On The Street Where You Live by Mary Higgins Clark

Author:Mary Higgins Clark [Clark, Mary Higgins]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-04-20T18:34:50+00:00

The state-of-the-art security cameras he was going to install around Emily’s home were already packed in his van, so immediately after the television interview, Eric Bailey began the drive to Spring Lake.

He knew he had to be careful not to drive too fast. Anger combined with humiliation made him want to press the gas pedal to the floor of the car, to weave in and out of traffic, terrifying the occupants of the vehicles he would cut off.

Fear was his answer to all the rejections in his life, to all the rebuffs, to all the ridicule.

He had learned to use fear as a weapon when he was sixteen. He had invited three girls, one after another, to go to the junior prom with him. They all refused. Then the snickering started, the jokes.

How far would Eric Bailey have to go before he could get a date?

Karen Fowler was the one whose imitation of him fumbling to articulate his invitation to her was considered most hilarious. He had overheard her mimicking him.

“Karen, I’d really like … I mean, would you … it would be nice if …”

“And then he started sneezing,” Karen Fowler would tell her audience, laughing so hard she was almost gasping. “The poor dope started sneezing, can you believe it?”

The best student in the school, and she called him “the poor dope.”

The night of the prom he had waited with his camera at the local hangout where everyone went after the band quit. When the drinking and pot smoking started, he secretly snapped pictures of a glassy-eyed Karen, hanging all over her date, her lipstick smeared, the strap of her dress falling over her arm.

He showed the pictures to her in school a couple of days later. He could still remember the way she paled. Then she cried and pleaded with him to give them to her. “My father will kill me,” she said. “Please, Eric.”

He put them back in his pocket. “Want to do your imitation of me now?” he asked coldly.

“I’m sorry. Please, Eric, I’m sorry.”

She had been so frightened, never knowing whether or not he would ring the bell some evening and hand those pictures to her father, or if one day they’d be delivered to him in the mail …

Thereafter, whenever she passed him in the hall in school, she’d given him a frightened, beseeching glance. And for the first time in his life Eric Bailey had felt powerful.

The memory calmed him now. He would find a way to punish the two who had dissed him this morning. It just took a little quiet thinking, that’s all.

Depending on traffic, he would be in Spring Lake between one and two.

He knew the route faily well by now. This would be his third round trip since Wednesday.

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