by L. T. Vargus
Clear. Good.
Now she moved to that tremor which had caught her eye just beyond the bottom mattress to her left.
Kathryn Porter huddled in the far corner of the bedroom, tucked in the shadows, half obscured by the antique dresser there. She held her head in her arms and rocked herself from side to side, a catatonic look to the behavior.
Darger knelt, sensing once again that she needed to be gentle with this one. Delicate. She spoke just louder than a whisper, placed a hand on the girl’s forearm.
“Kathryn. Are you OK?”
The girl stopped rocking, removed her arms from her head, peeked out, slow blinking like a lemur. She said nothing. Nodded her head after a second.
Darger stood and reached her hands out, helped Kathryn up. The frantic urge to scramble back to Fowles roiled over her skin, but she needed to find out what happened here first.
“He was there,” Kathryn said, whisper-yelling, a weird rising pitch in her tone. She sounded terrified. “He was out there. Right out there.”
She gestured out the window, not pointing with a finger so much as a floppy hand at the end of her wrist.
Darger’s mind tried to process this in fast speed. He was there. Outside. Did that make sense? Had he fired through a window? Darger hadn’t heard breaking glass. Only the gunshots.
She clenched her teeth. Needed to keep it simple. Of the many questions percolating in her head, she asked one.
“Who?”
Kathryn didn’t answer. She slow-blinked a couple more times and then shuffled off toward the door to the hallway, her arms once more hugging at her torso, her face going a little blank.
Darger grabbed her by the shoulders and spun the girl to face her again. There was no point in trying to get answers out of her just now, but she could still help.
“I need to see to Fowles. Do you have a phone?”
After another slow-blink, Kathryn nodded again.
“I want you to try to find a signal. Call 911. Tell them there’s an officer down.”
It was a lie — Fowles wasn’t actually law enforcement — but Darger didn’t care about that. She wanted the whole damned cavalry to descend on this place with urgency.
Darger rushed back to the sprawled figure at the edge of the kitchen. Tried not to note the stillness of his ribcage, the absence of any obvious signs that he was still breathing.
She knelt next to him. Held her breath as she checked his pulse. Still there, but faint. The beat felt thin against her fingers. Hollow. Thready was what they always called it in the first aid classes she’d taken. He didn’t have long.
She ripped off her jacket. Wadded it up. Pressed it to that ragged opening in his middle and applied pressure.
If Kathryn couldn’t get someone on the phone, they’d have to move him. Darger tried to go through the steps in her head. She should have Kathryn move the car closer to the door so they wouldn’t have to carry him across the whole yard. Kathryn could sit in back and apply pressure while Darger drove. Or maybe Darger should sit in back so she could perform CPR if that became necessary. She didn’t exactly trust the woman to drive in the state she was in, but her options were limited.
Fowles’ skin was so cold it felt like something pulled out of the back of the refrigerator, but the sheets of blood pulsing up to saturate her jacket seemed feverish. Too hot. Wrong.
She pressed harder, closed her eyes and tried to will the bleeding to slow, to stop. The jacket was already sopping in her fingers.
She thought maybe she should grab a towel. Were there towels in the bathroom? She couldn’t remember. The mattresses sported no blankets from what she could recall, all stripped bare.
She opened her eyes again and movement drew her gaze upward.
Kathryn stumbled out of the bedroom doorway, arms hugged around herself, a listless look in her eye. Mindless, Darger thought. Like a zombie.
“Did you call 911?”
No answer. Kathryn just kept shambling forward, feet sliding over the floor more than taking steps.
Darger hardened her voice. Tried not to sound too aggressive, tried not to let her fear and frustration seep through even though what she really wanted was to grab the girl by the shoulders and give her a good shake.
“Kathryn. Are you OK?”
“He was out there,” the girl mumbled just above her breath. She arrived at the kitchen counter and stopped, gazing out the window above the sink.
And again Darger sensed that something wasn’t right. Kathryn wasn’t making sense. She must be in shock.
Fowles moaned a little then, a sleepy sound emitting from his parted lips. Far away perhaps. Still there, though. Still alive, but they were losing time. He wouldn’t make it much longer.
Darger pulled out her phone, streaking blood all over the touchscreen with her red fingers. She couldn’t rely on Kathryn for any help in this. She’d have to do it all herself.
Her hands shook as she picked out the numbers on the dial pad, but before she could dial the second 1, a dark figure lurched for her.
She looked up, flinched, dropped the phone as she tried to shield herself with her hand, confused to see Kathryn Porter swinging something, something black and mean and arcing toward her head, something that looked like a cast iron skillet.
She sensed the first crack of the impact, a deep musical tone like a struck bell inside her skull, and then everything went black.
Chapter 57
You stop. Hover over the limp figure. Make sure she’s out. Little wheezes snuffle in and out of her, but otherwise she keeps still. Good.
You cup your hands under her armpits and lift. Lean her torso against yours. And now you move. Drag her inch by inch. Her legs dangling along behind you all loose like rag doll parts.
Her frame feels small in your arms, against your abdomen. Delicate. Like a bird or a baby turtle, you think. So small that the shell is still soft.
She is weak and you are strong, and this is how you fit together, how you’ve always fit together. Always and forever.
But the weight is dead. Limp. A floppy heap that strains against you. Makes your muscles quiver.
It’s not far, though. Not far to where she’s going, where you’ll make her clean.
Her pant leg gets caught on the metal threshold strip in the bathroom doorway. The fabric rips a little when you jerk her free.
And now you’re there. Her destination.
You slump the body into the tub, and the skull cracks into the polymer all loud. Sounds like you dropped a bowling ball or an anvil. Makes you think of cartoon characters trying to kill each other in elaborate ways.
You step back, and again you’re struck by how small she looks. And how perfect. She is something tiny and precious. Something totally at the mercy of your every whim.
Your hands move to twist the knobs, and the water rushes forth. Cascading out of the spout and slapping the floor of the tub. Little specks of spray flick up onto the rim just next to you. Spatter.
As soon as the faucet turns on, you feel better. The sound of the water soothes you. Sloshing and babbling. Makes life simple again. Makes everything small and clean.
You’ve always belonged together, haven’t you? Always.
Way back, all those years ago, you couldn’t be. Things were different in so many ways. And maybe she never wanted you the way you wanted her. Sometimes you can remember it being that way. This sucking emptiness in your chest, a world that brought you here to humiliate you, a universe full only of meaninglessness and pain.
Other times, though, she loved you. She really loved you and things just went wrong.
The bad thing just happened to her like all the rest. An accident, almost.
Cross your heart and hope to die.
It’s all happened so many times now. Like an endless loop. It gets hard to keep all the stories straight.
But you are together now. Together again. And she is yours. She is all the way yours.
Your possession.
You blink, and the rea
l world comes into focus again.
She is there in the water. Floating face down.
But some sense creeps over you, an impulse like an itch crawling up your spine that something is missing, some element of the ritual forgotten in the rush of events.
You need a blade.
Chapter 58
Darger drifted in the dark, somewhere between awake and sleeping. Apart from reality. Alone in her skull.
Part of her knew this was so, knew that she lay prone now in a strange place far from any road. At the mercy of something or someone to be feared. Something cold. Dark. Savage. And this conscious part of her held tight to some fractured awareness of the terrors waiting beyond that thin barrier of her eyelids.
This panicked portion of her mind struggled to alert the rest of her, to shake her from her sleep, but it did not know how. Most of her just floated in the emptiness, knew only the dark inside, only the peacefulness of the here and now. The abyss.
And she marveled at this sense that she was floating. Weightless. Unchained from the ground at last. Like a child free of any and all concerns.
Wherever she was, all sounds had been muffled. Dampened. But the quiet was strange. Wavering and wet and not right somehow. Not normal. The high end sucked out so everything lacked clarity, lacked a sense of space. A quiet that seemed right on top of her, pressing itself into her.
And then it hit her. Made her body jerk, that spinal reaction jolting her limbs before she really knew what was happening, like when she used to dream she was falling as a child and would startle herself away.
Cold.
Shocking cold.
Not just the cold. The cold and the wet.
It throttled her.
She opened her eyes. Ripped her head back from the water’s surface and felt the cold fluid all around her. Sucked in a big breath.
Water. Water and light so bright it stung through her eyelids. She couldn’t open her eyes.
Her mind struggled with this information. Made sense of it in stages.
Cold water all around her. Cupping her. Submerging her.
And the light wasn’t sunlight, she thought. Something artificial about it.
What the hell?
Her heart raced. Eyelids struggled to open. Her limbs flailed and crashed into something hard beneath the water. Thumping out a hollow sound.
Fear. Even if none of this made sense just yet, she knew she should be scared. That was something.
She blinked a few times, her wet lashes smearing in and out of her field of vision before staying open at last.
Bright white everywhere. Blinding, searing light. Pastel colors. A light blue paint adorning the top half of the walls. Some kind of soft green tiles covering the walls from the midpoint down.
Again, her groggy brain took a second to process the world around her.
The bathroom. The bathtub.
And the sound came to her as if from far away. The faucet gushing water into the tub even still, roaring on the way out and tinkling when it hit the standing water like a wind chime.
The water jostled around her. Disturbed. Miniature waves rolling away toward the tub’s rim before lapping back at her. She could see her hands moving about in it, jockeying for position, distorted by the water so they looked like strange flippers.
The room was empty apart from her. And she could see nothing stirring in the thin rectangle of the hall visible through the open doorway.
She tried to push herself up, to get out of the water, but her arms wouldn’t oblige her. Her muscles were shaky and weak. Offering only jerky little movements that reminded her of a hermit crab dragging itself along the shoreline in slow motion, leaving a strange trail in the sand.
The memory came free then. Played in her head: Kathryn Porter swinging that hunk of cast iron at her, everything going black. And the crime scene photos flashed in her mind’s eye one after another, of all those drowned bodies found in rivers and ponds in the outlying area, all of them found with bathwater in their lungs.
The final puzzle piece snapped into place, much later than it should have.
Porter was the killer. A woman connected to multiple victims. A woman whose behavior seemed strange and erratic, whose grasp on reality seemed shaky at best.
A woman.
A woman who had killed Fowles.
No, she shouldn’t think that. She could still feel the memory of his pulse pattering along in the tips of her fingers, galloping and jerky and sort of hollow somehow, his skin going cold from shock.
He was alive then. Could still be alive even now. Maybe.
And hot tears flooded Darger’s eyes. The acidic kind that stung as soon as they hit. Like public pool water with too much chlorine.
She gritted her teeth, blinked to fight back the wet from flooding her eyes. And some bitter flavor arose in her throat, earthy and disgusting like licorice without the sweet.
Kathryn Porter.
They’d interviewed the killer twice. Darger should have seen it sooner, should have pieced it together, should have known. This was the wrongness she’d felt all along. Why hadn’t she seen it?
She’d let her routine blind her to the truth. Let a sense of the way things ought to be disrupt her view of the way things really were. The accepted probability of a male perpetrator pointed her a different direction, led her astray.
She pushed these thoughts down, though. Buried them.
Her fuck-up didn’t matter at the moment. She needed to focus, needed to get out of here. Now.
Her head darted around again, taking in the tiny bathroom, the open door leading out into the hallway. Porter wasn’t here now.
This was her chance, it seemed.
Again she tried to push herself up, but her motor skills remained inarticulate. Still woozy and weak from being knocked out. The little hermit crab scrabbling at the sand, not really getting anywhere.
She stopped. Waited. Breath heaving in and out.
She couldn’t panic. Couldn’t break herself here, expend all of her energy in hermit crab mode like a fool. No. Better to catch her breath, gather her strength, wait for her muscles to come around.
When footsteps sounded out in the hallway, Darger didn’t think. She plopped her head back in the water to play dead.
Chapter 59
The water still roars out of the faucet, patters at the pool below. And the girl still lies there face down.
You flex your fingers around the handle of the steak knife in your grip. If she moves at all, your blade will take care of it. Calm her back down. Poke holes to let the tension out, the fight out, the blood out.
And you can picture it now, the pink swirls spilling out of her wounds and dancing in the water. Little clouds of it shifting around with the waves.
You can tell by the pitch that the stuff coming out of the faucet is cold, much colder than a bath should be. The tone sounds wrong. Feels wrong. And you vaguely remember encountering this with Dustin long ago.
The hot water heater out here poses problems. Unreliable. It annoys you for a second, but then you remember that it doesn’t matter so much this time, does it? Not to her and not to you. The cold will do just fine. Just fine.
It’s not until the bathwater lifts strands of the light brown hair that you see it. Realize it’s not her. Not the one you were thinking of all this time, the one you’re always thinking of.
And your chest shudders in a big breath, and an emptiness seems to enter you.
You long to go back to her. Back into the past. More than anything, you wish you could go back to her. To live out your ritual over and over. The real thing. Strong and weak.
The small body in the tub is the cop lady, of course. The one who keeps meddling in things.
Just as well to off her, right? Just as well.
You turn her a little to look upon the face. Attractive. Not like the one, but attractive enough. An object of great beauty.
And Dustin’s face flashes into your head as well, all those angular man featu
res swathed in stubble. You see him both as he was all those years ago and how he ended in this very tub. The dead face superimposed upon the living one.
He was attractive, too, Dustin. A rugged kind of handsome like the Marlboro man or something. You’ve always liked both. Masculine and feminine. Soft and hard. Never really distinguished between the genders. Maybe you would make more boys clean if they weren’t so difficult.
And heavy. You couldn’t even move Dustin after his ritual, and it had almost ruined everything.
Almost.
You turn the pretty face back into the water. Watch the water lap at her hairline and temples. It won’t be long now.
Chapter 60
The bulk of Darger’s torso kept her half afloat like a buoy. Reminded her of swimming lessons when she was small. Doing the dead man’s float to get used to being in the water and sort of on top of it at the same time.
She kept her mind blank. Didn’t let herself think about the building tension in her chest, her lungs aching, her brain sending stronger and stronger impulses to breathe.
She needed to wait. To be calm. To be patient.
The water lapped at her ears, her hearing bobbing in and out. She knew from the approach of the footsteps that Porter had entered the room, had felt the woman’s hands on the back of her neck for just a moment, but the choppiness in the following sounds made the rest unclear. Was she standing over her now? Had she just checked quickly and moved on, busying herself with God knows what as the tub filled and Darger slowly drowned?
Busying herself with Fowles perhaps. That would make sense.
And Darger wondered if Porter would move to her eventually. Grip her by the back of the neck. Shove her head all the way under and hold it there.
She suspected she would. Obsessive killers like her typically made the ritual as intimate as possible. Personal. An aggressive tactile experience rather than a passive one. She would want to feel the power in her skin, in her muscles, in her grip.
Darger would wait then, if she could. Wait until the moment Porter reached for her. She’d lurch at that moment of contact and hopefully surprise her, catch her off balance.
