The Dead Place (18 page)

Kate’s hand shook as she signed for her few belongings. Ian stood beside her, his presence looming and vulturelike. She had the feeling he was waiting to feast on whatever skin she had left.

The late afternoon sunshine warmed her briefly and felt good on her face. “This will be all over town before tomorrow,” Ian said as he unlocked the car.

“I’m sorry.” It seemed to be the only thing that Kate could say.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that there was a woman in danger and I wanted to help.”

“Help someone?” His voice rose. “How about helping me? I could lose my job over this, Kate.”

She got into the car, and had to hold onto the side as he pulled, screeching, out of the parking spot. She waited until they’d driven for a minute before answering him. “You’re not going to lose your job—”

“Would you care if I did? Do you have any idea how hard I’ve tried to make things work here? Does my happiness matter to you at all?”

“Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” she began, but he cut her off again.

“You’re selfish, Kate. Everything has always been about you, you and your art. And I was happy to keep it that way because I thought we were happy. But we’re not happy anymore, Kate. You’re not happy anymore.

“What you did today was crazy, Kate. Just plain crazy. Whoever killed Lily Slocum is not living in our neighborhood. A former boyfriend, or someone living far from here, probably killed her. You’ve let what happened to you infect every area of our lives!”

She couldn’t argue with him, not anymore. Her head ached, her body felt as if she’d been beaten, all her muscles tight from tension. She wondered what it would be like to simply curl up in a ball in bed and never get out. Streetlights blinked on as they drove through town, and she watched leaves falling lazily from a tulip tree as they waited at a red light. Had she lost touch with reality because of what had happened to her? Maybe Ian was right and everything she’d seen was nothing more than her imagination playing tricks on her because of what had happened, those fifteen or twenty minutes that had changed everything.

She kept her eyes down when they approached their street, and wouldn’t look at Terrence Simnic’s house. She felt as if neighbors were watching as she got out of the car. Grace was in the kitchen watching television when they entered the house.

“Mom, you’re on the news!” she said, getting up and running to her mother. Kate caught a glimpse of herself, handcuffed, being led out of the police car. It was worse than she thought; a television news crew had somehow managed to get footage. The caption under her photo was “Dean’s wife arrested.”

“Great,” Ian said. “Just great.”

Kate hugged Grace, trying not to mind that the only time she’d managed to get her daughter’s attention without forcing it was when she was arrested.

She couldn’t bear to watch the TV, and left Ian fixated by the coverage. Grace asked a flurry of questions, following Kate into her bedroom and lounging on the bed while her mother changed out of the clothes that smelled like Terrence Simnic’s house.

“That’s so wild, Mom, I can’t believe you did that.”

Kate was mildly flattered that her daughter, alone among everybody, hadn’t called her a crazy fool, but she thought that was really probably one more reason she should feel ashamed.

She didn’t cry until she was alone.

The memories the man cherished were of death in all its completeness. There hadn’t been too many over the years. He couldn’t afford to do too many. He deliberated over every one, taking his time to observe, to satisfy his desire to look, to savor their coming association the same way that a child anticipates Christmas.

If each event had not lived up to that happy holiday, it wasn’t because of any lack on his part. It was just that the actual moment of death was so brief that it could never wholly satisfy. Still, he relived these brief encounters with pleasure, pulling out his photographs to remember the look on each girl’s face, the sounds they made when he placed the wire around their necks, such original, soulful music! The exquisite pleasure of marking flesh humming with life and the different, but even more exquisite, pleasure of touching it in death.

He sucked in air through his strong teeth, and looked down on the cool flesh he was arranging on the chaise lounge. It was important that she look like she was sleeping. This was what Poe and the Victorian practitioners of this art had understood.

He arranged a fold in the nightdress to a more flattering position, stepped behind the camera again, and took another look. Still too stiff.

“Now, now, little one, you can’t stay that way.” He came out from behind the camera and changed the angle of her head. Then the flower wreath she wore needed to be rearranged. He did that, carefully touching the rose petals, and then stepped back again. Yes. Ye-e-s. He stood there enjoying the view.

The camera was mounted on a tripod for precision. Sometimes, in his excitement, his hands shook. His first attempts, before the tripod, had been too blurry to give any verisimilitude. Over time, through trial and error, by trying different cameras and various lights, he’d perfected his technique.

The space where he took the photographs was small, only nine by nine, but it was the second largest of the quadrants in the basement. He’d divided the space himself, installing drywall partitions and insulating the walls and ceiling to soundproof it. As an extra precaution he’d installed an intercom system so he’d hear anything upstairs. It was not a perfect job. There were slight variations in the surface of the walls, but for his purposes none of that mattered. What mattered was the division of space and what that allowed.

In the smallest quadrant, tucked close to the stairs, there was a sink, a commode, and a mattress pad. He installed an eyebolt deep in the cement wall and attached a heavy length of steel chain. The other end of the chain was welded to a metal cuff large enough for a female ankle.

It had taken him time to figure it out. He didn’t want to be inconvenienced by a slave’s bathroom needs. His system allowed a slave to move easily between the sleeping pad and the toilet.

The quadrant across from this was slightly larger. Here he had installed four eyebolts in a spread-eagle pattern, two up, two down, and a larger one in the center of the space, installed in a ceiling joist. When that was set up to his satisfaction, and after he’d tested the holding power of each and every bolt, he’d installed a hanging cabinet, oak stained dark brown, with two rows of hooks inside. The cabinet was where he housed his tools.

He’d heard others refer to them as “toys,” but this trivialized them. These weren’t toys, though he got pleasure from using them. These were tools necessary to mold a slave.

The biggest quadrant was much different from the other rooms. In here was a large, handmade metal bed that he’d specially ordered and assembled. The mattress was thick and plush with a quilted cover, the linens had a high thread count. It was the best bed he’d ever owned and cost far more than the bed he slept in at night. He’d never slept in this one.

Candles on wrought-iron stands flanked either side of the bed so that when they were lit it was cast in a soft glow. He’d painted this room, like all the others, black. It contrasted so nicely with the snowy linens and the gauzy white nightgown with lace trimming its collar and cuffs that was laid neatly across the foot of the bed.

That left the final quadrant, the room the slave never saw, where a chaise lounge covered in creamy white cushions sat in a place of honor surrounded on three sides by klieg lights and screens. In front of it was a very expensive digital camera mounted on an adjustable tripod.

There were always two sets of prints, one for private consumption, one for public. In the private ones, the photos for his own viewing pleasure, the slave would be naked on the lounge. She would have her legs crossed casually, much like Manet’s
Olympia
, with her breasts and her bush exposed.

She would look like the whore she was in the first photos, and in the second set, when she was wearing the nightgown, identical to the one in the bedroom except for the Velcro closures up the back, she would look like the angel she became after her transformation.

Behind the chaise, in a corner of the room, was a little table on which rested a pair of secateurs to make his floral arrangements. Under the table were the buckets to hold the flowers. They were always in shades of white and cream or sometimes blush pink. Their scent was powerful, cloying, and it lingered even after the flowers were gone. Sometimes, he could smell their lingering odor while he lay on the bed in the next room, and he wondered if the slave could smell it, too, but it was a fleeting thought and he didn’t ask.

There was a danger in caring about what the slave smelled or thought or felt. The only thing of importance was that the slave would serve. That was what the slave was for and that was what the slave would do. Not that the slave would do it willingly. Not at first. Sometimes not at all. One or two of them never stopped fighting their servitude, so they had to visit the room with the chaise lounge sooner than the others.

He enjoyed their photos as much as the others. In death all of them were compliant. If he had any regrets about his work, it was that he hadn’t photographed his first death. Not that he’d had such a good system with the second or even the third, but at least he had small Polaroids to remember them by. With the first, he had to rely entirely on his memory to recapture the sweetness.

She was a waitress in a corner restaurant he passed to and from classes. By then he knew the difference between decent food and truly great restaurants, and was used to much better coffee, but sitting in a leatherette booth sipping strong brew from a thick ceramic cup and saucer was pleasant Americana.

He was careful to only enter the restaurant if she was working and to make sure he was always seated in her area. She was beautiful in a small-town way, unaffected, natural-looking, with just a little bit of makeup, which was childishly applied. Once he took the liberty of wiping a trail of lipstick from the corner of her mouth with his napkin, and she’d blushed and thanked him.

She had plump little hands and an endearing, gap-toothed smile. Her name on the plastic lapel pin affixed to her pink polyester uniform was
CALLIE
.

“That’s a pretty name,” he’d said when she first served him, and that’s when he knew she would be the one. She’d been so thirsty for that compliment, so eager to hear anything nice about herself. He knew then and he’d continued with it, giving her compliments the way other people feed the birds, doling them out in little handfuls, like bread crumbs from a paper sack.

She gobbled up whatever he doled out, happy to swallow every word, eager to believe that at least one person on the planet had recognized her as special.

It was that eagerness, that and a few grammatical lapses, and the way she deferred to him because he was in college. All of it signaled that she was the choice, the one who would be molded by him, and perfected to serve him.

Only she didn’t like it. He hadn’t anticipated that, hadn’t anticipated that she’d give him trouble when, after months of wooing, he’d finally gotten her away from the restaurant and into his small apartment. She’d played coy about going out with him, but it had been just that, play. He’d known she would go with him when he asked; he’d seen the eagerness in her eyes.

Only they hadn’t been eager when he suggested she get undressed, when he showed her the bed and told her what he wanted her to do. She hadn’t been eager then, standing there in her cheap acrylic sweater, clutching her vinyl purse like he was going to take her envelope of tips away from her.

“You’re a beautiful girl, Callie,” he’d said, sitting down on the bed that he’d made sure to make that morning, beckoning for her to come to him. But she’d shaken her head.

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s wrong.” Her plump fingers fiddled with the small gold cross around her neck.

A mistake, that. He’d overlooked the necklace and its implications. “Are you saved, Callie?” he’d said then, turning serious just as he’d once been charming, already having developed that chameleonlike ability to be different things for different people.

He let her tell him about Jesus, listening as she talked about the one man she really loved, really served. He’d listened and listened and all the time he’d thought of what it would be like to peel the clothes off that plump little body and devour the flesh.

When she talked, he stroked her hand, then her arm, moving up to her shoulders, and finally taking the cross in his own hand, bouncing its small, warm weight against his palm. Her speech faltered then, she stared into his eyes, and he pulled the cross a little, guiding her closer to him, closer to his lips.

Afterward, she’d chattered, filling a pleasant, post-orgasmic haze with noise. He barely listened, hoping that his silence would quiet her, but she kept talking, non-stop babble about the future. It became clear that she saw the fact that they’d had sex as some sort of commitment. She thought that since she’d offered her plump little body, he would put a diamond chip on her finger and marry her and make her pregnant, so she could swell up like a sow with his child and waddle around some suburban tract home.

Jesus, it was pedestrian! She wasn’t the sweet, corn-fed little innocent, but a scheming, stupid bitch trying to scramble up the social ladder.

“Stop talking,” he’d said, watching her struggling to get into her clothes. Only she wouldn’t stop, her chatter continuing as she fastened her bra and pulled her sweater on.

He hit her as her head emerged from the sweater. A simple backhand, without even thinking about it. She fell sideways on the bed, caught herself against the comforter, and quietly gasped. She stared at him with round eyes, her mouth a perfect little O of fear. She didn’t yell at him, she just gave in. And that changed everything.

“Get back up on the bed,” he said, and it was his other voice, the voice that he knew he’d had in him, the voice of his father, who’d been suppressed all those years, the voice of Poe, who’d dared to smoke in violation of his mother’s wishes.

If she’d argued with him, if she’d simply grabbed her clothes, he would have let her go. Might have. But she didn’t argue, didn’t try to leave. Ambitious little Callie scrambled back up on the bed like an obedient, eager-to-please dog. He took the sweater off her body and when she whimpered, he hit her again and what blossomed along with the red mark on her skin was his own manhood.

Along with a sense of power came a deep feeling of satisfaction. Joy. He felt joy. He held those small hands above her head with one of his and forced her legs back open. He thrust inside her, watching her face and feeling his body respond to the fear he saw in her eyes.

She cried some and it made him angry, such a manipulative trick, tears, and he pulled the chain around her neck, twisting the cross until she stopped making those crying sounds, until she made gagging noises instead. He kept twisting until she made no noise, and he realized that he liked her better that way.

When he was finished, he stripped the clothes from her body and took the little cross, too, rinsing her skin and blood from it. He cleaned the scraps of blotchy makeup off her face, and swaddled her in the sheets from his bed. He lay with her like that for a long time, thinking how lovely she looked when she was silent, and how in death that innocent loveliness that she’d exuded if not really embodied was finally made real.

He had one large piece of luggage, a wheeled Samsonite case in dark green, and he folded her into it, bending her like an origami crane, to make her body fit. With the zipper shut and the case upright, he could see the bulge, but no more than any overpacked bag.

He washed his hands, then made himself a light supper and ate it in front of the TV while the suitcase stood beside it. They were calling for snow by the weekend.

After midnight, he wheeled the suitcase out to his car, heaving it with only moderate difficulty into the trunk, and drove up into the mountains, a trip that took a couple of hours, near a place where he’d hiked the year before. He stopped at an emergency pull-off on a deserted stretch of road framed by forest. The suitcase bumped along the forest floor and he had to use a flashlight, but it wasn’t hard to find a spot.

He left her body in a ravine, nestled among a blanket of golden leaves.

He burned the suitcase and her clothes, but he kept the little cross. It was months before they found her and when they did, she became just another Jane Doe on the police roster because he’d picked someone without ties to other people. Callie was an orphan, Callie had relatives who didn’t care about her, Callie lived in a room she rented from an old woman who cared more about her cats than the lonely young woman upstairs and didn’t think to report her missing.