Revenant in Death
Chapter 06
by Technomad
That night, Eve Dallas dreamed. And when she dreamed, it was never of a good thing.
In her dream, she was sitting in her parlor, talking to Vera Charles and Mame Burnside, with Mame's efficient, unobtrusive assistant sitting just behind her. Just as it had happened in real life. They were discussing the details of the upcoming Nixie Swisher Fund fundraiser.
Then she noticed something. Vera and Mame were both naked. She was terribly startled, and more startled to notice that she, too, was naked. Nobody else in the room seemed to notice anything, and the discussion continued as calmly as it had before. She felt self-conscious; Vera and Mame had both kept their youthful figures, and looked as good as they had when they had all shared a visit to a ladies' spa the previous year. They had all spent time together in the sauna and the hot tubs nude, so she knew just what they looked like. And they knew all about her injuries. When she had needed help getting out of the sauna or the hot tub, one lady or the other would quietly step forward and offer her arm, in such a way that Eve could cling to it, or not, as she preferred. She had been grateful to them for sparing her pride.
Then she looked behind Mame. Mame's assistant, Miss Mollenbeek, was still clothed. As Eve watched, she reached up and pulled her face off, as though it were a mask. Eve froze in terror at what lay beneath. Beneath the mask of surface normality lay the face of a leering monster, a monster with an unending hunger in its eyes and fangs for teeth.
"Hello, Eve Dallas," the monster whispered. "Been a long, long time, hasn't it? Did you forget me?" The monster's misshapen face formed into a parody of sadness. "But I never forgot you!" Slowly, slowly, it got up, moving nearer and nearer to Eve. "I've been waiting…oh, so long!…for a chance to repay you, for what you did to me!"
"What? What? What did I do to you?" Eve whimpered, trying vainly to get up from her wheelchair. Neither Mame nor Vera seemed to notice anything wrong, talking quietly among themselves. The monster that had been Jane Mollenbeek approached her, the expression on its face full of gloating triumph.
"Oh, nothing much," the monster purred. "Just ruined my life!" It got close enough to touch her, reaching out to run its scaly paw down one of Eve's breasts. "And now I'm back, to repay you in your own coin!" With the monster's touch, Eve regained her voice, screaming for help.
Snapping awake, she saw Roarke looking at her, wide-eyed. "Nightmare, darling?" For a little while, all she could do was shake, and Roarke took her in his strong arms, crooning to her comfortingly. "Was it your father again?"
"No. Not this time." Eve tried to remember the dream, which was already beginning to fade. "This was to do with that new assistant Mame Burnside's hired. I thought there was something a little odd about her when she was here earlier, and tonight, I dreamed that she pulled off her face to show that under it, she was a monster!"
"Was she, now?" Roarke stroked his chin, looking thoughtful. "Could it be that your subconscious noticed something that you didn't see on the surface?" After so long together, he knew that his wife was often very intuitive, particularly as regarded criminals.
"Not impossible. But I've had to do with so many criminals…" Eve looked up at him, rubbing her eyes to get the sleep out of them. "I wonder what a good computer search would find on her?"
"Just what I was thinking," Roarke said. He moved toward the bedroom door. "Let's have a look through the records, and see if our Miss Mollenbeek's got any skeletons in her closet!"
The thought was father to the deed, and soon both Roarke and Eve were hunched over Roarke's terminal. "Hmmm…I can't find much about her, other than that she's just out of prison," muttered Roarke. "Seems she was involved in an illegals ring, and served a couple of years in a minimum-security facility. She has a very good record, with no violations of prison rules, and was released without any trouble." He probed a little deeper. "About the only thing I can find on her is a requirement that, in order to remain free, she stay out of the city of Chicago. That's apparently where she's from, and where she got into trouble."
"Did she have a record there, before she was arrested for the illegals?" asked Eve.
"Not that I can find. Apparently, she took up with the wrong sort of boyfriend, and he led her into doing some 'favors' for his friends. With the current climate of opinion as regards illegals, that was all it took for the judge to come down on her, hard." Roarke looked grim. "You know, darling, I don't really think that treating minor offenders that badly is a good idea. Your Miss Mollenbeek might well be plotting some sort of revenge."
"But why would she target me, in particular?" Eve was trying to wrap her mind around this whole idea. "I've never even been to Chicago in my adult life, I've never specialized in illegals, and I had nothing to do with her trouble!"
"Good question, that," Roarke muttered. "I wonder if she's even particularly targeting you as you, or you because you were a cop for so long? Quite a few ex-cons come out of their sentences longing for revenge on the police."
"I wonder if Mame knows about her past?" Eve said. "She might, and still might have hired her. Mame's one of the most tolerant women I know, and doesn't think illegals should even be illegal. A little thing like this wouldn't bother her one bit." Eve smiled to herself. "And I must say, that her approach to things generally does seem to work."
"We'll need to have a talk with her. In the meantime, how about going back to bed? Morning's coming on, and we've got much to do tomorrow." Eve suddenly felt how weary she was, and she did not resist her husband guiding her back to bed. Falling asleep with her head on his chest, his scent in her nostrils and his hand stroking her hair as he murmured wordlessly to her, Eve felt safe from all monsters.
..oo00oo..
Across Manhattan, Jane Mollenbeek, who had once been Rayleen Straffo, was also having trouble sleeping. She finally gave up on it as a bad job, got up, made herself a (non-alcoholic) drink, and sat at the window of Mame's upscale apartment, gazing out over the sleeping city.
She had the day off tomorrow, so sleeping in if she needed to would be no problem. One thing that her years in confinement had left her, though, was the habit of being an early riser, so she figured she'd probably be up, sleep-deprived or not. She could always take a nap during the day if she needed to.
One thing she wanted to do was to get out to Connecticut, and spend the day getting information about her former family. She couldn't afford another rental car, at least not as yet. But public transportation extended out that far, and the neighborhood looked to be upscale enough to not worry too much about a respectable-looking woman wandering about. There were quite a few neighborhoods she'd never have dreamed of exploring on foot, but the area where her ex-family lived was not one of them.
She had also figured out a plausible excuse for being in the area. She worked for Mame Burnside, after all. Telling any snoops that Mame was interested in buying property in their part of the world would satisfy their curiosity, and if it never happened…Mame was known to be erratic, and to have her whims. As for covering herself with her employer, all she needed to do was to come up with a "Personals" ad from some man in the area who was interested in a new girlfriend, and tell Mame that she wanted to scout the guy out without his knowledge.
Her siblings were the first on the list she had made, after Eve Dallas herself, of course. Once she had managed to learn their habits, she thought it would not be difficult to lure them into a deadfall of some sort. Making it look accidental, as she had done for Trevor so long ago, would make it even better. And, of course, she planned to be nowhere near when the bodies were discovered, and leave no trace that she'd been involved. While Seal-It was supposed to be an item restricted to the police, it wasn't hard to lay hands on if one knew where to go and whom to ask. And Rayleen did know.
She considered her siblings' existence an insult to herself. She was the rightful daughter of Oliver Straffo, not some latecomers! She'd eliminated her baby brother easily enough, and at age seven, at that. If she hadn't made some fairly elementary mistakes, mistakes she could put down to youth and inexperience, even her mother wouldn't have ever suspected her.
Ideally, she wanted to kill her unwanted sibs in a way that really, really hurt, but she knew that sort of thing took time, and might attract unwanted attention. She had factors in her favor, mainly the fact that nobody knew that she was free, and the changes in her appearance thanks to Mame's wonderful stylists.
After her siblings were gone, it would be Mommy's turn. Her mother seemed to have recovered from her ordeals, and moved around fairly freely. There were lots of possibilities, ranging from maybe sabotaging her transpo, to sniping her from a distance, to just getting close and spraying her in the face with cyanide, counting on the coroner thinking it was just a heart attack or something of the sort.
Then Daddy would be her final target. She would have to arrange something unremarkable for him, if only, again, to keep the police from taking too much of an interest. She had not had a chance to analyze the security on her ex-family's home, but she doubted they had anything she couldn't defeat. And if she could enlist a suitable tool and patsy to do the dirty work, that would be even better. Particularly if she then eliminated her tool. Her ex-family's money would come to her, albeit by a rather convoluted route, and then she could relax in the sun at a nice beach resort. Just as she had always deserved to, and should have, if that damned Eve Dallas hadn't insisted on sticking her oar in.
One lesson that Renee Oberman had taught her, all unknowing, was "Don't get greedy!" When Rayleen had found out how much money Renee had already socked away when she fell foul of the accursed Lieutenant Dallas, she had nearly gasped in shock. Two hundred million, and properties overseas? And her subordinates also all had more than enough to retire on in perfect comfort. Why, she wondered, had Renee kept on and kept on and kept on with her operation?
Rayleen, herself, did not intend to keep on once she had enough money to live on in comfort. Instead, she planned to retire from crime and devote herself to forgetting the long years in prison as though they had never existed. She knew that every illegal activity she performed brought with it a certain percentage chance that the police would get on her trail. And she did not ever want to draw the attention of the police, ever again.
She thought that if she had had it to do over again, she'd have arranged to be far away on the other side of the school when Mr. Foster's body was discovered. Getting Melodie all upset had been part of her plan, but she saw now that she'd been overconfident and had made things too easy for the police. If she'd been clear away when the body was found, and had remembered to act shocked and horrified when given the news, she thought that unutterable swine, Eve Dallas, might never have come near her. But she'd been too tempted by the chance to have a moment in the limelight.
These days, she preferred anonymous excellence. Oh, it would be such fun to leave behind herself a biography, telling all the world about her exploits, but she wouldn't want such a thing to come to light until she, herself, was safely dead and out of reach of the law. She had also learned that bragging, even to herself, was a good way to get caught.
As the sun rose over Manhattan, lighting the canyons between the huge buildings, Rayleen went to shower, groom herself, get dressed and start her day off. She had no fear of disturbing her employer; Mame Burnside was a very, very sound sleeper, partly by nature and partly due to the fact that she seemed to run on martinis the way old-fashioned automobile engines ran on gasoline.
END Chapter 06
