Death Before Facebook (14 page)

“Well, that made her mad. I mean, really mad, and I caught on that the other kind of fightin’ was an act and when she didn’t get what she wanted, that was when she got bitchy. See, the way I piece it together, Leighton always gave her what she wanted—got jealous, got into a fight with her, got seduced and had a rare old time. You gotta remember, he wasn’t married to her as long as I was.”

“How long were you married to her?”

“Six years. Seemed like sixteen. Anyway, after I caught on to what was happening, I just left her alone. And then that started a whole new deal about why didn’t I care anymore and I must have another woman and all that kind of crap. But I’d had it by then. I just wasn’t falling for all that stompin’ and screamin’ and carrying on anymore.

“Anyway, by that time I could see I wasn’t going to get what I wanted out of the marriage.”

“And what was that?”

“Well, I was crazy about that ’lil ol’ Geoff. What I wanted was a kid.” For the first time he looked sad rather than unpleasantly angry. “But Marguerite just wasn’t interested.” He was quiet for a moment. “You know, sometimes I think I’m kiddin’ myself, that I didn’t marry her out of duty or because she was kind of pretty or anything. I just fell in love with that kid.” There was real pain in his voice.

“That must have been the hardest part about getting divorced.”

“Always is, they tell me. The kid. That’s why I stuck with her so long in the first place. In the end, she was the one wanted to get divorced. I guess I kept hopin’ she’d change.” He shrugged. “But both of us met someone within six months or so, got married again, and had a daughter. That always pissed me off, you know? That more than anything. That she had a kid with him when she wouldn’t have one with me. But I tried not to let it bother me; I had to be civil to her to keep up with Geoff. I miss that boy, you know that?” He had tears in his eyes.

“You still married?”

“No way. Got me another bitch, second time around. Totally different from Marguerite; I thought if I got an ugly one she’d stay home and take care of me like she was s’posed to. Helen was short, fat, and dumb—and just as mean as Marguerite. That’s it for me, lady. No more of this marriage shit.”

Skip didn’t reply, more or less struck speechless.

“But it was worth it. Got me a beautiful daughter that time. You know what? I got a picture right here.” He pulled a worn wallet out of his back pocket and extracted a photo of a teenage girl who’d obviously gotten both parents’ fat genes. But he was right, she was lovely just the same, mostly because of her skin, which was almost translucent, delicately pink.

“Light of my life. I’m crazy about that kid.” His moony face looked like the sun for a moment. He rested a hand on each knee, a man at ease for a second in the torment he seemed to find life on Earth. He smiled a distant smile, looked fondly at the wall for a bit, and came back, patting his knees to signal his return.

“Well, I guess that’s it. I just wanted to tell you my brother was the only thing I ever loved except for his son Geoff and my daughter Suby. I wouldn’t hurt Leighton, Ms. Langdon. And I wouldn’t hurt Geoff. I’d rather cut off my arm.”

I could believe the first part, anyway, the way this guy hates women.

She thought briefly about letting him get away with the way he’d addressed her, just to avoid a confrontation.

But why should I put up with that crap? He probably makes a career out of pushing women around.

“Officer Langdon, Officer Kavanagh. Thanks for coming by.”

“Well, sorry to offend you, Officer.”

“Thanks for getting in touch.” She didn’t smile as she said it.

“A lot of good this did me,” he said, and walked out of the room.

“You, sir, are a grump,” Skip said to the air.

Marguerite needed talking to, but Skip decided to leave her until after the funeral—Lenore needed talking to just as badly. If Geoff had told her things in confidence, she might be ready to come out with them. And how had she gotten that coroner’s report?

Skip gave her time to get off work, get home, and put her kid to bed. She turned up about eight-thirty, and was dismayed to see that the house looked dark. The curtains were drawn, but one of them moved slightly, and she thought she saw a flash of something, maybe a TV screen. Or a candle. The motion made her sigh—if she was about to interrupt a romantic evening, so be it.

She walked to the front door and raised a hand to ring the doorbell. But even as she started to press it, something stopped her.

Chanting.

Was it “Om”? Or just “Oooooooooooooooo”? She’d never heard anything like it. It made her spine tingle and her scalp prickle, made her want to get in the car, step on the gas, turn on her red light, and drive to Mexico.

Come on,
she told herself
. It’s just voices.
What’s the big deal?

The chant changed: “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaa…”

The voices were women’s, she thought, and they were playing with the sound, drawing it out, some singing in different keys, at different pitches from the others. The effect was eerier than bagpipes.

Shivering, trying to shake off what she knew was irrational fear, Skip moved to the side of the house. As she’d hoped, there were windows here whose curtains hadn’t been drawn. The trick would be to look in without being seen.

She needn’t have worried. The people inside were standing in a circle, arms around each other’s waists, swaying, eyes closed, so deeply involved in the chant she could probably take her time.

Candles burned at odd places about the room, some on what appeared to be an altar—or a coffee table that had been turned into one. In the light they cast, the ones on the altar were easy to see. There were two tall ones, one black and one green; and there were several votive candles, all black.

Also on the altar was a candle snuffer, a knife or dagger with a fancy handle, and some kind of small round plate with a star engraved on it—Pentacle, she thought, not quite knowing where the word came from. A large ceramic chalice was filled with some kind of dark liquid—red, she thought. Or am I crazy? And oddly, a curiously mundane item nestled in the midst of the macabre—a china plate of cookies. Next to the cookies was a skull.

Not a cow’s skull, or a cat’s skull.

A human skull.

The people chanting wore hooded black robes. Candlelight glinted on something shiny on one of the faces—something strangely metallic. Skip stared until, revolted, she realized it must be a nose ring. But she couldn’t tell anything about the face itself—that one or the others. Not even if the robed figures were men or women, black or white.

Voodoo, she thought.

But it didn’t seem right. She had been to the voodoo museum on a case, had read a little about it. This looked a little too stark for voodoo. There should be figures on the altar, perhaps. Offerings of rum and cigars. And she didn’t think the robes were right. Shouldn’t they be white?

But the cookies must be an offering of some sort.

Why cookies?

They were creeping her out, those cookies, so plain and wholesome sitting there next to the skull. Had she come face-to-face with the infamous banality of evil? The phrase had always puzzled her.

The chant was winding down.

I’d better get out of here, or they’ll sacrifice me and drink my blood.

She ran back to the car. It probably would have been safer to walk, but she couldn’t help it, she ran.

Once inside, windows up, keys in ignition, radio at hand, she felt her heart beating as if she’d run five miles. It was cold outside, but she tasted sweat.

She tried deep breathing
. Can I meditate
? she wondered. Usually, she couldn’t—she hated to sit still—but she had to get her center back. She sat and breathed until her heart slowed down. Only then did it occur to her to wonder what had gotten to her. Why was the thing so scary when there probably wasn’t any danger at all? The only weapon she’d seen was the dagger on the altar, and she had a .38. What was the big deal?

She honestly didn’t know.

Much as she would have given anything to go home and pull the covers over her head, she settled down to wait for the strange ritual to end. It was no night to beard Lenore, but she had to try to find out who’d been in there.

She wrote down the license numbers of the nearby cars and hunched down.

She had plenty of time to meditate; she could have written a sonnet or a symphony, too, if she’d been the creative kind. It was an hour and a half before the door opened and women’s voices chimed merrily.

“’Bye!”

“See you soon.”

“Give Caitlin a kiss for me.”

Skip shivered.

They hugged their hostess good-bye and tripped daintily to their cars, as if they’d just been to a tea party. They looked pretty normal except for the one with the nose ring—and she would have without it.

Several of them went to the cars Skip was watching.

Excitedly, she ran the plates. Two were noteworthy: one was registered to a Michael Kavanagh, one to a Nita Susan Terry.

Yes, now that she thought of it. The heavy girl who’d gotten in Kavanagh’s car was probably the one in the picture he’d shown her. The other one, the one with the nose ring, was about the age to be Neetsie Terry.

When she got home she ran all the names she had—six in all—through the TOWN’s data bank. Three were TOWNspeople—Neetsie (SaraB), Suby (Michelle), and someone named Kathryne Brazil (Kit), a tall slim woman who seemed a good deal older than the others.

SKIP FOUND, AS always, that once logged on it was difficult to get off. It wasn’t that she was fascinated—in fact, she was more or less bored—but there were so many choices, so many possibilities….

Who could resist checking a few of them out?

First, of course, she went to Geoff’s topics. Nothing new, which was wonderful news. Maybe she was up to speed with regard to the TOWN; that should improve her self-esteem.

What next? This was supposed to be a place where you could get information. Was there anything that could help her? How about religion? Yes, there was a Religion conference; she went there. There were 305 topics, mostly, it seemed, dealing with various forms of Buddhism and with channeling.

Ah, there it was—“Is It True What They Say About Satanism?”

Eagerly, she dropped in.

Reading quickly, licking her lips, she went through 150 entries in about half an hour. The gist of the discussion seemed to be whether Satanism was somehow an urban myth, a product of false memory syndrome, rather than a real phenomenon. Some of the people who posted, for instance, found it hard to believe that women were systematically gotten pregnant and forced to give birth to babies who were then sacrificed and eaten.

The whole Satanic scare, it seemed, had started with a book called
Michelle Remembers
that blew the whistle on the baby sacrifices and such described by people who claimed to have grown up in a Satanic cult. The name Michelle, Suby’s user ID, gave Skip a tiny bit of hope, but it was the only thing that did. Neither Lenore, Suby, nor Neetsie had posted in the conference.

Kathryne Brazil (Kit) had, however. She noted that nearly all the victims of the Inquisition had confessed to witchcraft and had described it in the same terms as all the other confessors—something about having sex with the devil, who had a memorable member. Though since none of the women complained of frostbite in a usually warm area, Kit couldn’t see why, unless they were lying. Well, not lying exactly—simply asked certain leading questions under torture. She had said she didn’t know whether that was quite like a shrink questioning a kid about his adventures with Mom and Dad’s naked pals, but it was funny the subject was the same.

That tells me exactly nothing
, Skip thought.
Oh, well, what next?

I know. What’s with tattoos and nose rings
?

In her mind, the two went together. Lenore had a tattoo and Neetsie had a nose ring. She associated both with heavy metal, which seemed rich in Satanic imagery.

Sure enough, there was a whole topic on body piercing, with a tattoo thread running through it. By the time she had read it, she knew quite a number of interesting things, but not whether the two went together (though some posters said one was a subset of the other) and not why people did them.

One thing she knew was that people sometimes got piercings in a sort of ritual with drums and hand-holdings, perhaps not unlike the one she’d just witnessed.

Another thing she knew was that, if you got your nipples pierced, you probably didn’t have to worry that it would interfere with breast-feeding unless you got badly infected; as a side issue (known on the TOWN as “topic drift”), she knew that a nipple has about 120 milk ducts.

She also knew two positions for labia piercings, each grosser than the other, and she knew that, if she should ever desire such a thing, it would be okay to bring friends to hold her down, and okay to videotape the procedure. She wondered if even Miss Manners was aware of these nuances.

Finally, she knew six different ways the penis could be pierced, including the ever-popular Prince Albert (“parallel,” the poster had gravely explained, “through the urethra”).

She had to admit that nose rings were pretty tame when there were questions like these to be explored.

She had found the piercing topic in the Sex conference and what the hell, she thought, why not stay there?

An entirely unembarrassed crowd of men and women who couldn’t see each other’s faces frolicked happily on their virtual bed, merrily tackling such questions as “The Best Phone Sex I Ever Had,” “What I’d Never Do Again,” “Flirting Online,” and “Who I’d Most Like to Do It With.”

None of the people she’d met posted here except Layne, who seemed more earnest about seeing that the gay side was presented than carefree about dirty talk in cyberspace.

She had to admit to a fascination with “Flirting Online.” Here people described (presumably in front of the people they were talking about) what happened when you knew only what a person wanted you to know about him or her. They liked each other’s posts, they bantered publicly, they engaged in E-mail, they wrote in a chatty, friendly way, and somewhere they crossed the line into flirting. Next thing you knew they were turning out porn and slavering for each other. So they did what civilized people do at the
fin de siecle
—they made a coffee date.