by Nora Roberts
“I've already told you everything I know.”
“Have you?” He didn't sit but studied her. “Why don't you tell me about Biff's interests.”
“Interests?” Her face went blank. “I don't understand.”
“What was he into, other than drinking?”
Her mouth was a thin, straight line. “I won't have you speaking ill of him in his own house.”
“This was never his house, but we'll leave that alone. What did he do with his time?”
“He worked the farm.”
Like hell, Cam thought, but left that, too, alone. “His free time.”
“He liked to watch the TV.” She groped, fumbling to find a grip on a man she'd lived with for more than twenty years. “He liked to hunt. He'd never let a season go by without getting a deer.”
Or two, Cam thought. He'd dressed them illegally in the woods, bypassed the check-in station at the market, and sold the meat.
“Did he read?”
Baffled, she blinked at Cam. “Some.”
“What kind of things did he read?”
She remembered the magazines she had found, and burned, in the shed. “The things men read, I suppose.”
“What about religion?”
“Religion? He didn't have one. He was raised Methodist, I think, but he always said church was a waste of a good hour every week.”
“How many times a week did he go out?”
“I don't know.” She began to huff. “I don't see what this has to do with his murder.”
“Was there any particular night he always went out?”
“I didn't keep track of the man. It wasn't my place.”
“Then whose was it? Who'd he go out with?”
“Different people.” Her heart was beating too loud, but she didn't know what she was afraid of. “Mostly he'd go out alone and meet Less Gladhill or Oscar Roody or Skunk Haggerty or one of the others. Sometimes they'd play poker or just go to Clyde's.” And sometimes he'd go into Frederick and visit a whore. But she left that unsaid. “A man's entitled to relax.”
“Did he ever relax with drugs?”
Her color fluctuated, white, then pink, then white again. “I wouldn't have those filthy things in my house.”
“I need to look in his den.”
Her color changed again, to a dull red. “I won't have it. I won't. You come here, after the man's dead and can't defend himself, and try to say he was some kind of drug fiend. Why aren't you out looking for whoever killed him instead of coming here and slinging dirt?”
“I am looking for whoever killed him. Now, I need to look through his things. I can do it this way, or I can get a court order. It's up to you.”
She rose, very slowly. “You'd do that?”
“Yes.”
“You're not the boy I raised.” Her voice shook.
“No, I guess I'm not. I'd like you to come with me. If I find anything, I want you to see where and how it was found.”
“You do what you have to do. Then I don't want you coming back here anymore.”
“There's nothing to come back to.”
He followed her stiff back up the stairs.
He was relieved she hadn't started on Biff's den yet. It was exactly as Clare had described it. Cluttered, dusty, scented with stale beer.
“I take it you didn't come in here much.”
“This was Biff's room. A man's entitled to his privacy.” But the dust embarrassed her almost as much as the magazines piled on the floor.
He started in one corner, working silently and systematically. In a drawer with shotgun shells and matches, he found a package of Drum, filled with about an ounce of grass.
He looked at her.
“That's just tobacco.”
“No.” He held it out for her to look at. “It's marijuana.”
There was a quick, dull pain in the center of her stomach. “It's Drum tobacco,” she insisted. “It says so right on the bag.”
“You don't have to take my word for it. I'll send it to the lab.”
“That won't prove anything.” She began to ball and un-ball the skirt of her apron. “Somebody gave it to him— like a joke. He probably didn't even know what it was. How would he know?”
He set the bag aside and continued to search. Inside the hollowed-out stand for the stuffed squirrel he found two vials of cocaine.
“What?” Jane put her fingers to her mouth. “What is it?”
Cam opened a vial, touched a wet fingertip to the powder and the powder to his tongue. “Cocaine.”
“Oh, no. My God, no. It's a mistake.”
“Sit down. Come on, Mom, sit down.” He led her to the chair. Part of him wanted to hold her and tell her to forget all about it, to put it right out of her mind. Another part wanted to shake her and gloat. I told you what he was. I told you. He set those parts aside, the two halves of her son.
“I want you to think, tell me who used to come here. Who would come upstairs here with Biff?”
“Nobody.” She looked at the vials Cam still held in his hand, then away with a kind of horror. She didn't understand drugs, unless they were the kind Doc Crampton gave you for the stomach flu or those twinges of arthritis. But she feared them. “He didn't let anybody come in here. If he had a poker game, he would lock the door first. He said he didn't want those guys poking around in his stuff. He'd just sit up here by himself.”
“Okay.” He took a chance and squeezed her hand, but got no response. “I have to keep looking.”
“What difference does it make?” she murmured. Her husband had been unfaithful to her. Not just with a woman. She could understand another woman, especially one who took money. But he had been unfaithful with those little tubes of powder. And that she would never understand.
He found a few more stashes. All small quantities, obviously for personal use. If he'd been selling, Cam thought, he hadn't been doing it from here.
“Did you ever see Biff with a large amount of cash?”
“We never had money,” she said wearily. “You know that.”
“How did he come up with the down payment for the Caddy?”
“I don't know. I never asked.”
He went through the paperbacks on the shelves and found a stack that dealt with Satanism, cult worship, and ritual sacrifices. Two of them were straight porn, with obviously staged photographs of naked women being tortured by men in masks. Others were serious works on devil worship.
Setting the worst of them aside, he brought the rest to the chair. “What do you know about these?”
Jane stared, with a glassy kind of horror, at the titles. Her Catholic background reared up and grabbed her by the throat. “What are they? What are they doing here? How did they get in my house?”
“They were Biff's. I need you to tell me if you knew anything about them.”
“No.” She folded her hands on her breasts, afraid to touch them. This was much worse even than the drugs. “I've never seen them. I don't want to see them. Put them away.”
“Do you see this?” He pointed to the pentagram on the cover of a book. “Did Biff have one of them?”
“What is it?”
“Did he have one?”
“I don't know.” But she remembered the things she had found in the shed. “What does it mean?”
“It means that Biff was involved in something. It could be why he was killed.”
She pushed out her hands to ward him off but couldn't find the strength to rise. “He was a good man,” she insisted. “He wasn't a churchgoer, but he wouldn't blaspheme this way. You're trying to make him into some kind of monster.”
“Goddamn it, open your eyes.” He all but shoved the books into her face. “This was his idea of a good time. And this.” He grabbed one of the other books and tore it open to a full-color scene. “And I don't think he just read about it. Do you understand? I don't think he just sat up here snorting coke and looking at dirty pictures. I think he went out and practiced this stuff.”
&nb
sp; “Stop it! Stop it! I won't listen.”
Now he did grab her, he did shake. But he didn't have it in him to gloat. “Why are you protecting him? He never made you happy, not one single day of your life. He was a sick, sadistic sonofabitch. He ruined this farm, he ruined you, and he did his damnedest to ruin me.”
“He took care of me.”
“He made you an old woman. A scared, beaten old woman. If I hated him for nothing else, I'd hate him for what he's done to you.”
She stopped struggling to stare. Though her mouth worked, there were no words.
“You used to laugh.” In his desperate and angry voice, there was a trace of a plea. “Damn it, you used to care about things, about yourself. For the past twenty years, all you've done is work and worry. And when you went to bed at night, too tired to care anymore, he was out lighting black candles and sacrificing goats. Or worse. God help us. Or worse.”
“I don't know what to do.” She began to croon, rocking back and forth. “I don't know what to do.” Jane believed in Satan, deeply, superstitiously She saw him as a serpent, slithering in the Garden, as a dark angel, taunting and tempting Christ, as the king of a fiery pit. In her heart was a cold terror that he had been invited into her home.
Cam took her hands again. This time she held on. “You're going to tell me everything you know.”
“But I don't know.” Tears leaked out of her eyes. “Cam, I don't. Did he … did he sell his soul?”
“If he had one to begin with.”
“How could I have lived with him for twenty years and not known?”
“Now that you do, you might start to remember things. Things you didn't pay any attention to before. Things you didn't want to pay attention to.”
With her lips tightly pressed together, she looked down at the book that had fallen open on the floor. She saw the naked woman, blood smeared on her breasts. A candle between her legs.
She'd been trained well, trained to be loyal, to overlook, to make excuses. But there had been an earlier training, one that surfaced now to make her fear the Wrath of God and the punishment.
“The shed,” she said weakly. “In the shed.”
“What's in the shed?”
“I found things. I burned them.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“I had to.” Her voice skipped and shivered. “I had to burn them. I couldn't let anyone see. …”
“See what?”
“Magazines. Ones like this.” She gestured toward the floor, then looked away.
“Is that all you burned?”
She shook her head.
“What else?”
The shame, the shame all but sickened her. “Candles. Like the ones in the picture. Black candles. And a robe with a hood. It smelled”—she tasted bile in her throat— “like blood. And there were pictures. Snapshots.”
Cam's hand tightened on hers. “Of what?”
“Girls. Two young girls. One dark-haired, one blond. They were … they were naked and tied up, on the cot in the shed. I tore them up and burned them.”
A granite fist closed in his stomach. “You burned the pictures?”
“I had to.” Hysteria bubbled in her voice. “I had to. I didn't know what else to do. It was so ugly. I couldn't let people know he'd brought women here, paid them to pose for those dirty pictures.”
“If you saw the girls again, or other pictures of them, would you remember?”
“I won't forget. I'll never forget how they looked.”
“Okay. I'm going to call Bud. Then you're going to take me outside and show me.”
“People will know.”
“Yes.” He let go of her hands so that she could cover her face with them and weep. “People will know.”
“What have we got, Sheriff?”
“I don't know yet.” Cam looked back toward the house where his mother was standing on the porch wringing her hands. “You brought everything?”
“Just like you said.”
“Let's put on the gloves and get to work.”
They snapped on thin surgical gloves and went into the shed.
She'd even burned the damn mattress, Cam thought, frowning at the iron frame of the cot. There was little left other than a few tools, lots of dust, and a few broken beer bottles. Hunkering down, Cam searched the underside of a workbench.
“Do we know what we're looking for?” Bud asked.
“I'll let you know if we find it.”
“Hell of a way to spend a Sunday.” But Bud whistled between his teeth. “I got me a date with Alice tonight.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Taking her to a Mexican restaurant and the movies.”
“Shooting the works, huh?”
“Well…” Bud colored a little as he ran his fingers lightly over and under the metal shelves. “She's worth it. Maybe you ought to take Clare up to the Mexican place sometime. It's got a real nice atmosphere. You know, pots and paper flowers and stuff. Women go for that.”
“I'll keep it in mind.”
“Do you figure a margarita's a woman's drink?”
“Not according to Jimmy Buffet.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Try a Dos Equis and keep it to one.”
“Dos Equis,” Bud repeated to himself, committing it to memory. “I wonder what—shit.”
“What?”
“Something sharp here, nearly went through the glove. One of those earrings with a pointy back.” Bud held it up, a bit uncomfortable. Everybody knew Biff had fooled around, but it was different when you were the one who found a woman's earring in his toolshed. “I, ah, guess I should bag it.”
“Yeah. And this, too.” Cam peeled off a bag of cocaine that had been taped to the underside of the worktable.
“Holy shit, is that what I think it is?”
Bud's eyes bulged. If Cam had held up a five-headed toad, he'd have been less amazed. “Jesus, Cam, what are you going to tell your mom?”
“Just tag it, Bud.”
“Sure. Yeah.” He took the bag, cradling it in his hands as if it were a squirming infant.
Using his flashlight, Cam crawled on his hands and knees, working every inch of the floor. Mixed with the broken beer bottles he found a thin slice of smoky glass. He held it up and peered through it. Prescription. Carly Jamison had been nearsighted. He shifted through the broken glass and found two more pieces.
When they'd finished the search, he stepped out into the sunlight. “Did you bring the Jamison girl's picture?”
“Sure, like you said. It's in the car.”
“You go ahead and dust for prints.”
“Sure.” Bud brightened instantly. It was something he practiced