I tapped on the door. A has-been boxer type in a filthy, stained, tank T-shirt answered. He stood in the doorway, weaving unsteadily, gripping the frame to keep himself from falling on his face. Instead of “hello,” he greeted me with a long, odorous belch. The belch, by itself, was fairly impressive, demonstrating a range and variety of tone found in most operettas.
It really stunk though. My guess was a beer and taco breakfast with undertones of lost-my-toothbrush-ages-ago grunge.
“My lucky day,” he said. Actually he said, “Mmm lickee duh,” but I speak fluent drunk. His bleary eyes crawled over my body. All of a sudden I found myself nostalgic for the charming innocence of the cookie creep.
“I’m looking for Bernie and Karissa,” I persevered, although frankly I don’t know why. “They were renting Lo—”
“Come on in, baby!” He threw the door open. Unfortunately for him, it ricocheted off the wall and slammed into his shoulder. He stumbled sideways, his face folding into a snarl of rage. “Grrr.”
“Did you just growl?”
“Grr … ahrooooo!” He threw his head back in full werewolf howl.
Time to split.
CHAPTER FIFTY TWO
The House O’ Eyes had aired out a bit, but I knew the stench would reappear as soon as I shut the windows. Still, with a choice between stink and howling werewolves, I decided to take the sensible route for once.
They were staring at me again.
I shuddered. How could anyone live like this?
First order of business: immediate doll removal. I’d never be able to look for clues to Karissa’s whereabouts with all those eyes. I yanked out a garbage bag and snapped it open. Grabbing armfuls, I set to. The more I scooped, the more they seemed to multiply. Doll mitosis. I started sweating and it wasn’t from exertion.
Dust coated my skin. Ten minutes into the job and I already felt grungy and in desperate need of a bath. I’d probably end up trashing my jeans and T-shirt, too, which was a shame because the latter was from my favorite band, Bon Iver. For a second I thought about heading out to my car to get my iPod.
A loud bam-bam-bam on the window made me shriek, clutching the lumpy bag of dolls to my chest. A fleshy, misshapen blob slid along the lower pane.
I shrieked again. An eye—yet another one—peered in, unfocused but searching. It found me. The blob grinned and turned back into a face as it pulled away from the glass.
Wolfman.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, dropped it, picked it up and dialed 9-1-1. My thumb hovered over the Send button.
Wolfman laughed, then stumbled back two feet so I could get the full visual effect as he grabbed at his crotch and rubbed. Thankfully, as drunk as he was, his aim was off and he ended up fondling his belly. But I knew what he meant.
Adrenaline surged through my veins, leaving a tinny taste in my mouth. I pressed Send. “I called the cops! Oh God, oh God. They’re on their way!”
Undeterred, he came back to the window, smooshing his nose and mouth into two flat circles on the glass. Then he licked a two-inch wide streak from one side to the other with a tongue as long and dirty as Keith Richards’s.
I gagged. Those were not clean windows.
He moved to the door, jiggled the knob. I’d locked it. Once more at the window, he fumbled with the sash, pulling. Had I locked them? They didn’t budge. Glaring in at me, he banged the pane with the flat of his hand. I thought the cheap glass would break, but it held. He stood, pondering the situation, then must have decided to heed some inner impulse from his soused brain. Staggering away, he wove a crooked line back to his trailer.
I stumbled to the window, charting his progress, making sure he left. I felt dizzy and clutched at the frame to steady my shaking legs. It shifted. Staring down in horror, I lifted. With just the slightest effort, it slid up. It certainly wasn’t locked.
As my heart slowed, I realized that in all the excitement I’d neglected to actually talk to the police. I pictured them trying to triangulate my position from my cell phone, satellites connecting in space, all to ensure my safety. Except why weren’t they here yet? By now, I should have been hearing sirens.
That’s when I finally noticed how light my phone felt. The battery had ejected itself when I’d dropped the phone. The only help that could possibly have intervened in any way was my Higher Power, whom I had been steadfastly avoiding for the past few weeks.
Maybe Sue had a point.
Not wanting to test the Big Guy any more, I gathered up my purse and the traitorous battery and scurried out to my car. I was still shaking too hard to trust my driving, so I pulled over three blocks down to pull myself together.
I decided to give Wolfman time to sober up. If I came back in a couple of hours, he’d either be sleeping it off or too drunk to catch me. But I wasn’t willing—or stupid enough—to come back alone. Like a homing pigeon, I found myself driving to the HP & Me club. Maybe someone there would be willing to give me a hand.
Sue was my first choice. I’d have to admit that after this incident I was slightly more inclined to view God in a more favorable light. I was fairly certain that if Wolfman tried any more breaking and entering or, God forbid, more licking, Sue would cut his tongue out with a meat cleaver and eat it on a biscuit. I’d bring popcorn to that show except it would also produce a lot of blood, which I’d have to clean up.
It didn’t matter any way. She wasn’t home or at the club or answering her cell. Neither did the next three people I tried. The club was strangely deserted, not even an old geezer trying to hunt up a game of Smear.
There was only one other person whose number I had and who I knew would be willing to drop everything and come to my aid. Well, two maybe, but I wasn’t calling Marshall.
I had no illusions about Paul’s ability to keep me safe, but at least he could be a witness for the prosecution after they dug my body out of the landfill.
He was happy to help.
CHAPTER FIFTY THREE
When I explained how I’d taken the cleaning job in order to look for clues to Karissa’s whereabouts, I thought Paul was going to burst in excitement at his promotion to official sidekick. I made him drive. By the time he made it to the club an hour had passed, not as much time as I’d originally wanted to let pass by, but I figured if we came in a different car, maybe Wolfman wouldn’t associate it with me and come a-courtin’.
Of course, Paul’s enthusiasm dropped like a rock when I told him about Wolfman. I waited until we were pulling into the trailer park so he didn’t have a whole lot of time to back out. As soon as we pulled into the “parking spot” for Lot 7—an area of dead grass in front of the rickety wooden porch—I jumped out of the car, up the steps and into the trailer. Paul’s choice was to follow me or sit by himself in the car so the Wolfman could drag him off into the bushes and eat him in leisure.
The dolls stopped him cold. I couldn’t blame him. I’d felt the onslaught of eyeballs as soon as I’d cleared the threshold, but I pretended to be calmer than I felt. I grabbed the trash bag that I’d been filling and got back to work. Paul stood on the cracked linoleum in front of the door, looking bewildered and twitchy.
“Come on, Paul. Let’s get rid of these dolls and then we can look for something that will tell us where Karissa is.”
The thought of looking for clues perked him up enough to join me in my doll eradication exercise. After nearly an hour, we had cleared the living room and master bedroom of the little beasts and had gathered the remaining stragglers from the kitchen and bathroom as well. It took three times as long as it should have, because we kept glancing out windows and jumping at strange sounds.
We hadn’t touched the spare bedroom, and I decided to skip it for today. With the mounds of dolls covering every surface, it didn’t look like Karissa and her sons could have been using it during their stay anyway. We’d uncovered several bed pillows and an old quilt by the living room couch and assorted kids’ clothes on the floor in the main bedroom, so if I had to gu
ess I’d say that Bernie had given over her room to Karissa and the children and taken up residence on the couch.
I also found an ashtray with some stray pot seeds and stems and a teensy nubbin of a roach. Not even enough to be tempted. It was next to the couch, but it could have belonged to either woman. We also unearthed a folder of worksheets on shapes and the alphabet, a Spider-Man lunchbox with moldy PB & J crusts in a crumpled baggie, and a pair of khaki green, no-name brand tennis shoes inside of a navy blue back pack. Mikey was old enough for pre-K or a Head Start program.
“Letty, what am I supposed to be looking for?” Paul asked. Part of me wanted to put him to work cleaning out the fridge, but he looked so eager to start clue-hunting that I couldn’t ask.
“How about an address book or mail or old phone bills?”
The look he gave me was pure admiration. I didn’t have the heart to tell him my methods were compiled from Kinsey Milhone books and old episodes of “Monk.” This time, I didn’t have to worry about breaking a password code on any computer, because there wasn’t one. There wasn’t even a desk, but Paul eventually found stacks of old bills and other household paperwork stuffed into an end table next to the couch. I told him to focus on the top of the stack, figuring the deeper layers would hold less potential for connection to the recent events. Eventually, however, we might require a more careful search.
The living room wasn’t big enough for the two of us to work without bumping into each other, so I grabbed the trash bags and girded my loins for the fridge clean-up. Actually, I just pulled on the Barney-purple gloves, but it felt like girding.
Tallie was right. It was a nice fridge. Nicest thing in the trailer, actually. Nicer than the trailer. Luckily for me, the Stanhope-Dillard household was either not interested in perishable goods like milk or fruit, or had decided to take such items with them. For the kids’ sakes, I hoped it was the latter.
The food stuffs leaned heavily toward condiments and canned drinks, not excluding four Bud Lites and a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid. One container held potato salad—nasty, but not as bad as milk would have been. It really hadn’t been long enough for the lunch meats to go bad. Besides, they probably had enough preservatives to last until the next Ice Age.
“Hey, Letty, is this something?” Paul was holding up a piece of paper.
“What is it?”
“A restraining order. For some guy named Mitch Dillard.”
“That’s Karissa’s husband,” I said. “Lemme see.”
Paul trotted over, excited by his find. “You hold it.” I held my gloved hands up like a surgeon. “I don’t want to get rancid potato salad on our first clue.”
A juicy clue at that.
It was a temporary restraining order, chock-full of good information. I particularly liked the section with Mitch’s physical description: 6‘1”, blond, brown eyes, and a tattoo of the Grim Reaper on his left shoulder. Nice.
“Ooh, and it has his address on it, too,” I said.
“How does that help us?” Paul asked. “He won’t know where she is, will he?”
“For all we know, she could be back at home doing laundry and painting her toenails. In fact, that’s the most likely possibility.”
Paul’s face scrunched up. “You really think she’d return to her abuser? I mean, I know you said some do, but—”
“They were working toward reconciling,” I mumbled, but I wasn’t really paying attention to him. Something he’d said. I held up a purple paw, my mind spinning; Paul hushed.
It clicked. “RTA,” I rasped.
“What?” Paul looked worried. I couldn’t blame him. I probably looked like I was having a brain aneurism. Felt like it, too.
“RTA—those initials at the bottom of all the files. They weren’t initials! I mean, not for a name. They’re an acronym: Returned To Abuser! That’s what all of those women had in common. They went back home. To their abuser!”
“Their abusers killed them?”
“Someone else did. Someone who couldn’t stand the thought that they went back. That’s what Regina figured out. That’s why she died.”
CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR
We kept working for another hour, but didn’t find anything else of note. I resisted the impulse to drive straight over to Mitch’s house. It was dark and it made more sense to wait until the next day. I needed to fabricate a pretext, too.
Paul took me back to my car at the club, and I decided to catch a meeting before heading home. Big mistake. Nobody is nosier than a recovering alcoholic, and our arrival together was duly noted. Wolf whistles and hoots greeted us, and I felt my face flame.
I tried ignoring the whole lot, but it didn’t help my composure to see Paul preening as though we really had been on a date. I fled to the bathroom until it was time for the meeting to start.
I barely restrained myself to wait for a decent hour before heading over to the address on the restraining order. Imagining a thug with a Grim Reaper tattoo being awakened at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning helped. I stopped for coffee even though I knew I’d probably have a long wait and would need to pee.
It was just past 6:30 a.m. when I turned onto Mitch’s street. Still too early to go knocking on doors, but unless he was an early-to-church riser I’d at least catch him at home. Judging by the scattering of bikes and play things littering the neighboring front yards, this looked like a family block. I drove slowly past Karissa’s house. No lights on yet, but it was still early.
Their yard was neatly trimmed. A sugar maple standing at the corner of the lot was just beginning to orange up and hadn’t dumped its leaves yet. A dented mailbox stood at the end of the drive, listing slightly. At first, I thought perhaps somebody had backed into it and created an imaginary scenario in my mind of a fleeing woman. However, a quick scan of the street told me it wasn’t an isolated case. Several other mail boxes had been bashed in, too. If it were winter, I’d have blamed snow plows, but not at this time of year. It was far more likely that the damage had occurred in a Wisconsin version of a drive-by: a carful of bored teens, baseball bats, and a case of PBR or Leinies, if they were lucky.
Fun times.
The house was a nice ranch, nearly identical to the other homes lining the quiet street, except for the body dangling from the ceiling just inside the open garage.
I yelped and almost swerved off the road. It gave my stomach a turn until I realized it was just a gutted buck. Bow season, I remembered. Hoisted up so it could drain and keep it safe from dogs with a taste for the wild. If Mitch was a hunter, then it was possible that I’d missed him already. He could be out in his deer stand munching on candy bars and Doritos, waiting for a buck to show. Still, if he’d already gotten his buck, maybe he was done for the season. Or maybe that was Karissa’s kill. Up here in the north, plenty of women hunt.
I was so busy playing girl-detective that I didn’t take note of the dented, blue pickup parked in the driveway until my second swing past the house.
A rectangular magnet with “T & M Construction: Concrete and Foundation Repair” decorated the passenger door. A clue, by gosh. There were two names as well—Tim and Mitch—with different phone numbers listed under each name.
I parked at the curb two houses down and turned off the ignition. It was so quiet I could hear my engine ticking. I cracked the window so the car wouldn’t fog up.
Then, I waited.
And discovered the most intense boredom ever experienced on planet Earth. How did stalkers manage this? To keep myself alert I counted the vehicles in the driveways and along the street. Then I tried to calculate a car-to-truck ratio but wasn’t sure what category to put SUVs in and the math got too complicated for me, anyway. I graded the landscaping for each home, taking grass length, dandelion dominance, and general tidiness into consideration. Extra points were given for restraint in plastic lawn ornaments. Mitch and Karissa got a B+. I didn’t take off for the mailbox since it seemed a recent development and nobody else had made repairs as yet. The Dillards’ h
ad some toy issues, though.
The neighbors didn’t fare as well, although one house three doors down looked like a promo for House and Garden. Lushly manicured lawn, well-behaved shrubbery, and they even had a wheeled conveyance for their trash cans. Snazzy.
Eventually I tried imagining the people who lived in the houses, what they did for a living, what their lives were like.
I fell asleep.
The sound of a tap, tap, tapping on my side window almost launched me through the sun roof. A pale face loomed in the glass next to mine. I shrieked. Paul shrieked.
My heart was still thudding as Paul slid into the passenger seat.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I figured you would be here. I brought donuts.” He held up a white pastry bag.
OK, the donuts helped. I poked through the bag until I found a chocolate with sprinkles. Sprinkles are tools of forgiveness.
“So, what are we doing?” Paul asked with his mouth full of a bearclaw .
“We aren’t doing anything. I am trying to see if Karissa and her kids came back home.”
“How are you going to do that if no one comes out?”
I sighed. I hated it when other people made sense. We sat in silence for a bit. Then Paul said, “How about this? We could act like salesmen. I could go home and get my vacuum and we could go up to the house and tell them we’ll give them a demo. We’ll need some dirt, too. What do you think?”
What I thought was that it sounded like a Lucy and Ethel adventure and there was no Desi waiting in the wings to play a bongo or save our asses. I had to think of something, because Paul had his hand on the door latch, ready to run home and grab his Hoover or whatever. “Hold up, Paul. I’ve got an idea.” I didn’t really, but as leader of this dynamic duo I felt I should at least be trying. Lucy always had a take-charge attitude and I was damned if I’d be Ethel. Lucy had style. “Wait here.”
Whittaker 02 The One We Love Page 21
