The Burying Place

by Brian Freeman

  The field ended in a nest of trees. He slipped between the shaggy branches and tracked wet footprints across the driveway as he approached the house. It was a modest two-story farm home that showed signs of neglect. The wood siding needed fresh paint. On the sidewalk that led to the front door, two squares of concrete had buckled and cracked. Dead flowers wilted over the sides of clay pots on either side of the detached garage.

  He studied the house carefully, but he knew she was gone now. Every window was black.

  He made his way to the rear of the house. On the back wall, he saw three steel half-moons buried in the earth at intervals along the foundation. They were open and shallow, about two feet in depth, protecting windows that led to the basement. He stepped down inside one of the window wells and drove the toe of his boot into the glass. It shattered in shards that spilled inside to the floor below. He kicked several more times, knocking away the remaining fragments, then squatted down and squeezed his legs and torso through the tight hole. Letting go, he dropped to the concrete floor.

  He slid a Maglite from his pocket and cast a narrow beam around the space. The air was cold and musty. He ducked to avoid pipes overhead and picked his way through the glass to the stairs that led to the main level of the house. The old steps squealed like mice. He took them slowly. At the door, he waited and listened, then pushed the door open and found himself in the unlit kitchen. Dirty plates were stacked in the sink. Half a pot of coffee grew cold on the counter. The butcher block table hadn't been wiped down, and he saw remnants of mashed carrots and banana strewn in front of a rickety high chair. He whiffed the air and smelled fried fish.

  He moved from the dinette to the family room, which was crowded with garage sale furniture scattered over the small square of worn beige carpet. A brown tweed sofa faced the television. The coffee table in front of the sofa overflowed with magazines and dog-eared paperback books. He spotted three photo frames on top of the television, and he illuminated each of them with the beam of his flashlight. One photo showed an older couple on a desert highway; the other two showed a young man and woman. The man in the photos was burly, with blond hair and a mustache that overflowed his upper lip.

  The woman had dazzling red hair.

  Hello, Kasey.

  He remembered her vividly as she'd looked in the field behind the dairy. Her body like a wet cat. Her eyes big and desperate. Her arms trembling and her hands looking small clapped around the big gun. He'd never dreamed she would fire. The wound in his shoulder still burned where her bullet had grazed him.

  'You're a bad girl,' he said aloud. And bad girls need to be punished.

  He scouted the ground level and then took the steps to the second floor. The first room in the hallway was an office with a computer desk and filing cabinets. A pale light glowed inside from a video loop repeated endlessly on the computer monitor. It was a screen saver of the Zapruder film showing the Kennedy assassination. As he watched, Kennedy took a fatal bullet in the head over and over.

  Well, isn't that sick. Then he smiled at his own joke. Takes one to know one.

  He rifled through the cabinets and desk drawers, pulling out months- old bank and credit card statements and cell phone bills. People never threw anything away. He flipped through a copy of the Duluth newspaper from the previous January and a February issue of Sports Illustrated. The swimsuit edition. He dug deeper, extracting file folders with tax information, which he paged through one by one. Toward the bottom of the desk drawer, he found a photograph of Kasey in a bathrobe holding her newborn son, his naked skin red and wrinkled. You look tired, darling.

  But her eyes were the same. Blue. Fierce. He slipped the photograph in his pocket.

  The next room was the bathroom. Kasey used bar soap that smelled like lavender. He spied threads of her red hair in the bathtub, which he picked up and twirled around his gloved finger. He imagined her stepping out of the porcelain tub, toweling her body dry, and studying her reflection. The tiny room would be humid and fragrant with her scent. When he opened her medicine cabinet, he found vitamin bottles containing fish oil and St John's Wort and prescriptions in her name for Xanax and Ambien.

  Don't you sleep, Kasey? Poor baby.

  He closed the cabinet and stared at his own face in Kasey's mirror. He kept his hair in a severe black crew cut. A gold earring hugged the lobe of his left ear. His right cheek was scarred and cratered from the acne he had suffered as a teenager. Looking at himself, he watched his dark, dead eyes come to life, like a doll turned on by a switch. He grinned and picked up an open tube of lipstick and scrawled a message for her on the glass. Two words to tell her who she was.

  I want you to know I was here. I want you to know it's not over.

  He found her bedroom at the end of the hall. The linens on the queen-sized bed were rumpled and unmade. Her closet door was ajar. He opened it and explored the contents, touching her blouses, running his fingers along the satin sleeves. On a hanger, he found a lace nightgown, which he removed and held at arm's length. It would fall barely past her thighs. The cups of the bra were sheer. He took the nightgown and draped it over the bed, as if she were lying there.

  Looking down, he felt the familiar rage bubbling up like lava. For him, desire was rage. But it was different this time, because Kasey was different. She wasn't like all the others. He thought about waiting for her in the darkness and taking her now, but he willed himself to be patient. He wanted her to know. To feel him coming. To realize there was nothing she could do to keep him away.

  As he turned for the doorway, he heard three muffled electronic beeps. He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted the small electronic receiver. The red light on the front of the black box was flashing.

  He cursed silently.

  Someone was at the school. Someone had tripped the sensors he had installed on the perimeter of the ruins. He couldn't have anyone discovering the burying place. Not now. Not yet.

  Not before he was done with Kasey.

  He ran into the hallway. By his mental calculations, he needed two minutes to sprint across the dark field to his van and another ten minutes to speed through the empty highways to Buckthorn.

  He wondered: who's there? Who's going inside?

  Was it the police?

  He didn't have time to think. He hurried to the top of the stairs, and then he froze.

  Headlights swept across the downstairs rooms. A key scraped in the front door lock. Someone was coming inside the house. He was trapped.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kasey let herself inside and closed the door behind her. The house was dark and unusually cold. Through the front window, she watched the tail lights of Maggie's truck disappear toward the highway. She kicked off her boots and padded in her black athletic socks through the landmine of toys in the family room. She poured herself a cup of cold coffee in the kitchen, but when she tasted it, she poured it out in the sink.

  'Bruce?' she called.

  There was no answer. She was alone. She dug in her back pocket for her cell phone and dialed his number. The call went straight into voicemail.

  'It's me,' she said in her nervous, child-like voice. 'I figured you'd be back by now. Is everything OK? Call me as soon as you can.'

  Kasey hung up. She untucked and unbuttoned the shirt of her uniform, letting it hang open. A draft snickered from under the basement door, making her shiver. It was the kind of house where all the windows and doors leaked cold air. She couldn't really complain, because the rent was dirt cheap. A farm widow had died here five years earlier, and the woman's family rented out the property now to cover their expenses. They didn't put much money into the place, but they didn't ask for a lot of money in return. She and Bruce had lived here since they moved to Duluth.

  Her eyes kept blinking shut. She wanted to wait for Bruce to get back, but she couldn't think about anything but sleep. She had slept badly all year, and even a couple hours felt like bliss when she could get it. She frowned, seeing the dirt
y dishes in the sink, but decided they could wait until morning.

  Kasey dragged herself upstairs. Her foot landed on a wet spot in the carpet, and she cursed as the water soaked through the fabric of her sock. She reached down and peeled it off, leaving one foot bare. She squeezed the damp sock like a stress ball as she wandered down the hallway into her bedroom. She tossed the sock into their dirty clothes basket and stripped off her shirt and undershirt, leaving herself in a sports bra and her uniform slacks. She began to unbuckle her gun belt, then stopped in surprise when she noticed her sexy nightgown stretched across their bed.

  'Bruce?' she called again.

  She waited and listened. There was no sound, but even in the silence, something felt wrong. She fingered the lace fringe of the nightgown and frowned. With a quick glance, she noticed that her closet door was wide open, which wasn't how she'd left it. Little hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

  She poked her face into the hallway and studied the succession of doors. The office. The bathroom. The nursery. Something shiny attracted her eyes. In the crack of the bathroom doorway, she spotted a silver cylinder on the linoleum by the toilet. It was her Walgreens lipstick.

  That was wrong, too. She'd left it on the sink.

  Her skin rippled with a wave of fear. She nestled the butt of her gun in her palm and yanked it out of the holster. She crept toward the bathroom and nudged open the door with her t—. The tiny room was empty, but when she reached around and turned on the light, her eyes fixed on the blood-red message scrawled on the mirror.

  BAD GIRL.

  Kasey stumbled backward, and her bare foot landed in another damp spot on the carpet. She understood now. He had been up here, him and his wet shoes, leaving tracks.

  'Where are you?' she screamed, like an animal that puffs its fur to appear larger than it is. 'I know you're here! This time I won't miss. This time I'll blow your goddamned head off!'

  She pushed her toe in an arc across the carpet and found another wet footprint. And another. The trail led her toward the nursery.

  Kasey pointed her gun at the door. Inside, she heard a noise now, like a deck of cards being shuffled. It was the sound of the wind slapping the vertical blinds together through an open window. She squatted down to peer under the door. Cold air roared through the crack and made her face cold. She put her eye to the carpet but didn't see anyone standing in the room.

  Not waiting, she cocked her knee and kicked her heel into the door, connecting near the flimsy metal knob. The door flew round and banged into the wall, and Kasey stepped into the doorway and blocked the door with her shoulder as it bounced back. She surveyed the room. The crib, undisturbed. The pirate wallpaper. The baby monitor on top of the white dresser. The closet door, closed.

  She eyed the window, which was open. The blinds danced and flapped crazily against each other as the night air swirled through the room. She made her way to the window frame, but with each step, she watched the closet door, in case the knob began to turn. At the window, she pushed the blinds aside and squinted at the darkness outside. She gauged the distance below her. It was a long way down, and the ground was hard.

  The height was too far to jump, she realized, but by then it was too late.

  She caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. The closet door flew open. He was inside, tall, masked, dressed in black, the same way he had been two nights earlier. She turned to aim her gun, but he leaped across the narrow bedroom before she could bring her arm around. His momentum drove her into the window frame. His hand locked around her wrist and jammed her knuckles into the glass, which shattered and made stinging cuts across her skin. Instinctively, her fist uncurled, and her gun dropped away, tumbling past the window ledge to the ground below.

  He backhanded her chin with his forearm. Her head snapped back, colliding hard with the wall. The impact rattled her teeth. Before she could clear her head, she was airborne; he lifted her bodily off the carpet and hurled her toward the opposite wall. Her feet hit the ground first, and she pitched forward into the closet. Her cheekbone struck the wooden floor.

  Dazed and bleeding, she twisted on to her back. She expected him to throw himself on her, but instead, he watched her, frozen. His eyes were bright behind the mask. The intimacy of his expression made her sick. She suddenly felt exposed, as if he could see all her secrets, see past her clothes, see what she cared about and fantasized about. He knew exactly who she was, and it terrified her.

  Then the moment passed, and he ran.

  Kasey got dizzily to her feet. Distantly, she heard the thumping of his footfalls on the stairs, getting further away. She felt the pressure in the house change as the front door was ripped open.

  He was gone. Everything fell silent again, except for the twisting of the blinds.

  Kasey realized that she couldn't run away from him. He wouldn't let her. That was her last thought before she passed out.

  * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  As Serena hunted for Regan Conrad's home on Lismore Road, a black van approached from behind at extreme speed. One headlight was broken, but its single remaining beam grew blinding in her mirror like a searchlight. As the van careened past her Mustang in the adjacent lane, a rush of air pushed her toward the shoulder. The van continued east into the no-man's-land of farm towns like Stewart and Buckthorn, leaving her alone on the two-lane highway.

  She slowed to a crawl at McQuade Road and scouted the numbers posted on the mailboxes on the opposite side of the rural road. Half a mile later, she spotted the address for Regan Conrad and turned into the nurse's long driveway. The houses in the countryside were built far back from the road, with several hundred yards of fields and trees separating neighbors. When she reached the house, she was surprised to find the kind of luxury country home that local professionals like doctors or lawyers afforded. Not nurses. A swimming pool, now closed for the season, sat amid a sprawling expanse of brown lawn. A multi-level redwood deck was built off the side of the house, with access from dual sets of French doors.

  The living-room window was brightly lit with a broad bay window, but she didn't see anyone inside. She parked beyond the house, where the driveway ended, and got out. As she walked to the front door, she spotted two cars parked in front of the garage. One was a black Hummer. The other was a 1980s-era Ford Escort.

  Serena rang the bell and waited nearly a minute before Regan Conrad opened the door a few inches and studied her suspiciously.

  From inside, Serena heard the bluesy strains of a soul singer on the stereo.

  'May I help you?'

  'Ms Conrad? My name is Serena Dial. I'm an investigator working for the Itasca County Sheriff's office on the disappearance of Marcus Glenn's daughter.'

  Regan's mouth twisted into a frown. Her lipstick was so dark that her lips looked purple. 'What does that have to do with me?'

  'I'd like to ask you some questions.'

  'Why? Do you think I swooped in and stole the baby and I'm hiding her here in my house?'

  'I don't know,' Serena said. 'Did you?'

  Regan didn't answer, but a ghost of a smile flitted across her ivory face. She invited Serena inside with a flick of her hand. She led the way to the living room on her right, where the bay window overlooked the yard.

  'I'll be back in a minute,' Regan told her.

  Serena ran her hand along a sofa that had a plush, almost velvet finish. 'This is quite the place,' she said. 'Did you win the lottery?'

  Regan stopped in the doorway and folded her arms over her chest, it was my break-up box, courtesy of a corporate lawyer from Minneapolis.'

  She disappeared.

  Serena examined the living room. Regan liked blown glass; there were several multi-colored bowls shaped like flowers. An original oil painting, abstract with thick squiggles of color, hung over the fireplace. From somewhere inside the house, the volume of the music increased. Serena realized there were hidden speakers in the living room. She recognized the singer now; it was Duffy belti
ng out 'Mercy'. Just as the volume went up, she thought she heard something else, like a faint echo from another room. The noise didn't recur, but she wondered if the music was meant to drown it out.

  She thought she had heard a baby crying.

  Serena was on the verge of investigating when Regan reappeared in the doorway with a glass of red wine. 'Do you want something to drink?' she asked.

  'No.' She added, 'Did I hear a baby?'

  'Only if you brought one with you,' Regan replied. 'Come on, we can talk in the library.'

  Regan led her out of the living room into the foyer. Walking beside Regan, Serena finally had a chance to study the nurse up close. She wasn't as tall as Serena, and she had a gaunt but attractive face. Her skin was paper white and appeared even paler against the dark make-up on her eyes and mouth. She had a pierced lower lip, four earrings in her left ear, and three in her right. She wore a black tank top that hung straight down, barely swelled by her small breasts, and Serena saw an elaborate serpent tattoo stretching down her forearm to her bony wrist. The head of the snake poked out of Regan's shirt near her neck. Her black hair was short and spiky with strands of blue highlights. Serena guessed that she was about thirty years old.

  'Do I look like a biker chick?' Regan asked, catching Serena's eye. 'Or just white trash?'

  'More like a goth Kate Moss,' Serena said.

  Regan smiled.

  'You live out here alone?' Serena asked.

  'That's right.'

  'I hope you're careful.'

  'I sleep with a shotgun by my bed,' Regan told her. 'I know how to use it.'

  She led Serena into a small den and used a remote control to replay 'Mercy' on her iPod dock. She mouthed, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah' along with the background vocals on the song, and she did a slithery dance across the carpet and then settled into a leather recliner.