House of Skin (10 page)

“Billy moved down the stairs and through the house trying to find his mother. He even called her by her Christian name—Elizabeth—yet no one answered. She wasn’t in the kitchen, so he searched for her in the living room. She wasn’t there either.

“Billy could see plainly that unless she’d taken refuge in a linen closet or the pantry, his mother had left the house. He opened the back door and stood on the stoop, listening. What he heard didn’t reassure him.

“There came a succession of sounds. There weren’t any footsteps or voices, but what he could hear was coming from the direction of the woods. The first thing he recognized were the sounds of a struggle. As he crept toward the trees, he heard the struggling stop, and it was replaced by wet sloshing sounds that made his sour stomach feel even worse.

“He couldn’t begin to guess at what it all meant, and the last thing he wanted to do was investigate. But he knew he’d have to. His sister had lost her mind, and she hadn’t been in very good condition to begin with. Who knew what the shock had done to her? His dad was too busy keeping things upstairs from getting any worse, so it fell to him to restore order and find his mom.

“When he found Elizabeth Hargrove, she was lying in the grass, clearly limned by the moonglow. Someone had gotten to her.”

Paul wished they’d go back to the house, get warm. He had no sense of family, really, but he didn’t like thinking about someone he was related to exhuming a dead fetus. He noticed with some unease how the trees bordering the trail leaned over them like ghouls trying to absorb all the story’s lurid details.

“Billy was wailing so loud his dad found him and discovered what had become of his wife. The minister fell to his knees and wept.

“Her entrails were spread out around her, her abdomen a bloody mess. Whoever had done it, he’d torn out her uterus.”

Paul gaped at the sheriff. “Good Lord,” he said. “And you think Myles did that?”

“I know Myles did it.”

“How do you know? He was only a boy.”

Barlow’s voice rose. “Because I
knew
him.”

Taken aback at the sheriff’s tone, Paul was quiet for a moment before asking, “Did they find the murder weapon?”

Barlow looked at him sourly. “Just another reason why there was no conviction.”

“Myles was tried for it?”

“There was no trial,” Barlow answered and spat black juice. “Things then weren’t like they are now, so there was no way to tell whose baby it was. It wasn’t like they could do a blood test on what was left of that fetus. There was no reason to suspect Myles, save for the whisperings of children. No one paid the kids much mind when they insinuated it could have been your uncle because the thought of a girl four years his senior being interested in him was incomprehensible.”
 

“Didn’t Billy Hargrove tell the police about seeing Myles in the yard?”

“Uh-uh. He was too scared of what Myles would do to him. Only person he told was Doc Trask, just before Billy and his dad left town for good.”

“What about Samantha?”

Barlow said, “I’m getting to that.”
 

They were moving deeper into the woods now, and as the earthen trail grew darker, the odors became more distinct. The earth underfoot smelled of wet leaves and young buds. Lilac tinged the air, a smell he usually found pleasant. But now it seemed cloying, oppressive.

“Standing there by his wife’s mutilated body, Reverend Hargrove and his son held each other and wept. The minister didn’t know what to do. Cover his wife, carry her back with him, or go get help. He dared not send Billy to do it because whoever butchered his wife might still be in the forest, waiting.

“Though the sight of her was terrible, he couldn’t leave her lying there in the woods for the bugs and animals to get at her, so he gathered his dead wife into his arms and made for the house with Billy holding the tail of his night shirt.

“They’d made it to the edge of the yard when they heard a shriek and a crashing sound. Then there was a sickening thump. When Reverend Hargrove saw what his daughter had done, he dropped to his knees and bellowed into his dead wife’s chest. Samantha had apparently leapt from the upstairs window and landed face-first on the ground. He didn’t have to go to where she lay. The way her neck was twisted, she was dead as winter.”

Paul peered up at the moonless sky but found it had darkened to the same inky shade as the oak trees that rose like crooked spires around them. To their left he could see what looked like a break in the forest, though it was much too dark to be certain. He wished Barlow would let him hold the flashlight. He felt like a child whose father didn’t trust him with the remote control.

The shrill warble of some unseen bird sent cold fingers down his back. Impatient to have the story ended, Paul said, “So the trauma of it all caused Samantha Hargrove to take her own life.”

Barlow shook his head. “I don’t think so. The Reverend was bawling over his dead wife and daughter, but Billy was staring up at the window. He told Doc Trask it was the worst part of the night, the worst thing he’d ever seen.”

“Let me guess,” Paul said. “It was Myles, grinning demonically at him through the jagged edges of the window.”

“No. Myles was gone by then. What Billy saw was someone else.” Barlow’s voice grew thin. “A woman. A blonde woman in a white gown.”

Paul imagined it, imagined her in the window. He thought about asking who it was, but before he could the sheriff added:
 

“But you were right about one thing.”
 

“What’s that?”

“The woman was grinning.”

They fell silent, the only sounds in the forest their footfalls. Ahead of them, the trail broadened and Paul beheld a white farmhouse in the middle of a large, overgrown yard.

“Who lives here?”
 

“A girl,” Barlow answered.

“Care to be more specific?”

“No.”
 

“Are you going to question her or something?” Paul asked.

Barlow ignored him.

Paul breathed in the honeysuckle reefing the backyard, but he couldn’t enjoy it. Finally, he said, “So why are we here?”

Barlow nodded toward the house. “This is where Reverend Hargrove used to live.”

Paul peered up at a second story window. “That the window Samantha jumped out of?”

“Was pushed out of, you mean,” Barlow said.

Paul waited and the sheriff shrugged. “Could be,” he answered.

Paul stared at the dark windows. “And this is where Myles killed Mrs. Hargrove?”

“Over there.” Barlow pointed back the way they’d come. “Beside the trail.”

But Paul was staring at an upstairs window where a woman was watching him.

“I see her,” he said.

The sheriff looked, then stared at him. “There’s no one there,” Barlow said.

Paul frowned. He could have sworn he saw a face, ghostly pale, watching him.

As they moved away, he asked, “Who was it Billy saw in the window?”

Barlow fell silent. He was silent for so long Paul thought he was going to ignore the question. When they were well away from the farmhouse, he said, “Someone I don’t care to discuss.”

She watched them from the second floor window, thankful she had waited to go down to the cellar. It wouldn’t do for Ted to scream and rouse the sheriff’s suspicion.

Their voices receded into the forest.

She went through her checklist again. Everything she needed was packed in two suitcases. It was depressing, actually. She’d been alive for nearly three decades, and all she cared about could be crammed into two suitcases.

Julia waited, counted slowly to fifty, before turning and leaving her bedroom. On the way to the cellar, she grabbed the fresh needle. The way she saw it, she couldn’t set him free without sedating him first. She couldn’t kill him. He was a lousy human being, but he didn’t deserve to die.

The important thing was to give him enough morphine to knock him out for a good long while, but not to give him so much that he’d overdose. If she let him awake too quickly she’d be caught, and with his connections she’d get the maximum sentence, whatever that was. He had her on kidnapping, battery, incarceration against his will and whatever other charges he could think of. Mental anguish, maybe. Cruelty. Assault with a British playwright.

It was decided then. She’d give him a double dose and hope he wouldn’t die.

Ted must have heard her open the basement door because he was already yelling about what he would give her if she’d let him go. Cars, jewelry, a new house. He promised it all.

Trembling a little, she flipped on the light.

She could see him blinking, his head turned awkwardly up at her.

“I’ll give you anything you want, Julia. Just let me out of these ropes.”

She strode down the steps. “Okay, Ted.”

It stopped him. “What?”

“I said okay. I’m letting you go.”

His voice grew hoarse. “What is that needle for? Christ, I feel like a pincushion already.”

“I have to sedate you to make sure you don’t kill me when I untie the ropes.”

“Kill you? You’re my only way out of here.” He chuckled. Unconvincingly, she thought. “You die, I die, right?”

“You’ll turn me in.” She crouched in front of him.

“I won’t turn you in. People make mistakes. I just want to get back to my family.”

“Just hold still.” She looked for a vein.

“Whatever you say, Julia.”

She paused, watching him. His tone was different. It worried her.

“Don’t move, Ted.” She stuck the vein, flushed the morphine inside.

“Sure enough,” he said, his voice going sleepy, “whatever you say.”

His breathing was slow and deep. She set the needle on the ground.

She waited.

After thirty seconds had passed, she untied first his right hand, then his left. She was moving toward his feet when she felt the needle stab her Achilles tendon.

Julia screamed and reached for the hypo, but Ted was already bear-hugging her legs, dragging her down like some animal in the wild. She saw his eyes then, his bared teeth. His body was twisted, his feet held down by the ropes, but his upper body was free. He should have been under by now, groggy at least, but his arms felt like steel, harder than she would have thought possible. He heaved and she felt herself hip tossed over his shoulder, the concrete knocking out her wind. She kicked at him. He punched her hard in the kidney. She tried to crawl away, get out from under him, but he seized her ankles, began reeling her back.
Please God let the morphine work
, she thought.

He hauled her back under him, grabbed the hypo sticking out of her ankle, and began stabbing her in the calf. She screamed, feeling her pants begin to bunch in his grip, and she didn’t care, anything to get away from the stabbing needle. He dropped the needle and got ahold of her with both hands. His weight pressed down on her legs. He pinned her and yanked down her pants. She reached for something, anything to help her fend him off, but nothing was within reach, she’d made sure of that when she tied him up. He was biting her now, his incisors sinking into her thigh. The pain was excruciating.

Julia tried to crawl away, but his teeth held her, tearing, ripping at her leg. His hands fastened onto her sides and pulled her under him, but what she expected didn’t happen. He was not reaching between her legs or fumbling with his crotch.

His hands were closing around her neck.

She batted at them, certain he was weakening, all that morphine pulsing through his body, but his grip was unyielding. The basement went gray. His hands were releasing her then, but she could barely feel them, and though she knew her chance to get away from him had come, she knew she was too weak, too faint, to crawl out from under him.

The last thing Julia thought before the gray tide pulled her under was how heavy Ted was, how hard it was to breath with his suffocating weight on top of her.

The grandfather clock in the foyer was chiming for the tenth time when Paul got back to Watermere. He ambled over to the bar, slid a hand over the tired mahogany. He thought of the dirt paths he’d just walked, the vastness of the estate. How odd it seemed that Sheriff Barlow knew the forest so well, as though the place were his.

As Paul stretched, his back popping dully, he thought of the sheriff’s broad frame, the man’s wise brown eyes.

Barlow seemed convinced of his innocence, but that didn’t mean Paul was in the clear. The coldness of the night, the grotesque story, the woman he glimpsed in the window of the old Hargrove house, it was all catching up with him. His nerves were frayed.

A drink would help soothe them.

Sure it would
, Emily’s voice spoke up.
And it would lead to another, and another, and how many more until you wake up not knowing where you are or how you got there?

Paul grimaced and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes to grind away the chiding voice. He moved to get a better view of the bar and felt his stomach flutter faintly at the many rows of bottles. Were Emily here now, she’d never let him drink without some form of remonstrance.