Hand Me Down Evil (Hand Me Down Trilogy) (5 page)

“Like what?” Mark asked. His expression turned sour.

“The doctors think that someone tried to drown her in the stream. She’s got a bump on her head and some nasty marks around her neck,” Henry said.

Mark started pacing nervously. “Catherine Singleton. I know her. Celia, wasn’t she the lunch room lady in our cafeteria until about a couple of years ago?”

“Yes, she was,” I replied.

The two officers glanced at each other but did not say anything. It’s uncanny how sometimes you notice something like a simple glance, and you read so much into it. The way the officers looked at each other signaled that they were holding something back, like they wanted to say something to me, but did not quite know how to tell me.

Mark must have felt the same way that I did because he said, “And what connection does Catherine’s incident have to do with Amber’s abduction?”

Henry rose from his chair, snatched the hat off his head, and leaned against wall. “Don’t quote me on this, but we are investigating the two incidents as being related since Catherine’s house is only a half mile from here. It is odd that two crimes were committed just hours apart and within a half mile of each other. Catherine’s house, as you know, is just a few blocks west of Mitchell’s Market. We rarely have any crimes in this small town. And yet we just had two very serious offenses take place in one night.”

Mark stopped pacing, clearly baffled, and asked, “Celia, can you think of anyone who would have a motive to hurt Catherine or Amber or your Mom for that matter?”

“Well, I did remember something last night just before I fell asleep,” I replied. “When I attended a therapy session with Amber, she told the psychologist that the woman who looks in her window is really a man dressed as a woman.”

“Bingo,” Henry said. “That’s exactly the connection.” His tone of voice rose a pitch.

“I have not seen much of Catherine ever since Mom divorced her son, Peter,” I said.

“Well, we have seen plenty of her,” Ken said. “We work this beat, and we’ve been called to her house often, maybe at least once a month. She was being stalked by Edgar Humphries. Actually, he has been stalking her since she was a young woman. He followed her to Ohio and back decades ago.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. “Who is Edgar?”

Ken sighed and rubbed his forehead. He explained that Catherine and Edgar were engaged to be married when they were both in their twenties. “Then Catherine broke off the engagement suddenly and moved to Ohio when she caught Edgar dressed in women’s clothing and wearing makeup,” Ken continued.

“She learned that Edgar suffered from a multiple personality disorder and that he had a female personality. And, she really moved to Ohio to get away from him because he, or rather, his female personality, kept stalking her, looking through her windows at night. That spooked her. Catherine thought her best chance of ditching Edgar was to move to another state. She starting living with her aunt in Ohio and rather quickly met another guy named Sylvester Singleton. She had two children with Sylvester, Peter and Brandon. Edgar managed to track Catherine down in Ohio when Peter and Brandon were still in grade school. Edgar’s female personality, who we later learned is named Shelly, kept lurking outside Catherine and Sylvester’s house, which caused them to have a lot of problems.”

“W
hat kind of problems?” I asked.

“Marital problems from all the worry and anxiety that Edgar caused,” Kenneth explained. “Catherine was forced to get restraining orders, but whenever she saw Edgar looking through her window and called the police, he was gone, and the police never could seem to catch him in Ohio. This stress caused Sylvester to begin drinking very heavily, and he became a regular alcoholic. One day, while Catherine was arguing with Sylvester who was drunk, Sylvester hit his son Brandon over the head with a flower pot. Brandon did not make it. He suffered from severe brain damage and died.”

My eyes widened. But I said nothing.

Mark stood perfectly still, his gaze fixed on Ken.

“The authorities charged Sylvester with second degree murder, but his trial resulted in a hung jury, and the authorities had no choice but to let him go,” Ken continued. “That was decades ago. What baffled the jury and prevented them from finding Sylvester guilty was that the Ohio police received a call at about the time of the incident from a neighbor. He said that he heard a ruckus going on in the Singleton house and also saw a woman looking through the window. The police caught Edgar dressed as a woman in the rear of the house when they went to investigate, and that is when they entered and found that Brandon had been fatally injured. So Sylvester’s defense attorney cast a lot of doubt as to who actually hurt Brandon. Sylvester’s lawyer kept pointing to the fact that Edgar was at the scene and that Edgar’s other personality, Shelly, could have killed Brandon.”

“Yes, but that’s not the end of it,” Henry added. “Catherine went crazy the evening that Brandon died. She lost all her senses. She left Sylvester and Ohio, returning to Michigan to live in Grayling with her older son Peter. When Peter turned eighteen, he got a job in a factory in a nearby town. One day Edgar accidentally ran into Peter in a bar while vacationing in northern Michigan. From that encounter, he tracked down Catherine again.”

“Edgar has been following Catherine around ever since then. The police would arrest him for stalking. But the courts in Michigan would never lock Edgar up for long even though he got caught violating the countless restraining orders Catherine managed to get against him. Within a few days, he would be released from jail and would start peeping through Catherine’s windows again. I bet that if Catherine could have afforded to move, she would have left Michigan as soon as she could have. But she lived off a meager Social Security check and even then, had to work part time as a school lunch lady to help make ends meet. Edgar’s female personality just could not leave Catherine alone. We know all of this because we got a call from Catherine every now and then about Edgar following her around and peeping through her windows while wearing female clothing.”

Mark shook his head. “Boy, that’s some story.”

I shivered and sank back in my chair.

“Where is Sylvester now?” Mark asked the officers.

“He’s not in good health. He’s in a nursing home in Gaylord,” Ken said.

“You mean he moved to Michigan from Ohio as well?” I asked.

Ken sighed. “No, actually Peter moved Sylvester to Gaylord when Sylvester’s mind started getting a little dimmer with that disease, what do you call it? Old timer’s disease.”

Henry chuckled. “That’s Alzheimer’s disease. Peter wanted to be close to Sylvester and got tired to driving back and forth to Ohio to see his father. So he admitted him into a nursing home in Gaylord a few years ago. It’s kind of sad, though, since Catherine refused to have anything to do with Sylvester. She always blamed him for killing Brandon. My understanding is that Peter is the only one who ever went to visit his father.”

The events that Henry and Ken had just recounted were too bizarre. How did my family happen to stumble upon this peculiar drama?

Could it have been Edgar who had been peering through the windows at Amber and Tally? All of the things I had heard seemed to point in that direction, especially after considering that Mom had married Peter, Catherine’s son, which tied us to Catherine in an indirect sense. But now that Mom was divorced from Peter, we did not have anything to do with Catherine or Edgar. And if Edgar’s female personality, Shelly, was obsessed with following Catherine, why would she follow Amber?

“Have you looked around Catherine’s house for any evidence of Amber’s whereabouts?” Mark asked.

Ken nodded. “We have had a team of detectives searching her house since the early morning hours. They have not found any connection to Amber. The only evidence of foul play was the bump on Catherine’s head and the marks on her neck.”

I felt my stomach muscles tense, and I unconsciously tightened my grip on the cup of hot chocolate.

It was then that Ken received a call from police headquarters ordering him to rush to Graying General Hospital.

As the officers turned to leave, I heard Ken whisper to Henry, “The dispatcher says that Catherine has regained a little consciousness, and seems to be murmuring under her breath, ‘run, Amber, run!’”

A
fter the officers departed, Mark asked me if I had heard the comment that Ken made to Henry about Catherine.

“I sure did,” I said.

“I’ve got to go to the hospital and talk to Catherine,” he said. His voice took on an enthusiastic tone. “I barely got to know her when she was the school lunch lady, but I need to become acquainted with her now. I need to know what makes her tick, what she’s afraid of, what her thought process is like.”

Mark started pacing again. He scratched his head and gave me a perplexed look.

“I’ll go with you. I just can’t sit home and wait by myself. You have no idea what this anxiety is doing to me,” I said, as I stood up abruptly.

He nodded in agreement.

When I called Eleanor to see if she could babysit Tally for a few minutes, she said that she was just about to jump in the shower and that she would come over in half an hour.

“I can’t just go off to the hospital and leave Tally here by herself. Can you wait until Eleanor arrives?” I asked, still clutching the telephone receiver in my hand.

Mark did not hear me. He had already bolted out the back door, down the stairs, and was sprinting toward his truck.

I followed him.

“I can’t wait. Who knows how long Catherine will be conscious,” he said.

Then for no apparent reason, Mark stopped and spun around. He appeared troubled. “Celia, you must promise me that you will wait here until I return. Promise that you won’t go running off by yourself. Don’t do anything foolish. I’ll call you as soon as I talk to Catherine.”

Where would I possibly go alone? What was he talking about? I detected a slight hint of concern in his voice. Although I had admired him from afar for years, I could never have imagined that I would really get to know him, know his feelings. Could Mark possibly care about me?

I smiled slightly without intending to do so at the thought that Mark had shown an interest in my welfare.

He stood still, his brown eyes glistening under the slight glare of the morning sun.

He was waiting.

“I won’t do anything foolish while you’re gone,” I assured him.

Mark gave a stiff smile which signaled that he did not quite believe me. He waved goodbye before he slid into the truck, swung it out of the driveway, and steered it onto the road.

The engine roared, and then he was gone.

When I returned to the kitchen, I stood by the window and rubbed my forehead.

Something was nagging at my subconscious, prodding me to rush to the hospital, but I could not leave Tally by herself. I glimpsed at the clock on the kitchen wall above the sink. It was midmorning. Tally is still sleeping because she stayed up late last night waiting for me to return home, I thought.

Glum and anxious, I settled in the kitchen chair and looked up at the clock on the opposite wall. How long would I have to wait until I heard any news from Mark, from anyone? Catherine did not know Mark. She knew me. Maybe I could talk to her, make her remember me, remember Amber. It was I who needed to get to the hospital to find out what Catherine knew.

With every passing moment, a sensation of utter helplessness began to set in. Eleanor will be here in a moment, I reasoned. Then I will hurry to the hospital even though Mark told me to stay home.

I only assured Mark that I would not do anything foolish, not that I would not leave the house at all. Maybe Catherine would wake up and tell us what she saw. Obviously, she had been a witness to something involving Amber last night. The old lady had seen something. And that was why someone hurt her, left her for dead near the stream. Someone wanted to silence her.

Cautiously, I tip toed to the living room to check on Tally. She was still sound asleep on the couch. I bent over and kissed her on her forehead.

She was all I had left.

While I was waiting for Eleanor, I slipped into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of blue jeans, a long sleeved, green cotton and spandex scoop neck shirt, and a pair of sneakers. After I combed my dark brown curls, I stuffed my wallet into my pocket.

Thoughts rattled in my mind as I rummaged for Mom’s car keys in her bedroom dresser. Last year, after the police found Mom’s black Lincoln at the airport with the keys laying on the car seat, they returned it to me. Shortly after that, they completed their investigation. I had vowed that I would never drive Mom’s car. In case she returned, she would find it in good working order, just like she left it. There was always this feeling in the back of my mind that Mom would come back home someday.

But now I had to make an exception to that rule. My Taurus was out of commission for a while, perhaps forever, and I needed to find an alternate form of transportation. I located the keys in the bottom drawer and stuffed them into my jean pocket.

Then I sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed my temples again. A headache was beginning to form as thoughts of the woman who spooked Amber forced their way into my mind. Why had the woman been snooping around the house for at least a year? How was Edgar involved? If Edgar’s other personality, Shelly, was the woman who peeped around, then why did she focus on Amber? Edgar was apparently known to the authorities for harboring multiple personalities and behaving strangely, but was he really dangerous? Did he kill Catherine’s son Brandon decades ago? Certainly there had to be a motive for Edgar to focus on Amber. Or maybe not. When someone is insane, what motive does he need?

I
nsanity defies logic, I thought.

And what if Edgar was perfectly sane, but his other personality, Shelly, was insane? Was Shelly the woman who looked through windows at Amber? I struggled to make sense of it all. What baffled me most was the mystery of why someone would plant a bomb under my Taurus. I wondered whether someone actually meant to hurt me, rather than my sister. Did Amber happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time? I felt like I was about to lose my mind. So many questions and so few answers.