by Chelsea Cain
“Yeah,” Archie said.
Frank grinned. “Remember, kids,” he said in a singsong voice, “it’s down the road, not across the street.”
“Frank,” Archie warned.
Courtenay shook her head sadly. “I didn’t know.”
Her knuckles whitened again and her elbow lifted, and Archie knew he only had a second to stop her from hurting herself again.
“You can’t get to the carotid artery with that,” he said quickly. “It’s not sharp enough.”
He stepped forward and pulled back his collar, exposing the scar on his neck. “Look,” he told her, and he lifted his chin and took another step to her, so she could see the ugly rope of scar tissue that Gretchen had left on him. Courtenay wanted to be beautiful.
“You’ll just end up mutilating yourself,” Archie said.
Courtenay’s mouth opened as her eyes dropped to his neck. She blinked rapidly, then let the Formica fall to the floor and dabbed at her self-inflicted wound with her fingers. “Am I going to have a scar?” she asked, forehead creasing with dismay.
Archie moved to her and took her tenderly by the shoulders. It was both a gesture of comfort and to ensure that she wouldn’t dive for the Formica. “I don’t think you’ll even need stitches,” he said.
Three uniformed hospital security guards hurried into the room, with the orderly and Rosenberg tagging behind them. The guards took Courtenay by each arm and led her mutely away.
Archie walked over to where the phone sat, still ringing, on an end table by the couch, and picked it up.
“Hello?” he said.
But on the other end there was only silence.
Archie hung up.
“I’m going to my room,” Archie told Rosenberg. “I need a sweater.” It was true. He was suddenly very cold. It was probably the adrenaline drop. Hospitals were kept ten degrees colder than what anyone would find comfortable. Archie didn’t know why. Maybe it was to keep patients like him from overstaying their welcome.
He had two sweaters: a green cardigan and a blue crewneck. They were in the bottom drawer of his dresser against the wall facing the foot of his bed. He was opening the drawer when he felt the vibration. He thought it was the medication at first. They were adjusting his Prozac dosage and he felt that sort of thing sometimes, electrical sensations that traveled down his arms, or lit up his brain at night. Brain zaps, the nurses called them, as if they were a perfectly normal side effect, like bloating.
But the vibration wasn’t the medication.
It was a phone.
Archie froze. It had been two months since he had heard a vibrating cell phone, that odd low-frequency buzz, both a sound and a feeling. Fifteen years he’d carried a phone in his pocket. And in two months, he’d already forgotten it.
It was in his dresser.
He traced his fingers up along the dresser drawers, feeling for the telltale vibration. The buzzing stopped.
He opened the second drawer down.
The phone was half covered by a pair of pants, but it was there, clear as day. Archie glanced up at the camera mounted in the corner of the room. The camera didn’t have the right angle to see it.
He reached into the drawer and pretended to be fascinated by an imaginary stain on a pair of corduroys while he fumbled with the phone with his other hand. He didn’t take it out of the drawer. Five hundred and thirty-eight missed calls. One text message. Archie clicked on it.
“DARLING,” it read. “FEEL BETTER?”
Archie’s body stiffened. Gretchen.
She’d gotten someone to put it there, some hospital employee who probably thought the phone was for Archie to keep in touch with a loved one.
It was the second phone she’d found a way to get to him. He’d discovered the first one the second week he’d been there. It was taped under the sink in the bathroom. He’d thrown it away in the bathroom trash, jamming it under half a roll of toilet paper so the custodial staff wouldn’t see it.
This time Archie slipped the phone out of the drawer, and put it in his pocket.
He was Level Four. Rosenberg had said he should go for a walk.
C H A P T E R 11
Three-nine-seven North Fargo was the scariest house in sight. The old bungalow sat abandoned on an empty block that had long ago turned to urban meadow. Its asbestos siding was painted a shade of brown that even in its prime must have embarrassed the neighbors, and its asphalt roof was more moss than shingles. Sheets of plywood covered the windows. The words KEEP OUT were spray-painted across the plywood that covered the front door. If Susan had been scouting locations for a horror movie, she would not have had to look further.
It had to be a prank. It was too perfect.
Susan sat in her car at the curb and craned her head around to look up and down the street. It was late morning, and no one was around. There were no other houses on that block, and the church parking lot across the street was empty. She considered the possibilities. What if there was a body in there? It was feasible. Some PBR-fueled college kids had sneaked inside to party or to read Longfellow or something, and found some dead junkie or homeless person and then didn’t want to report it because they didn’t want to get hassled for trespassing.
Sure. That made perfect sense.
Or maybe it was a trap. A Herald headline flashed in Susan’s mind: INTREPID REPORTER MURDERED AFTER WALKING INTO BEAUTY KILLER AMBUSH. Journalist, Susan corrected herself, remembering Henry’s joke.
Susan pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and stared some more at the house.
This was ridiculous. She was being dramatic. Get it over with, Nancy Drew.
She tossed her cigarette out into the rain, grabbed her purse full of mace, and got out of the car.
Look like you’re supposed to be there. Quentin Parker had taught her that. Look like you’re supposed to be there and no one will ask you what the hell you’re doing. He had always kept a clipboard in his car. No one questions a man with a clipboard, he’d said.
Susan went around to her trunk, where she kept her emergency reporter kit, and got out a flashlight and notebook, which she put in her purse, and an old clipboard. If someone in the church across the street was watching, she would look like she was trying to Rock the Vote, or maybe conducting a survey. And how many corpses do you have inside, sir?
She was wearing black jeans, black lace-up boots, and a black tank top. Add the purple hair and red lipstick and she looked more like she should be working at the MAC counter than conducting door-to-door surveys.
Did people even use clipboards anymore?
Stride confidently. That’s the other thing Parker had taught her. Susan tried to stride confidently, but it was a challenge since it was raining pretty hard and she had to tramp through a lot of dead weeds to get up the overgrown front walk.
The house, up close, was even worse off than it looked from the street. The porch, along with the stairs up to it, leaned slightly to the right, while the house itself seemed to lean slightly to the left. Susan walked around the side through knee-high grass. She put the clipboard under her arm. It was pointless. No one could see her anyway. Behind the back of the house she saw what she was looking for—a piece of plywood lay on the ground in front of a basement window that had been broken. You couldn’t keep people out of abandoned houses. Not in this neighborhood.
Susan got her flashlight out of her purse, flipped it on, and squatted near the window. The broken glass had been knocked out clean, so the window frame was free of shards. The natural light coming through the window illuminated a diffuse rectangle of concrete and broken glass below. Susan poked her head in, bracing herself on the window jamb with one hand, and reached the flashlight in as far as she could. It didn’t reveal much. Pipes. Ducts. Concrete. It looked . . . basementy.
“Hello?” she said into the darkness. “Did someone here order a pizza?”
The only sound she heard was a bus going by at the next intersection. Was it breaking and entering if the window was already b
roken? Or was it just entering? If she went in and didn’t find anything, she’d go straight to the paper and never tell anyone. Susan couldn’t believe she was actually considering this. And at the same time, she felt a shiver of delight. Six months ago, she was writing human-interest stories about zoo animals. This was a lot more exciting.
“I’m coming in,” she said. She stowed the flashlight back in her purse, dangled her legs through the window, and dropped down to the floor below. Broken glass crunched under her boots.
The house was quiet. Weirdly quiet. No central air, no water heater, no humming fridge, none of that ambient house sound.
She got the flashlight out again and turned it on. The flashlight illuminated so much dust in the air that the beam looked almost solid. A corner of the basement floor was flooded with brackish groundwater that had seeped in through the foundation. Beer cans, cigarette butts, and broken liquor bottles littered the floor. There was a vague smell of urine.
Susan shuddered. Suddenly covering an elephant’s birthday party didn’t seem so bad. She looked longingly up at the window she’d just come through. The sill was chin-high. She was skinny, but not strong. There was no way she’d be able to lift herself up to climb out. She was committed.
She took a few tentative steps and aimed the flashlight up the stairs. There were lots of things that could kill you in a house: radon, asbestos, toxic mold, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, lead, polyurethane foam, fiberglass insulation. This house wasn’t any more dangerous than any other.
“Anyone home?” she called. “I’m gathering signatures,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow and ner vous. “To legalize pot?”
Nothing.
She saw something move. Just a flash. She jerked the flashlight beam to the left just in time to see the back end of a rat skitter past a beer can.
She made it halfway up the stairs in two steps. Not that she was scared of rats, she told herself—she was just suddenly in a very big hurry. The stairs led up to the kitchen. With all the windows covered, the first floor was even darker than the basement. She knew it was the kitchen only because of the cracked speckled linoleum on the floor. There were footprints in the dust on the floor, seemingly dozens, in random patterns, like there’d been a scuffle there, or a square dance.
There were no appliances in the kitchen anymore, just empty wooden cupboards and fittings for gas pipes sticking out of the wall where an oven used to be. The sink was filled with more beer cans. There were no dead bodies.
Susan squeezed the flashlight in her armpit, and got her notebook and pen out of her purse. She had to hold the flashlight under her chin to see what she was writing, but she managed to take a few notes. Footprints. Miller High Life cans. Really fucking spooky. Also, rat.
She put the notebook and pen away, took the flashlight back in her hand, and followed the beam out of the kitchen into a dark hallway and toward the front of the house until she came to a bedsheet that blocked the entrance to the next room. The sheet had been nailed to the ceiling and hung to the floor like a makeshift door. Classy.
Rat-borne illnesses killed almost thirteen thousand people a year.
Susan heard another bus rumble by.
She felt strangely calm now. Like she was watching herself in a movie. Like she was one of those girls who go into the spooky house alone while the audience hides their faces and screams at her not to do it. The house was empty. She had done it. She’d crawled through a fucking basement window. She’d battled a rat. It was practically heroic. She was going to dine out on this story for months.
She just had to find her way out.
Her flashlight beam threw a yellow circle on the sheet. “Hello?” she said. She listened, not expecting to hear anything, and then, slowly, pulled the sheet curtain to the side and walked into the room.
The first thing she noticed was that it was clean. Not regular clean. Weird clean. Crazy clean. Her flashlight beam reflected off the scrubbed hardwood floors. The walls and ceiling were a freshly painted white. It smelled different. Like disinfectant. Like a hospital.
Susan’s stomach somersaulted as she panned her flashlight around. No furniture. No dust. No cobwebs. Whoever had been squatting there had been a real OCD case. Her flashlight swung past the open pocket door to another room, and stopped. Someone had hung clear plastic sheeting between the two rooms. Visqueen. Her mother kept a sheet of it over the compost pile.
She forgot what she was doing. She forgot that she was looking for a way out. She moved toward the plastic, flashlight in hand, but it was so thick that the beam of light couldn’t penetrate it enough to see the other side. She tried to pull it aside but it was nailed up more securely than the sheet in the hall, and she had to duck down and squeeze through below where it was fastened.
She turned, straightened up, and lifted her flashlight to look around.
Something was in there.
The knot in Susan’s stomach tightened. “Hello?” she said.
It was under a sheet. Maybe a piece of furniture. People threw white sheets over furniture to protect it if they were going away for a while. Rich people, with second houses, in the twenties. It wasn’t furniture. Old clothes? Something a squatter left, hoping to come back for later?
It wasn’t old clothes.
Who was the guy who’d phoned her? And why?
Call the cops, her little voice said.
But instead she felt in her purse for the notebook and pen.
She traced the form on the floor with her flashlight. Surrounding it, like some sort of offering, were eight or ten big red plastic flashlights, none of them on.
Maybe it was some sort of renovation project.
It wasn’t a renovation project.
“Okay,” Susan said. She moved tentatively forward, notebook and pen clutched in one hand, flashlight in the other. “I’m going to look.” When she got to the form she knelt down, and the knees of her jeans pressed into something wet. She sat back on her heels and shone her flashlight on her legs. Blood.
She jumped to her feet. Blood was everywhere. The form was soaked in it. It pooled on the floor, a viscous jam, shiny in the flashlight beam. She opened her purse, snapped up her spray can of herbal mace, and held it out, index finger on the nozzle.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a tiny voice.
It sounded stupid even as she said it. There was no way someone could bleed that much and still be alive. Don’t look under the sheet. She couldn’t help it. She had to know. She held the flashlight overhead, an ad hoc bludgeoning instrument, and, grimacing, used the spray can of mace to ease the sheet back.
She took his face in all at once—a flash of eyebrows and acne scars, a slender nose, round face, and soft chin, all the details ordering in her brain to form a face, a young man, a guy her age. For a split second, she thought he was okay, that he’d start laughing, that it was all some stupid joke. He was wearing one of those silly hospital scrub caps, for Christ’s sake, a purple one with cartoon elephants on it, like he was in some sort of costume. And his eyes were open. She let the breath she’d been holding escape in a gasp. Then her brain caught up with her.
The eyes weren’t right. The lids were pulled back too far, his fixed stare barely visible under a cataract-like white glaze.
She jerked back, and her flashlight beam momentarily angled up, cutting a path to the opposite wall. For a second Susan thought she was seeing things. She angled the flashlight up again, the beam trembling with her hand. The yellow ball of light slid across the wall, and Susan wanted to turn it off, wanted it to be dark, because even scary pitch-black would be better than this.
The wall had been painted white. But it had been decorated. Someone had covered the surface, almost every inch of it, with hundreds and hundreds of hand-drawn red hearts.
Get out of the house, her little voice screamed. But Susan didn’t move. There was no fucking way she was going back into that basement.
She reached into her purse and felt around for her phone.
She called the paper first, and 911 second.
C H A P T E R 12
Henry stood in the rain on the hillside with Detective Martin Ngyun, staring down at the leathery head in the mud. The ferns and brush around the head were charred and the entire area was dusted with foam from a fire extinguisher. Henry could see a soot-blackened cigarette that had been stamped deeply into the dirt.
Henry peered up the hillside. The whole task force had responded. A busload of Beauty Killer tourists were standing at the top of the hill behind the crime-scene tape taking pictures. No keeping this one under wraps. They were probably tweeting as he stood there. “Who put out the fire?” Henry asked Ngyun.
Ngyun had been on the task force for seven years. The only time off he’d ever taken was when the Blazers had made the finals. That hadn’t turned out well at all.
