The Grip

by Griffin Hayes

  An excerpt from Malice by Griffin Hayes. Available where eBooks are sold.

  Chapter 1

  The stranger grinned and his sunken cheeks made his face look like a skull.

  “Go on, Lysander,” his father, Glenn, scolded. “Shake the man’s hand.”

  Lysander Shore’s family hadn’t been in Millingham longer than a week, but he was sure somehow he had met this man somewhere before. Maybe filling bags at the grocery store or delivering mail down the street? This was going to torture him the whole day.

  Lysander stuffed his lunch into his knapsack and then slowly held out his hand. The cold palm that slid into his a second later made Lysander’s stomach turn. His father must have noticed the discomfort on Lysander’s face, because Glenn’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment. At least for once it wasn’t about Lysander’s black nail polish or matching combat boots.

  “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” Glenn said, clearing a place on the couch where the stranger could sit. “We’re still getting settled.”

  A pin on the lapel of the man’s suit jacket read “Peter Hume” and below that “Zellermann’s.” He was probably an insurance guy, Lysander thought, here about the fire that had destroyed their old house in Hayward.

  The two men spoke about how the house was a complete write-off, his father running through a list of things that were destroyed, when Peter Hume peered up at Lysander. The odd glint in his eye instantly made Lysander uneasy.

  “Do you have any pictures?” Hume asked Glenn. “So we can take inventory of what you lost.”

  “Yeah,” Glenn said, looking at his watch. “You need those now? I gotta leave for work.”

  Hume smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid so.”

  Glenn sighed, as he always did when asked to do something menial but necessary, and headed for the kitchen. “You want something to drink?”

  “Earl Grey would be nice.”

  “That’s the only tea we have,” Glenn said robotically. He seemed dazed. Or was he hypnotized? Lysander couldn’t tell which.

  Hume’s eyes were shining. “Legend has it an old Chinese man gave Lord Grey the recipe for saving his son’s life, if you believe that sort of thing.”

  His father shrugged and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Now Lysander and Peter Hume were alone and the air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. Slowly, the smile disappeared from Hume’s face.

  “You were warned not to come here,” Hume said, his voice gravelly, almost hoarse. Lysander peered down at Hume’s scalp and saw the man’s translucent flesh squeezing the plates of his skull together.

  Lysander’s breath caught in his throat.

  “He knows, Lysander.” Hume’s voice was more forceful. Desperate. “Knows you’re here. He knew the minute you arrived. Felt you crossing the town line, just like I did…”

  Lysander’s mouth was frozen open in a mix of confusion and disbelief.

  And then, Lysander knew where he had seen this man before. It was Hume’s hollow face that had been glaring back at him from the old weathered placard that greeted visitors on their way into town. And etched below him in crooked red letters had been the words:

  STAY AWAY

  But at the time Lysander was sure his mind had been playing tricks on him, because when he passed that same weathered sign on the town line days later, everything had changed. Even Hume’s face was gone. In its place was a beaming, happy-looking family.

  WELCOME TO MILLINGHAM!

  A tiny impression appeared in Hume’s forehead, and from it a thick drop of blood rolled down his face. The man’s sockets were receding into the back of his head. A noise came from the kitchen and Hume’s cavernous eyes darted over Lysander’s shoulder. The fear bubbling in his voice was palpable. “He hasn’t found me,” Hume whispered. “Not yet. But you. You, he’ll know right away.”

  Lysander tried to say something, anything, but all that came was a moan.

  Run Lysander! Turn your ass around and RUN!

  “He could be any one of them,” Hume croaked. “They all look so innocent, don’t they? With their little white houses and their hybrid SUVs. Hard to imagine there’s a monster coiled somewhere in all that.” Hume’s eyes—black bottomless chasms now—rose to meet Lysander’s, and when he did the expression on his face fell flat. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You haven’t remembered yet.”

  Lysander felt the muscles in his chest knot with fear.

  “He’s come to finish it, Lysander.” The structure of his face was coming undone. Blood flowed freely from his forehead. Into his mouth. Drenching the dark fabric of his suit and the upholstery of the couch. Lysander could see bits of splintered bone and flaps of dangling flesh. It looked like someone had redecorated his face with a tire iron. “That’s why he’s here. To finish it…”

  Lysander staggered back and nearly tripped over a moving box filled with old books. Glenn reached out a hand and caught him. He was holding a cup of tea. A photo album was wedged under his armpit. “Mr. Hume?”

  Hume’s face rose. Tight and skull-like, but nothing like the monstrosity from a moment before.

  Glenn was handing Hume his Earl Grey when he turned to Lysander. “You better hurry or you’re going to be late for school. It’s already a quarter past.”

  The alarm in his father’s voice rattled him. Lysander snatched his school bag off the floor, shoved his lunch back inside and left the room as fast as he could.

  “I wasn’t really expecting you till tonight,” he heard his father tell Hume as he sped away, “so I hope we can make this fast.”

  Lysander was trying to steady his hand over the front door handle when Hume replied.

  “Keeping you safe and sound, that’s our motto at Zellermann’s.”

  It was on the long walk to school that Lysander tried to make sense of what he had just seen. The whole thing seemed to happen so fast. Hell, he wasn’t sure he’d even closed the door behind him.

  Whenever Lysander closed his eyes, that was when he’d see the stranger’s face dissolving all over again.

  He’s come to finish it, was what that creepy bastard had said.

  Who was the he Hume had been talking about? Lysander wondered uneasily. More than that, Lysander wanted to know what he had meant by finish it?

  One thing was certain, there had been a serious look of desperation on Hume’s face before it began to look like raw hamburger meat. No, more than desperation. Hume was scared shitless.

  That made two of them.

  Chapter 2

  A heavy rain had swept over Millingham the night before, leaving the roads slick and shiny. The sky was low and thick with heavy gray clouds that threatened to open up at any moment. Samantha Crow stared out the police car window. She loved the stillness, the clean feeling after a rain, the way the air smelled soggy.

  A steady clicking sounded from the car dashboard. Her father, Steven Crow, the city’s sheriff, made a lazy left-hand turn.

  “People driving slow this morning,” her father said. He fancied a white handlebar mustache—a carryover from his hero, Wyatt Earp. “Good thing, ‘cause it’s slippery out there and we need to get you to school. Couldn’t afford to be pulling anyone over, now could I?” He winked at her, twitching a matching white bushy eyebrow, and she smiled weakly in return.

  “You’re gonna have to think about a graduation dress, you know,” he said.

  Samantha remained silent, eyes closed.

  “You know, I asked your mother to prom. I don’t think I was her first choice, though.” He laughed, the way older people often laughed at the humorless things they said. “Had her eye on a boy named Billy Dobbins. But I never gave up, Sam. Went out and bought myself a nice new suit.”

  Samantha’s blackened lips began to tighten.

  Her father combed his mustache with the flat tips of his fingers. “She was a good woman, your mother.” He glanced over and caught her change of expression. “I’m just thinking that with the way you
dress. What do they call it? Goth? I just wouldn’t be surprised if some nice boy might pass you up.”

  “I’m not a Goth.” Her laugh bore a threatening edge. “And what’s wrong with the way I dress?” She crossed her arms, glaring straight ahead.

  “No, not wrong…” he said. “Definitely not wrong, honey, just different. We don’t live in the big city, where people wear leather trench coats and knee-high boots.” His expression darkened. “I spoke to Mike Spiolis last week. You know, my friend over at the NYPD. He was telling me how a young boy and his father were waiting for the subway train when a man who lost his job as a middle school janitor came up behind them and pushed them both onto the tracks. Boy’s father managed to throw his son clear in time, but he stepped on the third rail trying to get out and jolted himself with 750 volts of electricity. When they asked the guy afterward why he had done it, you know what his answer was?”

  Sam’s face was blank.

  “He said he wanted someone else to know how it felt to lose something they loved.”

  Samantha sighed, tired of her father’s horror stories. “I’d rather take my chances with lunatics trying to push me in front of subway trains than spending my life living in a bubble.”

  “You know, your mother and…”

  “Can we not talk about Mom like she’s still around?”

  He pushed his glasses up on his face. “The day your mother died was the worst day of my life. Thank God you’re too young to know what it feels like to turn over at night and not have that person there anymore. You have no idea. No idea.”

  Whatever pity had started welling up within her was squashed flat when she remembered what had happened at the house this morning.

  She had gone into her father’s room to ask him for lunch money and had found his girlfriend, Sheila Evans, jiggling the bathroom door handle. The bathroom where her mother’s body had been found. The one nobody went into anymore.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Samantha screamed, her anger fueled more by her hatred for the woman than by what she was trying to do.

  Sheila’s face blanched. One of her sagging breasts lolled out of the satin negligee she was wearing. She fumbled it back inside, embarrassed. “I was just…”

  “Going to use the washroom… He didn’t tell you, did he?”

  Sheila was beginning to regain her composure, and anger was replacing shock. “Tell me what, Samantha?”

  “That the day my mother died, the day someone came into our house and killed her, he stopped going in there. Betcha he forgot to mention that ol’ chestnut. No, didn’t want to frighten off his new lay.”

  Sheila’s face became a mask of disbelief. No one had ever spoken to her that way before. And if Sam was lucky, it might just be enough to keep her from ever coming back.

  She watched her father as he turned the corner, the memory of what happened so fresh she could still smell the trail of Sheila’s cheap perfume as she’d stormed away.

  “And of all the people in town, did it have to be the principal of my school, Dad?”

  “Life goes on after people die, Sam. It’s a tough lesson, I know, but it’s one we all have to learn. Besides, your mother would have wanted us to be happy.”

  Sam clenched her fists. “None of us can be happy, Dad, because the day she was murdered, all that happiness packed its bags and went on vacation, permanently.”

  “Your mother was not murdered, goddammit.” A hank of hair tumbled into his face, and he combed it back with a shaky hand. “Sam, you’re gonna have to accept the truth or you’ll end up a bitter and angry person.”

  Too late, she thought, gnawing the black polish off her nails.

  “It just doesn’t make sense. Who kills themselves without a note? Who slits their wrists like that? And what she did to her face—Dad, her eyes!”

  “Your mother was a sick woman, Sam,” he protested, as he had dozens of times before. “There’s no other explanation. Only a person who needs help would do something like that. My greatest regret is that I wasn’t able to keep the details of your mother’s passing from you. No one your age should grow up with that kind of thing hanging over them.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense, Dad,” she repeated, trying to ignore that truckload of shit about her mother’s mental health that he had just tried to feed her again. “I mean, your marriage counseling was going well. You had just started loving each other again. And then this. I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it,” she shouted.

  The car descended into a moody silence. By the time they arrived at school, Samantha had scraped all of her nail polish off. Even her father’s tobacco chewing—which, for once, he had not tried to hide—had gone unnoticed and unchallenged.

  Somewhere out there was proof that her mother hadn’t killed herself. Somewhere the person who had killed her was still free. If there was a way, Samantha would set everything straight once and for all. That was what her mother would have wanted. Samantha couldn’t understand why her dad didn’t too.

  Chapter 3

  “Dorothy!”

  Dorothy Olsen looked up with a start from the liver she was slicing into thin strips.

  “Alex, you scared the hell out of me! Shame on you.”

  Deputy Alex Morgan shook with laughter.

  Dorothy removed her glasses and let them dangle around her neck. Rubbing the corners of her eyes, she headed over to the wall to snap the music off.

  “I passed by on patrol last night and saw the light still on. Two in the morning’s a bit late even for the medical examiner.”

  She plucked what looked like a heart from a scale suspended from the ceiling.

  “The Keenans want to know what Grandma died of,” she said dryly. “I think they’re scared it’s hereditary.”

  Alex removed his hat and brushed out his blond curly hair. He had celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday last August, but he looked more like twenty-one. Made it a hell of a lot harder to gain respect in a small town like Millingham. Alex let his hat plop on a nearby stool.

  Beside it was a stack of cardboard filing boxes. Printed on each was a name and case file.

  “What’s all this stuff?” Alex asked, scanning the containers.

  Lowery, Elizabeth: 25487.

  Dorothy frowned. “No more room downstairs. Not until they finish that space-age storage area.” As if on cue, two men with jumpsuits and heavy tool belts strolled past the open autopsy room door.

  Ames, Tom: 25463

  “Early lunch or another smoke break?”

  “Take your pick,” Dorothy said, rolling her eyes.

  Crow, Diane: 25437

  The box was open, and at once a chill rolled up Alex’s spine as a familiar feeling crept over him. Out of nowhere, a shiny white tub appeared—smooth edges, high glossy finish. Droplets of moisture had formed at the edges. The curtain around it folded back like an accordion, pulled by an unseen hand. The tub was full. The water was red and cloudy. It looked unreal, like tomato soup. A female figure lay face forward in the water, her hair floating listlessly. Her wrists were slit wide open, her body bled so clean her flesh looked nearly translucent.

  “Alex!”

  He looked up at Dorothy slowly, as though emerging from a long, disturbing dream.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Diane’s box, it’s still here,” he said. Alex remembered reading her death certificate like it was yesterday. Suicide, it had said. At the time he had swallowed his doubts, but he had wondered if Dorothy had allowed her feelings for Sheriff Crow to cloud her judgment.

  Dorothy’s hand went to the glasses hung around her neck. “Are you asking me if I’ve been reviewing the case?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, Dorothy.” Their eyes met for a sharp moment, and he turned away. “This whole business about Diane losing her marbles doesn’t sit well with me, and I’ve never tried to hide that. I was there when we found her, don’t forget. Hell, her wrists were slashed to the bone a
nd her eyes were gouged out. Not like any suicide I’ve ever seen.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” Dorothy looked away too. Down at the box, or at Alex’s feet, he couldn’t tell which.

  “I guess I’ve always been surprised at how quickly the decision was made,” he added. “I mean, maybe if we’d spent more time. What if there was something we missed?”

  Dorothy’s face grew hard. “Nothing was missed.”

  “I’m just—”

  “I’m telling you, Alex, nothing was missed.”

  The ghostly white light coming from the conference room said otherwise. On the screen was the body of a pale and naked woman in a bathtub, hunched over in a red pool.

  A vicious knot formed in his belly from the sight. No matter how many instructional videos you watched, nothing ever really prepared you for the real thing. And it only got worse when it was someone you knew—even when you hated them.

  There was a guilty look on Dorothy’s face. “You stubborn bastard! You just don’t know when to quit.”

  Alex smiled. “You found something, didn’t you?”

  She nodded sadly. “Here, let me show you.”

  The projector was humming when Dorothy reached for the remote and clicked to a white sheet with the outline of a woman’s body, front and back, arms and legs splayed. The one medical examiners used to identify important markings on a body. Most of it was blank, except for notes around the wrists, face and others at the top and rear of the neck. Dorothy’s handwriting was characteristically poor for an examiner. Alex could barely make heads or tails of it.

  “We never were able to find Diane’s eyes,” Dorothy said thoughtfully.

  He nodded curtly, remembering how disturbing her face had looked.

  “I know you don’t believe it, but judging from the evidence, she did this herself. The tissue and blood we found under her fingernails all belonged to her.”

  Alex craned his head for a closer look.