(I)
“It’s all beyond
belief,” Byron said in a very low voice over the
phone.
Patricia was looking
blankly out the window as she talked, her cell phone to her ear. “I
know,” she said. “I feel useless. I don’t know what to do. I came
out here to help my sister, but now I
don’t even know where she is.”
“Well, enough is
enough. You have to come home now.”
She chewed her lower
lip. She did want to go home now, but
how could she? “Byron, Judy is missing.
I can’t leave until I know she’s safe.”
Byron’s
dissatisfaction could be sensed over the line. “At this point, I
don’t even care. All I care about is you being back here with me. I
want you here now, in our house—safe. I don’t care about Judy, I don’t
care about those nutty Squatter people, I don’t care about docks
and lean-tos burning down. People are getting murdered there,
Patricia. So you get in your car—right now—and drive home. Now.
This minute.”
It was rare for Byron
to be this bent out of shape; he was even mad, something rarer. “I
want to come home, too, Byron. But I can’t leave until I know
Judy’s all right—”
“She probably passed
out drunk in the woods!” Byron exploded. “Whoever’s doing these
burnings—these drug people—they could burn Judy’s house down next,
with you in it!”
“Honey, calm down,”
she tried to pacify him. The sun from the window glared in her
eyes. He was right, and by now . . .
By now, I’m sick to death of Agan’s Point and hope I never
see the place again. “I’ll be home soon. . . .”
“Damn it! You’re so
fucking stubborn!”
I know I am. But I can’t leave yet. “I’ll be home
in three days, no more. I promise.”
“What if you can’t
find her by then? What if she’s dead? I’m sorry if that sounds
insensitive, but I don’t give a shit about your sister compared to
you!”
Patricia sighed. “I’m
sure she’ll turn up by then.”
“But what if she
doesn’t?” Byron blared.
“Then I’ll come home
anyway. I’ll come home Sunday no matter what.”
Now Byron sighed,
too. “I just miss you so much, and I love you. I want you home,
away from that crazy place.”
“I’ll be home, honey.
On Sunday.”
He calmed down in a
moment, and they said their good-byes for the moment, Patricia
promising to call him several times a day until she left.
Indulging me is wearing him out, she
realized. I’m not being much of a wife, am
I? She remembered her failed antics with Ernie, her
drunkenness, and her complete disregard toward Byron since she’d
been here. Yeah, I’ve been a really lousy wife
lately. About the only thing she could look forward to was
making it up to him.
Did she hear sirens
in the distance? She wasn’t sure. Don’t tell
me something else was set on fire. . . . She called the town
police station, inquiring, “Has Judy Parker been located
yet?”
“No, ma’am,” a woman
replied quickly.
“What about Ernie
Gooder?”
The receptionist
seemed hurried. “He hasn’t been found yet either, and neither has
Chief Sutter.”
“Is Sergeant Trey
available now?”
An exasperated sigh.
“No, ma’am. He’s out helping the state police look.”
“Well, if anybody
turns up, could you please call—”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I
have a radio call. I have to go. Call back at five or six. Sergeant
Trey should be back by then. Have a good day.”
Click.
The little bit of
radio squawk Patricia had heard in the background sounded urgent.
Maybe those really were sirens I heard. . .
.
She showered and
dressed, feeling awkward, even uneasy. I’m the
only one here, she reminded herself. Last night she’d slept
fitfully, the only one in the house then, as well. But she’d been
sure to wear her nightgown this time, and close and lock the window
and her bedroom door. She’d refused to admit to herself that she
was afraid.
The beautiful morning
outside should’ve heartened her, but it didn’t. What’s happening here? she thought, driving through
some of the town’s side roads. Modest homes from sparse yards
looked back at her. Yes, the town appeared normal, quaint, and very sane. But this
past week assured her of the falsehood of appearances. Who knows what’s going on behind some of those
doors? she thought.
She took the Cadillac
off the Point, vaguely heading in the direction from which she
thought she’d heard sirens. An ambiguous nausea flirted with her
stomach, and it took her a few moments to realize why: this was
roughly the same direction as Bowen’s Field. . . .
Forget about it. You’re long over all
that.
And she did feel long over the incident, just as Dr. Sallee
had explained. And miles before the road would lead to Bowen’s
Field, she saw a state police car turning down a trail into the
woods.
Something is going on out here, she
realized.
The road wound down
to a rutted dirt lane. Around the bend, she stopped short,
startled. My God! What happened here?
An ambulance and three police cars sat parked with their lights
flashing. Sergeant Shannon, the rugged state trooper she’d talked
to yesterday, stood with the other officers, arms crossed and
looking down toward a fingerlike estuary cutting into the woods
from the bay. Shannon turned at the sound of her tires, then broke
from the others and approached.
“Ms. White,” he said,
holding up a cautious hand, “you don’t want to come down
here.”
“What happened!” she
blurted, heart racing. She spotted two EMTs dragging a gurney from
the ambulance. One of them also unfolded a black body bag. “It’s
not my sister, is it?”
The trooper blocked
her way. He looked a little pale. “No, it’s not. It’s one of the
other missing persons—Ernie Gooder. I’m afraid he’s
d—”
Patricia pushed past
him, wild-eyed. No! It can’t be! But
even as the plea left her lips, she knew the worst.
Her eyes shot down at
the water. She blinked. Then she jerked her gaze away.
“I told you you
didn’t want to come down here, Ms. White,” Shannon said. “There is
some rough stuff going on in this town.”
Rough stuff. What
Patricia had seen in the several seconds she’d actually been able
to look was this: Ernie’s dead body being dragged out of the
shallow water . . . or, it could be said, something significantly
less than his dead body.
From the chest down
the body looked corroded, or even eaten. All the skin and quite a
bit of muscle mass was absent, leaving raw white bones showing. The
waist down was the worst—there was essentially nothing left but
tendons and scraps of muscle fiber along the leg bones and hips: a
wet skeleton. Skeletal feet pointed up at the ends of the lower leg
bones. Ernie’s sodden shirt had been torn open and hung off the
shoulders, while his pants looked congealed at what was left of his
ankles. Some arcane process had whittled away the flesh, leaving
this human scrap, and in the final second of her glimpse, Patricia
realized what that process was.
At least a dozen very
large blue crabs let go of those skeletal legs when the body had
been pulled out, whereupon they skittered back into the water.
Ernie had been used for crab bait.
Patricia wanted to
throw up. She felt dizzy at once, and braced herself against a
tree. “My God,” she wheezed.
“Sorry you had to see
that,” Shannon said. “These drug wars can get down and
dirty.”
“Iknew him very
well,” Patricia mumbled over the nausea. “He simply wasn’t the type
to sell or use drugs.”
Shannon seemed
convinced otherwise. “We found crystal meth in his room, so how do
you explain—”
“Sergeant Shannon?”
one of the EMTs called out. He knelt at Ernie’s horrific corpse, as
gloved cops prepared to slide it into the body bag. “Found some CDS
in his pants pocket. Looks like crystal meth. You’ll want to bag it
as evidence.”
“You were saying?”
Shannon said back to Patricia.
When she heard the
bag being zipped up, some morbid force caused her to steal one last
glance. Ernie was now mostly in the bag, but his head hung out,
neck craned back. That was when she saw . . .
His teeth . . . My God, his teeth . .
.
“You all right, Ms.
White?”
“His two front teeth
are missing,” she croaked. “It’s impossible for me to not have
noticed that in the past.”
“Ever hear of false
teeth? They probably fell out when his attackers were putting him
in the water.”
Patricia didn’t hear
whatever else he said before he departed and went to secure the
drug evidence.
His two front teeth are missing. The words droned
in her head. It was the one thing she’d never forget: the man who’d
raped her over twenty-five years ago had been missing his two front
teeth. . . .
Patricia could barely
maintain her composure. She stood up at the end of the road with
Shannon. They both watched in silence as the ambulance and other
police cars drove away, leaving a veil of road dust hanging in the
air. When the last vehicle had left, Patricia stood in numb shock,
the cicada sounds beating in her ears.
“I can tell you,”
Shannon began, “nothing will ruin a town and its people faster than
dope. It’s happening everywhere. And half the time it’s the people
you least expect.”
“It’s just . . .
Ernie,” she said. “He wasn’t the type at all.”
“All it takes is one
hit off a meth pipe and you’re done. Every addict I ever busted
says the same thing. It changes you overnight. And once the stuff
tips you over, you’re making it or selling it just to maintain your
own supply. It turns decent people into thieves, killers,
criminals—human animals. And good luck making it through rehab.
This stuff and crack? The success rate is so low it’s not even
worth bothering with. You can put a meth-head in prison for ten
years, and he’s back with the pipe the first day he gets out.
That’s how addictive this stuff is.”
Patricia shook her
head, looking out into the woods.
“So you knew this guy
pretty well, I take it,” the trooper observed.
“I thought I did. I
grew up with him as a kid. I live in D.C. now, but I came back to
Agan’s Point for a visit—the first time in years.”
“Well, now you can
see what happened to him over those years.”
“I guess I knew
something was wrong—I couldn’t imagine he’d gotten involved with
drug people. He wasn’t the type.”
“There isn’t a
type. It can happen to anyone. You
experiment with something like this, think, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it
once to see what it’s like.’ Then you’re never the same. We’re
pretty sure Ernie Gooder was the person who burned down the docks
two nights ago.”
“What time did you
say the fire occurred?”
″Three
thirty.”
Patricia smirked. “He
was peeping in my window around quarter after.”
“Really?” Shannon
said. “You’re lucky that all he did was peep. Anyway, it’s obvious
what’s going on out here—a meth war between two gangs. Ernie and
some of these other locals are in one gang, and a bunch of these
Squatters are in the other. And now they’re duking it out. It might
seem impossible for a place like this, but like I said, the same
thing’s happening all over the state.” Shannon shrugged. “Chief
Sutter being missing doesn’t look good either.”
“So you think he’s
involved with drugs?”
″A cop, especially a
police chief, is the kind of power person any dope gang will pay to
work for them and protect their runs. You wouldn’t believe the kind
of money a crooked cop can make.”
“Is that what you
really think? That Chief Sutter is working with a drug
gang?”
“It’s either that or
he got killed trying to make a bust. A police chief doesn’t just
disappear.″
Even in her civilian
naïveté, Patricia was coming to grips with Sergeant Shannon’s
suspicions.
The heat was
steepening, the humidity drawing beads of sweat on her
brow.
“And I’m sorry I’m
the one to tell you this, but I’m sure you’ve already considered it
anyway,” Shannon told her. “There’s a pretty big chance that your
sister was involved in some of this too. She’s also missing.
There’s a good chance—″
“I know, Sergeant.”
Patricia faced the facts. “My sister’s probably dead. Her body’s
probably lying in the woods somewhere.”
Shannon didn’t say
anything after that.
When he went back on
his rounds, Patricia headed back toward town. She drove aimlessly,
cranking the air-conditioning up. What am I
thinking? she asked herself. That I’m
just going to see Judy walking down the road? She’s going to wave
to me, with a big smile? She knew that wasn’t going to
happen.
She drove through
more of the town proper, and then the outskirts. I’ve never seen anything like this, she thought;
Agan’s Point looked abandoned, evacuated. Not
even one person out walking their dog . . . When she pulled
into the Qwik-Mart, she found the little parking lot empty, noticed
no one in the store, then spotted the SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED
sign.
Hours passed without
her notice. Patricia tried to keep her mind off what was becoming
the greatest likelihood. Eventually, she forced herself to admit
why she was driving so pointlessly.
I don’t want to go back to the house.
The comfortable old
house she’d been raised in now seemed utterly haunted, not just by
her dour parents but by murdered people she didn’t know, and by
Judy, by Ernie, by every dim, sad memory, and as she pulled up the
long cul-de-sac out front, those memories massed and urged her
away. She drove to the southern end of the Point. . .
.
Where the town looked
evacuated; the tract of land that comprised Squatterville looked
evacuating. It’s a mass exodus now, she
saw. She wondered how many Squatters actually had been involved in
drugs. Just those few? Or had the Squatters become a secret drug
culture of their own?
We’ll never know. They’re all leaving
now.
In small salvos they
trudged up the hill and away, beaten suitcases and sacks of
possessions in tow; Patricia thought of refugees leaving a bombed
city. Where they go next is anybody’s guess,
and it’s not like anyone cares anyway. . . .
The sun was sinking.
Patricia drove the loop around the crab-picking house and then
winced at the burned pier. The boathouse had been reduced to
cinders, while the boats that had been burned had been moored
ashore, the hulls like blackened husks. She could still smell the
char in the air, thick as the cicada trills.
Out in the bay she
saw the pale wood plank sticking up: the Squatter graffiti, their
good-luck sign. The plank appeared to overlook the ruined docks, a
symbol now of the clan’s bad fortune,
not good fortune.
The inevitable
approached quickly, like a beast running down a fawn. The sun had
now been replaced by a fat yellow moon that stalked her back to the
dark house.
She parked the
Cadillac out front, then sat for several minutes staring, the
engine ticking beneath the hood. I don’t want
to go in. There’s nobody there anymore.
She trudged up the
steps, frowning at the odd door knocker that was a half-formed
face. The fantasy beckoned her: that she would walk in, smell
homemade biscuits baking, and Judy would look up from the oven and
explain where she’d been the last two days, and it would all be so
innocent, and they’d laugh and hug and everything would be okay
again.
Patricia’s hands were
shaking when she entered and crossed the foyer. Darkness saturated
the house. She walked around downstairs, wide-eyed, snapping on
lights, but the illumination she sought only made the house feel
bigger . . . and emptier. Her feet took her listlessly to the
kitchen and no, the air didn’t smell of biscuits; it smelled
sterile, lifeless. Instinct urged her to call out for Judy, but she
didn’t bother.
Her sister wasn’t
here, and probably never would be again.
She checked the
answering machine. Had anyone called? Had the police left a message
to relate that Judy had been found, had been rushed to the hospital
for an appendectomy or something, and was recovering now and
waiting for her?
“You have . . . zero
. . . messages,” the machine’s generic voice told her.
She turned and went
to the refrigerator for some juice, but her hand froze in midair. A
strawberry magnet held a note to the door—Things to get: flour, milk, eggs, coffee—a shopping
list in Judy’s unruly scrawl. Patricia stared at the list and began
to cry.
She wore her clothes
to bed, too unsettled to undress. The bedroom window stared at her.
It was locked now, its curtains drawn, but just knowing what Ernie
had been doing on the other side of it several nights ago gave her
a grim fright. A dead man’s sperm is on my
windowsill, she thought absurdly. Just a few feet away . . . The notion knotted her stomach.
She could go sleep in another room, but that idea distressed her as
well. Which room would she take? Ernie’s? Her sister’s? Or what
about her parents’ old room upstairs? No, they were all chock-full
of ghosts now.
She stared up at the
ceiling, at the room’s grainy darkness. Were faces forming in the
grains? The window, the window, part of
her mind kept whispering to her.
There’s nothing there, so forget about it and go to
sleep! she shouted back at herself, but she couldn’t take
solace even in her own sense of reason. Eventually she threw back
the sheets, sighed to herself, and pulled back the
curtain.
See. No one there. No peeping Toms, no monsters.
Beyond the glass the yard looked normal, sedate. Night flowers in
the expansive garden opened their petals to the night. The moon had
risen higher now and turned white, flooding the backyard with a
tranquil glow. There was nothing out of the ordinary for her to
see.
Back under the
covers, she curled into a ball. Did she hear the hall clock
ticking? The house frame creaked a few times, causing her to
flinch. Please, Judy. Please come home. Please
be okay, she prayed, drifting off.
The maw of a
nightmare opened wide. She was in the same room, in the same grainy
darkness and on the same bed, only naked now, splayed. Moonlight
flooded the room and, in turn, her bare flesh. It painted her in a
translucent lambency: bright, sharp-white skin, the rim of her
navel a shadow dark as black ink. Her legs were spread to the
window, her furred sex shamefully bared.
She couldn’t close
her legs for the life of her.
She couldn’t cover
herself.
How can there be moonlight in the room? she
thought. The curtains are
closed. I
know they are. I just closed them. But of course she thought
that, for it didn’t occur to her yet that this was a dream. . .
.
She thought on
through a tingling fear, concluding her question: Someone must have opened the curtains.
Then:
The window . . .
She was determined
not to look, but just as she’d given the order to herself, some
force—the ghost of her father’s hand, perhaps—pushed her head up
and made her look.
She looked straight
ahead between the mounds of her breasts, down her stomach, through
her spread legs. The tiny tuft of pubic hair drew a bead like a
gunsight to the window.
The curtains weren’t
merely open; they were gone. The moonlight shimmered in an
unwelcome guest now. She felt humiliated, ashamed. If someone was
outside, they could look in and see her totally bared, the most
private part of her body displayed as if on purpose. What would
they think of her, lying on the bed like that, utterly
naked?
But . .
.
Thank God. There’s no one there.
The hall clock began
to tick louder than normal, and more rapidly. She kept looking down
her body at the window, saw her breasts rising and falling faster
now, her flat abdomen trembling, and then, beyond the ticking, she
heard something else.
Crunching.
Footsteps, she
knew.
Patricia’s paralysis
intensified; she felt made of cement, a prone statue. When the
shadow edged into the window frame, her scream froze in her
chest.
It was
Ernie.
Cadaverous now, he
leered in with a rotten grin, his eyes like raw oysters, his skin
fish-belly white. He was masturbating, his dead hand shucking a
rotten penis with vigor. Worse than the act—and the dead, wet gleam
in his eyes—was the gap that shone through the grin: the two front
teeth missing. At one point he pushed a black tongue through the
gap and wriggled it.
Soon another figure
joined him: David Eald and his dead young daughter, both blackened
corpses, the Hilds now naked, gut-sucked stick figures. Chief
Sutter, as bloated in death as he was in life, his dead face the
color and consistency of cheesecake, with two thumbholes for eyes.
And finally Judy herself, naked and sagging, the skin of her face
stretched across her skull like a stocking mask, the steam of rot
wafting off her flesh.
Yes, they’d all
congregated now—this cadaverous clique—to paint Patricia’s
nakedness with their spoiled grins. Ernie painted the windowsill
with something else, his bony hips quivering and cheeks
bloated—putrid semen spurting. In his enthusiasm, Patricia noted
that he’d actually wrung the skin off his penis at the climactic
moment. She also saw that maggots frenzied in the sperm as it shot
out.
Thank God the window’s locked, Patricia
thought.
Then Ernie’s and
Sutter’s cheesy-dead fingers began to open the window. First they’d
reveled just to see her, but now they were coming to touch. . .
.
When the stench
poured into the room, Patricia wakened and screamed loud as a truck
horn.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh,
God . . .
Was she going insane?
Her hand shot to her chest; her heartbeat felt like something
exploding in her. But at least her clothes were on—at least now she
knew it had been a dream.
The grainy dark hung
before her, a veil. The hall clock ticked but was back to its
normal, quiet pace. When the house frame creaked again, she
actually found it comforting—because she knew it was
real.
The window seemed to
beckon her, though. Of course its curtains remained closed, just as
she’d left them. But . . .
Her paranoia raced
back to snare her. Damn it, she
thought. Damn it, damn it! She needed to know, just to be sure. . .
.
She swung her feet
out and rose, giving herself a moment to fully come awake. When the
time came to move, she faltered. Come
on, Patricia. What are you thinking?
What was she thinking? That she’d pull the curtains back
to find a cluster of dead faces leering in?
Ridiculous.
But still, she had to
prove it to herself; otherwise she’d get no sleep at
all.
There! See? She was almost ecstatic when she looked
behind the curtains to find nothing there. The backyard faced her
exactly as it had earlier. No movement, the night flowers standing
open, moonlight shimmering.
Then her heart
slammed once.
Wait a minute. . .
.
There was one thing
outside that hadn’t been there when she’d looked before. At first
she hadn’t seen it.
Ernie’s pickup
truck.
The first foot of its
front end protruded into her view. That’s
impossible! She closed her eyes and took several deep
breaths. Ernie’s dead. I saw his dead
body. And his truck wasn’t there
before!
She was certain,
absolutely certain it hadn’t been there before.
And next the thought
exploded:
Oh, my God, maybe it’s Judy! She must’ve borrowed his
truck earlier and gone off somewhere! And she came back but didn’t
wake me up when she came in!
Now it was joy that
propelled her out of the bedroom. “Judy! Are you back?” She raced
down the hall, out to the foyer, and up the stairs. She swung into
her sister’s bedroom and snapped on the light.
“Judy?”
The bed lay empty,
neatly made.
Then she’s downstairs somewhere! Patricia felt
convinced. She has to be! That’s the only
thing that could explain Ernie’s truck being in the backyard. She’s
downstairs right now in the kitchen, getting something to
eat!
Patricia collapsed
when she burst in and flicked on the light. Her knees thudded to
the floor. She shrieked.
Judy was in the
kitchen, all right. But she wasn’t getting anything to eat. A cane
chair lay tipped over on the floor, along with two sandals. Judy
was hanging by the neck from a kitchen rafter.
The rope creaked, a
sound not unlike the house frame. Judy’s face ballooned, bright
scarlet tinged with blue, tongue sticking out. She wore the
flowered sundress Patricia remembered her wearing at the clan
cookout. To make it worse, the process had snapped the neck
entirely, and now beneath the noose, the neck stretched a foot.
Lividity had turned her sister’s bare feet something close to
black, and the lower legs too, veins bulging fat as
earthworms.
Oh, Judy . . . Oh, my God, my poor
sister . . .
She’d never been that
stable to begin with, and she’d never liked change. That was why
she’d stayed with Dwayne so long, even in the midst of all that
abuse, and that was why she’d never left this house. She was happy only when things were the
same.
But suicide? Patricia
dragged herself up, the horror replaced by the reality of the
despair. Squatters betraying her, selling
drugs while they took a paycheck from her? Police on the property
every other night for murders and burnings? Yeah, things have
definitely changed around here.
It was inexplicable,
but it happened every day: people killing themselves. It was the
only cure to a horrid symptom they had to live with for God knew
how long, and with nobody else even knowing there was a
problem.
I have to call the police right now, Patricia
realized. Knowing that her sister’s body hung dead behind her
couldn’t have been more distressing, but Patricia simply didn’t
have the strength to take her down herself. She turned for the
phone—
—and almost collapsed
again.
Sergeant Trey stood
in the doorway to the laundry room, as if he’d just come in through
the back. He seemed as startled as she.
“Damn, Ms. White. Ya
scared the bejesus outa me.”
Patricia looked at
him, confused.
“I just come in from
outside. About an hour ago I was looking out the station window and
thought I saw Ernie’s truck drive by, with Judy drivin’ it,” he
explained. “So I run out and jump in the cruiser, but the damn gas
tank was on E, so I had to fill up at the station pump. By the time
I was done with all that, Judy’d already got back to the house
and—”
He looked up the the
body.
“You . . . saw her
driving?” Patricia’s question faltered.
“Yeah, and I’m really
sorry. If my damn tank hadn’t been empty, I probably coulda gotten
up here in time to stop her.”
“But . . .” The
information bewildered Patricia. “But what were you doing walking
in just now? You didn’t seem surprised to see that she’d committed
suicide.”
“I already knew. I
found her about five minutes ago.” He explained more details. “So I
went back out to the cruiser to call the state cops on my radio.
Then I walked back in and found you standing here.”
“Oh.” Patricia
continued to look at him. Something wasn’t right. “But . . . your
radio’s right there on your belt.”
Trey’s eyes darted
down to his gun belt, the Motorola heavy in its leather holder.
“Well, yeah, sure, but that’s just my, uh, my field radio.” Trey’s
eyes shifted. He bit his lip a moment, but by then his cool
delivery was falling apart. “S-see, this radio ain’t got the, uh,
the state police frequency on it. Just the station frequency and
the county.”
“Why the county and
not the state?”
Trey blinked. “That’s
. . . just the way the . . . bands work.”
Patricia didn’t
consciously decide to say what she said next. She simply said it.
“I don’t believe you. You’re acting like you’re lying. You’re
acting like a prosecuting attorney who knows his case is
bullshit.”
Trey blinked again,
blank faced. Then he sat down in the chair by the kitchen table,
but by the time he did so, his gun was drawn and pointing right at
her. “Holy ever-livin’ shit, Patricia. Why couldn’t ya just leave
it?”
Patricia’s heart
hammered so loud she could hear it. “You killed my sister, didn’t
you?”
“Fuck,” Trey
muttered. The expletive was directed toward himself, not Patricia.
“Yeah. Wanna know what I did? I snatched her after the Squatter
cookout, kept her tied up for a day at one a’ old shacks way out at
the Point. Fucked the daylights out of her a couple of times, then
hung the bitch in the woods.” He shrugged non-commitally. “Then I
throwed her in the back a’ Ernie’s truck and brought her here and
just threw the same rope over the kitchen rafter. Easy. And who
ain’t gonna believe it? Alcoholic and a head case to begin with,
been depressed since Dwayne got offed. Looks like a typical widow
who just couldn’t stand to live no more without her man. Happens
every day.”
“She wasn’t the only
person you murdered, was she?”
Trey snorted. “These
hayseeds out here? Squatters? No-accounts like Ernie? They don’t
mean shit. But you’re different. You can’t just disappear. You
can’t wind up dead with a pocketful a’ dope. No one would believe
it. You ain’t no redneck; you’re a big-city lawyer. Someone would
come snoopin’ around.” He shook his head in the chair, suddenly
exhausted. “You fucked everything up.”
Trey’s attentions
seemed diverted inwardly; he wasn’t really looking at her. Patricia
had backed up against the wall, the entranceway to the foyer only a
foot away. But when she edged aside an inch . . .
Trey cocked his
pistol. “Don’t think I won’t do it. Shit, I been killin’ folks for
a month.”
“You and who else?
Sutter? He must have been helping you.”
“Naw, the fat ol’ boy
just wouldn’t turn crooked, even as bad as he needed the money. It
was me ’n’ Dwayne at first. The idea was to make a few Squatters
disappear—to scare off the rest of ’em. But it wasn’t enough, so we
had to start gettin’ rougher. We did the job on the Hilds and
flaked ’em with the crystal, started makin’ it look like two dope
gangs in a turf war. Then we burned up the Ealds with enough shit
in their shack to look like a meth lab.”
“So the state police
would think the Squatters were one of the gangs?” Patricia
asked.
“Sure. And it was
workin’. It was Ricky ’n’ Junior Caudill we paid for the rough
stuff. They come on after Dwayne got killed.”
Patricia somehow kept
her fear in check. “And let me guess. Gordon Felps is the
ringleader.”
Trey looked up, duly
impressed. “Yeah, the money man. Don’t you get it? Agan’s Point is
a shit town full a’ shit people goin’ nowhere, and I’m one of‘em.
But Gordon Felps was gonna turn this place all around, turn the
Point into somethin’ special, with some big payoffs for whoever
helped him. Shit, all your sister had to do was sell the land to
Felps and everything woulda been fine. But no, the dumb bitch
couldn’t turn her back on the fuckin’ Squatters—like they were her
fuckin’ little sideline family, her orphans. Like one a’ these
crackpot old ladies ya read about, takin’ in all the stray cats.”
He pointed up to Judy’s hanging body. “Well, this is what she gets
for her loyalty to the fuckin’ Squatters. We couldn’t let her stand
in our way. When little folks stand in the way of big things, they
get run over. I’m tired of small-time. I’m tired of bein’ town
clown on a no-dick two-man department in a shit-for-nothing town.
But once Agan’s Point booms, gets all full-up with rich folks
buyin’ Felps’s fancy waterfront condos? I’ll finally be a big-time
police chief. It’s still gonna happen. Don’t think it won’t. We
just have to adjust the game plan a little.”
“Because of me,”
Patricia realized.
“Uh-huh. I think
tomorrow you’ll be drivin’ back to Washington.”
“What?”
“You’ll be drivin’
back to Washington, and you’ll have an unfortunate accident in that
nice Caddy of yours. Far enough away from here that your people in
D.C. will believe it.”
“They’ll never believe it, Trey. And I’ve already told my
boss and my husband that I suspected you and Felps of having
something to do with all these murders.”
Trey smiled. “I know
shit when I hear it, and what just came outta your mouth is a crock
of it.” He took a breath and stood up. “Come on. Fun time first.”
He stepped right up to her.
Patricia’s heart
began to slug in her chest. “I have a lot of money,
Trey.”
“Not
enough.”
“Don’t be stupid. If
you kill me, someone will find out.”
“No, they won’t.” And
that was when his hand blurred upward and smacked the side of his
pistol across her temple.
Was it the dream
again, the nightmare? Patricia lay on the bed, naked, splayed
before the window. The curtains were open now, the moonlight
pouring in.
It’s the dream again, she felt sure, the dream I had before I found Judy’s body. . .
.
But in the dream
there’d been no curtain at all, and the clock had been ticking
madly, whereas now it ticked normally. In the dream she’d been
lying paralyzed on the bed, but now . . .
She craned her neck
in four directions and saw that her wrists and ankles had been
lashed to the bedposts. She felt as if she were drowning in dread,
remembering the scene from the kitchen. Trey had murdered Judy,
then staged the appearance of suicide. He and his cohorts had been
doing all the killing, not a drug gang, to frame the Squatters, to
get them off the land, thinking Judy would finally sell out to
Felps.
But Judy didn’t, so they killed her too. . .
.
Patricia gulped,
nauseous.
And now it’s my turn.
Trey would probably
strangle her here, then stage some kind of car wreck. But not
before he had some fun with her first.
He’d been standing
there all along, hidden in the shadows of the corner of the room.
He took several steps until the darkness expelled him into the
blaring moonlight. He was shirtless, and unbuckling his gun belt
now. Then he took his pants off. Patricia was grateful there was
only moonlight and not the lamp; it reduced the details. Trey’s
body was lean, like a jackal’s. The thrill of murder—and of what
was to come—had already erected his genitals.
“Good, you’re awake,”
he said. “Ain’t no fun pluggin’ a gal who’s unconscious. Let’s see
if you’re a screamer like your sister. Yeah, baby, that turns me
on. And ya can scream all ya want, ‘cos there ain’t no one to hear
ya.”
Now the dread was
piling up on her like a physical weight. Tears drew lines from the
corners of her eyes. I should’ve gone home to
my husband days ago. Why did I have to stay?
The moonlight painted
one side of his body icy white, and left the other half black. He
pointed to the window. “Bet‘cha don’t know that a buncha’ nights
since you been back, I come up here and watched ya through the
window. You are some sight, I’ll tell ya, all naked and tossin’ and
turnin’, playin’ with yourself in your sleep. Dirty
girl.”
Her nausea trebled.
“Jesus, and I thought it was Ernie.”
Trey sputtered.
“Ernie? That shuck-‘n’-jive piece a’ shit? I busted his back before
I lowered him in the water . . . so he could. see the crabs eatin’
him alive. The fuck.”
“But he was helping
you too, wasn’t he? He burned the docks last night—the state police
told me.”
Trey frowned. “That
redneck couldn’t burn shit. I burned
the fuckin’ docks. He tried to stop me, so I whipped his ass,
flaked him with dope, and let the crabs have him.”
Even in her horror,
Patricia felt astonished, even relieved. “I-I didn’t know
that.”
“Bet‘cha don’t know
somethin’ else too.” Trey’s voice darkened. He reached up toward
his face, and then . . .
Patricia squinted in
the dark.
He took his denture
piece out, a bridge of some sort. Patricia came close to swallowing
her own vomit at the recognition.
Now Trey’s two front
teeth were missing.
“You remember me now,
don’t’cha?” Trey guttered.
“My God,” she choked,
“I thought it was Ernie. His two front teeth were missing when the
EMTs were taking him out of the bay.”
“Aw, shit, that ain’t
nothin’. When me ’n’ him got ta fightin’ on the docks, I knocked a
couple of his teeth out, busted a rib too, ‘fore I jacked him out
the rest a’ the way. I don’t like Ernie gettin’ credit for
my balls—so make sure you know that. It
was me who split your cherry on Bowen’s Field that
night.”
Patricia wished she
could just die now.
“I done saw ya
skinny-dippin‘in the water,” Trey admitted. “Couldn’t help it—hell,
I was a young buck myself back then. Chick skinny-dippin’ in the
woods at night, all by herself? She’s asking for it.”
“You make me sick,”
Patricia managed, her muscles tensing against the
bonds.
“You were quite a
prize back then, and still are,” Trey said, feeling her body up
with his eyes. “’N fact, you’re a damn sight better-lookin’ now.
And ya know what else I remember, baby? I remember how much you
liked it. . . .”
Trey stuck the tip of
his tongue through the gap in his teeth, and then the rest of the
disgusting memory swamped her: her clitoris sucked through that
same gap over twenty-five years ago when she lay lashed to the
ground in the middle of Bowen’s Field, much the same way she lay
lashed to this bed now.
“Yeah, you liked it
then, and you’re gonna like it again tonight,” he promised. “You
ain’t gonna be alive much longer, so you might as well just lay
back and get into it.”
He began to walk
toward the bed. . . .
“Wait a minute,” she
said. “Answer me one thing.”
He chuckled. “Guess
it’s the least I can do.”
“Set me straight on
something. You’ve been killing the Squatters and making it look
like drug dealers were killing them. Right?”
“Yeah. And it
worked.”
“So you’ve been
killing them,” Patricia repeated. “But who’s been killing
you?”
Trey fell silent in
the moonlight.
“Come on, Trey. Tell
me the rest of the story. Dwayne was murdering Squatters; then
someone murders Dwayne. Junior Caudill murdered the Hilds; then
someone murdered him. Right?”
Trey hesitated but
said, “Yeah.”
“And what about
Junior’s brother? He was working for you and Felps, too—you said so
in the kitchen. He killed the Ealds, didn’t he?”
“That’s right. Burned
’em up in their shack.”
“Why do I have this
funny felling that Ricky Caudill is dead now, too? Is
he?”
Trey nodded. “He died
in the town jail cell, some disease.”
“Some disease? What happened to him?”
Trey was growing
flustered. “I don’t know—I ain’t a doctor. It had to have been some
disease or somethin’. Nobody killed him—he was in his jail cell
when it happened.”
“When what happened?” Patricia insisted.
“He lost all his
blood, it looked like.”
“Really? And Dwayne
lost his head, but there was no evidence of a wound, and Junior
lost all of his internal organs. I saw Junior’s autopsy, Trey, and
the inside of his body was empty. But
there was no sign of an incision. How do you take a man’s organs
out of his body without cutting him open first?”
“I don’t know,” Trey
said.
“Ricky Caudill lost
all his blood. Were there any cuts on him? Did somebody cut his
veins?”
“I didn’t inspect his
fuckin’ body; all I did was bury it.”
“You said he died in
his jail cell. So I guess his blood was all over the cell floor,
right? Right?”
“No!” Trey yelled.
“The floor was clean, and there weren’t no cuts on
him!”
Silence.
The clock was still
ticking, and outside Patricia could hear the cicadas’ drone.
“Answer me one more thing, Trey.”
“No. Fuck it.” He
grabbed a pillow off the bed. “I got me a piece a’ your ass when
you were sixteen—that’ll have to do. I’m just gonna smother your
ass right now and be done with it.”
He raised the pillow
and was about to position it over her face, then began to lower
it.
“Did Ricky Caudill
get a letter on the day he died?” Patricia blurted.
The pillow froze,
then fell away.
“How did you know
that?” Trey’s voice ground out.
“He did, didn’t he? A
sheet of paper with one word on it, one handwritten word.
Wenden, something like that, right? It
looked like it was written in some kind of dust or chalk. That was
the letter he got, wasn’t it?”
Agan’s Point’s new
chief of police just stood there in the moonlight. He didn’t
reply.
“Dwayne got a letter
like that, too.”
“Bullshit!”
“He did. I found it
in the garbage can in the den. The postmark was the day he died. Go
look if you don’t believe me. It’s probably still there. And Junior
Caudill got a letter just like it, too.”
“No, he
didn’t!”
“Yes, he did, Trey! I
saw it in an evidence bag at the county coroner’s.”
Now Trey stood with
his jaw dropping and his eyes wide, contemplating something in
utter dread.
“Trey?” Patricia
asked.
Trey just
stared.
“Trey?”
He looked down at her
almost beseechingly.
“Trey, did you get a
letter like that too? Did you get one today?”
Trey’s Adam’s apple
bobbed when he gulped. “It’s in my pants pocket. The postman
delivered it today. No return address. But I know who it’s from,
and I ain’t afraid.”
“Who’s it from, Trey?
Is it from—”
“It’s from Everd
Stanherd, that little shit. Just some a’ his backwoods
superstitious bullshit, tryin’ to scare us. But I ain’t afraid.” He
gulped again. “I don’t believe in black magic or whatever fucked-up
mumbo-jumbo he thinks he’s pullin’.”
Now it was Patricia’s
jaw that began to drop. “Everybody who got one of those letters
died. They died because something was taken from them. Blood,
organs, Dwayne’s head.”
“Ain’t nothin’ been
taken from me.” But even then his words began to slur. . .
.
“Trey,” Patricia
implored. “I think you should turn on the light and look at
yourself in the mirror. Something’s happening to you.”
“Ain’t nothin’
haplen-in’!”
But what was it?
Patricia’s eyes were riveted.
“Ain’t blow-one
play-ken bluthin’ flum me!” Trey shouted. He turned shakily, tried
to stride out of the room, but as he did so, he wobbled in his
gait. When he reached out for the doorknob, his fingers turned limp
as cooked pasta; then his arm slowly bowed, then fell,
tentacle-like.
Before he fell over
altogether, Patricia saw his head . . . collapse, as though his
skull had dissolved within the sack of his face.
A few seconds later
the door creaked open, figures entering. Some held candles made
from rendered fat, and in the flickering light Patricia recognized
the face of Everd Stanherd.
“Wenden,” came the bizarre word from the even more
bizarre Squatter accent. “It’s from our holy language, from a time
even before that of the druids. . . .”
Patricia had been
untied, dressed in a robe, and carried out. Then they’d driven her
to someplace in the woods, for the woods truly were their
home.
Everd Stanherd, his
wife, and a few of the elders sat with Patricia in a circle, their
candles guttering.
“We owe you no
explanations, for they are all secrets. But remember this: long
before Christ, God said ‘An eye for an eye.’ ”
Patricia was still
regaining her senses. I’m alive. And it wasn’t
a dream. . . .
“You’re a wizard or
something,” she managed.
“No. I am the
sawon—it means seer,” Everd intoned.
His face was barely visible—all of them were.
The moonlight
shimmered through the branches.
The cicadas
thrummed.
“Sawon.” Patricia remembered the word. The Squatter
on the pier had told them. “You’re, like, the clan wise man, some
kind of ancestral leader?”
“It means . . .
seer,” he repeated.
“What does
wenden mean?” Patricia asked
next.
One of the other
elders’ voices fluttered like a death rattle. “It means
gone.”
Gone. Patricia thought. Dwayne’s head. Junior’s innards. Ricky Caudill’s blood.
And Trey’s bones . . . all . . . gone.
“You cursed them,”
Patricia observed. “Any of them who harmed the Squatters. It
was magic.”
“We can say no more,”
Marthe Stanherd whispered.
Patricia couldn’t
resist. “But . . . how?”
“We can say no—”
Marthe began, but Everd leaned forward, overriding her. He held
something in his crabbed hand. A jar?
Patricia wondered. A clay pot of some sort, the size of a masonry
jar. A cross adorned with the familiar squiggles and slashes of
Squatter artwork had been etched into the pot.
“The burned blood,”
Everd told her. “It’s our sacrament, from the sawon before me. And when I am dead, my blood will
suffice for the next sacrament, for the sawon who is to follow. One of these men here
tonight.”
Several of the faces
in the circle looked startled when Everd removed the strange jar’s
lid and passed it to Patricia.
She looked in and saw
. . .
Dust?
Brownish dust. The
dull chalklike substance with which the death letters had been
written? There was very little left, just enough to form a rim
around the bottom.
Burned blood, Patricia repeated in her
mind.
“It’s consecrated,”
someone said.
And someone else:
“Through faith older than any religion . . .”
Patricia was
confused, but she also knew that there were some things she was not
meant to understand. No one was.
“I’m dying,” Everd
said next, through a smile that seemed to float around them in the
dark. “I will soon become the next sacrament. I will soon be
wenden. I will soon be
gone.”
They were all getting
up now, blowing out their gullfat candles.
“You’re a good
woman.” Everd was the first to walk away. “Continue to be
good.”
“But where will you
go?” Patricia blurted from where she sat
“From whence we came:
nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere.”
Like shifting ink
spots, one by one they disappeared amongst the trees, blending into
darkness.
But a final question
assailed her. “Wait a minute! What about Gordon
Felps?”
A hand patted her
shoulder. The creviced face of the final elder whispered, “Don’t
worry about Gordon Felps. We took care of him.”
When Patricia looked
again, they were . . .
Gone.
It was an hour before
daybreak when Patricia pulled through the gates of the compound. A
sign on the fence read: FELPS CONSTRUCTION, INC. BUILDER OF FINE
HOMES FOR LUXURY LIVING.
This seemed the most
likely place to check first; she had no idea where Felps was
staying in town. From the road she could see his truck parked in
front of the office trailer.
Gravel crunched under
her feet when she walked across the lot. She climbed the short
wooden steps before the trailer, then paused. It occurred to her to
knock but . . .
She tried the knob.
The door clicked open.
He must not be here, she deduced. Darkness seemed
clotted in the trailer. For some reason she wasn’t afraid of what
she might find.
“Felps? Are you
here?”
A voice rattled back.
“Who is it?”
“Patricia
White.”
A pause. “Thank
God.”
“Trey’s dead. I know
what happened, your plan, the people you paid to frame and murder
Squatters, all of it.”
“It doesn’t
matter.”
He must’ve been at
the very back of the trailer; she couldn’t see anything. And his
voice now was beginning to scare her. Something about it sounded so
hopeless.
She felt around the
wall for a light switch but couldn’t find one. Damn, I can’t see!
“Please come over
here,” Felps stoically begged her. “There’s a gun in the top drawer
of the desk. I want you to take it out and kill me. For God’s
sake—please. Kill me.”
She never found the
light switch, but in the little bit of moonlight coming in through
a tiny window, she saw a flashlight sitting atop a file
cabinet.
“Please,” Felps
pleaded.
She snapped on the
flashlight, pointed it, and . . .
Stared.
Gordon Felps looked
normal at first glance, sitting in a comfortable office chair. But
then Patricia noticed . . .
Oh . . . shit . . .
His sleeves were
empty. She lowered the flashlight. The legs of his pants were empty
as well. On the desk before him lay the letter she didn’t even need
to look at now. Wenden, she
thought. Gone. Gordon Felps’s arms and
legs were gone.
“Don’t leave me! I
can’t live like this!” he shouted.
But she was already
backing out of the trailer.
“Come over here and
get this gun and shoot me in the fucking head—I’m begging you!”
Patricia turned the
flashlight off. She walked out of the trailer, closed the door
quietly behind her, and walked back to her car.