by Donna Ball
After a moment, in which he seemed to assess both Carol and Guy, the man accepted Guy's handshake. “Henry Little.”
Carol said, “Mr. Little, Mrs. Little...” She looked at the woman sympathetically. “I know this is difficult. It's not easy for us, either, to intrude on your grief like this. Please accept my sympathy on the loss of your daughter.”
The wife averted her face, and it was a moment before Henry Little said quietly, “Life goes on. It doesn't feel like living sometimes, but ... life does go on.” Then, with an abrupt change of tone, he gestured with his glass and said, “Can I offer you a drink?”
Guy said, “No, thank you. This isn't really a social occasion and we won't stay long.”
Little nodded curtly. “After I talked to you yesterday, I started thinking this was a mistake. There's nothing we can do to help you and talking about it is only going to cause us both to relive things we're trying to put behind us.”
“You never put it behind you,” said his wife, softly and unexpectedly. “Never.”
Then she turned to them and gestured to the yellow silk sofa. “Will you sit down?”
“Thank you.” Carol sat at the end of the sofa next to a marble-topped table that held several photographs. They were all of the same girl. She glanced at the wife for permission, then picked up one of the framed photographs. “Is this Tanya?”
“Yes. It was taken—right before she disappeared.”
Carol showed the photograph to Guy. A pretty smile, shoulder-length dark hair. Green eyes. Carol felt her chest constrict, and she saw Guy's jaw tighten with a reflection of her emotion. Carol whispered, “I am so sorry.” Her hand was a little unsteady as she replaced the photograph.
Mrs. Little sank down onto a hassock opposite them and said anxiously, “You said—someone has been calling you, using our daughter's name ... that's obscene! Why would anyone do that? Why can't they just let her rest in peace?”
“We were hoping you could help us understand that,” said Carol. “Our daughter—has been missing for over two years. A couple of weeks ago, I started getting calls from her, or someone who said she was her, crying and asking for help. Then the calls stopped and someone who gave her name as Tanya Little called and said she and Kelly were being held together against their will and that Kelly couldn't call me anymore. That was the day before yesterday. Then, of course, we found out that Tanya Little was ... had been...”
When she faltered, Henry Little supplied harshly, “Killed, Mrs. Dennison. That’s what she was. Murdered. Whoever called you was obviously aware of that fact and was playing some kind of twisted joke.”
Guy said quietly, “We think there's a possibility it may be the same person who's responsible for your daughter's death. He was never apprehended, is that right?”
Henry Little said, “She had been gone so long, and she wasn't killed at the scene ... there was just no evidence. The case is still open.”
Sandra Little's lips tightened. “We haven't given up hope. Someday that monster will be brought to justice. If you think you can help in any way...”
Carol said to the other woman, “Is there any chance at all that Kelly could have known Tanya?”
Sandra Little frowned, obviously not following her train of thinking. “You live in St. Theresa-by- the-Sea, is that right? I thought it was odd when Henry told me. You see, Tanya was working there that summer before she disappeared. But that was three years ago, and she was eighteen. I think it unlikely that she could have known your daughter.”
“Where?” Guy said. “Where did she work?”
“A little shop on the strip. Blue Dolphin, it was called.”
Guy glanced at Carol inquiringly and she shook her head, indicating she didn't recognize the name either.
Carol tried a different approach. “You said your daughter had been gone so long ... I don't understand. Where did she go?”
Mrs. Little dropped her gaze. “We don't know. She left a note one day, said she was leaving home. She was eighteen, we couldn't do much to stop her ... and to tell the truth, she was a rather difficult child and we thought—”
“I thought,” interrupted Henry Little harshly. “I thought a taste of the real world would do her good.”
The silence that fell was sharp with the guilt with which he had lived since that day—just as Carol and Guy had lived with their own guilt from the moment of Kelly's disappearance.
In a moment Sandra Little picked up the story. “After she left, we figured she was moving in with friends there, or someone she had met at work, but it turned out she quit her job the day before she left home. A week or so later, we got a letter from her, postmarked Tallahassee, saying she was on her way to Hollywood to become an actress. It was crazy.” Her voice rose in indignation. “The last thing Tanya would do would be to go to Hollywood. She didn't even watch movies!”
Carol felt a chill go down her spine, and it was momentarily hard to breathe. Guy's hand covered hers on the sofa. It was the only spot of living warmth in a very, very cold world.
With his other hand, Guy reached into his pocket and pulled out the thong necklace. His voice sounded odd when he spoke. “Mrs. Little,” he said, holding it out to her, “have you ever seen this before?”
She caught her breath sharply, and Carol could see the color drain from her face as she reached for the necklace. “My God,” she whispered, “it's Tanya's!” She snatched the necklace from Guy's fingers and clutched it to her chest, her eyes big and dark and wild with pain and accusation. “Where did you get this?” she cried. “Where did you?
~
Chapter Thirty-one
Laura was getting ready to close the office when the phone rang. Tammy had already gone home, so she picked it up in her office. “Beachside,” she said.
A hesitation, then, “Mama, is that you?”
“Sorry, honey, you've got the wrong—” And then something made Laura stop. Slowly, she sank to the desk chair, gripping the side of the desk with her fingers. “Kelly?” she said uncertainly, “is that you?”
“You can come get me now,” said the voice. It was a young girl's voice, husky and breathy, but the tone was oddly flat as though she were reading a script. “You can come get me, but you have to come now. Can you do that?”
“Honey, where are you?” Laura's heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear herself speak. “Yes, I'll come, but you've got to tell me where you are.”
“Lighthouse Point, at the end of the beach, beyond the rocks. There's an old construction shack there.”
“Yes,” Laura said breathlessly, “I know it.”
“But you've got to come now. Can you come now?”
“I'm on my way, honey, right now.”
And suddenly the girl cried, in a much different, more urgent tone, “The tower! It's the—”
And the call disconnected.
Laura spent less than three seconds listening to the dead line, then she grabbed her keys and ran from the office.
***
After looking over the copies of the newspaper reports on Tanya Little that Guy Dennison had left the night before, Derrick Long spent an hour and a half on the phone with the Gulf County police, who had been in charge up to the point the body was found, and the state police, who had taken over then.
Though the body, like that of Mickie Anderson, had been subjected to predators and natural deterioration before it was found, several things had been determined on autopsy.
The girl had been subjected to torture with a knife. Finger tips and toes had been sliced away and there were cuts on her breasts, thighs, and genitalia.
She had been strangled to death with a narrow leather cord.
She had been killed elsewhere and the body dumped in the cypress swamp. She had been dead less than a week when she was found.
A positive i.d., both visual and dental, had been made. There was no possible way that Tanya Little could have called Carol Dennison two days ago. She had been dead for two years.
There were far too many similarities here between the death of Mickie Anderson two days ago and Tanya Little two years ago; chilling similarities that all seemed to revolve, somehow, around Kelly Dennison.
It wasn't until he received the case file, which was faxed to him as a simple courtesy from the Gulf County Sheriff's Department, that the most disturbing similarity of all arose. He might not have noticed it right away, if at all, had he not had an opportunity to read Kelly Dennison's file in the past few days.
But just to make sure, he pulled Dennison's file and placed the two photocopied sheets of paper side by side. Kelly's note read: “I am fine. I'm going to Hollywood…”
***
“... so you won't hear from me for a while. I have money. Watch for me in the movies. Love, Tanya.”
Carol looked up from the sheet of lined paper in her hand with a stunned, pinched expression around her eyes and mouth. Yet her hand was steady and her voice calm, as she passed the paper to Guy. “The note we got from Kelly, a little over a week after she disappeared, was worded exactly like this. Exactly.”
Henry Little stepped forward and snatched the paper from Guy. “That's absurd. The state police investigated this case thoroughly. They would have known if...” And he trailed off, his skin a sickly color, his eyes filled with confusion and disbelief. “Are you suggesting that the two girls were in collusion?”
Carol glanced at Guy, as though for reassurance against her own rising tide of helplessness and confusion. But he had none to offer.
He said quietly, “You should know that another girl disappeared from St. T. this week. She was found murdered and—tortured—in the same way that your daughter was.”
Little frowned. “We've been seeing it on television. You surely can't be thinking there's a connection.”
“Before she disappeared, she claimed to have met a man in town who was going to put her in a movie, or a commercial or something. The Hollywood filmmaking connection seems pretty strong. It could be the line he uses to lure girls to come with him.”
Sandra Little reached behind her until she felt the support of the arm of a chair, then sat, slowly and gracefully, with stiff back and legs, and folded her hands in her lap. Her expression was locked into composure, frozen.
Carol said hesitantly, “Your daughter was very pretty. So was Kelly, and this—the Anderson girl. They all looked kind of alike, actually. Long dark hair and ... well, girls that age are naturally vain. Even sensible girls can be moved by flattery, tantalized by the possibility of fame…”
Sandra Little nodded slowly.
Henry Little said sharply, “So now you're telling me that the same man who tortured and murdered my daughter two years ago also took your daughter, and this girl who washed up on the beach, and made them all write the same note to their parents—”
“Except for Mickie Anderson,” interrupted Guy. “For some reason, he didn't keep her long enough...” The sentence sounded horrible even unfinished, and he let it hang. In a moment, he said simply, “I don't know. I honestly don't know. It's just—a lot of coincidence.”
“You seem to be an educated man, Mr. Dennison,” said Little sharply. “You should know there's no such thing as coincidence.”
“No,” said Sandra Little softly. She raised her head slowly to look at them, eyes dark and pained, and she said, “There isn't. And what Mr. Dennison is trying to tell us is that this—monster—who took our Tanya, and their child, and who murdered that girl they found on the beach ... that he may have done it before, many times. And that he's there, in St. Theresa County, walking around free, looking for his next victim. That's what he's telling us.” And she looked at Guy. “Isn't it?”
The silence before he answered seemed to go on forever. But Guy didn't flinch, or evade her gaze. In the end, he replied simply, “Yes.”
~
Chapter Thirty-two
Lighthouse Point was the finger-shaped strip of land that had been left jutting out into the ocean when the channel was cut. It was so named because it was here that, if one stood at the end of the jetty, the optical illusion was such that the lighthouse, an easy mile away, looked close enough to swim to. The road ended some five hundred yards away from the Point; there was a narrow dirt-and-gravel turnaround where one could leave one's car and follow the sand path through thorny vines and sandspurs to the rock jetty, but few bothered. The fishing was better on the other side of the Point, and the lighthouse could, after all, be seen from almost anywhere on the beach.
Twilight was falling when Laura got out of her car, and she started thinking of a dozen reasons why she shouldn't have come. She knew she was acting foolish, crazy, she should have at least tried to call the police. But the one reason she should have come—what if it was Kelly?—kept her trudging on down the path, tripping over vines and snagging her clothing on shrubbery, clambering over the spill of granite boulders that reinforced the jetty, stumbling through the undergrowth on the other side.
Sea grasses grew tall around the construction shack, which looked empty and, not surprisingly, somewhat sinister. The sound of the surf crashing against the rocks was loud, and that made her nervous. She started toward the shack, calling loudly, “Kelly?”
She thought about Carol's theory, that Kelly was being held against her will somewhere. Could it be here? No one could hear her scream above the sound of the surf, even if anyone ever did come here, which no one did. But how could she be here? There was no telephone here and she had called....
Laura slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the reassuring weight of her keys, threading her fingers through them tightly. She pushed open the sagging door of the shack. “Kelly?”
The interior was dark and humid, smelling of sea rot and neglect. There were shadowed shapes in the far corner, boxes of rusted and forgotten equipment, but the interior was too dark for Laura to make out much of anything else. She took one careful step inside, worried about snakes and spiders and now all but convinced the place was empty. “Kelly?” she called again, but with less hope this time.
The movement came from behind her so swiftly she didn't sense it coming until it was all over. Something caught around her neck and jerked hard, digging into her skin. She gave a choked cry and, in her confusion, thought she had walked into something—a rope or a length of fishing line—that was tangled around her throat. Instinctively, she stepped back, trying to wrench away even as she brought her hands up to free the cord, and that was when she felt the human body pressing against hers, felt the hands tightening the cord around her neck. All this was no more than a few seconds.
She tried again to scream, but the sound came out as a choked gurgle and lights exploded behind her eyes, there was a rushing sound in her ears. Blindly, she swung her hand up and back, raking down with the keys that were gripped like brass knuckles between her fingers, and her blow met flesh.
She heard something, perhaps a cry of pain; the pressure on her throat gave way as she jerked the cord free and whirled toward the door.
“You're not Carol!”
That was what she heard him say, but she was moving. He grabbed at her hair but caught only a handful of strands. She screamed with the fury of renewed effort as she jerked free and didn't even feel the pain. He had her shoulder by the shirt, but she was almost at the door. She kicked backward, and struck out with the keys and he ducked his head and she had a glimpse of a face, hideously distorted and twisted in on itself, a monster face from a nightmare, a face that would cause her to wake up gasping and sweating in the middle of the night for years to come. And then, with a mighty wrench, the material of her shirt gave way and she was through the door, running, free, sobbing and gasping and running.
She fell once on the thorny path, but didn't look back. She crossed the rocks by sliding on their slippery surface. She was sure he was behind her, she could almost hear him breathing, and when her shoe got caught in a crevice, she tore it off and left it there. She saw her car and only then did she dare to look back. She w
as alone.
She flung herself into the car and locked all the doors and for a moment, she couldn't do anything except rest her head on the steering wheel, shaking, gasping, trying not to lose consciousness. Then she became aware of the keys in her hand, and of smears of blood on the tips of two of them. His blood. In her other hand, she still clutched the cord with which he had tried to strangle her.
She fumbled until she got the correct key in the ignition. She started the engine and slammed the car in gear, spinning the wheels wildly as she turned away and drove off with a spray of gravel. She did not look back.
~
Chapter Thirty-three
“I always felt real bad about Kelly,” John Case said. His tone was quiet and reflective, his pose that of a man who was thinking out loud. “I've known Guy Dennison for fifteen years, we go fishing together, and though I can't say we haven't had our disagreements about what he prints in the paper, I've always known him to be a fair man. A good man. His family, too. That kid, she was bright as a new penny. You could tell just by looking at her she had a future. Then it all started to come apart and I felt bad, real bad. But hell, it's not an unusual story, especially these days. The family breaks up, the kid gets in trouble, ends in tragedy.
“The trouble with this job, especially in a little place like this where you know everybody, is that you start to feel like your neighbor's keeper. You're more of a caretaker than a law officer and I don't know, maybe that's the way it should be. So when Kelly Dennison ran off, I felt responsible somehow, like it was my job, with her daddy living in the capital, to keep a better eye on her and I'd let them all down. I remember thinking, after we interviewed everybody we could interview and nobody had seen her, and when the days went by and she didn't show up, I remember thinking, please, Jesus, don't let anything have happened to that girl, not on my watch. That's what I was thinking. Not on my watch.
“So when her mother got that note saying she was running off to California, I was relieved. Too relieved. Case closed. It was bad, but it wasn't tragic. I could live with that. Maybe if I hadn't been so eager to live with it, maybe if I hadn't been so quick to grab the first out... But that was what he was counting on. That we'd all believe what we wanted to believe in the first place if he just gave us a little push in that direction.”