish making love until almost daybreak. When at last they composed themselves for sleep – nude, their heads between each other's legs, the way they always slept – Sharon knew that no luckier girl had ever been born. She had her youth and her beauty and her modeling career and, best of all, she had her good name back again.
No, that was wrong, she corrected herself as she burrowed her head further between the sleepy little silver-blonde's scented legs. No. Best of all she had Vickie.
She planted a long soft kiss on Vickie's cunt, rested her cheek against the satiny warmth of her thigh and, at peace with the world and herself, drifted off to deep.