Daddy's Little Girl

by Ed Gorman

  3

  The tall man who had visited Richard earlier that morning, who had tried to calm Reverend Heath only a few hours ago, jumped out of his van and walked up the sidewalk to Laumer’s Dry Goods. He moved through the door with a great deal of authority, saying hello and nodding to the half-dozen customers in the place. His name was Carl Laumer.

  In his cluttered office in the rear, he closed and bolted the door. Then he went to his phone, punched a button that opened a private line, and dialed a number he knew by heart.

  Sheriff Wayman answered. Laumer said, “We’ve got some troubles.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Bad troubles. Ones we’re going to have to deal with in ways none of us are going to like.”

  As he spoke, he surveyed a rack of shotguns above a filing cabinet at the south end of his office.

  Some of his favorite weapons were there.

  Good, dependable weapons.

  “The whole group needs to meet,” Laumer said.

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes. The cabin. Nine o’clock.”

  “Laumer, listen—”

  Laumer’s jaw tensed. Bill Wayman was a weakling, who couldn’t face up to reality, let alone deal with it effectively.

  “I’ll preside over the meeting, if you don’t mind,” Laumer said. There was an edge in his voice.

  “So be it,” Wayman said.

  “Just one thing,” Laumer said.

  “What’s that?”

  “What I say, that’s what we do, and no arguments.”

  “I guess it’s got to be that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  With that, Laumer hung up, then leaned back in his chair and contemplated his rack of shotguns.

  4

  She had looked at her breast once but then turned her swollen head quickly away.

  What he’d done to it was too ugly to dwell on for long, at least without going crazy.

  Deirdre had given up wondering who had brought her here or where she was.

  Those questions only led to panic.

  All she knew was that she’d awakened some hours ago to feel something sweaty and searing violating her body, threatening her vagina with horrors she’d never known even in her worst nightmares—

  Blindfolded, she was hung like a side of meat, twirling from a ceiling somewhere.

  Which was how she’d gotten a glimpse of her bruised and bloody breasts, by looking down through the bottom of the blindfold—

  Her long, teenaged limbs, naked, twisted as she twisted from the ceiling.

  Somewhere water dripped.

  Toc, toc, toc was the sound it made.

  Too, there was the chittering, though she was afraid to even think about what that meant.

  Rats.

  If they ever came up to her she would have no defense, dangling here helplessly as she was—

  But the worst pain of all was knowing what her father would be going through right now.

  All they’d done was checked into a motel.

  She’d been sitting in the car when—

  Nothing was clear after that. Only the searing juices of her violation.

  Only her screams in this murky cavern with the water dripping and the rats chittering—

  Suddenly, unmistakably, there were footsteps.

  Hollow, certain footsteps plodding their way down a passage toward here.

  Wherever here was.

  Please, God, help me.

  The footsteps—

  Then a door creaking open—

  5

  Sheriff Wayman had made sure that nothing changed anywhere in the house.

  It looked no different from the way it had the day his wife had died in her bed upstairs.

  Sheriff Wayman came into the cool shadows of the house that still smelled and felt of her, working his way through the back porch and into the kitchen.

  He stopped.

  He could hear her whistle on the air.

  See her smile as she turned to him from the oven.

  Feel the solace of her embrace.

  Shaking off his memories, he went over to the Mr. Coffee he had left on this morning.

  The warm liquid tasted good.

  He went over to the table and sat down.

  He could not remember feeling this weary—face it, this old—ever before.

  Even the bit of caffeine didn’t revive him.

  He knew what lay ahead for the town—for his friends—for himself.

  He closed his eyes, letting the memories of his wife fill his senses again.

  He saw her at Christmastime—at the Fourth of July—Easter Sunday—beautiful, despite her stoutness.

  He wished she were here now.

  To guide him.

  To help him.

  The things that were going on—

  He shuddered.

  It was his responsibility to see that the secret was kept, but—

  But he did not like to think of how it might have to be kept—

  He stood up and walked into the living room where her music box sat on the mantel.

  The tiny song gave the room a gentleness he lost himself in—forgetting all about the hounds and blood and frenzy of last night.

  He needed to calm himself now—gain strength and perspective—because things were going to get bad here.

  Very bad.

  Chapter Seven

  1

  Vince Reeves drove past the rectory three or four times before deciding to go inside.

  He parked the car on the gravel separating the church and the rectory, then sat in the squad car finishing his cigarette.

  He was thinking how tough it was to act the way you should. In his boyhood days, Sunday school teachers had always said that doing the right thing came naturally to human beings, and that other human beings respected a person who behaved that way.

  But in the world of grown-ups, people weren’t like that at all.

  When you told the truth about something, people inevitably got into trouble.

  So silence was your best friend, at least if you wanted to get along with others, not be hated, not be an outcast.

  Vince stubbed out his cigarette and got out of the car. In a situation like this, there was nobody else to talk to but your minister.

  He walked up the concrete walk to the front door and pressed the bell. During the wait, he had time to appreciate the day’s beauty. This only made him melancholy. He wanted to pack his good wife and all their belongings and head off someplace.

  Before he had to tell somebody what he knew and spoil all his relationships here in Burton.

  Of course, other people seemed to be on the verge of knowing, too. Beth Daye knew far more about the secret than he could have imagined.

  It was only a matter of time....

  The plump, nervous wife of Reverend Heath, Carlotta her name was, stood in the open doorway staring at Vince, who was lost in his own thoughts.

  She called his name.

  He snapped around, blushing immediately. “Hi, Mrs. Heath,” Vince said nervously. “I was wondering if your husband was home.”

  She looked at him as if he were ill.

  “Yes, he is,” she said, still watching him skeptically. She smiled awkwardly. “At least I think he is. He’s been up in his study practically all morning. Hasn’t even come down for a donut.” The smile again. “That’s a weakness we share.”

  She led Vince into the shadowed, cool house, then up a winding staircase to a door. She knocked softly.

  “Honey, it’s Vince Reeves to see you,” she said. She was, all in all, a pleasant woman, just twenty pounds overweight and a mite too fretful about things.

  She knocked again.

  “Honey.”

  An unmistakable look of worry crossed her cheeky face. “I wasn’t kidding about the donuts, Vince. He usually does come down—” She shook her head. “He left early this morning, then came straight back here to the den and—”

  This ti
me she rattled the knob.

  “Honey!”

  Nothing.

  “Let me try,” Vince said.

  “Please,” she said, hysteria already in her voice.

  “Reverend,” Vince said in his most booming, male voice. He tried the knob, too. Locked.

  “Reverend,” Vince said again.

  “Put your shoulder to it,” Carlotta Heath said.

  Vince nodded. Slammed his shoulder into the door. Pain spread from three different points down his arm. He thought better of muttering a curse in a rectory.

  He put his body to the door again.

  This time he could feel it give beneath him. He had been getting embarrassed about looking foolish and incompetent in front of Mrs. Heath.

  The reverend was inside, all right. He was a mess. The bullet hole in his temple had leaked enough heavy, dark blood to stain the whole left half of the reverend’s white shirt and to dribble onto the carpet.

  The gun, or the “suicide weapon,” as Vince would describe it in his report, lay inches from the reverend’s right hand.

  As Carlotta Heath tried to come through the door, Vince pushed her back.

  But she had already caught a glimpse of her husband and began to scream.

  “You go downstairs, phone the sheriff’s office, get an ambulance,” Vince said, gripping her arm.

  Despite her sobbing, he went inside the den and closed the door.

  He stepped over the body and began his search. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he felt, beneath his shock, an instant suspicion that suicide—if indeed that was the case—was unlikely for a man of the cloth.

  Perhaps there was a note somewhere. If so, maybe he should read it first, and destroy it if it made the man look bad via some last confession about something he’d done. Vince did not believe any good purpose was served by a man’s revealing secrets about himself. Especially a man so respected as the reverend had been.

  Vince went through the desk, a file drawer, and a box of papers. He found nothing resembling a note that Reverend Heath might have left behind.

  By now he had forgotten all about his own problem, why he had come here to see the reverend in the first place.

  He was turning to leave the room when he saw the newspaper folded neatly on the reverend’s desk. Actually, he had noticed the paper several times before. Yellowed with age, it looked as if it would fall apart if you picked it up.

  Vince went over to it, examined it carefully. On the front page was a story about President Eisenhower, then another story about Senator Robert Taft.

  That was when he noticed the date.

  June 8, 1953.

  At first he didn’t attach any special significance to the date, he just continued mulling over various stories in the paper.

  Suddenly he recalled the date that Beth Daye had told him she’d found in her husband’s notebook.

  June 8, 1953.

  And suddenly he remembered why he’d come here in the first place.

  He stuffed the paper in his jacket and went downstairs to find the wailing Mrs. Heath.

  2

  The blood on the butcher’s apron was fresh.

  Handyman Jake Darcy daubed at the red stuff with a finger. Then put the finger to his tongue.

  Blood. No doubt about it.

  The apron hung in the garage out behind the stone mansion where Jake had worked for the past twenty-five years for Mrs. Ruth Foster.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d seen such an apron, a bloody rubber butcher’s apron such as was used in hog kills at the Foster meat plant.

  No, every few years, bloody aprons had a way of appearing in this garage.

  Jake knew better than to say anything. Wasn’t none of his business, any way he looked at it.

  In town Jake had himself a small kitchenette with a hot plate and a twenty-one inch color TV. The set was hooked up to cable these days, so Jake got to watch every kind of show imaginable, including the sexy ones on the Playboy channel. A bachelor, Jake enjoyed masturbating to the shows, especially the ones where the tits were so big they jiggled as the women walked. Women with women were his special favorites, especially when they french-kissed. Saturday mornings he did his grocery shopping over to Bindler’s Supermarket, and Sundays he always had himself one of the Hungry Man TV dinners with the extra helping of dessert. Such was his life.

  A life he enjoyed, he thought, and didn’t want to spoil by meddling where he didn’t belong.

  From somewhere came a kind of whimpering sound.

  It could have been a young girl; there’d been a story on the Playboy Channel about rape one night. The girl had sounded like that when the burly guy had been putting it to her.

  Kind of like mewling.

  Jake looked toward the house ... but no, that was impossible.

  There were no young girls in the house.

  Impossible.

  He put his attention back on the apron.

  The bloody apron.

  Once again he daubed at the stuff, to convince himself it was real.

  It was a damn strange world, and nobodies like himself had best keep their observations to themselves, otherwise that world would soon be moving on them.

  Jake shrugged, trying not to hear the unmistakable sound of whimpering, and left the garage.

  In a bar of golden sunlight shining through the slats on the side of the garage, the red, sticky apron seemed to shimmer.

  3

  The library had been built nearly a hundred years ago, thanks to a grant from a wealthy railroader. A two-story red brick structure tucked between oaks and elms, it spoke of another time, especially the hitching post out front.

  Adam Carnes and Beth Daye had been inside the library for nearly an hour, in the basement, where decades of newspapers had been stored. Not all of them had been committed to microfilm as yet.

  Taking the June 8, 1953 date as a starting point, Carnes and Beth had looked many weeks in opposite directions of the June day.

  With no luck.

  Carnes, who admitted to himself now that there seemed to be no possible connection between the stories in the newspapers and the disappearance of his daughter, had begun to see the feverish flight to the library as just that—feverish and hopeless.

  He slumped in his folding chair, letting his eyes close, knowing that soon he would have to call his ex-wife and tell her that their daughter was missing.

  A grim reality began to replace his anxiety. A kind of deadness seeped through him.

  He had gone past shock, finally. Now he was into ... what? Despair?

  Watching Beth continue on through her own stack of papers, he tried his best to mouth the words to a silent prayer, but none came.

  “Beth,” he said.

  She looked up, her lovely face sober.

  Gently as possible, he said, “I appreciate all your work, but it’s no use. There’s no connection between your husband’s journal and his ‘accident’ and my daughter’s disappearance. None.”

  Now it was her turn to slump in her chair. She shook her head.

  “I know,” she said.

  “We both wanted there to be,” he said. “It would have made both our lives easier—a nice, neat package.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Across the table, she put her head between her hands. The pose made her seem much younger.

  A real feeling of admiration filled Carnes. He liked this woman. Very much. Under other circumstances ...

  “I’ve also been thinking about one other possibility,” Carnes said after a time.

  “What?”

  “That maybe Sheriff Wayman was right. That maybe she did run away.”

  “But she’s your own daughter. Surely you’d know if she—”

  He shook his head. “No. That’s what I thought at first, too. That I know her so well, I’d know if something was bothering her enough to make her run away.” He shrugged hopelessly. “But I don’t know her, really. I’m a father in exile. I talk to her
on the phone every few days and I see her several times a month, but I don’t have a truly ongoing sense of her life. Not at all.”

  “You really think she ran away?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “From everything you’ve told me, she just doesn’t sound like a candidate. She’s got a good life with her mother and her new stepfather; she’s got a good life with you; she does well in school; there’s no evidence at all that she’s heartbroken or on drugs, two of the reasons teenagers usually run away.”

  He just watched her as she spoke, the warm feeling for her increasing.

  But now wasn’t the time....

  He picked up a paper and looked at it. He enjoyed staring at the old ads, when things were absurdly inexpensive, a new car for a few thousand dollars, a good man’s suit for sixty or seventy, houses for ten, eleven, twelve thousand.

  He was burying himself in the past again when he saw it.

  As soon as his eyes encountered it, he wondered how he’d missed it the first time.

  What he’d been looking for was a very obvious story, something terrible that immediately made some clear connection between Beth’s husband’s journal and Deirdre’s disappearance.

  But here it was all the time, right in front of him.

  “Beth!”

  She glanced up from her own newspapers, startled. Almost instantly she was around the table, standing over his shoulder, reading.

  GIRL REPORTS PURSUER IN PARK

  Dora Jean Williams, 17, told police that an unidentified man chased her through Branch Park last Tuesday night.

  Dora Jean, who was on her way home from a church chorale practice, said the man grabbed her, tearing her blouse. She ran, escaping. She also told police that the man made strange noises, “sort of like an animal.”

  The story appeared in the June 10, 1953 issue of the Sentinel. The 8th would have been that previous Tuesday.

  The insatiable animal is born.

  “A teenage girl,” Beth said.

  “Exactly,” Carnes said.

  She put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I don’t have any idea what it means,” she said.