In the Dark of the Night

by John Saul

  With Hofstetter preceding him, Richmond made his exit, certain that Ruston would say nothing that might upset either of the summer people.

  Two minutes later Dan and Kevin were back on the street, and as Ruston watched them go, he was certain of only one thing.

  Whatever it was that those kids hadn’t told him, they hadn’t told their parents, either.

  But what was it they were hiding?

  And how was he going to find out?

  THE ATMOSPHERE OF grief hanging over Carol Langstrom’s small house on Beech Street was almost palpable as Rusty Ruston climbed the three steps to the front door and rang the bell. He waited a few seconds and was about to press it again when he noticed that the door was slightly ajar. Easing it open, he leaned in, saw a knot of people in the small living room that opened off the tiny foyer, and stepped inside.

  Leaving the door exactly as far open as when he’d arrived, he glanced down the hall toward the back of the house, saw three familiar faces among the half-dozen women who had managed to pack themselves into the tiny kitchen, and decided Carol was more likely to be at the center of the group in the living room than trying to make order out of the milling throng in the kitchen. He took off his hat as he stepped through the archway, glanced around for someplace to put it, and wasn’t surprised to see that every flat surface in the room was already filled with an array of casseroles, salads, cakes, and pies, as well as platters filled with cheese and crackers, cookies, muffins, and half a dozen varieties of pickles and olives. It seemed as if every woman in town had responded to Ellis’s death by heading directly to the kitchen.

  Carol Langstrom herself sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace, a box of tissues next to a teacup on the coffee table in front of her. Next to her was a woman who looked familiar, though Rusty couldn’t immediately identify her. Carol appeared to have aged ten years in the past two days, yet she managed a wan smile when she saw him.

  He dropped into a squat so his eyes were level with hers, and took her hand in his. It felt cold and clammy, and all the strength seemed to have drained out of it. “How are you holding up, Carol?” he asked.

  Her gaze fixed on him for a moment, then wandered over all the women whose soft murmurings had slowly fallen silent as they realized the sheriff had arrived. They were now looking at him, one or two even edging closer to make certain they could hear whatever he might have to say. “I had no idea I even knew this many people,” Carol said, her voice breaking. “Let alone that they were such good friends.”

  “That’s because you’re such a good friend,” Rusty said.

  Carol’s eyes glistened with fresh tears.

  “I’ve spoken with the coroner,” Rusty went on, dropping his voice in the hope that only Carol would be able to hear him, but knowing it was futile. “He’s going to do the autopsy this weekend.”

  “Autopsy?” Carol parroted the word as if it had no meaning to her at all.

  “Whenever there’s an unattended death, the state requires an autopsy,” Rusty explained.

  Carol stared at him a moment, and when she spoke, her voice was flat and the words were not a question but a statement. “So you’ll find out that my baby was murdered.” There was a pause, and then she added. “Will you find out who killed him?”

  Ruston chose his next words carefully. “At this point I don’t know what the report will show, Carol. We’ll have to wait and see. But I have every reason to believe that Dr. Bicks will be able to tell us exactly what happened. We’re doing everything we can until we know the exact cause of death.”

  Carol took a deep breath, seemed to come to some kind of a decision, and finally let the breath out in a long sigh. “Can I bury him?” she asked, a sob breaking her voice. “I should do it on Monday.” She took another ragged breath, and her eyes beseeched Ruston. “Can I bury my baby on Monday? Please?”

  Rusty nodded, and spoke more to the woman seated next to Carol than to Carol herself. “Tell the funeral home to call the coroner’s office. I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to—” He hesitated, then forced himself to finish the sentence. “—pick him up tomorrow, late in the afternoon.”

  The woman nodded, then held out her hand. “I’m Ashley Sparks,” she said. Ruston’s eyes widened, and Ashley explained. “I met Carol years ago—actually, I think I was one of her first customers.”

  Carol reached over and took Ashley’s hand, squeezing it affectionately. “The very first.” She turned to Ruston, dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex. “I still have her check framed on the wall over my desk. And I should have all the rest of them up there, too—I think she single-handedly kept me in business that first summer.” For the first time since Ruston had arrived, a genuine smile finally curled the corners of Carol Langstrom’s mouth. “I’d buy something one day, and Ashley would come in the next morning and buy it from me.” She squeezed Ashley’s hand again. “The morning I opened, I didn’t even have enough cash left for food for our dinner, and even though a lot of people came in that day, Ashley was the only one who actually bought.”

  “That’s not true,” Ashley interrupted. “I remember a little Spode figurine that Sandy Banks bought—”

  “That was so badly damaged that I could only charge three dollars for it,” Carol shot back.

  “You should have charged twenty-five, which I told you at the time. You were selling everything so cheap I felt like I was robbing you. Why do you think I kept coming back? I recognized a sucker when I saw one!”

  Carol shook her head in defeat and turned back to Ruston. “The sad part is, she’s right. But what she’s not telling you is that she started making me sell things for what I could get for them instead of ten percent more than I’d paid for them. God, I was so dumb until Ashley came along—she should be running the shop herself.”

  “And put in the hours you do?” Ashley said, pulling back in an exaggerated show of horror. “No thanks! I’d much rather mind your business than my own.” She turned to Ruston. “So now you know far more about me than you ever wanted to know, unless you’re as much of an antiques freak as Carol and I are. It’s nice to meet you. My husband—”

  “Actually, I met your husband earlier.”

  She nodded. “He dropped me off here on the way to your office. I trust he and Dan Brewster didn’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves?”

  “They were no problem at all,” Ruston assured her. “And thanks for being here,” he said, his eyes shooting toward Carol Langstrom for an instant.

  “I couldn’t be anyplace else.”

  “Okay, then,” Ruston said, rising to his feet and wincing at the pain in his knees.

  Carol stood up, too. “You’ll call me?” she asked. “As soon as you hear anything at all?”

  “Of course. You’ll know everything almost as soon as I do.”

  Carol sank back onto the sofa as Rusty made his way to the door. “I can make it until Monday,” she said quietly. “This is Saturday. I can make it until Monday.”

  “Of course you can,” Ashley replied, once more taking Carol’s hand in her own. “We’ll just take it a day at a time. We’re all here to help you do whatever needs to be done.”

  Carol gazed once more at all the people who had come to her aid. “I keep thinking about all the things that need to be done, and I keep making all these lists in my mind, and—”

  “And you don’t need to take care of anything right now. You don’t need to think about cooking, or cleaning, or anything else. We can take care of everything.”

  “Everything except the shop,” Carol sighed.

  “The shop?” Ashley echoed. “Why are you worried about it? You’ll leave it closed over the weekend—all week, if you need to.”

  Carol shook her head. “And lose the busiest weekend of the summer? I can’t afford it, Ashley—I’ve got so much inventory in the back room I can hardly move around in there, and if I’m closed next week it’ll all sit there for the rest of the summer. And I can’t afford to just keep it all in inv
entory.”

  “Then I’ll do it,” Ashley said.

  Carol stared at her. “You?”

  “Didn’t you just tell the sheriff I could run it as well as you? In fact, didn’t I hear you tell him I should be running it instead of you?”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” Ashley declared. “I’m not really doing you much good sitting around here holding your hand, and Lord knows you’ve got enough people in the house that you don’t need me. So until further notice, I’m running the shop. I’m assuming the key is in the usual place under that awful Chinese import urn you think makes such a great planter?”

  Carol’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know where the key is?”

  “I found it one day when I was poking around. So that’s that—I’m running the shop until you feel like coming back. Deal?”

  “Are you sure?” Carol asked, her eyes again glistening with tears.

  Life would go on, even after Monday.

  Ashley nodded. “Whatever you need, we’ll take care of it.”

  “I wish—” Carol began, then cut off her own words as she felt herself beginning to sink back into a morass of grief.

  “I know, honey,” Ashley said softly. “We all wish it. But these things happen, and all we can ever do is try to cope.”

  “I know,” Carol cried, “but why did it have to happen to Ellis?”

  No one had an answer for that question, and it hung, unanswered, in the air.

  ERIC CAST THE spinner out from the dock, watched it arc through the air and splash into the water, and slowly reeled it in. Yet when a big bass rose out of the depths to nibble at the lure, he barely even noticed it, let alone tried to jig it into snapping at the hook. Instead he merely sat down on the dock, let his bare feet dangle in the water, and reeled in the rest of the line. Next to him, Tad was still rummaging through the tackle box, supposedly looking for just the right lure that would bring a nice walleye home for dinner, but in reality paying no more attention to the fishing gear than Eric was to the fish that had nearly taken his hook. For his part, Kent Newell was sprawled out on the dock, staring silently up at the cloudless sky.

  No one who happened to look down at them from the house would suspect that there was anything on their minds other than fishing and lying in the sun. But Eric’s stomach was still faintly queasy from the nightmare he’d had, and out of the corner of his eye he could see that Tad’s face was still pale from the violent nausea his own version of the dream evoked. And though Kent hadn’t actually said anything, his very silence this morning had told Eric that he had something on his mind.

  Then, as the spoon on Eric’s line came out of the water, Kent said: “I had a dream last night.”

  As Tad’s head snapped up and their eyes met, a cold knot formed in Eric’s stomach.

  Kent sat up, pulled his knees up against his chest, and wrapped his arms around them. When he spoke again, his voice was little more than a whisper. “I dreamed that Ellis Langstrom’s arm was in that box.” He looked first at Tad, then at Eric, knowing he didn’t need to tell either of them he was talking about the white box they’d found in the hidden room yesterday.

  “S-So?” Tad stammered, refusing even to meet Kent’s gaze now.

  “So have you guys ever wondered how come Dr. Darby took all that stuff apart?”

  It was the last thing Tad had been expecting Kent to say, and now he finally looked at him. “Took it apart?” he repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  “All of it,” Kent said. “The table that was missing a leg. The hacksaw frame with no blade.”

  “M-Maybe they weren’t even together when he bought them,” Tad suggested, but even as he spoke the words, he knew they rang hollow, and even though he was looking at Kent, he could see out of the corner of his eye that Eric was shaking his head.

  “They wouldn’t ship the table with only three legs, would they?” Kent asked. “I mean, if they were going to take the legs off, they’d have taken all of them off, right?”

  Tad said nothing.

  “And what about the scalpels?” Kent pressed. “Who’d put them in another box if you were going to send the doctor’s bag anyway?”

  Tad shrugged, though his skin was starting to feel cold and clammy despite the warmth of the day. “Okay, so let’s say he took them apart. So what?”

  Kent’s eyes flickered between Tad and Eric. “Haven’t you guys noticed that ever since we started putting that stuff back together, things started to happen?”

  There was a silence as the full meaning of Kent’s words sank in.

  “Tippy and the scalpels,” Eric finally breathed. “And the hacksaw—we put the blade in the hacksaw, and Langstrom’s body was missing an arm.”

  A fresh wave of nausea broke over Tad as the still fresh memory of last night’s nightmare leaped up in his mind.

  He’d been sitting at a table.

  Jeffrey Dahmer’s table.

  And he’d been eating—

  Tad’s stomach heaved, but he’d eaten so little for breakfast that nothing came up but the foul taste of bile.

  “And I keep thinking about the lamp,” Kent said. “We put it back together, too.”

  “You think maybe something else is going to happen?”

  Kent shrugged. “How should I know? But doesn’t it seem like we should at least figure out who Darby got it from?” When neither Eric nor Tad responded, Kent went on. “Maybe if we can figure out what’s gonna happen, we can figure out how—” His voice faltered, then he looked away.

  “You mean maybe we can figure out how to keep ourselves from doing it?” Tad finally said, his voice shaking.

  “We didn’t do anything,” Kent said. “All we did was have a bunch of dreams!”

  “The same dreams,” Tad argued. “And if we didn’t have anything to do with Tippy or Ellis Langstrom, how come we all dreamed about it?”

  “I don’t know!” Kent flared. “And neither do you. All I’m saying is we should find out.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” Tad demanded. “Just go online and Google lamps and murders?”

  “No,” Kent shot back. “We go back in that room and look in the ledger. We find out where the lamp came from, then start looking in those books Darby put in there.” His gaze shifted from Tad to Eric, then back to Tad. “We have to go back in there and find out who owned the lamp. And I have to find out what’s in that white box.”

  “No way,” Tad said.

  “We have to,” Kent repeated. “Besides, what if that box is empty? What if my dream didn’t mean anything at all?”

  Tad’s jaw clenched—the last thing he wanted to do was go back in that room. Not today—not ever! But what if Kent was right? What if the box was empty?

  “Come on, Tad,” Kent said, sensing the other boy wavering. “We have to go.”

  “You can go back in if you want, but Eric and I aren’t,” Tad said, but his voice was hollow. “Right, Eric?”

  Eric shook his head. “I think Kent’s right,” he said softly. “We all have to go. We can just go in there, find out those two things, and come right back out.”

  Kent stood up. “C’mon,” he said to Tad. “Nothing’s going to happen. It’s just a room.”

  FIVE MINUTES LATER they stood in the secret room, bathed in the amber glow of the lamp. As the now familiar voices began to whisper at the edges of their consciousness, a serene calm fell over all three boys.

  The white box sat quietly waiting on the tabletop, exactly as they had left it, but none of the three made the slightest move to lift its lid.

  It was still not time.

  Eric drew the journal closer to him and slowly turned the pages until at last he found the entry he was looking for.

  The entry that identified the lamp.

  “E.G.,” he whispered, reading from the ledger. “The lamp came from Plainfield, Wisconsin, from the estate of someone with the initials E.G.” He closed the ledger and looked at the stack of books on the fl
oor. Surely one of them had an index.

  Eric picked up the first book on the stack, then the second.

  With the third one, he finally found what he was looking for, and as he began to scan the pages at the back of the thick volume, names seemed to leap out at him.

  Names he’d already found on the Internet.

  Jeffrey Dahmer, who had once owned the table on which both the ledger and the white box now sat.

  Patrick Kearney, who had cut up boys Eric’s age with the hacksaw.

  Jack the Ripper, who had kept his surgical instruments in pristine condition.

  And listed under G, in type that seemed almost to leap off the page, he found the name he was looking for.

  Gein, Edward, p. 72.

  Eric turned the pages back until he came to the right one, and found himself gazing first at a photograph of what looked like nothing more than an old farmer.

  Then he began to read: “‘Edward Theodore Gein,’” he said softly as both Tad and Kent listened in utter silence, “‘also known as the Plainfield Ghoul, was a serial killer and a grave robber who made unspeakable items out of his victims’ body parts. When he was arrested in 1957, police found a disemboweled and beheaded woman strung up and dressed like a deer, hanging in his kitchen. They also found bowls made of human craniums, a box full of noses, a belt made of women’s nipples, female genitalia in a shoe box, the carefully stuffed and mounted faces of nine women on his wall, and furniture and lamp shades made from human skin.’”

  “Lamp shades,” Tad echoed.

  “Made from human skin,” Kent breathed.

  Involuntarily, Eric’s eyes went to the lamp shade that was glowing with an ethereal light in the shadowy room, then to the other object that sat on Jeffrey Dahmer’s table. “Open the box,” he said.

  It seemed to shimmer with an energy of its own as Kent’s hands reached for it with the same involuntary movement that had taken Eric’s eyes from the book to Ed Gein’s lamp a moment before.