by Jo Macgregor
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” I yelled defiantly and stabbed a finger down onto whatever part of the map lay beneath it.
Opening first one and then my other eye, I saw that my finger rested on a section of Vermont northeast of Montpelier, not far from one of the circled barns in Caledonia county.
It was a complete coincidence. Of course it was. But still, that was where I’d look next.
– 23 –
Saturday, April 21
The moment I saw it, I knew that I’d found the right house.
It sat at the end of a rutted dirt road overgrown with weeds and grass, its windows as dark as the gaps of missing teeth. It had a porch with a broken supporting post and a caved-in roof. A round barn roof peeped out from behind it, and although there was no sign of a fancy cow weathervane, the cupola matched the one in my vision. A massive beech tree shimmering with the vivid lime green of new spring leaves stood guard to the left of the house, where something malignant beckoned me from the shadows.
I parked out front, reasonably confident that no homeowner would emerge from the dilapidated wreck to challenge me and that no hound would appear to rip out my trachea. It was a cool day, so I slipped on my jacket when I got out of the car but left my handbag in the trunk. Seeing my mother’s ghost-hunting backpack, I searched inside it for the flashlight she’d mentioned. It turned out to be an old toy one of mine with a cartoon firefly on the side, telling me to light up my life. I checked the beam strength — feeble — and decided to take my phone instead. My mental list for P.I. equipment to purchase now included a strong flashlight, a notebook, maximum-strength antiperspirant, and pepper spray in case of attack by mad dogs or people.
I’d transferred all the crystals my mother had ever given me into my jacket pockets, and as I walked up to the house, I clicked them together like worry beads. Stomach tight with nerves and growing dread, I climbed the steps at the front of the house.
“Hello?” My yell startled a mourning dove from its nest under the eaves, but otherwise, there was no answer.
I shouldered the stiff front door open and stepped inside. Sunlight coming through the open doorway illuminated a small hallway laced with spiderwebs. I moved into the room to my left, which must once have been a living room, and took in the peeling wallpaper, a couch spewing springs and stuffing, an old box-shaped television with a smashed screen, and a naked lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. I flicked the switch on the wall but wasn’t surprised when it didn’t work; this house had clearly been abandoned many years ago. Spiders had staked out the corners, but judging from the droppings covering the floor, rodents ruled below.
A heaviness pressed against my chest as I walked around the room, touching the walls, the couch, and a crushed cigarette box. I yanked the neck of my T-shirt up over my nose to filter out the musty, decay smell and the dust that stirred from every surface, then crouched beside a little mound of termite sawdust on the wooden floor. As soon as I laid a hand on the boards, an image shimmered to life in my mind. Closing my eyes, I surrendered to the vision.
A polished wooden floor is strewn with buttons. Crimson, turquoise, ochre, mauve. Brass and wood, round and square, domed and ridged.
A young boy with soft dark curls and a face glistening with tears kneels on the buttons. They dig into his knees and shins, bruising flesh and hurting bone.
A man, angry and purple faced, wags a finger at him. How many times have I warned you about that? Stop sniveling like such a sissy. Like a girl. The more you cry, the longer you’ll stay there. All night if that’s what it takes for you to learn to be a real boy.
A young woman with a white face and worn dress pleads with the man. It was an accident, and he’s learned his lesson. Please, Father. He’s so little.
He’s not little, he’s eight! What eight-year-old still does that? It’s a disgrace. He’s a filthy little shit. To the boy: you’re a filthy little shit. What are you?
A filthy little shit, the child says in a whisper.
Another hour for cursing!
The boy’s shoulders slump.
The woman steps forward. But, father—
He turns on her. Shut up! You think I care what you have to say? If you had any sense, he wouldn’t even be here. You’re too soft on him. You’re going to turn him into a little fag.
But—
Just button that lip of yours before I thicken it for you!
Please—
His hand lashes out, strikes her cheek, sends her stumbling backward.
The boy half rises. Mom!
That’ll be another hour for you, shithead. And as for you, you go clean the mess, and then you do what you need to, to fix my mood.
I opened my eyes and came back to the present, gasping and rubbing my aching knees.
It was the same middle-aged man from my vision at the FBI office. The woman in the worn dress had been his daughter and the boy his grandson My heart went out to the poor little kid and to his downtrodden mother, who was too afraid or too weak to protect him or herself from her father. Was he my killer? He was clearly angry and aggressive enough, and he had a thing about using buttons in his violence, like the killer did, and in his language.
Shuddering at the cruelty this house had witnessed, I got to my feet, dusted off my hands, and continued my exploration. One of three small bedrooms housed an old wire bedstead with a disintegrating foam mattress, and sun-faded pink drapes hung in shreds at the window. In the second room, a thin stained mattress lay on the floor, and pencil lines on the doorjamb recorded the height of a child — that poor boy, probably — at different ages. The last mark, made when he was fifteen, was about my height. Had they left this place, then? Had he run away or possibly even died? Or had his mother merely lost interest in preserving memories? I laid a hand against the markings but got no reading.
In the third bedroom, several bolts of rotting fabric — black-and-white gingham, cream cotton stained with rusty blotches, and gray-and-blue plaid — stood like dunces in the far corner below a sagging ceiling discolored with water marks and black mold. A desk was pushed up against the south-facing window. Had the boy’s mother sat there once, sewing clothes and drapes?
The kitchen was at the back of the house. Ducking under a dangling strip of fly paper peppered with the mummified remains of dead insects, I activated my phone’s flashlight and shone it around the gloom. Cupboard doors hung ajar, and drawers gaped from their housings. Paint peeled from the walls, and the cement floor was strewn with the dirt and debris of decades of neglect. Loose wires snaked out from behind the electric stove, where some kind of critter had made its nest in the warming drawer. There were no faucets at the kitchen sink, and the doorknobs and cabinet handles were missing. Maybe the same vandals who’d taken the weathervane had stripped this house of anything valuable.
Broken glass crunched underfoot as I walked around the room, touching items: a bread loaf pan scarred with scratches and rust, a blown can of beans, a few mismatched plates still stacked in a cupboard. I trailed my fingers over a dented kettle on the stovetop and a folding chair that lay on its back in the center of the room, and held a dishrag which crumbled to dust between my fingers.
Nothing.
The back door was locked, but a single hard kick took care of that. I made my way through the overgrown grass and weeds of the backyard, tripping over the skeleton of an old wheelbarrow and flushing a ruffled grouse from its cover. The barn, red with a gray roof, was situated about two hundred yards behind the house. Its board and batten siding walls rose from a stone-walled foundation, and it had the three levels I’d read about: a hayloft accessed by a raised drive at the top, the manure cellar at the bottom, and the main barn in between, where the cows would’ve been kept and milked. Each had its own wide entrance.
I strode up the raised drive and into the hayloft, where light filtered down from the cupola and gaps in the wooden shingle roof. The hayloft was comprised of a circular platform with a large central hole. A thick chain on a pulley dang
led down into this space, ending in a pair of big pincers, which rested on the barn floor underneath. This must’ve been the contraption used to grab and lower bales of hay from the loft to the animals below.
I was tempted to climb down the long ladder that rested against the lip of the loft, but closer inspection showed it to be rickety and missing several rungs. Remembering my promise to Ryan not to put myself in harm’s way, I left the loft and walked around the barn to the entrance at the main level. An iron wheel supported a heavy sliding door, which I was able, with much pushing, pulling, and grunted curses, to open a few inches.
Blinking as my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, I looked around. Cattle stalls were ranged against the south side, with non-opening windowpanes set in the walls above them. The wooden floor, where grain would once have been threshed, was littered with roof shingles, wind-swirled piles of straw, and old tools — a rusted hoe here, a pitchfork there. The air was thick with the smell of dust and mildew, and rustles from the murkier edges of the barn told me that rats and mice had colonized this structure too.
As I walked over to inspect the hay pincers, a sharp crack of splintering wood rent the air, and I plummeted.
– 24 –
My fall through the floor was halted by my chest and the one elbow I’d had time to fling out. Wedged at the waist with one arm pinned to my side and broken floorboards digging painfully into my ribs, I dangled halfway between the barn and the cellar below. My legs cycled uselessly in the open air, seeking purchase and finding none. Why the hell was I always falling through things?
I stopped moving in case the motion precipitated a further plunge and took a moment to catch my breath and think. I was stuck in a half-rotted wooden trapdoor mounted in an iron frame in the barn floor. I’d read about these in my research. They were the holes through which cow manure was swept into the cellar below. I struggled to haul myself out but couldn’t do it with only one arm. Given my feeble upper arm strength, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it with two. Doing my investigating along with others might slow me down, but it was, I admitted to myself as I wriggled like a mouse in a trap, probably safer.
Spitting dust and chaff, I twisted my head around, looking for something I could grab. The hay hook and chain were out of reach, but stretching as far as I could, I managed to lay fingertips on the handle of the hoe. Once I’d edged it close enough to grab, I lifted it into the air and brought it down, trying to hook the chain with the hoe blade. I missed the first time and spent several curse-riddled minutes wresting the hoe blade free from the floor where it had lodged in the wood too shallowly to support my weight. On my second attempt, I swung the hoe a few inches into the loop of chain puddled on the floor then slowly pulled back, dragging the snagged chain along the floor toward me.
“Yes!” I yelled when I could reach it.
Wrapping the chain around my hand and wrist, I dragged myself upward until I could free my other arm and haul myself out of the hole. Sweating, I lay back on the dirty floor for a few moments to catch my breath. I was learning new stuff about being a private investigator all the time, like that I should get in better shape and watch where I put my feet.
I stood up, dusting ineffectually at my clothes and procrastinating at going down into the cellar I’d almost fallen into. I wasn’t exactly claustrophobic or nyctophobic — not diagnosably so, in any event — but I loathed being in small dark places like cellars. Even the basement in my parents’ house, crowded with my mother’s metaphysical junk and my father’s fishing tackle, creeped me out. If I died — again — and was sent to the bad place, it would take the form of a small cellar with no light and no exit.
I lifted the trapdoor frame with its splintered remnants of wood and left it in the upright position so I wouldn’t accidentally fall through it again if I came back here. Grabbing the hoe, with some vague idea of fighting off rats, I walked out and around to the manure cellar. Its entrance — closed — was wide enough to allow a wagon or tractor to back into it and load up manure for the fields. I hesitated a moment, then made myself tug the sliding door open a few inches and go inside. If only I’d accepted Ryan’s offer to come with me. Together, this would’ve been a fun adventure. We would’ve joked about haylofts — maybe even made out in the light, airy one above — and surely he had a proper police-issue flashlight. And a gun. Alone, this part of my investigation was scary and unpleasant.
I directed the beam of my phone’s flashlight around the murky space. The cellar was about nine feet high with a floor of hard packed dirt. The damp air still carried a faint, sour stench of manure. In one section, the stone wall had collapsed inward in a rocky pile, making me worry about the stability of the barn floor above. At any moment, it might collapse on me and leave me trapped, pinned facedown in the dirt by beams and boards and stone. Cause of death: terminal stupidity and pig-headed independence.
Gingerly, I made my way into the darker recesses, where my light picked out a wire cage standing against the far wall, its drop-down side raised in the open position. This must once have housed rabbits or chickens, possibly a dog, though whoever had thought it a good idea to store animals down here surely needed his head examined. I was about to leave when a glint of something on the floor of the cage caught my eye.
Getting down on my haunches, I poked the hoe around in the mulch at the bottom of the cage and unearthed a battered old Christmas cookie tin. Pushing aside a flashback to those stomach-turning teeth in the coffee can, I prized the lid open to discover that this tin contained only a toy car, an ancient half-empty packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum, a matchbox, a candle stub, and a small true-crime magazine with a lurid cover. This must have been where the little boy hid his toys and treats from his grandfather’s sharp eyes. Clever. I pushed myself up and as I leaned on the cage for support, I was felled by a sharp vision.
You know what this means, the man with the furious face shouts at the skinny boy with the dark curls and huge scared eyes.
The boy begs and pleads, promises to be better, to be a good boy. Tears brim in his eyes.
The man points. Go!
Whimpering, the boy crawls into the cage. Crouches in a corner.
And take your useless cat with you. The man grabs a hissing grey cat by the scruff of its neck and hurls it into the cage, then slams down the hatch and padlocks it shut. You can stay there until you learn to control yourself! Control!
The man leaves, and the little boy cuddles the cat, murmuring softly while he strokes its fur, keeping it close for comfort.
Holy hell. Swallowing hard, I stood up, trying to wrap my head around what I’d just seen.
This was yet another awful way the grandfather had punished the boy — by locking him in a freaking cage. And leaving him there for … how long? Long enough and often enough that the poor kid had squirreled away a source of light and something to do while imprisoned like an animal in this dark, dank hole. What kind of monster could do that to a little child? A psychopath, that was who. A stone-cold psychopath with uncontrollable anger and no empathy. The violent man I’d seen in my visions was looking more and more like the Button Man to me. Hadn’t he told his daughter to button her lips? That was basically what the serial killer had done with his victims.
I needed fresh air and light. Rubbing my hands against my jeans as if that could wipe them clean of the painful echo they’d detected, I hurried out of the manure cellar and headed back across the farmyard toward the house. Righteous anger swelled inside me — anger at the man who’d abused the boy and at the mother who hadn’t protected her son. Sure, she must’ve been terrified, too, her self-esteem and self-confidence broken down by abuse throughout her life, but parents were supposed to love and protect their children, no matter what. Life on this little farm had been ugly and miserable. I wondered if anyone in the outside world had ever known the extent of it.
I skirted the house, passing the huge beech tree, the only healthy, solid thing still in this place. Its gray bark, wrinkled and scarred a
s elephant hide, was patchworked with blue and yellow lichen, and above, a canopy of leaves trembled in the breeze. Just beyond the tree, a collapsed trellis lay on the ground, its wooden frame now food for termites and beetles. When I touched it, the dim glimmer of an image flickered behind my eyes: sunburned hands picking a tomato and passing it to a smaller set of hands marked with raised circles of scaly skin. Ringworm.
My visions, both the actual seeing of them plus the emotional weight of what I’d unearthed, had left me dog-tired. I wanted nothing more than to get away from the place, to drive home and console myself with tea and toast and a hot bath, but I sensed that the hardest part still lay ahead. The darkness beyond the beech tree invited me closer. My feet, obeying the increasing pull, stumbled over rocks and clumps of rough grass. Above the background buzz of insects and the wheezing oh-oh of some bird, I could hear the thump of my heart. Somehow, I could hear the darkness too. And feel it. I heard it in my chest, not my ears. I felt it behind my eyes.
The sensations intensified as I drew closer to the structure that sat in the darkness clouding my vision. It was a small brick building only about five feet high, with a rusty tin roof and a low flap door for access. I came to a halt at an invisible border about ten feet away from the hut, fear overtaking curiosity. My mind told me to go on and investigate. My body ordered me to back off and run away. It felt like a strong magnet at the core of that dark place was repelling another inside my gut, yet I felt compelled to go inside.
Taking a deep, uneven breath, I stepped over the line.
– 25 –
Shoulders tense, limbs heavy, feet reluctant — my body protested every step I took nearer to the small brick structure. I hesitated for a moment, listening for any warning Colby might be sending me, but heard only the buzz of insects. Before I could think better of it, I lifted the flap covering the opening, crouched down and crawled inside.