She went in and stopped at the first bathroom she found. Just off the kitchen, adjacent to what looked like a servant or guest bedroom, she found a tiny but perfectly good toilet, sink and shower stall. Well, she thought, the tinier the better. Fewer places for vermin to hide. She’d heard them earlier, skulking in the shadows of the ballroom, and had no desire for a further encounter.
Quickly, she retrieved her black travel tote from the kitchen table and returned to the little room. The décor left much to be desired: pink wallpaper with a paisley design, chocolate brown pedestal sink and toilet, a hazy glass shower stall with more than a little rust creeping up its metal frame. An odd falling sensation tumbled through her, and she grasped the sink edge to steady herself. God, she better not mix her meds anymore. Though she’d never experimented with drugs, she supposed this weird, unsettled sensation was how they made a person feel.
When the room stopped tilting, she opened the shower door and looked with repugnance at the swirling rust stain, the ancient drain grate gone black with age. Emily twisted on the hot and cold knobs and was pleasantly surprised at the clearness of the water that spewed forth. Within moments the water was hot enough to steam up the mirror. All the better. She had no desire to see any more than she already had of the room. Renovating it would be, she decided, one of the first jobs she tackled at Watermere.
The clean white towel she’d brought curled in a ball on the edge of the sink, Emily peeled off her shirt and stepped out of her jeans. The steamy air was exhilarating on her bare skin. God, how she’d been craving a shower. The smell of the hot water, lazy and faintly metallic, routed the dank scent of must that had until now predominated. Her bra unclasped and hung over a towel rod, she drew down her underwear and tossed them aside. Immediately the drowsy mist moistened her pubic hair. The sultry air caressed the skin of her bare buttocks. Emily reached out and rubbed clear a circle on the mirror. The condensation wetted her hand, but rather than drying it on the towel, she slowly drew her palm along her belly, just under the navel. Her nipples hardened.
Making sure the lock on the doorknob was fixed in place, she crossed to the shower and gradually made her way under the scalding water. Ordinarily she hated too-hot showers, but this one felt sublime. The painful needling on her skin, the steam filling her lungs and nearly stealing her breath… God, it was so good it was all she could do not to faint. One hand braced on the white wall beside the showerhead, she leaned forward and took her time with it, her right hand kneading her breasts. Her fingers crawled down her tummy, massaging. The delicious burning water sprayed over her forehead, her eyelids, pure sweet runnels of it lapping over her lips, her teeth. She drank in the tropical spray, the wall upon which she leaned changing, growing pliant, rubbery, the warm surface writhing beneath her fingertips—
Emily froze.
She opened her eyes and saw the outline of a face and a large pair of hands reaching toward her. She opened her mouth to scream but couldn’t.
She watched the large finger shapes in the wall swelling and closing over her hand, the face pressing forward, leering, the pupilless eyes mere inches from her own, the showerhead itself bowing up from the strain of the undulating wall.
Emily screamed.
She pulled away, and in the moment before her elbow crashed against the stall door, she saw—she felt—the large fingers pulling her hand into the wall, the staring face grinning in triumph.
Emily landed on the pink tile and dove for the door. Her wet fingers fumbled about the lock for an eternity before she ripped open the door and dashed to the foyer. She’d never in her life been out of doors without clothes on, but she scarcely noticed her nakedness as she sprinted over the biting gravel driveway to the Camry. Her hands were shaking so wildly she was barely able to work the ignition, and she cut the wheel too severely as she swerved out of the garage. The edge of the driver’s side bumper scraped against the wooden garage as she arrowed the Camry toward the lane, the car sluing as rocks spattered the surrounding grass.
She had to calm down, had to corral her galloping heart. She’d escaped, that was what mattered. If she spiraled out of control now, she would only have herself to blame.
There, she thought as she pulled onto the empty country road. That was better. Safe and away from the house, from the staring, ravenous face and those horrible writhing hands.
Then, a thought jolted through her, and Emily’s foot recoiled from the accelerator. The Camry decelerated quickly, the gravel road grabbing her tires as if refusing to let Emily leave. She stopped the car, moved the gearshift to park.
What on earth was she doing?
She thought of the sedative her doctor had prescribed…Zolpidem, that had been its name. He gave it to her for insomnia, but when she looked it up on the Internet she learned it also had hallucinogenic qualities. And that didn’t even take into account how it might interact with her heart medication, her birth control.
So what was more likely? That she’d experienced an upsetting—and incredibly vivid—hallucination brought on by prescription drugs or that a monstrous male figure living in the walls of Watermere caught her masturbating?
She slumped forward on the wheel, a weary laughter taking hold. To think she’d nearly thrown away this new life with Paul because of a fluky drug reaction. Was she really so skittish? She continued to laugh as she pointed the car toward the shoulder and began the process of turning around. By the time she was heading back to Watermere, she’d all but managed to discount the idea that there were spirits inside the old house, that there’d been rubbery hands growing out of the tile walls. As the Camry moved down the lane, she was able to dismiss nearly every detail of the hallucination.
But try as she would, the leering white face would not completely fade.
Timmons and McLaughlin sat across from Sam, and Sam could tell by their faces that they’d rather be discussing anything but the disappearance of Daryl Applegate. Though no one could stand the guy, his vanishing had clearly shaken both deputies.
He couldn’t blame them.
Sam knew they’d come up with the same thing—nothing—that it was a waste of time, but he knew he wouldn’t get much done today anyway, so what was the use of pretending it wasn’t on all their minds? He wished he’d met them somewhere other than the police station. Lately, he hated coming here, as though the dual disappearances of Brand and Applegate were proof he didn’t belong here, didn’t deserve the job.
Doug Timmons started them off. “Deputy Applegate’s car was found at the quarry, near the back part that’s never used. No fingerprints were found inside Deputy Applegate’s—”
“I think we can call him Daryl,” Sam said.
He noticed his two deputies studying him, imagined what they saw. Eyes bloodshot from too much drinking and too little sleep, three days’ growth of beard, the shirt of his uniform even more wrinkled than normal, a coffee stain on the belly. He didn’t worry so much about Doug Timmons, who was thirty-five and had a wife and three daughters. But Tommy McLaughlin was younger, more impressionable. He was looking at Sam like a boy whose dad just struck out to lose a father-son baseball game.
Barlow sat up in his chair, tried to get it together. “Go on, Doug. You were talking about where Daryl’s car was found. As luck would have it—bad luck, I should say—the cruiser wasn’t discovered until three days after he was last seen. We’d assumed—wrongly, it seems—that being the screw-up he was, he just knocked off early on the night of the Fourth and went home. He wasn’t due back to work until the sixth, and none of us really worried about him until the seventh.”
“When the foreman at the quarry called,” McLaughlin said.
“Right,” Sam said. “So we know the last anyone saw of him was the evening of Independence Day, and that was me.”
McLaughlin said, “No one saw Daryl leave here, so we can’t say for sure when our window starts and ends.”
“Say eight o’clock,” Sam said. “I left the station at seven that evening to take in
the fireworks, and Daryl wouldn’t have left right away. So we’ve got from eight o’clock on the night of the Fourth to three p.m. on the seventh, when the quarry called.”
“That’s a pretty big window,” Timmons said.
“Let’s talk specifics,” Sam said, feeling better to be discussing facts, even if they’d been covered a dozen times before. “Daryl’s car was found on the north side of town, inside the limestone quarry behind a mountainous pile of rocks.”
“Whoever drove the car there was probably not Daryl,” Timmons said, “so the car was put there to hide it.”
“Or to make us think Daryl had disappeared there,” McLaughlin added.
Sam nodded, said, “Whoever ditched the car—if it wasn’t Daryl, and I agree with Doug it probably wasn’t—either had an accomplice who picked him up from that point and drove away, or else left on foot.”
“The quarry’s in the middle of nowhere. If someone walked away from there, he had a long way to get back to wherever he was going,” Timmons said.
“And the county boys found nothing?” McLaughlin asked.
“Not a thing,” Sam said.
“Just like Ted Brand,” Timmons said, voicing what they’d all been thinking.
Sam crossed his arms. “Let’s go down that road, Doug. We’ve discussed it already, but there might be something we missed.” He put his feet up on the desk. “Both missing persons are men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five. One was a good-looking guy with an affluent job and a nice car. The other one was…”
“Daryl,” McLaughlin said.
“That’s right,” Sam said. “Not exactly twins, but not completely different either. Brand had a history of skirt-chasing, and we know Daryl liked women an awful lot too.”
“It’s all he talked about,” Timmons said. He opened his mouth to expand on that, but stopped. Sam commiserated. It was the way all their brainstorming sessions went. They danced around it, but the truth was that Daryl was bad news. Sam knew the guy had been a heel, but the more he heard from his two remaining deputies, the more he realized Applegate had held back when he was around. Timmons had gotten on Daryl’s computer and found a good many nude pictures of teenage girls. McLaughlin talked about Daryl’s extensive porn collection, how the tapes were just lying around the house. Sam knew a lot of guys who got into the stuff, but to leave it lying around in plain sight, to make no effort to conceal it from people who might stop by…
Which brought him to another revelation about Daryl Applegate. The guy was a total loner. He’d suspected as much, but he’d never realized to what extent Daryl craved yet almost never received human contact. The bartenders down at Easter’s Tavern—a shithole if ever there was one, a place Sam wouldn’t be caught dead in and only visited when there was trouble there—said Daryl was a regular. He’d come in four or five times a week to drink and shoot pool.
But after he’d been there awhile he’d just stare. A waitress said it creeped her out. Like when he was drinking he forgot how impolite it was to ogle a woman for minutes on end. What bothered Sam, one of the many things he found out about Applegate while investigating his disappearance, was the way Daryl had spouted off about being a cop if anyone ever called him on his behavior. He’d play that card every chance he got, it seemed. A boyfriend or a husband got tired of him eyeing his girl or wife, Daryl would pull out his badge, remind him he was still a cop even if he was off-duty. But Applegate hardly ever got lucky. He was too drunk and too grating for even the easiest of the local barflies.
Realizing both deputies were watching him, wondering what was on his mind, Sam said, “We know that Daryl had no shortage of enemies. There were enough people he’d written tickets for, mouthed off to, that the perpetrator could be any number of people. How’d your latest check go, Doug?”
Timmons counted off the leads on his fingers. “There were four guys who had run-ins with Applegate who also had criminal records. One of them has since moved to Arizona. Of the other three, one has an airtight alibi—he was at the fireworks with his family, home with his family, or working at the trailer factory during the period we’re talking about—one is in jail, and the other, well, the other we’re still looking into.”
Sam knew the suspect Timmons was talking about. Everyone but Kenny Sayler was alibied out.
And Kenny Sayler hated Daryl Applegate.
Sayler was a drunk whose only alibi was that he’d spent most of that time working on the slipshod deck he was trying to slap onto his rundown house. What bothered Sam was the interval between the guy’s last dispute with Daryl and Daryl’s disappearance. They’d had a run-in over a year ago about a traffic violation that had carried over into Easter’s Tavern. Sayler had threatened Daryl, and the witnesses said Applegate had tried to arrest him but was too drunk to actually do it. None of them thought Kenny Sayler was capable of murder, but Sam wasn’t ruling him out. He lived on Gordon Road, which Ted Brand would have traveled the night of his disappearance. Could Sayler have been the motorist who gave the lawyer a ride? Might Ted Brand’s body be buried under Sayler’s new deck?
He’d interviewed the man already, and he seemed clean. Stupid, a bit truculent, but probably not a killer. Still, it was all they had.
Sam said, “Doug, I want you to go to Easter’s tonight, see what you can find out.”
“We’ve all three been there already.”
“Not during happy hour. Maybe they’ll say more when they’re drunk. Watch Sayler, see how he acts.”
“Okay,” Timmons sighed, resigned.
“Tommy,” Sam said, “you talk to Sayler’s co-workers at the gas station. See what they have to say about his altercation with Daryl. Maybe he let something slip.”
McLaughlin followed Timmons to the door.
“I’m going to meet with Daryl’s father to tell him we don’t have jack,” Sam said.
McLaughlin grinned. “Tell the selectman we send our regards.”
On the drive over Sam thought of how Daryl had looked at Julia, how the guy had gone quiet whenever she was mentioned. It made him think of Ted Brand, of how a guy like him would have gone crazy over a beauty like her. How Brand might have stopped to offer her a ride, hoping to get more.
Thinking of that got him remembering what happened fifteen years before, and that got him dialing through the radio, hoping to find a song that would bring his mind back to the present. He found one by George Strait, “The Fireman.” One of his favorites. He tried singing along but his heart wasn’t in it. Not for the first time that day he wondered if he’d done the right thing back then.
Or whether he’d created a monster.
Emily decided to wait outside for Paul.
She wondered if she could find her way back to the graveyard, see that stone he’d freaked out about. It certainly was unique—elaborate designs scarred by ugly hands, the sheer size of the stone and its obsidian hue—but did that warrant Paul’s reaction? He acted like touching the thing put him into some kind of trance. Then that childish show of his newfound athleticism, the mad dash through the woods. Proving to her he still had a lot of growing up to do. But wasn’t that why he needed her?
To her left, the undergrowth rustled. Emily pivoted that way, scanned the brush but could see nothing. Of course it was nothing. Funny, though, how much it had sounded like a person.
Her stomach growled. She thought of turning back, either forcing him into talking to her or getting something to eat. But the way Paul talked, he was going to be at it awhile. What was more, seeing his new streamlined frame had rendered her self-conscious. In the past she’d thought her body better-shaped than his, but now his muscles made her more aware of her little pot belly, her thick ankles. It wouldn’t kill her to skip a meal.
She thought of how he’d acted, so intent on locking her out of the den. Emily pursed her lips. It was just another boyish display meant to show her how changed he was. His attempt to prove once and for all his moving here had been the right thing. Well, if that’s what it too
k for him to feel vindicated, she’d let him have his little delusion. As for her, she’d believe he was a writer when she saw his name on the bestseller list.
She turned and though she was far too deep in the forest to see the house, she pictured him up there, in the den window, typing in that pathetic way he had. She wondered what tripe he was trying to pawn off as fiction.
It was getting dark. She started back toward the house, amazed at how much time had passed. The last place she wanted to be was within those walls without Paul by her side, but it would soon be night, and she couldn’t stay out here.
Unbidden, the leering white face loomed in her memory.
“No,” she said aloud, shaking her head. Her heart stuttered painfully in her chest, her throat suddenly desiccated by fear. If it wasn’t a drug reaction, there was no explaining what had happened to her, but not everything could be explained, could it? Look at Paul, who was almost an entirely new person, so different from the uncertain man she’d known.
You mean the man you could dominate, a voice whispered.
Emily’s nostrils flared as she sucked in frustrated breath. Yes, the old Paul had been more tractable, but hadn’t he been a little boring, as well? A bit too predictable?
She remembered their kiss earlier, the only real contact they’d had before he went loony tunes and left her in the graveyard. His mouth had been hot, his tongue strong and sensual. The feel of his muscles bunching under her fingertips, the broad outcropping of his chest pressing into her.
The woman watching from the window.
Gasping, Emily whirled, half-expecting a tall female figure to be bearing down on her. But the driveway and the surrounding woods were untenanted, quiet save for the swelling chorus of insects.
Soon it would be dark. And she was certain she hadn’t imagined the woman in the window.
Shivering, Emily jogged up the porch steps and reentered Watermere.
House of Skin Page 22
