“She was the sweetest girl,” Mrs. Collier kept saying. She had not wanted to talk to me. She had already been quizzed extensively by Granger’s investigators. “Sweet, sweet, sweet. All my friends told me that girls were the worst. That once they were teenagers they became monsters. But not my Helen. She was always so sweet.”
“I’m sure she was,” I said, wishing the woman would come up with a more useful adjective.
“She never went in for those naughty activities some of the other girls did. She didn’t chase after boys. She didn’t stay out late. She didn’t like to party. She preferred to tap-dance.”
“Did you say tap-dance?”
“That was her grand passion. Her idol was Shirley Temple, ever since she was a baby. She could’ve been great, given her chance.”
“Was she taking lessons?”
“Yes. She and her best friend, Amber, went to Miss Claire’s School of Dance on South Fremont. Almost every Friday, they went to the dance recitals held in the basement at Trinity Episcopal.”
“Any nights other than Friday?” I asked, remembering that she was last seen on a Thursday.
“No.”
“Never?”
“Absolutely not. I had a strict policy on bedtime by ten o’clock on all the other nights of the week, but on Fridays I let her stay up till midnight. I checked to make sure she was in bed, safe, every night. And I locked the doors.”
“Could I see her room?”
After a moment of hesitation, she escorted me upstairs.
If I hadn’t known the girl was sixteen, I certainly wouldn’t have gotten it from her living quarters. It was all decked out in pink frillies and lace and flowery dust ruffles and stuff I don’t even know the names for. My parents never went in for this junk. Even at an early age it was clear I wasn’t a Barbie girl. But evidently Helen was.
Or someone thought she was.
“Had this furniture some time?” I asked the mother, who was hovering awkwardly by the door. I figured she’d probably bought it when the girl was five and couldn’t afford to replace it later.
I was wrong. “Actually, we picked this set up last year. They were having a sale at Conway Brothers.”
Hmmm. “You know, I’m probably going to be a while. I like to soak up the atmosphere, get a feel for who your daughter was. You don’t have to wait for me. I’m sure you have many other things to do.”
Couldn’t be any less subtle than that. “Very well.” She was still reluctant, but she retreated. “I’ll be in the kitchen. If you need anything.”
Thank heaven. Behaviorists don’t work well with an audience. I couldn’t get inside Helen’s head with her mother monitoring and censoring me the whole time. Helen’s desk, her closet, and for that matter her entire room, were uncommonly clean. I realize I was not the prototypical teenager, but my room had never looked like this. Had her mother cleaned up before the cops arrived? Or did Mom always keep the joint like this? Was she one of those hausfraus who scurried around telling people to take off their shoes and not touch anything, making it more like a museum than a living environment? How would young Helen react to being raised by a single parent who had that obsessive-compulsive approach to life?
I combed through Helen’s closet, finding nothing of interest. She had a lot of clothes and tons of shoes, but I supposed that wasn’t unusual for girly-girls of her age. All her outfits appeared to be of the sort her mother would approve. Tasteful knee-length tea dresses that kept the body well covered. Pep club uniform. One-piece swimsuits. No Britney Spearsish midriff-revealing outfits. No hip-hugging blue jeans. No cleavage-boosting brassieres or clinging sweaters. No Victoria’s Secret lingerie.
Maybe her idol really was Shirley Temple.
Nah.
I checked the bathroom, too, but I felt certain that if there had ever been anything of interest, Mom would’ve removed it. I not only found nothing useful, I found nothing that suggested this girl had ever hit puberty, unless you counted the box of tampons shoved to the back of the cabinet beneath the sink. No pills, no diaphragm. Not even Clearasil.
I was hoping for a diary, but no such luck. In the bottom desk drawer, however, I found a stack of collage books. Helen was a scrapbooker. But this was not your garden-variety scrapbook. There were no pictures of actors or pop stars, no Eminem or Brad Pitt. Most of the pictures came out of magazines, and all were of people in authority, people in helping professions. Police officers, doctors in white coats, firemen. Wholesome role models.
Was this girl really the Pollyanna her mom thought she was?
Possible. But I still didn’t think so.
On the back page of one of the scrapbooks, I found a Web URL. I jotted it down in my notepad. I was putting them away when something spilled out of one of them, something that had been wedged between the pages.
A torn bus ticket. Now that was interesting. She wouldn’t need to ride the bus to get to Trinity Episcopal.
I didn’t expect to find anything useful under the bed. Wasn’t that the first place parents always looked? That was where I’d kept my pot when I was her age. And God knows I’d gotten caught often enough.
But under Helen’s bed, hidden in a small box wedged between the bottom of the mattress and the wooden slats, I found an outfit of clothes. It was all black. A sheer, tight lacy bodice. An equally tight, short leather skirt. Matching bra and shoes. Fishnet hose. A pair of black Ray-Bans with purple lenses. Something that looked like a white shoe polish brush but which I knew (thanks to Rachel) was actually used to put a temporary streak of color in your hair that washed right out once you were home from your revels. All told, a very exotic, erotic, interesting little outfit.
Granger’s investigators would’ve seen this, too, of course, but they wouldn’t grasp the significance. They’d laugh embarrassedly, or maybe make some off-color joke about the little girl getting some action. Then they’d close the box and put it away and proceed to look for bloodstains or something else they could understand. But to me, this box spoke volumes.
Helen was a closet Goth girl.
Downstairs, I found that one of Helen’s friends had arrived. I knew from a picture wedged into the side of the mirror above Helen’s dresser that this was Amber. She was more distraught than the mother, her cheeks still red, her eyes watery. When I asked if I could have a few words with her, I thought she might faint. But she agreed. That only left the more difficult chore of getting rid of Mom.
“I don’t see what you could possibly have to ask that I couldn’t hear. This is about my daughter, after all.”
“That’s just it,” I tried to explain. “Your presence could… inhibit the discussion.”
“This is still my home, and if you’re going to talk to my daughter’s best friend, whom I’ve known since she was six, you’re going to have-”
“If you won’t cooperate with me, ma’am, I’ll be forced to call some uniforms and take her downtown. Is that what you want?”
She stared at me stonily, lips tightly pursed.
“They’ll come with the siren blazing. They’ll put cuffs on her. She’ll ride in the back of the cop car and be processed and printed and strip-searched before being interrogated.” All of which was total bullshit, but I figured this lady wouldn’t know.
She relented. “Very well. But Amber, dear, listen to me.” She took the girl’s hand, and I got the immediate impression the girl wished she wouldn’t. “You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to tell this woman anything. If at any time you want the questioning to stop, you just call for me. Understand?”
“Yes, Mrs. Collier.”
The woman disappeared herself, leaving us alone. Amber was taller and beefier than Helen had been, with lighter hair and a way of talking that seemed both lazy and smart.
“Kind of controlling, isn’t she?” I said, hoping to break the ice.
Amber shrugged. “I’m used to it.”
“I guess you must be, if you’ve known her since you were six. Were you over he
re a lot?”
“Most times we hung at my house. It’s closer to school, and my dad keeps the pantry well stocked. Over here I was always worried that I might drop a cookie crumb on the carpet and give Mrs. Collier a heart attack.”
I grinned. Mordant Humor R Us. “But you and Helen were tight?”
“Yeah. Best buds.”
“And when the two of you took off on Friday nights, you weren’t going to a church and you weren’t going to any Shirley Temple show either, right?”
Now she became wary. Which I could understand. Why should she trust me? “What makes you think that?”
“My psychic powers. Am I right?”
She didn’t answer.
“I found one of Helen’s bus tickets.”
Still nothing.
“Found Helen’s party suit, too, and I feel certain she wasn’t wearing that getup to any church.”
Amber smiled a little.
“Where’s the Goth scene these days, Amber? Was there a bar you two liked? Maybe something on campus?”
“Nothing like that,” she said quietly.
“Did you go down to the Strip? Pretend to be hookers just to amuse yourselves?”
I was getting warm, but I hadn’t arrived. “We did go to the Strip sometimes.”
“To do what?”
“Whatever. Just hang. Went to shows sometimes.”
“And not tap dancing.”
“Helen was more into heavy metal.”
“But there wasn’t always a concert.”
“Sometimes we’d just walk. Go to the mall at Caesar’s or the Aladdin. See what was happening at the hotels.”
Of course. “The Transylvania. She liked the Transylvania, didn’t she? Where else would a Goth girl go?”
Amber nodded. “She got off on all that creepy stuff. Haunted houses. Horror movies.”
Sure she did. Anything that was the antithesis of her mother. That was her quiet rebellion. “Anyplace else?”
“There was this club near the Transylvania. An Army grunt hangout. Helen was kinda sweet on military types.”
“Do you know where she went the night she disappeared?”
“No. I had to go to Los Angeles with my parents. So I guess she went out without me.”
“Maybe with another friend?”
“Maybe. But I don’t know who it would be.” Her eyes lowered. “I bet she went alone.”
I bet she did, too, damn it. That’s why she’d been so easy to snatch. “Do you have any idea what happened to her?” I asked, but I knew Amber didn’t and I was right.
I left the house excited. I still had a long way to go, but I was definitely making progress. And the bizarre thing was, I wasn’t anxious to get back to HQ and wow O’Bannon. I wasn’t aching to spill the beans to Lisa.
I couldn’t wait to tell Darcy.
I found him more or less where I’d left him, out in front of the house. He was crouched down in the rather bosky garden that lined the north side of the house.
“Do you think Helen wore a size six?” he asked as soon as he saw me. “Because I think maybe she was a size six.”
“No,” I replied. “She was too busty.”
He looked at me, puzzled. I made an explanatory gesture. He blushed, then averted his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Did you know that I was asking about her shoe size?” he muttered, staring at the ground. “I was asking about her shoe size.”
“Oh, geez, sorry.” Pretty adorable really, watching him flush up like a radish over nothing. “Size six, huh?” I remembered the shoes I’d seen in the girl’s closet. “That sounds about right.”
“I think she was a size six,” Darcy repeated, still flapping his hands nervously. “At first I thought maybe her mother was a size six. But I saw her feet when she came to the door and they were like boats.”
I giggled. I thought I was allowed, since my feet were also of the boatish variety. “Why were you wondering about Helen’s shoe size?”
He pulled me into the garden, behind a row of hedges, then crouched down and pointed. Behind the hedge, close to the house itself, there was a faint but discernible impression in the soil. A footprint. The tread looked like some kind of spiked-heel number.
I looked up. We were directly beneath Helen’s bedroom window. There was a drainpipe attached to the wooden siding that could provide some support. Not that much was really required. Her window wasn’t that high off the ground.
Thanks to Darcy, I had a pretty good idea how Helen could walk on the wild side on nights other than Friday. Even if her mother did make sure she was in bed at ten and locked the doors.
“You’ve got a good eye, Darcy. That looks like it could be a size six. Maybe seven.”
“Six.”
“Well, to be sure, we should-”
“It’s six and five-twelfths inches long. That’s a size six.”
I’d been around this wunderkind long enough to know not to argue. “Let’s get some plaster out of my car and make a cast.”
“And after that?”
I grinned. Something about this guy brightened my spirits, just being around him. “I think you’ve earned a custard. Don’t you?”
He grinned excitedly. “Very Excellent Day! Very Excellent Day! Are you going to try the Strawberry Mash?”
“Maybe. What about you? Vanilla Toffee again?”
“I usually have Vanilla Toffee on Wednesdays and Strawberry Mash on Thursdays, unless there’s a new flavor, and then I substitute the new flavor for whichever flavor on my list has the most letters in its name. If there’s a tie, I cross out whichever one comes last in the alphabet, unless the Thursday falls on the last day of the month, ’cause then I reverse the alphabetical order and…”
He was so close. She was the third and final offering, and once he was done with her his work would be complete. He had crossed the Rubicon. The Golden Age would soon be upon them.
“You hurt me,” he said as soon as Lenore opened her eyes.
It was a long while before she could reply. Her eyelids fluttered as she slowly shook off the soporific. She parted her lips, then worked them slowly, soundlessly, as if taking them for a test drive. She tried moving other parts of her body and soon found that she could not.
He watched it all, reading her emotions as they raced through her head. Her first instinct was panic, but she stifled it. Even in this dazed state, she was smart enough to realize a cool head would be required if she was going to save herself. Her next emotion was anger, but that too she managed to sublimate. She thought that he was probably some kind of sexual deviant-how could she know?-and that she was more likely to survive by acting submissive and helpless. And waiting for her opportunity.
It was more than a minute before she actually spoke. “I-I’m sorry. I can see your hand is sore.”
“I don’t mean there,” he said. He placed his injured hand over his heart. “I mean here.”
“I-I-I’m sorry,” she said. She must be tired, lethargic from the drug. But he still sensed that she was playing him, exuding vulnerability until she had enough strength to make a break for it. Poor little offering.
“There was no justification for that sort of behavior,” he said firmly. “You forced me to retaliate in kind. I was not pleased.” He lowered his head. “I abhor violence.”
“I-I guess I just panicked.”
“So you did.”
“Why can’t I move my arms or legs?”
“I’ve given you a little something.”
“Is it… permanent?”
“It will wear off altogether soon, if I don’t give you another dose.”
“I-I’d rather you didn’t.” She was laying it on a bit thick now, he thought, with the stuttering and plangent baby-girl vocalization.
“Then I won’t.”
“Really?”
“I give you my word. No more injections.” He paused. “It won’t be necessary.”
“That’s good. I’m glad you feel tha
t way. Um…” She batted the lashes over those lovely Asian eyes. “Sir? Am I naked?”
“You are. Cap-a-pie. And let me just say-never have I had an easier time removing someone’s clothing.”
“So you’ve… you’ve done this before?”
“Once or twice.” She was testing, exploring. To his surprise he saw that she was already able to move the fingers of her right hand, just a bit. A strong girl, this one was.
“Are you a dentist?”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t have a degree. But I am not without skill.”
“Are-are you going to remove my teeth?”
“No, dear.”
“Are you going to remove… anything?”
He sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid I am. I do regret it. But it’s essential.”
“What… are you going to take?”
“Your head.” He revealed the axe she had discovered in the truck. “I should never have left this lying about. That was inexcusable.”
“Please don’t,” she said. Her voice was tiny, almost invisible.
“I have no choice, my darling.”
“I’ll do anything. Anything you want.”
“That’s most generous of you. But I can’t accept your offer.” He closed his eyes. “ ‘Vainly had I sought to borrow, from my books surcease of sorrow-sorrow for the lost Lenore.’ ”
“Don’t, sir. Please don’t hurt me.”
“ ‘For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.’ ”
“Please. Please!”
He smiled at her. “ ‘Nameless here forevermore.’ ” And then he raised the axe over his head.
12
Got to work without incident, thank God. Took a little more than I should’ve before I brushed my teeth, but it was right there in the open bottle, and I had to be sure I could work without distraction today, without that stifling, panicked feeling, without my temper getting out of control. I mean, it was one thing to be drinking last night. You needed something to get you through all those bizarre Poe stories. But in the morning? I probably shouldn’t have…
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