A state police cruiser and a sheriff’s sedan were parked at hurried angles in front of Felix and Rachel’s place.
He feared what was inside that apartment. Feared what Preacher had done to Rachel.
Sixteen years ago, standing at the feet of his sister’s body, Rath had heard a whine, like that of a wet finger traced on the rim of a crystal glass, piercing his brain. He’d charged upstairs into the bedroom, to the crib. There she’d lain, tiny legs and arms pumping as if she’d been set afire, that shrill escape of air rising from the back of her throat.
Rachel.
In the moment Rath had picked Rachel up, he’d felt a permanent upheaval, like one plate of the earth’s lithosphere slipping beneath another; his selfish past life subducting beneath a selfless future life; a niece transformed into a daughter by acts of violent cruelty.
For months, Rath had kept Rachel’s crib beside his bed and lain sleepless as he’d listened to her every frayed breath at night. He’d panicked when she’d fallen quiet, shaken her lightly to make certain she was alive, been flooded with relief when she’d wriggled. He’d picked her up and cradled her, promised to keep her safe. Thinking, If we just get through this phase, I won’t ever have to worry like this again.
But peril pressed in at the edges of a girl’s life, and worry planted roots in Rath’s heart and bloomed wild and reckless. As Rachel had grown, Rath’s worry had grown, and he’d kept vigilant for the lone man who stood with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets behind the playground fence. In public, he’d gripped Rachel’s hand, his love ferocious and animal. If anyone ever harmed her.
Rath yanked the Scout over a bank of plowed snow onto a spit of dead lawn.
He jumped out, tucked his .22 revolver into the back waistband of his jeans, and ran for the stairs that led up the side of the old house to the attic apartment.
He hoped he wasn’t too late.
5
Dusk leached what pale gray light remained of the winter afternoon. Fog curled.
A trooper and a deputy sheriff stood at the top of the apartment’s stair landing, the trooper’s hands cupped to his eyes as he peered into the apartment door’s window, lit by a light from inside.
Rath bounded up the stairs as his revolver dug into his lower back. The lawmen turned to him, hands going to their sidearms.
“I’m her father!” Rath shouted, winded.
The two men’s hands remained on the butts of their weapons as Rath stood just below the landing. “I called this in,” he said. “Frank Rath.” The deputy’s eyes brightened with recognition and he removed his hand from his sidearm. His coarse mustache was black as shoe polish. The trooper, Rath’s age with an impeccably trimmed ginger goatee flecked with silver, kept his hand on his weapon.
“She’s in there with him,” Rath said, his voice cracking.
“You called this in, sir?” the trooper said. Being a step above Rath, the trooper stood a good foot taller, his position of command undeniable. “No one inside called 911?”
Rath stepped onto the landing, forcing the trooper to take a step back. The trooper recognized Rath now. Preacher’s recent early parole had caused a hum of outrage in regional law enforcement, and the Mandy Wilks and Mad Doctor cases Rath had helped solve had made headlines. Photos of Rath had been part of several stories.
Rath’s revolver jabbed into his lower spine. He needed to keep at an angle so the revolver remained concealed. It was legal, but being armed would escalate the situation.
“If you called, we can’t just break in,” the trooper said. “We need probable for a locked building.”
“You have probable. And you needed to be inside an hour ago.” Rath tried to shoulder between the two men, but the trooper stepped in his way. “I pay the damned rent,” Rath lied. “Break it down. She’s in there with Preacher.”
“Preacher?” the trooper said. “You think he’s in there? Preacher?”
“I know he is. Didn’t Grout tell—”
“Get it,” the trooper said to the deputy.
The deputy hurried down the stairs to pop his cruiser’s trunk, hustled back up with a door ram.
“Stay outside,” the trooper said.
Rath wanted to break the door down and rush in there himself, but he understood his need to stand down, for now.
“Out of the way.” The trooper drew his sidearm as the deputy rammed the door just below its knob, the weakest part of the structure.
The door splintered; the deputy rammed it again.
The door’s lock broke, and the door swung open.
Canaries shrieked.
The trooper charged inside, shouting: “State police!”
The deputy strode in behind the trooper, weapon drawn.
The canaries flapped and fussed as the two cops swept to the kitchen, then down the hallway.
Rath reached for his revolver and stepped into the apartment.
“Police!” the trooper shouted from the back.
Rath looked around. A laptop computer sat open on the scarred pine trunk in front of a flea-market futon. The screen saver faded in and out with photos of Rachel and Felix.
The trooper said from the back, “What the hell.”
Rath grasped his revolver, took a shooter’s stance.
The air grew brittle with the tension of imminent violence.
Rath eyed the crawl-space door set in the wall beside the futon. It was open, a crack. Just enough for someone to see out from inside.
Rath licked his dry lips.
He stepped toward the door, revolver trained on it.
The canaries chittered frantically.
A feather floated in the air.
Rath reached for the crawl-space door.
A voice behind him demanded, “Stop.”
Rath didn’t move, eyes locked on the crawl-space door.
The deputy stepped into Rath’s line of vision, shook his head fiercely, his sidearm drawn but its muzzle aimed at the floor at Rath’s feet.
“Depart the premises.” The deputy wagged his sidearm toward the door. “And holster the firearm. Understand? Don’t make me arrest you.”
Rath eased the .22 down. He could not know if his revolver or something the deputy had witnessed in the back room spurred the deputy’s grave bearing.
“Until you tell me what’s back there,” Rath said, “I’m not moving.” His lower back, along the erecta spinae, ignited with a cauterizing pain he’d thought he’d left in the past.
From the rear of the place, the state trooper appeared. His face was all wrong.
Exasperated.
He holstered his weapon, stared Rath dead. “You sure your daughter was here?”
Rath raised an eyebrow at the crawl-space door, to indicate the door was open a crack.
“The place is cleared,” the trooper said as he nodded to Rath that he understood, trained his weapon at the crawl-space door. He nodded to the deputy, counted three on his fingers.
The deputy threw open the door and swung his weapon on it. He peered inside the space.
“Shit.” He turned to Rath. “Nothing. Boxes.”
“I heard the birds,” Rath said. He needed to get out of there. But to where? He took his phone out and tried Rachel’s cell. Voice mail. “Call me,” he pleaded, “now. Please.”
“Birds?” the trooper said.
Rath waved a hand at the caged canaries. “When Preacher called, I heard those goddamned things.”
“What is this about, sir?” the deputy asked.
Rath apprised them of Preacher’s call, leaving out Preacher’s sickening lie about Rachel.
“Didn’t Grout tell you?” Rath said.
“Dispatch just said a break-in was in process. Grout couldn’t reach me. But there was no evidence of such when we showed. You sure it was those birds?” the trooper said.
When Preacher had implied he was watching Rachel, intimated he would hurt her with his ugly lie, Rath had heard birds. He’d assumed they were Felix’s canaries.
Who wouldn’t have? Maybe he’d been right, Rachel and Preacher had been here, except Rath was too late.
“Sir?” the trooper said. “You sure you heard these birds?”
“No,” Rath said. “But—”
The trooper gazed at the apartment’s ruined door, his concern now clearly whether he’d get his ass chewed for busting down a door he had no legal right to bust down.
Rath’s cell phone rang, startling the canaries into discordant birdsong.
PRIVATE.
Preacher’s ID.
Rath stared at it, his muscles locked with the grim certainty of whose cold voice would greet him.
“Answer that, sir,” the trooper said.
PRIVATE.
“Answer it.”
The phone would kick to voice mail in another ring.
“Answer it. Or I will.”
Rath answered.
6
From the other side of the birdcage, the man appeared again.
He’d disappeared so quickly earlier that Rachel had begun to believe she’d imagined him, the threat of him. Now, he stared at Rachel, just long enough to lock eyes for half a heartbeat, only his eyes visible to her, his face obscured by the bars of the birdcage.
He turned away, as if satisfied his message had been received. But what message? Who was he?
“What do you want?” Rachel said, her voice too loud, a cry.
Birds squawked, a dog barked.
The pet shop patrons gawked at Rachel: the girl who cried out.
“What is it?” Felix took her icy hand in his warm one.
“Nothing.” She tried to swallow. Couldn’t. Her throat dry as bone dust.
“Nothing? You’re shouting and shaking. Your hand is freezing. Are you sick?”
“No.” She’d be damned if she’d let Felix know some guy glimpsing her for a blink had traumatized her. She didn’t need him thinking she’d gone berserk. She’d been distraught enough since learning just days ago that her birth parents had been murdered when she was a baby, that they had not been killed in a car wreck as her adoptive father had told her years ago. She was still freaked out. Who wouldn’t be? But she didn’t need Felix to think she believed every creep who eyed her was going to kill her. Even if she did feel that way now, about this man.
Truth was, since learning of her parents’ murders she’d felt altered. Alien. And angry. Infuriated. Not at the truth of her parents’ deaths so much as how she’d heard it—from a stranger, a weirdo girl with purple hair at a Family Matters meeting for young women trying to decide what to do about their unplanned pregnancies. Rachel hadn’t been pregnant, thank God. She’d gone to figure out if a predator was using the meetings to select victims. Since she was a little girl she’d helped her father with his mundane private investigation cases, and recently she’d had a fixation with deviant violent criminals and serial killers; so when her father had told her a dead girl might be linked to the meetings, Rachel had investigated, despite her father insisting otherwise. Purple Hair had mentioned Rachel’s parents’ murder in passing, assuming Rachel had known. Shaken, Rachel had holed up in a motel and googled the murders on her phone. She’d not found much, the crimes old. But she’d read a headline and enough to know it was true. Enough to know she did not want to know any more about it.
What galled her was that her dad had thought she was too weak to hear the truth. What bunk. He’d raised her to be, if not tough, then resilient. If she were a boy, he probably would have had a “man-to-man” when she was thirteen. It maddened her. And wounded her, too, that he believed she had so little brass.
And now? If she told Felix some freak staring at her in a pet shop with other people around skeeved her out, she’d look even weaker. She wouldn’t stand for it.
Besides, the man was gone again now.
Vanished.
Where was he?
Felix was speaking, his voice white noise. Rachel pushed past a boy tapping a finger on an aquarium to taunt a tarantula and came to the other side of the birdcages. The man was gone, and Rachel was left with a need to ask him just what the fuck he meant with his leer. Her heart pumped hard. She felt like her old self for a second. Defiant. Able. She felt like her dad’s daughter.
She spun in a circle to try to locate the man, knocking Tarantula Boy. The boy shrieked.
Again, all eyes on Rachel.
Mortified, she slunk out of the store, Felix trailing.
Outside, the dying sun had broken through rain clouds, its reflection mirroring off the dark, wet street, shimmering in the fog and backlighting the rain so it streaked down as flashes of liquid silver.
She did not see the man.
“What’s going on?” Felix said.
“Nothing.” In the few months she’d known Felix, Rachel had never lied to him, not even about nonsense, and questioned why she lied now and in the store to hide her fear. Who cared if she was afraid? It felt ridiculous now anyway, her fear, out here in the open air.
That feeling died quickly.
As she and Felix entered the Lovin’ Cup coffee shop next door, Rachel felt the stranger’s eyes on her again, her face warming, the sensation of that grimy fingertip snaking down her spine again, down and down and down as she sneaked a look back over her shoulder, afraid of what she might see; afraid more to see nothing to explain her terror.
7
As she and Felix sat on a bench under the Lovin’ Cup’s awning, Rachel turned on her phone to find messages from her father, each more urgent than the last.
Back in September, when she’d come here to attend Johnson State, she’d often put off returning her father’s calls, even when she’d missed him; especially when she’d missed him. She’d wanted to prove to herself she could be on her own. All she’d proven was she could choke back her homesickness and wound her father with unnecessary worry. In not getting back to him she’d denied herself and her father a chance to share in her transition, and she had come to regret it.
Now she wanted to hear her father’s voice as much as he apparently wanted to hear hers, perhaps more.
“Hey,” Felix said.
Rachel pressed her fingertips to Felix’s lips.
Her father picked up first ring.
“Where are you?” His voice was all wrong, aggrieved.
“School. Well. In town.”
Water dripped from the awning above Rachel.
Felix got up and stood at the edge of the sidewalk.
“Get home,” her father said.
“I can’t, I have my evening English Lit in an hour. My Civic’s dead. And—”
“Not home home. Your apartment. Get over here now. Meet me here.”
His severe manner scared her. She’d had enough of fear. “What are you doing there?” she said.
Felix was looking across the street.
“Get here as soon as you can,” Rachel’s father stressed.
Water dripped from the awning, spattered the toe of her boot. It was tinged red, like thinned blood.
Felix crossed the street and looked back at her, though Rachel could not make out the look on his face. The rain and fog, and the strange glow of the wet pavement cast that entire side of the street in a silvery halo.
“Fast as you can,” her father said.
“OK. Hang up. Everything’s OK.”
“Right.”
Felix stared at her. No. Not at her. At the awning?
The bloodred water dripped.
What the hell was going on?
Rachel stepped out onto the curb and shielded her eyes against the rain and the disappearing sun to look up at the awning. What was Felix staring at? She saw nothing, except the red water, trickling from rusted nails’ heads in the tin roofing.
She suddenly felt a presence behind her, at her neck. Heard breathing. Too close.
She spun around.
Felix.
“Damn it. What are you doing sneaking up on me,” Rachel said.
“I wasn’t sneaking. You were spacing.”
“We gotta go see my dad. He’s at our place. Why are you acting so sketchy?” Rachel said.
“Trying to figure out what that guy was looking at.”
“What guy?” Rachel’s pulse fluttered at her temple.
Felix pointed across the street. “Some guy was over there. I tried to tell you, but you shut me up. I swore he was looking at you. Like. Weird.”
“What did he look like?”
“Hard to tell. And he had his hood pulled up over his head. But he just stood there. I don’t know how to describe it. I went over to see what was up, but he was gone. I looked to see what else he might have been staring at.” He tipped his chin up toward the balcony a story above the awning, where patrons of the Lovin’ Cup sat in warm weather. There was no one there. “I thought maybe someone was up there.” Felix frowned. “No one was.”
“We need to see my dad,” Rachel said. “Something weird is going on.”
Water dripped from the awning into Rachel’s pixie cut she’d bleached platinum for kicks, and now wished she hadn’t. Her sprouting roots looked moronic; soon she’d sport a reverse skunk stripe for her middle part. She wiped at the water on her cheek. Rubbed it between her fingers.
In the fast-falling dark, she’d have bet her life it was blood.
8
Rath spotted the pale glow of the cell-phone flashlights in the fog as Rachel and Felix hiked up the dark road toward him. He wanted to run to Rachel, but feared he would alarm her more than he already had. Alarm was fine—it sharpened focus—panic was not. Whatever came next would require cool heads.
Rath’s phone rang. Harland Grout. Grout had been the one to call Rath earlier in the apartment, his mall work number showing private. He’d asked how things went. Rath had berated him for not reaching the deputy personally to give the specifics about Preacher, and told him to call back. Rath let this new call go to voice mail.
A car crept up the hill behind Felix and Rachel, headlight beams swimming in the fog, illuminating the couple’s silhouettes as Felix helped Rachel over the slags of plowed snow on the roadside, got her safely up against a scrub of alders to make room for the car.
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