The Unwelcome
Page 30
They were still looking for the head.
Flash on the run-up to the crime scene: He remembered breaching the front door of the lake house, seeing the tableau laid out within like a Renaissance painting. Mom and Pops and Junior all posed like wax statues, their guts scooped out like the beginnings of a Jack-o-Lantern. He hadn’t even realized they were dead until the woman at the sink fell over at his touch, collapsing into a boneless pile on the polished linoleum. Then there was the girl, shot through the trachea, leaking the darkest blood he’d ever seen on the shag carpet. He couldn’t say for certain, but he guessed from a hundred other crime scenes the bullet hadn’t killed her outright. A wound like that, she’d asphyxiate on her own blood before the bleeding really got hold of her. If she was lucky, she’d go into shock first. Really not feel much of anything past the initial jolt.
What really got him was the other boy. There wasn’t a mark on him, unlike the others, and his eyes were open. The look on his face gave Ymir the heebie-jeebies. It was not a look a corpse should make. He prayed the medical examiner would tell him something else, but the nameless horror piled up inside him anyway—that nothing had killed the lad at all. That he had just… stopped. Like he’d been removed, somehow. Like he’d been sucked out of his own body.
He tried to clear his head, focus on the other girl. They’d had to get her name off ID after they relieved her of the hunting rifle they’d found her with. Alice Gorchuck. No priors, no record at all. Student ID from Armistice College down south. They’d already bagged up the five bodies at the lake house by the time they heard the sound of her weeping down the hall. Stealth up to a bedroom door hanging ajar: pitch black beyond. That’s where they found her, curled in a ball on the floor, cradling a Winchester Model 94 to her chest like it was a doll. No visible wounds on her, but there was a spoonful of blood-spatter dried on her face, and more down the front of her chest and stomach. She didn’t even seem to notice them as they entered the room, and didn’t resist when they pulled the weapon from her grip and put her hands behind her back for the handcuffs. But she wouldn’t talk to them. She kept mumbling a name over and over again, the blood on her making her lips stick.
Kaity Kaity Kaity.
Ymir’s mind puzzled it, worrying it like a dog at a rawhide bone. Maybe the girl on the carpet, or the halfway-naked corpse they’d found at the edge of the frozen lake. Neither had ID. Maybe somebody from the school could make them. A teacher or a friend. Maybe this Alice girl could tell their names. Ymir guessed the medical examiner’s office would tell him they’d died the same way, that the bullets had both come from the same gun. They’d already dug one out of the back brick wall of the lake house, but had come up empty on the other. Chatter was, the other girl’s body had been moved after she died. A third crime scene, maybe, with more bodies to unearth. Ymir didn’t want to think about it, but he almost hoped they’d find more bodies. One better corpse, perhaps—one that told the story clearer than these mute horrors. He felt as though he were stumbling in the dark, grasping for a light cord he only half-recalled being there at all.
He remembered almost guiltily shutting off the running water in the sink before driving back to the police station, Alice Gorchuck muttering softly in the back seat of his cruiser. He thought of the old tube TV squatting in a corner of the living room, gone to static. It made him think of the boy-corpse’s strange empty body, and a chill crackled through him like an insect scurrying across his spine.
He pressed his nose against the two-way glass, looking through: Alice was cuffed to the table with a small Dixie Cup of water sitting undrunk before her. He was stalling, ashamed as he was to admit it: Soon, the chief would get off his phone call with early forensics, and then he’d have to go in and interview this girl. He could not explain the dread he felt. She wasn’t a small person by any means, but he was not afraid of her strength. He had handled himself around suspects far bigger and meaner than her. But halfway into the trip from the woods, she had started to talk—not mutter, but actually talk, in full sentences in a loud, clear voice.
And something had answered her.
He’d almost swerved the cruiser into oncoming traffic. Another girl’s voice had rung out, muffled by the shatterproof plastic between him and the back seat, but still clear enough to make out the words. It was a normal human voice, but something about it made him go tense all over—mostly because there was only one other person in the squad car with him. The voice only spoke twice: once to ask, in a hushed voice, “Do you want me to ask him for you?”
The second time it addressed him directly. “Detective,” it said. “How much longer will the drive be? I have to use the restroom.”
His eyes had flicked up to the rearview mirror, but the girl behind him had slumped over in her seat. He could still see the shape of her shoulders and the back of her hair rising from her head like a red tide, but her face was hidden from him. He answered her, but he had not been able to hear the sound of his own voice over the roar in his ears. Then he’d flicked on the siren and really booked it all the rest of the way to the station.
And now, as he watched her through the glass, she had begun to talk again. Her mouth moved, and her eyes cast about the room animatedly, looking for phantoms in the dark corners. He thought about turning on the monitor speakers, broadcasting her conversation for everyone in the hall to hear—but it was just him, now, alone. The rest of the station was still out across town at the crime scene, dealing with the bodies and the press. He was afraid that if he turned on the speakers now, he would hear that voice again, that clear female voice that did not belong to Alice Gorchuck. He was afraid it would speak to him again, and that this time he would not be able to refuse whatever it asked of him. No, he would wait for the chief to return from his phone call, and then he would go in, and then he would step in the parking lot and call his wife at her work and tell her that he loved her very much.
His wife. He thought of her at home, holding his breakfast for him in a clipped-closed paper bag as he rushed out the door. He would never be able to explain this to her, nor to his daughters. When she asked why he’d had to leave so suddenly in the morning, he’d make up some story about a Mexican standoff in a gas station. Their lives did not need nine dead bodies in them. They did not need that picture in their heads, of a family posed like waxworks, their eyes not dead but only empty, as if they could spring to life at any moment, just waiting for the word Go… He would hold this story inside himself where it belonged until he could find a more reasonable explanation for the whole business, and then he would file it away with the rest of the joy and horror of this job.
He wished Dooley, his old partner, had not retired. He could have talked this out with Dooley. They were buddies, and had seen their share of mayhem together. But it had been four long lonely months now, and Ymir felt them weigh between his ears in a way only a cop really understood. And now here was another story he would bear alone. One more dose of misery he would have to swallow. He stared through the two-way glass, watching the light change in Alice Gorchuck’s eyes. Back and forth, back and forth. On and off, like a light switch. He watched her lips move silently, watched her smile and laugh and slap the desk at something only she could ever possibly understand.
Kaity Kaity Kaity.
Perhaps he envied her.
The thought struck him crooked, making him grimace at his own reflection in the glass—and yet, he could not dispute it. He envied her. He had always envied anybody who could talk to themselves and get a straight answer back, even when Heloise Dooley had still been his partner. He’d seen hop-heads and speed freaks and all manner of other crazies crammed in the station holding cell, talking to the walls or the floor or even a smiley-face drawn in blue ink on the palm of a hand. They all had one thing in common: They understood what this Alice girl understood, that the world was huge and lonely and cold, that sometimes an imaginary friend was better than no friend at all. That even a voice in your head was preferable to silence.
&nb
sp; Ymir reached for the doorknob of the interview room. The chief could get his brief later. He would talk to the suspect now, while they could not be disturbed. Suddenly, even in the middle of the warm police station, he felt curiously cool all over. The feeling spread across his body, but he did not fight against it, not even when his limbs began to numb as though he had plunged them into icy water. He opened the door, stepped though, and closed it with a firm click. He was no longer afraid. He already knew precisely what he needed to ask.
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