Chad stood. He could hear Annabel and Jack talking in the kitchen. His first thought was to rush in and tell them what he found, but something stopped him. He didn’t trust Jack. He was better off finding out what he could and taking the information directly to Chief Carlson.
He glanced over at the basement stairs.
Annabel said that the police had been here this morning and checked the ash dump downstairs. They’d found nothing.
But that blood’s fresh. . . .
Chad surmised that the door to the ash dump at the base of the chimney would still be open. The cops surely didn’t lock it up again.
He needed to take a look. Then, depending on what he found, he’d hightail it out of this creepy old place straight down to the police headquarters. And he might just take Annabel with him, just to be safe. He liked her. He wasn’t going to abandon her if, as he was starting to think, somebody in this house was a murderer.
And that somebody was very likely her creepy husband.
Listening as Annabel and Jack continued to talk in the kitchen, Chad made his way stealthily across the parlor and out into the hallway.
He paused, listening. He didn’t want that weird old guy Zeke to spot him.
Chad made a dash for the basement stairs. He hurried down as quickly as he could without making too much noise.
He yanked the overhead light on.
He could see the chimney across the room, hunched over like a crippled Atlas, the sagging floorboards of the first floor the world on his shoulders.
Chad approached slowly. The dim light overhead outlined the small metal door on the side of the chimney. He could see that the door was shut tight. But there was no longer any padlock dangling from its handle.
He reached over to pull the door open, but then stopped. His hand hovered in midair.
What are you afraid of? he asked himself.
He wasn’t sure. But suddenly Chad was very, very afraid.
He forced his hand forward and gripped the door.
He tried to pull it open, but the old metal was stuck. Chad shook it a bit, and then gave it a good hard yank, and all at once the door swung open in his hand.
He had uncorked a river.
A cascade of blood burst forward, splashing out from the chimney onto the floor, wetting Chad’s shoes and turning them red. The flow only stopped when the doorframe became wedged with pale white human flesh.
Neville’s head, in fact, severed from his shoulders.
He stared out at Chad with wide, terrified eyes, his dead mouth in an eternal silent scream.
Chad, however, wasn’t nearly so silent.
He let out a scream and turned to run, only to be met on the staircase by a woman.
A woman he’d never seen before.
A beautiful woman with long gray hair, dressed in a long, flowing white dress.
“Hello,” the woman said calmly.
Chad opened his mouth to ask her to please get out of his way, to run as fast as she could out of this house, when he felt the pain in his abdomen. He cried out, then looked down and saw blood collecting behind his shirt.
The woman had just stabbed him with a knife.
82
Annabel heard the scream below her and spun around.
“What was that?” she called out.
Jack just smiled. “Don’t be so jumpy, baby cakes.”
“Didn’t you hear—?” She turned to run out of the kitchen toward the basement stairs, but suddenly her knees buckled. Her legs were too weak to hold her. She started to fall, but grabbed the table to steady herself.
“You okay, sweetheart?” Jack asked, his voice eerily calm.
“My head,” Annabel murmured.
The room was spinning. She was passing out. Something was happening in the basement, and she was losing consciousness....
Drink your tea, honey.
Annabel looked over at Jack. He was watching her compassionately, but not moving a muscle to help her.
“You . . . drugged the tea,” she managed to say.
She heard a second scream from the basement.
“Chad,” said Annabel, just as she crumpled to the floor and blacked out.
83
The light was different when Annabel woke up. She had the feeling that she’d been out for a long time. She realized she was in bed, in her room. She was alone.
She tried to stir, to sit up, but found her body was numb. She could barely move her hands or feet. What did he give me? That monster!
A monster she had once loved—and who, until a very short time ago, she had still been willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
Jack drugged me. He may be trying to kill me.
Just as he may have killed Priscilla and Paulie.
Annabel’s mind was racing. She thought she could see things clearly now. Jack had killed Priscilla the night they got drunk. He had stashed her body somewhere—the fireplace!—and Paulie had found it the next morning. That was why he’d had to kill Paulie, too. Jack had stuffed both their bodies into the chimney. Annabel had gotten their blood on her hands! And maybe—the idea hit her like a lightning bolt—maybe Jack had killed Cordelia as well. Richard had seemed to doubt the coroner’s ruling of accidental death. Had his grandmother discovered his crime as well?
Another memory suddenly struck Annabel. She gasped out loud.
Chad! Right before she’d blacked out, she’d heard Chad scream.
“Oh, no,” she moaned.
Please don’t let Chad be dead, too.
At least Neville had gotten away.
She had to get out of there. She had to run. She had to get Richard.
With great effort, Annabel managed to sit up in bed. It was morning. That much she knew. Although they’d lost power, leaving the electric clock on one side of the bed dark, the batteries in the clock on the other side had kept it ticking. The time was 10:15. Annabel realized she had been unconscious all night.
She needed to move. But she doubted she had the strength to swing her legs off the bed, let alone stand and walk. She was breathing heavily from the exertion. She looked helplessly across the room. Through the window she could see the storm was still raging outside. While she’d slept, the snow had piled up at least three feet. The whole world outside her window looked white. She could barely see the trees. Everything was just a washout of glaring whiteness.
“That means I’m trapped here,” Annabel said out loud. “I can’t get out and nobody can get in.” She shuddered. “It’s just me and Jack.”
And Zeke. Unless Jack had killed him, too.
But even if he was alive, was Zeke friend or foe?
Annabel began to sweat. She wasn’t sure what scared her more. Jack—or the claustrophobia of being snowbound in this house. The two together threatened to push her back over the edge.
Don’t worry, angel heart. I’ll dig a path from the front door to the street. You won’t be trapped.
He’d been lying to her. Playing her. He’d known what he was doing. Lulling her into a false sense of security. Then he’d drugged her.
But why? What was Jack’s plan?
What had turned him so insane?
“I’ve got to get out,” Annabel said, and summoned every fiber of her being to move her legs off the bed and touch her bare feet against the cold wood floor.
He undressed me, she realized. Jack took off my clothes and put me in my nightgown.
Had he done other things to her?
She shuddered, remembering the night he had raped her. Yes, that was what it was. Her husband had raped her. She had tried to deny it to herself, but no more.
Jack was a monster.
But why? How? What had turned him into something Annabel no longer recognized?
She grabbed hold of the bedpost and pulled herself to her feet. She let out a groan doing so. Whatever she’d been drugged with still had a heavy grip on her body.
Standing, she had a better view of the outside. The snow had covered Jack’s c
ar in the driveway. She couldn’t even make out its outline in the parking lot. The driveway was completely inaccessible. She had thought earlier that there were at least three feet of snow out there. Now that she could see the ground better, she revised that estimate up to five feet. From her second-floor vantage point, Annabel could see that the snow had drifted across the front porch, completely covering the front door. If she tried to leave by that route, she would be faced with a solid wall of snow. There was no way she could walk out of this house, even if she got her legs to move more freely than they did at the moment.
The snow was still coming down, too.
Annabel realized with a cold certainty that she was trapped.
Her palms started to sweat again. She began to shake uncontrollably. Stiffly, she wrapped her arms around herself.
“I’ve got to try,” she said out loud. “Maybe I can go out the back door.”
But what then? Maybe, despite the drifts and the blowing snow, she could make her way to Millie’s store, the closest inhabited place to the Blue Boy Inn. Annabel thought she had cell reception there. Even if not, she could just hide out there until someone came by, as she didn’t imagine the store was open in this blizzard.
She’d need to be dressed more warmly if she was going to try walking through that snow. With great effort she shuffled over to her dresser. With even greater effort, she pulled open the drawers. She let out a gasp. All her clothes were gone.
“No,” Annabel cried.
Her cell phone. Her gaze swung around the room. She didn’t see it.
It’s in my purse downstairs, she remembered. Jack surely has it.
If she could get downstairs without Jack stopping her, she could call 911 on the house phone. It was an old model, with no cordless handsets that required electricity. If the phone lines weren’t down, it should still be working.
She took a deep breath. With superhuman exertion, she put one foot in front of the other and walked. Steadying herself against the dresser, she made her way to the door.
She tried the handle. Of course it was locked.
He locked Neville in. Of course, he’d lock me in, too.
But at least Neville had managed to escape. Annabel suddenly felt she wouldn’t be as lucky.
She began to hyperventilate. Her knees threatened to buckle, dropping her to the floor. She leaned up against the door to keep herself upright. She began to cry.
“You’ll stay in there until you learn to be a good girl,” came a voice through the door.
Annabel pulled back.
It was Daddy Ron.
“Look around, Annabel. Look around and see who’s in there with you.”
“No,” she whimpered.
“Go ahead. Turn around. He’s right behind you. Can you hear him?”
Annabel listened. Yes, there he was. She could hear Tommy Tricky behind her, gnashing his sharp teeth.
“He’s not real,” Annabel cried in a terribly small voice.
“Oh, don’t say that,” hissed Daddy Ron through the door. “That gets him mad. He doesn’t like it when little girls don’t believe in him.”
She was crying like mad now, her body heaving.
This is crazy, Annabel thought, trying to get ahold of herself, to stop her plunge over the edge. This can’t be happening. I’m an adult, not a little girl locked in a closet.
There is no such thing as Tommy Tricky!
She turned and looked over her shoulder, just in time to see something scurry under the bed.
“No!” she screamed.
She was hallucinating again. That was the only explanation. She had to get out of this house! Even if it meant trudging through the blizzard. She’d rather freeze to death out there than go mad inside this house!
She walked slowly, awkwardly, over to the bed. Summoning all her strength, she grabbed hold of the side of the bed and shoved. It took a second, but then the bed slid across the floor.
And sitting there, underneath, his blue face alive with a mouthful of teeth, was Tommy Tricky.
Annabel screamed.
84
Richard Carlson stood at the window of the police station staring out into the snow. It had been snowing like this the day Amy had died. His wife had looked like a little rag doll in her bed at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, weighing just eighty-odd pounds. Richard had stood by the window, watching the snow blanket the city, looking back every now and then over at Amy. Her breathing was so shallow. The thin white sheet drawn up to her neck barely moved. Richard had known Amy was dead even before the nurses came in to examine her. There was no dramatic ending to sweet Amy’s life. She never opened her eyes. There was no last look between her and her husband. Her faint breathing just stopped and she was gone. Richard had sat at her bedside for three hours after she was gone, just holding her rapidly cooling hand.
“All the roads are blocked throughout the county,” Adam told him, coming into his office behind him. “There’s no way the plows can get through this.”
“I’ve lived in these parts all my life,” said Betty, the police secretary, “and I’ve never seen a snowfall like this.”
“We’ve got reports of drifts up to nine feet,” Adam said.
Richard looked back out into the swirling white. Why was he thinking of Amy? Maybe because of how badly he had wanted to save her. Maybe because he’d vowed to her that he wouldn’t let her die, and he had. He could stop a bank robber in his tracks, but Richard and all his police training had been no match against cancer.
And now he was worried that another woman’s life was in danger, and he might not be able to do a thing about that, either.
“Have you gotten an answer out at the Blue Boy Inn?” Richard asked Adam.
“Negative on that, chief. I suspect the phone lines are down. Power’s out all over the western part of the state.”
The station was being powered by a generator. Richard sat down at his desk and turned on his lamp as he looked again at the report that had come back from forensics late last night.
The substance they’d scraped from the base of the chimney at the Blue Boy Inn was definitely dried blood. The DNA tests weren’t yet back, and they’d likely be delayed due to the storm, so Richard didn’t know if the blood belonged to Priscilla or Paulie, or if maybe there was some from both. But the very fact that there was blood in the chimney warranted him to take Jack Devlin in for questioning.
“There are lots of logical explanations as to why we might have found blood in there,” Adam said, seeming to read Richard’s mind.
“Name one.”
“Somebody could have been cleaning out the ash dump and cut their hand.”
“According to Annabel, there was enough blood in there to coat her own hand with it. If somebody had bled that much cleaning the damn thing, wouldn’t we have been told about that? And this blood was recent. Seems to me somebody would have mentioned it if it was just a simple case of cutting their hand.”
Adam smiled. “I don’t doubt you’re right, chief. I’m just playing devil’s advocate. Because you know the lawyers are going to jump all over you if you try to arrest Jack Devlin on such flimsy evidence.”
Richard stood, returning Adam’s smile with a smirk of his own. “You younguns, all fresh from the police academy, think you know all the answers, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something, Adam. When you’ve been a cop as long as I have, you listen to your gut. And my gut tells me that Annabel is in danger out there.”
“But we have no real evidence that her husband committed any murder.”
“Nope, we do not. But you see, Adam, my gut also tells me that Jack Devlin is not our culprit.” He smiled again as he saw his deputy lift his eyebrows in surprise. “In fact, I think Devlin might be in almost as much danger as his wife.”
“From who? That old geezer the caretaker?”
“No, I don’t think Zeke’s our culprit, either. You see, this is where I’m stumped. To make any sense of this, I need to go over there. I
need to get a plow to make a path for me.”
Betty laughed. “Chief, even the county’s biggest plows can’t get through this stuff. All the roads are closed throughout the county.”
Richard frowned. “Well, we’ve got to find a way as soon as we can.”
“You could call in the National Guard,” Adam suggested, not entirely seriously.
“Well, there’s where your analysis would be right, Adam. The Guard would take a look at the evidence and say, ‘We’re supposed to send tanks out to the Blue Boy Inn because you found a little blood at the bottom of its chimney?’” He laughed. “No, we have to find a way to get over there ourselves.”
“Do you really think it’s that urgent, chief?” Betty asked.
Richard sighed. “We probably have a little time. But even if Devlin isn’t the killer, he seems to be covering up for somebody. He may suspect we found blood in the chimney, and he may be waiting for us to respond. But he knows that we can’t respond right away, due to the storm, so he’s likely waiting this thing out as much as we are. He doesn’t expect we’ll get there until the storm lets up, so if we could get there sooner, we could take him by surprise.”
“But you just said he wasn’t the culprit,” Adam said, “and that he might be in as much danger as his wife.”
“Right. Whoever committed these murders is not rational. He or she could strike out at Jack as easily as Annabel.” Richard sighed. “And as we saw when we discovered Roger’s body, our killer is pretty handy with a knife.”
Betty shuddered. “Do we know for certain that Annabel is there at the house?”
“Well, I think it’s a fairly safe bet to assume she is,” Richard replied. “I saw her in Chad Appleby’s truck yesterday as the storm was just starting. They were heading up toward the Blue Boy. I presume he was driving her back after picking out supplies for the contracting job.”
“Have you spoken with Chad?” Adam asked.
Richard shook his head. “No, but I’ve left him three voice mails. I presume in a storm like this, he’s out trying to clear driveways. He’s got a plow on his truck.”
Betty snorted. “Chad’s truck isn’t big enough to make it through this.”
The Inn Page 22