Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  This one would go better than the first. Cait was sure of it.

  35

  This time when Cait rang the bell it was with a genuine smile of pleasure on her face rather than one of nervousness. She still had no idea what might have changed her mother’s mind—Kevin was right about one thing, Virginia had been dead set against ever seeing her again the last time they talked—but at the same time, she didn’t really care. The important thing was that the telephone call represented real progress.

  The door swung open and Cait’s mother stood on the other side, just as before. Something was wrong, Cait could see that immediately. Her mother’s face was pasty-white, her lips set in a straight bloodless line. She looked even frailer than before, if that was possible. It seemed to be taking all of her willpower to…what? Avoid screaming? Look Cait in the eyes? Welcome them into her home again?

  But it didn’t make sense. She was the one who had called Cait and invited her here. She was the one who had pulled them off the airplane just as it was about to take off. Had she changed her mind again, and now didn’t want to see her? Maybe the woman was just plain crazy; who the hell knew? It wasn’t like Cait had any history to go on. They had just met twenty-four hours ago.

  Cait wrinkled her forehead. “Are you all right?”

  That was when she noticed the blood.

  Virginia Ayers’s right hand hung limply by her side, unmoving and apparently forgotten as the woman gazed at Cait with dead, empty eyes. A slow drip-drip-drip of thick maroon-black blood gathered at the tips of two of her fingers and fell to the floor in a steady rhythm, dropping first off one finger and then the other. It seemed to be a fair amount of blood. It wasn’t a river, exactly, but it fell in a continuous pattern, like the beginning of a soft summer rain, and was gathering into an impressive little pool on the hardwood floor.

  “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” Cait asked as she stepped through the door, overcome by her natural impulse to help the elderly woman. She felt Kevin hang back, still concerned about whatever had been bothering him since the phone call on the airplane. He had stepped one foot through the door, resting it on the interior floor, but his body hovered half in and half out.

  Kevin grabbed Cait by the elbow as she was reaching for her mother’s injured hand, pulling her insistently backward, trying to drag her out the door and away from her mother, who clearly needed help! Cait resisted, struggling, pulling in the other direction, but she was no match for his superior size and strength. She opened her mouth to complain. What the hell did he think he was doing?

  And then a man stepped out from behind the front door. He moved smoothly and quickly behind Virginia, wrapping one arm around her waist, gently, like a lover, and the other around her throat, a long knife pressed to her skin. The blade glittered and winked in the light, drawing Cait’s attention. She froze, her anger at Kevin forgotten.

  Her heart stuttered and her stomach flip-flopped. It took only a second to recognize the stranger; his face was burned indelibly into her brain. It was the man from the horrible Flickers of the last couple of days. The man who had tortured the poor girl strapped into the blocky wooden chair. The cold-blooded killer who had begun haunting her dreams.

  This was the man.

  And he was holding a knife to her mother’s throat.

  The intruder offered up an easy smile, the smile of a man comfortable in his surroundings. In control of the situation.

  “Please, come in,” he said, directing his attention at Kevin, who had stopped tugging on Cait’s arm and now stood unmoving.

  Cait tore her eyes from the intruder and glanced back at her boyfriend. She had known Kevin a long time and instantly recognized he was reverting to cop mode, sizing up the situation, trying to determine what action he might be able to take to neutralize this unexpected threat. He instinctively grabbed at his hip, but of course his gun wasn’t there. His gun wasn’t within a thousand miles of there. It was locked safely away in the closet of his apartment in Tampa.

  The intruder watched Kevin with dead eyes and a smile flickered across his face and disappeared. “No, really, come in,” he repeated. “I insist. We insist, isn’t that right, dear?” He waved the knife theatrically in front of Virginia’s face before replacing it against the wrinkled alabaster skin of her throat.

  “Don’t hurt anyone,” Kevin answered, raising his hands in a calming gesture, his voice steady and reasonable. “If it’s money you’re after, I’m sure we can get some together for you, maybe not as much as you’d like—none of us is rich, as I’m sure you can tell—but we will all be happy to contribute to the cause.”

  The man laughed. The sound was unexpected, Cait thought, and blood-chilling. His knife jittered against Virginia’s throat as he chuckled and she let out a gasp either of fear or pain, Cait could not tell which. So far there was no blood besides the droplets that continued to drip steadily off the ends of her fingers.

  “This isn’t about money,” the man said coldly.

  “Then what is it about?” Kevin asked. He eased his right foot inside the door and stepped fully into the house. As he did, the man pulled Virginia Ayers an equivalent distance back down the hallway. The intruder was being careful to maintain a safe distance from Kevin, a precaution that struck Cait as utterly unnecessary. As long as that razor-sharp blade remained pressed to Virginia’s throat, there was nothing Kevin or anyone else could do. It would take but one flick of the man’s wrist and Cait’s mother would bleed out within minutes.

  “What is it about? It’s about her,” he answered, directing the business end of the knife at Cait for just a second. At that moment she thought it looked more like a dagger than a knife.

  “Cait?” Kevin answered in surprise. It was clearly not what he had expected to hear.

  “That’s her name? Cait? What a pretty name. A pretty name for a pretty girl. A pretty, bad girl. A pretty, bad girl who’s going to suffer.”

  In that instant everything clicked in Cait’s mind. The phone call on the plane. Her mother’s sudden, unexpected change of heart. The plea to return immediately. The man had been here, brandishing his knife, injuring her fingers badly enough to make them bleed, forcing her to bring Cait and Kevin back here. What she didn’t understand was why.

  Kevin continued to move slowly and unthreateningly forward until he stood next to Cait. She knew he was trying to place his body between her and the lunatic with the knife, partly to put himself in a position to help Virginia, but mostly to remove Cait from as much of the danger as possible. “What has Cait done that requires her to suffer?” He kept his tone conversational, like two neighbors discussing the weekend’s football matchups.

  The man shook his head. “Step away from the door and close it behind you. There’s no need for the entire neighborhood to witness our little get-together, not that anyone’s out there to see it anyway.”

  Kevin once again took Cait’s elbow, this time moving her one step to the left. He reached back with his foot and pushed the door shut. It closed with a thunk of finality and she knew this was going to be bad. This was going to be very bad.

  36

  Maizie Adams had lived in Everett her entire life, the last forty-five years of it right here on Granite Circle. She had moved in when the neighborhood was still nearly brand-new, buying the only house she would ever own with her husband Roger, a printing press operator at the Boston Globe.

  Roger had worked long hours, doing the dirty, messy work of putting out a newspaper back in the days when each page was laid out by hand, decades before the process was simplified by the advent of computer programming. In those days it took a team of professionals hours to get it right. Roger would come home exhausted in the middle of the night while the rest of the city slept, his hands and arms stained with ink halfway up to the elbow, the day’s edition ready to go.

  Then he suffered a massive stroke and, unable to work, found himself relegated to the Barcalounger in the cramped living room, oxygen tank at his side, a once-proud man slipp
ing farther and farther into depression, his life eventually flickering out one night while Maizie slept on the couch next to him.

  “Natural causes,” the doctor had called it, but Maizie recognized that diagnosis for what it was: a steaming pile of crap. Roger had given up on living, unable to do the job he loved, unable to provide for the woman he loved, unable to find the will to continue breathing.

  Maizie buried her husband and then soldiered on alone, missing him but knowing he was better off now, wherever he was. She took a job for the first time in her life, working for a short while as a medical transcriptionist, eventually quitting when she came to the realization she had no real use for the money she was earning. Roger’s pension from the Globe, along with the small annuity from some long-ago investments, was more than enough to heat the house and buy the groceries and pay the property taxes. Maizie didn’t need any more than that.

  Now in her early eighties, Maizie Adams’s days were mostly spent puttering around her house, watching her soaps and cleaning. Rare was the day when the carpet wasn’t vacuumed at least three times, the dishes weren’t washed after every meal, and the furniture went undusted.

  She also maintained a healthy interest in the comings and goings of her neighbors. None of the other houses were occupied by the same people who had lived in them back in 1968, when the Adamses had moved in; in fact, most of the homes in Granite Circle had been sold several times over as families moved into these starter homes, made their mortgage payments for a few years, and then moved up to bigger and more expensive places in bigger and safer neighborhoods.

  But none of that mattered to Maizie. In fact, in some ways she thought it was good. New families meant new routines to observe, new quirks to discover, new people with whom to familiarize herself.

  For example, Virginia Ayers, in Number Seven, the house located directly across the circle from Maizie’s, had been living in her home since 1983, and she was a strange case. Her husband was long gone, having died in a suspicious manner—Maizie suspected he may have killed himself, but wasn’t sure—close to a quarter-century ago, and Virginia was nearly as reclusive as Maizie herself, although somewhat younger. She didn’t look younger, Maizie thought, but she was.

  Maizie could count the number of times Virginia had received guests since her husband died on one hand, which made the last two days’ flurry of activity so noteworthy. Yesterday a young couple had visited, arriving by taxicab and spending a couple of hours inside the house. Then they had left after a strained exchange on the front porch. Maizie’s eyesight was failing rapidly, along with most of her other senses, but the awkwardness of their departure had been clear even to her, watching from her living room at least a hundred feet across Granite Circle.

  Then, today, a young man had arrived, pulling into the driveway in his own car, knocking on the door and entering the house after a short conversation. Maizie had been watching closely and darned near called the police then. She would have sworn the young man had half forced his way in, sticking his shoe in the doorway and pushing his way inside like a bull in a china shop.

  She had almost called the police, but not quite. The whole thing happened so quickly and was over so fast that she immediately began to question what she had seen. After all, her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be and although Everett could be a dangerous city at times, especially if you didn’t know where you were going and ended up in the wrong section of town, this neighborhood was pretty safe most of the time.

  So Maizie had let it go, ignoring the feeling of unease worming its way through her intestines, blaming it on the undercooked chicken breast she had eaten for lunch. But then, just a few minutes ago, the couple from yesterday had shown up again. Three separate callers in two days!

  One caller was practically unheard of for Virginia Ayers, but three? Never. Something was definitely going on.

  And things had only gotten more perplexing. The front door swung open wide at their arrival and Maizie was certain she had seen the young man who had (maybe) forced his way inside standing behind the door, in the shadows of the hallway, like he was trying to stay out of sight. Then the young couple had stood at the door for a few seconds before beginning to back away. They had suddenly changed their minds and entered. Then the door had slammed closed.

  The entire incident had taken place in just a few seconds, and Maizie was watching from pretty far away and sure, she was old and her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be.

  But Maizie Adams knew trouble when she saw it. And she had seen it.

  She picked up the telephone and cursed herself for being such an old fool. Why hadn’t she trusted her instincts earlier? Whatever was happening over there at 7 Granite Circle was bad and she should have notified the police the minute she suspected something was wrong.

  It was too late to worry about her foolishness now, though. All she could do was try to correct her mistake.

  She squinted at the laminated card taped to the wall next to her telephone. Damn, the thing was hard to read. Her daughter Jeannie had placed the card there months ago, concerned about what might happen in the event of a fire or attempted break-in. All of Everett’s emergency response numbers were listed, but to Maizie’s way of thinking you had to have the eyesight of a twenty-year-old just to read it. She punched in what she hoped was the number for the Everett Police Department and was rewarded when it was picked up on the second ring.

  “Everett police.” The voice was female, and sounded young and bored.

  “Yes,” Maizie said. “I’d like to report…” What? A break-in? A disturbance? What?

  “Yes?” the voice prompted, now impatient as well as bored.

  “Well, there’s something strange going on in the house across the street from mine. The address is Seven Granite Circle.”

  “Something strange? Could you please be more specific?”

  “A young man I’ve never seen before knocked on the door a little while ago. I can’t swear to it, but I think he may have forced his way in. Now two other people have entered the house after visiting yesterday, and they seem to have entered reluctantly. Please send someone quickly, I’m afraid something is very wrong over there.”

  “What was the address again?”

  “Number Seven Granite Circle, here in Everett.”

  “Seven Granite Circle. Okay, ma’am, we’ll dispatch an officer to check on your neighbor.”

  “Thank you,” Maizie answered, hanging up the phone numbly, hoping she hadn’t waited too long.

  37

  “Let’s move into the parlor and get comfortable, shall we?” The man gestured toward the end of the hallway with his knife and the group moved en masse, all four bodies shuffling in a kind of tense, loosely choreographed dance, the man with the knife sliding slowly backward, pulling Virginia along, Cait and Kevin matching him step for slow step.

  Cait couldn’t take her eyes off the blade. It was thin and shiny and long, with a bone-white handle clutched expertly by its owner, who maintained light but steady pressure on Virginia’s throat. She glanced into her mother’s eyes and saw not just fear, but also regret and sorrow and a kind of tired resignation.

  She thought back to their earlier conversation in this very house and everything fell into place. The intruder with the knife was roughly her age, with the same wavy auburn hair and the same general build, thin and wiry. There had to be millions of men throughout the country fitting the same general description, tens of millions maybe.

  But she knew, nevertheless.

  The man with the knife was her brother.

  They moved into the kitchen and the man with the knife kept going, shuffling backward on the balls of his feet like he was performing some demented slow-motion version of the moonwalk. He turned ninety degrees to his left, pulling Virginia through a large open doorway and into the living room. He continued backing up until they reached a point more or less in the middle of the room. Virginia’s television loomed behind him, a gigantic old Sony with washed-out colors teet
ering atop a frail-looking TV table. On it, glamorous soap opera characters played out their glamorous fictional lives, babbling about love and loss and treachery.

  Next to the television, positioned roughly halfway between the TV table and the kitchen doorway, an ornamental cactus sat in an enormous ceramic pot. The cactus was mammoth, reaching almost all the way to the ceiling, and looked as though it had occupied its space for decades. Along the opposite wall, behind the man with the knife, was an old couch, worn and faded but scrupulously clean. The room was otherwise bare.

  The man with the knife—my brother, Cait thought with a numb fascination—focused his gaze on Cait and then inclined his head toward the TV. “You. Drag your ass next to the television set and don’t fucking move.”

  Cait froze and glanced uncertainly at Kevin. He nodded almost imperceptibly. The intruder pulled his knife away from Virginia’s throat and indicated that she should join Cait. Together the two of them took small, hesitant steps until they stood between the TV and the cactus plant. Cait felt like a junior-high wallflower at her first dance but was relieved her mother was no longer in immediate danger.

  Kevin moved to follow them and the man snapped, “No, no, no, not you.” He held his hand up like a traffic cop and Kevin stopped. “You look nice and strong; you can do some of the heavy lifting in preparation for our little party.”

  Kevin waited for instructions. He appeared completely at ease, didn’t even seem afraid. Cait had never had the opportunity to observe him in his work as a police officer, but was starting to understand why he was so highly regarded on the Tampa force, despite his relative youth and short time on the job.