Turn to Stone

by Brian Freeman

  “You didn’t see Kelli? Or anyone else?”

  “Nobody.”

  Stride approached the Camry. He shined the light inside the front and back seats and found nothing there. The door was open, and he reached inside and popped the trunk. When he checked it, he found the trunk empty, too, but he noticed something odd. The interior floor mat on the trunk had been removed, leaving only bare metal.

  He cast his light around the parking lot. Another vehicle had come and gone, leaving tracks. He wondered how much time had passed. The tread in the snow was pristine, and the flurries had barely begun to fill in the ruts. He snapped a close-up photograph with his phone.

  “Did you see another vehicle?” he asked Mike.

  “No. If somebody was here, they were already gone before I got here.”

  “Did you pass anyone on the highway?”

  Mike shook his head. “They must have turned the other way toward town.”

  Stride stared at the empty road. They were at an intersection near the lake, but from where they were, he could see only the darkness of the sky meeting the darkness of the fields. There wasn’t even a streetlight.

  He pointed his flashlight at Mike’s chest. “Why were you meeting Kelli Andrews?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  Mike hesitated. “I was meeting someone else.”

  “Who?”

  The teenager eyed his mother. “Sophie.”

  “Sophie?” Ginnie demanded sharply. “I thought I told you—”

  Stride held up a hand, cutting her off. “Whose idea was it to meet here? Yours or hers?”

  “Hers. We meet here a lot.”

  “Is she your girlfriend?” Stride asked.

  “No, she’s just a friend. I mean, I know she likes me. She’s not like the other kids in school. We talk a lot.”

  “Does Sophie know Kelli Andrews?”

  Mike nodded. “Yeah, Kelli’s her shrink. Ever since her folks divorced. She meets Kelli out here, too.”

  “What did Sophie tell you?” Stride asked.

  “She said I should come here right away. She was afraid there was going to be trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. I just hopped on my moped and drove over here, but Sophie wasn’t around.”

  Stride put a hand firmly on the boy’s shoulder. “Listen to me, Mike. This is important. I know that you went through something horrible at the Novitiate. I also know what really happened to your father.”

  Mike stared at his mother. His eyes were wide. He shook his head silently.

  “It’s okay, Mike,” Ginnie said softly. “Mr. Stride knows that it was really Kelli who was responsible for Jet’s death, but he doesn’t blame her.”

  “I—I don’t know anything,” Mike murmured.

  “No one’s blaming you, Mike,” Stride said. “I just need to ask you something. Did you tell Sophie what you saw at the Novitiate? Does she know what Kelli did to Jet?”

  “I didn’t tell her anything!” he exclaimed. Then he hooded his eyes. “The thing is, she already knew about Kelli.”

  Ginnie reacted sharply. “What?”

  “She said Kelli was the one who killed Dad, and Percy covered it up. She said it was like the Devil took over Kelli’s body, and Kelli went crazy. I told Sophie she was nuts to think that, you know? She was wrong. I said she should never ever tell anybody about it. I told her Percy and Kelli could both get into trouble.”

  “You should have told me about this,” his mother snapped.

  Mike nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “How did Sophie find out?” Stride asked.

  “She heard Percy and Dr. Bruin talking about it.”

  “When was this?”

  “The day Dr. Bruin died. His wife went out for a walk and left Sophie with the baby. Percy was there, and he and Dr. Bruin were talking about what really happened. About what they did. About what Kelli did. Sophie heard everything. It was on—”

  “On the baby monitor,” Stride said, closing his eyes.

  “Right.”

  He thought about sitting in Anna Bruin’s living room as the gurgling noises of the baby came through the speaker, along with Sophie singing Lady Gaga songs. He remembered Anna saying that they had moved her husband to the downstairs bedroom near the end and that she’d listened to him over the monitor, gasping for breath and life.

  Percy had come to see Tom on that last day. To make amends. To make their last confessions. Sophie—the girl who liked to listen—had heard them spill out the truth.

  “Mike, who did Sophie tell?” Stride asked.

  “Nobody! I said she shouldn’t tell anybody at all. I told her it was a stupid rumor, and it was wrong, and she didn’t understand. She swore she would keep it a secret.”

  “She didn’t,” Ginnie Black concluded, stepping into the pool of light. “She told her father. That’s who she told. Neal knows.”

  Mike’s face twisted into a frown. “Mom, just because you don’t like him—”

  “You’re right, I don’t like Neal Gandy. I told you not to hang out with his daughter, because I didn’t want you in his house.”

  “Why?” Stride asked, grabbing her wrist. “What do you know about Neal?”

  “I know his ex-wife,” Ginnie explained. “She’s told me things about him for years. About things he liked to do to her. Seriously creepy things. She put up with him as long as she could, but she finally got fed up and left him. She was afraid of what he would do next. She’s been trying to get the judge to keep Sophie away from him, too.”

  Stride thought about the stuttering footprints in the snow, carrying Kelli’s body away. It wasn’t the movement of someone slipping on the wet ground. It was someone limping.

  “Neal’s limp,” he said. “He told me he was a tennis star in school. Then he accidentally crippled himself with his dad’s gun.”

  Ginnie shook her head. “Accidentally? No way. Back then, all the kids knew, but we didn’t talk about it. Hamlin was the men’s coach, remember? He humiliated Neal Gandy the same way he did Jet. Bullied him mercilessly. Made his life hell. It got so bad that Neal couldn’t take it. The only way he could get away from Greg Hamlin was to shoot off his own foot.”

  22

  Stride found Neal Gandy’s farm on a country road south of Shawano. Tall grass lined the ditch, waving madly in the wind. Barren fields surrounded the house and barn. A rusted chain hung between posts across the driveway, blocking visitors. The small gray house was a hundred yards from the highway, sheltered by the limbs of a giant oak. A light burned in one of the downstairs windows.

  He left his SUV in front of the chain. Outside, he listened for police sirens, but he didn’t hear them coming. He ran up the dirt driveway alone and saw Gandy’s old red pick-up parked in the brown grass. He felt the hood, which was warm. The tires were crusted with mud. When he yanked open the door, he saw a messy interior, littered with fast food wrappers and adult magazines. An old blanket lined the seat.

  He smelled the barest hint of flowers. Perfume. The truck smelled like Kelli Andrews.

  Stride crept toward the house. Missing shingles dotted the roof like teeth that had been punched out. Paint peeled from the gray siding and flaked from the window frames. The weeds surrounding the property were overgrown. Two of the windows sported cracks in the glass.

  He listened at the front door. The interior was silent. He knocked sharply and received no response. When he turned the knob, the door was open. He pushed inside. Icy drafts blew along the floorboards. There were stairs in front of him leading up to the second floor. The downstairs was dark, except for the living room, which glowed from a lamp in front of the curtained window.

  “Neal?” he called. “It’s Stride. We need to talk.”

  There was no response.

  He stood in the doorway of the living room. He smelled musty furniture. Nothing matched, as if the pieces had been
snapped up at garage sales over the years. The fireplace was cold, and the mantle was empty. The lamp cast shadows. He was about to turn away when he heard the whimper of a girl crying. He stared at the armchair near the fireplace and saw part of a yellow sneaker sticking out from behind it.

  Stride gently pulled the chair from the wall. Sophie Gandy sat in the corner of the room, her knees squeezed against her chest. She chewed her fingernails. Her eyes were red, and her cheeks were streaked with tears that crept under her glasses. Her flyaway brown hair was plastered to her face.

  “Sophie, what’s going on?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer. Her fingers leaked blood where she’d bitten her cuticles.

  “Where’s your dad?”

  The girl still said nothing. She stared through her dirty glasses into space.

  Stride left her where she was and quickly checked the rest of the downstairs. It was empty. He flipped the light switch at the stairs, but the light didn’t work. He crept to the second level in the dark, where there were doorways to three bedrooms. One was Sophie’s room, which was girlish and filled with dolls. The second was an overflow room, almost impassible with junk. Neal Gandy’s own room didn’t have a bed in it. He slept in a sleeping bag on the floor. The adjoining bathroom had a glass counter over the sink, stocked with prescription medications, including heavy painkillers and anti-depressants.

  No one else was in the house.

  He returned to Sophie in the living room and squatted in front of her. She barely acknowledged his presence.

  “Sophie, did you ask Mike to meet you at the theater?”

  Her head bobbed up and down, no more than inch.

  “Why?”

  She spoke with her finger between her teeth. “I thought he could help Kelli.”

  “Why did Kelli need help?”

  Her glasses slipped down her nose. She pushed them up with one finger. “I called her. I said I needed to see her, but that wasn’t true.”

  “Was it Neal?” Stride asked.

  She sniffled and nodded. “My dad wanted to see her, but he knew she wouldn’t talk to him. He doesn’t like her. He thinks she’s always taking my Mom’s side. Like she’s turning me against him. I tell him that’s not how it is, but he doesn’t believe me.”

  “Why did your dad want to see Kelli?”

  “I don’t know. He told me not to worry about it.” Sophie shrugged, as if she believed her father, but then she started to cry again. “He gets so mad sometimes. It scares me. He says I shouldn’t tell my Mom, because then they’d take me away from him. I don’t want that.”

  Stride put a hand on the girl’s arm. She flinched at the touch. “Sophie, where is your father?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “His truck is in the driveway,” he told her.

  Her eyes widened behind her yellow glasses. She shook her head again. “No, I don’t know where he is. Maybe he’s working.”

  “Sophie,” he said. “Please. You said you want to help Kelli. I want to help her, too. To do that, I need to find your dad.”

  She hugged her knees, shrinking into the tiniest ball she could make. She slouched, pushing her face into her thighs. Her hair fell forward like ratty curtains. She spoke, but her voice was muffled, and he couldn’t hear her.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Her face tilted. Her lips hardly moved. “He must be in the barn.”

  Stride began to stand up, but one of Sophie’s hands shot out and clutched his wrist. “Nobody goes in the barn,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  The girl whispered, as if it were the kind of secret you didn’t dare say out loud. “You just don’t. That’s the rule. Dad always says you never, ever go in the barn.”

  Kelli lay sprawled in the straw. Her eyes were closed. She was unconscious. Blood had dried in the bridge of her nose and on her forehead, where he’d struck her with the steel peg from his taxidermy supplies. Hard enough to break bone, not hard enough to kill her. There was time for that.

  Neal stared at the woman at his feet. He rubbed the handle of his Piranta knife between his sweaty fingers. He sat in a wooden chair beside her, because it was too painful to stand for any length of time. His long legs were stretched out, touching the fabric of her Packers sweatshirt. A halogen light dangled from a hook above them, casting hot light over her body.

  “Hello, Kelli,” he said, although she couldn’t hear him.

  They were at the back of the old barn, in the nook he’d built on the lower level for his work. Even in winter, even years after this had been a real farm, he couldn’t escape the smell of mold, manure, and old wood. He was used to it, as he was used to the smell of blood, clay, preservatives, glue, and stripped skin.

  “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” Neal leaned forward with a grin: “In the flesh, if you know what I mean.”

  He put down the knife. He picked up a pair of iris scissors. Great for close-up work on an animal’s eyes. He had all of his tools at his disposal on a table beside him. He liked the feel of them, how they molded to his hand.

  “The truth is, I don’t like you, Kelli. You think I don’t know about the lies you fed my daughter? You think I don’t know that my ex-wife told you all sorts of shit stories about me? Nobody gets between me and my daughter. I spent a lot of nights imagining a scene like this one, but I never did anything about it. Now Jet? He found some balls. Not me. No way I could do anything like that. And then last year—well, last year, everything changed.”

  He put down the iris scissors.

  He picked up the antler saw.

  Need to hack off the skull cap? That’s the tool.

  “Sophie told me what she heard. How Percy and Tom talked about it while Tom was dying. Percy didn’t kill Jet after all. You did! And shit, the things you did! Poor Jet. I have to tell you, I became kind of obsessed with you after I found out what you did. It’s like we were connected, you know? Did you feel it?”

  Neal slid off the chair and sat on the floor next to her. Her chest swelled as she breathed, but she didn’t move or wake up. He always talked to the animals. Except the animals were typically dead already by the time they got to him. Whitetails. Red foxes. Raccoons. Bear.

  “A couple times I dropped in to see Percy when I knew he was alone. I slipped some of your things out of the house. Things I thought you might miss, just enough to wonder, you know? Perfume. Underwear. A hairbrush. I took a paring knife, too. Did you notice it was gone? See, it was like you had a ghost sharing your life. I just didn’t know where it was all leading—not until Mr. Hamlin wrote me a letter. Then I knew. Oh yeah, then I knew.”

  He grinned and laughed.

  “There was Mr. Hamlin wanting to talk to me, and it’s like the tables had finally turned. I was fearless. He was the pussy. Right from the start, I had a plan. You. You were my plan. Well, and Percy, too, can’t forget him. I told Hamlin I would meet him at the theater. That’s where you liked to meet Sophie, too. See how perfect it was? Mr. Hamlin never saw it coming. I hit him like I hit you. Boom. I thought about taking him to the Novitiate, but that would have been too much. Then I remembered Tom’s camper. I tied him to the bed there, and he and I had kind of a school reunion. I made him tell me again all the things he’d done to me. After all, he wanted to make amends, you know? Confess his sins? We spent days together. The time just flew by. Maybe more for me than for him.”

  Neal chuckled again. He retrieved the knife, which he kept well honed. A knife was no good if it wasn’t sharp.

  “Mr. Hamlin finally bled out, but he was strong. He lasted. I left him in the camper, but don’t worry, I laid out breadcrumbs for Percy. See, the first thing I did after I grabbed Mr. Hamlin at the theater was use his phone to call you. I mean, I knew Percy would get the case when Hamlin disappeared. I knew he’d see that call. If you’re married to someone who killed once, you always have it in the back of your head, right? Would she kill again? And now here was Mr. Hamlin disappearing right afte
r he calls you. Mr. Hamlin, who was so tormented by what he did to Jet. I gave Percy a little nudge about the camper. I phoned in an anonymous tip. Imagine what he thought when he went inside. Smelled your perfume. Saw strands of your hair. Saw the knife from your own kitchen used to do a little carving on Mr. Hamlin’s chest. I slipped the blanket I used to transport Hamlin’s body into the trunk of your car, too. Case closed. I mean, what was Percy going to do? Turn you in? I have to admit, though, the suicide took me by surprise. I never saw him going that far. I figured he’d cover it up and let it go. I guess the man loved you, that’s for sure.”

  Gandy put his hand on the warmth of Kelli’s stomach.

  “Time to get started,” he said. “Better get you tied up, huh? Chains, clamps, gag—but hey, you know the drill.”

  He laughed again. He laughed hard. He picked up her limp wrist, but as he did, something changed in the woman beside him. Something in her body awakened and came to life. He’d lingered too long. He’d talked too much. He looked up at her face, and there she was, waiting for him.

  Her eyes were open.

  Her eyes were stone.

  23

  The wall of the barn loomed in front of Stride.

  Nearly every barn in Shawano County boasted a painted barn quilt, and Gandy’s barn was no different. He saw it in the light of his flashlight, a square of vibrant colors depicting lightning bolts laced together like a razor-edged throwing star. It was vivid against the decaying red of the wall itself.

  The barn’s foundation was built of fieldstones and mortar, dug into a shallow bank of land, making two levels. He found a wooden door in the stone, but when he leaned his shoulder into it, the door held firm. A chain rattled inside. He climbed up the slope to an old row of windows, but the glass was painted over and the frames nailed shut with plywood. He kept climbing to the top of the slope, where a large shed jutted from the wall on the barn’s upper level. The shed door was padlocked, but he reared back and kicked, and the rotting wood splintered and readily gave way.

  He went inside. Spider webs clung in sticky ropes to his hair. Rusted tools dangled from hooks. Hack saws. Scythes. Drills. Dank water puddled in the dirt. He smelled gasoline. The shared wall with the barn was moldy and soft, a mess of half-broken beams. He pried at the old wood, tearing it away, opening up a hole. Dodging nails, he squeezed through the wall into the interior.