The Silent Girls (26 page)

“We shouldn’t waste their time,” Rath said, wanting to call his bluff, if it was a bluff. “We should call and tell them what happened. Not to come. On a night like this, they’ve probably got plenty to do with—”

“I called 911. You can’t undo 911, as I’m sure you know. We can wait for them in comfort, then explain it all. Have a guffaw. It is rather humorous. Don’t you think?”

Rath did know. Once 911 was dialed, the police showed. No matter what. Rath was torn. He’d come storming up here with a loaded gun, certain his daughter was housed here, a prisoner along with another girl. Locked away in a manor where he suspected at least four other girls had been kept to . . .

“Everything okay?” Langevine asked, blinking up at him. “You look . . . stunned.”

“I am,” Rath said. “From staring out the windshield at a blizzard.”

“Let’s have that nip.” Langevine clapped Rath on the back again, then led him to a tight hallway cast in a muddy light from frosted-amber sconces. The hall was so small, Rath could drag his fingertips along each wall and touch the ceiling.

Langevine opened the door and swept his hand to permit Rath to enter first into a library lit in the same dull, amber glow as the hallway, the source of which was now a fire in a massive stone fireplace at the far wall. Shadows and light danced together on the teak paneling and woodwork.

“Warm up. Be comfortable,” Langevine said, permitting Rath to enter. The fire alone lit the room, shadows and light playing about the room as the flames leapt.

“Sit,” Langevine said, “goodness.”

Rath sat hesitantly in the wingback chair that faced the door. The fire roared and cracked and threw off its intense heat, which that blasted Rath’s icy face and hands, making his skin itch to life. The revolver dug into his back. He felt disarmed, but he could not just sit and have a drink. If Rachel wasn’t here, Rath was wasting time he couldn’t afford to waste. Yet. Everything had pointed to it. All the facts. Or, the facts as he’d arranged them in his mind. Now he had enough doubt that he couldn’t just brandish the revolver in Langevine’s face and demand he take him to the dungeon, just in time for the state cops to witness it. It seemed outrageous now, that this meek man of medicine was responsible for missing girls, that as a child he’d sliced open a woman, and—

An idea struck him. He stood.

“Sit, please,” Langevine said as he swept his tiny, manicured hand toward the chair. He tonged ice cubes from an ornate silver bucket and dropped several tidy cubes into a snifter, lifted a bottle of scotch from among a collection of bottles. He poured two fingers of the honeyed liquid slowly, the cold ice cracking with a snap as the scotch slipped among it.

Langevine pushed the drink toward Rath, scotch sloshing at the rim. Rath took the glass.

“Shit,” Rath said.

Langevine raised an eyebrow. “You don’t care for ice? A
neat
man. I should have sussed.”

“No. It’s fine. I prefer it. I just think I left my dome light on.” Rath needed an excuse to get outside to meet the cops alone and explain his suspicions in private. Have them
radio
Sonja. Since they’d been called to the house, anything deemed suspicious while on the premises gave them authority to search. It was the legal equivalent of a vampire needing to be invited into your home to have access to its powers.

“Excuse me?” Langevine said, confused. He poured himself a neat scotch from the same bottle.

“Before I got out of my Scout,” Rath said. “I was rummaging for my notepad, and I turned on my dome light. If I left it on like a dimwit, the battery in that old jalopy—”

“The police will surely jump-start you,” Langevine said.

A thought snapped to attention in Rath’s head then was gone.

“I’d rather not look the fool,” he said, and sipped his scotch. It was the smoothest scotch he’d ever tasted, the booze going straight to his brain, seemingly not obliged to take the trip through the circulatory system to which the Islays Rath drank were subjected. He glanced at the bottle: Glenmorangie 25-Year.

“Sublime, yes?” Langevine said, smiling.

“Mmm,” Rath said, and indulged in a second longer sip before setting down his glass on the marble tabletop. He worked his jaw back and forth to stretch his face muscles, the wonders of the scotch making fast work of him, the gums of his back molars feeling puffy, his face lax and numb.

Langevine glanced at the wingback chair. “Sit,” he said. “Please.”

“Look,” Rath said. “I’ll be straight. I didn’t leave the dome light on. I’m embarrassed. I came up here and barged in planning to ask what I now see were weak questions at best.”

“Ask them anyway.”

“No.”

“No?” Langevine’s face squirmed beneath his beard, his eyes pinched down behind his large eyeglasses. His flop of bangs stuck to his forehead with sweat.

“I’ve bothered you enough,” Rath said. “The fact is, I’ve already made a big enough fool of myself. I’m sorry I bothered you at all.”

Langevine stared at him for a long, steady, uneasy moment. “Well,” he said, and sighed. “We all make mistakes. Yours is quite inconsequential in the scheme of things.”

Rath blinked. For a moment the room listed, then righted itself. It wasn’t just the scotch. It was absolute exhaustion, and not having had anything proper to eat in days. Rath took one last long pull of his scotch, reluctant to relinquish it, and said, “I really must go. I’ve imposed enough.”

Langevine made to put a hand to Rath’s back, where the revolver was snugged in his waistband. Rath dodged him, squirted past, out into the hall, which seemed to have grown to the size of Penn Station after the tight quarters of the fireplace room.

High above, chandeliers swayed on a draft.

Rath walked down the hall, his footfalls echoing in his ears though he could not actually feel the marble floor beneath him. Langevine followed at his side, drinking his scotch. Rath’s throat felt scratchy and choked, as if he’d swallowed steel wool. He cleared his throat, the sound a
whoosh
in his brain.

At the door, he gave his best smile, the smile feeling loose and manic, and said, “Again, I aplog- apologize.”

“Do not fret,” Langevine said. “Drive safely. I’ll work the gate for you so you don’t have to climb back out.” He giggled and opened the door, and a gush of wind was sucked into the house as if the manor were a beast sucking in a terrific breath.

The wind nearly knocked Rath over as snow swirled in. “Sorry,” he said, and stepped out into the rejuvenated storm.

The door closed behind him with a solid, deadening
thunk
.

Chapter 57

R
ATH
PUSHED HEADLONG
down the walk, disoriented and depressed. He jammed his hands into his jacket pocket and waited for the gate to open. It didn’t. He stared back at the manor, his footprints already blasted to oblivion by the blowing snow. He pulled on the gate to see if maybe it was frozen in place. No. Locked.

The front light in the alcove blinked out, and the walk fell dark. What was going on? Did Langevine suspect Rath was going to wait for the cops? The snow was falling so hard and being blown so fiercely now, Rath could not see his boots. He put a foot up on an outcrop of the marble pillar and was reaching up for a finger hold to attempt to climb again when he heard a sharp metallic clank and an electric whir as the gates spread open.

Rath fought against the gale to the Scout. He started up the rig and cranked the heat, waiting to thaw, his head sodden. He ran the wipers and watched the gate yawn shut as he waited for the cops.

And waited.

Until it hit him like an anvil from the sky.
You don’t close a gate when cops are expected any minute. You leave the gate open.

No cops were coming.

They’d never been called.

Langevine had deceived him, lulled him with his smiling mug and his cloying nonchalance. Langevine had known, or suspected at least, why Rath had showed up at his door. The doctor had played up the casual, befuddled reception, welcoming Rath with an air of natural curiosity, clapping him on the back and feeding him top-shelf scotch.

Rath’s gut seized with nausea. He shut his eyes and leaned forward, breathing hard through his mouth to calm his guts, which felt as if he’d drunk down bacon grease now congealing into a lump of hard fat in his intestines. His head clanged. His vision was watery. He spit up bile. Was that blood in it?

The scotch. If Langevine himself had not drunk from the same bottle, Rath would have suspected perhaps. But he had drunk from the same bottle.

The ice.
The melting ice. Langevine had his scotch neat. No ice.

Fuck.

Rachel was in there. And Mandy. Rath felt it. Knew it.

His guts heaved, and he stumbled from the Scout and shoved his fingers down his throat, past his tonsils, and vomited until there was nothing left to vomit, until he was emptied and feverish. Then he did it again, gagging dryly.

He stood, leaning on the Scout’s fender, and rubbed snow on his face and neck.

He stared at the gate, thinking, recalling what Langevine had said with a chill in his spine:
Behind the house you could literally tramp for miles before you come to the nearest road.
It struck him, what had skittered in his brain earlier when speaking with Gale.
Every mountain.

Rath plucked his Gazetteer from under the Scout’s seat. Yes, there it was. If you followed a line back up from where they’d found Julia’s body, followed it up and back for miles, it took you to Canaan summit, a wilderness barren of homes or roads. But. Down the other side of that summit. This side. You came to Ravens Way. The back of Langevine’s estate.

If Julia had escaped from here, she’d escaped out the back and immediately run straight away from her prison. There had to be a way out from behind. An in.

Rath stalked through the trees, mindless of the branches whipping his face. A warm trickle of blood slithered down his cheek as he staggered toward the iron fencing.

The terrain grew rocky with granite stone left behind by the glaciers. Ankle breakers. Head crushers. He picked his way, reaching into darkness as black as a covered well, and found the cold iron bars of the fence. He grabbed them, not wanting to fall off a ledge. His screams, his body, would be swallowed up forever.

He trudged along the perimeter, pulling himself forward by the iron bars, the snow deepening as he gained elevation, and the trees thinned. He stopped to gain his breath and peered through the iron bars. The cuffs of his wool pants were stiff as metal sheets with caked ice, his feet numb. The back of the manor had to be near.

He plowed through snow up to his thigh, the wind wailing, his frozen face and ears singing with pain.

The fence ended.

It was there, then gone.

Rath held on to the last bar and groped around for more fencing in the dark. But when he made to take another step, there was only empty air. How far down it fell, there was no way of knowing.

He held fast to the fence and inched around the end of it to solid ground. He was convulsing. Eyes burning. He tried to flex his fingers, but they would only bend at the first joints. The tips were dead.

He stared into the wind, toward where the house had to be. The snow stung his face. There. A dim light. He felt around in the snow. The ground was level. A lawn.

He pushed toward the pale light in the blizzard until he knocked up against a hulking metal contraption, a behemoth outdoor smoker, caked in ice. He slipped past it and came to the back of the manor, the wind flagging at the lee side, the snow falling gracefully. He stood in what looked like an outdoor patio, shaped in an arcing half-moon from a portico and edged by marble Greek balustrades capped with snow.

The light came from a window situated at least a foot above his line of sight.

He looked around for something to stand on.

There was nothing.

A shadow crossed a lit window upstairs, ghostlike.

Rath tucked close to the wall and found a door in the portico. He tried the knob. It was locked. He pondered breaking a windowpane, but he could not risk alerting Brutus.

As he walked the edge of the patio, he heard a flapping sound, like someone airing out a carpet. At the bottom of the door: a dog’s entrance. The plastic flap slapped in the wind. Rath knelt and pushed the flap but was met with resistance. A piece of Plexiglas was screwed tight to the frame. He leaned against the Plexiglas with his shoulder, and it gave with a
pop.
Rath froze, waiting. When no light went on or noise came from inside, he squeezed through the dog door and lay on the floor, listening, hearing nothing but the whining wind. He was in. Thank you, Brutus.

Gingerly, he stood, his back protesting. The room was empty and cold, a three-season affair the size of a wedding banquet hall, the floor a jigsaw of multicolored slate. He stepped briskly across the room, feeling for his revolver with numbed fingers that stung ferociously as they warmed.

He worked the doorknob of a grand door. It turned with a click, and he pushed open the door and stepped deftly into a room with vaulted ceilings, gun drawn.

The room was dark, but he could make out a billiard table with the balls tidily racked at one end and a pair of cues crossed like swords at the other end. Beside it stood an ornate bar of dark wood, teak maybe. A flat-screen TV on the wall facing him was so immense, Rath at first did not recognize it as anything but a wall itself. It was the size of a drive-in movie screen. On the wall to his left was a stone fireplace with an elaborately carved marble mantel. This fireplace ran on propane gas, its pilot light pulsing in the dark room like a glowing blue eye of a madman. Above the mantel was hoisted a crucifix on which a life-size Jesus hung by the nails driven in his palms.

He slipped through a door into a hallway, revolver out, fingertips smarting with a prickling sensation, as if he were grabbing hold of cactus. Frostbite. He’d likely lose a finger, or two.

He prowled down the hallway toward a sickly light bleeding out from under a doorway at the end of the hall, stopped with his back to the wall to calm his breathing.

Light leaked from the antique doorknob’s skeleton keyhole. He squeezed his revolver and put his eye to the keyhole as the woman’s voice rose to a fervent pitch, words enunciated annunciated with a hard, precise bite of the teeth, as if each syllable were being punched out from a sheet of tin.

“Renstrom has led the way!” she bellowed. “He has soldiered in the trenches of the heartland for ten years. With steadfast heroism, he has enacted laws in his home state of Missouri to save our innocent unborn! He has been vilified and libeled and attacked for speaking the Holy Truth! For calling abortion what it is!” The woman’s voice reached an incantatory crescendo, mesmerizing, orgasmic.

Rath pressed his eye tight to the keyhole but could make out only the jog of shadows on the wall. Rath lunged into the room, revolver up and swinging.

There stood Betty Malroy, wailing: “He has made it through his trials of fire
because
he speaks the Holy Truth. God’s Truth! And he has made it nearly to the Promised Land, and if you get behind him, it is a win not just for the United States, no! But for God!” She sliced a finger through the air, as if to cut a throat. Her face was scarlet with fury. Insanity. A daub of spittle frothed at the corner of her mouth like a spiderweb.

She looked like she might faint from rapturous overload.

“We will win this war! ”

Rath stared as Malroy continued her rant, oblivious to him because she was an image on a flat-screen TV that overlooked what could only be viewed as an altar, the room itself strung with pews, a small chapel with walls adorned with paintings of the Crucifixion.

Rath raced down the hall toward a spiral staircase where light from above pooled on the wrought-iron landing. He climbed the stairs quietly until he found himself in another vast corridor of marble.

At the far end, a single bright light shone like the lone headlight of a locomotive in a tunnel, casting a silver glow on the marble floor. A figure stepped across the light and was gone.

Rath hurried, the marble floors making it impossible to tread quietly, his footfalls seeming to boom around him. At the end of the hall, he panted and looked down the hall toward where the person had gone. Empty. He crept down the hall, looked left then right down the next hall. The place was a labyrinth.

He was about to venture left when he heard it: a weak, muffled sound, like a child sobbing into a pillow.

He waited.

There. A mewl.

It seemed to come from within his skull. A dream sob. A nightmare.

The sob floated along the floor, drifted from under the door like a sonic fog.

No. Not from under the door, from the vent beside the door. He crawled to the vent and put his ear to it. A girl’s voice, pleading: “Help.”

Rachel?

A voice, a woman’s voice, not Malroy’s, cried up through the vent: “For the body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body!”

Rath was pushing off the floor to stand when the hallway imploded in brilliant light, and the back of his skull cracked open.

He rolled onto his back, head screaming, and looked up to see Langevine standing over him, smiling.

In one hand, Langevine held a pool ball, slick with what Rath imagined was his own blood. Dangling from his other hand, a knife of gleaming steel, sterile, its blade long and slim. Wicked.

Langevine’s face cracked open wider with a mad jack-o’-lantern grin. “It’d have been much”—he scratched his thick beard—“easier for you if you’d simply stayed and finished your scotch. You’d simply have slipped away and never awoken. Very peaceful. I had your feelings in mind. You’d never have had to suffer this indignity, as swiftly as I will try to make it for you now. I’ve grown quite adept at it. Surgical. Of course, if you care to drink the scotch, I’ll permit that. I am not a cruel man.”

Rath felt sure his skull was cracked open along its seams, his brain oozing out.

He kept his eyes locked on Langevine’s eyes and crawled his hand in the shadows beside him, trying to locate the revolver.

Langevine stabbed Rath’s hand and it burst with a supernova pain as he swallowed his scream, not wanting to alert the woman, was it Leslie, Gale’s boss, down there with Rachel?

Langevine picked up the revolver and fiddled with it, opened the cylinder and tipped out the bullets so they clacked onto the floor. “I hate guns. So . . . dispassionate. Cowardly even. Wouldn’t you agree?”

He leaned down, his face inches from Rath’s face, and smiled. Beneath the masking scent of mint mouthwash, his hot breath so rancid Rath recoiled. Langevine squeezed Rath’s jaw and met Rath’s eyes with his own. His eyes were . . . wrong. Somehow. The irises as black as the pupils. Lightless. Magnified by his thick eyeglasses, the blackness swam in the whites, an island of black in a puddle of white. Rath had taken Langevine’s eyes as odd due to his eyeglasses magnifying them. He saw now the eyes themselves were abnormally large.

“Yes. My eyes,” Langevine said, his breath caustic enough to shrivel a flower. “And. My breath. Side effects of Sjogrens Syndrome, I’m afraid. An autoimmune-system disorder.” He waved his hand around as if batting at phantom mosquitoes. “It affects the mucous membranes and moisture-secreting glands. Thus. No saliva. Dry mouth. Bad breath. No tears either.” He shrugged. “Waa. An annoyance compared to the joint pain I suffer in my knees and hips, and the ongoing attack on my liver and thyroids. Rheumatism and arthritis since I was five years old. Dreadful.” He giggled as if amused by an old joke.

Rath eased himself to sit against the wall. The pain from the stab wound volcanic. Blood spread out on the floor from where his palm rested.

A whimpering came from the vent, and Rath tensed.

“A shame,” Langevine said. “It’s a monstrous business, as I believe I mentioned in our initial interview.”

“What?” Rath said. He wanted to keep him talking.

A whimper rose out of the vent. Rachel? Rath thought his heart might burst.

Langevine looked Rath in the eye. “I’d rather be alive and the way I am than have been murdered by my own mother.”

Rath fought the urge to spring on Langevine. He’d only be stabbed to death. He needed the precise moment if it came.

Langevine put his face close to Rath’s again, smiling.

Rath squinted. There was something wrong with Langevine’s face, too. Up close, it was asymmetrical. As if it were a mask that had been broken to pieces and the pieces had been stitched back together again with meticulous precision, but with a few parts missing, so the face did not quite add up.