The Dead Place (12 page)

Kate drove home wondering if the police would do anything at all. How many names did they have on that list? How long would it take them to get to Terrence Simnic and what could he get up to in the meantime?

Ian might be right about Lily Slocum’s death. It might just be a single crime and nothing like this would happen in Wickfield again. Only what if he wasn’t and what if it would happen again and again because no one could stop it?

The room where he kept her was dark and very cold. The Snake (this was how Elizabeth thought of the man because he hissed like one when he talked to her) kept the space pitch black much of the time, cool all of the time.

She didn’t know why and the Snake, who rarely spoke, wouldn’t have explained that he kept it cold because he liked to see her nipples perpetually erect.

Most of the time, she was chained in one corner like a dog. There was a U-bolt buried deep in the juncture of what felt like concrete block walls, and it wouldn’t give no matter how hard she pulled on it. In those first nightmarish hours, she’d tugged on it so hard that she’d rubbed her ankle raw. He’d rubbed salve all over it with a curiously light touch, and then he’d beaten her for damaging his property.

Her food was served to her in a dog bowl and so was her water. He liked to watch her bend over to lap at it. After a time, she no longer felt the humiliation of the request.

She did not know how long she’d been there. She didn’t know where she was except that she was underground, and she only knew this because she could hear his footsteps coming down a staircase. The light from upstairs would illuminate the last two steps so that the first thing she’d seen of him was his thick soled black workman’s boots.

The first lesson she’d learned was that she was to present her naked body whenever he came in the room. Waking up bare, chained to a wall, she’d pulled up the thin mattress where she slept and tried to hide behind it as his measured footsteps crossed the cement floor.

The harsh beam of a flashlight focused on her and he’d yelled, “No!” before dragging the mattress away and hitting her with the short whip he liked to carry.

After, he’d kissed the marks, lingering over the redness on her shoulders and across her buttocks, stinging them anew with the roughness of his tongue until she’d pulled away in discomfort. He’d stopped abruptly, pushing her face down into the stained mattress and holding her there while he wielded the whip again, criss-crossing her legs this time with biting strokes. That had been lesson number two: Don’t pull away.

The bed was in another section of the chamber. A huge four-poster in curved and twisted iron, it had a thick, soft mattress covered with pristine white bed linens that the Snake made her change every time it was used. He brought the folded sheets to her in a basket, and she had to strip off the old ones and put on the new ones while he watched, tapping the whip against his gloved hand.

He taught her how the first time, following behind her as she tucked in the sheets with trembling hands and then checking her work. The first time, he found a wrinkle in the sheets and beat her for it. The second time she was careful, oh, so careful, for there to be nothing wrong with it at all, and he smiled when he was done checking it, his lips curving upward. Then he had her get on all fours in the center of the bed and whipped her anyway. That was lesson number three: He didn’t need a reason to beat her.

When he played with her on the bed, he dressed her first, and it was perversely true that she’d come to welcome these sessions simply because it was the only time she was truly warm. He made her raise her arms to accept a long, white cotton nightgown edged in lace at the collar and cuffs. There was a placket in the front with a row of buttons that he did up himself, and then he turned her toward the corner of the space where the bed sat, pulling back the thick comforter and tucking her in as if she were a child or a virginal bride.

The first few sessions in the bed, he got in next to her fully dressed, posing and fondling her as if she were a plaything, but it was a welcome change to being treated literally like a dog and she thought it wasn’t so bad.

Then things escalated. The first change was that he undressed. Every time he visited he wore the same clothes: dark pants, dark shirt, and a thin black mask that covered most of his face. When he removed the trousers, she saw that he was wearing innocuous white cotton briefs.

It was the briefs that made it all ridiculous; then he slipped those off and she could see he was just like any other white man, all pale-skinned and hairy, with his erect penis bobbing in the air like a skinny, salmon pink balloon. It surprised her to realize he was human, not a reptile after all, and she’d laughed a little, a nervous laugh, but he’d stopped at once, stripping the covers off her, then the gown, and manacling her spread-eagle to the four corners of the bed before he beat her breasts with his whip. She didn’t laugh again.

“Let me go!” she screamed at first, and sometimes, “Why are you keeping me here?” After a time, she stopped talking to him, taught by his whip and his indifference that her words didn’t affect him. He talked often, sometimes over her screams, telling her in sibilant whispers exactly what he wanted her to do.

Sometimes he turned the lights on—and she’d been surprised to discover that there were lights embedded in the drop ceiling—but mostly he preferred things lit only by a few tall, sputtering candles mounted on ornate iron stands.

Elizabeth liked candles, had many of them scattered about her apartment, and enjoyed the scented ones best. She’d once lined her entire bedroom with them, especially for Joel. All those tiny flickering lights had been very romantic. That was before. She didn’t think she could ever look at another candle without seeing these fat, yellow-white pillars.

She stared at the candles while he raped her. Watched the steady drip, drip of the greasy wax rolling down the sides. She’d fought him the first time. Fought him hard enough to feel the satisfying thud of connection with his pelvis, but while he’d dropped her arms to cup his injured genitals, she’d barely scrambled off the bed before he was on her, a hand snaking out from the bed to snatch one slender ankle and bring her down.

The punishment for fighting was the worst. He’d stripped off the nightgown and hung her by her wrists from a hook in the ceiling, suspending her so that just her toes grazed the cold floor, and then he’d doused every candle and left.

She didn’t know how long she hung there. An hour? A day? She had lost her sense of time already; the subterranean darkness had seen to that. She couldn’t accurately judge by the pain. Within moments the juncture where arms met shoulders felt sore, then hot, then the feeling spread throughout her body, an inferno of pain as her joints strained at their sockets.

She cried, indulging in it since the Snake wasn’t there to witness her tears. “You fucking bastard, let me go!” she screamed, but he was gone. Later, she cried, “Help! Please help!” but there was no one there to hear her cries. The walls swallowed them up. She dozed, only to jerk awake when her head tipped too far forward and upset the balance.

She thought longingly of her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, and of her younger sister, whom she’d always disliked, and of how much she wanted to see them, hear them, touch them.

She thought that no painting she’d seen of Hell had come close to this because, at least in the Hieronymous Bosch paintings she’d seen, no one was alone in their suffering. There was some comfort in suffering along with someone else.

When he finally came back, when she saw the sliver of light illuminate the steps and heard his heavy footsteps coming down, she felt awash in relief and then ashamed to be glad to see him. He walked silently toward her, dressed in black as usual, whip in hand.

“Have you learned your lesson?”

It was his usual, paternalistic speech. She nodded, it took an effort to move her head. He slapped her face with his gloved hand and she answered correctly, “Yes, Master.”

This had been lesson number five: He was to be addressed as Master. He would address her as slave. Sometimes, when he played in bed, she was “little one.” She wasn’t sure which made her skin crawl more.

“Are you sorry, slave?”

“Yes, Master.” Sorry I can’t rip off your balls, you bastard. “Sorry, so sorry.”

A slight smile touched his lips. He stepped toward her, already reaching up to release her hands from the cuffs, and then he stopped. Stepped back. The smile vanished and his nose wrinkled in revulsion. “You soiled yourself, slave.”

The urine had long since dried on her legs. She’d forgotten about it. “What else could I do?”

His gloved hand moved so fast that she saw its flash a split second before the slap blazed across her cheek.

“Master!” he screamed. “You call me Master!”

He turned from her, striding back the way he’d come, and she panicked. “I’m sorry, Master! Please, Master, don’t leave me here!”

He didn’t respond, but he didn’t climb the stairs. Instead he was fiddling with something in a corner, and then he came back dragging a long hose with water dribbling out the front. Without speaking, he aimed the hose at her and turned the nozzle. Cold water sprayed her stomach, then her pelvis. His whip lashed her thigh.

“Spread your legs, slave!”

The spray was so sharp it felt like it was cutting her. She tried to turn to avoid it and the whip lashed her arm. “Stand still, slave!”

He hosed her thoroughly, inside and out, and then he took her down and threw a towel on top of her.

“Dry off!”

She dried hurriedly, watching as he coiled the hose away. When he returned, the smile was back in place.

“Let’s get you into your nightgown, little one.”

If he saw the tears in her eyes, he gave no sign. He hummed a little as he slipped the nightgown carefully over her head and gently smoothed it down her body. “That’s better. Ready to try again?”

“Yes, Master.”

She let him lead her to the bed and tuck her under the covers. When he forced himself inside her, she bit hard on her lip and stared at the flickering candles.

Sunlight streamed across Ian’s desk, but it was the knock on his office door that caused him to look up from his paperwork. He was amazed to see that it was after four. Had he really been working straight for more than three hours?

“Come in!” he called, and Mildred Wooden stepped in the door. She wore hot pink today, an incongruous choice for fall except that the suit was in tweed. She tugged at the glasses strung around her neck and gave him a maternal smile.

“I have to leave early today, Dean, remember? Is there anything I can get you before I go?”

“No, thank you, but I’ve got some donor letters to go out.” Ian handed over a large stack of signed papers.

“Great, I’ll just pop those in the mail tomorrow morning.”

She took them with a smile, waving good-bye over her shoulder, and Ian wondered, for the thousandth time, at her ability to channel everything into something positive.

He sighed as he sat back down at his desk. He wished he had that ability. Take the disappearance of Elizabeth Hirsh, for instance. Mildred could probably spin that as a student taking off for a romantic getaway. That’s how she’d spun Lily Slocum’s disappearance initially. And when the body had been found? Mildred squared her shoulders, tsk-tsking under her breath about the unfortunate girl and her unfortunate family, but then she’d brightly suggested that at least it was a chance for the university to tighten security.

Where was Elizabeth Hirsh? Last seen at an off-campus party, she’d been missing two weeks. Officially, the university was working with police, but unofficially, there was quite a lot of tension between the administration and the police force.

The University’s president, Hugh Slater, had held three emergency meetings since the news of Elizabeth Hirsh’s disappearance. She was the second student to go missing in less than six months. This was not good for the school, and Slater was keenly aware of how it would look to alumni and all other possible donors.

Sixty and silver-haired, he’d come from Stanford, a large, ruddy man with the charm of Cary Grant but the bearish good looks of a boxer, which he was rumored to have been in his student days.

“If public perception is that Wickfield has become unsafe, we won’t be selecting from the top of the barrel for next year’s freshman class,” he’d said at a meeting earlier that day. “We’ll be lucky if we get those from the middle of the crop.”

Someone from the English department groaned under his breath. Slater was fond of clichés and mixed metaphors, but he’d been brought in to raise the profile of Wickfield, and that he’d done in the five years he’d been at the helm. The board of trustees loved him—well, at least its female members.

He’d pulled Ian aside at the end of the meeting to ask if he’d sit in at a meeting with Elizabeth Hirsh’s parents. They’d insisted on meeting with the president, but as Slater said to Ian, “She’s in Humanities, Corbin, that’s your department.”

All of these meetings were taking up time that Ian didn’t have. The latest thing he’d had to deal with was whether or not to be present at a candlelight vigil for Lily Slocum and Elizabeth Hirsh being held at the nondenominational university chapel later that evening.

Certainly, a vigil was something positive, to paraphrase Mildred Wooden, but it was tricky. By linking both girls were the organizers essentially saying that they thought Elizabeth Hirsh was a victim, too? If so, then it could be a problem for the University. Or could it just be viewed as support for a community in distress? For it definitely was in distress.

The counseling wing of the health office had seen a forty-percent increase in drop-ins since Lily Slocum’s body had been found and there’d been a protest march, though what exactly they were protesting, Ian couldn’t have said. Maybe it was just a change from chanting about war or the latest embargo against tyrants in developing nations. Hey, hey, ho, ho, this murder thing has got to go. Even without a clear agenda, the protest had attracted a motley crowd of about a hundred students and at least one faculty member, though he was adjunct and viewed, by and large, as a weirdo.

“Nothing like this has happened at Wickfield,” a professor emeritus in psychology told Ian gleefully at the end of one of Slater’s meetings. “I guess it was just your luck that it happened on your watch.”

They’d been standing in front of the coffee and cookies, and Ian surreptitiously scanned the crowd, wondering which professor would be most likely to carry a flask of something to make the dreadful coffee, and these long, boring meetings, more palatable.

“Yeah, just my luck,” he muttered, taking a big bite of a stale sugar cookie to avoid saying more. It had been a relief when Dr. Beetleman hailed him from across the room.

“I’ve heard from the architect and he’s got some preliminary drawings,” the older man said when he got close enough. “Do you have a minute?”

“Yes, definitely.” He took Dr. Beetleman’s arm and steered him out of the conference room and away from the throng. “It will be a relief to talk about something other than this latest disappearance.”

Dr. Beetleman’s lips pursed in a moue of distaste. “Yes, I think some of the people coming to these meetings are attracted by the hope of hearing something salacious.”

“It certainly isn’t for the coffee.”

Laurence Beetleman laughed, eyes crinkling at the corners, and his shock of white hair bobbing. “How true!”

He told Ian about the architect’s plans for the Performing Arts Center, and Ian soaked it in. This was what he wanted to think about; the bigger, creative projects that were the real attraction of becoming dean.

They’d been standing in the atrium of Ludlum Hall. It was a large monstrosity of a building, late nineteenth century, and with all the pomp and circumstance and manifest destiny inherent in some of the design of that period. He found himself comparing its heavy lines with what he hoped would be the exact opposite feel of the new arts center. Light, airy, appearing to stay up in the air through sleight of hand—that’s what he wanted. There would be walls of windows and studios laid with bamboo floors, and of course the acoustics would be far superior to anything now on campus.

Talking with Laurence Beetleman about the plans had been one of the few times in this hectic week when he’d had the chance to think about anything besides the murder.

Ian picked up the next set of grant applications and settled back in his chair, trying to summon enthusiasm for another hour’s worth of work.

Another knock on the door surprised him. Wondering what Mildred had forgotten, Ian called out, “Come in!” just as he turned his chair to look at the sun setting over campus.

“It’s beautiful isn’t it,” he said without looking around.

“Yes.” The voice wasn’t Mildred’s. Ian swiveled around and saw Bethany Forrester standing in the doorway with a paper in one hand and a briefcase in the other. “You’ve got the best view,” she said, walking forward.

Ian stood up. “Come in, come in—I thought you were my secretary.”

“Oh, dear.” Bethany gave him a look of mock dismay, and Ian laughed. She couldn’t be further from Mildred Wooden. Silhouetted in the light from the window, she looked long, lean, and beautiful. She walked slowly across the room toward him, swaying slightly on high heels, the silver of her bracelet glinting in the sunlight, and a soft shushing sound accompanying each step as her charcoal silk slacks rubbed.

“It’s such a spectacular view,” she said, looking past him out the window where the sun was giving a terra-cotta glow to gray stone facades and setting every tree alight.

“Yes.” He was looking at her. She wore a fuzzy, black V-necked sweater, and he had a sudden longing to place a hand against that V of pale flesh. Ian hastily averted his eyes.

“I’ve finished the letter to some of our Drama alumni and thought you might like to take a look before I send it out.”

He didn’t need to look at it; with anybody else he would have declined. “Sure. Let me see.”

She held it out to him, and whether he contrived or she contrived he didn’t know, only that somehow their fingers touched. They paused. She looked at him then, staring directly into his eyes. The sunset made hers look like amber, pools of transparent brown flecked with gold.

A sharp, buzzing noise made Ian jump and jerk his hand back from Bethany’s. The phone on his desk rang again, a shrill rebuke. “Hello?”

“Ian Corbin?” A woman’s stern voice. He’d been seen. Ian felt heat crawling along the back of his shirt collar and creeping up his neck.

“Yes?”

“I’m calling from Wickfield High School about your daughter, Grace.”

“Grace? Is something wrong? Did something happen?”

“No, Mr. Corbin, at least not that we’re aware of. Grace hasn’t been in school all day and since this is her fourth unexcused absence we were concerned…”

Bethany put the letter on the edge of his desk and waved. She mouthed, “Catch you later,” and walked out of his office as he watched the sway of her hips and the curve of her ass in her slacks.

“…need you to come in and have a meeting with our school counselor, Harold Trowle.”

“Yes, of course.” He couldn’t concentrate. The office door quietly clicked. She was gone. He felt rock hard and shifted in his chair.

The woman said something about dates and Ian scrolled through his online calendar. “Yes, okay, and yes, I’ll be sure to tell my wife, too.”

When he’d hung up the phone, Ian sat back in his office chair and exhaled loudly. Had that really happened? There was a certain dreamlike quality to it that made it feel like a fantasy, but no, there was the letter just where she’d left it.

For a moment, Ian just looked at it. He had the feeling that it could hurt him, and then he realized how ridiculous he was being and plucked it from the edge of his desk. Without thinking about it, he slipped it in his briefcase.

Damien Rattle pulled the ends of the rope tighter around her foot and Grace couldn’t help it, she made a faint noise of pain and fear.

“Quiet,” he snapped, letting go of her foot and looking at her. “You have to be quiet or it spoils the mood.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you going to be quiet or not?”

She nodded and he smiled, that perfect smile that she’d come to crave.

They were in his bedroom in his parents’ apartment in Manhattan. When they’d met and he told Grace he lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side, she’d pictured a place like her own—small in square footage but nicely decorated with cool furniture and art.

It had the cool furniture and art, all right, but it was anything but small. It was a huge place, four bedrooms, each one of them the size of the living room in her house, each with its own mammoth attached bath. The sunken living room had a spectacular view of the park. There was a doorman downstairs, and a maid upstairs. The wooden floors were inlaid on the edges and polished to a high shine. The place smelled of furniture polish and fresh flowers, which adorned large porcelain vases on spindly-legged tables in the hall.

Damien’s room had an enormous iron bed frame, and he’d grinned when she’d admired it.

“It’s French,” he said. “Mother found it when we were in Brittany last year. Doesn’t it look like something belonging to the Marquis de Sade? I don’t think she had that in mind, but we can christen it in high style.”

That’s what they were doing, christening the bed. He’d produced the rope, a tightly wrapped coil of black nylon, after picking her up from school.

“It looks painful,” she’d said, but he only laughed.

“You’ll love it.”

Only she didn’t. She didn’t love it at all. First, he’d wanted her undressed. She didn’t want to get naked in front of him. So far, she’d been naked in pieces with him, allowing him to touch her under her shirt, to slip his hand down into her pants, to feel her and see her in pieces, but never whole. Somehow, it was more real whole.

“It doesn’t work if you’re dressed,” he’d said. “C’mon, it’s much more fun if you’re naked.”

And he’d smiled at her, the smile she loved, and she’d stood between his legs while he sat on the bed and began the slow undressing of her, taking his time.

That part had been okay, that part she’d even liked a little, her nervousness fading away as he muttered “Perfect” as each part of her body was revealed. She’d glowed from the praise, stood up a little straighter, even admired the way her breasts hung like small apples when he removed her bra.

Then he’d had her lie down on the center of the bed and he’d climbed on top of her, straddling her torso, his jeans scraping the tender skin of her waist. She’d told him it hurt, and that’s when he’d first said to be quiet. He’d taken her hands and raised them to curve around the bar of the iron headboard above her.

“Stay that way,” he whispered, and then he slowly, ever so slowly, inched out the rope and wound it about both her wrists and tied them to the headboard.

That hadn’t been too bad. Exciting, even, with Damien watching her, but then it changed. He’d turned, for starters, taking his eyes off hers and focusing on her feet. He’d jerked them a little too hard toward the foot of the bed, and now he was tying them, one by one, just as he had with her hands. She didn’t like it. It felt like she was stretched too far, and she remembered the chapter from her history book on the Inquisition and the illustration that showed a screaming figure stretched on the rack.