Poe Page 16

  “Your supervisor behind you?”

  “Yes,” says Lisa in a bright professional voice. “You’re correct about that.”

  Okay. Definitely not the time to break the news. “Do me a favor. Don’t take the bus. I’ll come pick you up at four.”

  She must hear a note of my constrained panic. “Is there a particular reason—”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I’ll explain when I come get you. But wait for me inside, okay?”

  There is a pause.

  “Just—just promise me. Okay?”

  She sighs, completely exasperated. God she’s sexy when she sighs. “

  Okay,” she finally says. A giddy wave of relief rushes through me. “You better be on time though,” she adds in a lower voice.

  “Me? On time? I’m always on time.”

  Lisa starts to snort derisively but has to catch herself. “Oh, that’s really funny, Mr. Stevenson.”

  “In fact, I’m on my way now. I’ll be waiting outside.”

  “You’re going to spend the next four hours in your car?” she whispers quickly. “What’s wrong, Dimitri?”

  “Oh nothing,” I say as innocently as possible. “More rats in the wall. I can’t be there while they fumigate.”

  “Right,” says Lisa. “You’re a bad liar, you know that.”

  “Oh, and keep an eye on Delia. No unexplained visitors.”

  Her voice suddenly goes all formal—her supervisor must be back within earshot. “May I ask why?”

  Because after my dream I think there’s probably some connection between Delia, my female ghost stalker, and the murders? Yeah, that wouldn’t make me sound like her crazy brother at all. “I’m not sure. Let’s call it a hunch.”

  “Do people still actually use that word?”

  “What can I say, I’m hooked on Columbo reruns.”

  “That explains a lot,” says Lisa dryly. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr. Stevenson?”

  “What are the chances of getting some smokin’ sex tonight?”

  Click. Can’t blame a guy for trying. And I really am on my way to Crosslands (considering my scoop on the autopsy photos, I think Mac will forgive me if I’m late) when an unmarked, very governmental beige sedan speeds by with two serious-looking men in front wearing sunglasses (in winter). They might as well have a bumper sticker that says “Kick Me, I’m FBI.” The sedan screeches right on Harrison Street, which means they must be on their way to The Hurry Back Inn.

  The light in front of me turns green. I should turn left, toward Crosslands.

  But for some inexplicable reason I find myself sitting in the car letting the engine idle, strangely transfixed by the crosswalk light on the corner of Main and Ocean that’s blinking a red palm, next to it the digital countdown 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. In the last few seconds, a skinny, blond, teenage girl, looking cold and lonely, trots across the street, pulling the collar of her jacket up against the wind. A car honks its horn behind me.

  Lisa will be more than okay for the next few hours; heck, she’s in the safest place she could be, a veritable fortress. All I’m going to do is take a quick drive by, maybe add a little flavor to my article. At least this is what I tell myself as the light turns red.

  And I turn right.

  There is, as one might expect, a whole block full of squad cars outside the old motel. It’s as if every policeman or policewoman in the county, tired of writing speeding tickets, wanted to take full advantage of this rare opportunity to see an actual crime scene. I immediately recognize the reporter with the whipping hair on the opposite side of the street; she stands next to her white news van, leaning against the hood and sipping a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee.

  I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something in the apartment I’m supposed to find. Unfortunately it’s crammed with people carrying live ammunition.

  “Now what?” I whisper.

  I pull my Mustang over to the sidewalk and sit for a moment, taking in the scene. The parking lot has been completely cordoned off with police tape, and there are two officers standing in front of the entrance. Several others are just standing around blowing on their hands and chatting idly. An empty plastic bag, caught by the wind, takes sail and drifts down the street.

  And then I see her—Poe. Or at least I think it’s her; all I catch is a brief glimmer of her pale reflection in the news van’s rearview mirror. Maybe ghost girl isn’t the housebound sort of spirit. Either that or I have lost my mind. Quite the toss-up.

  But if it is Poe, then she’s obviously leading me to the reporter. On the one hand, I hate to let a possible hallucination take the lead, but on the other, I haven’t a clue what to do next, so what the hell.

  I jump out of my car, put my hands in my pockets, and briskly trot over to the reporter, who is shivering miserably.

  “Hot enough for you?” I say cheerfully.

  She regards me with an icy stare. “Let me guess, local paper.”

  I shrug. “I saw you on TV this morning. Weird, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she says coolly. “You might say.”

  I grin at her, undeterred. If there’s one thing I’m an expert at, it’s being shot down by the ladies. “You know anything you can’t say officially?”

  She gives me a hard look. “Of all the lazy-assed questions—”

  “Hey, we’re just the local paper. Basically a fifty-cent mat for house-training puppies and pushing coupons. I’m Dimitri, by the way. D. Peters is my byline, which you’d know if you read the obituaries, though no one under sixty-five does.”

  She steps back, and her eyes squint a bit. “I’ve seen you before. Morgue guy!”

  I hold up my hands. “Guilty as charged.”

  “I’m Jennifer. Was that for real?” She leans closer. “I didn’t see a lawsuit. Did you settle out of court?”

  “I can’t remember,” I say, looking to the sky as if the answer lies there. “Maybe if I knew more about this homicide I might come up with something.”

  “An interview?”

  Damn she’s gotten eager and pushy all of a sudden. “Maybe,” I say. “What you got?”

  She looks around, as if Brian Williams might actually be within earshot. “Well, they are connected. The murders. Probably some teenagers who’ve been rolling E and listening to Marilyn Manson. Everyone’s pretty much decided Celia was really the first victim, but there’s very little physical evidence that’s the same. Besides the removal of the spleens.”

  “And the numbers,” I add. “And the bite marks.”

  “What?” I can see her calculating the potential value of an information trade. She must decide that the risk of a local newspaper printing the story the next morning—after she’s reported it live on the evening news—is worth it, because she pulls me to the rear of the van. I notice she wears soft, expensive-looking leather gloves that, given her blue lips, are probably useless in actual cold. “Okay, talk.”

  The rear door of the van is open, and I see a pudgy, bald cameraman—a forty-year-old version of Charlie Brown—eating a sandwich in the back, eyes glued to a football game playing across four video screens. Around his neck is a professional black digital camera with an impressive lens. I catch a flash of movement in the glass, like a shadow. Suddenly the signal on the video is lost and it all goes to snow.

  He swears under his breath and roughly knocks the screens a couple of times. “Fuckin’ backwater Hicksville…” he mutters with a thick Boston accent.

  “Have we lost our feed again?” asks Jennifer in a tight voice. “Mike, you know CNN is scouting.”

  Mike grudgingly drops his sandwich onto the control board, wiping the crumbs off his pants. “No need to get all hysterical again; just have to adjust the dish—”

  But Jennifer is already a couple notches past hysterical. “Because I swear to God if I’m not on at exactly five tonight…”

  Mike pulls the camera off from around his neck and hands it me. His cheeks are ruddy with cold. “Hold this for me, kid.”
The camera feels oddly heavy, and a chill spreads through my fingers and up my arms. With a surprising agility given his thick stomach, Mike climbs up an attached ladder to the roof of the van.

  “… I swear I will make your life a living hell,” continues Jennifer.

  “Already is,” mutters Mike.

  I feel something brush against my ankle and look down to see the plastic bag tumbling by—and then something else—impossible. Footprints in the snow, but not of shoes or boots. These are delicate barefoot prints that even Columbo would recognize as a perfect match for the strangely ethereal prints left in my bedroom.

  Poe again.

  The prints lead away from the van down the sidewalk. An obvious trail to follow.

  For the first time it occurs to me that this might be a really, really bad idea. The kind of bad idea that causes teenagers in a spooky cabin in the woods to decide to split up to investigate a strange sound, or that assumes a land war in the Middle East will be short. What am I doing here? Who, or what, is Poe after all? For all I know, she’s the reason Daniel went insane.

  “I’m not Daniel,” I whisper.

  Wonderful. Talking to myself now.

  But I know I don’t have a choice. I have to find out whether this is all random or it’s connected to my father, even if I lose my mind in the process. And I know what I’m going to do next. It’s really not even a question, it’s more a perverse exercise to ease the inadequately small amount of guilt I feel about doing something Lisa would rightly call idiotic.

  The wind blows coldly as I sling the camera over my shoulder and follow Poe’s footprints.

  Jennifer and Mike are so engrossed adjusting the dish that neither notices as I slip away with my hands deep in my jacket pockets, making off with the weighty camera. The air’s so cold that my breath forms a mist in front of me, but strangely I’m not cold at all—I feel distant from reality, like I’m having some kind of lucid dream. I follow the footprints, making my way up the sidewalk past a small group of worried onlookers—none under sixty. I glance at the alley behind the motel and see two local cops standing by the back door. I keep walking.

  But when I get to the street corner, the prints stop abruptly, like whoever made them melted into thin air. A frigid gust of wind pushes across the deserted street, and I catch a slight movement to my right—a blue scrap of cloth that’s stuck in a frozen pile of debris. I walk over to it, reach down, and pull it free.

  A navy-blue baseball cap. White letters on the front: FBI.

  Hot damn, that can’t be random.

  “Not bad, Poe,” I whisper. “Not bad at all.”

  I put the hat on my head and then casually stroll back to the alley behind the old motel. The local cops take one look at the hat and the camera and say nothing as I brusquely push past them, opening the door with ease. The lock, I notice, has been crudely broken.

  Inside, deep voices echo down the fire escape stairs.

  “What’s the score?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  A haze of cigarette smoke drifts past the one small window, so dirty it lets in only a few dim rays of winter sunlight. I climb the stairs to the second floor, then the third, where two more cops lean against the unpainted cement block wall. I nod at them, they nod in return, and then I open the heavy metal door.

  The hallway is wallpapered with a spidery, shiny metallic print, like someone took a sledgehammer to a glass windshield. The carpet is a dirty, well-trod brown. A couple of interested elderly neighbors wearing bathrobes stand in their doorways, their silver hair wrapped in identical pink plastic curlers, excitedly shocked.

  “She never locked her door.”

  “Never.”

  As if Mrs. Chesterfield somehow brought this on herself. It’s a conversation that’s familiar. At my parents’ funeral there was much discussion about their decision to buy a convertible, as if the karma of owning a sports car did them in.

  I actually breeze into the crime scene. The first room is packed with police officers, busy field technicians wearing latex gloves and men in dark suits with long black coats. And this room has to be the saddest I’ve ever seen in my life. It has a dusty, gray quality, as if the windows haven’t been opened in decades, and it smells of wet dog. All the furniture is obviously cheap motel décor circa 1950. The thin, olive-green sofa sags in the middle, the chrome-accented linoleum table in the kitchen is rusting, and the amber glass lamps are adorned with beige, spidery shades, continuing the theme from the wallpaper in the hall. There were some attempts, primarily with knitted lace, to cover the worn spots on the chairs, and a crystal vase is filled with blue marbles and red plastic roses.

  The carpeting is the same dark brown from the hallway. And dead center in the room is a darker stain. Blood.

  One of the men in dark suits glances over; his blond hair is military short—obviously FBI. I raise my camera and take a picture of the bloodstained carpet. He’s about to come over and say something when his cell phone rings, so I dart into the adjacent bedroom.

  A pink polyester bedspread covers the single twin bed. Two unrolled stockings are strewn on the floor, looking like discarded snakeskins, but other than that the room is shabby but impeccably neat. It doesn’t look like anyone lived here, certainly not for fifteen years, as Alice had done, week to week. She could have easily packed all of her personal belongings into a single suitcase and been gone in thirty minutes. But maybe that was the point.

  A cop pokes his head in, so I take another picture, this time of the stockings on the floor. And then something catches my eye—a lone photo in a cheap brass frame leaning against another amber lamp. I can tell that it’s old, black and white. I slowly walk over and pick it up.

  Aspinwall, of course.

  A party, probably in the forties, judging by the hairstyles. Everyone is wearing a costume and sitting around a long rectangular table covered with elegant white linen. In the center is Amelia Aspinwall. (She would never be anywhere but the center.) She wears a tight-fitting sequined gown, and her face is covered with a peacock Mardi Gras mask; its feathers fan out and partly obscure Captain Aspinwall, who’s dressed as a pirate, with a real parrot on his left shoulder. Sitting next to Amelia is the needy platinum blond from my dream, dressed like Little Bo Peep, with round circles of rouge on her cheeks and a dainty, painted mouth. In her right hand is a white staff and in her left she cradles a lamb that looks like it would rather be anywhere else. Next are two women wearing black wigs and dressed as geisha, their identical faces blanched white and mirroring the same solemn expression. There’s a man dressed as a Roman soldier, and another dressed as the Tin Man.

  But it’s the woman at the far left who catches my attention, partly because she seems more aloof, more regal than the others, but also because she seems strangely out of place. Her costume consists of a plain black mask and a pair of demon horns, as if she hadn’t thought through her outfit or had been handed some props at the last minute. There’s a visible edgy space between her and a man dressed as Zorro on her right. He leans toward her; she leans away. She’s also the only one who isn’t smiling.

  I hear a deep voice in the kitchen say, “I thought he was with you.”

  Quickly, I slip open the back of the glass frame, pop out the photograph, turn it over. A shaky scrawl in pencil.

  Halloween, 1940. Right before the fire. Me as Little Bo Beep. Mrs. Aspinwall & Captain A., center, Blaine as Zorro, Edgar, the Tin Man, Sidney pretending to be a Roman. Fitzgeralds as geisha, and K.G., the psychic.

  I pull out my notebook, writing down all the names as quickly as possible, but just as I write the initials “K.G.” I hear a shout.

  “Hey you! Turn around, turn around! On your knees, on your knees!”

  Two things happen next.

  One, the lights flicker, then go out, which is interesting.

  Two, I hear but don’t see the click of a gun’s safety being released.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: DANIEL’S ESCAPE

  Jail is not a good
place to be. There are no snacks in jail and people, police people, feel perfectly free to drink coffee in front of me without offering me a single cup. And it smells like really, really good coffee; I have a feeling the good people protecting and serving know their Colombian from their French roast. Plus a jail cell smells like piss and lead paint. There is a single thin and rancid mattress in my cell, which is so disgusting I wouldn’t even think about sitting on it unless I was wearing a hazmat suit, which I’m sadly not. So instead I sit on the concrete floor, pressing my head against the cool wall, trying not to imagine all the ways that Daniel might have killed Lisa while I was out playing crappy detective. The FBI weren’t too impressed with my theory that Daniel is behind the murders; apparently, he doesn’t match their profile for the spleen-eating serial killer, but judging from their hard stares and even harder line of questions—“Would you call yourself a loner?” “Have you ever impersonated an officer before?”—I might.

  They did give me my one phone call—on a device called a “pay phone”—and even the phone smelled like piss; amazing considering it was made of plastic and stainless steel. But then who to call? It’s not like I’ve bothered to memorize anyone’s phone number when they’re all stored in my cell phone, which the police unfortunately confiscated—as if I would be able to disassemble it and use the parts to pick the lock of New Goshen’s city jail, MacGyver style. Lucky for me, Lisa answered the phone for Crosslands, a number that was readily available in the battered yellow pages hanging from the pay phone, and she accepted the collect call.

  But I don’t feel particularly lucky when I see her expression as the guard walks her down the hallway. Furious doesn’t even begin to describe it.

  “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a joint like this?” I say doing my best Bogart impression, which is really not all that good, I admit.