Daddy's Little Girl (27 page)

Not dead.

Those were the first two conscious words that occurred to Carl Laumer.

Not dead.

Ruth Foster apparently took him for dead, but there was power and murder in Laumer, nonetheless.

He spent several minutes gathering himself and then raised his head the tiniest amount possible that would allow him to see into the anteroom before him.

There Ruth Foster and Jake stood talking.

Laumer prepared himself for the push he would have to make soon.

If he wanted to get out of here alive.

He let his elbow brush his jacket pocket and let his arm touch the grenade that rested there.

He was going to get to use his grenade after all.

Carnes went into the bathroom next to Minerva’s room and splashed cold water over his face.

He needed to be awake, ready, for whatever he would find tonight.

Beth came to the doorway.

“She say anything?” Carnes asked frantically.

“Afraid not,” Beth said softly.

Carnes sighed.

“We’re going to have to start searching the house.”

“I guess that’s all that’s left,” Beth said.

Carnes dried his face. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s start in the attic.”

“You’re very pretty,” Ruth Foster said to Deirdre.

Deirdre had crawled over to the wall, was trying to cover herself.

She knew she didn’t have long to live.

“I’m sorry Kenny has been such a bad boy. I’m sorry we have to do what we have to.”

Deirdre said nothing.

The woman was obviously crazy. “I suppose I should have had him committed,” Ruth said. “But he had a wife and child—it was a way to carry on the Foster name.”

Then she paused, seeming confused. “But when he killed his wife and son—” She began to sob quietly. “I should have told the authorities about that, but I was always in hopes he would straighten out.”

Kenny came up to Deirdre now.

“My mother is my friend,” he said. “She tried to help me. I—I killed a girl and she was afraid of what they would do to me, so she made it seem like I was killed, so people wouldn’t suspect me.”

He looked back to his mother fondly. “She knew I had to kill my wife and my baby—” He shook his head. And smiled.

In the smile, Deirdre saw all of his treachery as well as his illness.

“She’s been a good mother,” he said.

Ruth began to cry. “I was wrong, Kenny. I meant to help you but I see now that—I should have let the police have you when you killed the first girl. Before all this—”

Kenny’s smile returned. “You don’t have to worry about regrets, Mother.” From his pocket he took a small silver pistol.

“I’m going to kill you along with her,” he said. “You’ve suffered enough. I shouldn’t make you go on.”

Deirdre began to scream in utter hysteria.

Half an hour had lapsed by the time Bobby entered the mansion gates.

By now he was thinking of Angie with bitterness.

How she’d taunted him.

And he had believed her.

What a nerd he was—

He had believed her.

That was all Bobby Coughlin could think of after he’d fled Angie and her lies.

She had sweet-talked him about being sorry, but then she’d laughed at him—

His run to the mansion had been blind. He had no idea where he was going.

Through sweat and anger and humiliation—through a night he hoped would never end (he could hear her telling her story to all the popular girls tomorrow morning)—he kept on running.

Until he reached the front steps of the mansion. And heard the weeping woman.

Bobby could not be sure, but the woman hunched in the shadows seemed to be Minerva, Ruth Foster’s maid....

He went up to her carefully, his feet scuffing on the broad steps of the mansion.

“Miss,” he said, breathlessly.

She didn’t seem to hear him.

He stood in the pine scent and the moonlight and the melancholy breeze and thought about his life.

It was a mess.

He spent a long moment ridiculing himself about Bruce Lee. About the poster in his room. About all his nerd habits.

His little sister was right.

That’s what he was.

A fucking nerd.

He’d never gotten so much as bare tit off a girl. He’d never landed a punch in his life. And tonight, the one time he’d seemed able to act like a man, he’d fallen for Angie’s wily lies.

His face got red again, thinking about that.

He turned himself around and sat down on the steps of the mansion and stared into the night.

Dogs prowled the woods. Owls lent the dark its music. Clouds lay silver across the light.

And Bobby Coughlin sat frozen, a prisoner of his own disgust.

He jumped and his heart threatened to tear out of his chest, when the woman put a hand on him.

“Damn!” he screamed and jerked a full four inches off the steps.

“Easy, easy boy,” Minerva said, seeing she’d spooked him.

Once again Bobby Coughlin was embarrassed.

He felt foolish, the way he’d responded.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry if I scared you.” She wiped away tears.

“It’s all right.”

“You’re the Coughlin boy, right?”

“Right.”

“Are you a brave boy?”

She must know about him, he thought. His cowardice. His nerdishness. “No,” he said truthfully. “No, I’m not brave.”

“Oh,” she said.

For a time they just stood there and looked at each other.

Minerva took a step toward him. In the moonlight her face was pretty in an older way. She was one of the few women Bobby could imagine as a young girl.

“Something terrible’s going on down in the basement.”

“What?” he asked.

“I’m afraid if I tell you, it’ll kill my friend Ruth.”

“Maybe you’d better call the sheriff,” he said.

“The sheriff,” she scoffed.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“You’ll find out before this night is over.”

Bobby paused. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on,” he said tentatively, not sure he wanted to hear.

“I’m afraid,” Minerva said.

Bobby sighed. “So am I,” he said.

It took her ten minutes to tell the story. And at the end of it she seemed much older.

Bobby wanted to leave.

Go home and face the old man and get it over with for being such a jerk at the dinner table tonight.

Just get it over with and go to sleep and in the morning get up and go play some video games and just accept the fact that he was a nerd and a turd and a coward.

He didn’t want to know the things Minerva had just told him.

“You want to be brave, don’t you?” Minerva said.

Bobby stared at her.

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“The way you looked so ashamed when I asked if you were and the way you said no. There was shame in your voice, I’m sorry to say.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to go downstairs and do something for me. Save a young girl’s life.”

“I don’t know if I could.”

“You think you could?”

He thought a moment. “No.”

She smiled. “Well, there’s worse things to be in this life than a coward.”

“Like what?”

“A killer, for one.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“But maybe now you’d better run along home.”

“Why?”

“Because things are going to get pretty bad.”

“The basement?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you afraid for yourself?”

“Honey, at my age, I’ve learned to live with being afraid.”

“I would if I could.”

“You could if you tried.”

Bobby put a foot on the steps.

“You go with me?”

“Yes.”

Bobby put another foot on the steps.

Started to climb upwards.

What Minerva had told him about the basement—it terrified him.

Not even thoughts of Bruce Lee gave him courage.

But maybe that was the trouble, anyway.

Maybe that’s what Minerva meant by living with fear. All his young life he’d looked for heroes. Maybe he should be his own hero.

“Shit,” he said, “it’s dark in there.”

“It sure is.” She took a metal rod from her dress pocket. “Maybe this’ll help.”

With her flashlight leading the way, they proceeded inside.

Muffled screams from beneath the house pressed up against the floor.

“Damn,” Bobby said. “Maybe I—” He tensed, trying to make his breath come steadily, confidently. “Maybe I’d better get down there.”

“Now would probably be a good time,” she said.

“All right,” Bobby said. Then he said, “You wait upstairs.”

She started to protest.

“Upstairs,” Bobby said. “You’ll be safe.”

He had never heard his voice sound so deep and resonant.

The attic had told Carnes and Beth nothing other than how old the house was.

The cobwebbing was as thick as the fake stuff on TV monster movies.

Moonlight spilled over decades of accumulated dust and discarded toys and clothes long out of fashion.

Nothing.

He wondered now if he would ever find his daughter.

He turned to see that Beth had started down the stairs again. The dust had begun to work on her sinuses. Suddenly Beth stopped.

“What is it?” Carnes asked.

“I’m not sure,” Beth said. “Something’s going on downstairs.”

“Come on,” Carnes said.

They reached the second-floor landing and then the wide staircase leading to the vestibule.

From the top of the stairs Carnes saw Bobby Coughlin and shouted out, “Stop right there!”

For a moment, Bobby Coughlin froze in place. The man coming down the stairs looked like a lunatic. Anger and frenzy fought for dominance on his face.

Minerva scurried out of the man’s way. Apparently she knew who he was.

The man grabbed Bobby before the youth could even raise his arms to defend himself.

“I want to know what’s going on!” Carnes screamed.

Carnes started slamming Bobby against the wall trying to get him to talk.

Bobby Coughlin was terrified.

“I—I—” Bobby stammered. And finally the words came. He told Carnes everything Minerva had told him.

The story went this way: Kenny Foster was a killer. His mother had discovered this, as had the sheriff, when the lawman found the body of a dead girl in a forest drainage ditch and a piece of Kenny’s clothing close by. Terrified of the fate awaiting her son, Mrs. Foster desperately made a threat to Sheriff Wayman and the town council—if they identified Kenny as the murderer and helped imprison him, then she would see to it that her husband moved the meat factory. The town of Burton would be ruined.

Ruth had clung desperately to the notion that Kenny would someday be all right and carry on the Foster tradition in Burton.

The town council thought this over for two days. At first the council was outraged by such a suggestion of blackmail. But the longer they debated her proposal, the more obvious it became that she could in fact do just what she threatened—utterly ruin the local economy.

Finally, the “greater, good” in mind, they capitulated and struck a bargain with the woman.

In return for the safety of her son, she had to promise to send him away and keep him away from the town forever.

She had agreed.

But after several years—years in which she saw his sickness get worse instead of better—she realized that only she could help him, only she could hide the family name from shame.

So she devised an idea. At that time Kenny was living back East. She found a plastic surgeon for him to contact. Through the man’s work Kenny had become Jake and as Jake he had returned to Burton.

For three years Ruth Foster had hopes that her son had changed. He spent much of his time in the subbasement, where they saw each other. But then he had killed again and the sheriff and the town council had realized that he was back. All they could do was hope that the women he killed would be transients.

They could hardly arrest Kenny, what with their complicity in his first killing. They even overlooked the fact that Laumer was helping Kenny find victims, a job Laumer enjoyed.

Beth’s husband had begun to piece certain things together about the pact between the council and Mrs. Foster.

Which was why he had been killed.

And now Kenny...

“Kenny, he’s in the basement,” Minerva said, obviously terrified. “In the subbasement.”

“The basement,” Carnes said, “My God!”

He jumped immediately toward the cellar door.

Bobby surprised himself by following.