Resurrection (16 page)

“Why? What did they see?” Tommy asked him.

He just shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m figuring it’s plenty bad.”

Mitch noticed how he did not meet their eyes when he said this. He was probably lying or just concealing something and you couldn’t really blame him; cops were supposed to quell panic, not create it.

“You don’t have any kids, do you, Tommy?”

“Nope. Not a one that I know about.”

George licked his lips and looked around. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. “I guess…I guess that if you did, I’d tell you to pull them out of the city for awhile until things cool down.”

“Because of the rain?” Tommy said.

He shook his head. “No…not really. I don’t know. Just that there’s been a lot of crime. You got gangs of…of people out there that are pretty desperate. That’s all I’m saying.”

Mitch took the opening. “Yeah, I’ve heard there’s some weird ones out in the storm. People are saying some of ‘em look kind of funny, like maybe they’re—”

“Crazy or something,” Tommy broke in.

“Sure, lunatics. Some people just went nuts with what’s going on and others…well, there’s some mad shit out there, boys. Really mad shit. You just never know what you might run into out there. You just never know.”

Mitch was going to press it, ask what sort of
things
they might run into out there, but he didn’t have the heart. George Lake looked—as they said when they were kids—screwed, chewed, and barbecued. But Mitch was willing to bet he knew some things that he wasn’t about to put into words, at least not with a couple civilian johnnies. He believed George when he said some cops had seen things that made them suffer nervous breakdowns. He was willing to bet they’d seen things that had not just unhinged their minds, but turned their hair white. Maybe all the cops didn’t know what was going on here or refused to believe, but many of them did. And still they were out there, trying to reign in the madness and restore some sort of order. You had to hand it to them for that. That took guts.

“No, if I was you boys,” George said, “I’d beat those streets for your girl. We’re stretched pretty thin here. If you find her, then wait for daylight and get out of the city for a few days. If you don’t find her by dark, well, just hole up for the night. She’ll probably be doing the same somewhere else. But I’d get inside before dark.”

“Why’s that?” Mitch asked him.

George looked uncomfortable. “Just dangerous out there with the storm. And after dark…well, it could get a little wild out there after dark.”

Tommy said, “Well, I got a four-ten in the rack of my pick-up. I’m thinking that’ll be enough.”

But by the look in George Lake’s eyes, you could see he wasn’t so sure about that. “I’m just saying, you should get in by dark, that’s all.”

“She’s my kid, George,” Mitch said. “I just can’t leave her out there missing.”

George stubbed his cigar in an ashtray next to a green, peeling bench. “There’s gonna be lots of kids missing out there tonight, mister.”

17

Tommy drove over to East Genessee, which had become something of a bedroom community for the city. There had been lots of urban renewal there as the yuppies had flooded in with their minivans and modular homes.

Like Pennacott Lane getting devoured by Main Street and the University, Genessee had been similarly gobbled up through the years. It had worked pretty hard to erase its industrial past. Gone were much of the factories and machine shops that had marked its heart when Mitch was a kid and with them had left the saloons and strip joints, the sandwich counters and rows of seedy railroad hotels and freight yards where the bums used to live in their shacks. What was left were blocks and blocks of urban blight…empty storefronts and failed businesses, boarded-up dance halls and pool rooms, deserted tenements awaiting the wrecking ball. Those manufacturing plants and tool-and-die shops that still stood were gray, grim, and abandoned behind high chainlink fences, their sprawling parking lots sprouting weeds where once hundreds of cars were parked. East Genessee, like much of the city, had lost jobs by the hundreds in the past twenty-five years. Most of them had been sold overseas by the big corporations and their politico pals.

They could call it
outsourcing
all they wanted to, but when you put a guy in office and he allowed jobs to be shipped down to Mexico so that corporations could make obscene profits, then it was just a dirty shame. Rape was rape no matter what fancy tag you hung off it.

They passed through the remains of the industrial graveyard and then property values began to shoot up and you had lots of nice parks and schools, thriving business sectors, blocks upon blocks of ranch houses and prefab mansions. Things started to sink back the other way as you entered the surviving older sections of Genessee that sloped down towards the river. Where there had been but four or five inches of rain in the streets of yuppieville, down here where the old saltbox and two-story framehouses stood, there were a couple feet of standing water washing down the lanes. But it was no problem with Tommy’s Dodge Ram which was jacked so high you had to jump up into the cab anyway.

“
Looking for four
-
oh
-
three Wilbur,” Mitch told him. “That’s where Lisa Bell lives.”

Tommy pulled onto Wilbur Avenue and studied the house numbers in the rain. It was still coming down, but not excessively. He moved the truck along slowly, leaving a foaming wake behind him that slopped into flooded yards. A few people were moving up the drenched walks in raincoats. They did not look as the truck passed.

“If I wasn’t seeing people,” Tommy said, “I would have thought this whole neighborhood was deserted.”

And there was that feeling, Mitch knew. He saw a few cars parked in the streets and a few more in driveways, but nowhere near the amount of vehicles you would have expected. There was that same feel you got here as you got over in the empty industrial sector, that sense of desertion and abandonment. While over there it was easy to see why, here…well, it was like driving through a ghost town and wondering what exactly had depopulated it.

Tommy said, “There it is.”

He touched the brakes a little too quickly and the truck jerked.

“What?” Mitch said.

Tommy brushed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Thought…thought I saw someone sitting in the swing on the porch. Nobody there now, though.”

Mitch looked at him, swallowed, and looked away.

Tommy pulled the Dodge into a driveway, just behind a parked Neon. Then they sat there looking up at that narrow L-shaped clapboard house with its high
-
peaked roof. There was the bracket for an old TV antenna up there that had bled rusty stains over the green shingles. Just a house like any other house you might stumble across in the Midwest…yet, as Mitch looked up at it leaning out at him, it was every empty house on every weedy lot he had suspected of being haunted as a kid.

He knew the very idea was ridiculous.

The Bell house was neither rundown nor shabby, shunned nor shadowy. The windows were not planked over and no rusty FOR SALE sign creaked on dry posts. It was actually a very nice house, old—probably late 19
^th
century like most of the older homes in that section—but well-maintained. There were flower boxes out front and neatly-trimmed hedges, a flagstone path leading up to the front door. Definitely not a ghost house of any sort and if it hadn’t been for the sullen, leaden hues of the day washing it down with a grim uniformity and giving it roughly the same coloration as a cemetery monument, it would have been very pleasant.

But it was not pleasant.

Mitch could not adequately express even to himself what he was feeling, just that the house inspired dread in him, filled his belly with shards of broken glass he felt would slit him open if he dared move. Maybe it was nerves and maybe it was the knowledge that on days like this sundown could drop very fast and leave you groping. Maybe it was that and maybe something else.

“Cmon,” Tommy finally said, grabbing his Savage four-ten pump from the rifle rack and pumping shells into the breech. “Let’s get this done.”

“I’m not seeing Heather’s Bug around.”

“No, they’re probably not here…but I suppose we better check.”

They hopped out, Mitch in the lead. He went up the path to the porch, splashing through that foul-smelling water with his rubber boots. The rain was pissing down in gray sheets, stirring up a sluggish groundfog, and visibility was low. Looking in either direction down the block, he could not see anyone out and about. But he couldn’t see very far, either. He shook the rain off him and climbed the porch. There were a few flowerpots with withered plants in them. Nothing unusual for late September in northern Wisconsin. Most of the trees had already been stripped of leaves. Something which didn’t usually happen until mid
-
to late
-
October. Orange and yellow carpets of them bobbed in the street.

Tommy was looking at the porch swing.

It was wet like maybe a pile of soaking laundry had been set there. On the porch beneath it there was a puddle of gray water with bits of black debris floating in it. Kind of funny because the roof overhang had kept the rest of the porch pretty much dry. But Mitch figured rain could have been following a beam and dripping all afternoon.

Or maybe somebody very wet had been sitting there.

He let that go, went up to the door and knocked lightly. But there was no sound from inside.

“Maybe you should knock harder,” Tommy said.

So Mitch did and then thumbed the doorbell a couple times, hearing the
ding-dong
echoing from the depths of the house. Still silence. No approaching feet or anything. He supposed if someone got a look at them, particularly Tommy with his shotgun, they might not be so inclined to answer the door.

Mitch knocked a few more times and as he did so, a chill went right up his spine and spread over the backs of his forearms. He suddenly had the damnedest, most uncanny feeling that somebody was standing on the other side of that door, just waiting there like a kid playing hide
-
and
-
seek. The door itself was old hardwood with an oval glass panel set towards the top. A heavy cream
-
colored curtain covered the glass from the inside. You couldn’t see through that curtain exactly, but Mitch was almost certain that a form was throwing its shadow against it.

Mitch knew it was true. He led Tommy off the porch and around through the sideyard, the water splashing up around the tops of their boots. The rain abated for a few moments, then came down heavy again. Off and on, off and on. They tried the backdoor and it was locked, too. All the windows were hung with sheers, so you could not actually see inside the house, but more than once Mitch was certain that a shadowy form passed by a window like somebody was watching their progress through the yard.

What the hell is this about?

They went back around front and stood at the bottom of the porch steps. The feeling that someone was standing behind the door watching them had not abated…it had
grown
to a near certainty.

18

“We could always go grab a beer and a burger, think this out,” Tommy said, his voice almost hopeful.

Mitch would have liked that very much. But as the minutes passed, he became more and more worried about Chrissy. Maybe she was home right now. Maybe this was all a wild goose chase. But he couldn’t let it rest at that. He loved her like his own flesh and blood and if getting some answers, or at least putting his mind to rest, meant he had to go inside this coffin, then he was going.

He charged up the steps in kind of a childish gesture so that whoever or
whatever
was in there would see he showed no fear, that he was ready to kick some ass. Without hesitation, he tried the knob and it was unlocked.

Mitch gripped the knob and threw the door open, stepped inside like he owned the joint and almost went on his ass. There was a puddle of water on the floor. Dark, dirty water like the run
-
off from a septic tank. And it didn’t smell much better, either. In fact, the whole house had a stagnant, vile stink to it like all the old pipes had burst, all the sediment and silt spilling out. It was the smell of seepage and old sewer lines.