I threw my shoulder at it, suddenly irrationally convinced that Carol and Tyler were on the other side. The door took the impact without noticing.
Bill moved me to one side and took his turn, dropping his shoulder and jogging it up at the last moment. He had more weight and a much better technique. The frame still wasn’t budging, but the panels in the middle splintered, and another two tries had it broken.
When it was open, you could see immediately how this side of the house differed from the other. The addition below had been extended up on this level, too, making Brooke’s sitting room perhaps twice as long as Cory’s, in an L-shape with a wide window at the end. There was a fireplace, cold. Three seating areas, and two long walls lined with drawers, from floor to ceiling.
Hundreds of them.
CHAPTER 44
“Christ," Bill said, quietly. “What’s all this?”
We split to opposite sides and went along the walls. The units that held the drawers looked as though they’d been constructed over a very long period. Many were as you might expect to find in an old-style apothecary, or museum storeroom, hand-drafted in dark wood, varnished and revarnished time and again. Others looked more recently built, but as though they’d been designed to remain in keeping with what had come before. As one progressed farther toward the large window in the back of the room, however, the final two columns of drawers were made of metal, more like safety-deposit boxes.
They were about eighteen inches across, four inches tall, and designed to be opened with a small key. All had small recessed handles, and brass plates holding little labels. Each of these had what appeared to be a surname on it, written by hand, some in ballpoint, some in ink, those on the oldest-looking drawers very faded and in a script that looked like copperplate.
Bill went up to one of the modern portions and yanked on a handle. It didn’t budge. He tried a couple in other sections. Even the ones in the oldest part had clearly been built to last. I started looking through the names. The wall wasn’t arranged alphabetically, which didn’t help. There was no obvious order at all, in fact, and some of the oldest drawers bore labels in new-looking writing.
“What’s up?” Bill asked.
I shook my head, not really sure what I was looking for. We both turned at the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, and had our guns trained on the doorway in time to see Little D and Switch come in. Both were soaked to the skin and looked spooked.
“Empty,” Switch said. “Like, cleaned out. No furniture, carpets, nothing.”
I returned to the wall of drawers, started looking randomly among them again. And finally I found a name I recognized.
Cornell.
“And what the fuck is this smell everywhere?” Little D added, shivering. “Something died?”
“Maybe. You got game with locks?”
“For sure.”
“See if you can open this,” I said, pointing at the drawer I’d just found. He pulled out a ring of slim pieces of metal from his designer jeans, looked closely at the small lock on the drawer.
“I think you got the wrong place after all,” Bill said to me. “There’s nobody here, John. They sold you down the wrong road. What do you want to do now?”
I shook my head, knowing we should be moving in some direction or other, and moving fast, but not knowing where it lay.
I looked at Switch. “You said it was a police pointed you in my direction, right?” He nodded. “What did he look like?”
“Big guy.”
“Tall, or bulky?”
“Bulky.”
Not Pierce, then, which had been my immediate assumption. More likely Greene, the deputy I’d just seen in the photo in Cory’s room—who, I now remembered, had also been hanging around the hospital the morning after Ellen had her accident. Whose daughter was the maid at my motel, and who might (just) conceivably have let him into a room to deposit a body there. What could she do about it, after all? Call the police?
“What actually happened? How did it go?”
“He pull us over, wants to see my license, registration. I got those, no doubt. So he’s, what you around here for, nigger? I tell him we looking for a friend of ours, gone missing. He ask where he missing from, and I say Oregon, young boy name of Kyle. I say what he look like and that.”
“You told all this to a cop?”
Switch shrugged. “It all true. Just didn’t say we were here to kill him. So the police gets helpful, says to look out for an older guy, might know something, tells us what your car look like. He rolls out, have a nice day. That’s all.”
“Try calling the Black Ridge Sheriff’s Department,” I told Bill. “See if you can get hold of Pierce. Make like it’s trivial.”
“Thought he hung up on you already.”
“Maybe not.”
There was a click from the drawer Little D was fiddling with. I pulled the drawer open. It was empty. Then I spotted another name two columns away.
Collins.
“Try that one instead.”
D moved over and used the same tool, but couldn’t get anywhere with it. I heard Bill talking to someone in the background. D switched to another shim and eventually got the drawer open. He stepped back. There was a manila envelope inside.
“Pierce is out,” Bill said. “Allegedly a message will be passed to him.”
“Who’d you speak to?”
“Deputy Phil Corliss.”
“Then it probably will be. What did you tell him?”
“Not much. I didn’t get the sense I’d got the guy’s full attention.”
I took the envelope out, and opened it. Inside was a second envelope, the kind you’d use to send a greeting card. It had been sealed, opened, and then Scotch-taped shut again. I opened it. Inside was a single hair. Held against the pure white of the envelope, you could just tell it was blue at one end.
When I looked in the drawer again I saw I’d missed a piece of paper that had been lying under the envelope. The sheet looked fresh and new, as did the single line of text written on it:
2009 / sadness / directed at Jess C.
“Jesus,” I said softly, looking at the line through the letters at the end. “Bill—look for the name Ransom.”
“Who?”
“Carol’s maiden name.”
He went hunting down the rows. I did the same, until I happened upon one with the name Greene on it. I got Little D to open it.
“There going to be money in any of these?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
This drawer was hard to slide open, so stuffed was it with envelopes. Items of clothing. A watch. Photos, some recent, some much older-looking. On top of these lay three pieces of paper, stapled together, with perhaps thirty separate entries on each. Whoever kept these records—Brooke, I assumed, though some of the older ones were in a different hand—would be needing to start a new sheet soon. Each line appeared to have a reference to a person, in the distinctive style of two or more letters of a first name, and then a single initial for the last.
Near the top of the last page was an entry dated five years before:
2004 / Lost / directed at Co. G
“Got it,” Bill said. “Ransom, C.”
I heard Little D move over to Bill and start fiddling with the lock, but I was fixated by the piece of paper already in my hands. “Co. G”—Courtney Greene? The daughter of the man whose drawer this presumably was? A girl could certainly be said to seem “lost,” but not in the usual ways. Not merely vague or doped or teenaged, but as if she was barely there at all. Plus there had been the bizarre reaction when I told her that I wouldn’t tell if she wouldn’t, when a different personality had seemed to surface momentarily, as if the phrase had cut through the fog she normally moved through to someone trapped inside, who might have been offered little raises in her allowance, down the years, to keep her mouth shut. Not to mention her apparent acceptance of the unacceptable—a dead body in a motel room with a nail sticking up out of its head.
If you really could visit a sadness upon someone, could you also make another person lose themselves, become occluded to events in the past or present? Could you make them forget things that had happened in the night, and perhaps still continued? Could you cause someone to become lost amid internal corridors to protect yourself?
Were there men who could do that to their own daughter, and what might they owe the person who made it happen for them?
I was distracted by the lights in the room flickering. All of them. A couple of quick blinks, then a second of blackness, and then all were on again. I put the piece of paper back and moved over to the drawer where Bill was standing. There was an envelope here, too. Inside it was an old ballpoint pen with a clear plastic shaft, on which someone had once written the name Paul in correction fluid, and something that looked like the cover of a long-ago exercise book.
There was a piece of the note paper, with four lines written on it in two different hands:
1989: Mania (passion) / at Paul B.
1991: " / at Robert S.
2004: Quickening / at self
2005: Sadness / at JR
Personal effects. Things that another human being’s hand or mind had once touched, which could be made to stand in for them. The pen looked like it had been lying in the drawer for a long, long time—from 1989, presumably. The property, presumably, of a long-ago Paul, whose eye a much younger Carol Ransom had wished to attract; as the exercise book had likely belonged to another teenage boy three years later? Boys now middle-aged and married to other women, who probably didn’t even remember the girl who’d once gone to these lengths in the hope of snaring their attention.
Unless, of course, they’d been doing the same thing themselves. There were a lot of drawers in this room, after all.
Underneath the four entry lines, by itself, was something else. A series of marks made on the paper, in pencil, almost random. Lines I’d seen before, in more than one place since I’d been in Black Ridge. I realized for the first time, perhaps because whoever had put them on this piece of paper had more of an understanding of what they were doing, that three of the lines did look like a recognizable shape—like the stick figure of a large, crooked man, or a dog, slashed across with lines.
Beneath that was another line written in ink:
Scott H [+++]
It took me a moment to realize the first part must refer to a boy called Scott Henderson.
“John—are you okay?”
I held out the piece of paper. He read it, and looked up slowly. “That mean what I think it does?”
“The only other crossing out I’ve seen seems to refer to the girl who died in Black Ridge yesterday.”
“No. I meant the pluses.”
I shrugged. It was hard to see them as meaning anything other than one down, three to go. The idea was making it hard for me to breathe.
“Something out there,” Little D said suddenly.
He was standing down at the end, by the window that stretched across nearly the room’s full width.
Bill went to see. “What?”
“Thought I saw something way back. A light or something.”
I went over, too, and stuck my face close to the glass, shielding the light out with my hands. “Bill—any idea what’s back there?”
“Never been here before. Woods, I’m guessing.”
We tramped quickly down the stairs together and back out the front door.
“Is this snow?”
The rain had now gone through sleet and into something else. Whether it was snow I wasn’t actually sure, but it was white and falling slowly and the world now sounded deadened. The awful smell had abated somewhat with it, but it was still there, underneath.
I heard a shout and saw someone was running up the driveway.
“Becki,” I said. “What the hell are you doing?”
“People,” she said, panting, when she reached us. “I had to tell you.”
“What do you mean?”
“A bunch of cars. We’re sitting there, and nothing passes, for ten minutes. Then suddenly all these cars go by, and keep coming. Ten, twenty of them?”
“Are they outside now?”
“No. They went straight by.”
That didn’t make any sense to me. If you continued on up the road there was nothing until the turnoff that led to my old house, a couple of miles away. Past that, another twenty miles to Roslyn or Sheffer.
“Where’s Kyle?”
“He wouldn’t get out of the car.”
Then we all heard it together. A scream, far distant, muffled. But I knew where it had come from—the other side of the house. I also knew who had cried out. Even if you have never before heard the scream of someone you were married to, you recognize the sound.
And I had, of course. The day Scott died.
I started to run, heading for the left side of the building because it was closest. I heard Bill shouting to me as they started to follow but paid no attention. He’d been correct before, though in not quite the right way. This hadn’t been a setup, but they’d left the house open and lit it up to pull me in the wrong direction again and waste time.
That wasn’t going to happen now.
I came around the back of the house into a wide, deep lawn, beyond which the trees started in a rough semicircle. I slowed, trying to see if there was any indication which direction would be best to go in, some sign of a path, or the light that Little D thought he’d seen from upstairs.
There wasn’t anything. The woods merely looked like a wall of darkness into which you’d have to be out of your mind to run.
I was dimly aware of the sound of the others following around the side of the house, but then I heard the flat crack of a rifle shot and threw myself down onto the ground.
I heard the sound of pain immediately afterward, but this time the bullet hadn’t hit me.
Becki screamed.
At least one of the people behind me started shooting immediately.
“John—stay down!”
I ignored Bill’s advice, got to my feet, and zigzagged back. I’d been way out in front, isolated in the middle of the lawn. If whoever had fired had me in mind, I would have been an easy drop.
The others were hunkered down at the back of the house, to one side where they were covered by shadow. Bill was letting spaced shots off into the trees, from a steady double-handed grip. Becki had most of her right hand in her mouth and was biting on it, her eyes bulging. But she wasn’t who’d been hit.
Little D was lying sprawled on the ground, the small of his back curving up, hands around his own throat. Blood was pulsing from between his fingers in thick, dark clots. He was blinking fast, his eyes trying to find something to fasten on beyond what was happening to him.
“Fuck,” I said, kneeling at his side, unconsciously reaching for a service backpack that wasn’t there, trying to remember how you were supposed to respond in these circumstances. “Where’s the other guy?”
“Went running off into the trees,” Bill said. He stopped shooting, reloaded, listened. Silence for a moment, then the sound of shots in the distance.
Little D coughed, spraying blood.
I told him to keep his hands where they were, but I’m not sure he was hearing me. I tried to turn him on his side, to keep the blood from flooding straight down into his lungs. His arms started to spasm, and it was hard to hold him still.
“Bill, you remember what to do?”
“Find a medic. Call for a chopper. Run away.”
“Apart from that?”
“No.”
“He’s dead,” Becki said dully.
He wasn’t. But he’d stopped blinking and his hands were no longer gripping as tightly. A couple of minutes later he did die. His last cough sounded like a man deep underwater. Snow dropped onto his face, falling harder now.
“This is a nightmare,” Becki said to herself.
“Go back to the car,” I told her. “Drive back to Black Ridge, find the
sheriff’s department. Get anybody you can find to come out here.”
“Screw that. If they’re not going to come when you call, why would they just because some chick turns up?”
“Because you’re covered in blood.”
Becki looked down at her hands and arms and seemed to realize for the first time that this was true.
Bill turned his head back toward the front of the house. “Incoming,” he said, already moving.
I grabbed Becki’s arm and pulled her with me, as Bill went wide. He hadn’t made it to a viable position before we realized it was Kyle, running toward us. He saw Little D’s body and stopped so fast he skidded, staring down at it.
“Kyle, go back to the—”
“Something’s coming,” he said.
“You mean ‘someone’?”
“I guess,” he said, uncertainly. “I’m sure I saw people in the trees, or something in there, on the other side of the road. I mean, I couldn’t really see properly because it was so dark over there. But I know something was coming. Some people or . . . shit, I don’t know, okay?”
I realized that Kyle was terrified, his eyes and hands in constant movement, as if his body was panicking even worse than his mind. “We need to rethink,” Bill said. “Go back to the car, regroup.”
“No way,” I said, pointing toward the woods. “Whatever’s going down is happening in that direction and it’s happening now.”
“With who knows how many assholes in the trees with guns pointing at us. Come on, John. You know it makes no sense to just go running in there.”
“I heard Carol”
“Maybe. Point still holds. We run into there and they’ll take us one by one. Though I guess . . . maybe it’s everyone except you, right?”
“What?”
He was looking at me steadily. “They grab you out of a parking lot, but don’t kill you. They don’t do it when they’ve got you in a secluded house with no one around, either, and they make a half-assed job of it when you escape. Five minutes ago you’re in the middle of the lawn, with the house lights full on you. But they shoot the guy over there instead, who means nothing to them.”
Bad Things Page 30