She's Not There (36 page)

I opened the driver's door. The van was empty. She'd been on her way to get Tommy's help too. She'd run off the road but she'd made it.

I dashed to the house. I could see just one small light and it was coming from Jake's shack. Jake was standing outside, his hands over his ears the way Kate's had been. He was trying to block out the thunder. I shouted, “Please go inside, Jake,” but he didn't. Why wasn't Tommy with him? Because Tommy was too old to take responsibility for Jake any longer.

Just as I reached the front porch my foot snagged on something and I fell into the porch steps. I got tangled in the soaking poncho. I freed myself and went up to the door, banged on it, and tried to turn the knob. It was locked. I saw a doorbell. I pressed it. A light flashed on inside the house. Jake had rigged something up with the doorbell.

I waited but nothing happened. No one came. First, I went to the side of the porch and tried to open a window. It was locked, too, or stuck. I turned back toward the porch just as a crack of lightning rent the entire sky, and I saw a wire on the ground. It ran along the edge of Tommy's house in front of the porch and kept going along the ground. The wire was what had snagged my foot when I'd first reached the porch, more of Jake's doing.

I saw a light come on inside the front window. I ran to the door and was about to bang on it again when he opened it. Tommy stood there, his face haggard, his eyes weak with fatigue. I felt a sense of comfort in that tired worn face. A network of lightning infused the sky, surrounding us in a web finer than the network of capillaries I'd watched with Carol, and accompanied by the roll of the timpani and then Jake's piercing scream. Tommy's face was illuminated by the lightning for just a second with such a glaring whiteness that his grizzly whiskers, deep wrinkles, and the bags under his eyes were all erased and his face became as smooth and flawless as a child's. The timpani rolled and rolled as if it were coming at us. Tommy grimaced, and one hand went up to protect his ear. With the other, he grabbed my wrist and yanked me to him, and my eyes were inches from his. I recognized the face of the child in Esther's newspaper clipping.

14

I willed my jangling nerves to be still. I said, “Tommy, I'm hurt.”

I held up my arms so he could see the blood running down from my elbows, smeared everywhere because of the rain mixing in. “I fell. My knees are really banged up.”

He relaxed his grip and then let go. I slipped out of the poncho. “My knees.” They were bleeding harder than my elbows.

He said, “Come.”

I followed him into his kitchen. He couldn't have had time to kill Christen. Then where was she? Maybe he had overpowered her with a remote control, with an acoustic laser. Maybe Auerbach was right. Maybe there were zebras. In the kitchen, Tommy turned to me. I smiled at him.

Tommy had me sit at his table. He went to the sink, opened the cupboard beneath, took out a bottle from a cardboard box, and came back to me. It was a gallon jug, three-quarters full of a greenish-yellow liquid. He put it on the table and went to another cupboard and got a basin. He placed the basin on the table and put my elbow into it. Then he poured his green soap down my arm. I yelped. He did the other arm. He didn't hear my yelps. His sensory cells, at least a good number of them, had disintegrated when he was a small boy. He went to the sink and filled an empty bottle with water, came back, and rinsed my arms. He was firm but gentle, just as he was with Jake, whose screams he couldn't hear.

Then he got down on his knees the way he had when he'd studied Dana Ganzi, one of the girls he'd killed, the one I'd found lying in the middle of Coonymus Road.

He said, “Your knees aren't as bad as they look,” and he dabbed them with a cloth soaked in his green soap.

There was a bumping sound from overhead. Tommy didn't hear that either. It had to be Christen. She'd heard me yelp.

“Tommy, I came because another girl is missing. We have to find her.”

“She can't go anywhere in this weather. She's found shelter.”

“Tommy, she must be with the man who killed her friends.”

I stood up.

The bumping from above was much louder. Tommy tilted his head. He'd sensed it. He stood too, and he looked into my eyes. He grabbed my wrist again.

Tommy had a grip stronger than any I'd ever been subjected to. He twisted me around so that my back and the arm he'd immobilized were crushed up against his rock-hard chest. His free arm he held tight across my upper body. The pain from my jerked-back shoulder felt worse than the one in my crushed wrist. I did all that I was taught except screaming. Screaming was useless. No one outside would hear me except maybe Jake, and Jake was impotent. So I saved that element of my strength. As ferociously as possible, I alternated between kicking back at his shins and stomping on his feet. But he was wearing boots and I had on soaking wet sneakers. I tried bashing the back of my head against his chest, but he only held me tighter.

He dragged me out of the kitchen. I saw a baseball bat lying in the hallway. The name
LANCELOT
was painted across it in red. Christen had brought her weapon just as she'd told her friends she would.

Tommy pulled me backward down a hallway. He wilted for just a second when I decided screaming at the top of my lungs couldn't hurt after all. Maybe screaming would make me stronger, a theory some held. The theory was false. But with my screams there came a stronger thumping now, directly above us. He never paused. He hadn't felt it this time, he was concentrating too hard on pulling me across the floor. And then I heard my name called out, muffled. He hadn't heard that either—hadn't heard Christen, secured in the room over our heads, calling my name.

I shouted, “Christen, it's Poppy! Try to get out! Try!” I didn't know if Tommy could make out any of it. I didn't know the extent of his hearing loss. But sometimes, someone who is hard of hearing can't understand the words if they're spoken at a loud pitch.

In the lightning flashes, I could see a painting on the wall. Esther's. He hadn't killed Esther. She was his friend, trying to help him in her own way, trusting him with a picture. The wind was picking up and the rain flew horizontally into his windows as loud as bullets. I stopped struggling. I turned my head to the side, my lips near his ear. I said to him in a normal voice, “Tommy, don't do this. I understand what happened to you. But the girl upstairs isn't the one who did it. The girls from the camp did nothing. They did
nothing
.”

He was too involved with getting me through his house to pay attention to what I was saying even if he could hear me. Tommy made the most of my attempt to calm myself, to speak rationally to him. He hauled me through a door. I felt desperate. Now I screamed Jake's name—“
Jake!
”—over and over again, screamed for him to help as Tommy dragged me down a stairway into his cellar. Tommy was the man with the picnic, and Kate thought she had seen another person in the picnic-man's truck. It had to have been Jake.

There was light in the cellar, a bare bulb in the ceiling with a string hanging from it just like the one in each of the Camp Guinevere barracks.

I kicked Tommy with a vengeance. I could survive a fall better than he could. Still, he was strong, a big man, and he hung on to me all the way down the rest of the stairs. I was unable to trip him. I threw my head back and caught his chin. He jerked me harder into the vise of his arms and body, and I felt the incredible shock of my shoulder separating. Now I didn't shout deliberately, I screamed in pain indiscriminately.

He'd felt the fight go out of me. He released some of the pressure of his arm across my chest while he pulled back a large bookcase standing against a wall. There was a door in the wall and a small window next to it. Under the window, a console, a board with toggles and switches and wires jury-rigged from the insides of radios. Jake's doing.

He opened the door and pushed me through it. I came down on my knees onto a cement floor. I could make out nothing but the one window where the bit of light came through. No light at all slipped past the outside edge of the door. It was fully sealed. The room was about eight feet square. The walls were poured cement except for the new wall with the door and window, which was lined with soundproofing wallboard, as was the ceiling. There was an open drain in the middle of the cement floor. This was the place where the girls vomited the contents of their stomachs and where he washed it away.

Pain was shooting out in all directions from my shoulder, down my arm, across my back, becoming worse. The one thing I had to do that took precedence over anything else was to fix the shoulder. I cradled my arm, got to my feet, and walked till I was close to the wallboard. Then I took a tight hold of my elbow, grit my teeth, and smashed my injured shoulder into the wall. My head filled with black dots and I went to my knees again in a faint that lasted just a moment; the burden of pain fleeing my shoulder acted like a shot of morphine. I stood up again and right then bright lights came on in the little room.

Tommy's face was in the window. He was looking down at his control panel. Then he looked up at me. His face was as hard as granite. I was in a place he'd intended for Christen, the place where he'd killed the other girls and so harmed Kate.

I smiled at him, the same smile I gave him when I ran into him on the street, at Richard's Patio, and yesterday when I'd asked him for help. Whenever I'd spoken to Tommy he'd looked intently into my face. Now I understood why; he'd been reading my lips. The psychiatrist who raised him must have taught him to do that. I spoke to him slowly and deliberately. “Tommy, I'm Joe's friend. Your friend. You don't want to hurt me. It's too late to hurt me. The little girl with the doll—she's alive. You know that. You know we saved her. She's told the doctors what happened. They
know
.” But his gaze had left my lips. He chose not to see what I was saying. He was looking down again.

I went to the window and touched the glass. His face came up, inches from mine. “Tommy, we want to help you. We found out the terrible thing that happened to you when you were just a child.”

His eyes glittered and he said something. He pointed up. He was talking about Christen, but I couldn't hear him and I did not know how to read lips. So I guessed.

I said, “No, she's not the one who did it to you.” But he cast his eyes down again.

I banged on the glass with my fist. “I'm hurt, Tommy. Please.” He raised his eyes and I said it again. “I'm hurt, Tommy.”

This time I could tell what he said to me. He said, “I'm sorry.”

And the sound of Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue
filled the room. No piece has been played by more pop orchestras than this one. A bit of trivia I'd read. After just a few bars, though, the music stopped. It was how he tested the system. That's what he'd used to test his mechanism on Dana, and Rachel, and the girl who'd arrived early—the first girl, Erin—and Kate, too, and maybe Christen, before I interrupted and he'd had to get her up two flights of stairs. Maybe she'd gotten treated with the same diabolical method of torture that I was about to get, only I knew what to expect and she hadn't.

A bell clanged louder than any noise I have ever experienced. It clanged again, louder still, and then it clanged nonstop. I put my hands over my ears and looked up at the amplifier perched in the corner of the ceiling. The loudspeaker sticking out from it seemed to be alive, to become a face, a menacing face, a face from a horror movie taunting me—clanging and clanging and clanging. There were three other amplifiers in the other corners of the room. The second one came alive too, a shattering piercing whistle. I made the same shocked sound I screamed when my shoulder ripped apart.

I went to the door, turned the doorknob, and pushed at it. He had a bolt thrown across the jamb. I threw all my weight against it and all but dislocated my other shoulder. The door frame was reinforced. There was no give at all.

I could see Tommy move a little to his left, and the third amplifier came on. I think the noise was the sound of a train, a helicopter, I couldn't be sure. The pounding inside my head prevented me from being able to differentiate between the noises anymore. I never heard the fourth one come on but it must have. The noise was so insufferable I suppose I did what the girls did. I was against the other wall now, the concrete wall, banging my head into it. Then, without knowing it, I rolled across the floor in some involuntary attempt to get away from the noise. That roll across the floor saved me from losing all reason because another pain struck me—a normal pain coming from the injured shoulder that my roll had caused. I didn't want my muscles to spasm, my eardrums to burst, my lungs to collapse and my heart to give out. I looked at the window. Tommy wasn't watching me. He'd watched the others, I knew, but with me … he was sorry.

But then I began to hallucinate. I thought trucks were bearing down on me, crashing into me, big tandem trucks, their enormous wheels crushing my bones. And I could hear the moaning of the foghorns back and forth across the sea too. I began rolling again and my injured shoulder brought me back once more. I was the one who was moaning, not the foghorns.

I forced myself up and over to the window. I banged on it. I tried to speak but I couldn't. I was crying hysterically. I couldn't breathe. I thought my head would explode, and a new pain was coming from my wracked eardrums, an unbearable, excruciating throbbing.

I pulled off my T-shirt. I tried to wrap it around my head. Then I did what the dead girls had done. I ripped off pieces of it with my teeth as they had ripped off pieces of theirs. I stuffed the shreds of the shirt into my ears. Immediately, the sound was muffled. I tried to see, and it took me a moment to understand that I couldn't see because my eyes were squeezed shut. I opened them. The light in the room had dimmed. On the other side of the window, Tommy was moving about frantically, trying to get his power up. The noise had diminished, was now no louder than a smoke alarm. I could bear it. The pieces of the shirt hadn't muffled the noise; it was the storm that had done it.