by P J Parrish
It was the house. That much he was sure of. A red brick place with a steep-pitched roof and two gargantuan evergreens guarding the front door.
It was the evergreens that he recognized. He remembered going up the snow-covered walk and how they blotted out the sun as he went between them.
Things were coming back to him now, things he had thought long lost in the shadows of his boy-brain. The long bus ride from Mississippi sitting next to a strange woman. Now he knew she was from social services, but then she had been just a fat white woman who smelled of the tuna sandwiches she ate.
Another woman’s face swam into his head. Black, thin. A distant aunt . . . the person the white woman left him with. He remembered that tired black face and all the kids in her house and how she yelled at them. And how she took him by the shoulders and told him she didn’t have enough for him, too.
Then . . .
Just a blur of houses. Three, four? Other houses and other faces who didn’t have enough. That’s when he started to run away. They kept finding him and bringing him to other houses.
Until they brought him to Strathmoor.
The memories from this house had always swirled thick and black in his boy-brain and chased him into adulthood. But until this moment, he had never known they were real.
Louis stared at the red brick house. A car came ambling down the street toward him. The deep thudthucka-thud of music grew, pounding in his ears as the car drew abreast. The car passed, the fading music a dirge for a dying neighborhood.
Louis put the car in gear and drove away.
CHAPTER 36
Shells of burned buildings and evergreens that hid the sun followed him into his dreams that night. And when the sun falling on his face woke him, for a moment he didn’t know where he was.
He dressed quickly in the quiet house and went downstairs. There was a note from Phillip on the kitchen table saying he had gone out and not to expect him back for dinner. He had left a fresh pot of coffee.
The sun was bright in a cloudless sky, and he had to wear sunglasses to see as he drove back to Hidden Lake. He pulled off to the side of the road as he drew near so the troopers at the gate wouldn’t hassle him.
He cracked the window for some fresh air and, for a few minutes, he sat watching the two uniforms move in and around the entrance.
Yesterday, after he returned from Detroit, he called Detective Bloom and arranged to meet him here. His intent was to offer up Buddy Ives as a suspect. He knew he should have turned over all four names right after Zeke was killed. But he had been trying to protect Dr. Seraphin.
There was no way he could do that now unless he took the fall himself. And he had decided that was exactly what he would do: tell Bloom that he alone had found the names in the E Building files. Dr. Seraphin had a lot to lose. All he would get was slap on the wrist and a trip out of state again.
Louis got out of the Impala and was halfway to the security booth when one of the troopers spotted him and started over.
“Took you long enough,” the trooper said.
“What?”
“We called an hour ago,” the trooper said. “That crazy guy is back again.”
“Who?” Louis asked.
“Charlie, the Fairy Queen.”
“He’s inside?”
“Yeah,” the trooper said. “This is the third time in two days we caught him here. First time we ran him off. He was back three hours later. Second time, we turned him over to Chief Dalum. But he’s back again.”
Louis suppressed a sigh. “Where is he?”
“Sitting on the steps of the admin building. He’s fucking up the surveillance, man. He ever shows up at night, somebody’s going to shoot him.”
“Can I go in and get him?”
“Yeah. The guys inside have just let him sit there so they don’t blow their cover. I’ll radio them you’re coming in.”
“Thanks.” Louis started back toward his car, then turned. “Hey, I’m supposed to meet Detective Bloom here. If he shows up, tell him I’ll be back.”
“Will do.”
Louis eased the Impala through the gates and to the front of the administration building. The place looked deserted, the ground a rolling ocean of white. Louis’s eyes flicked up to the dark windows and he wondered how many cops were up there, wondered if there were rifles trained on him right now.
He saw Charlie huddled on the top step. Charlie saw him, too, but he didn’t move. Louis had to park and get out, again feeling a dozen eyes on his back.
Louis stopped at the bottom of the steps. “We need to go home, Charlie,” he said.
“This is my home.”
“Not anymore. Don’t you live with Miss Alice now?”
“I can’t. I can’t leave until the apple babies come.”
“You can leave. You have a new home. C’mon, I’ll take you back to Alice’s house.”
“Not until the apple babies come.”
Louis looked around the grounds, then back at Charlie. He remembered something Dr. Seraphin had said at her lake house the other night, that madness should be viewed from the inside. He had tried reading the book she had given him, but it was dense going. The only thing he had gotten out of Laing’s ideas was the notion that you could “converse” with the insane by trying to enter their world empathetically.
“Charlie, I got an idea,” Louis said. “We’ll go buy all the apple babies you want. Where do we get them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s go look.”
Charlie’s head came up quickly. “Do you know where they are now?”
“I bet we can find them.”
Charlie stood up, pulling at the dangling wool straps of his multicolored hat. Once in the Impala, Charlie was quiet, sitting on the edge of the seat, eyes focused forward, hands on the dash.
Louis pulled out onto the highway and gave the trooper a final wave. Bloom’s car was nowhere in sight.
“Do you have music?” Charlie asked.
Louis turned on the radio. It was tuned to a rock-and-roll station, and Charlie just stared at the dials, his head tilted toward the speaker. It was something by UB40, “Red, Red Wine.” An easy song with repetitious lyrics and he could tell Charlie recognized it. He even started singing softly.
“You know that song?” Louis asked.
“Yeah.”
Louis let him sing, glad his mind was off the apple babies. But then the song ended and “Candle in the Wind” came on. Charlie didn’t seem to know that one.
“Do you have those things with music on them?”
“Tapes? I don’t know. Look in the glove box.”
Charlie opened the glove box and took out the two cassette tapes Phil kept in there. Louis had no idea what was on them; then it occurred to him Charlie might not be able to read anyway.
“What song are you looking for, Charlie?”
“Emma got to come feed ya.”
“What?”
Charlie was staring at the tapes, and he started to sing again. It was low and slow and he was jerking his shoulders up and down to the staccato beat in his head.
“Boomp, boomp, boompa pa boomp . . . boom . . . boom . . . boom.”
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida?” Louis asked.
“Emmagottacomefeedthebaby,” Charlie sang. “Donchaknow that I love you? Donchaknow that I’m blue?”
Louis laughed.
“That’s an old song. How did you ever learn that?”
“I was born with it in my head.”
“Born with it?”
“Just like the lights. Emma got to come feed the baby . . . Emma got to come feed the baby.”
Louis knew this was no memory of Hidden Lake. And he couldn’t help but take it a few steps further, suddenly seeing Charlie as a toddler, wandering through some psychedelic blacklight apartment, breathing in marijuana or eating pills from the top of a coffee table while his parents were passed out somewhere.
“Do you know Emma got to come feed me?” Charlie aske
d.
“Yeah.”
Charlie started singing again, and in between verses, he looked back at Louis. “If you know it, then sing it.”
“I don’t sing, Charlie.”
“Why not? And woncha sing with me and be my band . . .”
Charlie was into his music now, his whole body swaying back and forth as his voice grew deeper and hoarser, like he was trying to imitate something or someone he had seen, and suddenly he didn’t sound like the same man.
Louis glanced at him, then sang part of a line, and Charlie looked at him, grinning. And they continued to sing for another mile, the car filled with twisted lyrics and sour notes.
“Stop!” Charlie yelled suddenly.
Louis hit the brakes and the Impala slid, then caught on the asphalt, coming to a jerky stop. Charlie was out of the car in a second, running back along the road. Louis caught up with him in a snowy driveway at a wide, metal gate.
Charlie pushed on the gate, and when it wouldn’t give, he started to climb over it. Louis pulled him back down.
“Charlie,” he said, “what’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
“This is where the apple babies are!” Charlie shouted. “This is where they come from.”
There was a wood sign stuck on the ground: SHADY TRAIL APPLE ORCHARD & CIDER MILL. CLOSED DECEMBER- JUNE.
Louis wasn’t sure what the hell to do. But something in his gut told him to just keep going, just ask questions.
“Charlie,” Louis said, “what are apple babies?”
Charlie was standing knee-deep in a snowdrift. “They’re apple babies and they bring them to the hospital! They bring them in baskets.”
“Can I make them?”
Charlie looked at him, confused. “What?”
“Are they dolls or something? Can I make them?”
“No, no. Only the ladies can make them.”
“I can cook,” Louis said.
“They’re not cooked, Mr. Kincaid,” Charlie said. “They grow.”
“On trees?”
Charlie hung his head and moved away from him slowly, like he was giving up.
It hit Louis how weird it was that Charlie was the one getting frustrated with his inability to understand. Louis came closer, making an effort to keep his voice normal. “Charlie, what do the apple babies look like?”
Charlie’s hands were curled around the gate, the tips of his fingers red. “I’ve never seen one.”
“But you saw the baskets?”
Charlie nodded. “The baskets come in trucks.”
“Like an apple truck?”
“Yes. It has apples on it.”
“Do you eat the apple babies?”
“No. That would hurt.”
“Hurt who?”
“The apple babies.”
Charlie’s face was raw, his eyes teary, and all the laughter that had been in him during the song was gone. It was freezing out here, the wind a brisk wash across the open farmland, and Louis knew he should take Charlie back to the car. But he didn’t want anything to distract him. Not yet.
“Charlie, are the apple babies real?” Louis asked.
Charlie looked at him. “Real? Of course they are real. They’re changeling babies. But they’re not sick. They get taken away because they’re perfect. The sick ones are left so the perfect ones can go away.”
Louis studied him, trying to remember everything he had said about apple babies and the Shakespeare book and the baskets. “Is that why you came here, because you were sick?”
“Yes.”
“And when you came, an apple baby was taken away?”
“I was a changeling child. I told you that.”
Louis touched his arm, and Charlie turned to look at him.
“Charlie, how do you know there was a baby in the apple basket?”
“I heard it cry.”
“Like you heard the graves cry?” Louis asked.
“Babies don’t cry at the graves. Only girls.”
Louis ran a hand over his face, sniffing from the cold. Charlie seemed unfazed, his gaze moving back to the bare trees.
“Charlie,” Louis said, “will you come to the cemetery with me? Will you show me exactly where you hear them?”
“Okay.”
Louis took his arm and led him back to the Impala. Charlie glanced back at the orchard as they climbed inside, but he seemed calm now, almost as if he couldn’t remember why they were here. The two-lane highway was empty, and Louis pulled away from the snowy shoulder and did a U-turn, heading back east to Hidden Lake.
He let Charlie go first, prepared to follow him wherever he went. Spera’s equipment still sat at the corners, and there were some open empty graves. Donald Lee Becker’s was one of them, his concrete liner sitting in a frozen pool of black ice.
Louis watched for movement in the trees, wondering if there were troopers posted out here. But he doubted it. It was too open, with no place to hide, and it was too exposed to the weather. Not likely the killer could bring any more victims here.
Charlie headed to the middle of the cemetery. To their left was a row of trees behind which Louis could just make out the spires of the Hidden Lake infirmary. To their right, more trees that dwindled off into open farmland and orchards, and far ahead of them, up near where they had found Sharon Stottlemyer, more trees and thick brush.
“Where are you going, Charlie?” Louis called.
Charlie just pointed to the north end. He paused where they had found Sharon Stottlemyer’s remains. The shallow grave had been carefully excavated. It didn’t look like the other graves, and Charlie seemed to notice it was different, but he said nothing. He just moved on toward the back of the cemetery. Then he stepped into the brush and reached for a tree limb.
“Charlie, what are you doing?”
“Climbing the tree. This is where I hear them.”
Charlie scaled it easily, his thin body squeezing through the branches and finding a perch about ten feet off the ground.
Then he sat and waited.
After a few minutes, Louis spoke. “Do you hear anything?”
“No.”
Louis looked around. The only sound he could hear was the whistle of the wind in the trees. From back here, in the brush beyond the north boundary of the cemetery, he could clearly see the iron fence surrounding the back perimeter of Hidden Lake. He could see part of E Building through the naked branches and above its roof, the spires of the infirmary just beyond. He knew there had to be cops stationed up in E Building, and he wondered if they could see him right now.
“Can I come down now?” Charlie asked.
“In a minute,” Louis said. He stepped farther into the brush. It was sharp and tore against his jeans as he crunched through it. He came to some small trees and pushed through them, glancing back to check on Charlie.
“Anything?”
“No,” Charlie called back.
Louis went a few more steps, and the trees suddenly stopped. There was an area of brush that had been tamped down, like someone had walked on it. But he could see the brush was loose, like it had been carefully positioned. He knelt to push it aside but drew back, pricked by thorns. He pulled at the brush. Suddenly, his hand hit something hard.
Metal.
He was standing on a platform of some kind. Old, red-brown with rust. It looked like a door set in the ground.
“Charlie!” Louis called. “Come here.”
Louis started yanking at the remaining brush. When Charlie saw what he was doing, he knelt to help. In a few minutes, they had cleared away a ten-foot area.
There were two metal doors, about eight feet wide, embedded in the ground. One hinge had rusted off, leaving one of the heavy doors slanting downward slightly. Nearby, coming straight out of the ground, was a pipe that looked it might have had controls or a lever on it at one time, but it was broken off now.
“Charlie, stand on that side over here and grab the edge,” Louis said.
Together they lifted the slan
ting door, letting it fall backward with a spray of snow.
Louis looked down inside. He could see the bottom of the hole, down to another iron platform. But that wasn’t all that was down there. Louis could also see the beginnings of a tunnel.
“This is where the bodies come out,” Charlie said.
Louis looked up at him. “You knew about this?”
Charlie looked at him from the other side of the hole, frowning at the sharpness in Louis’s voice.
“Not anymore. It’s closed now,” he said softly.
Louis looked back into the hole, holding his frustration. It was his own damn fault. If he had spent more time talking to Charlie instead of dismissing him as crazy he would have found this sooner.
Louis stood up. “Charlie, I need you to do something. Go back to the car. There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment. Bring it to me. Can you do that?”
Charlie nodded and ran off. Louis knelt by the door’s edge, dropping his head into the hole. There was a rusted mechanism on the bottom platform that looked like some kind of hydraulic or pulley-type lift.
Louis stood and looked west. This hole was directly in line with the back of the infirmary. He looked back at the rusted doors. This had to be connected to the mortuary in the bottom of the infirmary. It made sense that there would be a direct way to transport the dead from there to the cemetery. Most likely, a casket would be loaded on a gurney in the mortuary and wheeled through a tunnel to here, where a lift was used to bring it up for burial. It made sense, too, that this would be a tunnel dedicated only to this grim task so patients and staff didn’t have to see the dead. It probably ran under E Building, unconnected to the main tunnel system.
Surely they had bricked this one off, too. But if not, it was a perfect conduit for the killer that allowed him to enter the tunnels through the cemetery, outside the scope of the police surveillance.
Charlie was back with the flashlight and Louis clicked it on to check the battery. It was strong. Then he shone it down the hole.
Ten feet to the bottom, he estimated. The flashlight beam picked up the rusted workings of the lift. It looked to have enough places to grab on to so he could get back out.