Head To Head. Linda Ladd

      PINNACLE BOOKS

      Kensington Publishing Corp.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      For my husband, Bill—the love of my life.

      For my mother, Louise King, with love—thanks for always being there for me.

      For my son, Bill and his beautiful wife, Paula Ladd—thanks for your love and support through thick and thin.

      For my daughter, Laurie and her handsome husband, Scott Dale—thanks for your love and generosity, with a special thank you for being my first readers and for all your thoughtful comments, great ideas, and endless encouragement.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Life with Father

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Life with Father

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Life with Father

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Life with Father

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Life with Father

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Life After Father

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Life After Father

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Life After Father

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Life After Father

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Epilogue

      Life After Dottie

      Prologue

      LIFE WITH FATHER

      Nobody knew what really went on in the embalmer’s house. It appeared normal enough where it sat on a dirt road on the outskirts of town. Surrounded by dense woods of white oak, maple, and hickory trees, the house was constructed in 1902, but now the white clapboards had been repainted countless times through decades of families. A converted coach house stood at the back of the property, where a wide creek rippled over smooth, tan rocks. Both structures had been neglected and had weathered to gray, and the white curlicues along the ceiling of the porches and the once ornate banisters were peeling paint, giving a forlorn, abandoned look to the place. The dining room in the main house had a curved turret window seat that overlooked the wraparound porch, and above the dining room, on the second story of the turret, was a large master bedroom.

      The property had belonged to the same family ever since the houses’s construction; in each generation the oldest son was always the owner of the house and an apprentice in the lucrative embalming trade. Inside, the rooms remained timeless, spacious, and dark with faded floral wallpaper and massive mahogany furniture, which intimidated children in the dark of night. The attic was unfinished and dusty, with old trunks and books and the smell of mothballed clothing.

      No one ever visited the house unless they wished to have a corpse prepared for a funeral and burial at one of the town mortuaries. The embalmer worked in the chilly basement of the house. A special door had been constructed under the side porch, where a ramp led into the laboratory workroom. The bodies would arrive in ambulances or black hearses, and the workers lowered their voices as they rolled them down the brick sidewalk to the cellar door.

      The embalmer was a big man, rawboned and strong, able to lift by himself corpses of any weight onto the cold steel tables in the cellar. He had black hair cropped close to his scalp and a full beard, which he sometimes forgot to trim. He lived in the house with his wife and their child. He was a strict man who demanded that rules of family conduct be followed to the letter. If they were not, if the woman or the child disobeyed his decrees, he would walk slowly to where he kept the old razor strop on a hook inside the door at the top of the cellar steps. This means of punishment had been in the family for as long as he could remember. His father had used it to make a man out of him, and his grandfather had wielded it before that. It was black leather, worn thin now, with bits of brown showing through, and the metal buckle on the end was tarnished and half-broken, so that it left strange, irregular scars on flesh that looked like half-moons. The embalmer had many half-moons on his back. So did the wife and child.

      By the time the child was old enough for the mother to teach him to read and do sums, they both had learned to behave in a way consistent with the embalmer’s house rules. The mother kept the child close to her every minute of the day, and sometimes they sneaked out of the house and took a walk in the woods so the child could run and play. When they were far enough away from the house, they quit whispering, which was one of the rules—everyone in the house always spoke in a reverent whisper. They never stayed away long and made sure they returned home with plenty of time to prepare the evening meal, because the only time the embalmer left the dead bodies in the cellar was at night. A formal evening meal had always been the custom in the embalmer’s household. Although they had never once attended church services, all three of them dressed in their Sunday best for the dinner hour, spent in the big dining room with its brown wallpaper depicting Chinese peasants pulling carts of rice, with cloud-ringed mountains in the background.

      The meal routine was set in stone. The mother would give the child a bath, and then she would wash herself because the embalmer demanded cleanliness. Once they were dressed formally, she would lead the child by the hand to the kitchen, and the child would sit quietly at the kitchen table and watch her cook. If they spoke at all, it would be in whispers, because one time the embalmer had come upstairs early and caught them breaking the rule. But that had only happened once. After they healed from the punishment meted out by the embalmer, neither mother nor child ever again spoke above a whisper, not even outside in the woods as they’d done before.

      At exactly five minutes after six each evening, the mother would place the food on the dining room table, on warming trivets lit by tiny, white tea candles. Then she would pull the heavy brown velvet curtains tightly together, turn off the electric light suspended over the table, and touch a flame one by one to the tapers in the five-light candelabras positioned in the exact center of the sideboard and at the exact center of the table because the embalmer liked to dine by candlelight. Then mother and child would take their places across from each other, fold their hands in their laps in exactly the correct manner, right hand on top of the left, with right thumb resting inside the curled fingers of the left hand. Silently, they would sit and listen for the embalmer’s slow footfalls as he mounted the cellar steps.

      When