East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

  She didn’t answer right away.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out how I can stop myself from sleepwalking. The footprints on the deck … What if I’d climbed over the railing and kept on going? Feeling like you don’t know what you’re going to do after you fall asleep is a bit disconcerting.”

  “I’ll sleep on the floor by the door,” he said. “I actually sleep on the floor at my house when my back acts up. I took a hit against the Patriots that gave me a compressed disk.”

  Dani offered to inflate an air mattress for him. Tommy declined but accepted her offer of a foam rubber yoga mat. She found a sleeping bag for him in the basement. When she unrolled it, she found the Girl Scout sash she hadn’t seen since eighth grade.

  “Impressive,” he said when he saw the sash and all her merit badges. It didn’t surprise him. She’d been an overachiever from the first day he’d known her in elementary school, where the students pasted small book-shaped stickers on a chart to record all the books they’d read over the summer. Dani’s count was literally off the chart and halfway to the guinea pig cage.

  She led him to her bedroom and showed him where to put the sleeping bag. When she came out of the bathroom in her oversized flannel pajamas, he was already in the bag on the floor, blocking her from somnambulating out onto the deck again. She locked the bedroom door and left the night-light on in the bathroom.

  She got in bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin.

  “Would you mind taking the bullets out of the gun?” she asked him, eyeing his leather jacket, which hung heavily to the left.

  “It’s not going to go off by itself,” he said.

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of,” she said. “If I can walk in my sleep, I don’t know what else I might do in my sleep.”

  “I think I’ll just take the bullets out of the gun,” he said, moving quickly to the jacket.

  He’d locked all the downstairs doors and made sure the windows were secured. He tried to close his eyes and fall asleep, but within a matter of minutes he heard a whistle. He sat up. He heard it again. It soon became evident that the whistle was coming from Dani’s nose. It was almost cute, but he soon realized that he was not going to get much sleep with the sound repeating in the darkness.

  The only solution he could think of was to move his pad and sleeping bag out onto the deck. The rain had stopped, and the bag was warm, and the spot beyond the French doors was dry, and the cool air was refreshing. Sleeping inside or out, he was still blocking the door. Dani was just as safe.

  He was awakened in the middle of the night by a blood-curdling scream and Dani shouting, “Tommy! Where are you? Tommy!”

  He found her in her bedroom, backed into the far corner, clutching her bedspread to her chest and sobbing.

  “Where were you? Where’d you go? Tommy …”

  “Calm down, I’m right here,” he told her, hugging her. She put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest, sobbing for a moment longer before pulling back.

  “Where were you? I looked for you but you weren’t here …”

  “Slow down and take a few deep breaths,” he told her. She did as he instructed. “I was sleeping outside, just on the other side of the doors.”

  “Why?” she said. “I thought … When did you go outside? Why did you sleep outside?”

  “You were snoring.”

  “I don’t snore. I was snoring?”

  “Just a little. Sort of a nose whistle. It was kind of cute, actually, but it was keeping me awake.”

  “Tommy …”

  “Shh, shh,” he said softly. “Just tell me what scared you.”

  “I thought,” Dani said, taking a few more deep breaths. “I thought … I was certain … Tommy, do you promise me you were outside the whole time? Do you swear you’re telling the truth?”

  “I swear. I wouldn’t lie about something like this. What is it? What scared you?”

  She seemed considerably calmer now, but no less perplexed.

  “I thought …” She looked at him. “Tommy, you’re going to think I’m losing my mind. There was someone in the bed with me.”

  “Dani …”

  “At first I thought it was you, and then I just thought we had some boundary issues we needed to discuss, but I was still half asleep. And then …”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I sat up, wide-awake, and turned … and there was no one there. And then I screamed.”

  “Dani,” Tommy said, wanting to tell her that she’d only had a bad dream.

  “It was absolutely real,” she said. “I could feel you—I could feel him … breathing on my neck.”

  “It was a bad dream,” he reassured her. “Maybe a very realistic one, but that’s all it was. You’ve been having a lot of them lately, right?”

  “I have,” she agreed. “You think that’s all it was?”

  “I do,” he said.

  For now.

  But the truth was, he did not think that was all it was. He was of the conviction that it was more, but he didn’t know how to put it, and he knew this was not the time to talk about it.

  Nor was it the time to tell her that when he heard her scream, he’d jumped from his sleeping bag to push open the French doors to her bedroom and found them locked.

  From the inside. He’d had to force the doors open with his shoulder.

  Now was probably not the best time to tell her that. She was scared enough already, and so was he.

  WEDNESDAY,

  OCTOBER 20

  28.

  Dani’s mind whirled as she drove to work. The first thing she knew she could cross off her list was the possibility that Tommy was lying. She believed him completely, based on everything she’d learned about his character and integrity—and on everything she knew about how to tell when someone was lying. She never should have accused him of coming into her bed.

  Yet the sensation that someone had been lying next to her, behind her, was utterly and undeniably real. She’d felt his breath on her neck. Definitely a he, a male presence. She’d felt a strange warmth, and a weight.

  Dani knew herself as the kind of person who faced challenges rather than running away from them. She confronted things even if they made her uncomfortable, and kept thinking, kept trying, when other people quit. So, as she drove, she reviewed everything she knew about delusions, what produced them, how to understand them. She reviewed everything she knew about dreams, and everything she knew about sleep deprivation, for clearly she was sleep deprived. She went beyond what she’d learned from books or from teachers to what she believed about reality itself. She was a rational, logical woman. She’d been rational and logical since she was a little girl. She’d wised up about Santa Claus when she was three, and the Easter bunny when she was four, though she didn’t let on until she was nine because she liked the jelly beans. She was a skeptic. She wanted solid proof. She didn’t care to speculate. She was never fooled by magicians. She didn’t believe in ghosts. She saw through how charismatic individuals could push buttons and twist suggestible minds. She believed there were things that humans still didn’t understand, things unknowable and beyond comprehension, but real all the same.

  It seemed logical and rational to believe in God, in that the world itself, the universe, had a logic to it independent of anybody’s perception or interpretation, immutable mathematical and physical laws that would exist even if human beings never existed, and the way to study and understand that logic was through reason and science and skeptical inquiry. Some people worried that science was going to somehow explain away the mystery or the wonder, or that there was something antitheological about it, but there wasn’t a single scientific discovery she could think of that didn’t create more wonder and open the door to greater mysteries. And to her way of thinking, God was that infinite wonder and boundless mystery. Tommy had tried to tell her she’d probably just had a very realistic dream. She tried to let that explain it. It didn’t go far enough.


  When she got to the DA’s office fifteen minutes early, she parked on the street and paused in her car to use her BlackBerry to open her search engine. She’d tried to think it through rationally—and rationally, if there wasn’t a rational explanation, the next thing to do was look for irrational explanations. What was it Sherlock said about eliminating the possible? Once you did, whatever was left was the best explanation.

  She searched for: “demon” + “nocturnal visitor.”

  The Boolean logic of Google kicked back an answer in a microsecond.

  Incubus.

  She clicked on the link and read.

  Incubus. A male demon first recorded in Sumerian legend around 2400 BC, a demon who preys upon women when they sleep, lies with them and impregnates them. St. Augustine believed in them, wrote that there was too much undeniable evidence, as did Thomas Aquinas. The half-human, half-demon offspring was called a cambion. There were stories about incubi, variations, all over the world and throughout history, the Alp of German folklore, the Popo Bawa of Zanzibar, the Trauco of Chile, the Tintin of Ecuador, the Lidérc of Hungary, all who came to women in the night while they slept, lay down with them …

  Dani shrieked and dropped her phone when it suddenly buzzed in her hand.

  “Are you okay? You don’t sound good,” Beth said when Dani answered.

  “I’m fine,” Dani said. “You scared me.”

  “How did I scare you?” Beth said. “I dialed your telephone number.”

  “I was holding it in my hand when you called.”

  “And I repeat—what’s scary?”

  “Rough night,” Dani said. “Do you remember when I had nightmares when I was little?”

  “You never had nightmares,” Beth said. “I had them all the time. It was totally unfair.”

  “I think I’m catching up,” Dani said. “Why did you call?”

  “Just to check in and see how you were,” Beth said. “Now I know. This thing is getting to you.”

  “Maybe a little,” Dani lied, knowing her sister would worry if she told her the truth. “I gotta go or I’ll be late for my meeting. Thanks for calling. You just interrupted a rather silly train of thought.”

  Irene had asked for a morning meeting. Dani decided the best thing she could do was throw herself into her work.

  The district attorney was in a foul mood. She said at the meeting that she’d called for a press conference at eleven, and she didn’t like press conferences. She was annoyed because somebody had released the image of the symbol found on Julie Leonard’s body. It was in the morning papers.

  “That was me,” Dani confessed. “I asked the girls if they recognized the symbol. I showed it to them. They probably talked about it.”

  “Maybe,” Irene said. “That’s the thing. Maybe they leaked it, or maybe the killer did. Problem is, now we can’t trace it back to the source because there’s more than one source.

  “I can’t say I’m thrilled,” she continued. “The more this gets talked about in the papers, the more likely a defense attorney is going to say the jury was influenced by media coverage. Now I have to go out there and face Vito Cipriano and the rest of those weasels and give it a spin. And I hate it when I have to spin. It makes me dizzy.”

  For a moment Dani considered resigning her position. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for it. Perhaps they could find someone who was.

  “It’s okay, kiddo,” Irene told her as if reading her mind. “This is one little glitch. You’re doing great. Everybody learns on the job. Right, Detective Casey?”

  “My first day in uniform, I accidentally turned on the siren during a surveillance,” Phil said dryly. “My partner was unenthusiastic about the prospect of our ongoing collaboration.”

  “What have you got, Dani?” Irene asked. “Let’s put our notes on the table and see where we are.”

  Dani gave the DA the information she had, what she’d learned talking to Julie’s mom and sister, what Tommy had learned from Liam about his band and how he’d rejected Julie because she couldn’t sing. She related how Tommy had discovered that the symbol might just be the letter Z in Cyrillic. She decided not to say anything about the plagues of Egypt or the dreams she’d been having. The Kasdens had given Dani the name of the White Plains child psychologist Amos had first consulted before transferring to St. Adrian’s.

  “Anything there?” Irene asked.

  “Possibly,” Dani said. “Amos wet the bed until he was thirteen. They even had him see a urologist, who found nothing wrong physically. Amos also liked to start fires in trash cans. Taken separately, neither is reason for concern, but together they might be. Late bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals, in constellation, indicate serious psychopathologies.”

  “Any reason to believe the Kasdens might have been abusive?”

  “None whatsoever,” Dani said. “I’ve contacted a man who worked in Moscow for the State Department. He said he’d make some calls to find out what he can about the orphanage Amos came from. I hope to hear from him today. The Kasdens also said they’d give the school psychologist at St. Adrian’s permission to talk to us.”

  “Good,” Irene said. “The Friends of Julie Leonard page on Facebook is up to three thousand members. Lots of suspicions but nobody naming the names we have, so that’s good. Phil, anything on Liam?”

  “Just what we’ve got,” Phil said. “The blood on the Dorsett kid’s shirt is a match, along with the mud on his shoes. The mud on the other kids’ shoes match too. They were all there.”

  “Nothing more from Logan or Amos?”

  “They were served this morning,” Phil said. “We got a meeting with Amos today, but they want the school psychologist present. I can work with that if we have to. I want to avoid any further delays.”

  “Dani,” Irene said, “can you go with him?”

  “Absolutely,” Dani said.

  “What about Logan?” Irene asked.

  “Appearance is scheduled for four o’clock this afternoon,” Stuart said.

  “I’m not holding my breath on getting a look at his shoes or clothes,” Phil said. “They’ve had enough time to take care of anything incriminating. Same with the other kid.”

  “The surveillance videos put Amos in the dorm anyway,” Stuart said.

  “Would it be all right if I brought Tommy when we talk to Amos?” Dani asked.

  “Why?” Irene said. “St. Adrian’s is skittish enough already. Do you really need an assistant?”

  Dani wasn’t sure how to frame her request.

  “I’d like it too,” Phil said. “The kid’s a big football fan. He might talk to his hero if he won’t talk to us.”

  Irene approved Dani’s request.

  Dani walked with Phil in the hallway. “Thanks,” she said. “How did you know Amos is a big football fan?”

  “Made it up,” he said.

  Dani got it. The detective had her back and would support her even if it meant putting himself on the line. She was in his debt.

  The sky was dark gray, and it was raining again, a steady autumn rain that soaked the countryside under a mat of soggy leaves, when they arrived at All-Fit to pick up Tommy. He was wearing a green Barbour raincoat, Timberland boots, and a black baseball cap.

  Dani had always hated the movies or TV shows where the females seemed helpless and in need of male protection or rescue, and she’d always thought of herself as someone who could take care of herself. But at the same time, she couldn’t think of two men whose company could make her feel safer.

  They turned at the sign for St. Adrian’s Academy for Boys. The school property was enclosed by a high stone wall that made it feel more like a prison than a place of learning, a fortification, Dani had always thought, modeled after the walled colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.

  At the gates, Detective Casey showed his badge to the video camera, and the wrought iron gates swung open. The camera swiveled to follow them as they drove through, and then the gates closed behind them. The sch
ool grounds were immaculately groomed. The drive wound up the hill to the Grand Commons, an imposing slate-roofed, ivy-covered brick mansion that was grand in every sense of the word, with leaded windows, a central bell tower, and towers at the end of either wing. The dormitories and academic buildings were similarly imposing, redbrick and ivy and slate except for the athletic facilities and the science building, which were modern and state of the art.

  “It’s a nice campus, but I’m glad I decided not to go here,” Tommy said.

  “You could have?” Dani asked, surprised.

  “It’s part of the original charter,” Tommy said. “Every year they give full scholarships to two kids from town, and in exchange they don’t have to pay taxes.”

  “They wanted you to play football?” Phil asked.

  Tommy nodded.

  “Why didn’t you?” Dani said. “This school has probably the best academic reputation in the country. If not the world.”

  “I didn’t because when they gave me a tour, everybody I met was a jerk,” he said. “It was kind of weird. Not one person I wanted to spend any time with.”

  When they reached a circular at the end of the drive, Phil dropped Dani and Tommy off beneath the covered front portico, out of the light rain. He parked the car in a space just beyond the portico and joined them.

  The porter asked their names, then ushered them into the foyer, which opened into a larger hall lit from above by a massive domed skylight that reminded Dani, she told him, of the pictures she’d seen of the Crystal Palace from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

  The porter smiled in condescension. “The glass is indeed from the Crystal Palace,” he said. “Erected in 1851 in Hyde Park, London, during the Great Exhibition. Designed by Joseph Paxton, who had been a student here. I’ll tell the headmaster you’ve arrived.”

  The walls of the great hall were decorated with murals depicting the history of mankind, which, Dani noted, had been reduced to a series of battles and wars, kings and thinkers, all male, with an occasional mechanical invention thrown into the mix, a railroad locomotive or a biplane. Closer to the floor, the walls were painted white, and paintings were hung every ten feet and lit with spotlights. She saw a Breughel and a Matisse and a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. Above an arched door, carved into a marble shield, was a saying from Confucius: The most beautiful sight in the world is a little child going confidently down the road after you have shown him the way.