The Dead Place

by Rebecca Drake

  Something gurgled to her left and Kate jumped, swinging the flashlight in that direction. It was just a water heater. The big dark lump next to it was an old-fashioned boiler. Something gleamed, and she swung the light back a pace to reveal a shelf filled with rows of dust-covered but neatly labeled canning jars. Tomatoes. Pickles. Beets. They all had their years marked, and the latest were already five years old.

  Nobody was down there as far as she could see. There was a hose rolled in a corner and a patch of damp near the drain on the floor. The smell of bleach was stronger there. Had he already killed the girl and cleaned up? Her chest ached from shallow breathing.

  Something drew her eye up, and she saw an iron hook screwed tight into a wooden joist from the floor above. The light bounced as her hand trembled. “Sweet Jesus.” The words came to her instinctively, though she couldn’t remember saying them before. It was something her mother used to say, a prayer as much as an exclamation of shock.

  She could almost see a body suspended from here. Was this where he’d killed her? The papers hadn’t said how she died, just that her body had been found.

  Her light caught a glimpse of a sharp-toothed saw through the gloom. Kate moved toward it, and saw other tools hanging in marked spaces on a Peg-Board running high against a wall. She bumped into a stool she hadn’t seen, and its metal legs rasped against the cement floor. Steadying it with her hand, she brought the flashlight waist level and moved its beam across the rough surface of a tool-scarred workbench. An eyeless doll’s head grinned at her from the center of the table-top.

  Kate suppressed a scream, swallowing it down along with the bile that rose in her throat. For a moment she’d thought it was a real skull, and the relief of it not being one made her legs weak. She swallowed again, steadying herself against the stool before moving the light along the low shelf that ran along the back of the bench behind the head. Rows of little jars, baby-food jars, filled with tiny nails and wire and something blue, green, and glittering that turned out to be dolls’ eyes.

  So Terrence did work on his dolls down here, just as she’d envisioned. Was that all he worked on? She searched the bench for something more, for evidence that he was working on humans, too. She thought she’d find photography equipment or something belonging to one of the girls, but there was nothing.

  In a cupboard near the workbench, she found a cardboard box labeled simply HAIR, but that proved to be synthetic, doll-sized wigs, not human hair.

  She left the basement, went upstairs, switching off the flashlight and stowing it in her pocket as she entered a kitchen that smelled faintly of tuna and sour milk from two cracked saucers left on a faded linoleum floor. Terrence’s cat was nowhere in sight today. Everything was in order. A dishcloth folded neatly in half was drying over the handle of the kitchen faucet, and a single mug and a bowl were in the dish drainer along with a teaspoon. An old-fashioned clock ticked away above the gas stove; otherwise, there was no noise in the room. There was no sign of anyone either, and no sign that anyone other than Terrence had been here, but then she found the robe.

  The sight of it hanging on the back of the kitchen door made Kate’s rapid breath catch in her throat. It couldn’t belong to Terrence. A woman’s robe, white cotton, with lace at the cuffs and collar. Kate’s stomach rose again. He was neat, the house so clearly showed that, but he’d forgotten to hide this. She ran gloved hands through the pockets, but they were empty.

  The find galvanized her. She moved through the dining room with its curio cabinets stuffed with dolls and into the gloomy front hall, barely pausing to look in the living room with its dark upholstered furniture trapped in time with crocheted antimacassars, and then up the creaking wooden stairs to the second floor. It was even gloomier up there.

  “Hello?” she called, though her voice was faint and got swallowed up down the long, dim hall. The walls seemed compressed, but maybe that was the wallpaper with its rows of vertical blue stripes. Prisonlike, with rooms for cells opening on the right and the left, but every room had a closed door. She pictured Terrence carefully closing each one. It seemed that Terrence had a bit of an OCD problem.

  Thinking that helped her relax enough to open the door to the right without bracing for some horrific scene.

  It was empty. A large painted metal bed covered with a faded chenille spread stood sandwiched between lilac nightstands holding clear acrylic lamps with dusty lilac shades. A matching lilac bureau sat against the opposite wall, a large chip out of a corner.

  Something about the bed looked unoccupied and when Kate pulled back a corner of the white chenille, there were no sheets but a stained mattress underneath. It was depressing.

  The bedroom opposite was much smaller and obviously being used, but it was a child’s space. Kate looked around, confused. The twin bed had obviously been slept in; while it was neatly made, the faded blue comforter had a slightly rumpled look and there was an indentation in the pillow.

  She realized that this must have been Terrence’s room, still was Terrence’s room, though he was a grown man, closer to fifty than the five-year-old for whom it might have been decorated. The walls were painted baby blue, and a border of matching blue and white sailboats floated around the top of the wall. There were knotted ropes tying back curtains faded from the sun. An equally faded pillow with a stained anchor embroidered on it lay on the windowsill.

  A desk in the same dark wood as the bed stood against another wall. There were books in its top slot—Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, a paperback compendium of true-crime stories. The last tickled the hair on the back of her neck.

  A piece of pale blue stationery covered with large, looping cursive lay on the surface of the desk. It was addressed to a local realty company. She read, “Dear Sir, Thank you for your inquiry, but at this time I have no desire to sell the house.”

  The room was fetid and hot from having a full-sized radiator cranking out heat in such a small space. The old windows were tightly shut, the shades drawn. Through the half-open closet door she could see the sheen on Terrence’s polyester-blend easy-care shirts.

  It was at once pathetic and grotesque, and suddenly it was too much. Kate backed out the door and pulled it shut, breathing hard. She had to resist the urge to run, screaming, from the house. Only the knowledge of that robe, and of the girl, and of the way his hand had rested on the girl’s shoulder, kept her going.

  She looked at two other bedrooms, but there was nothing in them. No girl, no weapons, no links to the other two young women who had vanished on the streets of what was supposed to be such a safe town.

  “Where are they, Terrence?” she muttered under her breath as she checked a linen closet with neatly folded yet fraying bath towels. Like everything in the house, it was both tidy and caught in a time warp. Terrence was caught in a time warp, a case of arrested development. She wondered just how long ago his mother had died, and then she remembered Margaret’s comment about finding his mother, à la Psycho, somewhere in the house.

  When she glanced at her watch, Kate was shocked to see that she’d been in the house for almost an hour. Terrence could come home soon. Did he eat his lunch at the store or come back here? She could picture him coming back and eating the same lunch his mother had always made him, a tuna sandwich perhaps, sitting alone at the kitchen table, his massive hands wrapped around plain white bread.

  She hurriedly opened the next door, which was a bathroom with period fixtures and the original tile floor. A fraying green hand towel hung on the rack next to an old-fashioned sink. There was only one door after this, sitting facing out at the end of the hall. She was about to head there when something on the bathroom floor caught her eye. As she stooped to pick it up, Kate heard a door open downstairs.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Time stopped. Kate held her breath. The door closed. There were footsteps crossing the floor.

  Shit, he was back. She was stuck, on the second floor, alone. She was afraid to walk back into the hallway. There was nowhere else to go b
ut in the tub, hidden behind the shower curtain. It wasn’t a safe place to hide. She climbed in anyway, crouching down on the cold, stained porcelain with the white plastic curtain damp against her side. She fished the flashlight quietly out of her pocket. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was all she had.

  She was scared in a way that she hadn’t been scared since the moment in her studio when she realized she wasn’t alone. Her breath came in shallow bursts and she knew that wasn’t helping, could hear the therapist’s voice in her head explaining why it was important to breathe deeply so she wouldn’t hyperventilate, but she couldn’t.

  There was no sound for a moment except her own breathing, and then she heard the thud of footsteps, but they were still downstairs. Kate glanced down at what she clutched in her other hand. It was a ponytail elastic, bright pink, something a girl or a young woman would wear, not an older woman and certainly not a man. Here was something tangible, like the robe.

  Only it didn’t make a damn bit of difference because the footsteps were closer now and then she heard the creak of the stairs. They were coming up, higher and higher. And then she could hear them coming down the hall, thud, thud, thud, the slow, heavy tread that she knew was Terrence Simnic’s. The flashlight shook in her hands. The footsteps were louder, closer.

  They stopped. Silence in which she heard the muffled gurgle of water in old pipes and farther off, through the old single-pane windows, the distant whine of a leaf blower.

  A floorboard squeaked under the weight of heavy shoes. He was outside the door. Afraid of crying out, Kate bit her lip so hard that she tasted the metallic bite of blood. Was he looking into the room? Could he sense her through the shower curtain? Just as she was sure he would enter the room, there was a muffled, high-pitched cry for help.

  The footsteps started again, past the bathroom, and then Kate heard the sound of a door opening, the last door, the one she hadn’t opened yet, and there were muffled voices, and then very clearly Terrence’s voice rose. “Stay there, Beth.”

  Beth. Elizabeth. It was Elizabeth Hirsh. He had Elizabeth Hirsh in his spare room. She had to get help, had to get the police. Kate scrambled up and out of the tub, shaking so hard that she banged the flashlight against the side. It reverberated loudly with all that tile. Kate froze for a split second. He must have heard the noise. She thought she heard his footsteps again.

  Kate burst through the bathroom door, catching a glimpse of Terrence Simnic in the hall just beyond her.

  “Stop!” His voice was a guttural roar.

  She flew back down the hall toward the stairs, hearing his slower feet behind her. Down the steps, using the banister to jump the rest of them, skidding on the carpet in the front hall, and coming to the front door just as he thundered down the steps.

  She turned the knob and pulled at the door, but it wouldn’t budge. The door was stuck. She could hear him coming, his breathing loud and wet.

  Her hands slipped on the knob. Keening, she twisted again, tugging with all her might. Why wouldn’t it open?

  A hand fell on her shoulder and she screamed. The door gave way and she jerked free of his grasp, bolting onto the porch just as a squad car, siren blaring, came screaming into the driveway.

  “She’s in a room upstairs!” she called to the cops who emerged, guns drawn.

  “Hands in the air!”

  “What?”

  “Hands in the air! Now!”

  The other officer unclipped a radio from his belt and called for backup. Kate shot her hands in the air. Terrence Simnic was doing the same close by, she could hear his snuffled breathing and see the edge of him in her peripheral vision.

  “I’m the home owner,” he said. “I’m the one who made the call. She broke in my house.”

  The officers approached and patted her down. Then they pulled her arms down behind her and cuffed her.

  “This is a mistake,” Kate said. “He’s got Elizabeth Hirsh in an upstairs room. Stop bothering with this and go find her!”

  “Ma’am, you need to cooperate with us,” the younger cop said. They led her to the squad car just as another car pulled in behind the first. The officers who stepped out of this one looked like the two who’d responded the other night. They conferred in low voices with the police officer who’d cuffed her, all three of them turning to stare at her as she took a seat in the back of the first cruiser.

  Another officer had Terrence Simnic in cuffs. He was red in the face and talking loudly. She caught the words “pattern of harassment.”

  They came out a few minutes later, and she caught a glimpse of a small dark head. She was hauled back out of the squad car by the young cop, his tendons tight on his scrawny neck. He smelled like cheap aftershave.

  “Is this the female you saw?” the older officer, the one who’d responded two nights ago, said to Kate.

  “Yes,” Kate said, “I think so.” And then the officer leading the trembling girl brought her closer and Kate could see that she wasn’t a girl at all, just a short, slightly stoop-shouldered woman in her thirties with Down syndrome. She looked childlike, with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and bangs framing her face and matching slacks and a T-shirt.

  “Terry,” she said. “I want Terry.”

  “I’m right here, Beth,” Terrence Simnic said. His voice was quiet, almost tender as he spoke to her.

  “I don’t understand,” Kate said.

  “This is my sister,” Terrence Simnic said, and his voice had hardened though he kept his focus on the police, not Kate. “She lives in a group home a few hours from here. I drive up to get her sometimes on the weekend. She’s scared of guns, so I couldn’t tell you she was there. It would have frightened her.”

  So that was why he’d been home so late, that was why he’d had his hand on her shoulder. Kate had been wrong about him, so terribly wrong.

  “You lied to the police, Mr. Simnic,” one of the officers said. “You could be facing some charges for that.”

  “She broke into my house,” Terrence Simnic said, nodding at Kate. “I want you to charge her.”

  The next thirty minutes were a nightmare. Kate was hustled into the back of the squad car again and driven away while neighbors gawked from their porches. She wanted to shield her face as they drove through Wickfield, but the cuffs wouldn’t allow it. They bit into her wrists and every time the car hit a bump she got a nasty jab in the back. The cops up front didn’t talk to her, conversing easily with each other about a football game the night before. It was surreal.

  At the station, a man came running up to the car with a camera ready, snapping pictures that momentarily blinded her. Only on the last did she manage to turn fully away. She was escorted through the station house with both officers flanking her, and it was easy to see the frank curiosity in the eyes of the desk sergeant and the policewoman who took her fingerprints and lined her up for a mug shot.

  She had a sudden memory of college days, when friends of hers would try to impress her with their arrest records for various campus protests. She’d always been proud of not having been arrested. She’d done a few protest marches, she wasn’t apolitical, but one of the benefits of being an artist was the ability to see multiple sides of most issues, and the polemic nature of the campus activists was ultimately unappealing. She could remember feeling relieved that she’d never been arrested, mainly because it wasn’t something her law-abiding, gentle parents would have understood.

  What would they have made of her now? She could feel their shame even if they weren’t there to express it. It was hard to hold the block of numbers straight when they took her mug shot. She thought of Ian and Grace and felt hot and cold at once at the humiliation of it all.

  After they’d searched her and taken her fingerprints and her picture, she was escorted by the desk sergeant, a kind-looking, stocky older man with thick white hair who smelled faintly of cigars, to sit at a plain metal table in what she assumed was an interrogation room. He left her for a few minutes, and returned with a Styrof
oam cup of tasteless but hot coffee.

  She warmed her hands around it, wondering when someone would talk to her about what had really happened. Her one phone call had been to Ian’s cell phone and she’d had to leave a message.

  There was a clock high on the wall encased in a metal cage. She wondered why they bothered to cage it in a room so devoid of furnishing. Had some previous occupant thrown the chair at it?

  Thinking about the clock stopped her from thinking about what was happening but just for a minute. How had she found herself arrested for breaking and entering? Oh, Lord, that was a felony. She tried not to think about what could happen, or worse, about what Ian would say.

  It was a good thirty minutes before anyone came to talk to her, and when they entered, it was two plainclothes police officers that she’d never seen before, who looked like an advertisement for a muscle-building program, like those old cartoons for Charles Atlas. The shorter, skinnier, “before” version introduced himself as Detective Stilton, and looked at her with a sour expression that might just have been the set of his jaw. The bigger, “after” version said he was Detective Barnaby, and when he reached out to shake her hand, she thought she heard a seam rip in the sports coat straining across his massive shoulders.

  “Let’s talk about why you broke into your neighbor’s house,” Barnaby said, swinging a leg over the other chair and dropping into its seat. The metal frame shrieked like a mouse squashed by an elephant. Stilton had brought a folding chair with him. He struggled to open it while Barnaby pretended not to notice.

  “I thought he was responsible for the disappearance of Lily Slocum and Elizabeth Hirsh.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  So she explained, and just as with Ian, her rationale for suspecting Terrence Simnic seemed faulty when she verbalized it. When she tried to describe the clues that had led to her conclusion, they seemed paltry. “There were lights on in his basement very late at night,” she said, “and then when I saw him going into the house with another woman.”