1975
[102]
Michael took a sip of coffee and watched the movement on the other side of the frosted glass window that separated the lieutenant's office from the rest of the second floor. It was well past one o'clock in the morning. He had been here better than three hours, after Lieutenant Sterns had dropped by his motel room and asked him to come down to the station for questioning.
Michael placed the coffee cup back on the corner of the lieutenant's desk.
The office door opened and Sterns came in with a typed transcript of their interview. He pulled a stapler out of a desk drawer, stapled the pages together, then handed the transcript to Michael and sat down.
“Okay,” he said, exhausted and rightfully so, Michael imagined. Not only was the hour late, but when they had first arrived at the station, the temperature in the office had been hovering near the mid-eighties. The lieutenant had turned on the fan, which sat on the filing cabinet in the corner and was still swinging from side-to-side trying to create some semblance of relief. “Read it over and sign your name at the bottom of the last page and we'll call it a night. Fair enough?”
Peggy's death had not yet been ruled an accident or a murder, though the lieutenant had implied that until the coroner's report came out he would most likely be treating it as an accidental overdose. Michael had wanted to tell him everything... all about Teri's first call, about talking to a boy whom he had come to believe was Gabe, about arriving unexpectedly in town, about the people watching Teri's house and the people who had been watching him the past day or two. He wanted to tell it all, but realized how bizarre it would sound and managed to keep most of it to himself. Peggy was just an old friend, he had said. Someone he hadn't seen in years and thought he'd call since he was in town for a visit.
Michael read through the relatively short statement, beginning to end, asking only if he could change the wording where he had said something to the effect that it wouldn't surprise him if Peggy were still into drugs after all these years.
“I don't really know if she was or she wasn't,” Michael said, feeling more cautious than he had when they first began their conversation. “Isn't it enough that I mentioned her drug use back in college?”
“Go ahead and cross it off if it makes you feel any better,” Sterns said wearily. “Just initial next to the change.”
Michael crossed out the sentence in question, initialed it, then signed at the bottom and handed the statement back.
“How long are you planning on being in town?” the lieutenant asked.
“I don't know,” Michael said. “Until I can track Teri down, I guess.”
Sterns nodded again, though Michael wasn't sure if the lieutenant had actually heard him. He slipped the statement into a manila folder, thoughts apparently preoccupied by other matters. “You going to stay at the motel?”
“No, it's not the best part of town. I think I'll look for somewhere else to stay tonight.”
The lieutenant took a business card out of the middle drawer of the desk and handed it to him. “Give me a call and let me know where you're staying, all right?”
“Sure,” Michael said, glancing down at the card. “Sorry I couldn't be of more help.”
[103]
Someone was in the apartment.
Teri was sure she had heard the front door close. She pulled back the bed sheets and sat up, her heart frantically racing a track in her chest. She grabbed her robe off the foot of the bed, tied the sash around her waist, and went to the bedroom door to listen.
“Time to get up, little missy.”
A whisper.
A man's voice.
Close.
The bedroom door was unlocked. Teri reached out, her hands trembling, and engaged the lock, then took several absent steps backward. It wasn't Walt, she knew that much. And she didn't want to think who it might be. Only that it might be no one at all, just the sounds of a strange apartment.
“Little miss—ssie,” came another call, and there was no mistaking this for the creak of an old floor board or the wail of a hot water heater.
Teri fell back on the bed, and grabbed at the phone with a sudden loss of motor skill that knocked the receiver off the cradle. The receiver did not reel in easily, but slammed first off the bed frame, then off the night stand before she was able to regain control of it. She tapped out a desperate 9-1-1, and raised the phone to her ear.
She was suddenly breathing heavily, and for a moment all she heard was the sound of the air entering and exiting her lungs. It was the sound of someone just beginning to lose her breath.
“Come on! Come on! Come on!”
No answer.
Teri hadn't taken her eyes off the door, even as she had dialed. Now, as she hammered out the numbers again, she thought she could see the brass door knob beginning to turn and the sight sent a wave of dread through her body.
“Little miss—ssie.”
The voice was not one she recognized. That piece of information swirled around inside her head, compared itself with the voice of Mitch, and then concluded she really couldn't be certain one way or the other. Teri held her breath and listened to the phone. The reality—that there was no dial tone—took a moment before it sank in like a heavy stone upon her chest. There was no dial tone. The phone was dead.
“Time to get up, little sleepy-head.”
This was followed by what at first sounded like a huge explosion. Teri's body did the rattle of a marionette and she let out a whimper that felt shameful. He had brought his fist down against the hollow-core door like a hammer. She dropped the phone
“Gonna let me in, little miss—ssie?”
No, I'm not going to let you in.
There was an aluminum-sash window into the room, covered by a thin veil of curtains that did little to keep the sunlight out during the day. Teri had opened and closed the window several times since she had begun her stay here, and she knew outside was a two story drop to a concrete walkway below. She looked from the door to the window, back again, and found herself unlatching the window and gazing down at the cold, chalky concrete below.
Behind her, the man's fist came down against the door again, sending a wave of thunderous hot air rolling across the room like an earthquake. Teri felt it pass through her. She recoiled and briefly considered the window again.
“No way to treat a guest now is it?” he said.
It was his foot that came down against the door next. He had wound up for this one, she imagined, because the door splintered around the molding and made an ugly sound that reminded her of a bone breaking.
He tried the knob again, unsuccessfully. Then, drunkenly, sloppily, added, “Almost together again, dearie.”
Teri started for the lamp on the night stand, on the far side of the bed, closest to the door. One final kick and the door exploded into the room, nearly torn completely from its hinges. In the doorway, like an image out of a nightmare, stood the silhouette of a man whose entire body seemed to be venting rage. His glowering eyes narrowed. He swung his arm across his body and slammed his fist sidelong into the door, and didn't flinch when Teri knew it must have hurt. A cut opened across the back of his hand. Blood began to gush forth in a crimson tide.
“Together at last.”
There was a moment of paralysis in Teri's mind when she realized this was not the man she had expected, nor was it a man she knew. His eyes, which had narrowed at first, now seemed to grow larger. She shook herself free of the paralysis and wrapped her hands around the cool ceramic base of the lamp. In one swift motion, as he crossed the distance between them and reached for her, Teri swept the lamp off the night stand and swung it.
The motion startled him slightly. He tried to pull back and the lamp caught him across the face with little force. The shade collapsed and left a mark where the metal frame had scratched him on the cheek. It turned bright ruby red almost instantly, and Teri thought how close the color of blood matched the color of his eyes.
“Jesus! You littl
e bitch!”
The man's face flared. He swung wide with a closed fist and his knuckles brushed past Teri's face so close she could feel the air current across her ear. She fell back against the wall with a heavy thud. The back of her head took the brunt of the impact.
A moment passed, maybe two, but no more than that, then Teri drifted dreamily into a wistful, ethereal duskiness. She smiled, drunkenly, and let herself be drawn all the way into the darkness.
[104]
When she awoke, only a scant few seconds later, Teri found herself on the bed, her legs dangling over the edge, the man hovering above her. He grinned through tobacco-yellow teeth and let out a laugh that smelled sour from whiskey. “Welcome back, little missy. Couldn't bring yourself to miss this part, eh?”
He was tugging at something, and for a moment Teri thought—rather crazily she was soon to realize—that he was trying to make the bed with her on it. He gave another tug. Then Teri rose the final wave up from her blissful reprieve and realized it wasn't the bed sheets he was tugging at ... it was her panties.
She managed to position her knee between herself and the man's chest, feeling a bit dull all the same and wondering distantly how she had put herself in this position of fending off a complete stranger. For a moment, he seemed to brighten with her resistance, his lips curling back into an odd mutation that was part grin, part sneer. Then Teri flexed her leg and brought her foot up solidly against the man genitals.
A huge sour breath poured out of his mouth, followed closely by a coarse, throaty groan. He fell back against the wall, both hands clutching at his crotch.
Teri rolled off the side of the bed, landed on her feet and was out of the bedroom faster than she had ever imagined possible. She stumbled her way down the hall, hands pushing against the walls, keeping her from losing her balance. In her mind, she quickly made the decision to go for the front door. Surprisingly, though, the man was right behind her, moving with care now, in obvious pain, but moving just the same.
She rounded the corner and followed her instincts into the kitchen.
Behind her, realizing she had trapped herself, the man stopped in the doorway. He was bent over and breathing hard, his face flushed an angry red. “When I get done, bitch, it's gonna take 'em a month to piece you back together again.”
His left hand was pressed flat against his belly, as if he were trying to keep his intestines from spilling out. A knife materialized, seemingly out of thin air, in his right hand. He raised it to eye level and the light from down the hall glinted off the cold steel blade like the last light of her life.
The man took an unsteady step forward, still clutching his belly.
Teri didn't wait for him to draw closer. She went first for the knife drawer on her left and when she realized she wouldn't have enough time to get the drawer open and a knife out, she instinctively grabbed for the freezer door at the top of the refrigerator. The door popped open in a surprisingly fluid motion, swung on its hinges with Teri's weight behind it, and landed flush against the man's forehead.
The impact sent him reeling back several steps, and toppled him over. The back of his head slammed heavily into the linoleum floor. He groaned, semi-consciously.
Teri moved forward, stepped on the wrist of the hand that was holding the knife, and tried unsuccessfully to force the knife free. Every breath was deep and heavy, the air barely enough to fill her lungs. Tears began to fill her eyes.
“Come on, you bastard, just let go of it!”
He groaned again, then his eyes—which had been clamped shut in a grimace that she didn't think she would ever forget—suddenly shot open again. He reached up to grab her leg.
Teri pulled back and landed a kick to the left side of his face. The man's head slammed into the linoleum floor again, then bounced back up and Teri delivered a second solid kick, this one landing flush against the man's nose. The tears that had been collecting in her eyes suddenly broke free and poured down her face. She pulled back a third time, preparing to deliver one last kick, then slowly became aware that the man was no longer moving.
The stillness of the night, long and breathy, hot and weary, settled onerously over her.
Teri balanced her weight evenly between the foot that continued to rest firmly against the man's wrist and the other foot, which was planted solidly on the linoleum floor now. She choked back the next wave of tears without moving, too frightened to disturb the strange, dreamlike stillness that had taken her under its spell.
For a long time, shapeless ghosts became her thoughts and she gave herself to them freely. When she was finally able to go to the neighbor's for help, she was only distantly aware that she was still in her robe and panties and that the morning sun was only a few short hours away.
[105]
Sleep, as fitful as it was, did not come until late in the morning, long after the police had left and Teri had found herself once again alone in the apartment. She curled up in Walt's bed, staring through the thin curtains at the orange-red colors pushing their way above the horizon, and tried unsuccessfully to expose the photographs in her mind to enough light so they would fade from her memory.
The man's name had been Richard Boyle, and she had killed him. The back of Boyle's head had struck the floor one too many times, harder than Teri had imagined possible, and in the end he had been left with a pool of thick, dark blood circling him like an angry aura.
“Just desserts,” an older officer had muttered somewhere in the tangle of distant conversations that had taken place afterwards. Teri had nodded numbly, suffering a chill that had entered her body and held her in its cold hands since shortly after she had gone to the neighbors. She was lucky to be alive; she knew that. And maybe a Bible-thumping, eye-for-an-eye brand of justice had taken place just the way the good Lord would have wanted it. But then why did she feel so damn horrible inside?
“We'd be happy to give you a ride if you'd like to stay somewhere else tonight,” another officer had said. This was long after the body had been removed, long after all the photographs had been taken and the events of the evening had been recounted time and time again. The chill had not let go of her still, and it was the only tie keeping her from drifting away completely. So easy it would have been to simply close her eyes and sail off on the cloud of melancholy that was surrounding her.
“I'll be all right,” she had heard herself say from faraway.
I've already done my running, Teri thought now. She closed her eyes against the sunrise taking place just outside the bedroom window, and the sleep came and took her far, far away this time. She would not wake again, until early evening.
[106]
Walt parked near the picnic tables not far from where the youngest children were swinging on swings and building castles out of sand. Across the park, near the baseball diamond, Childs sat in the bleachers, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. In his company this afternoon was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late thirties, her hair cut short in front. She was wearing a modest, gray pants suit that seemed oddly out of place here at the park on a sunny day.
Walt climbed out of the car and moved over to sit at one of the tables. An old oak tree provided a canopy of branches and leaves, blocking out all but a few tiny patches of sunlight. Behind him, a little girl screamed with delight as she came down the slide and was caught at the bottom by her mother. This was the way it was supposed to be, he thought. Children building their sand castles, delighting in their rides, not a care in the world. Children weren't supposed to have cares. Those were for the adults, for the ones who had forgotten what it was like to be children.
He noticed a pair of initials carved into the corner of the picnic table. D.E. Nothing else. No postscript about love. No misshapen heart. No giant plus sign connecting the initials to another pair of initials. Not even a hint as to whether a boy or a girl had done the carving, though Walt assumed it had been a boy. It seemed like the kind of thing a boy would do without thinking. Some hot summer afternoon when nothin
g was going on and no one else seemed to be around, the knife had come out almost unconsciously an hour had passed.
He looked up and watched Childs nudge the woman next to him and point across the park to the snack bar. A piece of plywood had been set into place over the window, like a storm shutter, and painted in crude white lettering across the front was the announcement: CLOSED FOR WINTER. Congregating near the building was a small group of teenagers, just hanging out as kids were prone to do. A girl with beautiful brown hair, an oversized sweatshirt and a nose ring, laughed loud enough that Walt could hear her from across the park. The boy next to her reached into his shirt pocket and offered her a cigarette. She nodded and they passed it back and forth for awhile.
It was the group of teenagers that had apparently piqued Childs's interest.
In the bleachers, the woman asked the doctor a question. He nodded and offered her a hand as she climbed to her feet. She made her way down the stands one cautious step at a time, still curiously out of place, then strolled across the park toward a small grassy area near the restrooms.
Two of the kids broke off from the group. They backpedaled off the gravel and onto the grass, talking casually, then turned and started in Walt's direction. Another kid, wearing a plaid shirt over a black tee-shirt and looking to be no more than thirteen or fourteen, broke away. He raised his hand and pointed apologetically toward the restrooms, nodded and started in that direction.
Almost immediately, the woman appeared to take notice.
She tucked her hands into her pockets and moved across the grass toward the walkway. It was an angle designed to take her directly across the path of the young man.
Whatever it was, it was going down.
Walt stood and stretched and wandered over to the barbecue pit. The two kids, who had been the first to leave the group, passed in front of him, one of them rattling on zealously about some group called the Cranes.
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