by Theresa Weir
She heard the hiss of a plastic twist cap. A second later, water hit her face and she gasped and choked on the fluid, her body racked with spasms. When she could finally breathe again, she shoved herself to a sitting position and stared at him through watery eyes. “What…do you want?” she asked.
“I want you to shut up.” He managed to retain his pleasant voice, speaking as if they were discussing dental care.
“You think I know something about you, but I don’t know anything. Why don’t you let me go? I’ll leave. I’ll go far from here.”
“And not tell anybody about me?”
“I don’t know anything about you!”
He stroked his fingers down the side of her face. “You know everything about me.”
He sat in the straw and leaned back on one elbow, crossing his ankles. “Here.” He reached into the paper bag. “I brought something for you.” He pulled out a black nylon slip and tossed it at her.
She fingered the slick fabric. “This isn’t mine.”
“Put it on.”
She dropped it.
He picked up the slip and shoved it at her. “Put it on. Now.”
“No.” She threw it back at him.
“You want to know what’s funny?” he asked. “Nobody’s looking for you. Did I tell you that? Nobody. In fact, everybody’s glad you’re gone. Guess who I saw just a few hours ago? Ol’ Sheriff Sinclair. You know what he told me? He said, and these were his exact words, ‘I’m glad the bitch is gone.’ That’s what he said. ‘I’m glad the bitch is gone.’ So I guess what I’m getting at is that it’s just you and me. And you’d better be nice to me, you’d better do what I say, because I’m the one in control here. Now put on the slip.”
She picked up the piece of lingerie, then got shakily to her feet. With her back to him, she removed her top.
“Everything,” he said. “Take off everything.”
Hoping to buy herself time, she removed her bra, then slid the black fabric over her head. She reached under the hem to remove her jeans and panties, sliding them down her hips and stepping free, then she slowly turned around, arms at her sides.
“Nice.” He nodded then checked his watch. “I have an appointment in forty-five minutes.”
“Then I guess you’d better be on your way,” she said. When he was on the ladder, she would grab his ankle and knock him off balance. He would fall. She would get away. But he didn’t move toward the ladder. He moved toward her.
I can overpower him, she tried to tell herself.
He pulled something from the pocket of his jacket. A syringe.
He snapped off the cap and moved closer.
She fought him, but he was too strong. The needle plunged into her arm. While she still had strength, she swung and kicked. But soon the room tilted. Warmth seeped into her limbs, and she slumped to the ground.
She felt his hands stroking her legs, her thighs, moving higher. She wanted to push him away, but she couldn’t lift her arms.
He unzipped his pants while she tried to remove herself, tried to fly away.
Fly away, fly away.
She braced herself for the pain of his forced penetration.
Waiting, waiting.
He hit her. Hard, against the side of the face, the blow bringing her around. And then he was shoving himself away from her as if she had some disease, as if she were some sickening, rotten thing.
Open your eyes. You have to open your eyes.
Somehow she managed to open her eyes a crack, enough to see Campbell standing over her, zipping up his pants. He must not have been able to perform.
“Sinclair was right,” he said. “You are a bitch.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Inside room six of The Palms, the air conditioner had conked out. It had to be ninety degrees, the heat intensifying the smell of ancient body odor. Daniel was searching the space again, looking for any clues he might have missed the first time through.
He dumped the wastebasket on the bed, mentally cataloging the items. A couple of smashed paper cups, a straw, the magazine she’d asked to borrow that first day.
The used rubber.
He cringed at the memory of that night, but knew he had to stay focused.
The magazine was full of holes where pictures or articles had been removed.
Why?
He held the wastebasket to the edge of the bed and scooped the trash inside, the magazine hitting the bottom with a metallic thud.
On the wall was a dime-store landscape, the frame warped, colors faded. He lifted it from the wall, disgusted to find that it covered a peephole. He ripped the sheets from the bed then pulled off the stained mattress. Lying on the box spring was a yellowed piece of stationery with The Palms in faded green print across the top. Glued to the paper were pictures cut from the magazine.
Pictures of barns. It looked as though she’d cut out every barn image she could find, gluing them down, overlapping them.
Why the hell had she cut out pictures of barns? To convince any remaining skeptics of her validity? Or was there more to it than that?
He rubbed the back of his neck. He was probably the biggest sucker of all. He’d accused Jo of being scammed, but he was the one who in the end had refused to believe that Cleo had walked out on them. One mind-blowing night and he was suddenly one of her followers.
He stepped outside and discovered that the baking heat and humidity felt better than the staleness of the motel room. He was approaching his car when his cell phone rang and he answered it.
“Daniel Sinclair?”
He backtracked to the sidewalk and building, seeking out a couple of feet of shade. “Speaking.”
“It’s Adrian Tyler.”
Daniel slumped against the wall, his eyes closed, head back. Thank God. “You’ve heard from Cleo.” A statement, not a question.
“No.”
Daniel straightened and opened his eyes.
“I want to know what’s going on,” Tyler said.
“No news.”
“Maybe I’d better come down there.” Tyler sounded pissed, sounded as if he’d spent the past several hours stewing. “You hillbillies are probably sitting on your asses, scratching your armpits and chewing a wad of tobacco while the trail gets cold.”
The man was as charming as his sister. “Calm down,” Daniel said. On one hand, he was irritated by Tyler ’s insults, on the other, he understood the guy’s frustration.
“I want to know everything,” Tyler said again. “Where was she staying? Someplace that wasn’t safe? I’ll bet you put her in some dump, didn’t you? Some crack house.” He paused then groaned. “She was walking on the edge as it was.” Tyler ’s tone became more pleading than angry. “Don’t you know how fragile she is? Couldn’t you see that? Or didn’t you give a damn?” His voice wavered and broke.
“What do you mean, your sister is fragile?” Daniel asked.
“She has problems. I don’t mean she’s crazy. Nothing like that. I’ll bet she pretty much told you she was a fraud, am I right?”
“Yeah, but she didn’t have to tell me. I knew it before she got here. I heard about that deal in California, about how she stepped in and took credit for finding that little girl.”
“That deal in California,” Tyler said. “You wanna know about that deal in California? Cleo didn’t want anybody to know about her involvement. The cops were happy to take credit, but then the press stepped in and sensationalized the whole thing. She sees things, Sinclair. She’s been lying to me about it, but I’m her brother and I can see through her, no matter how good the act.”
“If she’s psychic, why pretend she isn’t? How does that make sense?”
“It’s something to do with an accident she was in. It’s personal, and I can’t tell you any more. I’ve told you too much already. Cleo’s a private person. I just want you to find her.”
“I’m not even sure she’s missing.”
“Something’s happened,” Tyler said with conviction. “Sh
e knows how I worry, and she never goes anywhere without giving me a telephone number where she can be reached. I know her. And I know this isn’t like her. Not like her at all.”
Daniel didn’t know what to think. Maybe the whole damn family was nuts. But he couldn’t deny that he’d had an uncomfortable feeling about this from the beginning.
With the cell phone to his ear, Daniel went back into the motel room and picked up the paper Cleo had left behind. “I’m in her room right now,” Daniel said. “I found a collage she made, a bunch of pictures cut from a magazine. What’s that all about?”
At first the man was silent. Then he began to speak-a little reluctantly, Daniel thought.
“Her therapist used to have her do stuff like that.” Tyler ’s voice sounded sad. Tired. “Whenever she was having a problem handling something, she’d cut pictures out of magazines.”
“What about orange? Why doesn’t she like the color orange?”
Another silence, as if Tyler was wondering how much he should tell a stranger about his sister. “It has something to do with the car wreck and her boyfriend’s death. Listen, man. Even though I’m her brother, Cleo never spilled her guts to me. I can’t fill in the blanks for you. You just need to get off your butt and do something.”
There was more to know about Cleo. A lot more, but Daniel didn’t think he was going to get anything else out of the brother, at least not right now.
He stared at the collage in his hand. He thought back to the day of the séance, or whatever the hell it was. She’d spewed that stuff about a road and a barn. He hadn’t believed her…until he’d gone into the bathroom, until he’d seen the naked fear in her face. In that encapsulated moment, he’d believed her. In that moment, he would have believed anything she said. But then she’d gotten mad. She’d pushed him. And he’d come to his senses. Or had he? Had he really?
Had he seen the real Cleo for one unguarded moment? And when she realized how open and vulnerable she’d left herself, she’d lashed out, distracting him, bringing him back to his original impression of her- Cleo the con artist, Cleo the fraud.
“Premonition.”
Daniel’s thoughts were pulled back to the man on the other end of the line. Premonition? How had Tyler known? Was he a mind reader? Was this sixth sense a family trait? A genetic thing?
“Where’s Premonition?” Tyler asked. “Cleo never goes anywhere without him. She loves that dog.”
Daniel didn’t handle guilt well. At the moment it was eating at his stomach. “My brother’s got the dog. She gave him to my brother.”
“She never goes anywhere without that dog,” Tyler said. “She loves that dog.” His voice rose. “That dog is like her kid.”
Daniel thought about that first evening, the way she’d watched Beau and Premonition playing, her expression appearing calm. Maybe if they hadn’t just met, he would have recognized emotions hidden to a stranger.
“I’ll call you if I hear anything,” Daniel said, sweat running down his spine.
After hanging up, he continued to stare at the collage in his hand.
Groping blindly in the darkness, Cleo found the bottled water Campbell had dropped. She unscrewed the cap and drank thirstily. Before she was finished, warmth seeped into her arms and legs. She tried to replace the cap, but couldn’t match the threads. The bottle slipped from her numb fingers, cold liquid splashing on her legs. She wilted against the straw.
The sound of the dental drill rang in Dr. Burton Campbell’s ears.
His patient flinched and tried to pull away.
“Almost done, Mrs. Cabot.”
He pressed harder, his mind drifting to the woman in the barn. He’d thought it over and decided he was going to have to kill her. He didn’t want to. He wasn’t some psycho, killing people for the sake of killing them. But he had a reputation to protect, and the only way to be certain nobody ever found out about the prostitutes was to kill Cleo Tyler. It was that simple.
Beneath the sound of the drill, Mrs. Cabot, a woman in her mid-fifties, a woman with very little tolerance for pain, was making noises in her throat, a kind of panicky hum, the sounds getting louder and more desperate by the second. With an internal sigh, Burton pulled the drill away, impatient and irritated at her for making this take twice as long as it should.
“Are you feeling some discomfort?” he asked in a concerned, soothing voice.
She nodded, her brows drawn tightly together, eyes watering.
“I’m almost done,” he said. “Just one more minute and we’ll have it.”
She shook her head and said something too garbled to understand.
“More Novocaine?” he asked. He picked up a syringe from the stainless-steel dental tray. “I’ll just deaden that a little more for you.” He patted her arm. “We don’t want anyone in pain.” He stuck the needle into the fleshy part of her mouth, just under her tongue, pushing the plunger too fast, novocaine spilling down her throat.
He hadn’t meant to kill either of the prostitutes. Both had been accidents. The last one had told him she liked rough, kinky stuff-that was why he’d picked her-but at the first sign of blood, she’d freaked. She’d acted like he was the lowlife, the pervert. That pissed him off, really pissed him off. He’d shoved her, held her down. She started screaming. Well, what else could he do but make her stop?
With hindsight, he saw that he should have just shot her full of dope, making it look like she’d overdosed. But she was bruised and bloody, and he’d panicked.
Maybe he could have told a slanted version of the truth and gotten off with a couple of years, but his reputation would have been ruined.
But the drug thing might work with the Tyler woman. Oh, yeah. He’d load her up with morphine. When she was too drugged to fight him, he’d find a vein in her arm and finish her. She wouldn’t know a thing. It would actually be a pleasant experience for her.
His daydream moved on. He could even be the one to find the body.
He almost laughed out loud at the idea. How perfect. He imagined himself on the front page of the paper, looking distraught and concerned.
He smiled. “How does that feel, Mrs. Cabot?” He poked a metal instrument against the woman’s cheek. “Numb yet?”
She closed her eyes in relief, nodding, letting him know he could proceed, that everything would be all right. She was in capable hands.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Three days dragged by with no sign of Cleo. Daniel had searched every barn within a ten-mile radius of Egypt. Nothing.
“Did you check the barn at the Radcliff farm?” Beau asked.
Beau was dressed in his Tastee Delight shirt and cap, sitting at the kitchen table, working on a bowl of cereal before heading out. In true Beau fashion, he wasn’t worried about Cleo. Not that he didn’t care. If something bad happened, he would just pretend that she’d left town.
It had to be nice, Daniel thought. For most people who suffered a great loss or witnessed an unnecessary act of violence, there was no looking back, no returning to the way it had been before. Because now you had proof that bad things happened for no reason. And life didn’t always make sense.
Beau hadn’t been tainted by the horrors of life. He didn’t know that most things were out of his control. Control wasn’t anything he thought about. He could sit there eating his cereal. When he took a bite and it slid to his stomach, the food didn’t churn until it turned into a heavy stone. At night, he slept a deep sleep, because in his own mind his mother was at a nursing home. In his own mind she would be coming back any day now, and Cleo had simply gotten tired of Egypt.
Daniel had gone without sleep for too long. He couldn’t stay focused. “The Radcliff place?” he asked. “There’s no barn on the Radcliff place. It burned down along with the house.”
“There’s a barn. A different barn. I saw it when I was riding with Percy, delivering mail. He turned wrong, and we ended up at a barn. There was a lot of weeds in the road. Percy got some of them stuck under the car.”
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br /> “A barn?” Daniel asked, leaning both hands on the table, staring at his brother. “Are you sure?”
Beau took another bite of cereal, swallowed, then continued. “A big, broke barn with one of those wind things on top.”
“A weathervane?”
“Yeah. Weathervane.”
Beau had an eye for detail. If he said there was a weathervane, there was a weathervane.
“With a pig. It had a pig on it.”
Daniel grabbed his truck keys off the table and headed for the door. “Thanks, Beau.”
Hands on her. Cold hands. Rolling her to her back. Something tight on her biceps. Tight, like a big rubber band. Somebody slapping the inside of her arm, rubbing, slapping, breathing hard. Cleo felt a sharp/dull poke. The rubber band fell away. The ground fell away.
Daniel pulled down the lane that led to the Radcliff place, his heart rate increasing.
There was the spot where the house used to be, the only thing left a cement foundation and a brick chimney. To the left, across the lane, was a small hill of soil, littered with the ugly kind of weeds that went along with disturbed earth. A huge milking barn had once stood there. As far as Daniel knew, the Radcliffs still owned the place, but they’d quit farming and had moved to the city.
There was a lane of sorts, leading past the place where the barn used to be. The weeds were so tall and overgrown that his two-wheel-drive truck wouldn’t clear them. He shut off the engine and got out, slamming the door behind him.
Birds called from nearby trees, and the sun beat down on his head. He walked along the path, noting that someone had been there within the last few days-weed stalks were broken, leaves crushed.
That didn’t mean anything. It was the perfect place for a party. He spent half the summer breaking up keggers.
The road turned to loose black dirt that was almost sand. The weeds were fewer now, the earth unable to hold enough moisture to nurture them.
Directly ahead was a barn. Red, like most barns in the area. Loco weed, mare’s tail, and goldenrod grew around it. On the cupola was the weathervane, just as Beau-and Cleo-had said. A sliding door ran on a track and was big enough to drive a combine through. Next to it was a regular door cut from the side of the barn, hinged, reinforced with a diagonal piece of wood running from top to bottom, and rehung.
