by Warren Court
“Mr. Graham what kind of AMC did you have?” Armour asked.
“Come again?”
“The sign in your garage, it’s for American Motor Corporation. AMC. What did you have?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was it a Pacer? Little two door car. I know the boy under the bridge, the witness he said four doors. Maybe he got it wrong. I bet it was a Pacer. Nice little car. Different design, almost looks like a foreign import. Was yours brown?”
No answer.
“I bet Bill Powers knew what kind of car you owned that day Burke came out to the plant. That’s how he was able to black mail you all these years. No matter,” Armour said. “There are ways of finding out what kind of car you had.”
“Are there?” Graham said.
“I’m looking at one right now.” Armour was staring at a photo of Cynthia and Lester Graham. It could have been when she was still Cynthia Squires. It was her in the car beside him in his spell, Armour was sure of it now. He squinted and looked closely at the picture of Cynthia, her long brown legs. That’s what he was seeing, her thigh. And the sound of singing to that ridiculous pop song from the early nineties wasn’t coming from the girl Armour was seeing it through. It was coming from Cynthia. Cynthia was playing music, singing along. Putting her passenger at ease.
But there was something else in the picture. The couple was in front of a house, not the one Armour was currently in. Maybe it was the Graham’s first house or one of their parent’s or friends’. In the driveway was a brown, two door AMC Pacer. Armour felt a rush of a panic attack. His pills were out in his car. He wouldn’t take one even if they were in his hand. The blood and adrenaline surged through his veins and he loved it.
“They have DNA. Your DNA. The authorities could see if it matched. That would be proof. If it was proof enough to set the Macintyre boy free, it should be proof enough to lock you up. And your wife.”
Armour saw the reflection of Lester Graham behind him and moved to the left just as the killer brought his cane down, smashing the picture. Graham lashed out to his right and caught Armour on his side and a jolt of pain went through his ribcage. He dodged away as Graham turned and raised the cane over his head and brought it down, hitting the carpet.
“You son of a bitch,” Graham screamed.
Armour backed up and saw that Graham, holding his cane in two hands like a baseball bat came at him swiftly and sure footedly. The old man being crippled by a stroke was a ruse. Probably meant to put off any suspicion of him as a serial killer. Armour realized he was in real trouble, the man, the killer coming at him, wasn’t what he appeared to be. He was incredibly strong and... an experienced murderer.
Armour kept circling backwards around the living room never taking his eyes off Graham. Graham lashed out with the cane and smashed a vase. Slashed again and sent a reading lamp flying into the wall.
“Your wife lured the girls into the car, didn’t she? You weren’t good at it. The first one, Housen got away from you. The second girl, Truscott, happened too quickly. Wasn’t good enough. So, your wife, she got Sanders into the car. And what, drugged her? Brought her back to you.”
Graham swung and caught Armour on his shoulder. He felt his collar bone crack and grabbed at the cane but Graham yanked it away.
Armour maneuvered so the easy chair was in between him and Graham. He could go for the three steps up to the front entrance way, go for the front door. It had a dead bolt on it, that would take precious seconds to open. The other way out was through the glass doors out onto the deck that overlooked the lake. Armour would have to hurl himself through them. What if they didn’t break all the way and he got hung up or bounced off them. Either way Graham would be on him.
“Look,” Armour said. “You can’t do this. People know I’m here. The cops know.”
Graham lunged at him. Armour let the cane swing past him then violently pushed the easy chair, picking it up off the ground and hurling it at Graham who fell to the ground. Armour leaped over the chair. He had one chance. He cocked his fist and just as Graham was struggling to his feet Armour landed a haymaker on his jaw knocking him out cold. Armour stood over the prone man and kicked the cane away.
“You’re the son of a bitch,” Armour said and spat on the floor.
Armour bent over at a ninety-degree angle sucking in huge breaths. He stood up, brushed the hair out of his eyes and slicked it back, looking down at Lester P. Graham. Armour knelt down and put his fingers to Graham’s neck and felt his pulse. He heard a boom come from above him and looked up at the ceiling.
41
Armour climbed the stairs to the second story slowly. There was a door at the top of them, very unusual. He tried the handle but it was locked solid. There was a dead bolt on this side. He turned the handle on the dead bolt and it thudded home like a gun shot.
“Help!” A muffled voice came from the other side.
Armour became enraged. It all became clear to him now. He leaned back holding the banister and kicked the door as hard as he could. It didn’t buckle, his foot bounced off like a rubber ball and it sent pain shooting up his ankle.
He tried again, same result. He was going to bust his foot doing this. The door must be solid wood. The framing around it was enforced with metal.
Armour went back downstairs where Graham was still lying on the floor. A string of drool was hanging down his slightly open mouth and pooling on the carpet. There was an antique metal fire extinguisher on the wall. Armour grabbed at it. It was heavy and solid as things from the past were, thankfully. Armour ran back up the stairs, holding the fire extinguisher in front of him as a battering ram. He charged at the door.
There was a scream on the other side of the door as Armour hit it. Then he heard what sounded like a baby crying.
Armour pulled back and charged at the door over and over until the wood around the lock started to splinter. This progress spurred him on and he rammed at it furiously, widening the damage. Then the door came away from the lock. Armour dropped the extinguisher and it banged down the stairs and smashed a large planter next to the front door.
Forgetting about his broken collar bone, Armour put his shoulder into the door. The pain was exquisite but kept him focused. Little by little he got the door open until he got through.
There was a bathroom directly across from the door, it looked like something out of an insane asylum, dirty mildewed walls and used toilet paper on the floor and an over powering stench. There was no shower curtain in the shower, just brown and black streaks on faded yellow tiles. Further down the hall were three doors, bedrooms he presumed. But what did they contain? He knew one contained a baby, he could hear it wailing. Then the voice called out again.
“Help me!”
“Where are you?” Armour shouted, his voice echoing down the hallway.
“In here,” a voice said. It sounded like it came from the end of the hall. Armour charged down it, not bothering with any door handles any more. With his momentum and his foot placed squarely against the door at the end of the hallway it buckled easily and Armour came crashing into the room.
There was a bed with a brass headboard and stained mattress. Tied to it was a girl – no, a woman. He immediately saw the tattoo on her shoulder, same one as the girl on the poster. It was the Rickover girl.
“Help me.” Her cheeks were hollow and her skin pale and scabby and she had a wild look of terror on her face. Despite her plea for help she shrank away as Armour came to her.
She was tethered by the wrist to the headboard with thick yellow twine which had cut deep red gouges into her arms. Armour fumbled at the rope.
“I have to get help,” he said.
“No, don’t leave me,” the woman pleaded. Her breath was foul and her teeth dirty and yellowed. Her sunken eye balls glared up at him begging him not to leave. “My baby,” she said and Armour renewed his attack on her ropes. If only he had a knife.
He felt a sudden hot stinging pain in his back. Armour yelled and
spun around. Cynthia Graham was there, her eyes a murderous fire. The girl on the bed screamed and Cynthia stabbed at Armour again, slashing him across the chest with the seven-inch-long butcher’s knife. She came at him again like a wild animal stabbing and slashing and screaming. Her voice louder than Armour’s and the savaged girl’s combined.
He caught her arm and held it. “Stop it. It’s over,” Armour said pleadingly, his words not heard over the screaming. She was strong too, like her husband. Cynthia Graham closed the distance, that wild look in her eyes and she gnashed her teeth at him.
“Yes, it is over,” She said and pulled free, taking a step back and coming at him again. Armour let her close with the blade and then moved in quickly inside her outstretched arms, inside her reach. The knife went over his shoulder and he grabbed her arm again and pushed back as hard as he could propelling her back against the other side of the small bedroom. The collision with the wall jarred her and Armour moved his hand up to her wrist with the knife. She tried to twist it away as they wrestled and brought it up between them. No more screaming now, just grunting of the end game. Armour put the power on and with the last of his strength pushed against Cynthia Graham as hard as he could.
A shocked and then almost comical open-mouthed grin came over Cynthia Graham and all resistance ran out of her. Armour pushed her back up against the wall and pressed harder. The expression ran off her face as the life ran out of her. All that rage was gone now.
Armour backed away, the knife still imbedded up under Graham’s rib cage right into her heart. He let her slump to the floor and turned his attention back to the girl. The ropes.
Armour bent down and pulled the knife out of Graham and went over to the girl on the bed. She looked up at him helpless as he raised the knife and brought it down hard on the ropes where they met the headboard.
“Can you walk?”
“Just watch me,” the girl said.
“Let’s go.”
“My baby.”
“Which room?” Armour heard the wailing now. It had been going on the entire time he had been in the girl’s bedroom, her dungeon, but he had tuned it out. The girl led him to one of the other locked rooms. He put his shoe against it, buckling it in too. And the girl was in and out with an infant in her arms. The girl was crying, the infant wailing and Armour was stone faced as he led his charge down the stairs and out into the street.
42
Armour stood in the graveyard with his one good arm behind his back, the other arm in a sling to stabilize his mending collar bone. He was in that same cemetery where Armour had scared those two kids weeks before.
Melanie crouched down in front of the tombstone and stretched a newspaper sized piece of white paper across it. She took a piece of charcoal and scraped it back and forth over the worn headstone. When she was done she stood up and let Armour see it. It said Armour Black 1865 – 1902. Armour’s great grandfather.
Armour had waited a week until the furore was over before coming back out here. A spate of warm weather had come across Southern Ontario, Indian summer Armour had called it but Melanie had informed him that was no longer an acceptable term for the brief reprieve from the oncoming winter.
Newspaper reporters no longer hammered on his door, his image was not shown on television anymore. The video of him running out of the Graham house leading the Rickover girl, now a woman of twenty-two years and carrying her nine-month-old baby, out onto the street was no longer shown, though Melanie had informed him that it was on Youtube and would be forever. A neighbour had heard the commotion in the Graham house and had filmed it.
***
Armour had spent two nights in custody after a trip to the emergency room for his knife wound. Just routine, Kenny had told him. To give them time to calm the Rickover girl down and have her tell her story. Lester Graham had been arrested too but he’d been shipped to a medium security detention centre in Milton. The stroke and his apparent disability had all been a ruse to throw off any would-be investigator. His wife had been quietly put in the ground in an unmarked grave somewhere. The public outrage over the house of horrors in little Port Dover demanded it. There were already calls for the house to be torn down and a park put there in its place. But for now, the house was sealed off by the police as investigators poured over it.
When the spotlight was off him and he was able to poke his head out of his house without a camera going off, Armour continued his quest to find his great-grandfather’s grave and he took Melanie along with him.
They’d taken Armour’s Model T. It seemed fitting and Melanie had reluctantly agreed as she found riding in his car uncomfortable. Armour had been pleasantly surprised, the ride up the backroad to the cemetery had gone well, his little car had taken the worn-out road like a champ.
“Looks good,” Melanie said and nodded at her handiwork with the paper.
Armour grunted. He couldn’t escape the obvious implication of finding the grave here. If he had stayed on after those kids had fled and searched this particular cemetery thoroughly, he wouldn’t have even had a need to go out onto the Scotch Line road and none of the events that followed would have happened.
Then he realized that the Rickover girl and her baby would still be held captive. Armour found the forces that swirled around him more than a little disconcerting but it also gave him some sort of comfort to know, to really know, that there was some greater power out there. And he was its instrument. Were there others?
“Your great-grandfather’s stone is in poor shape. You could get a new one.”
“I couldn’t afford it. Besides, I believe things like this should be allowed to go the way they’re going.”
Melanie laughed. “You’re just being stingy. We could at least put some flowers around it. You could come out to visit it.”
Then he remembered a promise, a request about putting flowers on a grave. He doubted Cathy would have any still blooming, but who knows? Maybe some oxeye daisies or New England aster. He could plant perennial wildflowers here and they’d always bloom. He doubted he would ever come back to this grave for, as pleased as he was to have found it, there were too many bad memories now associated with the whole thing.
***
Armour put pressure on the brake and slowed his car when he was still five hundred feet from the farm house.
“Armour what is it?” Melanie said.
Armour said nothing, just stared at the house and then stepped on the gas. He came up on what was left of the house slowly. He didn’t bother driving in through the gate, just left the car on the road. In the distance he heard the hum of a tractor and saw Dale working the field with his son.
Armour approached the house. Melanie got out but hung back. The metal gate was on the ground and pushed to the side of the entrance way. Weeds and tall grass came up through the rusted bars. The house had no roof, no front door and the window glass was gone. There were tattered remnants of curtains billowing in the wind.
Armour went inside. The wooden floor was rotten and torn up in many places. There was no furniture, the kitchen shelving doors were gone. No refrigerator. Garbage and other detritus littered every corner. Armour looked up and saw clouds lazily crawling by.
He moved into the bedroom which was as rotten and dilapidated as the front except it still had the bed. The mattress was a sodden mass that looked like a rotting piece of bread. It made the mattress he found the Rickover girl on look like something in the Ritz Carlton. There was nothing else in the room.
There was a hole in one wall and Armour saw newspaper coming out of it. That was done back in the day, cheap insulation. He pulled at some of it. The London Gazette 1930. He let the paper fall to the floor.
Melanie had not come in, she was waiting by the road. Armour came out the front door and headed around to the back and Melanie finally followed.
Where there had been the rose bushes and other flowers was a mass of weed and farm grass. There was a shallow indentation in the earth where no plants grew. Not even grass or
moss. Armour stood over it.
“Armour, what is this place?”
“She was scared,” Armour said
“Who?”
He nodded down at the earth. Melanie gasped.
“She was abused, frightened. She married a monster. And he finally killed her. Buried her here.”
“What should we do?”
“Nothing. It was a long time ago.” Armour stood there a bit longer trying to contemplate what had happened to him in that house. Now that it was all over, he found it hard remembering what her face looked like. What it was like to touch her skin, what her hair smelt like. All of it was a quickly fading memory. A cold autumn wind blew in and the back door, hanging by one hinge, creaked. He shivered and scrunched up his shoulders then turned and left.
Armour stopped at the fence post where the gate had been attached and looked at the hobo code carved into it. Beware, a dangerous man lives here.
THE END
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About the Author
Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, Warren Court currently lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter. When not writing he spends his time cultivating cold hardy palm trees and working on old cars. Dead Girl Found is the second novel in the Armour Black series.
Other books by this author are: