(1T) Real murders

by Harris, Charlaine

  I was going to die and I had cost my little brother his life, and my heart broke for what he would endure before they finally tired of him and killed him.

  “We heard you come in,” Bankston said, smiling. “We were down here waiting for you, weren’t we, Phillip?”

  Incredible, Bankston the banker. Bankston with the matching almond-tone washer and dryer. Bankston arranging a loan for a businessman in the afternoon and smashing Mamie Wright’s face in the evening. Melanie the secretary, filling up her idle time while her boss was out of town by slaughtering the Buckleys with a hatchet. The perfect couple.

  Phillip was crying hopelessly. “Shut up, Phillip,” said the man who’d played baseball with him that afternoon. “Every time you cry, I’ll hit your sister. Won’t I, sis?” And the golf club whistled through the air and Bankston broke my collarbone. My shriek must have covered Melanie’s steps, because suddenly she was there looking down at me with pleasure.

  “When I pulled in, the Scarecrow was searching the parking lot,” she said to Bankston. “Here’s the tape recorder. I can’t believe we forgot it!”

  Gee, what a madcap couple. She sounded for all the world like a housewife who’d remembered the potato salad in the fridge just as the family was leaving on its picnic.

  I decided, when the pain had ebbed enough for me to think, that “the Scarecrow” was Robin. I managed to look at Phillip again. God bless him, he was trying so hard not to make sounds, so Bankston wouldn’t hit me again. I tried to push the pain away so I could look reassuring, but I could only stare at him and try not to scream myself. If I screamed, Bankston would hit me quite a lot.

  Or maybe he would hit Phillip.

  “What do you think?” Bankston asked her.

  “No way we can get them out of here now,” Melanie said matter-of-factly. “He said he’d called the police. One of us better go up soon and offer to help search. If we don’t the police will want to look in here, I guess, get suspicious. We can’t have that, can we?” and she smiled archly, and poked my leg with her foot, as if I were a piece of naughtiness that they had to conceal for convention’s sake. She saw me looking at her. “Get up and get over there by the kid,” she said, and then she kicked me. I moaned. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” she said to Bankston with a smile.

  It was not only the fall and the blows that made it hard to move, but the shock. I was in this most prosaic basement with these most prosaic people, and they were monsters that were going to kill me, me and my brother. I had read and marveled for years at people living cheek by jowl with psychopaths and not suspecting. And here I was, trying desperately to crawl across a concrete floor in a building my mother owned while friends looked for my brother outside, because I had never, never thought it could happen to me. I got to Phillip’s side in a few moments, though the young woman I’d known all my life and gone to church with did kick me a few times on the journey. I grabbed the edge of the seat and dragged myself to my knees, and clumsily draped my good arm around Phillip. I wished Phillip would faint. His face was more than I could stand, and I had no consolation for him. We were looking at the faces of demons, and all the rules of kindness and courtesy that Phillip and I had been taught so carefully did not apply. No reward for good behavior.

  “I got the tape recorder, but now we can’t use it,” Melanie was pouting. “I think that’s when she got suspicious, when she saw me pull out of the parking lot. I didn’t want to have to help her look, so I had to act like I didn’t hear her. I don’t guess we’ll get to have any fun tonight.”

  “I didn’t think this through,” Bankston agreed. “Now they’ll be out there looking for the boy and her all night, and we’ll have to go volunteer, too. At least now we’ve got her keys, they can’t use the master set to come in here.” He held them up. I must have dropped them when I fell.

  “You think they might insist on searching all the apartments?” Melanie asked anxiously. “We can’t turn them down if they ask.”

  Bankston pondered. They were at the foot of the steps still. I could not get by them. I could not see any weapons besides the golf club, but even if I did attack them with my one good arm and my little remaining energy, the two of them could easily overcome me and the noise would not be heard by anyone…unless the Crandalls had decided to spend the evening in their basement. “We’ll just have to wing it,” Bankston said finally.

  The baseball! Maybe Robin would see it, like I had.

  “Did you talk to anyone when you pulled in?” Bankston was asking.

  “Just what I told you before. Robin asked me if I had seen the boy, and I said no, but that I’d be glad to help look,” Melanie said with no irony whatsoever. “Roe left the back door open, so I closed and relocked it. And I picked up the kid’s baseball, it was still out on the patio.”

  That was our death warrant, I reckoned.

  Bankston cursed. “How did it end up out there? I was sure I’d brought it in.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Melanie said. “Even if they did find it, you could just have said you’d been keeping it for him but he didn’t ever show up looking for it.”

  “You’re right,” Bankston said fondly. “What shall we do with those two? If we leave them tied up down here while we go help to search, they might somehow get loose. If we kill them right now, we lose our fun with the boy.” He strolled over to us and Melanie followed.

  “You acted on impulse when you grabbed him,” Melanie observed. “We should just go on and take care of them now, and hide them down here good. Then when the search dies down, we’ll see if we can get them out to the car and dump them. Next time, no impulses, we’ll do what we planned and nothing extra.”

  “Are you criticizing me?” Bankston asked sharply. His voice was low and dangerous.

  Her posture changed. I had never seen anything like it. She cringed and folded and became another person. “No, never,” she whimpered, and she bent and licked his hand. I saw her eyes, and she was role-playing and it excited her immensely.

  I was nauseated. I hoped I was blocking Phillip’s view sufficiently. I huddled closer to him, though the pain from my collarbone was becoming more insistent. Phillip was shaking and he had wet himself. His breath was getting more and more ragged, and muffled sobs and whimpers broke out from time to time.

  Melanie and Bankston were giving each other a kiss, and Bankston bent and bit her shoulder. She held him to her as though they would use each other right there, but then they unclenched and she said, “We’d better do it now. Why run any more risks?”

  “You’re right,” Bankston agreed. He gave her the golf club, and she swung it through the air experimentally while he searched his pockets. In her black slacks and green sweater and knotted scarf she looked ready to tee off at the country club. In that small area the club whistled past me with no room to spare, and I started to protest, when I realized yet again that Melanie absolutely could not care less. Old assumptions die hard.

  I saw a foot on the stairs behind them.

  “Give me your scarf, Mel,” Bankston said suddenly. Melanie unknotted it instantly. “This would be less messy, and I’ve never done it before,” he observed cheerfully. They never looked at me or at Phillip, except in passing, and I could tell to them we were not people like they were.

  The foot was joined by a matching foot, and silently took another step down.

  “Maybe I should tape this,” Melanie said brightly. “It won’t be what we had planned, but it might be interesting.”

  The next step squeaked, and I screamed, “God damn you to hell! How can you do this to me? How can you do this to a little boy?”

  They were as shocked as though a chair had spoken. Melanie swung the club instantly with both hands. My body was covering Phillip’s on the chair, but the blow was so strong the chair was rocked. It was easy to shriek as loud as a freight train. I saw the feet descend all the way in a rush.

  “Shut up, bitch!” Melanie said furiously.

  “Naw, you shu
t up,” a flat voice advised her.

  It was old Mr. Crandall, and he was carrying a very large gun.

  The only sound in the basement was the sobbing coming from me, as I struggled to control myself. Phillip raised his bound wrists to loop his arms over my head. I wished more than ever that he’d faint.

  “You’re not going to shoot,” Bankston said. “You old idiot. With this concrete floor, it’ll ricochet and hit them.”

  “I’d rather shoot them directly than leave them to you,” Mr. Crandall said simply.

  “Which one of us will you shoot first?” Melanie asked furiously. She’d been sidling away from Bankston a little at a time. “You can’t get us both, old man.”

  “But I can,” said Robin from higher on the stairs, and he wasn’t nearly as calm as Mr. Crandall. I managed to look up. I saw Robin descending with a shotgun. “Now I don’t know as much about guns as Mr. Crandall, but he loaded this for me, and if I point it and fire, I am real sure I will hit something.”

  If they tried anything desperate it would be now. I could feel the turmoil pouring from them. They looked at each other. I could only stare through a haze of pain at the green silk scarf in Bankston’s hand. Oh, surely they must see it was over, over.

  Suddenly the fight oozed out of them. They looked like what they used to be, for a moment: a bank loan officer and a secretary, who could not remember where they were or how they had come to be there. The scarf fell from Bankston’s hand. Melanie lay down the golf club. They did not look at each other anymore.

  There was a gust of people noise, and Arthur and Lynn Liggett came pelting down the stairs to be stopped short by the tableau.

  Phillip’s breath came out from behind the gag in a deep sigh, and he fainted. It seemed like such a good idea that I did it, too.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “If I’d had my Dynamite Man Particle Blaster they wouldn’t have hurt us,” Phillip whispered. He simply would not be parted from me while I was being patched up. He held on to my hand or my leg or my torso; though many kind people offered to take him and rock him, or buy him an ice cream cone, or color with him, my little brother would not be separated from me. This definitely made it harder on me, but I tried to have so much sympathy for Phillip that the pain would not seem important. I’m afraid I found that to me, pain is very important, no matter who else has been hurt.

  Now he was actually in the hospital bed with me, huddling as close to me as he could get, his eyes still wide and staring, but beginning to glaze over. I thought he’d had some kind of mild tranquilizer; I thought I remembered saying that was okay. My father and stepmother were driving back from Chattanooga; Robin, bless him, had found their phone number and called, miraculously catching them in their motel room.

  “Phillip, if I hadn’t had you to hold on to, I would have gone nuts,” I assured him. “You were so brave. I know you were scared inside, like I was, but you were brave as a lion to hold yourself together.”

  “I was thinking about escaping all the time. I was just waiting for a chance,” he informed me. There, he was beginning to sound more like Phillip. Then, less certainly, “Roe, would they really have killed us?”

  What was I supposed to say? I glanced over at Robin, who shrugged in an it’s-up-to-you gesture. Why was I asking Robin what I should say to my little brother?

  “Yes,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Yes, they were really bad people. They were rotten apples. They were nice on the outside but full of worms on the inside.”

  “But they’re locked up in jail now?”

  “You bet.” I thought about lawyers and bail and I shivered. Surely not. “They can’t ever get you again. They can’t ever hurt anybody again. They’re far away and all locked up, and your mom and dad will carry you home even farther away from them.”

  “When are they gonna get here?” he asked desolately.

  “Soon, soon, as fast as their car can come,” I said as soothingly as I could, perhaps for the fiftieth time, and thank God at that moment my father did come in, Betty Jo right behind him and under rigid control.

  “Mama!” said Phillip, and all his hard-held toughness left him. He became an instant soggy puddle of little boy. Betty Jo swept him out of the hospital bed and into her arms and held him as tightly as he held her. “Where can I take him?” she asked the nurse who’d followed them in. The nurse told her about an empty waiting room two doors down, and Betty Jo vanished with her precious armful. I was so glad to see Betty Jo take him I could have cried. There is no substitute for a real mother. At least I am no substitute for a real mother. The past few hours had certainly taught me that, if I’d ever doubted it.

  My father bent and kissed me. “I hear you saved his life,” he said, and tears trickled down his face. I had never seen my father cry. “I am so thankful you are both safe, I prayed in the car all the way here. I could have lost both of you in one night.” Overwhelmed, he sank into the guest chair Robin had quietly vacated. Robin stood back in the shadows, the dim room light glinted off his red hair. I would never forget how he’d looked with the shotgun in his hands.

  I was just too tired to appreciate my father’s emotion. It was late, so late. I had almost been strangled by a bank loan officer with a green silk scarf. I had been hit by a secretary with a golf club. I had been terrified out of my mind for myself and my little brother. I had looked into the face of evil. Strong words, I told myself hazily, but true. The face of evil.

  Finally, my dear father dried his eyes, told me he’d see me very soon, and said they were taking Phillip home that very night. “We’ll have to see about treatment for him,” he said apprehensively. “I don’t know how to help him.”

  “I’ll see you,” I mumbled.

  “Thanks, Aurora,” he said. “If you need help yourself, you know how to reach us.” But they were dying to get Phillip away, and his voice verged on perfunctory. I was a grown-up, right? I could take care of myself. Or my mother would take care of me. I let myself have a flash of bitterness, and made myself swallow it. He was not being careful of me, but he was right.

  I drifted off to sleep for a second. Robin was holding my hand when I woke up. I think he had kissed me.

  “That felt good,” I said. So he did it again. It felt even better.

  “They were stupid really,” I said a little later.

  “When you think about it, yes,” Robin agreed. “I don’t think they ever realized it wasn’t a game when they began patterning the deaths after old murders. Bankston snatched Phillip on impulse when they should have waited and picked a victim from at least across town…. If he’d really been intelligent, he would have known taking Phillip from the same place he himself lived, then keeping him in the townhouse instead of getting him out to Melanie’s place…Well, maybe they would’ve smuggled him out, but you started looking too soon, and they didn’t even consider you having keys.”

  “How did you know where we were?” I asked. It had never occurred to me to question our last-minute rescue.

  “When I saw Melanie pull back in, she acted strange,” he began. “I had started to wonder where you’d disappeared, too, and her coming back after she’d just left a few minutes before seemed peculiar. She’d gone home to get her tape recorder, you know,” he said, and looked away into the shadows of the room. “I ran around front, saw you weren’t there searching, and decided there was only one place you could be. Really, I was just guessing,” he said frankly. “You had disappeared as suddenly as Phillip, there were no strange cars around, Melanie tried to act concerned about Phillip being missing but she wasn’t, and she had that damn tape recorder. Perry Allison is very strange and maybe dangerous, but he’s also obvious.” Robin reached down to take my hand. “I had to persuade Mr. Crandall in a hurry that we had to raid Bankston’s place, but he was game. Even if I had made a mistake, he said, if Bankston was any kind of a man he would realize when a child and woman are missing, anything goes. Jed’s a frontier kind of guy.”

  “How’d you
get in? Didn’t Melanie lock the door behind her?”

  “Yes, but Mrs. Crandall had a key, the key she’d been meaning to bring over to you—I think she kept it because the former tenant used to lock herself out a lot.”

  I would have laughed if my side hadn’t hurt so much. The emergency room doctor said I’d be able to go home in the next day or two, but my collarbone and two ribs were broken, and I was bruised all over from tumbling down the stairs. There was a spectacularly ugly combination of bruise and scrape covering one cheek.

  My mother wanted me to come home with her, but I was going to tell her I’d rather be in my own place, I decided, depending on how sore I was in the morning. Mother had flown into the hospital with every eyelash in place but a wild look in those fine eyes. We had hugged and talked for a while, and she had even shed a few tears (certainly atypical), but when she learned that as far as I knew my apartment was sitting wide open and, for that matter, Bankston’s as well since the police were still searching it, she decided I was well enough to leave and flew off to see to safeguarding my property and the disposition of Bankston’s.

  My mother was a friend of Bankston’s mother, and she was terrified of seeing Mrs. Waites again. “That poor woman,” Mother said. “How can she live with having raised a monster like that? The other Waites children are fine people. What happened? He’s known you all your life, Aurora! How could he hurt you? How could he think of hurting a child?”

  “Who knows?” I said wearily. “He was having a great time, the time of his life.” I had no sympathy to spare for Bankston’s mother, right now. I had no extra emotion of any kind to throw around. I was drained, exhausted, and in pain. I had bruises and bandages galore. Even Robin’s kiss didn’t make me feel lecherous, just raised the possibility that someday I might feel that way. He was picking up his jacket now, getting ready to go.