GRAVEWORM (12 page)

A half an hour after they left the Coombes’ house, they still hadn’t brought any of that up. Wilkes was going on about how pretty the colors were this year and how the warm days and cold nights really brightened Mother Nature’s pallet. He was driving around town in the state car, pointing out what a nice little place Bitter Lake was, how it’d be a good place for a guy to hang up his hat come retirement. How he heard they had some kind of fishing in the lake and what Fingerman thought about the Packers this year and how that ringer Shupmann had stolen fifty bucks from him when he’d bet him that the Brewers would sweep the Tigers at Miller Park last week.

But the whole time, Fingerman wasn’t really listening. Just nodding and staring out his window like he was looking for something, probably thinking about how the whole business gave him a funny feeling.

“
I’m not liking this much,” he finally said. “The whole setup.”

“
Nice town, though,” Wilkes said. “Damn nice town.”

“
Sure. Nice.”

“
Yeah, good fishing, they say… smallmouth, pickerel, perch, sunnies. I could see myself retiring here, going down to the pier every morning and drowning some worms, not doing much else. I could summer here and then head down to my sister’s in El Paso before the snow flies. A guy could do a lot worse than to retire to a sleepy little place like this.”

“
Sure.”

“
I been thinking a lot about this, settling in a place like this. Wausau’s all right, but I’d like to hang up my spikes in this sort of town.”

“
Sure.”

“
I ever tell you, kid, about how we’d go fishing spring bass with wigglers down on the Black when I was young? Now, that was some kind of action. Spend all morning out there, casting wigglers, and come home with a full stringer. We’d take ‘em over to my Gramma LaRue’s house and filet ‘em in the fish shack out back that Grandpa Jack had used as a still house in the merry days of bootleg liquor. Yeah, we’d filet ‘em and Gramma LaRue would dip those filets in salt and eggs, roll ‘em in crackers. Pan fry ‘em. You put a side of fried taters on the plate and you had a meal, you know?”

“
I don’t like fish.”

“
No, you wouldn’t.”

“
Right now, I want to talk about something else.”

“
Figured that. Nothing better than fresh fish, son, pan-fried the Grammy LaRue way. Hell, makes my mouth water.”

Fingerman sighed. “Mmm-hmm, I’ll bet. But right now I don’t want to hear about your glorious upbringing fishing the Black River or tipping over outhouses on Halloween. I don’t want to hear about how Uncle Ike laughed so hard at that Fourth of July picnic that he shit his pants or how you and Jimmy McCabe got drunk on Grandpa Jack’s chokecherry wine and spent all night in the pasture puking fire and ice. Right now, I want to talk about Margaret Stapleton and where she isn’t, which is with her husband.”

Wilkes had to suppress a grin. The kid knew his stories, all right. “You want to tell me how all that gives you a funny feeling?”

“
That’s right.”

“
Sort of a gut sense, eh? A feeling in your belly like I get when I swallow a dozen pickled eggs and wash ‘em down with a six of warm Pabst? Sure, I know the feeling, kid. It’s one of those cop things. A gut-feeling like Broderick Crawford used to get on
Highway Patrol.
I think Steve McGarrett used to get ‘em, too, when he was with
Hawaii Five-O.”

Fingerman looked at him now. “Hell are you talking about?”

But Wilkes just shook his head, remembering that his partner was just a kid and had never in his life seen any decent TV. Just a lot of shitty reality shows which is what the network execs had come up with when they ran out of plots.

“
I’m saying I got a bad feeling,” Fingerman maintained.

“
I got ya.”

Thing was, Wilkes had one too and had been really hoping it was just age. But he knew better. Margaret Stapleton was elderly and missing. The two didn’t go together like Martini and Rossi. He was still playing the Alzheimer’s card in his head, thinking maybe the old girl was suffering from dementia. That maybe she’d been on her way to the Coombes’ place, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to go there and wandered off. Maybe fell off the pier down at the lake or got lost in the woods or something, was still out there, shivering under a tree or getting her bones picked by crows. Could have happened. Or maybe it was like Bobby Creen of the Bitter Lake force had suggested, maybe the old girl had wandered off and ended up on Sunset Creek Road and fell in that old quarry up there. Damn thing had eaten more than one kid over the years and a couple deer hunters to boot. Sure, maybe. And maybe Margaret had been abducted by space aliens and was right now in a flying saucer on her way to Saturn’s moons, support hose down around her ankles while some green fellah from Altair-4 was sliding a well-oiled probe up her geriatric ass.

Maybe, maybe, and maybe. Anything was possible, they said.

Only Wilkes did not believe any of it, because that bad feeling of his persisted and he did not like what it was hinting at. Bitter Lake simply did not lose people the way Chicago or Milwaukee did. Wilkes knew that the last person (or persons) that had turned up missing in Bitter Lake were an elderly preacher named Keeves and his wife. That was fourteen years ago and still a big mystery. Since then… nothing.

Nothing at all.

Until now.

Fingerman said, “Well? What do you think happened here?”

Wilkes sighed. “Not sure, son. I’m still favoring the Alzheimer’s thing. Bud himself said how she was forgetting things. It happens. I remember when my Gramma LaRue lost it. It was a sad business, all right. Poor thing would get all dolled-up in her Sunday-go-to-church clothes and wait out on the sidewalk, pacing back and forth. Thought my Grandpa Jack was coming to pick her up for a date and he was thirty years in the ground by then. She’d stay out there for hours until one of us would bring her in. Then she’d sit there, staring out the window, eyes full of tears. About broke my heart.”

Fingerman nodded. “I’m thinking about Tara Coombes.”

Ah, the kid was moving from generalities to specifics now. “Thought you might be.”

“
She was lying about something. I’m sure of it. Don’t know why. I mean, it’s not like I think she killed the old lady or anything.”

“
Would be definitely against type.”

“
But you saw her… you saw how she looked. How her eyes got when I mentioned her sister…”

“
Like two pissholes in a snowbank?”

“…
that’s it.”

“
Okay. What do you plan on doing about it, son?”

Fingerman thought about it a long time before he answered. “Maybe I’ll start checking a few things out. Tara Coombes. Her kid sister. Take it from there. I just can’t quite get away from Tara’s eyes. I can still see them.”

Wilkes could too.

Like the eyes of a Jack-o’-lantern burning in his head. Eyes once dark with sorrow and bright with profound truth. Eyes filled with secrets. Maybe all that had nothing to do with Margaret Stapleton, but they’d never really know until they did what cops did best: get their hands in the dirt and start digging. The disappearance of the old girl was a mystery, a grim secret this town was holding tight to its breast. And Wilkes had a feeling that when that particular secret saw the light of day, it was going to be brutal and ugly beyond belief.

25

Lisa was in a cellar.

She was chained to a wall.

Many hours ago she had given up screaming, given up crying, given up a lot of things. After she had been kidnapped, after she had seen a woman she’d known very well get murdered and dismembered, and after she had been buried alive and then resurrected… well, there wasn’t too much that could upset her.

So Lisa waited there, in chains.

The cellar was dark, dank-smelling. The floor was dirt and the only light there was came in through a dusty window set in the far wall. It only gave minimal illumination in the large cellar and she could not be sure just how large or even where she was in it now.

She waited there, her dirty face streaked with tears.

It was very cool and damp down there and she shivered.

She kept telling herself all that had transpired was real. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t some fevered nightmare she would wake from at three in the morning. This was real. She had been kidnapped by a man who claimed his name was John Shears, but she no longer believed that. The man was a ghoul. A psycho. Lisa had seen her share of true crime documentaries on TV. She knew that things like this happened. She knew that sometimes monsters like her keeper abducted girls and kept them chained up in dark cellars for years. The girls were raped. Tortured. Brutalized. And when they were rescued, if ever, they were usually insane after what they had been through.

And right then, she knew that madness was close.

She could feel it scratching in her brain like something locked in a moldering trunk that wanted to be let out. First, there had been panic and horror. Then despair and sheer terror, claustrophobia and shock. And now… now there was madness. A madness like a black, sucking pool opening beneath her. And if she gave into it, if she relaxed even a moment, then she would sink into the darkness of insanity for an eternity.

Are they looking for me?
she wondered.
Are the police even now going house to house to house? Was Tara out of her mind? Was it in the newspapers? Oh dear God, how could any of it be happening and how long would she be here? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Oh God, not that, not that, anything but—

Listen.

A sound.

Something.

Was it the man? Was it that fucking ghoul and that creature Worm who was little better than an animal?
I’m going to keep you down here, Lisa. Go ahead and scream if you want. I like girls who scream. And I like them even better when they’re still, when they’re quiet. You might want to remember that.

It was at this point that Lisa realized that what she was hearing was…
breathing.
Yes, a subtle yet raspy respiration coming to her out of the darkness. Drawing her legs up, she tried to make herself as invisible as possible, listening and peering into the gloom. There was a wall in the distance and next to it… a shadowy shape. It could have been a crate or an overturned chair, but Lisa did not think so. The more she looked, the more saw something else.

Two glistening things.

Eyes.

Eyes watching her.

Eyes that had probably been watching her for some time now.

Like glass eyes, like the eyes of a wind-up monkey or a puppet: shining and dead but maybe not as dead as they should be. It’s her and you know it. It’s that girl. Worm. That stupid, mindless, maggoty little girl who maybe is nothing more than an animal but maybe she’s not as dumb as you think because YOU’RE the one chained to the wall, missy. You’re the stupid bitch that got into a stranger’s car and spun the wheel of fucking chance and this after you’d been warned your entire life not to take candy from strangers. So who’s the STUPID one now? You let this happen. You were seduced effortlessly. YOU put your head on the block. YOU got into that car. You might as well have screamed MOLEST ME, RAPE ME, DESTROY ME because, in a way, that’s exactly what you did say. And now you’re here. You’re chained in a dirty stinking cellar with a graveworm for company and ain’t that just special? The same crawling horror that chopped up Margaret with a hatchet. You stupid bitch… who’s your daddy now?

Swallowing down fear and paranoia and an entire catalog of sorrows, she said, “Who is that? Is someone there?”

A smacking sound like parting lips.

A rustle of cloth.

“
Who is that?”

There was a quick furtive shuffling and then something came bounding out of the darkness with an obscene hopping. She thought it was some huge, pale, hairless spider because it skittered much like one, but it was only Worm. She hopped over near Lisa and just sat there, rocking back and forth on her haunches. Her black hair hung in her face. Her arms and legs were streaked with dirt. Her feet were filthy. She wore a long white T-shirt with a Barbie emblem on it. A stink of urine and moist soil came off her.

She came no closer.

Lisa wanted to scream now. She did not know what Worm was and some purely superstitious sliver of terror told her that she was not even a girl but some malefic thing from a grave. But she knew she couldn’t think things like that, couldn’t let her imagination run wild. She had to use her head, had to be calm even though she was shivering now, within and without.

“
Worm,” she said. “Can you let me go?”

Worm shook her head. Her breathing got louder as she did so. It sounded phlegmy and congested like she was sick.