The Coffin (Nightmare Hall) (9 page)

“Well, if she’s not here,” he said brusquely, “I guess that means she
is
sick or something, right? Now, can we please cut out all this stupid chitchat and go get our ice cream?”

Tanner was starving. But a feeling far stronger than hunger kept her fingers clenched around the edge of the table. She couldn’t have explained it to anyone, not even Charlie, but a sudden conviction that she should not, under any circumstances, go near that back porch, nailed her feet to the blue and white tile.

“I said come on,” Sigmund said rudely, and gave her elbow a push.

Tanner knew she had no choice. Reluctantly, she let go of the table and forced her bare feet, cold against the tile, to shuffle along beside him.

She was only a few feet from the doorway leading to the porch when she saw it. A scrap of vivid rust and bright yellow material hanging over the edge of the freezer, underneath the closed lid.

She knew that material well. It was part of an outfit that Silly was very proud of, because she’d made it herself—a short-sleeved cotton dress with a triangular headscarf and an apron that tied at the waist.

Tanner tried to tell herself that the apron or the headscarf must have fallen off when Silly was putting something in or taking something out of the freezer. She tried so hard to believe that.

But she knew it wasn’t true.

Tanner held back, her bare toes gripping the cold tile.

He pushed, urging her onward.

“No,” she said quietly. Her eyes, filled with apprehension, stared at the telltale bit of bright yellow and rust fabric trailing, oh, so innocently, from underneath the freezer lid.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Silly wasn’t at her apartment, hadn’t been at the dentist’s.

Silly hadn’t left early,
wouldn’t
have left early last night when they had planned to celebrate with homemade chocolate cake. It was still sitting, half-eaten, on the kitchen table.

And Silly hadn’t shown up for work today.

Silly was nowhere to be seen, and her apron or headscarf was sticking out of the freezer. Tanner couldn’t bear to look at it for another second. Her chest ached from the sight of the rust and yellow fabric.

But when she turned her head away, a rough hand came from behind and buffeted her head sideways so that her eyes were once again facing the freezer.

“Go ahead!” Sigmund ordered, his hand pushing against the small of Tanner’s back.

Tanner felt sick. “You didn’t hurt her, did you? You didn’t hurt Silly?”

The hand pushed again. “Your housekeeper’s name is Silly? Well, that’s pretty stupid.” A low, wicked snicker accompanied a push that sent Tanner up against the front of the freezer. “Or should I say that’s pretty
silly?”
Another snicker. “Open the freezer, Tanner!”

Dizzy, Tanner leaned forward, onto the freezer, which came up to her waist. Her right hand brushed against the scrap of apron protruding from the top.

“I
said
open it up!” he commanded, shoving at Tanner’s right arm.

And even though she knew, without a doubt, that he had it in him to kill her, even though she knew that as surely as she knew her own name, she lifted her head, staring straight ahead at the knotty pine paneling behind the freezer and said clearly, defiantly, “No. No, I won’t. I won’t open it.”

She had no idea why she said the words. If she had thought about it carefully, she probably wouldn’t have defied someone she was now convinced could take her life without batting an eyelash. “Okay, okay, I’ll open it,” she would have said if she’d been thinking clearly.

But she wasn’t thinking at all. Her mind was too stunned, as if she’d just received a second sharp blow to the skull. The shock of seeing that scrap of fabric hanging from the freezer, when Silly was nowhere to be seen, had rendered her brain useless. Everything she did now was purely instinctive, and every instinct she possessed screamed at her not to open the freezer lid.

There was a cold, angry silence behind her.

Tanner’s breath came in short, panicky gasps.

The angry silence lasted for a thousand years.

Then it was broken by Sigmund’s husky voice saying, “Okay, then, I’ll open it!”

Something inside Tanner screamed, NO! She stiffened her spine and slammed both hands, palms down, upon the top of the lid in an effort to keep it closed.

In vain. The arms that reached out from behind her and began to pull up on the lid were much stronger than hers.

She pressed downward with every ounce of strength she had left.

Laughing, he pulled upward.

In spite of her efforts, the lid lifted slightly. Not much, just an inch or two. Tanner was proud of her strength as she battled against his obvious superiority. Only an inch or two.

But an inch or two was enough.

She wasn’t going to look down, into the freezer, wasn’t,
wasn’t. S
he was going to keep her eyes focused on the knotty pine walls behind the freezer. She would concentrate on studying the different sizes and shapes of the darker circles of wood. She was
not,
ever, going to look down.

But he took one hand off the freezer lid, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and pushed her head down, forcing her to look.

She saw almost nothing. Almost. First, more of the apron. The part of the apron that had been trapped inside the freezer had stiffened, as if heavily starched. Then she saw a pocket, with the corner of a tissue poking out over the edge. Silly had allergies, and never went anywhere without a pocketful of tissues.

Tanner struggled to avert her eyes, crying out in pain and fear, but the hand on her hair kept her head immobile and there was nowhere else for her eyes to look but inside the freezer. The lid lifted a tiny bit more.

Bangles … cheap, silver bangles, on a thick, freckled wrist. The wrist that had handed out cookies and cold drinks and hot cups of tea and sandwiches cut in the shape of hearts, that had made the bed in the apricot and white bedroom, had ironed blouses and dresses, washed jeans and sweatshirts, had pulled a clean tissue from an apron pocket and handed it to Tanner to wipe her eyes when she was homesick for Ashtabula.

That wrist was once a healthy, freckled pink. But the bangled wrist that Tanner looked down upon now was stiff and bluish-gray, like a frozen dove she’d found in the backyard in Ohio one winter.

Tanner saw no more than that. That one small glimpse was enough to make her gasp. Her head snapped backward against the fist grasping her hair and, without a sound, she reeled off into a black void.

Her body folded into itself as if someone had removed all of her bones.

O
NLY JODIE WAS WILLING
to go with Charlie to the campus police. The others felt that while it was weird that Tanner had taken off without letting any of them know, the note
was
in her handwriting.

“The police will take one look at that note,” Philip said as they finally gave up their hammering and pounding and bell-ringing at the Leo house and left, “and they’ll decide you’ve got no case at all. Tanner’s eighteen, Charlie. She’s allowed to go wherever she wants. And she left a note saying where she was going. That’s what they’ll tell you.”

“She didn’t
want
to go join her mother!” Charlie said heatedly.

“Yeah, but try telling the cops that, when that’s what it says in the note. The note that Tanner
signed.”

Sandy and Vince, like Philip, saw no point in going to the police, “They’ll just think she didn’t want to stay in the house alone,” Sandy said, “Like the note says.” Vince nodded, adding, “That note’s your problem, Charlie. Without it, you might have a case. I mean, since Tanner isn’t where she’s supposed to be. But …”

“Then I won’t show them the note,” Charlie said firmly, folding the note and stashing it in a back pocket of his jeans.

Sandy was visibly shocked. “Charlie! You can’t do that! Tanner
wrote
that note. That’s hiding evidence.”

“It’s only evidence if there’s been some kind of crime,” Charlie pointed out. “And that’s what I’m trying to find out … if something criminal has happened to Tanner. If the note’s going to keep me from doing that, then I’m hiding it.”

“Charlie!” Jodie said quietly, eyes behind her glasses wide with alarm. “You don’t really think something criminal has happened to Tanner, do you?”

“I don’t want to. But this just isn’t like Tanner, not at all. The thing is, you guys are right, if I show the cops the note, they won’t help us find out anything.
We
know Tanner wouldn’t have taken off without telling us.” Charlie hesitated. “We
do
know that, right?”

“Right!” Jodie said emphatically. Vince, Sandy, and Philip only nodded halfheartedly.

They had turned off Faculty Row and were standing in front of the science building, a tall, light-colored brick structure. Students and teachers hurried to and from the building through a light, chilly drizzle. Sloane Currier drove by in his bright red sportscar, rolling down the window as he reached them. “What’s up, guys?”

Charlie quickly filled him in.

“If you ask me,” Sloane said, wiping at the mist coating the inside of his windshield with the sleeve of his expensive red sweater, “Doc Leo probably had second thoughts about leaving a college kid alone in that house of his and called to order Tanner to Hawaii, on the double.”

“Then why,” Charlie asked, “would she say in the note that she was going to see her mother?”

“Because,” Sloane said calmly, “she knows we can’t stand her father’s guts and wouldn’t want us to think she’d cave in to him, right? So she lied.”

“That’s stupid,” Jodie cried. “Tanner wouldn’t lie about something like that.
You
might,” she added scornfully, “but Tanner wouldn’t.”

Sloane’s smile thinned. “No need to be snide, Joellen. Anyway, Vince and Sandy are right. Going to the law is a waste of time. Especially with that note that Tanner wrote herself. They’ll think you all need a couple of hours on the couch with the fink-shrink, Dr. Leo.”

They all knew that one of the reasons Sloane detested the psychology teacher was Dr. Leo had once reported him for cheating. Only the fact that Sloane’s father, a Salem alumnus, contributed generously to the college, had kept him in school. But he’d been on probation and that had not made Sloane happy.

“I’m not taking the note to the cops,” Charlie said, his mouth grim. “It’ll only get in the way. Without it, the police might be willing to check things out.”

But they weren’t. Even without the note, which Charlie kept safely tucked away in his jeans pocket, campus security declined to take any action.

“Can’t do a thing for seventy-two hours,” the officer told Charlie and Jodie. Tanner’s other friends had gone about their business, convinced that a visit to the police would be a total waste of time. They were right. “She’s not a little kid,” the pair was told. “If there was some sign of forced entry, something suspicious, we could investigate. But you said the house looked okay, right?”

Charlie nodded reluctantly, wishing he’d had the foresight to break a cellar window at the Leo house.

“Your friend probably just didn’t want to stay in the house alone now that Dr. Leo’s out of town.”

“Tanner’s not like that,” Charlie argued, but he could see that it was hopeless.

“You should have showed him the note,” Jodie said when they were standing outside on the quad. The drizzle had thickened into a steady rain shower. Her hair was already wet, strands of it plastered against her cheeks as if they’d been glued there. “Maybe he’d have some way of telling whether or not Tanner actually wrote it.”

“Oh, she wrote it, all right,” Charlie said darkly, hunching his shoulders against the rain. “The question is,
why
did she write it? Why
would
she? He couldn’t tell us that, could he?”

“No,” Jodie admitted, “I guess he couldn’t.”

They had classes to go to. Although Jodie felt that falling behind in her own schedule wouldn’t do Tanner any good, Charlie knew he’d never be able to concentrate and had already decided to cut. Disheartened, they separated, promising to call each other later and decide what to do next.

Charlie Cochran, like Tanner, wasn’t used to feeling afraid. But he felt afraid now. It was a new sensation. The blood in his veins felt cold and he could feel the rhythm of his heart and his pulse speeding up, pounding erratically. The ground underneath his feet, slick with rain, felt unsafe, as if he were walking up a muddy slope instead of on level cement.

Tanner
had
to be in that house. She wouldn’t have gone off anywhere without calling him first. And if she
was
in the house, and she hadn’t answered the doorbell, there had to be a reason. Maybe she’d fallen asleep in the music room. She wouldn’t have heard the doorbell in there, wouldn’t have heard them pounding on the doors, rapping on the windows.

The only problem with that theory was, Tanner hated that room. Why would she go in there and spend the night?

Maybe just to prove that she could? That would be like Tanner.

There was only one way to find out for sure.

Charlie stuck his hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket, and shoulders hunched against the rain, struck out in the direction of Faculty Row.

He was about to kill two birds with one stone. He would break into the Leo house and see for himself if Tanner had fallen asleep in the soundproof room. If she had, if she was safe and sound, that was one thing. But if she wasn’t, this time when he went to the police, he could honestly report a broken window in the back door, because he was about to break that window himself.
Then
they’d come running, wouldn’t they?

Two birds with one stone. It would help, one way or the other.

But what would really make him happy and melt the ice in his veins would be finding Tanner curled up on a couch in the music room, sound asleep.

Faculty Row was deserted. It was after ten o’clock, and most professors had morning classes. The street was quiet but for a dog or two barking, annoyed at being left out in the rain, the muted roar of a distant motorcycle, and the steady tap-tap-tap of the rain hitting new leaves on the trees overhead and slapping onto the sidewalk.