As I watched, He picked up the heavy toilet tank cover, presumably to use as a club with which to bash my head open and splatter my brain. He’d replaced His sacred sacrificial knife in its sheath at His belt. Didn’t want to sully Pandora with my ugly blood, evidently. I wondered why He bothered to keep the guns in His fridge at all, He so obviously preferred the more primal weapons.
Balancing His club in both hands, He strode up to me. “Dumb slut,” He told me, “you should know by now you can’t get away from me.”
I didn’t bother to tell Him I wasn’t trying to get away from Him. All I was trying to do was lure Him as far as possible from Juliet, and not just because I was drawing a predator away from her.
I also had another, new reason: She mustn’t hear what I was going to say to Him. She must never know.
Keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t reach her, but very clear, I said, “We need to talk, Blake Roman.”
I saw those two words, his name, strip him of his authority, stagger him like a rope around his ankles. They shook him so badly that he lost his grip on his heavy white weapon, which fell to the shredded carpeting with a thud. The wooden mask of his face turned to something more like gray clay. His mouth sagged. He tried to speak, but managed only a wordless sound, wet, like the blood from Juliet’s bite on his lips.
I told him, “If you have a soul at all, Blake Roman, you will keep your hands off that girl. She’s your daughter.”
ELEVEN
Sam perceived a gritty, annoying noise trailing along behind him as he strode to the van. Oh. It was Bert, saying, “Wasn’t the vehicle your wife described supposed to have a spare wheel with a logo—”
“There it is. Dumped in the back.” Already at the van, peering in, Sam flapped one hand toward the tire on its rear floor, then hurried on to the passenger’s-side windows. “The driver’s window is busted in. There’s broken glass on the floor. And some kind of bag . . .” His voice stopped with a squeak. He recognized that handbag, yet felt afraid to recognize it; women and their everlasting purses—they spent hours shopping for just the right one, but who could tell them apart anyway?
Sam grabbed the handle of the van’s side door, and it slid open; it was not even locked. Diving into the belly of the van, he grabbed for the darkish, sprawling object he had seen.
“Wait,” said Bert in bored tones. “Don’t touch anything.”
But already Sam stood with the purse open in one hand as he pawed through its contents with the other. “It’s Dorrie’s!” he cried at the sight of her pills, her checkbook, her wallet.
Bert remarked, “Walker’s gonna shit a brick, you messing with evidence like that.”
“Walker schmalker,” Sam said before he could stop himself. “Bert, Dorrie’s in that building.”
No question which building. Its shadow hung over them like a gallows.
“Now, don’t go off half-cocked. You don’t know that.” The old cop started groping at the paraphernalia hanging from his belt. “First we got to call in about the van and the purse—”
Beginning to lose patience, Sam said, “No, Bert, first we have to go get Dorrie.”
Bert gave him a quelling look. “Can’t get a search warrant without some kind of probable cause—”
Now, that was just plain stupid. “Her car is there,” Sam yelled, pointing. “Her purse is here, her name is there—” His hand started to shake, aimed like a handgun at the reprehensible message painted on the old building’s foundation.
“Doesn’t mean she’s in there,” Bert said.
“Then what the—What does it mean?”
“Darned if I know.” Bert succeeded in fumbling a two-way radio out of its case on his belt. “Doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.”
“How could it make more sense?” Sam knew to the marrow of his bones that Dorrie was trapped, somehow endangered, in that place from out of her past. “Bert, I run a machine shop. When the chips fly here, here, and here”—Sam gestured wildly south, northwest, and northeast—“then the part you’re milling is in the middle! It’s that simple.”
The old man eyed him with what appeared to be honest sympathy, but shook his head. “Walker’s regulation minded, as you may have noticed,” he remarked. “And I hate to say, but I believe it was him personally who checked the building last night and said it’s sealed solid. Plus he’s got the FBI riding on him like fleas on a coonhound. You aren’t going to get him to ask the judge for a warrant—”
“Warrant?” Sam couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “But that’s going to take time!”
“It’s not going to happen at all,” Bert pointed out, “unless you can come up with some way anybody could have gotten into that building.”
* * *
“Juliet. She’s your daughter,” I repeated, not sure whether Blake—only desperation could make me acknowledge the name—whether he had heard me or comprehended. His face remained lumpen, stunned.
But in a moment his mouth stirred, stretched, shouting, “Bitch, are you out of your half-assed mind? I don’t have a—”
Juliet must not hear. Keeping my voice low, I cut him off. Instinctively I used the only words that could have silenced him. “Pandora says you do.”
And the moment I said it, my heart tried to stop beating and die, because I realized I hadn’t always been terrified of knives. Not when I was a young girl. The fear had come later.
I had managed to forget it or repress it till now, but I had made Pandora’s razor-edged acquaintance once or twice before.
No. No! Don’t remember.
My invocation of the knife’s name stopped Blake’s shouting. I saw it stagger him. “What?” His voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s.
Keeping my voice very firm, teacherly but low, I told him, “You do have a daughter. Pandora knows it and I know it.”
“You lie.”
“I’m telling you the truth. That young lady sitting in the other room is your daughter.”
“You say. Freaking crazy—”
“I happen to know.”
Hoarsely he demanded, “How?”
“I know. I was there.”
“You were—who the hell are you?”
“Me?” I shrugged. “I’m nobody.” This wasn’t about me. It was about Juliet. I was doing it for the sake of whatever time, whatever hope, whatever change of plans, I could gain for her, even if it was only that he would kill her—and me—more mercifully. Trying for plausibility, I explained, “I went to high school with you. You wouldn’t remember. I was one of those chubby girls nobody remembers.” Blessedly, where I stood, at the end of the dim hallway, I think he could barely see me. I saw his face only in Escheresque white/black outline, by the canted light that knifed through the shattered bathroom door.
“You liar. I know damn well there wasn’t no Marie—”
“Not in your class. I was in Dorrie’s class. I knew her.”
“Bullshit. She didn’t have friends.”
“I just said I knew her. My mother went to Bible study with her mother. I heard Dorrie got pregnant and her parents took her away.”
That smacked the truculence out of him. Apparently his cognitive processes had not yet progressed from abstract to specific; “That girl is your daughter” had not yet developed into “You got Dorrie knocked up.” Gray as clay, he whispered, “Pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . she never told me.”
“She didn’t know till it was too late. Her parents wouldn’t let her tell you. They kept her locked in a room and wouldn’t let her ever see you again. It broke her heart. She was crazy in love with you.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
Trying to pander to his ego, I went too far. Saying those words, I felt my aching, disillusioned heart start pounding, blushing,
swelling, yearning for that once-upon-a-time white flame of passion. I had forgotten about the knife, Pandora, and the way in which I had first made her acquaintance. I remembered only the other days, the angel white, cherry red earlier days. I had forgotten to be a fat interfering bitch. My voice had softened. Something must have shown in my eyes.
Or maybe he was remembering too. Maybe my words had opened something in him that had been closed before.
He saw.
Shock of seeing flew between him and me like scarlet lightning.
In that moment he knew who I was, and the knowledge nearly knocked him to his knees. He reeled, eyes wide, everything wooden about him shattering. This man wasn’t made of wood or clay either; he was made of raw bloody hurting anger. His mouth stretched as if to scream, but I could barely hear him or understand him. “No! No, you can’t be!” He snatched his knife from its sheath.
I’d met that knife—my mind had mostly obliterated that time with a kind of mental perfect fog filled with a rosy glow, I couldn’t remember exactly, but—one of those last days before my parents had taken me away, he had held that grinning blade to my throat as we made love.
Just for thrills? Or had he raped me?
A jab of long-belated anger gave me strength to demand, “I can’t be who?”
“Shut up!”
“Shut up, who? What’s my name?”
“You’re not her!” He raised the knife, its blade shivering cold as my spine. Trembling, he screamed, “You’re ugly! No Candy of mine gets fat and ugly! Traitor!”
Traitor? My parents and their hellfire-based religion had inflicted guilt upon me in many forms, but never that one. I whispered, “You think I—I betrayed you?”
Raving, he didn’t even hear me, yet echoed the word. “You betrayed me. Fat, ugly, old, you got no right! You were supposed to stay. Stay!”
Softly, reasonably, I said, “I just told you, they took me away.”
“Dumb fuck!” He stamped the floor. “You turned into a typical woman.” He couldn’t have given me a higher compliment, yet he made it sound like a curse. “I can’t stand it.” His stony eyes remained arid, like pebbles in a desert, yet he sobbed. He staggered. Reeling, he attacked the air with his knife, slashing, stabbing. “Big, fat, mouthy . . .” He gave me a rabid glare. “No Candy of mine gets past eighteen. Candy’s supposed to stay sweet and young. Stay.”
Oh.
Just as I began to understand, he turned on me, knife raised, to kill me.
I thought of grabbing something to use as a weapon or a shield. But something in me had gone stoical, like doom, and also relentless, like fate.
I didn’t move, but I kept fighting.
I demanded, “Blake. Why did you paint me a whore on the wall?”
Not very clearly phrased, that question, but he knew exactly what I meant.
His knife flashed down, but he’d flinched, or I had, or both. Instead of stabbing me in the chest, the blade glanced off my upper left arm. I felt the slash before the knife struck the makeshift wall behind me.
I wouldn’t cry out. Would not clamp my right hand over the bleeding wound. Would. Not. I stood there.
Yanking his knife out of the board it had pierced, Blake stood panting, gasping.
I demanded, “When did you paint that awful thing on the wall?”
“Back . . . then.”
“Why?”
He met my eyes and cried, “Because you pulled back, you kept trying to chicken out, I could tell you didn’t want to do it!”
“So you had to advertise that I’d done it anyway?”
“I ain’t talking about getting laid, you bag of shit. Stupid slut, I don’t know why I ever thought you could understand, and now you’ve gone and turned into—into—you’re Candy’s mother?”
Juliet’s mother, he meant?
Or did he mean that I had turned into my own mother?
Something, the way nothing made sense, a shining knife-edge of hysteria in that word mother, gave me an inkling.
A hint of who had made him crazy.
A sense that I had to be crazy too, in order to talk with him.
So, sweetly conversational, I nodded. “I love being a mother,” I confided. “Mothers are the nicest people, don’t you think, Blake?”
Instantly I knew I’d made a connection that could either save me and Juliet or get us both killed. I knew because everything changed in that moment. His face flattened into a mask again. He went profoundly still. His silence sobbed, shouted, screamed.
“Sure,” he said tonelessly. “Mothers are very nice.”
“Was your mother nice, Blake?”
“My mother is dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I said as if I hadn’t known this before. “I’m very sorry,” I said, feeling the blood running down my arm. I knew I couldn’t back off. I had to be insistent, obsessive, as psycho as he was. “But when she was still alive,” I said, my voice softer yet and pitched higher, “wasn’t she a nice person?”
Silence. A pause that seemed to last a minute. He didn’t move so much as a hair, but a nerve in his face twitched, and twitched again, and again.
Finally, “She and my father loved each other very much,” he said, each word equally inflected, equally expressionless. And as he said it, he drew his knife blade lightly across one scarred wrist.
What had his parents done to him?
“She and your father loved each other,” I repeated, expecting that next he would say they had loved him too. And expecting—dreading, actually—that he would caress his wrist with the knife again.
But that wasn’t what happened. One flat word at a time he said, “They died together. They slit their wrists together. They did it to each other. They didn’t do it to me.”
* * *
With his size-thirteen feet planted stubbornly on the gravel of the parking lot, Sam stood fuming behind the deserted library.
Bert had “reported in” on his antiquated radio. Bert expected the FBI would want a look at the van. Meanwhile, while waiting for the FBI or Walker or the “lab boys” or whomever, Bert had wandered off to “have another look around the perimeter.” Not trusting himself to be civil, Sam stood where he was, glaring.
CANDY GOT LAID HERE
Monstrous. The whole thing was monstrous. What sort of monster would have put that there? In big print letters that practically shouted? The guy had to be sick, sick, sick, some kind of psycho, a—
A very unstable, potentially violent individual.
Sam stiffened, blinking. He looked at the graffito one more time, letter by letter. Then he grabbed his cell phone, and thank technology, yes, the number was still in memory from the night before. He called the Fulcrum Police Department.
“Officer Chappell, please.”
“Who?” The receptionist sounded tired and bored. “I’m not familiar with any Officer Chappell.”
“Young woman, skinny, black.” To heck with political correctness. Sam was in no mood to pussyfoot around.
“Oh, you mean Sissy!” Apparently Officer Chappell got no more respect from the secretarial staff than she did from her chief. “She’s off duty—”
Another tired, bored female voice sounded from the background. “She was in here sending a fax about half an hour ago.”
“Then I guess she’s back on duty already?”
“Ma’am,” Sam interrupted between gritted teeth, “I need to speak with her.”
“Well, um, if she’s still in the building, let me see if I can page her.”
“Please.”
* * *
Moseying around the old building, Bert Roman carried almost seventy years of Appletree history with him. Heck, he’d worked his first job here at this place, back when it was still a cigar factory making all of Appl
etree smell like apple cider, which was a heck of a lot nicer than what a paper mill would do. He’d started in the cigar factory as a floor sweeper, advanced to being a wrapper, then a machine operator. He remembered the people he’d worked with. He’d gone to school—elementary, junior high, high school, it was all in the same building back then—within a block of here. He remembered people from school too. He remembered people he’d had dealings with over the years. Arrested. Rescued. Watched die. He remembered births, weddings, funerals, scandals—there wasn’t much that went on in Appletree that he didn’t know about. He knew more about this jurisdiction, and more about life in general, and way more about being a cop, than Walker ever would.
And the son of a bitch treated him like a messenger boy.
Fine. Retirement was coming up in just a few months now.
Taking his time, Bert scanned the old Appletree cigar building from roofline to foundation, took a few steps, scanned some more. He loved these old factories. They didn’t build them generous and solid like this anymore, rows and rows of stately double-sashed windows giving natural light to rooms twelve feet high, basement twelve feet deep, access through an outdoor concrete stairwell with a double metal door—firmly padlocked, Bert noted—over top of it to keep the rain and dead leaves and such from puddling at the bottom. Sloping door, nearly horizontal; they didn’t make basement entryways like that anymore. Or basements that rose into a three-foot foundation with real windows, not just window wells, for illumination—
There was a broken basement window.
Bert frowned, wondering why this window hadn’t been boarded up like the others. Looked like it had been covered from the inside for some reason. Now it looked like somebody had put a rock through it.
Probably had nothing to do with anything, but Bert made a mental note to point it out to Walker when he got here.
Movement on the parking lot caught his eye: Sam White waving at him like he wanted to talk with him. Sam was a nice guy, Bert had decided, but excitable. Required a lot of smoothing down. Bert didn’t mind; smoothing people down was one of the things he did best, and anyway, he’d finished his look around. Smiling, he ambled over to the White fellow, who was speaking into a cell phone clutched in one hand and was saying, “You think it’s him? Blake Roman?”
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