Tasha heard her father duck back out of the bedroom and close the door. Her thoughts spun like wheels on slippery ice as she tried to think of how to use this chance. If she screamed now, would anyone outside the house hear her through the face mask, through the closed bedroom door, through the closed front door of the house? How long could she scream before Robert would be on her like a wolf bringing down a rabbit?
Besides, what if Patty was alone? Surely the front door was locked, just as it had been when Tasha came home. So what was Patty supposed to do, kick her way in like a SWAT team? What could she do against Robert, armed and waiting inside for her? Even if Tasha screamed and Patty ran for help, how long would that take? And in the meantime, what would Robert do to her in his panic and in his rage?
She couldn’t scream.
Maybe Patty would just figure out that something was wrong and call somebody. Tasha fought to remember: did Patty know where Claire worked? Could she reach Claire even if she wanted to? A warning call to her mother at work might bring a call to the neighbors, maybe even the police.
Then she remembered—Patty could get in the house whether it was locked or not.
When the two lived there they had both used a method of jimmying the lock on the window next to the front door whenever they forgot the keys. If Patricia got curious enough about things, if she started to wonder if maybe Tasha had fallen and hit her head in the shower or God knows what, then she could be in the house almost as fast as anyone else could open the door with a key.
Tasha felt her blood run cold. Her heart sank as the question beat its way into her thoughts: Where was Robert right now? Was he cowering on the other side of that window, just in case his daughter’s best friend should get curious and decide to come on in, ruin his plans? And if Patty started in the window, what fate was waiting for her at this moment on the other side?
Tasha began to concentrate with all her might, to reach out mentally through an act of sheer willpower. She pictured her friend as clearly as she could, while she beamed the simple message to her: Get away. Get help from somewhere. Get away. Get help from anywhere.
She sent silent images of wrongness, feelings of danger. She wrapped them in a powerful mental plea and beamed it out with the energy of desperation to the one friend in the world she was closest to at this point in her life.
Bad trouble, Patricia.
The very worst kind of trouble.
Patty knew that Eric and Jeff weren’t going to hang out in her backseat all night waiting for her to figure out what was the deal with Tash. But it was her car, after all, and this neighborhood had some vicious hills for foot traffic. No, Patty knew that the guys were going to have to get a lot more pissed off before they actually got out and started walking. Besides, hitchhiking to Magic Mountain would be a complete drag. So Patty figured she could give this thing another couple of minutes.
Because so far it was totally weird.
She had been calling the house over and over, beginning shortly after arriving home that afternoon. There had never been any answer, just that new answering machine Tasha’s dad had installed at the house three or four weeks before. It was bad enough having to leave messages on a machine with his voice answering the phone when he didn’t even live there, but not to get any answer from her friend, hour after hour—it gave her a creepy feeling that had grown stronger all afternoon.
The feeling had started when she’d happened to pick up her senior yearbook after getting home that day. She had reread Tasha’s note to her on one of the pages inside. It talked about their friendship, their plans to take a trip to Lake Tahoe together. And for some reason she didn’t fully understand, Patty picked up the phone and began calling over to Tasha’s house, even though they had just spent the day together and had already made plans for the evening.
She just felt this need to hear Natasha’s voice.
When the machine picked up her first phone call she wasn’t too concerned, even though it was bizarre to have a phone machine there when she knew perfectly well that Claire had refused to have one in the house for so long. Patty hoped that maybe Natasha was just out in the yard mowing the lawn and that her father had already left. That would be fine with her. Still, she had felt the need to hear her friend’s voice right then, not two hours later, so she kept calling and calling, leaving one message after another. As the time kept passing she didn’t like the way that the feeling kept building up inside of her, even though she couldn’t explain it. Finally she went and got the two guys and headed on over without waiting for Tasha to give them the go-ahead.
But she had been knocking on the door for several minutes, getting no answer. Both of Mr. Peernock’s cars were still parked there just as they had been when Patty dropped off Tasha that afternoon. Darkness had closed in by now; she could see light from the TV screen coming through the curtain covering the front window.
Claire’s car wasn’t there. So, Patty thought, hadn’t she come home yet or what? Natasha was pretty reliable, especially when it came to going out and having fun together. If something had come up, she would have called.
She went around to Tasha’s bedroom window and knocked on it. Could her friend have fallen asleep?
“Hey, Tash, are you in there?” Patty called up at the window. No answer. Not a sound. There was something even stranger; the curtains were closed. Tasha never liked the curtains to be closed, and unless someone reminded her to shut them she tended just to leave them open. But now they were pulled tightly shut. And the TV was on inside. And nobody was answering the door.
Patty went back to the front, thinking that the whole situation was getting extreme. Mr. Peernock’s Cadillac was parked there all the time, it was true, but it was usually just covered up and sort of stored there. His regular car, the one he drove mostly, was hardly ever there at night. This wasn’t even his place anymore, really.
At that point she noticed that the grass hadn’t been touched, although Tasha had made it clear that one of her chores was to cut the lawn before she went out that night. So what was the deal? Tasha had to keep up with the chores if she wanted to get any cooperation out of her mom. No, it wasn’t like she would just blow it off or anything.
Finally she was back at the front door, knocking one last time. Was there a movement inside the house? Did she see a shadow pass across the window curtain, or was it some reflection from the TV screen?
She could always go through the window. It was a small section of lower window, not high off the porch level. Patty got down on her knees. She reached for the latch … and the little hairs on the back of her neck stood up straight.
A cold feeling washed through her, a funny kind of cold. It gave her gooseflesh as a little shudder shook her.
Patricia stopped short.
Natasha’s best friend will never be able to prove that she was stopped by telepathy and not by sheer common sense. After all, on the practical side she knew better than to just barge into the house when Mr. Peernock was there. Back when Patty was staying there, he had made it clear that he didn’t like any of Tasha’s friends. And he wasn’t supposed to know that the lock on his door was a joke to these two resourceful girls. She knew that even if Tasha was stuck in there with him, maybe being put on restriction for something or other, Patty wouldn’t exactly be a welcome intruder. No, if Tash was going to make it out of the house, she’d already had plenty of chances.
And yet something made Patty turn away. Today she confirms that she can see it in terms of unspoken communication between two friends whose invisible link was strong. Whatever kept her on the safe side of the window that night—
She turned back.
Everything went quiet inside the house. Tasha tried to listen carefully, but the silence thickened again. Soon, with no disturbance to puncture the buzz of her thoughts, deprived senses began to focus on inner images alternating between hope and despair. She felt no doubt that Robert’s burst of panic had come from Patty’s arrival there, so while she lay physically helples
s in the darkness and focused on pumping out messages of warning to her friend, she had listened with dread for the sounds of commotion. Now each minute of silence that passed gave her the growing feeling that somehow she had reached Patty and kept her away.
But would her friend actually call the police? It seemed clear that Patty was safe now, but how strong would a psychic message have to be to make Patty start some kind of huge ruckus with the neighbors or with the cops? With a sinking sensation Tasha realized that wasn’t going to happen. And while she reasoned her way to that inevitable conclusion, a deep sense of dread began to creep through her.
It took another fifteen or twenty minutes for Robert to come back into the room after Patty left. But Natasha didn’t ask what had happened. That would give away too much. No, she thought, let him wonder who else might be coming. Uncertainty was the only retaliation she could throw at him. Let him sweat.
For his part, Robert wasn’t offering information either. With the tube again wedged into Natasha’s mouth, he held her down on her back and poured another few swallows of alcohol into her. She heard no pumping sound this time; the stuff flowed faster, but still slowly enough for her to swallow most of it.
And then she heard him walk away. He disappeared back into whatever part of the house he was waiting in for Claire’s return, back to whatever he was doing to keep himself busy in the meantime.
Now there was nothing to mark the passing of time except the long, unfamiliar selections of classical music and a soft-voiced announcer who tastefully avoided bothering the listener with idle chatter. The music on the radio began to blur into fuzzy collections of nattering instrumental lines, anonymous and hypnotic. Tasha lay still on the bed, inside the blackness forced upon her by the hood.
Time passed. More than a few minutes, less than a few hours. Buzz time. Dream time. Tasha wasn’t really conscious of any particular effect from the alcohol or the drug. But then there wasn’t much to measure it by, bound and hooded and lying there as she was in total darkness.
The dogs. Niko and Queenie. Why were the dogs barking? Tasha struggled to come alert, forced her eyes open. But when they finally opened she still couldn’t see anything.
Niko and Queenie were really going at it, going crazy. They hardly ever barked like that, never made that kind of noise at ordinary dog-bark things like cars going by, like strangers coming to the door. What had happened? Tasha couldn’t think.
She cleared her mind enough to realize that the dogs weren’t in the house. If they had been, the barking would have been much louder. Someone must have put them in the backyard. Was her mother home? She fought to clear her mind, but thoughts felt thick and heavy.
Then Tasha felt the fabric against her face, and she remembered. She wasn’t aware of the handcuffs as the dogs brought her back to earth, but when she tried to roll over she felt the restraints against her wrists.
The dogs were frantic. They must be at the glass doors in back, jumping up against the panes, landing on top of each other the way they would do when something really set them off. It didn’t happen often. Since they couldn’t see the street or the sidewalk from the backyard, they were usually quiet unless something was going on inside the house that disturbed them. It would take a lot to get them this worked up, though. She had only seen it happen a few other times.
Like when her father tried to hurt her or her mother.
Something hit the floor in the next room with a huge bang. The family room. The impact vibrated through the wooden floors of the house, barely muffled by the carpeting on the floor. The sound went through Tasha as if she had just been slammed in the stomach. The dogs were going ballistic. She realized that whatever was setting them off must be right in their line of sight, visible through the glass doors. Niko and Queenie were watching whatever had made that sound. They were seeing, at this very moment, what she could only imagine.
And there it went again. A heavy thud shuddered the floorboards, as it would whenever Tasha and her sister were roughhousing in the family room, turning cartwheels. Falling down. Landing heavily on the floor.
As Tasha lay alone in her mother’s bedroom, feeling her mother’s bedspread against her skin, she stared into the black nothing that was given to her eyes by the homemade canvas hood. It was still held tight over her head with long leather strips laced through the bottom and pulled tight against her throat. But her mind’s eye could almost make the switch, almost leave the hooded face mask and enter the eyes of the dogs and be with them there in the backyard, bouncing up and down two or three feet off the ground as the two white frantic furballs bellowed and snarled and clawed at the glass, watching these things that were making such heavy noises in the family room. Witnessing.
The floor banged again and the heavy thud was only a few feet away, just on the other side of the wall from where Natasha lay barely inside her own body. While her physical self remained helpless in the darkness, her awareness hung in the air halfway between her bound form and the eyes of the loyal pets she so desperately wanted to enter into and look out of, whose knowledge she wanted to share as they watched something taking place so close by that if it weren’t for the hood she might see it through her own eyes. If it weren’t for the handcuffs she might reach out with her own fingers. If it weren’t for the thin wall separating the bedroom from the family room, her fingers might even brush momentarily against something as it went by, heading toward the floor again, toward the impact with the carpet covering the wooden floorboards, sending out the jarring thump that Tasha could feel traveling through the monster house.
Because the dogs knew. The dogs never made those kinds of noises unless something was dead wrong.
CHAPTER
5
Another thick pall of silence fell back over the house. Natasha’s drained state overcame her at last. Lying silent in the darkness, pumped with alcohol and some mysterious drug, she couldn’t measure how much time passed between intervals while she drifted in and out of real consciousness. During that time she had no further awareness of her father entering the room.
Much later, she roused herself enough to focus on the radio when the music paused. The announcer began to say something. She concentrated on the words, laboring to hear them clearly. When a brief time check was announced, her awareness seized upon it: eleven o’clock. For a moment she felt steadied by the knowledge, oriented as to time and place. She realized that her captivity had already gone on for six hours.
Although Niko and Queenie left her with no doubts that her mother had come home and that the thudding sounds in the next room, vibrating the floor and the walls, had been caused by a struggle between her parents, she had never actually heard their voices. There had been no screams, no shouting, no cries for help. She wondered fearfully what could have happened to her mother to keep her silent under such an attack.
But the answer came back to her as quickly as she formed the question; Tasha hadn’t yelled or screamed either. Something about the shock of a sudden and brutal attack had stunned her into silence. Had the same thing happened to her mother? After all, that simple question Tasha had posed when she asked her father if he was going to kill her had been spoken so softly that if others had been here in the next room, they wouldn’t have heard it either. Or had there been some kind of brief shouting match before the dogs went into action, had the alcohol numbed her to it?
There wasn’t a sound anywhere in the house now. She realized things must be very bad. Her mother would never have remained in the house for so long after returning home without entering her own room, not if she had been able to move about freely. And she would never have remained in the house at all after being attacked by Robert with the kind of violence that had reverberated through the floors.
But if Claire ran outside, Robert would have to drag her back in. If he wasn’t able to catch her, then he would have had to hurry in and take Natasha out before anyone could discover her there. Her mother would have sent help to check the house if she had been able to do it
.
So had Robert presented Claire with the “papers” he mentioned? Had Claire scorned them? Of course Claire would scorn signing anything on demand, with the divorce action set to resume in just a few days. Had she spun on her heels and started for her bedroom, thinking she was simply walking away from Robert? Worse yet, had she been threatened, told that even now their daughter was bound and helpless on Robert and Claire’s former marital bed?
Tasha knew that would have sent Claire into an instant rage. Her mother wouldn’t have paused for an instant, not even long enough to shriek her outrage at Robert as she darted down the hallway to yank open the door and free her captive girl.
And Robert would have had to stop her on the spot. Jump her. If she had any idea that her daughter was in the house suffering at Robert’s hand, he would have to quickly render her defenseless. He would have to do anything necessary to make her unable to put up the resistance he loathed. Perhaps a full-fist blow to the side of her face, right below the temple, as he straddled her on the floor? The dogs would have a clear view there. They would go berserk at witnessing this attack upon the woman of the house by a man who was far less familiar to them. The sounds of such an attack would travel instantly all through the house, vibrating the floors, the walls, like rambunctious girls on rainy days turning cartwheels and landing on the floor.
The mind can only absorb so much horror and helplessness. Numbness filters in to protect it from the jagged edges of situations too awful to sustain.
The thick black blur descended on Tasha once more. She no longer knew if she was drifting in wakefulness or sleep as the time wheel turned unmarked. Only vague sensations found their way as far as her preconsciousness when she would shift position on the bed, try to lift her arms only to discover the handcuffs again, try to open her eyes only to encounter the hood once more. She never heard another announcement of time on the radio. If one was broadcast, it went by unnoticed.
A Checklist for Murder Page 5