He paused, looking around at the high fences that surrounded Mrs. Schneider’s little kingdom. “Why aren’t there any here, though?”
“Any what?” Christie asked.
“Bystanders,” Alex said. He knew at least a few people were home during the day besides Sofia. He was struck by the intense lack of interest from the neighbors. It was also unusually silent for a summer’s day. Shouldn’t kids be playing outside, running around under sprinklers, biking around the cul-de-sac? Where were the teenagers blasting Michael Jackson from their boom boxes? He didn’t even hear the noise of afternoon television drifting through open windows.
It’s almost as if everyone is hiding, he thought. Trying not to be noticed . . . but by what?
Christie shrugged. “People mostly mind their own business around here. You haven’t been here very long, so you’re still thinking like a city cop—eyes everywhere. That’s not the case in Smiths Hollow.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said. The silence suddenly seemed oppressive, an extra blanket on top of the heat. When he raised the camera to his face he felt the sweat on his upper cheekbone sticking under the eyepiece.
He photographed the whole scene from several angles so Christie could start gathering his samples, then got down to do a close-up of the girls’ heads. He lifted the camera to his face, adjusting the focus on the girl with the long braids.
The girl looked straight into the camera, opened her mouth, and whispered, “Help me.”
Alex jerked back, dropping the camera in the grass.
Christie glanced over at him. “Problem, Lopez?”
Alex shook his head, then picked up the camera again. Christie bent his head over his work. Alex’s hands were shaking—not enough that Christie would notice, he hoped. Of course Alex hadn’t seen what he thought he’d just seen. It was just the heat and the silence and the terrible strangeness of these murders getting to him.
He refocused on the girl’s face, holding his breath.
Nothing happened.
Of course nothing happened, you idiot. It’s just your imagination.
Alex had to go around to the other side of the circle to photograph the second girl’s face because they’d been placed cheek-to-cheek. He noticed Christie scooping some of the viscera into a plastic bag and suppressed a little shudder.
Yeah, it’s getting to you, he thought. He took a deep breath in and exhaled through his nose, an old trick to stop from throwing up at grisly crime scenes. There was no nausea at the moment—he just wanted his nerves to settle. Several flies dive-bombed his head, and he batted them away with an impatient hand.
Alex dropped to his knees and then his stomach and then set the camera against his face again. The short-haired blonde stared off into the distance.
He focused the lens, his finger hovering over the shutter, and her blue eyes jerked toward him and her mouth moved. “We aren’t the only ones.”
He’d been braced for something like this, he realized, despite his self-assurances that it was all in his head. Very carefully, he lowered the camera to the grass. He felt his heart slamming against his ribs, pushing into the ground beneath him.
Christie did not seem to have noticed anything this time around. For one wild moment Alex wondered if Christie also could hear the girls talking but was pretending not to.
But that was more ridiculous than dead girls speaking. Even the eminently steady Van Christie would react if voices emanated from his crime scene.
One more time, Alex thought, and lifted the camera to his face again.
He was prepared when the short-haired girl stared into the lens and said, “Find them. All the other girls, girls like us. Find them.”
He depressed the shutter release, so Christie wouldn’t think he was just staring into space, and waited a moment more. There weren’t any more messages. The dead girls had said everything they were going to say.
Find them. All the other girls, girls like us.
Alex stood up, casually dusted off his pants, and put the lens back on the camera. The elaborate movements were a disguise, a deliberate trick to slow his racing pulse and his equally racing thoughts. “Never seen anything like this before.”
Christie grunted. “Nobody has.”
“Well, there was that case you had here last year—Joe diMucci?” Alex said.
Christie looked up at Alex, and his eyes clouded over for a minute, like he was reaching far back into his memory for a man called Joe diMucci.
Same as Miller, Alex thought. You’d think they would remember a man who’d been found with his heart torn out more clearly.
“Right,” Christie finally said. “Lauren’s dad.”
There it was again. Not Karen’s husband but Lauren’s dad.
“Wasn’t that like this?” Alex said. “I know it was before my time, but . . .”
“Nah, that was totally different,” Christie said, placing the last of the samples carefully inside the case. “That was a drifter.”
“A drifter,” Alex said. “A drifter who just happened to kill a man and cut his heart out?”
“Must have been,” Christie said. “It couldn’t have been anyone from Smiths Hollow. We don’t have those kinds of people here.”
His tone indicated that the subject was closed. Alex was astounded that the chief of police could so completely disregard a similar crime to the current one in a town with almost no crime. He was about to ask how Christie had come to that conclusion when he decided against it. Better not to show how interested he was. He could poke around on his own later.
“Well, I’m going to have to call the funeral home to collect the remains,” Christie said.
“Dean Reynolds isn’t a coroner,” Alex said automatically, though of course Christie knew this.
The chief nodded. “He’ll take what’s left of them and keep them in cold storage until the state medical examiner can get here. In the meantime you head back to the station and see if there are any reports of missing girls from the surrounding area. These girls don’t look familiar to me. I don’t think they go to the high school.”
“If they aren’t from Smiths Hollow then they probably came here in a car. When I’m finished with the phone calls I’ll take a drive around and see if there are any abandoned vehicles near the woods.”
“Good idea,” Christie said. “The sooner we can identify these girls, the better.”
Alex thought he detected another message underneath Christie’s words. The sooner we identify them, the sooner we can close the case and pretend this never happened.
He wondered why he was so sure Christie was thinking that, or why the chief of police seemed strangely disinterested.
Find them. All the other girls, girls like us.
Alex thought that maybe after he’d completed his assignments he might just spend some time looking through the old case files.
All the other girls.
What other girls? Alex wondered.
7
Lauren hadn’t wanted to ride her bike after finding the bloody handprint on the seat, but she finally conceded that it would take longer to walk it home. Plus, if she walked it and someone else came along the road they might notice the blood.
She didn’t have a tissue or anything to wipe it off, so she grabbed a handful of dirt and scrubbed it over the seat until the print was distorted. This left her hands both dirty and bloody, but she scrubbed them on her cutoffs as best she could and thought that it just looked like mud.
Her mother would no doubt complain about the stains on her shorts, but then her mother complained about every little thing Lauren did, so what else was new?
She sat carefully on the bike seat and tried not to think about what was on her hands and under the back pockets of her shorts. It was harder to put away the vision—for that was what it was—of the girls being slaughtered.
Sla
ughtered by a monster, Lauren thought. But a monster with human hands.
It didn’t really make sense, what she’d seen. And she would be inclined to dismiss it altogether if it weren’t for the handprint.
The handprint muddled things even more, because it wasn’t quite human, either.
That’s it. Keep thinking about the handprint, because if you think about the handprint you don’t have to think about the girls.
Lauren didn’t want to think about the girls. The headache was mostly gone but there was a lingering feeling behind her eyes, almost like a bruise.
There was more traffic on the road than earlier. Lauren had gone out right after lunch to meet Miranda, and she suspected that most people were still indoors eating their midday meal at that time. Now they were out running their afternoon errands, picking up library books and groceries, taking their kids to baseball practice. More than one car horn sounded as it went by and Lauren always waved, even if she didn’t recognize the person behind the wheel. It was important to act normal, to act like she was just on her way home from an outing with Miranda.
Thinking of her friend made Lauren glad that Miranda wasn’t with her when she entered the woods. Miranda would have been grossed out by Lauren’s puking, freaked out by Lauren’s headache and subsequent rolling on the ground, and completely hysterical about the handprint on Lauren’s bike. So it was probably a good thing that Lauren had slipped out of the Dream Machine on her own.
And if Miranda was angry with Lauren and didn’t call for a while . . . well, Lauren was okay with that. She hadn’t seen the fascination of Tad, and didn’t want to spend more of her precious summer afternoons watching him show off at the arcade.
What if Miranda never calls, though? What if she’s so mad she doesn’t talk to you again?
That, Lauren thought, would probably make her sad, because Miranda had been her friend for a long time. But then she realized that this was unlikely to happen. Once Miranda moved on from Tad she would want someone to talk to again, and of course she would call old reliable Lauren.
But she wouldn’t sit around waiting for Miranda, she decided. She would do her own thing.
What is your own thing? a little voice in the back of her head whispered. Everything you do, everything you’ve ever done, has been with Miranda.
“I’ll find a thing,” Lauren said.
She turned onto her own street, which ended in a cul-de-sac farther down. Lauren’s house was the third one on the right, and as she skidded to a stop in her driveway she saw a Smiths Hollow police cruiser approaching the intersection.
She waved at Officer Miller and Officer Hendricks, who was driving. Lauren liked Officer Hendricks, who was young and had a nice smile and brown eyes with laugh lines around them. If he saw her on the road riding her bike he would always slow the cruiser and roll down the window and ask how she was doing.
Lauren thought that maybe Officer Hendricks really cared that her dad was dead and was investigating on his own and that whenever he asked how she was it was like he was sending her a secret signal, to let her know not to give up and that he was going to fix everything and catch her dad’s murderer.
But this time Officer Hendricks didn’t stop and roll down the window. He didn’t even seem to notice that Lauren was there, even though she was standing in the sun. The car went by Lauren much faster than it normally would on a residential street, and Lauren suddenly remembered the cruisers screaming down Main Street earlier.
She peered down toward the cul-de-sac. The other cruiser and the chief’s car were parked at Mrs. Schneider’s house, across from the Lopez place. Lauren didn’t like Mrs. Schneider—she always yelled at Lauren and the other kids who played stickball or soccer in the street because they made an “unearthly noise.”
Maybe something happened to her. Good. At least it’s not anyone I like.
She wheeled the bike around to the back of the house. At first she thought she’d just rinse off the seat with the hose but then decided this would draw attention to the very thing she didn’t want anyone to remark upon. Lauren leaned the bike against the siding and climbed the back porch steps.
Like a lot of the houses in the neighborhood, the back porch opened into the kitchen. Her brother David sat at the round white kitchen table with a He-Man coloring book and an old cigar box stuffed with crayons—some new, but most of them old and broken with partially peeled labels.
David was carefully filling in Skeletor’s costume with a bright blue. He wasn’t like other kids his age, who considered the lines obstacles to their true artistic vision. He always stayed inside the lines, shading every character just so.
“Where’s Mom?” Lauren asked as she pulled open the screen door and crossed to the sink.
“Cleaning the upstairs bathroom,” David said. “She said you’re not going to get your allowance this week if you forget again.”
Lauren had meant to clean it after lunch. She really had. But then Miranda called and she forgot all about it.
“If she had just waited for me to come home I would have cleaned it,” Lauren said, irritated.
It was like her mom did these things just to make her feel stupid, or like she was looking for an excuse to yell at her daughter.
Lauren opened the cabinet under the sink and took out a yellow plastic bucket, a big blue sponge, and the dish detergent. The bottle was nearly finished, but she was only going to use a little bit.
She squirted some detergent in the bucket and then ran the hot water on top of it.
“Whatcha doing?” David asked.
“Going to give my bike a car wash,” Lauren said, shutting off the water and taking the bucket out of the sink.
“I want to help,” he said, closing his coloring book and jumping off the chair.
“Better check that it’s okay with Mom,” Lauren said, thinking fast. If David went upstairs she could scrub off the seat without him seeing the blood and dirt encrusted there. “You might get wet.”
“Okeh,” he said.
She smiled as he ran down the hall to the stairs. He was pretty articulate for a little kid, but he always said “Okeh” instead of “Okay,” and had since he started talking.
David stood at the bottom of the stairs and yelled up. “Mom!”
He wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs without Lauren or Mom around, and since Mom probably wouldn’t hear him the first time Lauren figured she had a few minutes. She hurried outside with the bucket, ignoring the few slops of water that splashed over the side and onto the kitchen floor. She would mop them up when she was done, but for now she needed to get that seat clean.
A few minutes later David pushed the screen door open and let it slam shut behind him, another habit that drove their mother crazy.
“Mom says I can help,” he said.
Lauren had already scrubbed the seat and started on the body of the bike. “What are you going to use, your fingers?”
David frowned. “I don’t have a sponge.”
“Go and see if there’s an extra one under the cabinet,” Lauren said. She was pretty sure she’d seen one there—a bright pink one still wrapped in store plastic.
“Okeh,” David said, and went back inside.
Lauren examined the bike seat in the dappled sun-and-shadow cast by the oak tree in their backyard. The seat was still wet, so she couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but she was pretty sure all the blood was gone. She scrubbed at it one more time with the soapy sponge just to make sure.
Then she heard a squeak, like the rubber sole of a sneaker slipping, and then a crash followed by a cry from David.
The water. She dropped the sponge in the bucket.
David was sitting up, rubbing the back of his head, when Lauren threw open the back door. He wasn’t generally a crying child, but a few tears had gathered in the corners of his eyes, so he must have bumped his head
pretty hard.
“Hey, bud, are you okay?” Lauren said, kneeling on the floor and gathering him up. She sat back on her haunches and put him in her lap.
“Bunked my head,” he said.
“Bumped,” Lauren said, smiling. “Or bonked, but not both at the same time. Can I check it?”
He nodded, swiping the tears from his face. There were no fresh ones, so Lauren figured he was probably fine. She carefully touched the back of his skull. There was a tiny little bump there, barely noticeable.
“Want some ice for it?” she asked.
David wrinkled his nose, like he was thinking about it. Then he shook his head.
“It’s just a little bunk,” he said.
“Bump,” she said, and kissed his cheek. “How about a Popsicle?”
“We don’t have any,” David said. He usually knew better than Lauren did what was in the house, because he went shopping with their mom.
“I’ll get you one when the ice cream truck comes around later,” Lauren said. “With my money, okay? Because it was my fault you fell down.”
“Okeh,” David said. “But the ice cream truck might not come today.”
“Why not?” Lauren asked. “He comes every day once school is out.”
There were a lot of kids on their street, and the cul-de-sac was a safe place for him to park and deal with the packs of children that mobbed the truck the second they heard the opening bars of “The Entertainer.”
“He might not come today because of the dead girls,” David said.
Two girls walking, hand in hand.
“What girls, David?” Lauren said. She tried very hard to keep her voice calm and even. How could David know about the girls she’d seen in her vision?
“The dead girls in Mrs. Schneider’s backyard,” he said matter-of-factly. He looked up at Lauren’s face. “There was a lot of blood. Did you see them, Lauren?”
The Ghost Tree Page 6