The pictures included several of her granddad, whom she barely remembered, a white-haired man with a walrus mustache. Her father and mother. Joanna herself. Various ranch hands. Numerous horses. Auntie Kat from when she visited once. Here were Hector Alvarez, the ranch manager who served under her granddad, when Rustling Willows was a cattle operation, and then under Father when the focus shifted to breeding quarter horses for racing and show-worthy thoroughbreds. Hector alone but also with his wife, Annalisa. Annalisa alone and sometimes with Joanna or with Joanna’s mother. Pictures of Joanna and her mother in swimsuits, on the shore of Lake Sapphire, or bundled up for sledding on a day of driving snow. Birthday parties and celebrations around a Christmas tree. Hundreds of photos. Joanna took an hour and a half to study them, remember the moments that they captured, and organize them in piles—and at the end, she had found not one picture of Jimmy Two Eyes.
14
He had taken away Ophelia Poole’s wristwatch because he said time had already run out for her, and therefore a watch was of no use.
Perhaps an hour before sunset, Optime returned for her. Asher Optime. He’d shown her his driver’s license, so that she would know the name he’d given her was in fact his and would conclude that he wouldn’t have revealed it if he wasn’t certain she had no chance of escape.
This self-emasculated crackpot scared her, but he didn’t terrify her into helplessness. He didn’t understand why she didn’t quail before him, but he had no way of knowing that she had been expecting him for years and living for the day when he would appear.
Leaving his chair on the veranda, eating one of the cookies that earlier he’d retrieved from his larder when weed-induced craving overcame him, he said, “Pissed your pants yet?”
“Not me,” she said. “What about you?”
Looming over Ophelia, screwing his pale face into as portentous an expression as he was able to manage while wacked-out on pot, he said, “I’m escorting you to the necropolis. ‘No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than there.’”
“What an ass you are,” she taunted him. “Who talks that way?”
“Samuel Johnson. Though his subject was libraries rather than graveyards. I think it was Johnson, not Shakespeare. Anyway, it was someone whose IQ was three times yours.” He sucked at his teeth to extract a lingering morsel of cookie. “Let’s see how long you can hold on to hope when you’re locked in there with the rotting dead.”
“If you’ll let me take a piss, I’ll have no trouble holding on to hope until I kill you.”
Ophelia dared to speak to him like this because she had three advantages over the sociopathic creep. First, she had read what existed of his ridiculous manifesto and understood the swollen ego and the delusions that motivated him. Second, she was a lot more intelligent than he thought she was, with common sense and street smarts that were unknown to his kind. And finally, he was ludicrous, a fool who lacked the capacity for clear-eyed self-examination that might have saved him from his foolishness. She only had to play with him psychologically and keep herself alive until he made the stupid move that would be the death of him.
Or so she told herself repeatedly, insistently. In spite of the extraordinary intensity of Optime’s madness and his barely repressed ferocity, Ophelia refused to entertain even a shadow of a shadow of a doubt.
“What about you?” she asked. “Do you still piss like a man, or did you cut off your willie, too?”
His throttled rage was apparent in tics and other stresses in his face. His eyes were incandescent wicks swollen with gaslight. The hissing of the lantern seemed to come from him, as if he were the great snake that resided at the bottom of the pit of the world “until he awakens in hunger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.” She considered reciting those lines to him, but she doubted that he would know the source, T. S. Eliot, and she was sure that he would not grasp the meaning.
When he took the switchblade from a pocket of his jacket, she thought she might have pressed him too hard. However, he only used the knife to cut the zip tie that bound her wrists.
He put the blade on the table where she could reach it, though he drew the pistol from the holster on his hip and gave her a look into the muzzle. “Free your ankles, but don’t do anything stupid.”
After she cut the zip ties that fettered her, she returned the knife to the table, and Optime took possession of it again.
He keyed open the padlock that fixed the chain around her neck, and she was free of that, too.