Hangman: A Novel (31 page)

The coal window was right here, but someone had patched it over. Years ago.

She walked slowly, her hand still on the house, crouching as she crept along. There was an earth smell back here, and her hand touched only concrete. Abbie counted out another eight feet, then ten, before she came across a thick black pipe that turned on an elbow joint and went into the cement.

“Damn it,” she muttered, then pushed ahead. Five feet later, her hand dropped onto the cool surface of glass.

Abbie dropped to her knees. It was an old, leaded glass window set deep in the base of the house. The glass was dark and greenish and
looking through it was like staring into a deep pond where the bottom wasn’t visible. If the diagram was right, she was at least fifteen feet from the coal bin. Abbie took out her flashlight. At least she’d get a look into the basement.

She flicked the flashlight on and turned it toward the green window. A bright cone of light lit up the surface. She moved it down and dropped to her knees.

I hope McGonagle chose a talker. Tell Myeong a story, comment on his chimney, scare him into getting an estimate.

The cone of light spread itself into an egg shape as it shone on the basement’s dusty floor. It was like looking at objects at the bottom of a well. She could only make out shapes.

Her phone buzzed.

“Done?” the text read.

“Not even close,” she muttered and stuffed the phone back in her pocket.

There was a box, maybe wood, maybe not, with some writing on the side. Abbie pressed her face to the glass, the light skimmed over something flat, something familiar. She moved it back.

It was a desk. She recognized it from her days at Mount Mercy High School. A school desk with an attached seat, held together by a gray metal tube.

Basement clutter, she said to herself.

The phone buzzed again. She didn’t look at it. Instead, she moved the flashlight to the right. Something glowed in the light and disappeared. The back of her neck went ice-cold. Abbie moved the beam back.

A human hand, pale in the dark cellar.

Abbie gasped and pulled the flashlight back. She couldn’t
see past the wrist, there was something large—a dresser?—in front of the arm blocking her view. Abbie sat back, a surge of terror inching up her throat.

She couldn’t make out any details, beyond that the arm looked thin and wasn’t moving. Abbie rubbed the heavy glass of the window with her sleeve, then shone her light back on it. The arm hung there. A young girl’s arm.

Abbie banged the flashlight on the window. “Katrina,” she called.

No movement.

Something buzzed on her thigh, and she jumped back. The phone again.

She looked down at it. “Myeong antsy. Be ready to move.”

Abbie reached for the window and began to push it with both hands splayed against the glass. The frame groaned, but refused to give. She turned her head and pushed harder. Either the window was painted shut or it was locked from the inside.

“Katrina,” she cried out.

Abbie moved along the base, feeling through the thick grass. Five feet down was another window inset into the concrete. She pushed on
it and it gave a half-inch before springing back. Breathing hard now, Abbie turned and sat on the cold ground, putting her riding boots against the frame. She took a breath, held it and pushed, her hands gripping the dirt underneath them.

The frame gave way with a horrendous shriek and dropped inward on a rusted hinge. A smell of dampness came rushing up into Abbie’s nostrils. She coughed and turned away.

The buzzing from the phone again. Abbie ignored it. She was going in.

The interior of the room was dark as a shroud. Abbie pushed her head and shoulders through the gap and felt for something in the semidarkness. Her hand dropped down until it touched steel, round and cold. She pushed against it and it held. Abbie braced herself against the pipe as she pulled the rest of her body in and lowered down face-first toward the floor. Oh, God, she thought, don’t let it be a torture rack.

She held the bar and swung her feet to the floor. Abbie stood, grasping for her flashlight. The basement was quiet, the silence enveloping her.

Then she heard footsteps from above.

Abbie clicked on the light and dust rose from the floor. She’d disturbed the tiny particles, but through the veil of motes she could see objects: a low dresser, and something turned against the wall, tall and rectangular with something silvery at the center. A mirror, Abbie thought.

Another noise from above. A door closing? She no longer heard footsteps.

The phone buzzed. She snapped it out of her pocket.

Text from McGonagle: “Run.”

Abbie shoved the phone into her pocket and moved the flashlight to her right hand. As she did so, the shaking light revealed paintings stacked against a concrete wall. Abbie pulled the Glock from the holster, its raised grip cold and damp, then turned toward the steel thing she’d felt when climbing in.

An old bed frame, painted with that black old enamel that gleams.
On it hung something small and square. Abbie walked up to it and reached for it in the darkness.

A baby’s building block, worn, with some of the edges chipped. The letter A, painted in blue, the background in white. Abbie stared at it, then twirled the block slowly in her hand.

A baby block.

Her eyes were wide with adrenaline and she felt her hand shaking. Easy, Abbie. You’re close now. Get to the girl and get out.

Abbie flashed the light ahead and approached the door. She took two steps, more dust billowing up, golden in the light. She touched the knob. The room’s mustiness nearly choked her.

She opened the door a crack. Air came rushing in through the dark gap and Abbie listened into the room ahead. Silence.

Why didn’t the hand move when I tapped the glass? She had a vision of Katrina Lamb hung from a rafter, hand dangling down, like Martha Stoltz up in the tree. The stillness of death.

Abbie pushed open the door and put the flashlight through first, turned it slowly to the right, followed by the Glock. Shoulders squeezed together, she pushed through the doorway.

A low-ceilinged hallway led to steps twenty feet away. Seven of them, she counted. And a door in the wall to her right. She moved toward it quickly.

Steps again, closer now, definitely on the floor just above her. The floor seemed to creak under someone’s weight. Abbie took a shaky breath and flexed her palm over the Glock’s grip.

Should I text McGonagle, tell him to get some cops down here? No time, she thought. What if Katrina is still alive?

Abbie dashed toward the room with the body and pulled on the knob. The door pulled back but the top corner was jammed in the frame and the door torqued back without releasing. Abbie set her feet and pulled away. The corner stuck fast. She closed her eyes and tried again, the veins in her neck beginning to stand with the effort. The door creaked, then all of a sudden it shuddered open. Abbie fell back against the far wall. Crouched against the cold, jagged stones, she shone a light into the doorway.

A dresser, oak. A nice one. Newer than the stuff in the next room. Abbie got up quickly and stepped toward the room. She listened almost subconsciously for the creaking of a rope, a rope with something heavy on it. She slid in, an icy tremor sweeping across her face as she entered.

There was a body straight ahead of her, turned away, motionless. Abbie felt her skin tingle with horror.

Abbie pulled the Glock up and was about to draw on its chest when she noticed the outline of the head. It was odd, misshapen.

She brought the flashlight up and saw a head with no eyes or ears.

“A mannequin,” Abbie whispered. It wore a tartan skirt and a crisp white blouse. She was momentarily confused, until she recognized the uniform from her school debating days. Sacred Heart Academy. Maggie Myeong had gone to Sacred Heart.

Abbie moved closer.

Another mannequin to her left. This one wearing a flowing green dress, one-shouldered. Abbie stared at it in horror, not understanding.

“Can I help you, Detective?” she heard behind her.

She swung around, her hand shaking.

“Mr. Myeong,” she whispered. His eyes were covered by shadow, which cut across his chin.

“What are you doing in my house?”

Abbie breathed, her heart pounding furiously. Was Katrina Lamb nearby?

“What are these mannequins, Mr. Myeong?”

He stepped closer. Myeong was pale, his face tight with anger or surprise. The eyes were agitated and red-rimmed. His hand came up, pale as a ghost in the moted light, and he seemed to cover his eyes. “When you lose a girl,” Myeong said, and came toward her into the room. “You want to keep as much of her as you can.”

She saw his eyes now, and they were angry, but they wandered past her and focused on the mannequin just over her right shoulder, the one wearing the school uniform.

Abbie’s eyes took in the things behind him. A bedroom set. Canisters leaning against the wall, the kind you’d put art, or posters in. A padded jewelry case sitting on a chair.

“You moved Maggie’s room down here?” she said.

Myeong looked around, then nodded.

“I couldn’t walk by her room every day. It’s just down the hall from my bedroom. Even if the door was closed, which is how I always kept it …”

He paused. Abbie released a breath and dropped the Glock to her side.

“Their clothes keep their smell the longest. Especially a girl who liked perfume.” He wasn’t crying, he was far past crying. He was numb.

Abbie felt her body droop. The room was a shrine to his daughter. Hangman wasn’t here, Katrina either.

His eyes were on her, dead black eyes. “Why are you here, Detective?”

“I’m looking for Katrina.”

His eyes seemed to dilate inward. “And you thought she might be here?”

“We’re searching the area. I saw this”—she pointed to the mannequin, its fingers elegantly curved.

Myeong nodded. “Do you think I’m insane?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Because only an insane man would take a girl when his own had been killed.” Then he said something low. She thought it was, “I loved her very much,” but she couldn’t be sure.

Abbie stepped toward Mr. Myeong. She couldn’t go without knowing.

“In the other room, there’s a baby’s building block. The letter A looks just like the one carved in Maggie’s hand.”

He nodded and seemed about to speak, but he turned and walked out into the corridor. Abbie followed him, terror at the thought of being locked in this room blooming in her chest. By the door was a jewelry chest, covered in dust. Abbie instinctively reached over and brushed some of the grit off the dust. When she turned back, Myeong was watching her.

“This way,” he said.

“The symbol on her hand was a threat,” Myeong said, sitting
in the front room with the grand piano gleaming under a picture window. Abbie perched on the edge of the piano seat, while the diminutive man was sunk into the folds of an enormous leather couch. She smelled the Pine-Sol that had been used on the piano, which looked like the only thing in the house that Myeong cared for.

Abbie didn’t take out her notebook. They were way past all that.

“Something that happened in Arizona?”

Myeong shook his head. “Before.” His eyes were far away, fixed on something out the window. He sat slumped forward, his feet spread apart.

“Mr. Myeong?”

“You were right, the A was a baby block. I knew it right away.”

Abbie took a deep breath.

“But she was your child, you have no doubt?”

He nodded quickly.

“You see, the year before she died, Maggie had a child. Secretly. She wanted it that way, and we agreed. Afterward, when it was all over, I’d find her in her room. She …” He hung his head and his eyelids pressed
close. Myeong’s ribs strained against his shirt as he cried. He was breathing fast.

“It was a boy. She thought she would call it Alexander.” He came up, took a ragged breath, then wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.

“
If
she’d kept it?”

Myeong stared at her, shaking his head, his lips pursed to speak but no sounds coming out.

Abbie closed her eyes.

“Maggie gave the baby away?”

He nodded violently.

“Yes. She did. I never knew she was pregnant until the end. I thought she was putting on weight, that’s all. It was partly my fault, we never talked about personal things and she was terrified of disappointing me. I think my wife knew this.”

“And you took her to Arizona …”

“There’s a psychiatric facility in Tempe that deals with young mothers. She felt guilty about the whole thing. So we brought her there.”

“But why would Hangman carve that into her hand?” Abbie asked.

“It was a message, a warning. Hangman had time with those girls; he talked to them. What else could it be? A message to me that she’d told Hangman about Alexander. I thought he was threatening to reveal it to the world. A final humiliation.”

“Is that why you went on TV?” Abbie said.

“Of course. He wrote me, threatened to send a letter to the newspapers. I paid him $40,000 not to reveal Maggie’s secret. It was the least I could do.”

Abbie stood up. Her feet rang out on the cold hardwood floor as she walked to the window. The trees lined in the front yards of the nearby homes were filled with leaves, just beginning to change color. A fall day heading into the depths of winter.

She turned. Myeong’s head was down, bobbing just above his knees. It looked like he was shaking off a punch.

It felt like there was a magnet in Abbie’s head, with ideas flying
toward it: images, snatches of conversation that before had nothing to do with each other. They were forming themselves into a pattern. She closed her eyes.

“You’re right,” she said. “The letter A was a message to you. But not from Hangman.”

Abbie sat in her car after finishing with Myeong and
watched the leaves fall, swaying and dipping, from the trees that lined Summer. The dark gray asphalt was covered with them near the gutters, and she watched two swoop and fall to the top of the yellow pile.