by Sharon Sala
The tone of Brett’s voice lowered, but his gaze never wavered. “Like I said… I need something to do.”
Lacey saw past Brett’s request to the pain in his voice. “I don’t have what you need, Hooker.” Then he touched Brett’s shoulder. “The night you went into surgery, I never saw a woman as afraid of losing someone she loved as Victoria Lancaster was about you. And don’t forget, she laid her life on the line when Huffman tried to finish you off. If she’s gone, she’ll be back. You can lay money on it.”
Brett tried to grin. “I didn’t think you were a betting man.”
“A sure thing is never a gamble,” Lacey said, and headed out the door. “And remember, until you get well, I’m shorthanded, so do as you’re damn well told.”
***
Tory had no problem finding Morrow. It was on the main highway. And she had no trouble finding Turner Avenue. It was the third street just east of Main. But when she found out that Fourth Street didn’t intersect Turner Avenue, she realized her troubles were starting all over again. It took her another couple of hours to locate someone who knew someone who recognized Stinger Hale’s photo. At that point she was faint with exhaustion and sick to her stomach. By the time she realized she was only hungry and not coming down with something, she wasted another hour getting some food. At one-thirty in the afternoon, she pulled into the driveway of a neat, red-brick house and parked.
The house wasn’t what she’d expected, and neither was the woman who came to the front door. It was obvious to Tory that LeeNona Beverly liked yellow, which, at LeeNona’s age, was not the best of choices. It gave depth to her wrinkles she didn’t need, and a sallow, washed-out tone to skin already dotted with age spots. In her prime, she had probably been quite a gal. But at this point in her life, she was an amazing fashion faux pas.
Tory got out of her car, trying not to stare at the bright yellow tights and the red-and-yellow striped baby-doll top LeeNona was wearing.
“Mrs. Beverly, I’m Tory Lancaster. I called a short while ago from the Realtor’s office, remember?”
LeeNona waved her hand, scattering ashes from the smoldering cigarette between her fingers. “It’s Miss, not Mrs., and I’m old, not senile. Of course I remember.”
Tory grinned. Darned if she didn’t like LeeNona’s attitude.
LeeNona took another drag from her cigarette, inhaling deeply, then jetting the smoke out her nose and mouth with a snort and a cough.
“Dammit, one of these days I’m gonna have to quit these things.” She squinted through the smoke, eyeing Tory carefully. “So, Mayrene down at the real estate office said you are trying to find Oliver.”
“Oliver?”
LeeNona frowned. “She said you had his picture. Do you or don’t you?”
Tory yanked a copy of the picture from her bag. “This is the man I’m looking for. Someone told me he rents a house from you.”
LeeNona glared at the picture, then turned aside and spat. “The rat. Yeah, he did rent from me.”
Tory’s hopes sank. Did? “Do you mean he’s not here anymore?”
LeeNona spat again, then picked at the end of her tongue until she got rid of whatever it was she’d been trying to eject.
“No, he ain’t, and I can’t say as how I’m sorry to see him go. Oh, I’ll admit we had our good times,” she said, and fluffed at the bright yellow fuzz that passed for her hair. “But that was before he skipped out owing me two months back rent.”
Tory wanted to cry. She’d been so sure that if she could only talk to him, her life would start to make sense.
“Do you know where he went? I really need to talk to him,” she said.
LeeNona laughed, then choked and coughed, thumping her sagging breasts until she caught her breath. “He’s in some jail but I don’t know where. The stupid old fool tried to rob a liquor store. They caught him red-handed, and it served him right. But, I’m left with all his crap and nowhere to put it.” She frowned and took another drag on the cigarette, inhaling and then blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth with the skill born of years at the job. “One of these days I’m gonna sell all that stuff in a garage sale and get my back rent.”
Dejected, Tory turned and started to go, when she remembered something Brett had once said about investigations. Sometimes he got his best clues from the places people lived, rather than what he was told.
“Miss Beverly, I wonder if—”
“Hon, you call me LeeNona. That other way makes me feel old.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tory said, and then grinned when the old lady gave her a frown. “Yes, LeeNona. I was wondering if I could see where Mr. Hale lived.”
LeeNona shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know about that. It don’t seem quite right, him being locked up and all.”
“I’d pay his back rent,” Tory offered.
LeeNona’s face brightened. “Hon, you just bought yourself a truckload of junk.”
“I don’t want his things,” Tory said. “I just want to go through them. I have reason to believe that Mr. Hale could help me with the answers to some personal problems I’ve been having.”
The old woman cackled as she stepped off the porch. “Oliver Hale couldn’t help himself fart, but it’s nothing to me why you want to look through his things. Come with me, the house is just around back.”
Tory followed the old woman through a path between neatly trimmed shrubs, and was mildly surprised by the neatness of the tiny house behind LeeNona’s home.
“When I bought this house, that was the garage. But I never did learn to drive, so what the hell do I need a garage for?” She brushed at a tube of ashes that had fallen on the front of her red-and-yellow blouse, then paused on the doorstep. “Ollie was owing me three hundred dollars when he got himself arrested.”
Tory froze, her hand on her checkbook, and swallowed past a sudden knot of nausea. Ollie? Ollie? Somewhere in the back of her mind, she could hear herself shouting that name.
“Hey, dearie, are you all right?”
Tory leaned against the door frame and wiped a shaky hand across her face. “Yes,” she said shortly. “I’m just tired. As soon as we get in out of the sun, I’ll be fine.” And before she could change her mind, she wrote LeeNona Beverly a check for three hundred dollars.
“It’s good,” she said, noting the hesitant look on the old woman’s face as she handed it over. “If you want, you can call my bank.”
“Oh, what the hell,” LeeNona said, and tucked the check in the waistband of her tights. “Come on in and let’s get this over with. I have a hair appointment in a couple of hours. I don’t want to be late.”
Tory followed her inside.
Over an hour later, Tory’s hopes were just about gone. Oliver Hale’s belongings were unremarkable and sparse, and not a thing among them had given her pause for thought. She dropped into a kitchen chair, staring around the small, compact kitchen, accepting the fact that she’d just wasted three hundred dollars. On the other hand, LeeNona seemed to be having herself quite a time going through Oliver’s things.
“I remember when we bought this,” she said, holding up a chicken-head cookie jar. “We were at a flea market in Billings. Boy, Ollie sure does like them flea markets.”
Ollie. Again, the name made her shudder. Tory nodded, and then had a thought.
“LeeNona, how long did Mr. Hale live here?”
“Oh, dearie, it seems like he’s been here forever. Let’s see, I had just bought this house. I guess it’s been at least nineteen or twenty years… maybe longer. I remember he said he’d come up from Arkansas to work in the mills.”
Tory sat up straight. Arkansas. The state of Arkansas had funneled Tory through its foster care system. This had to be more than a coincidence. And then she noticed a small, narrow door just behind LeeNona’s left shoulder.
“Where does that door lead?” she asked.
LeeNona turned. “Oh! Why, the basement. Shoot, I’d forgotten there even is one. But I doubt if—”
; “Could we see? We’ve come this far.”
LeeNona glanced at her watch. “Okay,” she said. “But make it snappy. I got to get my hair fixed, remember?” And then she led the way down the steep, narrow steps.
“Lord have mercy!” LeeNona shrieked, as they got to the bottom. “He’s got hisself a still.”
Tory had to smile. The setup was antiquated, but it had obviously done the job. There were several dozen quart jars full of some kind of liquid sitting on shelves. But she wasn’t interested in illegal hooch and started digging through the boxes shoved beneath the old shelves.
In less than thirty minutes she’d gone through the entire lot, save for a small, brown trunk LeeNona had just kicked out of a corner.
“This is the last of it,” LeeNona said. “Why don’t you just take it with you, dearie? I really gotta go.”
Tory eyed the dusty old relic, pictured it in her nice clean car and shook her head. “Wait. Please. It won’t take but a minute to go through it.”
She dropped to her knees and lifted the lid.
“Well, that don’t surprise me none,” LeeNona said, as a stack of pornographic magazines was revealed. And then she leaned down to finger through them. “But they’re old. Maybe they’re worth something.”
“Feel free,” Tory said, setting them aside as she continued to dig through the trunk. A few moments later, she rocked back on her heels with a sigh. “There’s nothing left in here but a bundle of old rags.” She picked them up, and as she did, something fell out of them and onto the floor at her feet.
She looked down, and as she did, the expression on her face shifted. A wail sounded deep down inside her mind, coming up from a place where it had long been lost. Her heart started to pound, and her legs went weak. If she hadn’t been squatting, she would have fallen.
“Oh, oh, oh.”
LeeNona heard Tory’s whisper and turned in time to see the young woman blanch.
“Hey, dearie, are you all right? You didn’t get bit by some spider or something, did you?”
But Tory couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t hear. Something kept pulling her down, down, down, into a dark, empty place.
LeeNona leaned over. “Well, would you look at that!” she said. “A little old rag doll. It’s near about rotted, but you can tell the dress was blue. Blue gingham, don’t you know? And look at that hair! I bet that yellow yarn was bright and pretty when it was new. I sure do love yellow.”
Tory shook her head, unable to speak. She reached down to touch it, unaware she was holding her breath. The doll felt damp, and when she suddenly clasped it to her breast, she could smell the dust of the years on the fabric. A terrible pain racked her belly as tears blinded her eyes. She leaned over the dolly and started to moan, rocking to and fro on her knees as if she would never stop.
LeeNona looked around in a panic, suddenly aware that she was alone in a basement with what could be a crazy woman. She started backing toward the stairs.
“If you’re getting sick, I guess I can call you an ambulance. But I’m not liable, you know. You didn’t get hurt on my property, and I—”
With the instinct of a woman driven to get to her mate, Tory rose to her feet, staggering toward the steps leading up to the light.
Brett, my Brett. Something is wrong in my heart, and Brett will know how to fix it.
She walked out of the house and crawled into her car with the rag doll still clutched to her chest. Without conscious thought, she backed out of the driveway, somehow finding her way out of town.
She drove blindly, with no idea how fast she was driving, or how far she’d gone, stopping only when her body or her car refused to go any farther, refueling both and then driving again until she would fall asleep on the side of the road. The scent of the doll was in her nose and in her mind. The feel of the fabric against her fingers made her ache in a way she couldn’t understand. With each passing hour, her world was growing darker and darker, closing in on her conscious mind and threatening to leave her lost inside forever.
Brett. Get to Brett.
It became her mantra. Her salvation. She had no concept of how long or how far she’d driven, only that she was going home.
Nine
It was eleven minutes past midnight when Tory pulled into the apartment parking lot, but time held no meaning for her. The only urgency in her life was the need to get to Brett. He would know why it hurt her to breathe. He would hold her and make everything bad go away.
She got out of the car with her keys in one hand and the rag doll in the other. Clutching the doll to her breast as if it were a shield, she started running and didn’t stop until she reached the front door to the apartment. She dropped the key twice in an effort to get it in the lock, and each time she picked it up to try again, her anxiety grew. Only after the tumblers finally clicked and the door swung open did she take a deep breath and relax. She stepped inside the darkness, shouting his name.
“Brett! Brett! I’m home.”
Her voice came back to her in an echo, but it didn’t register. Her focus was on the room, and the room was dark. Darkness was not her friend. She reached for the switch as she called out again, then choked in midsentence as the room was illuminated.
Bare. Bare walls. Bare floors. Everything was bare. Everything was gone. She started shaking her head from side to side in a childlike manner, refusing to believe what was before her eyes. Her purse fell to the floor, her keys beside it as she grabbed the doll with both hands, shoving it beneath her chin and burying her face in the faded fabric. From a long forgotten part of her mind she began to chant the doll’s name, pretending, as she used to when she’d been small, that when she got to the end of the chant, whatever she wished would come true.
“Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby.”
The words echoed around her. A draft from the open doorway in which she was standing pushed the fabric of her shirt against her back, and she shuddered as an ugly voice began to whisper inside her head, drowning out her Sweet Baby chant.
Again. Again. It’s happened again. You aren’t any good. That’s why they don’t stay.
She whimpered, clutching her doll closer as her voice rose in pitch.
“Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby.”
But old echoes from her past persisted, growing stronger with each passing second. She could hear them clearly now. Inside her head. Mocking her. Laughing at her. Stupid… stupid… stupid. No good… no good… no good. Nobody wants Tory Lancaster. Nobody… nobody… nobody.
“Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby, Sweet Baby.”
But the chant wouldn’t work, and no matter how many lights she turned on, the darkness inside her mind kept growing.
She began running from room to room and back again, shouting Brett’s name in a frenzy. And with each trip, her terror grew, until his name was a scream with no beginning and no end.
***
When the phone rang beside his ear, Brett jumped as if he’d been shot. It wasn’t as if he’d never gotten a phone call in the middle of the night. It was part of his business. But for some reason, this time the shrill urgency of the sound made him more than uneasy.
When he picked up the receiver, he knew he’d been right to panic. He could hear the woman screaming before he ever said hello. Although a dozen scenarios went through his mind in the seconds between answering, he was unable to focus on anything other than that unending, heart-wrenching scream.
“Who is this?” he shouted.
There was a scuffling sound in the background, and then it sounded as if the caller was moving to another room in order to be heard.
“Mr. Hooker, this is Mel Roberts, your old landlord. I think you better get over here quick. Miss Lancaster came back tonight. She’s uh… upset… as you can hear, and we can’t seem to get her to stop.”
Brett’s heart stopped. “Tory? That’s Tory I hear?”
“Yeah,” Roberts said. “Something’s wrong… bad wrong.”
But
Brett didn’t have to be told to know that was so. He dropped the phone without bothering to hang up. Within moments of the phone call, he was dressed and grabbing his car keys on the way out the door. He couldn’t think past the memory of Victoria’s screams.
“God help me… and her,” he muttered, as he backed his car out of the driveway.
A few minutes later he turned onto the Northwest Expressway, heading east. It was about a fifteen minute drive from his new address to his old apartment complex. He made it in just under seven minutes, with a city police car on his tail.
By the time he pulled into the complex, the cop had already run the plate, learned the identity of the driver, and was calling for backup. The way the officer figured it, if one of Lacey’s men was in that big a hurry, there had to be a reason.
Brett started running toward the building before the police car behind him had come to a stop. There was no time to explain away his haste. Already he could hear Tory’s screams, even outside the walls.
Every light in his old apartment was on, and the door was open. Some of the neighbors were standing in their doorways, their faces etched with worry, while others had gathered just outside his door.
“Get back!” he shouted, pushing his way through the crowd. “Let me through! Let me through!”
The landlord was just inside. His bathrobe was awry, and his hair was standing on end. It was obvious that Tory’s screams had roused him from his bed, as well.
“I don’t know what caused—”
Brett ran past Mel Roberts without waiting for his explanation. All he wanted was to get to Tory, to put his arms around her and never let her go. He ran into the bedroom, then stopped. She was nowhere in sight, but it was obvious from the sounds of her screams that she was in here somewhere.
“Tory! Tory! Where are you?” he shouted.
“In there!” Roberts said, pointing toward the closet.
Brett leaped, yanking back the door, intent on scooping Tory up in his arms. But he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. She was crouched in the back of the empty closet with her face on her knees. Her hair was matted with sweat and sticking to her arms and forehead. When he called out her name, it was as if he weren’t even there. He knelt, touching her shoulder, then rocked back on his heels when she threw back her head in a shriek, exposing the tender white arch of her throat and the dirty rag doll clutched to her chest.