Darkness peering (26 page)

"Exactly what difference would it have made?"

"I don't know."

"Then why tell me?"

She shook her head mutely, eyes wide, and Rachel knew she was holding
something back. "I've gotta go."

"Casey..."

"I really have to go now ... they'll be wondering where I am. I don't
want them to know I was talking to you."

"What went wrong in there, Casey?"

"I don't know. Something awful. I never want to be that scared again
as long as I live."

GUS ENTERED THE CLASSROOM SWINGING HIS CANE IN SUCH

broad, lethal arcs, Abraham Andrews had to leap out of his way. Gus
must've been crying because his eyes were swollen shut, and Abraham
guessed he'd heard the ugly rumors circulating around school. Abraham
was the director of Winfield School for the Blind and Special Needs,
and his neck was stiff from lack of sleep. He detested being put in
such a position, but Billy Storrow, Claire's teacher's aide, had called
him late last night to confess he didn't know what to tell the
children, didn't have a clue, and so it was up to Abraham to break the
news.

"All right, boys and girls. Settle down."

The students formed a semicircle, luminous faces uplifted, heads cocked
toward the sound of his voice. The room's stillness was insufferable.
Claire Castillo's absence clanged like a bell. She should have been
there, brushing her long, flowing hair off her face, fingering the tiny
gold cross at the base of her throat.

Abraham considered Claire to be one of the best teachers he'd ever
hired, but he didn't know about Billy. How could someone so bright be
so lacking in ambition? What was he now, thirty-four?

Billy Storrow was leaning against the blackboard, trying to make
himself invisible. Arms crossed, eyes downcast. His knees wobbled,
but his feet somehow managed to plant themselves, and Abraham silently
encouraged him to pull himself together. Come on, boy, suck it up.
Abraham was there to break the news, but Billy would have to shoulder
the rest of the day himself until a substitute teacher could be
found.

"I'm afraid I've got bad news." Abraham couldn't keep his usually
booming voice from shaking. "Some of you may have already heard about
Ms. Castillo ..." He broke off in mid-sentence. Their wide,
expectant eyes were indifferent to the glaring sunlight, and suddenly
he realized how unknowable they were in their innocence. Next to these
children, he felt old. Worn-out. "Ms. Castillo passed away last
night," he said simply.

The children remained remarkably silent, fingering their pencils and
gazing at the sunlight slanting in through the windows.

"We've all been invited to the service this coming weekend."

"What happened?" one of the students asked. Her name was Gabie.
Abraham only had to be introduced once, and the name stuck. "How come
she had to die?"

Billy wilted, hands covering his face.

Abraham glanced around the room. "Her heart stopped," he said as
gently as he could.

"Why?"

"Because she was very sick."

"Why?"

"I don't know, children."

"How come her heart stopped?" a tall boy named Luke wanted to know.
"What happened?"

"There was ... an accident," Abraham hedged, shooting Billy

a sideways glance. No wonder he'd palmed this heartbreaking little
task off on him. But it was all right. Abraham had broad shoulders.

"What kind of an accident?"

"Mr. Storrow?" Gus said. "Are you here?"

"Yes, I'm here." The children turned expectantly toward the sound of
his voice as if he were an index of their despair and hope.

"What happened to Ms. Castillo?"

Abraham detected the sub-Richter shift of Billy's pupils and thought to
himself, This won't do.

"Sometimes," Billy answered in a voice softened by sustained shock,
"sometimes bad things happen to really nice people. There's no ...
there's no explanation why, really ... there's no--"

"She was murdered," one of the children blurted.

There it was. The word hung suspended in the air. A communal gasp was
followed by a stunned silence. Things had strayed far afield.

"Now, children," Abraham said, "speculation will get us nowhere."

"That's not true, is it, Mr. Storrow?" Gabie wanted to know. She had
an awkward way of sitting, never resting for too long in one place, as
if she were being constantly observed. "Was she murdered?"

Billy was trembling visibly now, lightning dancing behind his eyes.
This wouldn't do. Not at all. Another few minutes and he'd be
blubbering like a toddler. Abraham realized he'd better rearrange his
schedule in order to accommodate these anxious and confused students.
They sorely needed an adult around.

"Who killed her?" Gus asked, tears streaming down his battered face.
They were all staring vacantly, mouths dots of despair.

"We don't know what happened," Abraham said firmly, taking

the reins. The class was his now. "All we know is that someone we
all loved and cared about is no longer with us."

"Where is she?" asked a small voice.

Looking around the room, he tried to match the face with the voice, and
found the tiny albino girl, the one with the key fetish. "Well,
Brigette," he said, "she's in heaven now."

The children fell silent again, and he hoped they were conjuring up
their beloved teacher in heaven with wings and a halo, for that was
certainly where Claire Castillo belonged.

THE CAST ILLO HOUSEHOLD WAS THICK WITH ANGUISH. RAchel crossed the
dining room past an eight-person dining table and matching oak hutch
into the living room, where an impeccably groomed Jackie Castillo
waited for her on the white sectional sofa. "I stare at the phone and
pray for good news," she confessed, her angular face streaked with
sunlight. "When it rings, I practically jump out of my skin."

"I'd like to go through Nicole's bedroom," Rachel said softly, "to
search for any possible clues."

"Yes, of course." Jackie reluctantly emerged from her cloud of grief.
"Right this way." Her light touch wouldn't threaten a house of
cards.

It was a typical teenager's room, except for the traces of fingerprint
powder covering every surface: newly purchased clothes, stuffed animals
tumbling off the bed, old Cabbage Patch dolls and Judy Blume books
lining the shelves. There was a dusty telescope in one corner, a stack
of CDs and a CD player in the other. The last album she'd been
listening to was Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'.

On the desktop was a Macintosh computer and printer, schoolbooks and
crumpled homework pages. Tucked in the top drawer was an illicit pack
of cigarettes, five dollars in change, and a love letter from Dinger
Tedesco: "I will never stop loving you. You are so beautiful, Nicole.
Did I ever tell you how beautiful you were? U have all the answers.
Yers 4-ever, Dinger.

XXXOOOXXX."

Everything--clothes, CDs, books, makeup--was accounted for, except for
what Nicole had worn out of the house that night, along with her bike
and backpack. Jackie described her daughter's outfit: pair of spandex
tights, white sweat socks, hiking boots, yellow T-shirt, blue down
jacket, the silver necklace holding Dinger's school ring, two
glow-in-the-dark barrettes in the shape of stars, two tiny gold hoop
earrings.

Like her sister before her, Nicole had simply disappeared. Rachel
didn't know how much more of this she could take. The room spoke of
the incredible promise of this child on the verge of womanhood.

Nauseated, she left the house, walked out to her car and stood in the
freezing cold. Every angry thought found instant expression inside her
crowded brain, where promising leads circled and collided with alibis
and dead ends. She needed to vacuum her mental landscape. Stop
thinking, she silently insisted, staring at her own papery breath
smudging the bitter autumn air.

RACHEL VISITED THE PLACE IX THE WOODS WHERE CLAIRE

Castillo was last seen alive, a rise near Highway 71 less than a mile
from the downtown business district. The forest floor was wet from the
recent downpour, carpeted with sword ferns and

fallen leaves. Old Mo Heppenheimer's cow pasture, where Melissa
D'Agostino's body had been discovered eighteen years ago, was two miles
east. Rachel stood for a moment in the shadow of the tall pines and
surveyed the eorcloned-off area. Officers were combing the woods for
clues, and so far nothing useful had been found. They'd spent the day
soaked to the bone, sifting through wet leaves, overturning stones and
kicking in rotten stumps in their relentless search for evidence.

Rachel trudged past a deadfall fir, with each step her heart beating
just a little harder for the young woman she hadn't been able to save.
She slid down a slimy incline, wondering what it must have been like
for Claire on this death march through the woods. The UN SUB most
likely had pulled his car over onto the shoulder of Highway 71,
escorted her toward this general area, forced her to lie down, injected
her with an unknown substance and then exited the area, leaving Claire
to crawl out of the woods on her own. Rachel hoped against hope the UN
SUB had left something of himself behind, but once again the heavy
rainfall didn't help.

Rachel made a mental map of the area. Eighteen years ago, five stray
cats had been decapitated in a grove one and a half miles northeast of
this location, and Melissa D'Agostino had been strangled to death two
miles east of here. Her heart was a fist knocking against her rib
cage. The clouds were torn away, sun shining down through a canopy of
golden leaves, and suddenly everything seemed crystal clear. She
thought about her brother, the absence of grief in his dull eyes after
their father's tragic suicide. She vividly recalled a dream he'd once
had about killing a neighborhood girl. She lived on their block, and
rumor had it she liked to play doctor. Billy must Ye been thirteen or
fourteen, and he hated this girl, he said. In his dream, he cut off
her head. It was the way he'd said it that stuck with her, eyes
flashing, mouth a vicious blur, just like his idea about the Old
Testament God being better than the New Testament Codbrutal, bitter,
avenging, murderous, the kind of deity who took no prisoners and made
no excuses.

She loved her brother but didn't fully understand him. Sometimes they
could be so close, yet other times he withdrew from her like a snail
into its shell. Even as children, she sensed he had a secret life. He
could have easily become a teacher, but instead he'd chosen to remain a
teacher's aide. He'd won a scholarship to Amherst, had majored in
English, had graduated with honors, and yet he'd never written so much
as a paragraph as far as she could tell. He was bright and kind, the
best brother anybody could ever want, yet he'd alienated himself from
all his old friends and had never had a successful relationship with a
woman. His one long-term relationship lasted only a few years. Gillian
Dumont. She'd moved away over a decade ago and nobody had been able to
locate her after she left Seattle.

Billy lived alone in a house four miles north of here, and worked at
Winfield, half a mile to the northwest. Billy was obsessively neat.
He owned a dark-colored car, a forest green Plymouth Breeze. He'd
always had difficulties with women. He was very intelligent and
organized. He'd been implicated in the murder of Melissa D'Agostino and
he'd admitted to killing those cats. Disturbed individuals were known
to torture animals in their childhood. Violence was generational.
Billy was a local. He lived in a secluded part of town and had, in the
past, rented a cabin in the woods near the Canadian border.

Rachel shook her head. What kind of desperate speculation was this?
It went against everything she knew about her brother. Despite his
shortcomings, Billy was no monster. It failed to make sense to her on
any level, and she dropped the thought as abruptly as it had
appeared.

Reaching for a tree branch, Rachel hauled herself out of a ravine and
grabbed the trunk of a birch tree. There were indentations in the
bark, three gnarled holes that reminded her of the holes in a bowling
ball. People sometimes collected sap from

these trees, drilling holes with a gimlet, then hanging a tomato can
on a nail to collect the water-sap. She traced her fingers over the
rough, sticky bark, then looked around at the patches of light and
shadow, the sky above her a stirred-up summer blue. Exactly the kind
of weather they should've had four weeks ago when Claire Castillo first
went missing, instead of this relentless downpour that washed away
fingerprints and fibers, hairs and precious clues, leaving no odor for
the bloodhounds to track. It was cosmically unfair.

Rachel followed an overgrown trail to Winnetka Road, where Ozzie Rudd
had spotted the victim crawling out of the forest. They'd already
examined the marks in the leafy dirt where she'd dragged herself along,
semiconscious. With her mouth sewn shut, Claire wouldn't have been
able to scream for help.

The chirp of brakes snapped Rachel's train of thought in half.
McKissack got out of his car and joined her by the side of the road,
his face peppered with beard stubble, eyes red-rimmed from lack of
sleep. He put on a pair of mirrored glasses and gripped her arm. "How
are you?"

"Fine."

"Funny, you don't look so hot."

"Neither do you." She smiled back.

"No word from the lab yet about the semen." McKissaek's mouth tucked
around the corners. "How about you? Any luck?"

"One of the nurses at the hospital told me she didn't think Claire
Castillo had an asthma attack in the ER that night. She seemed
concerned about the doctor's decision to treat the patient for acute
asthma."

McKissack shrugged. "Ultimately, it wouldn't've mattered what he did
if she was poisoned."