The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  “You buy it?”

  “Harriet’s had it a few years. What the fuck are you bothering me for?”

  Even this was said calmly. Maybe he’s taking his meds after all, thought Bobby. Maybe it was flattening him out. But though his voice was calm, the rest of him seemed tense.

  “Don’t you care who found the cat?”

  “Why should I? It wasn’t my cat. Maybe Harriet found it. Maybe the kids.”

  “Did you want your wife or kids to find it?”

  “There you go again, talking junk. Anyway, they’re my stepkids.”

  Bobby turned away toward the window. “You’ve got a great view here. It’s a great place to work.”

  Carl took a few steps into the room. There was a rug, and Bobby barely heard him. He turned, and Carl was five feet closer.

  “If you like views,” Carl said.

  It occurred to Bobby he might not be safe here. Not that he was afraid of Carl, but he realized it would be dangerous to turn his back on him. He still had a mark on his cheek where Bobby had smacked him with the barrel of the shotgun. Carl wouldn’t forget anytime soon.

  “We might have to give you a lie detector test about the cat. You ready for that?” Brotman would pitch a fit over a polygraph test about a cat.

  “Feel free,” said Carl. “I got nothing to hide.”

  He’s lying to me, thought Bobby. The whole thing’s a lie. Either he’s a wack-job or I’m a wack-job, and I’d like it better if it was him.

  • • •

  Vicki Lefebvre went out around noon to find Nina’s best friends. One was still in school; one was working; one was a freshman at URI. The one in high school was out of town; the one at URI might be hard to find. That left Betty Hanchard, who worked at a Dollar Store in Hope Valley ten miles away. It was eleven o’clock when Vicki got there and another half-hour before Betty could take a break. Betty was overweight but had beautiful brown eyes and thick, shoulder-length chestnut hair. She was eighteen; Vicki had known her since she was six.

  Vicki could see that Betty had mixed feelings about talking: on the one hand, it was a betrayal of Nina; on the other, she needed someone to talk to. In fact, she’d been worried sick. She had tried Nina’s cell phone at least a dozen times, but Nina hadn’t picked up.

  Vicki and Betty had gone out behind the store so Betty could smoke. When Betty asked how Nina was doing, Vicki said, “Awful. She stays in her room and weeps. I’m really scared.”

  So Betty decided to reveal the text message she had received last night. It had kept her awake, it was so bad. That was when she’d started calling Nina. Betty scrolled through her cell phone until she found it. Then she showed it to Nina’s mother: “Ive bin raped dont tell.”

  All of Vicki’s worst fears seemed realized. She questioned Betty but learned nothing more, except Betty said Nina had often been busy in the last month and hadn’t wanted to go out. “She was just no fun,” said Betty. “I tried to come over, but she didn’t want me to.”

  Vicki, who knew that her daughter had often been out, and often quite late, said nothing. She thanked Betty and drove back to Brewster.

  Vicki meant to drive home and confront Nina with what she had learned. But the closer she got, the more she thought she should go to the police. She felt sure the rapist was one of Nina’s new associates. She didn’t want to go home and hear Nina defend them and talk Vicki out of doing anything. So when she reached Brewster, she went to the police.

  Vicki Lefebvre first talked to a dispatch officer, who sent her to a patrolman, who sent her to a detective, Sarah Muller, who specialized in domestic issues. In explaining what had happened, Vicki mentioned that Nina had been returning home late at night with mud on her shoes. Muller had attended the briefing that morning, and the word mud caught her attention, which led her to think about Nina’s “new friends.” A minute later, she called Woody.

  So it was that thirty minutes after entering police headquarters, Vicki was sitting in Woody Potter’s borrowed office. It was shortly before one o’clock.

  Vicki was in her mid-forties. She had never been beautiful, but she was relatively athletic, practiced yoga at You-You, and was in good shape. She had no chin to speak of, and her lips were like a pair of dimes pressed together, but her eyes were nice—a gingerly brown, though a little red from weeping. She had hoped to speak to somebody important, such as the police chief, and was disappointed by what she’d got. Woody wore jeans and a blue plaid shirt flecked with dog hair, and needed a shave. His short brown hair looked like something had been chewing it. Sarah Muller had told her Woody was a state trooper, so Vicki thought he was probably more accustomed to pulling over speeders than dealing with rape.

  Despite her doubts, she told him about Nina’s text message to Betty: “Ive bin raped dont tell.” Then she said Nina had been coming home late, that she had these new friends, that she’d come home late Wednesday night with mud on her shoes, and that she’d refused to tell what had happened but was scared. Vicki spoke of standing at Nina’s door, listening to her weep.

  Woody got up. “Let’s go see her.” He phoned Sarah Muller to meet him there.

  They left Vicki’s car parked on the street and went in Woody’s truck. Ajax had been sleeping in the small backseat, and Vicki saw right away where the dog hair had come from. Now she’d be covered with it, and it made her mad that Woody should be so insensitive. Vicki’s own car was a pristine Honda Civic in which no animal had ever ridden. She meant to keep it that way. When Ajax licked her face, she shoved him away.

  As Woody drove, Vicki described her ex-husband, Harold Lefebvre, who lived in Groton with his new wife. Vicki and Harold had been divorced when Nina was twelve. He’d never been worth much, but at least he paid the bills. Now it was hard to get him on the phone; maybe he saw Nina once a month, maybe less. Sometimes he’d call her or send a funny e-mail. Thinking about it, she couldn’t imagine why she had married him, except he had been handsome. Nina had inherited his good looks.

  Woody said little; at times he asked a question and if she could describe Nina’s new friends. Vicki found him inattentive and expressionless. Then, pulling up in front of Vicki’s white colonial, he wrote down the phone numbers of Nina’s friends, as well as descriptions of the new friends and where Vicki had seen them. Maybe he’s not so bad, Vicki thought.

  Sarah Muller had already arrived in a Brewster patrol car. She was about thirty, with short dark hair, and wore gray slacks, a gray striped blouse, and a blue jacket. She understood she was the token female. Vicki led the way inside.

  The house was silent except for the hum of a refrigerator. To Woody the interior looked like a house in a magazine, not because it was expensive but because it looked unlived-in. On the tables were ceramic figurines and half a dozen vases with silk flowers: yellow tulips and blue hydrangeas. There was also a collection of silk Japanese bonsai—cypress and Japanese maples—but Woody didn’t realize the trees were made of silk and plastic. He was struck by the thick carpeting, even on the stairs, which masked their footsteps.

  Vicki stopped at her daughter’s door and rapped twice. “Nina, are you decent? I’m coming in. I’ve some people with me.” Without waiting for an answer, she pushed the door open. “Excuse the mess,” she said over her shoulder. “My daughter’s a slob.”

  Nina had been asleep, and she quickly pushed herself into a sitting position. She wore a man’s white shirt buttoned to the neck. Her thick brown bangs nearly concealed her eyes; Woody at once linked her bowl haircut to the posters of the young singer with the deadpan expression—muscular melancholy, he called it. The floor was layered with clothes, shoes, papers, books, CD cases, and PowerBar wrappers, so little of the rug was visible.

  “These are policemen,” said Vicki. “I know you were raped. You have to tell them about it.”

  Sarah put a hand on Vicki’s arm. “Why don’t you let us handle this?”

  Woody drew a chair up to the bed and sat down. Nina stared at her lap, though Woody had s
een the angry glance she’d shot at her mother. Sarah stood next to Vicki to keep her from interfering.

  “Will you tell me what happened?” Woody asked. He tried to speak gently, but he only spoke quietly.

  Nina kept staring at her lap. She was a pretty girl, but her mixture of anger and misery was what struck Woody most.

  “Do you know who did it?” he asked.

  Nina didn’t answer.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  No answer.

  For twenty minutes, Woody repeated his questions. Sarah also asked several questions. At one point, Woody sent Vicki from the room. At another point, he decided to keep quiet for five minutes—five minutes was his limit—and he had to look at his watch, because the time seemed so long. Through this Nina neither moved nor spoke. She seemed to be in a trance. Woody wondered if he should turn the whole business over to Sarah, that a woman officer might be more successful, but he couldn’t see he was doing anything wrong.

  He glanced at Sarah, and she shrugged. All right, Woody said to himself. Let’s go for the throat.

  “Let me tell you how it was,” he said. “You were taken by some people in a car out into the country. Then they led you through the woods. Maybe you were blindfolded; maybe you walked through some water. Then you joined some others by a fire. They all wore long cloaks. Maybe they were smoking weed; there was dancing. You started feeling light-headed. A man pressed you down onto the ground or onto a blanket. The others formed a circle around you. The man removed your pants. This was the man who raped you. But you don’t know who it was. He was wearing a skull mask. All you could see was the skull.”

  At this point, Nina began to scream.

  TEN

  WHEN DARKNESS FELL on Saturday night it was an unsettled dark, not the velvet dark of restful sleep. Too many stories were afloat, too many anxious speculations. One might think the baby’s abduction, the snakes, and the scalping would be enough to disrupt the dark, but there was more. Some people had heard what Peggy had said about her baby, and some had heard something about the circumstances of its conception. How could they keep that information to themselves? Tig had told her friends that coyotes had chased Hercel, while Hercel’s crutch lent credence to her story. When kids told the story to their parents, they were rarely believed—after all, they were kids—except in those cases where nurses at the hospital passed on remarks of Bernie’s. It gave the story credibility. It gave it legs.

  Then came the disappearance of Nurse Spandex and even the discovery of the hanged cat, which Maud Lord described to everyone at Ocean Breezes and which Tommy Cathcart talked about at the post office. Did something link these different events? Maud would say that was surely the case. And what was the cause of these events? This too generated theories—insanity, Indians, kidnappers, black magic, free-floating malice—all sorts of theories, and none of them comforting. What was lacking was a single theory to bind them together. That would come soon enough.

  At first Hercel and Lucy didn’t know the cat had been hung. However, other kids were eager to tell them, each hurrying to be the first. Lucy had cried so much that Harriet could hardly console her. Hercel hadn’t cried. He believed that Mr. Krause had hung the cat, and it made him angry.

  Harriet also suspected her husband, who hadn’t liked the cat. It had been a gift from her first husband, Hercel Sr. He’d first planned to give her an armadillo, and Harriet had thought it was a victory as big as the battle of Gettysburg to convince him to get a cat instead. Because the cat was gray, Hercel named it Sooty. But it had been Harriet’s cat, and maybe Lucy’s. Hercel said he didn’t need a cat; he already had his snake. The dog, Randy, Harriet had bought six years before. She’d never imagined having a menagerie. And now Lucy wanted a goldfish.

  When Carl got home from work Saturday afternoon, Harriet had asked, “Did you hang Sooty from the juniper?”

  “You fucking kidding me? Why should I hang a cat?”

  “You don’t seem too surprised about it.”

  “That colored cop told me.”

  “Why’d he tell you about it?”

  Carl grinned. “He wanted to know if I’d hung it. I told him just what I’m saying to you: Why should I hang a cat?”

  “I think you hung it.”

  Carl had been taking off his jacket. Now he threw it at her. “You’re getting to be a real bitch, you know that? You’re always suspecting me of something. You’re lucky I don’t give you what you deserve.” He went on like this for another minute and then made for the stairs.

  Harriet called after him. “Carl, what’s wrong with you? We need to talk to someone about this. We need to talk about your anger. Why’re you always suspecting me and the kids?” Harriet spoke rapidly to get it all out before Carl disappeared upstairs.

  Carl paused with his back to her. “I know what you’re doing.” He grinned at her over his shoulder, the sort of devious grin without a trace of humor. “You want to get me locked up. You want to go off on a fuck trip with that colored cop.”

  Harriet opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out, as fear, surprise, and indignation wrestled for her tongue.

  • • •

  Saturday afternoon Nurse Spandex returned to her own apartment, but she didn’t like it. Although she hadn’t had sex with Dr. Balfour in the two days she had stayed at his place, she’d thought it might happen soon, despite the fact he had made her sleep in the spare bedroom. She’d thought he’d grow so horny with her walking around in front of him—sometimes half-naked—he would just jump on her. That’s what had happened in the past. But if she was home, she hadn’t a chance. Hope on one side, no hope on the other—it was that simple.

  “I bet you’re gay,” she had told him, but he only laughed.

  “I bet you’re afraid of women,” she said, and he laughed again.

  The worst was when she had said, “My pussy’s wet for you.” He had tossed her a towel.

  She’d sulked and was ignored; she’d wept and was ignored. At last she had said, “What’s wrong with me?”

  “I just don’t want you, that’s all.”

  “Can’t I fix it?”

  “No. This is permanent.”

  So she’d tried anger. “I’ll tell them you seduced me, you dragged me into that room!”

  Again he had laughed. “I’m the doctor, you’re the nurse. Who’re they going to believe? You’ve already got a reputation. Nurse Spandex, remember? You’ve made your moves on lots of doctors. I may be weak, foolish, and irresponsible, but they’ll see me as victim and you as predator. Tell me who’s not going to believe it?”

  After lunch, Dr. Balfour had driven her home. Maybe he was a bit friendlier. “They’re not going to arrest you, don’t worry about that. Even if you get fired, you can find another job. There’s a nurse shortage, remember?”

  A little later, Bobby Anderson had shown up at her door. She hadn’t wanted to see him, and at first she didn’t think he was a cop. He wasn’t driving a cop car, and in his gray sharkskin suit he wasn’t dressed like a cop. But in another minute he was in her living room. She hardly knew how it had happened.

  “So, Alice, if you weren’t sitting on the can, what was going on?” Bobby wanted to know more about her involvement with Dr. Balfour, not the gory details but the general picture and how long she was off the floor. Alice had wept, which was always the wisest course when she didn’t want to talk. She was on the couch, and Bobby was walking back and forth in front of her. Bobby had been really rude.

  “Give me a break with the tears, okay? Tell me what happened.”

  She explained she hadn’t wanted to have sex, that Dr. Balfour had talked her into it. Some doctors were real predators, and she’d been unable to stop him.

  “Were you raped?”

  No, she couldn’t say she was actually raped.

  In that case, Bobby explained, you can’t say it’s just one person’s fault.

  So she told Bobby what he wanted to know. Dr. Balfour had said to meet him outsi
de of room 217 at two a.m., and the business had taken exactly fifteen minutes.

  “There”—Bobby put his notebook in his pocket—“that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Smart-ass black bastard.

  Bobby had seen Carl Krause immediately before seeing Nurse Spandex, and immediately afterward he went to check on his cat detail: six Brewster cops who had talked to Carl’s neighbors in the vicinity of Newport and Hope. None had seen anything suspicious. Some had seen the cat in the neighborhood and knew its name was Sooty. Some said Carl used to be real friendly, but in August, more or less, he’d stopped being friendly. They didn’t know why.

  Then Bobby had visited Maud Lord at Ocean Breezes. Two other policemen had already interviewed her, but that was okay, because Maud liked the attention. She had also described her experience to everyone at Ocean Breezes, and she had called the Brewster Times & Advertiser to see if they meant to send out a reporter. She hoped there might be a headline to send to her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to indicate she wasn’t entirely safe. Nasty business was loose in Brewster, and if a cat could be hung, no one was secure. Maud Lord didn’t believe this, but she saw no harm in stirring up her family.

  What she liked about Bobby was that he called her Mrs. Lord. Regrettably, she had little else to tell him, so she told him about her walks. Bobby said he also liked walking. Maud explained that some days she went this way and some days that way, but it had been several months—probably last spring—since she’d walked past the gray craftsman bungalow on Hope Street, if at all.

  “You’d be doing us a big favor, Mrs. Lord,” said Bobby, “if you’d include that house in your daily walk.” He knew there was almost no chance of anything coming of this, but he was a firm believer in extra eyes, especially sharp eyes like Mrs. Lord’s.

  Maud said she’d be delighted. She had served on eight juries in her time as well as reading a bunch of John Grisham novels, so she knew the sort of sharp eyes that Bobby required. She, too, knew there was almost no chance she would see anything, but even a useless task would add purpose to an otherwise long day.