“Oh, yeah,” she said aloud, her pencil scratching away, the shadows in the drawing darkening, gaining substance. “How you like me now?”
She laughed as she began to add a strangely shaped vase to the second shelf of the bookcase, one that wasn’t there but would have been if she’d bought it last week instead of deciding that Daniel would have considered it too expensive. He wasn’t against paying for nice things if they were worth it, but their opinions on both what was nice and what was worth it differed a bit. So she added the vase. Heck, why not add the other vase she’d considered, the tall, thin one? She put that on the end table by the doorway to the dining room.
The sketch was nearing completion. Alice paused in her work to examine the room for some detail she’d missed but which deserved inclusion. She sank a little lower into the sofa.
ALICE AWOKE TO a quiet thump and the loud sizzle of static. She forced her eyes open and reached for the remote, then saw that the TV was turned off. She blinked herself a little more awake and realized that the static was in fact the sound of rain thrashing against the windows. The night had made good on the afternoon’s promise of rain. It was pounding down out there. A flash of lightning lit the room. If thunder sounded, she didn’t hear it, though she couldn’t help but hear the wind crying out there. It was a good night to be snuggled under a blanket on the sofa. She wondered briefly about the thump she thought she’d heard, but decided she either hadn’t heard one or that it had come from a neighbor’s apartment.
She shifted and her pencil slid off her lap, onto the floor. She picked it up and tossed it onto the coffee table, then took a quick glance at the drawing of the room she’d done. Pretty darned good, she thought. She’d created an accurate rendering of the room, used artistic license to change a few details to please her eye, adding a couple of vases, leaving out the basket of still-unfolded laundry on the floor, and thought it was a successful exercise. She was particularly pleased with the doorway and the dining room beyond. There she had sketched in the suggestion of the table and the two chairs she could see, the chandelier over the table, the mirror on the far wall, the wine rack—
“Oh, please, no.”
She shifted her eyes back to the mirror on the far wall. It reflected back into the living room. In the mirror she’d drawn herself in the corner of the couch. She hadn’t even realized she’d done that. Nor had she realized that she’d added another figure, half-visible, half blocked by the edge of the doorway. The boy again. The damned little blond boy. He appeared to be standing just a couple of feet from Alice, just off to her side a bit, in the middle of the room. His back was to the mirror, which meant he would have been standing right there, right there in front of her.
Watching her.
And he was pointing again, one arm raised and pointing at Alice…no, not at her…over her, out the window behind her.
“But he wasn’t really here, of course,” she said and she didn’t like hearing the crack in her voice. “He wasn’t really standing here or I would have seen him. How would he have even found me? And how would he have gotten in? Just how the hell would he have gotten in?”
The rain roared at the window right behind her. Lightning flashed outside again. The wind cried louder. Alice threw off her blanket and hurried to the apartment door. She checked the locks and found them securely engaged, which made her feel a little better. Then she looked at the peephole and hesitated. Suppose she peeked out and he was standing out there, just standing there looking up at her? She almost backed away from the door, but suddenly the thought of the boy out there, keeping silent vigil, waiting, waiting just for her, creeped her out enough that she knew she had to look. She steeled herself, looked through the little lens, and saw a fish-eyed view of an empty hallway. She blew out a breath and headed back down the hall toward the living room.
She stopped. What if he was there now in the middle of the living room, where he’d been standing while she sketched? But no, he hadn’t really been there. The doors were locked. He couldn’t have gotten in.
But what if this was a boy who could not be deterred by locked doors?
“You’re being an idiot,” she said. “A slightly crazy idiot.”
She walked into the living room. There was no little boy. Not in here, anyway. Feeling more than a little foolish, she checked the other rooms, starting with the kitchen, then the dining room.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she said and realized she’d mimicked Robert De Niro from some scary movie from years ago. “Come out, come out, wherever you aaarrrre,” she said again.
She moved through the living room, which was still devoid of creepy little boys, and down the hall. She started in the bedroom and found no one, not even in the closet. She didn’t even realize that she was chanting “All-ee-all-ee-in come freeeee.” She cleared Daniel’s office, then found herself outside the closed door to her studio.
She paused with her hand on the knob. Without knowing how or why she knew it, she realized that if she were going to find the boy, it would be behind this door. Which meant she should lock the door and flush the key down the toilet and into oblivion. Instead, she gritted her teeth and opened the door. The room was dark and lightning flashed before she could hit the wall switch. In that instant her heart and breath stopped and she knew—she just knew—that he’d be revealed in that staccato burst of light, that he’d be standing there, standing right there, waiting for her, staring at her, maybe pointing off to the side, and maybe she’d turn her head and finally see it, see whatever it was he’d been pointing at all along, and she’d realize that it was something she didn’t want to see, something no one should see, something —
But the lightning revealed nothing that shouldn’t have been there. She hit the wall switch, flooding the room with artificial light. He wasn’t in the studio. He wasn’t behind the easel or under her drawing table or in the closet. He wasn’t there.
“Of course he isn’t,” she said. “He isn’t here now and he wasn’t here earlier.”
She walked back into the living room.
“I imagined him. I do that. I have a great imagination. I’m an artist, for God’s sake. Now, I’m going to bed.”
She flipped a switch, letting darkness take the room. As she turned to leave, lightning blazed again and she glanced at the window and stopped. Cold water trickled down her spine.
“I didn’t just see that,” she said. “I didn’t.”
Another flash told her she was wrong. She saw them again.
Two little handprints on the window.
She started across the room, taking slow steps.
Another burst of lightning and there they were. They hadn’t disappeared like she hoped they would. They were still there. Two little handprints. And right between them, a small smudge, like the imprint of a nose. Like a boy had stood on the couch in front of the window, that window right there, his hands on the glass, his nose pressed against it, looking out at the city.
Perhaps he’d been here all day, inside her apartment, at this window, standing on the sofa right where Alice had just been sitting, watching her in the park five stories below, looking at her as she looked for him. She knew the bench where she’d sat was visible from this window. Had he been watching her that entire time?
She stepped closer to the window.
“But that’s crazy,” she said. “He couldn’t have gotten in here.” She shook her head angrily. “He’s not even real, goddamn it.”
But those handprints were real. And they were certainly too small to have been left by an adult. She tried to remember the last time a child had even been in the apartment. She couldn’t.
As she reached the window, Alice expected lightning to flash again, but it didn’t. She hoped to find that the handprints weren’t visible without it, that it was all somehow a trick of the light, of the night, of her mind. But damn it, they were there.
Alice put a knee on the sofa, leaned forward, pressed her forearm against the glass, and rubbed fur
iously with her shirtsleeve. When she was finished, when those marks had to be gone, she looked at the glass again.
She began to cry.
The marks were still there, right behind where Alice had been sleeping just minutes ago, but on the other side of the glass, the raindrops running over them but failing to wash them away.
“No, no, no, no, no.”
Five stories up, yet there they were—little handprints, a tiny nose print—on the outside of the window.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“YOU THINK ONE of your patients wrecked your pictures?” Kenny asked as he shut off the tap and slid a beer across the bar. Though Boone was usually in his stool at the bar during happy hour, he didn’t always come back down later in the night. But tonight he needed another beer. And he needed to talk about the photographs.
Boone shook his head. “They’re my clients, not patients, and no, I don’t think so. Stan told me they were like that when he got there, and he was the first to arrive.”
“Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he’s the one who did it.”
“I was never out of the room. Besides, you know how long that would take? Fourteen different pictures, in three different rooms? I never leave my clients alone in my place. They show up, we talk, they leave. It couldn’t have happened while I was home.”
“You want me to have the locks changed?”
Boone shrugged. It seemed crazy to think that someone had broken into his apartment with the sole mission to deface Boone’s photographs in such a specific way, scratching away the faces of old men and leaving everything else untouched—even going so far as to return the pictures to their correct places on the walls. Then again, there wasn’t a single sane alternative theory he could concoct.
“Yeah, maybe you could change the locks,” Boone said. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Boone heard a beep, followed by the sound of Kenny fumbling with his cell phone.
“Well?” Boone asked. “Was that Susie texting? Is the baby finally getting off its ass and joining the rest of us?”
“Nah. Susie’s just telling me that her mother has arrived. She’s gonna stay with us for a little while to help when we bring the baby home.”
“How long?”
“Susie says no more than a week, so I figure I’m looking at two weeks, minimum.”
“You’re a lucky man.”
“Ah, it’ll be fine. Her mom never notices my earplugs.”
Boone took a sip of beer. “Shouldn’t you be home with her right now?”
“My mother-in-law? God, no.”
“I meant Susie. That baby’s gonna burst out of her like one of the things from Alien any second now. Shouldn’t you be there?”
“It’s four blocks away. Her water breaks, she texts me, I’m home before she stops dripping.”
“That’s really disgusting.”
“Yeah, I started to regret it halfway through saying it.”
Someone tapped on the bar a few stools away and Kenny went to serve the guy. When he returned, he said, “You realize it was probably one of your clients, right? Scratching out the faces in the pictures? Even if it didn’t happen tonight, when you were there, one of them probably did it sometime earlier, when you weren’t home, and you just didn’t notice.”
It was possible. The pictures could have been ruined days ago and Boone wouldn’t have known. “You think?”
“Boone, I don’t know how to say this delicately, so I won’t even try. You don’t know anybody else. You never leave this block. The only people you talk to are me, your patients—”
“Clients.”
“Whatever. Me, your clients, and a few neighborhood kids. You don’t know anybody else. And nobody else knows you or where you live.”
“So maybe it’s one of the kids around here. Most of them call me Frankenstein. I could see them breaking in and doing something like this.”
“Maybe. But kids aren’t that…I don’t know…sophisticated. I could see them breaking in, all right. Hell, some of them probably learned how to pick a lock from their daddies before they could count to twenty—the daddies or the kids. But once they got inside, I just don’t see them taking the pictures down, wrecking the photos, and putting them back up. More likely, they’d just smash the glass, or just trash the whole place. They’d probably spray-paint ‘Frankenstein’ on the wall or something. This just seems somehow more controlled than they’d be, you know?”
Boone took a sip of Budweiser and wiped a sheen of foam from his upper lip. “I see what you’re saying. I suppose none of the other tenants complained of something like this?”
“Nope. Not yet, anyway.”
“Nobody thought someone had been in their place, messed with their stuff, nothing like that?”
Kenny shook his head.
“So this was definitely directed at me.” Boone took another sip. “You think it’s a message?”
“What kind of message?”
“I don’t know. Obviously there’s a connection to my face.”
“Yeah, of course. You’ve got scars and someone scars the men in your pictures. But what’s the point?”
“People can be cruel.”
“Yeah, but again, if it wasn’t some kid, then it had to have been one of your patients, right? As I said, the list of suspects in your life is pretty short.”
“None of my clients would do that, even if they could break into my place. They have no reason to. They have their own deformities. They know what it’s like to suffer humiliation. Why would they add to mine?”
“Maybe you said the wrong thing to one of them. Or you weren’t sensitive enough. Maybe your rates are too high. I don’t know. You call the cops?”
“Seems like a small thing to complain about. They did minimal damage. The cops have bigger things to worry about.”
Kenny was silent, probably realizing that Boone simply didn’t feel like having a couple of cops stare at his face for a few minutes, especially when the chances of finding out who did this were slim anyway.
“I think you should be careful for a while,” he said to Boone. “Okay?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, it might just be a mean-ass prank, but like you said, it could also be a message, right? A warning?”
“What kind of warning?”
“I don’t know, but you said the guys’ faces in the pictures were completely scratched out, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if someone was making a statement about you, maybe he’d have only scratched out half the face. So it looks more like yours, you know?”
“And?”
“And, uh, maybe someone is saying that they’re going to do something to the other half of your face.”
Boone stopped in mid-sip. He hadn’t considered that. It seemed far-fetched, but then again, this whole thing was far-fetched. No, he hadn’t thought of that. Hell, he wished Kenny hadn’t thought of it, either.
BOONE ENTERED HIS apartment, locked the door behind him, then unlocked it again and opened it, leaving it ajar. In case he surprised an intruder, and the intruder wanted to make a fast getaway, Boone was going to let him.
Boone faked a cough, opened and closed a drawer of an end table, and picked a book up off the coffee table and dropped it. After he’d made enough noise to alert anyone in the apartment of his presence, and after no one sprang out from hiding, he closed the door and reengaged the deadbolt.
He turned and was about to head into the kitchen when he saw it. The photo of the mountain, which he’d left on the floor, leaning against the wall, was hanging from its hook again. And it was crooked again. Boone tried to recall putting the picture back up, but he couldn’t. Surely, he must have, but he didn’t remember doing it. And if he did, he certainly wouldn’t have hung it crooked. He straightened it, shook his head, and, out of the corner of his eye, saw something else. On the wall above a waist-high bookshelf hung a photo of Mount Kilimanjaro, which Boone had taken at sunrise. The picture was cro
oked.
What the hell was going on here?
Boone straightened the picture, thought for a moment, then walked back to his apartment door. To the left of it—which would have been to his blind side as he entered earlier—hung his third and final photograph of a mountain. It was of a peak in Hawaii, draped from its base to its tip in lush green vegetation. Boone wasn’t surprised to find it hanging crooked. He supposed he should have been surprised, but by now, he wasn’t. He straightened the picture and sat down on the couch to think.
Should he call the cops? This would sound crazy to them. And, like he’d told Kenny, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway.
Why tip only the pictures of mountains? Why scratch off the faces of only the old men?
Something occurred to him. He walked back into the living room and straight over to a photograph hanging above his television. He did his pigeon head cock, couldn’t see it clearly, so he took it off the wall. He took it into the kitchen and sat down at the table again. He turned the frame over and removed the backing. He took the photo out and slid his hands over the surface of the picture. No scratch marks. He would have felt them if they were there. This photo was of a young Japanese couple in brilliantly colored, traditional ceremonial wedding garb. The man’s face was untouched. Boone reassembled the picture and returned it to the living-room wall. Next, he went into his bedroom, where he had hung a photo of a Venetian gondolier. He hadn’t really seen the picture in years, but he knew it well. The man, who looked to be in his early thirties, wore the traditional gondolier’s garb—shirt with horizontal black and white stripes, a red scarf tied loosely at the neck, and a straw hat with a red ribbon adorning it. He stood at the back of the gondola, a long pole in his hands, his mouth open in song. Boone took the picture down from the wall, removed the photo from the frame, and was unsurprised to find that the man’s face was unscathed.
Boone returned the picture to the wall and went back to the kitchen table. He had confirmed that it was indeed only the old men who’d had their faces removed. If this was a warning to Boone, why would only the old men be defaced? Why not the younger ones? Boone was only thirty-six.
Drawn Page 7
