Ash Wednesday (44 page)

But still, all she had to do to start the nightmare was to look out a front window at the dead man in the yard, or peer out back across the narrow patch of field toward the older section of town to see the glow, shining solidly in the distance.

The back door slammed and her body jerked in sudden shock. Damn!

"Chris?" It was Brad's voice. "Where are you?" He stood framed in the doorway, half smiling. "We're going to a movie.
Bambi
's around again. You want to come?"

"Where?"

"Lansford. Not here." His lip curled as if in disgust at her cowardice.

"All right. I'll come."

"I don't want you to come just to get out of the house for a few hours," Brad said, his face grim. "I want you to come because you want to see
Bambi
with your kid."

"All
right!
" she said. "I want to see the fucking movie, okay?"

Brad gave her a long look. "Then you'd better get ready."

They went to the movie. Brad and Wally laughed at Thumper. Christine didn't. When Bambi's mother was shot, Wally leaned over to his mother. "Where's his mommy?" he whispered.

"She's dead," she replied, not in a whisper, but in a low voice that was audible several rows away. Somewhere a little girl started to cry.

That night, as on all the others she'd spent in Merridale since the phenomenon had begun, she remained awake until exhaustion finally drew her down to sleep. Just before she drifted off, she felt a touch of exasperation at a noise that barely parted her consciousness. It was the sound of a car coming closer and then idling for some time before it stopped. It was a sound she had heard before, late, on other nights, and she thought dimly that it must be a neighbor.

~*~

It wasn't. The car belonged to Carl Bailey, and Dave Boyer was behind the wheel, Mr. Bailey's daughter, Kim, next to him, her hand riding high on his thigh. "Here? Again?" she whispered.

"Why not? It was fine last week."

"I don't know. I'd feel better out farther."

"Honey, this is the suburbs. There are cars all over, and nobody's walking. It's perfect."

"But what if somebody sees us?"

"
Nobody'll
see us. We'll be in the backseat with our heads down . . . won't we?" He let his finger trail the curve of her ear.

"What's wrong with farther out?" she pressed. "What about
Schwanger
Road? There are those dirt roads off of it."

"Uh-uh. Cops could see us from the road. And what if some creeps pull up behind us—we'd be stuck. This is fine. Safest of all."

"Well, turn on the heater, then."

"Who needs a heater?" He chuckled, but he started the ignition and let hot air flow into the Pontiac until they were uncomfortable in their jackets. "Enough?"

She nodded, and they crawled over to the backseat, fearing to open the doors because of the courtesy light. For a few minutes, as on the previous Saturday night, she was nervous and apprehensive, tensing at every infrequent sweep of early-morning headlights. But slowly Dave made her relax, and when she finally came she had nearly driven from her mind the image of Police Chief
Kaylor's
stern, puritanical face gazing through the back window.

~*~

She needn't have worried. Frank
Kaylor's
mind was as far from the thought of two teenagers making love in a car on Sundale Road as it was from the Charlie Chan movie he was supposedly watching on television. Barry, his thirteen-year-old, was lying on the floor in front of the set, entranced by each pseudo-Oriental
bon mot
that dripped so easily from Warner Oland's smiling mouth.
Everything
dripped easily for Charlie Chan.
Kaylor
wondered how the hell easily Chan would solve the Marie Snyder killing. Get everybody in town together in a big room, maybe.

Shit, it
could
be that easy. After all, Merridale was still a town in self-imposed quarantine, so you didn't have drifters. Great. So that left, what, only 8,000 suspects? And the way Marie Snyder gossiped, there were any number of people with possible motives. The venomous old bitch had spread rumors true or false about half the people in town over the years. Maybe, he'd supposed at first, somebody finally had had enough. It was one way to close that thin-lipped, hard-lined mouth.

But the killer hadn't closed it, had he (or she)? That mouth was opened for good now, hanging over the edge of the counter where she'd counted what must have been millions of coins in change over the decades. He confessed to himself that he wasn't sorry to see her go, but he was damned if that was going to let him turn a blind eye toward this investigation. This was his town, and he loved it, and he owed it something, just like it owed him his fifteen hundred a month.

So he sat and watched Charlie Chan bump into his Number One Son in the shadows and thought some more about that day when Fred
Hibbs
had nearly battered down the door of the police station.

Kaylor
hadn't arrived yet, and Del Franklin, who'd been stuck with night duty that week, had called him. When
Kaylor
arrived at the newsstand, Fred
Hibbs
was standing outside on the sidewalk, afraid to go back in.
Kaylor
left him there and went in to talk to Del, who, to
Kaylor's
indignation, hadn't searched the place. They went through it together, hands on holstered guns, but found no one. Del proudly pointed out that it looked as if someone had gone through the apartment opening and closing drawers, a situation
Kaylor
had noticed right away. While they waited for the state police to arrive, Del mentioned how cold the shop was. "Go down and put some coal on,"
Kaylor
said. "I don't think
she'll
care one way or the other."

Del Franklin made his way to the cellar, grabbed the coal shovel, and began to toss the coal into the wheezy old furnace. When the coals were burning well, Del continued to add more. Gonna be here a long time, he thought. The coal bin was dark, so he didn't see the envelope, now blackened with coal dust, until he flung the shovelful of coal that held it into the furnace's mouth.

He heard it hit before he saw it, then watched as it ignited far more quickly than the coal, burning with a bright, yellow flame in brilliant contrast to the tamely glowing red lumps. What the hell? Del thought. What was that? Something, apparently, that didn't belong in a coal bin. He frowned, wondering if he should say anything to Chief
Kaylor
, but decided not to. Just piss him off that I wasn't more careful, he told himself. Besides, what's
done's
done. He couldn't reach in and snatch out whatever it was, and who could tell now what it ever
had
been? Probably, he thought, just some paper the old lady kept handy to start the fire when it died out.

So he shut the furnace door, and left Marie Snyder's perfect hiding place, going upstairs to share in the warmth of ten thousand burning dollars.

The investigation proved to be a dead end. There were no Charlie Chan-type clues, no telltale cigarette butts, or buttons torn off the killer's coat by the victim, or crumpled slips of paper with the murderer's handwriting. Even the forensic specialists found nothing. Hairs, pieces of thread, tiny bits of flesh under the victim's nails—all were absent. "I thought you guys were supposed to be able to tell
something
about the killer,"
Kaylor
told a forensics man later over the phone. "After all, they got that guy in Atlanta with pieces of fiber, didn't they?"

"It wasn't just that," the man, a clerkish type named Rogers, replied. "They couldn't have got him on that alone. Besides, they had all the money and equipment they needed. We don't."

"So it's what? A question of economics?"

"All the money in the world won't buy clues that aren't there, Chief." The "chief" was slurred deprecatingly. "So you got nothing."

"That's the size of it."

"Where the hell's Craig Kennedy when you need him?”

“What?"

"Nothing. Thinking out loud."

Kaylor
began to think silently as well. He questioned dozens of people who had known Marie Snyder, and those who only frequented her store. "Did you notice anything different about her lately?”

“Had she mentioned anything or anybody in a peculiar manner?”

“Did she do anything peculiar?" He'd spent over an hour talking with John Grubb, the tight-fisted pensioner who occasionally tended the newsstand and helped Marie with the heavy work. He denied noticing any recent changes in her, except for one small thing.

"She always argues with me when I got split time—I mean, like if I got a spare five or ten or twenty minutes. I always got a full half hour out of her for it—that was the deal—but she always groused about it. The Sunday before she died, though, she didn't. I thought that was queer."

Kaylor
thought it was queer too. It might have been an indication that she'd gotten some extra money from someone somewhere, which might make robbery the motive. But it also might have been only an indication that she was full of Pastor Craven's Christmas spirit sermon. Even if it was a clue, there was nothing to support it. Marie Snyder's bank account showed no deviation from the norm, and no secret caches of cash, gold coins, or green stamps were discovered when the apartment was searched.

So the police, to Frank
Kaylor's
extreme dismay, remained ignorant, Marie Snyder remained dead, and the killer remained undiscovered, for it would be incorrect to say that he was unknown, since Clyde Thornton was still easily the most conspicuous man in Merridale.

The first week after Marie Snyder's killing was torturous for Thornton. Not a minute passed in which he did not listen for the sound of a police car growling up the driveway. Every phone call was, in his imagination, from Chief
Kaylor
asking him if he wouldn't mind coming down to the station to answer a few questions. Thornton did his minimal work, filled out his reports, wrote up the required psychosocial profiles, but every second he expected to feel a steely hand close on his shoulder, to hear the rough click of a handcuff at his wrist.

The Wednesday evening town meeting was the worst. There he sat at the head table, Tom Markley on one side, Frank
Kaylor
on the other, Pastor Craven two chairs down. The first topic of discussion, of course, had been Marie Snyder's murder. No,
Kaylor
had answered, there were no leads at this point and he couldn't say when they might have a suspect, and Markley had said that he felt confident that between the facilities of the state police and the inside information that their own town force was gleaning there would be an arrest before too long, and Craven had added that it was terribly, terribly tragic that in a place where death was at everyone's right hand, someone should add even more death. If this person, he went on, would like to come forth and turn himself in, or if he wanted to contact Craven anonymously, Craven would be more than willing to give whatever help he could. We are all God's children, he said, and he will comfort us no matter what our transgressions.

Thornton had actually shifted in his chair then, preparatory to rising, but he caught himself in time. It was the fear and apprehension that tormented him more than any guilt that he felt, and Craven's words of comfort, his soft, deep, soothing voice, the promise of rest, had almost brought Thornton to his feet in a public confession, like some tired sinner brought to Jesus under a canvas roof and over a sawdust floor, lured by promises of peace and a ripe ambience of agape. But a face in the mass of townspeople had shifted to his own face at that second, and the eyes of a woman he did not know by name looked into his. It was, for all he knew, one of those random movements of the head, nothing more, but his fancy saw coldness in it, the hardness of a town toward a man who takes one of their own, and the look stopped him, saved him from his own confession, and he held his fear within.

But as the days lengthened into weeks, the fear receded. In its place there grew a quiet triumph, a sense that he had done it all correctly and would not be discovered. Time, place, method—nothing had been linked to him. He remembered reading that most arrests were made within forty-eight hours of the crime. After that, the perpetrator's odds were better and better that he'd get away with whatever it was he'd done. And now, at the beginning of February, the killing was almost six weeks behind him. He no longer flinched when the phone rang, and had not peered backward over his shoulder for quite a while.