The Unwanted (39 page)

“All right,” Templeton said heavily, standing up and pulling his raincoat on. “I’d better get out to the marsh and see what’s happened. Ed can sit in a cell the rest of the night, and in the morning I’ll think of something to charge him with. I can try failure to report evidence of a crime or something.” He turned to face Laura. “Unless you decide to change your mind.”

Laura looked up fearfully. “I can’t.” Her voice was a whisper. “I just can’t. You have to understand.…”

Templeton nodded wearily. He did, indeed, understand, for the position Laura had taken tonight was no different from what he’d seen again and again as a policeman in Boston: women who were absolutely certain that the only way to save themselves from worse beatings was to keep silent about the ones they had already suffered. And in a way they were right, for too many men had come out of courtrooms swearing they had changed, only to return to their wives with their hatreds festering deeper than ever.

Some of those women, Templeton knew, had paid with their lives for assuming the law could protect them. Laura Cavanaugh had no intention of becoming one of those.

“Okay,” he said, his voice gentle. “I’ll do what I can to hold him, but I can’t tell you he’s not going to do it again, Laura. You know he is.”

Now it was Eric who broke his long silence. “He won’t,” he said, his voice clear. “I told Mom, and I’ll tell you too. If he ever tries to beat either one of us again, I’ll kill him.”

Templeton gazed silently at the boy. Something in Eric, he realized, had changed. Always before there had been a gentleness and kindness in Eric that he’d always marveled at. By rights the boy should have been silent and brooding, striking out at others in retribution for the injustices he suffered at home.

In Templeton’s experience, most boys Eric’s age and with Eric’s background had long since shown some rebellion.
But Eric never had. Always he’d seemed to rise above his father’s hatred, had appeared almost untouched by it. But now there was a hardness in the boy’s eyes, a detached coldness. Eric’s words had not been uttered in momentary anger.

“That won’t be an answer, Eric,” he said quietly. “In a few more years you’ll be out of it. If you can’t stand it now, file charges against him yourself, or take off. But don’t even think about killing him. He’d probably kill you first, but even if he didn’t, you’d never get away with it. You’re a good kid, Eric—you always have been. Don’t let him push you into destroying your own life.”

Eric’s lips tightened, and the expression in his eyes didn’t change. Finally, with nothing left to be said, Templeton buttoned up his raincoat and disappeared out into the night. When he was gone, Rosemary looked nervously at Eric, but he didn’t seem aware of her gaze. His eyes were fixed on Cassie with an intensity that made Rosemary turn to look at her stepdaughter.

Cassie was returning Eric’s steady gaze.

An icy chill passed through Rosemary’s body.
They’re hiding something
, she thought.
They know something that neither of them wants to talk about
.

The rain finally stopped as dawn began to break, but still the morning light came slowly. Leaden clouds hung low over the sea, and the horizon seemed not to exist at all. It was as if False Harbor, that morning, had been suspended in both space and time.

Charlotte Ambler opened the drapes over the front windows of her house and looked out into the gray morning. A somnolent foreboding hung over the village, and there was none of the usual Sunday morning peacefulness that had always been her favorite part of her week. On any other rainy Sunday morning she would be lighting a fire in her fireplace and curling up in her robe to slowly peruse the thick weekend edition of the Boston paper. But this morning was not like other Sunday mornings.

She gazed out toward the marsh, where the tired figures of the searchers were now clearly silhouetted against the gun-metal sky. A knot of people had already gathered in the
parking lot at the end of Oak Street, and as she watched them quietly talking among themselves, she realized that she was seeing a reflection of both the best and the worst of village living.

In another place—a larger city—Lisa Chambers’s disappearance would have been noted in the morning paper, and the search would have gone quietly on, almost unnoticed. And for most people, life, too, would have gone quietly on, essentially unchanged for the absence of a single member of their society.

But in False Harbor there was no morning paper; indeed, none was needed, for by now, Charlotte was quite certain, there wasn’t a soul in town who was unaware of what had happened last night, at least in its barest essentials. But in the realm of detail there would be as many versions filtering from ear to ear as there were mouths to speak them, and until the truth about what had happened to Lisa was discovered, there would be scant attention paid to any other subject.

She turned away from her front window and went to the kitchen. Soon people would begin noticing that her drapes were open and would start dropping by, some looking for news, some only needing a respite from the vigil by the beach. Her large percolator had just begun to simmer when the doorbell rang for the first time. When she opened the front door, she wasn’t surprised to see Gene Templeton standing on the front porch, looking every bit as tired as she herself felt.

“Anything?” she asked.

Templeton shook his head. “Not yet.”

“What about Ed Cavanaugh?”

Templeton shrugged. “I found him on his boat, dead drunk. He—well, he claims there’s a body out there all right. But he says it’s Cassie Winslow’s. He says he saw her in some quicksand but couldn’t get to her.”

“Cassie?” Charlotte echoed. “But Eric said—”

“I know,” Templeton interrupted. “And if there
is
a body out there, it isn’t Cassie. She’s at home with Rosemary. Anyway, a little while ago I got to thinking …” He fell silent, reluctant to reveal the thought that had been nibbling at the edge of his mind for the last hour or so.

Charlotte frowned in puzzlement.

“I keep thinking about Simms,” Templeton said finally.

“Harold?” Charlotte breathed. “I—I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

The police chief licked his lips nervously. “Remember what happened that day? He’d been riding Cassie pretty hard, and Eric too.” He paused. Then: “Lisa’s been giving Cassie a rough time, too, hasn’t she?”

Charlotte’s frown deepened as she grasped what Templeton was suggesting. Before she could speak again, a shout rose up from the marsh and both she and Templeton turned to see one of the deputies waving frantically. Templeton’s stomach knotted as he realized that the man was standing only a few yards inside the marsh, very close to the place where last night he’d seen the fading marks of tire tracks on the beach. It was, he realized now, almost as if they had been pointing at the spot where Harve Lamont now stood.

Swearing softly, Templeton took the front steps of Charlotte Ambler’s house two at a time and began loping back toward the marsh. Pausing only to pull her mackintosh from the hook by the front door, Charlotte followed as quickly as she could.

“How’d you find her?” Templeton asked, his voice low enough that only the heavyset deputy would be able to hear him. Harve Lamont said nothing for a moment. His eyes were still fixed on the specter of Lisa Chambers’s face, barely visible beneath the thin layer of brackish water that covered the surface of the marsh.

“The reeds,” Harve finally managed to say. “I couldn’t really see her at all. But the reeds were all broken here, and the grass was kind of squished down. It looked to me as though there’d been some kind of struggle or something. So I came out a little closer, and there was just enough light, so … so—” His voice cracked and he was unable to go on.

She was nearly buried in the mud, only her face visible. Her mouth, wide open, seemed still to be forming a silent scream, while her eyes stared sightlessly up through the water. The lacerations that covered her face had been washed clean, and the damage that had been inflicted showed clearly
through the water. The skin on her forehead was all but torn away, and a large chunk was missing from one of her cheeks.

And everywhere—in every place in which her flesh was still intact—there were deep parallel rows of cuts that looked to Gene Templeton almost exactly like the wounds that had covered Harold Simms’s face.

Lisa’s left arm was buried in the mud, but her right, almost completely entangled in a matting of swamp grass, was crossed over her body. From her position Templeton was almost certain she had continued struggling right up until the end, then—in a last terrified grasp at survival—managed to turn herself over. But it had already been too late.

Templeton nodded curtly, then signaled two of the firemen to bring a stretcher. Clyde Bennett and another man appeared with it. Behind them came two other deputies carrying wide planks, which they carefully laid on the surface of the marsh, one on each side of the corpse.

It took the four men several minutes to work Lisa’s remains loose from the oozing sands. When at last her stiffened body came free, there was an ugly sucking noise as the marsh gave up its prize. But then, as Templeton watched in a kind of awe, the mud flowed swiftly together. In moments only the broken reeds still testified to the fact that only hours before a girl had died there.

In a strange cortege, Templeton led the four men bearing Lisa Chambers’s body slowly back to the path and the beach beyond. Waiting for them at the point where the reeds met the sand was Harriet Chambers, her face ashen, her hands trembling.

She stared at the body for a few seconds, her lips working to stifle the scream building in her throat.

“No,” she whispered at last, and then the word was repeated, rising into a keening wail that sliced through the quiet of the morning.
“Noooooo …”

She was about to throw herself on her daughter’s corpse when Templeton slid a firm arm around her, holding her back while he signaled to Fred Chambers with his free hand. Instantly Fred was next to his wife, supporting her while he glared at the police chief over her shoulder.

“Well?” he demanded. “Are you satisfied now? Now are you going to lock that drunken son of a bitch up?”

Templeton stared at the man for a moment, then decided it was useless to try to argue with him now. If he wasn’t in shock yet, he would be in another few minutes, and though the police chief felt pity for Lisa’s distraught parents, he had to attend to pressing matters. To his relief the Chamberses’ friends were already beginning to surround them even as he stepped away to begin issuing orders to have Lisa’s body taken to the clinic, where it would be examined by Paul Samuels.

Starting back toward the parking lot and his car, Templeton saw Charlotte Ambler, who appeared to have been frozen in her tracks by the sight of Lisa’s body. But as he came abreast of her, she put out a hand and grasped his wrist.

“What does it mean?” she asked. “It—it
is
just like Harold Simms. But what does it mean?”

Templeton shook his head grimly. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “And I’m not going to even venture a guess until the doc’s taken a look at her.”

He tried to move on, but Mrs. Ambler didn’t release her grip. Templeton felt her fingers tighten on his arm.

“What if it is?” she pressed. “What if it really is just like Harold?” Her eyes held Templeton’s. “Are you going to say she did it to herself?”

Templeton’s eyes flashed toward the group of onlookers who were staring curiously at Charlotte now, straining to hear her words. “I’m not saying anything yet, Charlotte.” He spoke quietly but with an urgency he hoped she would understand. But Charlotte seemed not to have heard him at all.

“What if Harold was right?” she went on. “What if he really did see Cassie that day? And what if Ed Cavanaugh really saw her last night?”

Templeton heard the faint gasp that passed over the small crowd, immediately followed by a buzz of whispering.

That does it, he thought. Within an hour the rumors would be all over town.

Ed Cavanaugh woke up quickly: a sharp pain was jabbing through his head, as if someone had shoved a knitting needle into his ear then jerked it viciously up and down. His eyes, still closed in a futile effort to shut out the throbbing ache in his head, felt like they had ground glass in them, and
his tongue—a thick slab in his dry mouth—had a sour taste to it. His body felt clammy, and remnants of the nausea that had first awakened him sometime before dawn were still clawing at him, warning him that if he moved too fast, he would find himself on his knees, retching.

A siren sounded somewhere, exacerbating the agony inside his skull, and he tried to raise his hands to clamp them over his ears, but the movement was too much for his polluted body to stand, and his stomach heaved in protest. He dropped his hands back down and concentrated on summoning the energy to bellow to Laura for a cup of coffee.

Or maybe he should just go back to sleep for an hour.

His fingers closed on the sheets, ready to pull the covers up over his head. Dimly, he became aware that something was wrong.

His hands, instead of clutching the sheets and soft blankets of his own bed, had closed on some kind of rough wool. He held still for a moment, trying to think through the pain in his brain. Then he groaned and opened his eyes a crack.

What he saw confirmed the vague memory he had summoned from the depths of his consciousness.

Above the metal cot on which he lay, there was a concrete wall, its gray paint chipped and etched with obscenities. Halfway up the wall there was a small window, covered on the outside with a heavy grillwork of bars. He stared at the barred window for a few seconds, numbly wondering if perhaps he was only dreaming.

But he knew he wasn’t.

Carefully twisting his neck, the throbbing in his head building to a crescendo of pain at the movement, he saw a toilet bolted to the opposite wall.

Another memory stirred, and he vaguely recalled having rolled off the cot during the night to lean over the toilet while the contents of his stomach boiled up from his throat. The stench in the air told him that when he’d finally returned to the makeshift bed, he hadn’t bothered to flush the toilet. Slowly, almost tentatively, he reached out and pressed the button that protruded from the wall next to the toilet. Instantly the roar of water under pressure filled the cell, then faded away as the mess in the metal toilet bowl disappeared into the sewers. Ed Cavanaugh groaned, turned his head to
the wall and clamped his eyes closed again, as if the action itself could change the reality around him. A moment later, though, the clang of a heavy metal door made him roll back and reopen his bloodshot eyes.