Sketched

by E. M. Townsend

  Still breathing heavily, he placed the jar to the side and went onto all fours. Piper watched, terrified he’d turn to her, as he used his still moist fingers to pry up one floorboard and then another.

  She stayed as still as she could as he removed enough boards to reveal a crawl space beneath the floorboards. He paused before slipping under the floor, turning his head to the side.

  There were tears falling from his black eyes. Kingston Entler was crying, his hand shaking as he wiped his running nose.

  With a choked sob, he swung his legs into the crawl space and then was up to his waist in the floor, leaning down to remove something. Remove one of several somethings.

  Piper was helpless to do anything but watch. Every muscle in his back bulged outward as he yanked what looked like a person up out of the hole and slid them across the floor. The body jiggled slightly, its limbs loose and mismatched.

  It was naked and from her position, Piper could make out the stitch marks where the limbs had been adhered. It was on its stomach, a surreal slab of meat with a black-skinned body, the smooth, hairless legs of an adolescent and mismatched arms, one longer than the other.

  Still weeping, Kingston crawled out of the hole after it. He touched it tenderly, like he might his own child. His hand went to the hair, dark and long just like Piper’s.

  Don’t. Don’t turn it over. Don’t.

  With a withering sob, Kingston pushed the body to its side. Immediately he curled into a fetal position beside it, wrapping the stiff arms around him as best he could.

  He stroked the face tenderly as he had stroked Pipers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”

  Terrified but unable to budge from the spot where she stood, Piper watched as he pushed the hair away from the body’s face and behind the ear. When he did, the thing began to slowly turn toward Piper, the single bulb shining down on a familiar profile.

  When her mother’s head opened its mouth, Piper knew for certain where the weeping chorus was coming from.

  Gasping for breath like she was surfacing from her pond, Piper sat upright in the narrow bed. Her body ached in protest, her torso tied tightly with what she thought was duct tape. She clawed at her nightgown, lifting it frantically to get at where he had bound her.

  All that she found was soft gauze and the kind of metal clips she had only seen in hospitals. She slowed her breathing, running her hands over the bandages as if to reassure herself they were real. There was no sobbing chorus, just the beep of a monitor beside her bed and the hushed swish of soft soled shoes on the corridor outside.

  She had never been so tired. Falling back on the pillow, she felt her eyes almost instantly begin to close again. She forced them open, looking down at her hand where the IV tube was taped securely into her veins. Whatever they were giving her was powerful stuff. The dream seemed to drift farther away every second, leaving nothing but a dense warmth in her brain. She was safe. The beeping lulled her again, a steady reminder that she had survived.

  She struggled again to keep her eyes open, but they felt as if someone were gently pushing down on her lids, teasing her lovingly into a chemically induced coma. Piper rolled her head to the side, attempting one last time to keep them open long enough to look out the curtains and outside, to fix herself back into reality one more time before surrendering.

  Her mother stood by the large window, holding the curtain back.

  For the first time her face was fully visible. Lit from within, her eyes seemed centuries wiser than they had been. When she smiled at her daughter, it was with a kindness that she had never shown in life. The diamond heart necklace sat against her collarbones and she was wearing the fuzzy cardigan she had always wrapped Piper in like a cocoon on those rare nights she was home for bedtime.

  “Mom,” Piper tried to speak, but the calm that spread over her felt like a weighted blanket. She didn’t want to close her eyes. She didn’t want to miss a moment of that smile.

  Piper’s mom raised a finger to her lips to shush her. She watched as the smile returned as her mother slowly moved her finger from her mouth to between the curtains. She pointed out into the night, her face still glowing with a soft, easy radiance. As Piper surrendered, slipping away into drug fueled sleep, she knew in a primal part of her brain that she’d never see a light that beautiful again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  Dixon City Hospital - Room 216

  “I would’ve made you a sandwich to bring with you if you’d told me you were leaving you know. A little snack pack at least.”

  Adam’s voice pulled her awake. Emerging from a kind of soothing grey womb of sedation, Piper waited for the world to congeal around her again. He was perched at the end of the narrow hospital bed. She focused on his kind face, his eyes squinting with the force of his smile as he looked down at her. As her awareness increased, she felt the warmth of his hand. How long had he been there, his hand patiently wrapped around hers?

  “I…” her mouth was dry, her tongue heavy in the back of her throat, “I didn’t want to bother you.” She smiled at him weakly. “I know how you hate to be bothered.”

  “You are never a bother. You never have been and you never will be. Running off before dawn to chase down murderers might turn most boys off, but what can I say. I’m loyal.”

  Piper’s head was clearing. She scanned her body for pain and found none. She lay her head back on the pillow and sighed.

  “Oh Adam, I should’ve told you. I should’ve left a note at least. I could’ve called you.”

  “It only took me ten minutes to figure out where you’d gone. Your trail wasn’t exactly a complicated one. Either that or my deductive skills are out of control from all those Scandinavian detective thrillers I’ve been watching.”

  Adam sighed and shook his dark head, annoyed at his own tactless wording “I’m so sorry Piper. They told me about Harrison. I know you two had a history. I’m so sorry you had to be a part of that.” She felt him squeeze her hand and looked down. As soon as she saw the cast on her wrist, a shock of emotion eliminated any comforting calm that the drugs had been supplying her. A sadness so intense it hurt caused her eyes to blur with unstoppable tears. She saw Harrison again, his throat split, his head lolling at an obscene angle. She closed her eyes against the memory but it was useless. Harrison’s body, dropping with sickening finality to the floor - his wound yawning wide enough to show hints of his spinal cord like clenched knuckles barely holding his skull to the rest of his body. Her ribs complained slightly as a sob rattled through her exhausted body.

  “Harrison isn’t still in there, is he? That place?” She forced the words through her tight throat. “Did they get him out?”

  “They took him right away. Of course, they had to get you away from him first.”

  Piper tried to take a breath but her body hitched with more sobs, “I don’t remember that. I don’t remember what happened after the girl, after she finished Kingston.”

  Adam leaned over and with his other hand he pushed Piper’s hair from her face. He gently wiped a tear from her cheek with this thumb in passing.

  “Jennifer Stone. She’s a powerhouse that one. They’ve got her under pretty strict care though. It took them a while to find…” Adam stopped, checking himself.

  Piper sniffed and looked up. The sun was shining bright through the curtains, filling the pristine hospital room with a comfortingly clean light. She knew what it took them a while to find. Her mind might have shut off as soon as Jennifer swooped her into her strong arms, but she had a feeling she’d be struggling with another catalogue of dark memories for a while to come.

  “It took them a while to find all her mother’s parts.” She finished his halted sentence for him.

  “Almost as long as it took them to get you away from Harrison. You refused to leave, you don’t remember that? At all?”

  Piper shook her head. Adam continued.

  “Jennifer tried to drag you, but you just str
aight out refused. You’re stronger than you look, apparently. It took the officers they sent there fifteen minutes to find you two in that place. They said it would’ve taken longer if Jennifer hadn’t found the cellphone in your jacket pocket.”

  Piper took some deep breaths, her chest tight with sadness.

  “He was the closest to a father I’d ever had.”

  Adam squeezed her hand again, his fingers so stable and real wrapped around hers.

  “I know.”

  “After my mother disappeared, after she was,” The word felt strange on her tongue, “After he killed her, I don’t know what I would’ve done without him.” Piper stopped. Adam watched as her tears abruptly ended - her face becoming blank as a memory passed over her still moist eyes.

  “What is it?”

  She’d seen her mother. Standing at that window, her face clear and beautiful, she had pointed at something through the curtain. Piper struggled to sit up, feeling the various cords and tubes poked into her fighting back.

  “Whoa, mate. Hang on. You’re better but you’re not perfect. You might want to consider taking things slow for a while.” Piper was looking at him, her pupils wide with some kind of revelation. “What?” he said, confused.

  “I know you don’t have a history of believing me when I tell you shit like this.”

  Adam held up his hand, stopping her.

  “No, that’s over Piper. In the past. My days of doubt have come to an end. I’d be more an idiot to deny what you’ve been through than I would be to accept it. You saved that girl Jennifer, you know that? Saved her life. This city’s most prolific murderer is dead and that has everything to do with whatever lines of communication are open in that magnificent head.”

  The relief Piper felt at her friend’s admission was overshadowed by the sudden urgency that had overtaken her. She found herself pulling the thin hospital blankets off her body where they had been tightly tucked.

  “I don’t think it’s over yet, Adam.”

  “What do you mean? Don’t fiddle with those!” Adam slapped her hand lightly where she had started to pull the tape off her IV line. “At least get a nurse in here or something first.” Adam stopped suddenly, his eyes widening with disbelief “I’m sorry I’m quite rattled, apparently. Did you say your mother was killed? How did you know?”

  “He told me.” Piper battled her second bout of tears successfully. She was surprised to feel a sense of relief beneath the sadness though, a sense of completion. “Kingston recognized me and told me how he’d, how they’d killed her all those years ago. He and that awful woman, his mother Brynn.”

  “Oh, my god Piper.”

  She shook his sympathy off, forcing her tears to recede. She felt the cold hospital floor against her feet as she hoisted herself up. “Last night, I saw my mother, Adam. It wasn’t in a dream. There were no dead kids, no victims this time, just her. I had a dream first where I was in this hallway, somewhere in a house.”

  The semi-listening look that Adam had always held when she talked about her visions was gone. It was replaced with an intense concentration that she couldn’t help but be a little intimidated by.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “It was like a hallway system within a house somewhere. It’s hard to describe. Like a hall of mirrors without the mirrors. I was following him, following Kingston through it and I got to this room.” Piper felt an unintentional shiver run through her. She closed her eyes, trying to push the memory of that rotted mockery of a human form he had dragged from under the floorboards out of her mind. “He was,” she struggled for the word, looking toward where the fresh morning light made the curtains glow bright white, “He was cuddling this thing, this thing made of different parts of the people he’d taken.”

  She glanced down at Adam. She could see the struggle he was having accepting her story but bless him, he was trying.

  “When I woke up, or at least I think I was awake, my mother was standing at the window. She smiled at me. I think for the first time. She smiled and pointed at something through the curtains.” Adam protested as she grasped her IV stand and began to move toward the window. There were a few seconds where she felt she might fall as the blood rushed to her head and she paused.

  “There really is no stopping you, is there?” he mumbled, standing up to take her elbow.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” she mumbled back. She walked unsteadily to the drawn curtains, Adam supporting her like she was his dowager aunt.

  “She was pointing straight out of the window toward something,” Piper said, releasing her IV stand and grasping the fabric. “Something she wanted me to see.” She opened them and stopped. Her breath halted. Beside her she could hear Adam’s sharp intake of air.

  The top most spire of the Entler mansion was clearly visible from the window. She could follow where her mother had been pointing like a line of fire over the streets. The biggest and most elaborate home in the area, the uppermost story rose above the cityscape below like a church spire.

  “That’s the Entler mansion, isn’t it?” Adam spoke softly beside her. Piper nodded, staring toward where the spire pointed like a black knife blade against the spring sky. “The Dixon police are there right now. I heard they were hollowing the place out after those two officers found the bags.”

  “What bags?”

  “Apparently, the chief sent a few officers there after Detective Harrison,” Adam swallowed, “after Harrison asked him to send some backup to the department store. He threw him a bone, for lack of a better term. He thought they’d find nothing. They found at least four bags of um…parts. They called it in right away and I reckon Chief Hill thought it prudent to send the calvary to find you.”

  “He’s there now? Hill I mean?”

  “They’ve got forensics down there, everyone you could think of. I drove by it on the way to see you.”

  Piper began to tug her IV tower with her again, searching the room for her clothes.

  “I need to get dressed. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get down to that house.”

  Adam picked up a black leather duffle bag from one of the chairs by the door. He held it up, a sly smile on his face.

  “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said. “But I’m not going anywhere with you all hooked up like that.”

  ********

  The Entler Family Mansion

  It looked as if some kind of darkly efficient circus had pulled up outside of the Entler Mansion. There was no parking on either side of the road as media vans and what remained of the neighborhood skirted around the edges like children waiting for the gates to open. They craned their necks and babbled in excited voices, some even rising on their tiptoes to see past the barricades the Dixon police had already installed.

  By the time the nurses had pulled out all her tubes and Adam had charmed the doctors into an early release, Piper was practically seizing with impatience. The fact that they couldn’t find parking only enraged her more. The two of them had had to park a couple of blocks away in order to get anywhere near the mansion.

  She sped through the crowds on foot, maneuvering around women with strollers and dodging cameras crews volleying for the best spot. Some were already addressing their cameras, the unnatural lighting from their equipment making their faces look even more plastic and insincere than usual. Piper couldn’t help but glare at the shiny suited men as she passed, unable to stomach the great sincerity with which they addressed the gore hungry nation. Adam must have read her mind and she felt him tug her in another direction just as she was about to shoulder check one of the out-of-town journalists, slobbering across the police tape.

  “That way,” he said, pointing in the direction of a young officer standing by the main gate to the mansion. His arms were crossed and he was doing his best to look stalwartly. This was not an easy job seeing that there were about three microphones hovering in his face.

  Piper, ignoring the warning pains from her ribs, sped up until she reached him. He looked down at
her, pleased to address someone who wasn’t flanked by a flattering light and a camera.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t come in here. This is police business,” he said, sounding as if he’d been practicing that line for at least a couple of years now.

  “Is Chief Hill here?” Piper said. “I need to talk to him. My name’s Piper Cooke.”

  “You’re not with the police? If you’re not in the department, I’m afraid that you’re just going to have to…”

  Piper had stopped listening and was scanning the crowd behind the gate for a familiar face. She was disappointed at the number of strangers prowling the property. It seemed every officer she remembered from her time at the station was gone, replaced by unfamiliar, frightened looking faces and a legion of imported specialists.