GRAVEWORM (31 page)

Frank was nervous about going into the kitchen.

Sure, Steve understood that. He’d had a relationship with Tara and Tara’s world was her kitchen. Though she was simply too high-strung to eat much herself, she cooked and baked with a frenzy. And that was probably because her mother had and she made sure that her mother’s shoes were filled completely. Lisa would lack nothing.

The kitchen was just as spotless. The smell of Pine-Sol was even stronger, mixed with stale cigarette smoke into a heady, pungent brew. There was an ashtray by the sink, but it was empty. That was Tara. Two butts in there she’d empty it, wipe it out.

He shook his head. “Nothing but cigarette butts.”

He went over to the refrigerator and saw that it was amply stocked with milk and juices and bottled water, fruit and vegetables, but no meat. No leftovers. Everything was meticulously organized in its proper place. The water bottles were in such straight lines you could have set a level against them and the glass shelves themselves were gleaming.

“Man, she’s even more anal than she used to be,” Frank said.

“
She’s always like that a little bit,” Steve said, though it did not need saying. “But… but this is extreme even for her.”

“What are you thinking?” Frank asked him.

“
It’s just that…”

“This place looks like it was stored in a box?”

“Yeah.”

Nothing more needed to be said about that. Steve led the way upstairs and, again, Frank hesitated. They were now invading the most private recesses of the house. It was up here, Steve knew, that she and Frank must have—

No, he wasn’t going to think silly jealous shit like that.

Frank would not go into Tara’s room, so Steve gave it the once-over himself. Nothing out of place. This was a waste of time. She was just busy as usual, that’s why she wasn’t home. He knew if he told himself that long enough he might even start believing it.

Lisa’s room.

Now here was the strange thing: Lisa’s room was what might be called Teenage Girl Modern. The bed was unmade. Clothes overflowing the hamper. CDs and books heaped on a desk, a vanity mirror top cluttered with makeup and nail polish, a few magazines, a couple empty water bottles, hair dryer, a heart-shaped tin overflowing with ponytail rings. The closet was ajar and that was because there were so many shoes in there the door wouldn’t close.

Frank laughed at the sight of it all. “Well, the kid hasn’t changed any.”

Steve tried to laugh with him, but it just wouldn’t come. Tara had sterilized the entire house… but left this room untouched? It seemed absolutely inconceivable. Tara was always after Lisa to clean her room. It became a bloodied point of contention between them. Absolute verbal knock-down, drag-outs. And in the end, of course, Lisa won and Tara couldn’t take it so she went in there and cleaned it herself and Lisa had a pissy fit over the whole thing. Drama, drama.

But now in this latest manic, obsessive-compulsive cleaning barrage, she had left this room untouched?

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Steve said to Frank and told him why.

“Maybe she got sick of it.”

Steve just looked at him. “Tara? Conceding defeat?”

“
Yeah, I see your point. She got lazy?”

Again, Steve gave him the look.

“Okay, I guess not.”

This was screaming something dead in Steve’s face but for the life of him he could not hear the words. This meant something. This was no red herring, this was the big clue, only he could not define it.

“
Let’s get out of here,” he finally said after standing at the doorway to Lisa’s room for a few minutes. It was like the threshold between tidy and chaos, between this world and the next.

“
Sounds good,” Frank said. “This place is giving me the creeps and I honestly don’t know why.”

And neither did Steve. Only that he felt it so deeply he was almost physically ill with it.

58

Wasting time, wasting time, wasting time. Couldn’t they see how they were wasting their time? Tara almost laughed at the idea of them watching her through the mirrored glass. She kept thinking about that movie with Sharon Stone where she crosses and uncrosses her legs without anything on under her skirt.
Sorry, boys. I wore jeans. No show today.
That made her giggle… but not outwardly, only in her head where sometimes there was a lot of giggling which was better than the other sound: the boogeyman’s voice scratching around inside her skull like rats in the walls of old houses.

She stared at the glass.

Detective-Sergeant Wilkes said he was going to get somebody to give her a lift back to her house. That’s what he
said.
Of course, his real reason was to leave her inside this tight little room, alone with her thoughts, maybe hoping some dark flowers of guilt would begin to bloom and she’d cry out, admitting it all, screaming at the top of her lungs—

The room didn’t bother her because she was not remotely claustrophobic. Even being buried in a box—
don’t think that, you fucking idiot, don’t you dare think that—
did not scare her. Let the boogeyman take her and try and bury her in a fucking box and she wouldn’t even scream. Not that she would let him get that far. But she
would
bait him. Use whatever was necessary to pull him in, get him in the trap so she could show him what it was like to suffer and, oh yes, oh yes indeedy, he was going to find out when he was trapped in her web and she had him right where she wanted him.
Do you like it my fat, juicy fly? Do you feel terror and fear as I creep ever closer with my many legs and my sucking mouth puckers for your throat?

Tara realized she was breathing hard.

A bead of sweat rolled down her cheek.

Don’t wipe it, they’ll see!

Calm, remain calm, that was how you did this. Yet, the weird and distorted and thoroughly grotesque imagery of her as a spider creeping down her web to the trapped and squealing boogeyman… it had excited her. God, she felt hot all over. Her nipples were erect, pressing against the lacey material of her bra. There was a dampness where her thighs met and she had the craziest, most obscene impulse to unzip her pants and slide a finger into herself… no, two fingers. That’s exactly what she wanted, but she fought against the hot animal lust inside and concentrated on that mirror because she knew they were watching her.

Get a good eyeful, you assholes.

I know what I’m doing.

I’ll get Lisa and then I’ll get the fucking beast who took her. There won’t be any courts or stays for him, I’ll teach that slimy crawling fucking worm to go dirtying up my life and putting his filthy fingers on my sister.

Tara sat there, crossing her legs and uncrossing them, trying to control that pesky tic in the corner of her lips, bunching her left hand into a fist because it shook so badly. It had been shaking like that ever since she’d clutched Margaret’s cool blood-clotted hair with it and pulled the head free of the drying rack. It had touched something it did not like and refused to stop trembling.

Let it shake.

Each night the game.

And each night closer.

She felt strong, she felt mighty, she felt invincible. She felt like a warrior hopped up on bloodlust, a berserker tripping his brains out with death-lust. She was ready to spill blood, to bathe in its dark rivers and nobody had better try and stop her. The glory would be hers. The glory of the kill. And her left hand had better get used to it because Margaret’s head would not be the only one it would lift high.

Oh, the smell, the stink.

Yes, this damn room. She could really smell the god-awful stench of misery and guilt, fear and anxiety. These things bled from the walls in a sickly brown sap. She could feel it oozing over her, dripping on her, trying to worm its jellied way into her pores. Wilkes thought he would break her but she was flexible, rubbery, she could not break. But the smell… well,
yes,
it was disturbing and it made her feel dirty and sticky like there was dried blood on her skin, a membrane of it. Too bad she didn’t have cleaners, she would have cleaned the place up for them.

They’d think you were crazy.

Yes, Tara knew she had to sit there and be calm, relaxed, unconcerned… but her mind kept wandering in so many murky directions, creeping down so many twisting dark avenues. It was hard to control her thinking. It was hard to concentrate. That mirror. They were watching her, those fucking pricks.
Funny.
Windows. Mirrors. Reflections never looked completely real in them, kind of like Tara’s world which was slightly askew like that untidy world Alice had spied through the looking glass. It felt like that. Everything looked normal… yet it wasn’t, things were off-center somehow, gloomy, shadowy like there was a sheet of yellowing cellophane between her and reality.

Wasn’t that weird?

She needed to quit thinking like some crazy woman and concentrate on what was here and now. She wished she had her razor. She would cut her arms until they bled and that would make things clearer. It always did.

C’mon, Wilkes! I don’t have all fucking day here!

Soon enough, soon enough. She could still smell that awful stink in the room, but it was her own smell that was starting to bother her—it was sweating out of her pores, an awful fetor of death. Well-marbled slabs of raw meat, coiled greasy loops of gut, cool stiffening limbs, and heads… staring, glaze-eyed heads bearded in drying blood.
Good God, the stink of it. It’s gagging.
It was in her hair. On her fingertips. They would smell it when they came in. She knew they would because they were cops with cop’s noses, twitching pink hog noses with flaring porcine nostrils that could smell dirt and filth and rubbish and decay.
Oh, but if they smell it on me I won’t let them get their dirty grubbing fingers on me I won’t let them I’ll scream I’ll claw their fucking eyes out they better not try and stop me because I won’t let them I WON’T FUCKING LET THEM GET IN-BETWEEN ME AND LISA I CAN’T BUT OH THAT FUCKING STINK OF GRAVEYARD DIRT AND COFFIN ROT I CAN SMELL IT I’LL KILL THEM I’LL SLITHER AWAY AND THEY WON’T GET ME THEY WON’T—

The door opened and Wilkes stepped in. “Are you all right, Miss Coombes?”

She wiped cool/hot sweat from her face. “Never better.”

“I have a car here for you.”

“
It’s about time,” she said, refusing to look at him as he passed because his face looked like pale, moist mortician’s wax.

59

When Wilkes was done and Tara Coombes was gone, he found Bud Stapleton waiting for him in a little office that was vacant this time of evening. He was pretending to be reading a magazine, but the tough old cop was nervous like he had a belly filled with kittens. He could barely sit still.

“What do you think?” he said, paging through his magazine.

“I’m not sure.”

Wilkes sat down on the opposite side of the desk and studied the dying rays of the evening. He had watched Tara while she was alone and all she did was stare at the glass and smile. And there had been something terribly wrong about that smile… yet, she seemed composed.

“
To tell you the truth,” Wilkes said to him. “I find it very hard to read that woman. Her eyes bother me, though. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

Bud Stapleton nodded.

“
I don’t see at this juncture where we can do anything. She said her sister will be home in a few days or so and then we’ll have a chat with her. And if she says she hasn’t seen your wife, then this has all been a colossal dead end and you have yourself a very angry neighbor.”

“
Well, you better learn how,” Wilkes told him, uncharacteristically harsh. “That woman has had her fill of you and I’m pretty sure you’re no longer welcome on her property. If something’s going on, you could foul up an investigation. Stay away from her.”

He grunted again.

Wilkes softened a bit. “I’d say that’s it for now, Bud. All we can do is wait and cross our fingers and hope for the best. Maybe something will break.”

Bud looked up at him with eyes that were worn and rheumy. “She’s dead, you know. She’s been dead since the first and I think I know it just as I think you know it.”

Wilkes said nothing. It was true. When an elderly person disappears, a cop thinks the absolute worst. And he
had
been thinking that way ever since he got involved in this. Stapleton was a cop. You could not sugarcoat it to an old veteran like him.