The Dead Place (16 page)

“All right, ma’am, I’ve got a squad car on the way. Please stay in your house. Do not attempt to confront your neighbor—what’s his name?”

“Terrence Simnic.”

“Okay, I’ve got it. Don’t attempt to confront Mr. Simnic yourself. Stay in your house, do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand.”

“The officers should be there in a few minutes. If you don’t see a squad car in ten minutes, call back.”

“Ten minutes? He could kill her in that time!”

“I understand, Ms. Corbin, but they’re on their way.”

Kate hung up the phone. Ian was staring at her with his mouth open. “What the hell is going on?”

She explained as quickly as she could. Ian’s look of confusion gave way to frustration. “But Kate,” he said when she was done speaking, “you have no real evidence that he’s done anything wrong.”

“It all adds up, Ian. Just look at the total picture.”

“I am looking at the total picture. Are you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that there could be perfectly logical explanations for all the supposedly strange things you’ve seen.”

“Sure, you can explain one, maybe two, but this many things together? It just doesn’t make sense, Ian.”

A squad car came screaming down the street and pulled into the driveway, lights flashing.

Ian shut off the kitchen lights and they got to the window in time to see two cops emerge and march up Terrence Simnic’s walk to his porch. Even through the window Kate could hear the rap on her neighbor’s door. One of the cops stood slightly behind the other, hand resting on the gun at his side.

Seconds seemed to drag by. The cop rapped for the third time. He turned to look back at his partner and Kate saw boredom on his features. It seemed incongruous for him to look so unconcerned when she was so tense. As if in response to her thoughts, he suddenly straightened up and his partner shifted, both of them with hands on their weapons.

“Police! Open up!”

Ian flinched beside her and Kate’s panted breaths steamed the window. They couldn’t see the door open, but it must have, for the cop was talking to someone. Then both he and his partner stepped into the house.

“Oh, my God, what if he ambushes them!”

“This isn’t the movies, Kate,” Ian said, but he sounded just as worried as she did.

Minutes went by with nothing happening. In unspoken agreement, Ian and Kate sank into chairs next to the glass.

“What’s taking them so long?” Kate muttered, staring at the empty porch. What if he was holding the cops hostage?

“They’ve got to question him. Maybe they’re searching the house. How old was the girl?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a really good look at her face.”

More than ten minutes passed before sudden movement at the porch brought Kate out of her chair. Ian stood behind her. “What’s happening?”

“Ssh, they’re coming out.”

First one officer, then the other stepped back onto the porch. But what was this? They were laughing? Terrence Simnic stepped out on the porch after them and he was smiling. Then they shook his hand.

“What the hell? Where is she? What’s going on?” Kate couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but the cops were crossing the porch, heading down the walk toward the squad car.

She pushed past Ian and ran for the front door. They were getting in the car when she came running toward them.

“Officers, please wait!” They stopped, and both of them had hands on their guns this time.

One of them held out a hand. “Stop!”

Kate stopped in her tracks. “I’m the one who called in the complaint.”

“Okay, ma’am, we’ll come to you.” They stepped away from the car and walked toward her. “What’s going on, ma’am?”

“I’m the one who called. I don’t understand—why haven’t you arrested him?”

The cops exchanged looks. “What should we arrest him for?”

“Didn’t the 911 operator tell you why I called? He’s got a girl in the house! She has brown hair pulled back in a ponytail—”

“Ma’am, there’s no one there but Terrence Simnic.”

“No one else?” Ian’s voice startled Kate. She turned to see him standing behind her. He’d thought to put a coat on over his pajamas. She was suddenly aware that she was wearing nothing but a thin cotton nightgown. In the same moment, the cold registered. Her bare feet felt frozen to the concrete walk. Ian had shoes on.

“That’s right. He had someone visiting but she’s gone home.”

Kate crossed her arms over her chest, blocking herself. “How do you know she’s gone?”

“He told us so and we looked around.”

“Did you check the basement?”

The two exchanged looks again. The older officer, a hawk-faced man with tired eyes, said, “Ma’am, Mr. Simnic was in bed when we arrived. I think you’ve let your imagination get the best of you.”

“But I saw him bring a girl into his house! I saw her! And he’s in his basement at three in the morning. Did you look down there? He had women’s clothing—I saw him with women’s clothing. Explain that.” Kate stopped as Ian’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, all at once aware that she was babbling.

“Thank you for your time, Officers,” Ian said. “I’m sorry we brought you out for nothing.”

“No problem. Better safe than sorry, right, ma’am?” The older officer smiled at Kate, and she felt suddenly warm despite the cold.

When they were back inside, Ian stared at her with concern. “I can’t believe you just called the cops on our neighbor.”

“He’s a killer. He might have them fooled, but he’s not fooling me.” She locked the door and then checked it twice.

“Just because someone’s a little eccentric doesn’t make them a killer.”

“There are too many things connecting him—”

“Except anything tangible.”

“How do they know that no one is in his house if they didn’t search it? I mean really search it. Why are they relying on his say-so?”

“Maybe because he looks and sounds perfectly reasonable while you’re standing out there half-dressed making a fool of yourself in front of the whole neighborhood.”

“I saw her, Ian.” Kate gestured at her eyes. “Are you going to accuse me of being blind now, too?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. You’re the only one doing the accusing. Jesus, Kate, you really need some help. I hope you’ll stop being stubborn and actually get it.”

When he went back to bed, she stayed at the kitchen table pretending to sip her milk. It was cold.

The biweekly dean’s meeting with department heads was the least favorite part of Ian’s job. When he’d begun in academia years ago, he’d been slow to understand that discussing where the money came from and where it went was an integral part of university life, albeit a despised one. Time had taught him to accept that every meeting would eventually come down to a discussion of funding, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

One of the few positives was that Bethany Forrester, as head of the drama department, always attended the Monday afternoon meeting, and without being conscious of it, Ian began anticipating seeing her. Once he did become conscious of it, he’d reassured himself that his desire to see her was strictly professional. She was a good colleague. Truly collegial, as interested in other people’s opinions as well as her own, and without too many of her own personal interests to trumpet. She was easy to work with and a genuine asset.

She was also sexy as hell. There, he’d admitted it to himself. Ian shifted in his seat and tried not to notice the way she was touching the funding proposal, the tips of her fingers tapping lightly against the edge of the paper and straying once in a while to spin the woven silver bracelet on her other wrist. She always wore that bracelet. Was it a special gift from someone?

He found himself unaccountably jealous. It wasn’t his business if she was dating someone, but hadn’t she said that she had yet to meet anybody worthy of collaborating with on that level?

Focus, Ian, focus. He glanced back down at page four of the report. These were numbers from Jerry Virgoli, head of the visual arts department, who was expounding on them as if everybody didn’t have that sheet in front of them. It’s a top-tier university, Jerry, the faculty can add and subtract. God, but the man was boring.

Not that Ian could ever express that. Jerry was still sensitive as hell about being passed over for promotion in favor of Ian. It was Ian’s unspoken obligation to make him feel like a team player and not the jilted professor. Remembering that, he nodded at some point Jerry was making, trying to look as if he truly cared.

Bethany Forrester yawned discreetly, hiding it behind her hand, and Ian caught her eye across the table. He raised his eyebrows in mock disapproval and she flashed him a quick, guilty smile.

The rush of pleasure he got from such a small gesture surprised him. It was like being back in high school and having the popular girl deign to say hi to him. The last time he’d felt pleasure like this had been in those early days with Kate.

Thinking of Kate reminded him of the incident with the police, and the pleasure he felt was replaced by guilt. Clearly, she was worse off than he’d thought if she’d taken to calling the police on their neighbors. He hadn’t been able to look Terrence Simnic in the eye when he saw him on Monday morning.

It was paranoia, obviously fueled by what had happened to her, but he didn’t know what to do about it except keep encouraging her to get back into therapy. He’d gone so far as to print out a list of local psychologists that he thought sounded qualified, but he couldn’t call them for her.

She seemed insulted whenever he suggested the idea, as if he was saying that getting therapy was tantamount to admitting she was crazy. At this point he didn’t care. What if she called the police on someone else and he wasn’t there?

“Dean Corbin?”

Jerry Virgoli had finished speaking and sat looking at Ian with an expectant air. It reminded him of a child expecting a pat on the head, but the rest of the faculty members at the long table were watching him, waiting for his wisdom. Ian stifled a sigh.

The curtains were drawn in Terrence Simnic’s house. Kate had been watching on and off since Friday night and they’d never been pulled back open. On Saturday night, she’d waited until Ian was asleep before tiptoeing down the steps to look out the side window and verify that the basement lights were on again.

There was no sign of the girl. She was probably tied up in the basement if she was still alive, but no amount of discussing this possibility with Ian had gotten him to believe it.

“This is paranoia, Kate,” he’d said when he caught her spying through the kitchen windows on Sunday. “You heard what the police said. If there is any truth in what you say, they would have figured it out by now.” A few hours later, he’d handed her a list of local therapists culled from the Internet.

“Just call them,” he said, his entreaty so heartfelt that she didn’t refuse outright. It was Monday afternoon and so far she hadn’t called one name on the list.

Kate looked away from the window and back to her easel. The body was fully formed now, a curve of alabaster white trapped in the ribbon of dark water. She looked from the canvas to the palette balanced in her left hand, and took another daub of near white and applied it to the female form’s left leg. The hair had metamorphosed, transforming from Lily Slocum’s blond locks into something darker, a coffee shade that merged in and above the dark water swirling around it.

Something was different in the face, too, since she’d tinkered with it. Was it even Lily Slocum anymore? With the hair, it looked more like the photo she’d seen in the paper of the other girl, Elizabeth Hirsch. Was her body, even now, resting in muddy water?

The slap of a door closing startled her. Kate’s head turned automatically from the canvas to the window, and she saw Terrence Simnic getting into the dusty white van.

He was leaving, finally leaving. She’d been waiting for this for hours. Dumping the palette on the small table next to the easel, she slipped out of her paint-daubed shirt and dug in her jeans pocket for the studio key. It was always there against her. In her old studio, she’d hung her keys just inside the door on a metal hook another artist had fashioned from scrap iron into the shape of a mermaid. The friends who’d cleared her studio had left it behind, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t use a hook anymore. She couldn’t feel safe without the keys physically on her.

She’d thought a lot about the possibilities and only one had come to mind—she had to get in that house. To that end, she’d spent several fruitful hours researching breaking-and-entering on the Internet. It was true that anything could be found online.

She slipped on her jacket and checked the small pack of tools she’d assembled earlier and tucked in one zippered pocket. Screwdriver, flashlight, old credit card, and a pair of gloves. She put on the gloves and waited an extra five minutes to make sure that Terrence Simnic wasn’t just making a quick trip to the store and back, and then she headed out of the studio, locking the door behind her.

She approached the back of his house slowly, carrying a piece of junk mail addressed to Simnic that had come to their house by mistake. If anyone saw her, it would look as if she was just being neighborly.

In case anyone was watching, she knocked on the door first, turning the knob surreptitiously with her gloved hand as she did so. It was locked. Shielding it with the mail, she inserted the screwdriver into the lock and attempted to bump it, following the instructions she’d gotten online. It didn’t work. It didn’t work the second time either, or the third.

She thought that things like this always looked easier on TV, and then that she would have made a very bad thief. Enough of the screwdriver. She pulled out the credit card and attempted to slip it in the jamb under the lock. Only it wouldn’t fit because the door was old and there were multiple layers of paint holding it tight against the frame. All she managed to do was scrape off some flakes of brown paint.

When she’d planned this, Kate had pictured the door giving easily. She hadn’t pictured trying for five minutes without a result and feeling every one of those three hundred seconds tick by. The handle grew slippery in her grasp and a bead of sweat trickled down her forehead and stung her left eye.

It wasn’t going to work. She conceded that after one final try with the screwdriver, and felt, mixed up with the panicky adrenaline rush, a tiny sense of relief. She’d tried; she could honestly say that she’d tried.

As she stepped down the back steps, she suddenly noticed the storm door. It was one of the old tornado affairs, angled metal doors that led into the cellar of the house. Brown paint was flaking off them and they looked like they hadn’t been opened in years. Probably rusted shut. Kate glanced around, saw no one watching, and tugged quickly on a handle. To her surprise, the door actually lifted, groaning as it opened to reveal dusty cement steps leading into the dark chasm of the cellar.

She really, really didn’t want to go in through the cellar. But what if the girl was being held in there? Kate bounced lightly from one sneakered foot to the other and then pulled the flashlight from her pocket. With one last look around, she opened the door all the way, jumping as it fell back with a bang. A dog barked in the distance. She swallowed hard and took the first step down.

A spiderweb caught her in the face as she reached the third step, and Kate swung her arms madly, brushing away sticky, invisible threads. No one had been this way in a long time. She held the flashlight in front of her with her left hand, keeping the right hand free to sweep the air in front of her. At the bottom of the steps, her free hand hit wood. Another door. She pushed against it, and it easily gave way.

“Hello?” Kate’s voice seemed to echo back at her, and she swept the flashlight up from the steps to see a vast expanse of unfinished basement spread out before her. The faint light shining through the grimy-looking glass block windows cast shadows over the space, so it looked like shades of charcoal instead of unremitting black. It smelled of dust and mildew and, surprisingly, bleach and some other perfume over it. Laundry detergent. Kate’s flashlight revealed an old-fashioned double laundry tub standing between a washer and dryer on the far side of the room. A clothes rack stood beside the dryer, lined neatly with what looked like men’s socks and underwear.

Something gurgled to her left and Kate jumped, swinging the flashlight in that direction. It was just a water heater. The big dark lump next to it was an old-fashioned boiler. Something gleamed, and she swung the light back a pace to reveal a shelf filled with rows of dust-covered but neatly labeled canning jars. Tomatoes. Pickles. Beets. They all had their years marked, and the latest were already five years old.

Nobody was down there as far as she could see. There was a hose rolled in a corner and a patch of damp near the drain on the floor. The smell of bleach was stronger there. Had he already killed the girl and cleaned up? Her chest ached from shallow breathing.

Something drew her eye up, and she saw an iron hook screwed tight into a wooden joist from the floor above. The light bounced as her hand trembled. “Sweet Jesus.” The words came to her instinctively, though she couldn’t remember saying them before. It was something her mother used to say, a prayer as much as an exclamation of shock.

She could almost see a body suspended from here. Was this where he’d killed her? The papers hadn’t said how she died, just that her body had been found.

Her light caught a glimpse of a sharp-toothed saw through the gloom. Kate moved toward it, and saw other tools hanging in marked spaces on a Peg-Board running high against a wall. She bumped into a stool she hadn’t seen, and its metal legs rasped against the cement floor. Steadying it with her hand, she brought the flashlight waist level and moved its beam across the rough surface of a tool-scarred workbench. An eyeless doll’s head grinned at her from the center of the table-top.

Kate suppressed a scream, swallowing it down along with the bile that rose in her throat. For a moment she’d thought it was a real skull, and the relief of it not being one made her legs weak. She swallowed again, steadying herself against the stool before moving the light along the low shelf that ran along the back of the bench behind the head. Rows of little jars, baby-food jars, filled with tiny nails and wire and something blue, green, and glittering that turned out to be dolls’ eyes.

So Terrence did work on his dolls down here, just as she’d envisioned. Was that all he worked on? She searched the bench for something more, for evidence that he was working on humans, too. She thought she’d find photography equipment or something belonging to one of the girls, but there was nothing.

In a cupboard near the workbench, she found a cardboard box labeled simply
HAIR
, but that proved to be synthetic, doll-sized wigs, not human hair.

She left the basement, went upstairs, switching off the flashlight and stowing it in her pocket as she entered a kitchen that smelled faintly of tuna and sour milk from two cracked saucers left on a faded linoleum floor. Terrence’s cat was nowhere in sight today. Everything was in order. A dishcloth folded neatly in half was drying over the handle of the kitchen faucet, and a single mug and a bowl were in the dish drainer along with a teaspoon. An old-fashioned clock ticked away above the gas stove; otherwise, there was no noise in the room. There was no sign of anyone either, and no sign that anyone other than Terrence had been here, but then she found the robe.

The sight of it hanging on the back of the kitchen door made Kate’s rapid breath catch in her throat. It couldn’t belong to Terrence. A woman’s robe, white cotton, with lace at the cuffs and collar. Kate’s stomach rose again. He was neat, the house so clearly showed that, but he’d forgotten to hide this. She ran gloved hands through the pockets, but they were empty.

The find galvanized her. She moved through the dining room with its curio cabinets stuffed with dolls and into the gloomy front hall, barely pausing to look in the living room with its dark upholstered furniture trapped in time with crocheted antimacassars, and then up the creaking wooden stairs to the second floor. It was even gloomier up there.