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  CURSING

  An Angie Faust Book

  By Lynne Murray

  Copyright © 2019 Lynne Murray

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior written permission of the author.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Ravenborn,

  Chapter 1

  Things changed the day I killed my boss. I was trying so hard not to.

  He died quickly from cardiac arrest in front of a dozen witnesses in the glassed-in fishbowl of a conference room at Wolfe, Savage and Steele, the law firm where we worked. I never touched him physically. I didn’t have to. His name was Carroll Caine.

  The Office Manager’s death interrupted an extended yelling session aimed at me. Caine was a short, square-built man with small bulging, blue eyes, a permanently red face and silver hair, cut brush short. For some reason, he had singled me out for verbal abuse almost from his first day on the job. He retired from the Navy as a Warrant Officer. Law firms like to hire former non-coms on the theory that they work well with a formal chain of command. But for Caine, taking orders from civilian lawyers he didn’t respect chafed him like a sandpaper jockstrap.

  I suspected that Caine hated me for my size—a head taller than him in flats and strong enough to pick him up and move him out of the way. Looking up at me seemed to fuel his rage. He would have fired me just for being a big girl if he could have, but San Francisco is one of the few places where discrimination on grounds of personal appearance is illegal. Law firms paid attention to that sort of thing. They have an allergy to employee lawsuits.

  I knew more about Caine than he realized. Growing up, I studied the bullies who plagued me, looking for weak spots and ways to escape without anyone getting hurt.

  Now that Caine had no formal rank in front of his name he also had to deal with the Boy-Named-Sue Syndrome, which infuriated him. People often asked to speak with Ms. Carroll Caine, assuming he was female. It didn’t help that the “impressive” salary turned out to be below average for San Francisco, a city that just kept getting more expensive every year.

  So he took it out on his subordinates. I was a favorite target.

  Understanding why Caine attacked me so often didn’t protect me when he did.

  He threatened to fire me often over the past year, but he never did. I guess he kept me around as a handy target. I triple checked all my work so as never to make a mistake that would attract Caine’s attention. But that didn’t work. Now he was yelling at me for being too slow.

  My other co-workers looked away in embarrassment or relief that, at least for the moment, Caine wasn’t singling them out. Not Francine, the woman sitting next to me in the conference room. She was petite, blonde and eager to score points with Caine by digging up the slightest hint of an error on my part. She and I shared a cubicle in Accounting. The first week I knew her, she was very friendly. But when Caine came to work there, she started spending a lot of time in his office. She became very interested in how I spent my time and any mistakes I might make that she could report to Caine.

  This kind of staff meeting gave her a front-row seat when Caine attacked me. She sat so close to me that I heard her breath came quicker. She was actually getting off on this. I tried not to think of her or Caine because I so badly wanted to kill both of them.

  Quitting wasn’t an option. I needed the job, my first one fresh out of college. I grew up as the target of bullies. I should have known how to endure it by now.

  I have no clear memories of my earliest childhood when my parents were alive. I don’t know what happened much before age five. So far as I could remember, I hadn’t ever killed anyone. But I grew up with the odd, irrational fear that I might.

  Caine picked a bad day to stand over me and settle in for an extended rant. My Aunt Bess had simply disappeared six months earlier and without her, I had no one. The pain of her loss had retreated to a dull ache most days, but sometimes it flared up into a sharp pain of grief and confusion.

  Aunt Bess had raised me. She never spoke of the earlier days except to say I had survived the auto accident that killed my parents. She always made it clear that it was Very Important to control my temper.

  “You’re stronger than they are, Angie,” she told me. “But we have to hide that to protect ourselves. We need to keep your strength a secret,”

  She never explained more, but she taught me to breathe deeply and not fight back when bullies singled me out for an attack, and they always did. Sometimes I lost my temper. I never touched anyone. Yet some of those bullies suffered falls and broken bones. No one officially blamed me. But when suspicions arose, we left town. We moved a lot when I was growing up.

  Aunt Bess worked from home. She never mentioned any relatives. I didn’t know I had a grandfather alive until the day we arrived in San Francisco and moved in with him. I made it through SF State and even found a job with no more unexplainable incidents. My grandfather died two years after we moved in. He had a sudden stroke (don’t blame me, I loved the old guy, besides, I was at school that day). After that, it was just my aunt and me again.

  Then one day, six months before I killed Caine, my aunt simply left and didn’t come home. No warning, no calls, emails. Not even a postcard with a forwarding address. Her old Toyota sat in the garage under our building. Her emergency bank card and getaway bag for quick escapes still sat next to mine in the front closet. I was very afraid she was dead, but I had no way to know for sure.

  I kept the apartment in case she came back.

  Also, rent control.

  Under Caine’s verbal attack, I remembered my aunt’s lessons and focused all my attention on breathing slowly and letting his word roll over me. He noticed that and started throwing in some hostile questions. It seemed to go on for half an hour, but it was probably less than three minutes.

  I huddled in my chair, trying to make myself invisible, staring down at the pad of paper in front of me, a pencil gripped in my hand.

  Caine paused for breath as if savoring looking down at me. He leaned in close. “You’d already be out of here if I didn’t suspect you might have a hidden disability and you’d sue all our asses. Is that it, Angie?”

  “Look at me!”

  I slowly looked up and met his eyes. Bad idea. The urge to let loose the anger that built in every cell of my body. I blinked when a cloud of black dots like a swarm of tiny insects filled my vision, swirling between Caine and Francine. I glanced around. Most people stared at the table or Caine. No one else gave any sign of seeing the whirling dots.

  Great Angie, you’re hallucinating, just what I need.

  “Keeping something you’re keeping up your sleeve, Angie? Maybe you lied on your employment application?” His spit landed on my face. Droplets hit my glasses. I wanted to wipe them off, but I didn’t move a muscle.

  I could smell Caine’s rage under the Bay Rum aftershave and lingering cigar smoke on his breath.

  Something inside me settled. Everything seemed sharper, clearer and despite the black cloud of dots passing between Francine and Caine. It couldn’t be real. A voice somewhere in the mists of early life echoed in my head.

  Stop the heart.

  Deadly calm washed over me. I felt myself starting to shake as if there was an earthquake. There was not. Yet an inner vibration shook me physically like the roars I heard when my aunt took me to the Lion House at the San Francisco Zoo at feeding time.

&n
bsp; I focused on Caine. Not on his face, on his chest. Every sound in the room fell away. I found his heart. I raised my hand to point at him, still holding the pencil.

  He straightened up. A slow smile on his face told me he was hoping he had made me mad enough to do something stupid. He had.

  “Ya gonna hit me, Angie?” he asked.

  “No.” I couldn’t remember ever feeling so calm.

  Now.

  I snapped my arm a few inches back as if I meant to throw the pencil at him. Caine instinctively rocked back on his heels, but there was no escape for him. Energy tore through me. My fingers tingled as I completed the short gesture toward his chest. I sensed the familiar but unknown force piercing him like a tool. It reached for his heart and grabbed it. And squeezed.

  The pencil broke in half. The eraser end bounced off the table and fell on the rug. I lowered my arm, feeling his heart, frozen in a spasm as if my hand really was squeezing it. The inner shaking stopped and I took a deep breath, suddenly, oddly at peace.

  Caine’s knees gave way and he crumpled to the floor. He twitched a few times. I don’t know how, but I could feel his life leave his body. He wasn’t coming back.

  I stood up and backed away as two co-workers rushed past me to attempt CPR. They knelt beside him, but I knew they wouldn’t be able to revive him. I jammed my hands into my pockets and finally let go of the top half of the pencil. I kept my head down because I couldn’t help myself from smiling. The roaring inside me was gone. The swarm of black particles was gone too.

  I took my hands out of my pockets and saw a couple of wood slivers had pierced my skin. I was bleeding. It didn’t even hurt. I didn’t feel anything but relief at the sudden quiet when Caine shut up.

  Then the fear hit.

  Everything I learned growing up told me I should go home, grab my getaway pack and leave town. It would be hard to run without my aunt organizing our escape.

  I didn’t want to move again. I loved San Francisco. The rent-controlled apartment was my true refuge with my grandfather’s books lining almost every wall. Even the kitchen had a shelf of cookbooks. My aunt had traveled with a few treasured books and she had put her own recipe book on the kitchen shelf as soon as we moved in. The place felt like home as nowhere else ever had.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have to run. Maybe no one noticed how Caine had died. People drew back to the edges of the room while efforts to revive him got more frantic. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to me. It wasn’t as if I’d physically touched the old man. Maybe no one would blame me.

  Scratch that.

  As I surreptitiously dabbed Caine’s saliva off my face and glasses with the cuff of my long-sleeved blouse, I raised my head and looked straight into the eyes of the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. He twirled a pair of sunglasses in his hand and continued to stare right at me.

  He had a tousled mop of sun-streaked light brown hair. He wore a tan suit about the same shade as his hair and a light blue shirt and gold and darker blue striped tie. His angelic face, even features and sensual lips seemed familiar. Maybe I’d seen him in one of those semi-porn underwear ads—the kind where you don’t look closely at the model’s face because you’re too busy checking out that impossibly lithe and muscular body. He leaned against the receptionist’s desk as if he owned it, as if he owned any place he stood simply by standing there.

  He stowed his glasses in his jacket pocket and raised a blond eyebrow at me as if asking a question with luminous blue eyes.

  The receptionist, a sixty-something retired airline stewardess with a British accent, had already called 911. Now she leaned over her counter at the perfect angle to check out Underwear Model Man’s ass at the same time that she watched the drama around our co-workers struggling to revive Caine.

  Underwear Model Man held my gaze and nodded at me. I flinched in surprise. He didn’t quite smile, but his eyes crinkled as if we had a secret understanding. A deep feeling of dread settled like lead in my gut. This couldn’t be good.

  Donna, the head of Accounting and my immediate supervisor, herded all the staff out of the conference room and told us to go back to our desks. My cubicle was two floors down.

  I made it past the reception desk and nearly to the elevator when Underwear Model Man fell into step beside me. He was taller than me. I’m five ten, he must have been around six feet.

  “Meet me for coffee after work,” he whispered, leaning close. He smelled of Irish Spring soap. “There’s someone you need to talk to. Someone you have a lot in common with. You won’t regret it.”

  I kept moving without answering. Every woman in the place stared at this guy. He was that magnetic. The last thing I wanted at this particular moment was anyone paying attention to me.

  But the stranger followed me and held the elevator door while I got in. “Seriously, you owe it to yourself to listen to an offer that would get you out of this...place.” He didn’t have to say “This hellhole,” it was implicit in his tone. I couldn’t disagree with him. The only thing I liked about Wolfe, Savage and Steele was the paycheck.

  “An offer I can’t refuse, huh?” I snapped at him. “That turned out so well for the guy who found the horse’s head in his bed.”

  The man chuckled. “No dead horses, I promise. But your skills deserve better.”

  “You know nothing about my skills,” I kept my voice low.

  “Don’t I?” Maybe it was a mistake to speak so softly, he leaned close and sketched a small gesture that encompassed the office, the building, the paramedics arriving now and rushing past us with a stretcher to haul Caine into the next open elevator for more futile rescue efforts.

  Francine and three other women slipped past Underwear Model Man into the elevator with me. They all stared at and me, then back at him again.

  He let go of the door and it closed before I could say another word.

  “Do you know that guy?” Francine asked.

  “No,” I muttered. “I think he’s selling something.”

  “Well, whatever he’s selling, I’m buying,” Tanya, a legal secretary to one of the partners, said.

  Everyone but me laughed. I could feel the near hysteria in their laughter. They were relieved to be thinking of anything but Carroll Caine falling to the conference room floor, not breathing, being raced to the hospital.

  An older woman whose name I didn’t know commented on how fine that young man was. Then the elevator bell dinged for our floor and we all filed out in silence. No one mentioned Caine.

  When I got to my cubicle, I checked my computer for urgent business. Nothing I couldn’t postpone. I headed for the ladies room. I went into one of the stalls and once the door was closed and locked, the sobs I had been holding back broke out. I cried as quietly as possible. Someone could come in at any moment.

  What was wrong with me? I had killed an old man who hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Okay, he was a micro-managing control freak who hated me for no reason. He also kept trying to goad me into doing something that would give him an excuse to fire me. But he never came close to hitting me or even threatening me with violence. He was just a miserable person who hated his life. Nothing he said or did could justify killing him no matter how much I had desperately wanted him gone. Now he was, I was oddly certain that I was responsible for his death.

  Sobbing gave way to quiet tears. After a few minutes, I managed to get my breathing steady. Mercifully no one came in to see me break down.

  I came out of the stall and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was red. My shoulder-level brown hair was a little scrambled. I washed the spot of blood off my hands. It hurt but it had stopped bleeding. When I got home I’d pour some hydrogen peroxide over it. I combed my hair with my hands and some water. I scrubbed my face with hot water and dried it on paper towels. I’d washed off the last traces of the make up I’d put on before work. I didn’t have more with me to reapply, but what was the point?

  Francine came into the restroom. “You dropped this in the conferenc
e room.” She handed me the eraser end of the broken pencil.

  I took it and stuck it in my jacket pocket with the top half. “This is all so shocking,” I managed to get the words out.

  “Are you okay?”

  My instinct was that Francine wanted to savor my pain. I needed to redirect her. “Did you hear anything more about poor Mr. Caine?”

  “We won’t know till later.

  I knew.

  Francine’s insistent questions faded away. I lost track of the liquid soap and flat, disinfectant-laced smell of the ladies room. I smelled an oversweet cherry smell, like kid’s vitamin syrup. A ghostly voice floated out of the mist of my memory. If I concentrated I might be able to make out the words.

  “Find the heart.” A man’s voice.

  I started to shake all over.

  “I found it.”

  “Stop the heart.”

  “No.”

  “Do it NOW.”

  “No.”

  “Angie, are you okay?” Francine touched my arm and I flinched away.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said. She jumped at my sharp tone. That pleased me somehow. I wasn’t going to lash out at her, but I didn’t want her hands on me and something in my face made her retreat a step.

  She gave me an eyes-narrowed look and headed for the door. “Don’t stay in here all day. Donna’s looking for you. There’s still work to do.” Then she left.

  I couldn’t help but think about what Underwear Model Man had said about getting out of this place. If only it were that easy. Much as I loved San Francisco, jobs were scarce and rent-controlled apartments even scarcer. If I left town, I’d never be able to afford to come back. Worse yet, what if I left town and my aunt returned?

  The briefest glance in the bathroom mirror reminded me that whoever that handsome stranger was, he had to be working a scam on the Big Girl. That would be me—tall with brown hair and brown eyes. Broad of shoulder and hip. A workhorse. I might have been bred specifically to carry heavy burdens. The perpetual victim. Underwear Model Man was right about one thing—my current situation could stand massive improvements. But that didn’t mean whatever he was selling would help me. So far nothing ever had.