Laura Cardinal - 01 - Darkness on the Edge of Town lc-1

by J. Carson Black

  They walked up to the corner. An Apalachicola PD patrol car came up the street. To Laura’s dismay, it stopped right in front of Lundy’s house. Might as well be a flashing sign. Laura wasn’t surprised to see Jerry Oliver emerge from the driver’s side.

  She regretted not pushing Chief Redbone to request a SWAT response from the sheriff’s office. She knew the chief was smart, and there was no question he knew his town. But he might be out of his depth here. If it weren’t for the fact that the house was boarded up, she would call this off now.

  She let Redbone outline the problem, only interjecting to say that she wanted Descartes to take the back and Oliver to remain in front with them. She wanted Jerry Oliver where she could keep an eye on him.

  As Redbone parroted her earlier instructions, Laura looked the house over. Like its neighbor, it was clapboard—modest compared to some of the houses on this street. The original color was Wedgewood blue trimmed with white, but the wood had weathered to gray. Plywood had been hammered across the windows, the front door barred by several planks. As they crossed the leaf-littered yard, an enormous magnolia tree swallowed them in dark shade. Some kind of hedge Laura didn’t recognize grew around the house, something with thorns. It had gone wild, obscuring several of the windows. The porch was festooned with Virginia creeper that in some places had died but remained, snarled and gray like a spider web.

  Gun ready, Laura crept up to the house at an angle, even though no one could see out the windows. She stood to the left of the door, which would open inward. But first, it would have to be stripped of the planks that had been hammered across it.

  Redbone nodded to Oliver, who pried up the boards with the sharp end of a crowbar. When he was done, Oliver threw the crowbar on the grass with a hollow bang.

  Laura crouched down, looking over to see that both Redbone and Oliver were in position. She caught Oliver’s eye and nodded toward the gun on his hip. He sighed heavily and drew his weapon. Redbone checked the radio to make sure Descartes was stationed at the back door.

  The radio crackled. He was in position.

  Redbone tested the knob on the door. Locked. He nodded to Oliver, who re-holstered his weapon, retrieved the crowbar, and bashed the lock with repeated blows. The door creaked open a couple of inches.

  This time when Oliver threw the crowbar, it nearly took out Laura’s foot. He caught her look and had the grace to look sheepish. He again withdrew his weapon, but held it loosely at his side, pointed down and dangling a little behind his leg.

  She thought: I hope his complacency doesn’t catch up with him someday.

  She dropped into a crouch. Looked at Oliver again. He assumed a crouching position and raised his gun. Redbone remained standing, aiming his weapon toward the left. Laura shouted, “Police! Search Warrant!” and shoved the door the rest of the way open, swinging back and forth into the dark, her weapon leveled on empty air.

  37

  The word that came to her was “surreal”. As if she were in the middle of a snow globe, but the snow was the dust motes that floated in the golden light from the open doorway. Glittering snowflakes falling across the jumping beam of her MagLite.

  It floated out of the darkness at her, this strange, cluttered room. Too much to assimilate right now. She didn’t have time.

  “Clear!” she called as she ducked into the doorway to her left. Another light—Redbone’s—jumped into the darkness, a weak ray. She was in the kitchen. Counter, sink, refrigerator—

  “Kitchen is clear!”

  Her flashlight swung in the other direction as Laura heard Oliver scrambling toward the doorway on the other side.

  “Bedroom is clear!” Oliver shouted.

  They went through the house, systematically clearing every room. Laura saw things that she did not expect to see, but it was so dark she would reserve judgment until they could get light on the situation. They returned to the first room, the living room.

  Despite her wariness, respiration was beginning to return to normal. They’d checked every closet, every alcove. No one home.

  The place smelled stale.

  Oliver holstered his weapon and stretched his neck as Andrew Descartes entered through the front door. Jerry Oliver would not be punished for his inattention today.

  “Let’s get some light in here,” Laura said. “Get the rest of that plywood off.”

  38

  Once the plywood was off, there was enough light to search some of the rooms, but not all. Redbone got on the horn and made arrangements for a gas-powered generator and a pair of 500-watt quartz lamps from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.

  There was enough light, though, for Laura to think she had stepped inside an old photograph of a Victorian house—something you’d see in a history book.

  The front room—the parlor—seemed to press in on her. A stamped tin ceiling, an old-fashioned chandelier, dark furniture, burgundy velvet drapes swagged to reveal immaculate white lace. Everything fringed, shirred, swagged, or flocked. The wallpaper was dark, the floor dominated by a large oriental carpet. Oval portraits on the walls in old, convex glass. Bric-a-brac everywhere: china cabinet, ottoman, settee, footstools—

  So much of it.

  Ottoman, settee … Words people didn’t use anymore: A room out of the nineteenth century. The operative word here was fussy.

  “Good Lord Jesus,” muttered Redbone. “It looks like a museum.”

  Laura’s attention was caught by a sewing machine, modern vintage, on a table. Another sewing machine that looked exactly like the first one except smaller—a child’s machine?—sat on a shorter table.

  Laura’s throat felt dry as her latexed hand pulled open the many drawers and searched alcoves neatly stacked with patterns, thread spools, bobbins, measuring tapes.

  Him and his mom, sewing together in the good old days?

  But it still confused her.

  This room confused her.

  A Bible stand in the corner of the room, old and well-used. On the inside it said, “This Bible belongs to Alene Davis.”

  His mother’s maiden name.

  This room had a surreal quality, as if all she had to do was close her eyes and when she opened them again she’d see an abandoned house with plywood windows and cracking plaster.

  She ran an index finger across an oval rosewood table. Dust. Several layers. But other than that, the place was clean. The dust was the only sign that Lundy had not been here for a long time. Everything was neatly displayed, a tableau.

  A shrine?

  She bent to look at the underside of the rosewood table: Ethan Allen—the store.

  Not an antique then. An approximation of an antique.

  She flashed her light on the ceiling. It might have been stamped tin, or plastic made to look like stamped tin.

  Watching where she walked, Laura went down the hall.

  She looked in on a bedroom. It, too, looked frozen in time. A single bed with lace and eyelet Victorian linens, a down comforter, heaps of satin pillows. A wooden rocking horse. Enormous dry flower arrangements in tall vases. Dolls on a window seat.

  A little girl’s room, but Dale Lundy was an only child.

  Onward, farther down the hall.

  A boy’s room. This one had Darth Vader sheets and posters from the seventies. A hooked rug on polished floorboards. Cowboy-and-Indian wallpaper, cornflower blue.

  Dark in here. On an impulse, Laura walked to the window. Carefully, she moved aside the cowboy-and-Indian-patterned drapes with her latexed hands. She was right. Black-out curtains.

  He’d used plywood to cover up the windows, but he’d added black-out curtains as well. Why? It was as if this house had to remain a secret. As if it embarrassed him in some way. Maybe the kids at school had called him a mama’s boy.

  But he had been home-schooled—isolated from other kids.

  Lonely?

  At the end of the hall was what Laura assumed was the master bedroom.

  She opened the door.

&n
bsp; From every wall, Marisa de Seroux stared down at her.

  Eight-by-tens, four-by-fives. Posters, blown up and fuzzy. Photo after photo after photo, a collage from floor to ceiling. Mostly black and white. All of the same girl. Most of them candid shots, where the girl wasn’t posing or even looking at the camera. Many of them had been blown up to catch her face. But the majority of them were good, professional quality. Taken with a telephoto lens, pictures of the girl, unaware, going about her life in the small town of Apalachicola. As if she were being followed around by paparazzi.

  The photos were cracked in places, as if they had curled up at one point and then been flattened again and again, glued in place.

  She called Chief Redbone in.

  “What does this look like to you?”

  “I’ll be damned. He sure had a thing for her, didn’t he?”

  “So this is definitely Marisa de Seroux?”

  “Oh, I’d say so. That’s Misty.”

  “Misty?”

  “That’s what everyone knew her by.”

  Laura walked to the first wall. “She didn’t know he was taking them.”

  “This makes no sense.”

  “Maybe it does. It looks to me like he was obsessed with her.” Enough to come back to town and pretend he was a member of her family? She had seen stranger things in her career.

  She inhaled. It was musty in here; the place had been closed up for a long time.

  “Hey, look at that.” Chief Redbone motioned to a shelf crammed with books. “That one on the end. Looks like a scrapbook.”

  She walked over to the shelf and gently lifted out the scrapbook. More dust, like a blanket. The scrapbook was a cheap one he must have gotten from a drug store. It had a bright yellow sunflower on the front.

  She opened it up, careful not to smudge anything. The first thing she realized: it was less than a quarter full.

  The first few pages were some of the best photos of Marisa de Seroux. Pale skin, blond, with serious eyes and a heart-shaped face. An angel.

  Then she came to a yellowed newspaper clipping. Laura recognized it: The New Times article about the de Seroux murder-suicide. She turned the page and saw the photo from Page 2, a white coffin under a mass of lilies being hefted up the steps into a church.

  In the margin someone—Lundy, she assumed—had written in faded ink, “Liars!”

  She made a note to save it for handwriting analysis.

  Chief Redbone bent to see over her shoulder. “What does he mean by that?”

  Laura knew. She felt it, that tangible truth that occasionally revealed itself at a certain point in a case. “He didn’t believe she was dead.”

  “What? Why would he think that?”

  “It was a closed-casket funeral, right? He could have gotten the idea she somehow escaped.”

  “Escaped?”

  “Uh-huh.” Laura remembered the news reports on TV after the Judd murder case in Safford. The hope everyone had that one of the children had escaped when all that time she lay underneath the house, dying.

  “He must have been delusional,” Redbone said.

  “They say love is blind.”

  “What? Are you saying he was in love with a twelve-year-old girl?”

  “Is it really that much of a stretch? How old do you think he was?”

  Redbone frowned. “I don’t know. A teenager, I guess.”

  “Probably not that much older than Marisa—Misty.”

  “She didn’t escape, though. Everybody knew that. No way anyone could escape something like that—Henry shot up the house.”

  “The paper didn’t publish any crime scene photos.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “There was no trial?”

  “Nobody to prosecute. Everybody was dead.”

  “I’m guessing Lundy didn’t want to believe it, so he didn’t. What do they say? Perception is reality. Misty escaping—that was his reality.”

  “We can’t know that for sure.”

  “No.” Laura turned the page. It felt fragile in her hand, crackly. Another shorter article describing the murders-suicide. Laura read through it quickly—nothing new.

  But on the opposite page was something that made no sense at all.

  It was a small news item in a Vancouver newspaper.

  “WOMAN IN ALERT BAY SUCCUMBS TO INJURIES. Live-in Boyfriend Charged with Capital Murder.”

  “Misty Patin of Alert Bay, British Columbia, who has been in a coma for half a year, died today, paving the way for Robert Lewis to be charged with murder…”

  Laura read quickly. Misty Patin, age twenty-eight, had been beaten so badly she had been on life support for six months before succumbing to her injuries. She left behind a girl, thirteen, and a boy, five. This had been one of two traumatic events in Misty Patin’s young life. Her daughter, Kim, had been kidnapped from a Wal-Mart in Vancouver during a family shopping trip two years before. Tragedy was averted, though, when she was found shortly afterwards in the custody of a cabbie several miles away. According to the cabbie, he had picked up a nervous man and young girl in the Gas Town district. The girl started crying and told the cabbie that the man was not her daddy. The man then jumped out of the cab and disappeared into the crowd.

  The Pakistani cabbie described the man as “not a tough guy, you know? He was more like a gay.”

  Gay, Laura thought. Or just effeminate? The kind of guy who grew up sewing alongside his mother. She said aloud, “How would he get the idea this woman was his Misty?”

  “Lundy?” The chief stared at her. “What, you think he followed her there? Because of her name?”

  Laura was thinking on her feet now. “My guess it was Lundy who kidnapped the girl.”

  “I thought he was in love with Misty.”

  “I know.” It didn’t make sense. Something was missing. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he didn’t follow her there. But she wondered how a man in Apalachicola, Florida, would get his hands on a newspaper from Alert Bay, Canada. She wondered how many people in Apalachicola, Florida, knew of the existence of Alert Bay, Canada—or vice versa. She herself had never heard of Alert Bay until now.

  Laura said, “There must be some link.”

  “You think he tracked down every Misty he could find?”

  “Somehow he got on to this one.”

  “That’s crazy. How would he get the idea that was Misty de Seroux?”

  “I don’t know.” She was stuck on the kidnapping. If it was him—and she felt sure it was—why did he kidnap the girl when it was Misty he was after?

  He was attracted to young girls. That had to be the reason. Maybe he went looking for Misty. And then he saw her daughter.

  He’d gone looking for Misty. It was the only thing that made any sense. “If you thought you’d been lied to, that the girl you were in love with got away, how would you track her down?” Laura asked the chief.

  “It’s too unbelievable.”

  “I know. But remember that story about Anastasia, one of the Czar’s daughters? A lot of people believed she escaped. They made a movie about it. If you thought Misty had somehow gotten away, what would you do?”

  “I guess I’d get in touch with her people—if she had any left.”

  “Do you know where her family were from?”

  “I have no idea. I know they moved here from somewhere else. But they weren’t from too far away. Their accents.”

  “Why’d it take him so long?” Laura said.

  “What?”

  “Why did he go after her in 1998?”

  She looked down at the scrapbook. That was the last page. It was as if he’d abandoned it. Or started a new one.

  She stared at the sunflower. It sat in a turquoise water can. Behind it, through a window, a man stooped behind a plough. She thought that Jay Ramsey could have used his image recognition software to pinpoint the water can, the man, the mule, the plough.

  “The Internet,” she said.

  “What?”

  “H
e found Misty on the Internet.”

  “How would he do that?”

  “He did a search on Google or another search engine. Probably found himself a bunch of Mistys, then whittled them down.”

  “How would he do that?”

  She shrugged. “Age, coloring, height—maybe he knew how to get information from driver’s licenses. Maybe he hired a private investigator. For whatever reason, he zeroed in on this Misty. Maybe because of the name. Patin.”

  “Makes sense. Patin’s French. De Seroux’s French.”

  “Maybe he found a Misty Patin, found out she once lived here in this part of the country.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “He was there in 1998. He took her daughter.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Redbone scratched his head. “You think he was the one who killed her?”

  “It says in the article her boyfriend killed her. I think that’s probably true. Lundy wouldn’t hang around. He wouldn’t kill her two years later. He would have moved on by then.”

  To preteen girls.

  “Found something here!” yelled Officer Oliver from somewhere else in the house. He sounded excited.

  Laura didn’t like being dragged away from her thoughts. Hard enough to keep track of them—they kept doubling back on themselves, trying to make sense of Dale Lundy’s actions.

  “In here!” Oliver called again.

  She left the scrapbook and made her way to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was utilitarian, with a round-shouldered refrigerator and sunny yellow, chintz drapes and matching covers for the kitchen chairs. The large hooked rug in the center had been pushed aside to reveal a trapdoor in the old floorboards.

  “Want me to open it?”

  “No,” Laura said.

  He gave her a hostile look. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing for now. We’ll get to it later.”