The Dead Place (24 page)

“Oh my God. Not you, too?”

“You’ve been going through a really hard time.” Ian put his hand over hers and Kate jerked away.

“Don’t touch me!”

Ian rubbed the hand over his face instead, as if all of this were making him weary. Kate would have laughed, but she was afraid it would turn into a scream. How could they think she would make this up? How could they just sit here? New tears cupped in her eyes, but she held them back. She sure as hell didn’t want Stilton to see her cry.

“I swear on everything holy that I did not write this letter.” Her voice shook, but at least she didn’t scream. “And I didn’t take my daughter’s necklace. What I told you is the truth. This came in today’s mail. I came straight here with it. I didn’t even stop to get changed.” She indicated her paint-daubed shirt. Something occurred to her and she turned to Ian. “How did you know I was here?”

He flushed, and the mixed look of shame and defensiveness he shot her told her what had happened before Stilton answered for him. “We called him.”

They thought she was some crazy woman and they’d called for her husband to come and get her. “And you just agreed with them and came along to fetch me?” she said to Ian. “Did it even occur to you that I might be telling the truth?”

Again, it was Stilton who spoke before Ian got a chance. “Mrs. Corbin, I’m afraid you’re not a credible witness and without your husband’s verification that your daughter was, in fact, wearing the necklace—” Stilton paused and looked inquiringly at Ian.

Kate begged, “Ian, please, we’ve got to find Grace.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. A moment’s hesitation and then, with a simple shake of his head, he betrayed them both.

There was no sense of day or night. There was only pain and the absence of pain. Grace knew that time had to be passing, but she didn’t know what time it was or what day it was, and sometimes, groggy from too much sleep, whether she’d ever existed outside of this blackness.

The sound of the man’s footsteps on the stairs terrified her. She pushed back into the corner of the walls, curling up like a snail, not that it did any good. He had the flashlight with him like always and found her easily.

The metal casing rapped the wall. “Up, slave!” She stayed curled in the corner, feigning sleep.

The tip of his boot nudged her ribs. She didn’t move. The nudge became a slight kick. If she didn’t get up, she knew he would kick her harder until she did. She pushed herself up and stood swaying slightly on the pallet, blinking in the light.

“Closer!”

She stepped off the pallet and onto the cold concrete. It was so cold that she shifted from foot to foot.

“Stand still!”

“Fuck you, I’m cold!”

The blow knocked her to the floor and she tasted blood. For a moment, her head swam and the flashlight’s beam became spots of light bouncing around the room.

“Up, slave!”

She rolled to a sitting position, waiting for her eyes to focus before getting even more slowly to her feet. She could feel his eyes sliding over her and then his hands joined in, crawling from her face to her feet. She wondered if he was checking if she were clean or just liked to look at the bruises tattooing her body.

When he moved to unfasten her shackle, Grace panicked. The last time she’d cursed at him, he’d freed her only to drag her into another room with nothing but a brown cabinet on one wall and a set of eyebolts on another. He’d taken leather cuffs with welded links from the cabinet and chained her spread out like a snow angel.

“Slaves need to be trained,” he’d said while she hung there. The tip of something had trailed along her skin from her neck down the hollow of her back and then he’d beaten her with it. A stick? A whip? She didn’t know. Didn’t care. All she cared about was not going back there.

“Please, Master.” She jerked her ankle from his grasp.

He grunted and simply grabbed her leg again, his thick fingers digging into the flesh while he unfastened the shackle. It clattered onto the floor, and then he had her by the arm, dragging her along. She pulled back in his grip, trying to break loose.

“I’m sorry, Master, please.”

He gave no sign of hearing and his grip didn’t slacken. The beam from the flashlight danced on the floor in front of them, and then it swung up and what she saw wasn’t that horrible room but a bed.

A large scrolled metal bed frame with a thick comforter. Candelabras stood on either side of the bed, warm light flickering from their wicks. She stopped struggling, staring instead. It looked warm.

“This is for you, little one.”

There was a long, white nightgown laid out on the foot of the bed with lace trim at the collar and the cuffs. Something about it seemed familiar. Grace thought about that while she ran a tentative hand over the soft material.

“Dress.”

As always, his voice was a command. Relieved that there was no whip in sight, she obeyed his command. She had the gown over her head when why it seemed familiar suddenly clicked.

Uttering a harsh cry, she tore the dress off and threw it back on the bed. He was taken by surprise, she could see it in those granite eyes behind the mask as he loomed over her.

“Put it on.”

“No!” It belonged to the girl. Lily Slocum. It was what she’d been wearing in that photo. Grace backed away from the bed, whimpering.

He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her back to the bed. “Dress!”

“No!”

His hands were rough on her arms, trying to force them into the sleeves. She fought him, scratching what she could reach of his skin, kicking back with her legs. She connected with something soft and he cried out and loosened his grip.

Grace pulled away from him, running from the room, but when she slammed her shoulder into the doorjamb, he was on her, his hand in her hair, dragging her back.

He stopped beside the foot of the bed. Placed her hands on the nightgown.

“Dress!”

She shook her head back and forth, not once but several times. “No!”

Slap across the face. “The slave will obey!”

“I’m not your damn slave!”

It was stupid to fight him, stupid to think that she could win, but fear and the kernel of free will that still existed refused to cooperate. She blocked her face in anticipation of another blow, but instead he yanked her by the arm and led her back out of the room. She stumbled along with him, but it wasn’t back to the pallet and the ankle shackle. When she saw the brown cabinet she screamed.

He hung her from the eyebolt in the ceiling, admiring the length of thin white flesh displayed like a carcass. It was marred somewhat by her constant talking. In the end, he fixed a ball gag in her mouth and beat her to music from one of his favorite CDs.

When he was winded, he stopped, the fog that came over him lifting slightly so that he could admire the red lines striping her back from neck to knee. They’d fade to purple, another pleasing color on skin so milky.

He fingered her for a moment while she hung there, more as a test of how much fight she had left in her, though he did enjoy the exploration. She didn’t resist him, staring at him mutely, the deliciously vague look in her eyes spoiled slightly by drool spilling from a corner of her widely stretched mouth.

Time to remove the ball gag; he didn’t want to cut her lips. There was a tear in the rubber where she’d bitten through it. He frowned at that, not liking to see his tools broken.

“You can stay here longer for that,” he said, forcing her chin up and dangling the damage in front of her eyes. She stared at him blankly, only moaning a bit as he left the room and switched off the flashlight. He was pleased to see that the restraint had curbed her speech.

Humming a little Mahler, he climbed up the stairs out of one sanctuary and into another, carefully locking the door behind him. The key went into its secret place and then he removed the mask, mopping up the sweat that had formed in it and on his face from the effort of training his slave.

This one was delightful. He’d known she would be. He’d often thought of the challenge before he’d actually taken her, but she was proving to have far more spunk than the others and that was both stimulating and enjoyable.

He changed out of his clothes swiftly, tucking them away, and put back on the bland khakis and yellow polo shirt he’d been wearing earlier in the day. Loafers replaced his boots. He checked himself in a small mirror, struck, as always, by the difference in his face. It was rounder, gentler. He was two halves of a whole person and this affable man was his public self.

The book club was still going on. He could hear the soft rise and fall of conversation interrupted by short bursts of laughter as he came in the back door. He frowned at the pile of dirty dishes, the empty bottles of wine, and the crumbs from a hastily sliced baguette left on the kitchen counter. His wife always tried to impress the other women.

He plucked a grape from a bunch that had been separated with fruit scissors and eavesdropped on their conversation for a moment, just long enough to know he wasn’t interested in whatever work they were debating. He could have gone through the other door and up the back stairs to the second floor, but that wasn’t his way.

He paused in the doorway to the living room as if he were embarrassed to intrude, just long enough for the women to notice him.

“Well look who’s here!” one of the loud ones said, her teeth unnaturally bright. The women were mostly like his wife, plump and middle-aged, showing traces of the beauty they’d once had. A few of them were keeping a tighter hold on youth, working harder at it and resented for their sculpted bodies and revealing clothing. It gave the rest of them something to talk about when they weren’t around.

He stepped up behind his wife’s chair, and she smiled up at him as he bent to place a gentle kiss on her cheek. His nostrils flared at the smell of wine on her breath. She ordinarily wasn’t a drinker. “Enjoying yourselves?” he asked, smiling at the room while he shifted her glass slightly out of reach.

“It’s a great book—you should read it,” one of the women, a teacher at the local elementary school, said with great earnestness. He perched on the edge of his wife’s chair, asking a few questions and pretending to listen, though he was remembering the feel of a slim, young body convulsing under his touch.

After a few minutes he excused himself, saying, “I hope you’re not going to leave us all this food,” with a nod at his wife’s carrot cake while ruefully patting his stomach. Laughter followed after him. “You’re so lucky,” he heard one of the women say to his wife.

He was reading in bed when he heard his wife close the door after the last of her guests. He waited a few minutes and when she didn’t come upstairs, he went down to find her.

She was standing in the kitchen finishing off the last of the wine.

“Is that your first glass?”

She whirled around, hand to her chest. “Oh, you scared me!”

He crossed the room to her, plucking the stem from her hand. “I thought we’d discussed how much wine you’re allowed to have.”

She looked at him with big eyes, round brown eyes that had wooed him once upon a time, but had less effect on him today. Sometimes, she reminded him of a milch cow. He reached out a hand to heft her ample breast through her straining blouse and she giggled. He squeezed a nipple and she gasped.

“No more wine,” he said. “You know how it affects you.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

She lowered her eyes. “Yes, honey.” It was mumbled, but clear enough.

He smiled and smacked her lightly on the bottom. “Good girl. C’mon, it’s time for bed.”

He made love with her as he did faithfully twice a week, and tolerated her need to cling to him afterward, though he sweated with her weight draped over him.

“All my friends envy me my husband,” she murmured in a satisfied tone as she drifted off to sleep. He stroked her head and found his own sleep in dreams of a milky body suspended in darkness.

At no other time in her life had Kate been so utterly alone. She thought she’d known this isolation when years ago, as a young art student, she’d traveled to Italy for the summer. Sometimes, while sipping espresso at a café or falling asleep in a
pensione
, she’d felt the pang of traveling without friends in a country where she didn’t speak the language. That had been loneliness, though, a mood capable of being lifted by encounters with other American tourists or Italian art students.

This wasn’t loneliness; it was complete and total isolation. To know something, to believe something, and to be totally alone in that belief was a horrible state. Just as bad was the knowledge that the man she’d shared a life with for almost twenty years thought she was crazy.

Two days after the letter had arrived, Ian drove Kate to her meeting with Dr. Schneider, neither of them saying anything while the car wound its way through Wickfield’s quiet streets. Kate looked out the window at the placid-looking homes with their neat lawns and leafy trees and felt nothing but bitterness. Such a safe place, everyone had said. Such a good place for kids, aren’t you glad you came here and left the city.

When he pulled up in front of the building, Kate got out without saying good-bye. She felt a moment’s regret when she saw the hangdog expression on Ian’s face as she closed the passenger door, but the chill that had settled on her heart at the police station reasserted itself. She walked without looking back into the lobby of the building and stood leaning against the wall, ignoring the curious looks of people who passed on their way into the dentist’s.

She waited until Ian had pulled away, until she was sure that he’d made it past the traffic light and turned left to head to the university, before venturing back out onto the street.

It was two long blocks to the cab company. She walked briskly, passing by Thorney Antiques Emporium without stopping to see if the owner was in the window. It was an easy thing to get a cab to take her back home. During the ten-minute drive, she stared out at the sunshine fighting through the clouds before she was dropped off at her front door.

She was in the Volvo minutes later and zipping along the back roads to Wickfield High.

During the night, staring at the ceiling while Ian slept, she’d replayed that frantic afternoon three days earlier when she’d searched for Grace. She kept coming back to seeing Harold Trowle in the parking lot at the high school.

Why had he seemed startled when he saw her? And he’d been evasive when she asked about Grace. Could he be the one who’d abducted her? In the middle of the night, feverish from anxiety and sleeplessness, it had all made sense.

Now she wasn’t so sure. He was certainly an odd man, but she’d already made that mistake with Terrence Simnic. She couldn’t assume anything, nor could she count on police support. If she wanted to find out anything about Harold Trowle, she’d have to go see him in person.

The security guard at the front of Wickfield High’s main building was snoozing. She walked past him and into the same hallway where Grace had fallen asleep while she and Ian had been talking with the smarmy guidance counselor.

Relying on memory, she turned down the hallway that she thought led to his office, her shoes clicking loudly on the shiny linoleum floor. Where were all the students? The doors of the classrooms were all shut, but it seemed strange that there was no one walking in the halls and she couldn’t hear the murmur of classroom conversation.

“Excuse me!” The nasal bark came from behind. Kate whirled around. There was sunlight streaming through the windows, and for just a second Kate thought the figure she saw was a ghost. Then the figure moved and she realized it was a woman. All of her appeared as shades of gray—the hair, the skin, the clothes. Drab and dour, she pursed her blue-gray lips and looked at Kate as if she’d committed a huge security breach.

“Can I help you?” she said, but her expression and tone belied the offer.

“Yes, I need to speak with Harold Trowle.”

“He’s not here. They’re all at an assembly.” The look on her face suggested Kate should have known this.

“I’ll just wait for him in his office.”

The gray woman shook her head. “You can’t do that. You can’t be anywhere here without a pass from the office.”

She turned without waiting to see if Kate would follow, and they moved in tandem back to the main office. When she stepped behind the center desk, Kate remembered her. The gray woman was the main secretary, the woman in charge of doling out late slips and scheduling appointments with the principal. The nameplate on her desk seemed more like an ironic comment on her personality:
MRS
.
JOY
.

“Name?” she said as she filled out a visitor’s badge with a gray hand. Even the wedding ring set on her left hand seemed colorless, the diamond flat instead of sparkling.

“Kate Corbin.” Was it her imagination or did Mrs. Joy give her a funny look? She’d probably seen Kate on the local news.

“You’ll have to wait to see Mr. Trowle.” The secretary indicated a stiff-looking couch sitting opposite the desk. Kate dutifully took a seat feeling the woman’s eyes on her while she idly flipped through old issues of the Wickfield High yearbook.

When she saw a familiar-looking smiling face, she stopped, startled. Ann Henke, one of the girls who’d disappeared eight years ago. Kate hadn’t realized she’d been a student at the school. Her heart beat a little faster.

The book was ten years old and Ann Henke had been a senior. There were multiple photos of her throughout the book. She flipped back through the pages and there were the pictures of faculty and staff. She spotted Mrs. Joy right away, as whey-faced then as now, but she couldn’t find any photo or mention of Harold Trowle.

She carried the book to the desk. Mrs. Joy looked up from her perusal of the computer screen.

“How long has Mr. Trowle been at Wickfield High?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t see his picture here.”

Mrs. Joy gave a put-upon sigh and took the yearbook from Kate’s hands. She scanned the open page and then flipped to the front, frowning. “He probably wasn’t here back then.”

“But he could have been?”

“Maybe.” Mrs. Joy sounded doubtful. She handed the book back to Kate. “Why do want to know?”

“I wondered if he knew Ann Henke.”

The secretary gave a distinctly unjoyful sniff. “Everybody knew Ann Henke, or at least they claimed they did once she went missing. Suddenly, everybody was her best friend. Nothing like being murdered to make you a celebrity.”

“Did you know her?”

“About as well as any kid at the school. I get to know the ones that get into trouble. Who do you suppose gets to look after them when they’re sent here? Me. I’ve told the vice principal many times—I wasn’t hired to be a baby-sitter, I’ve got my own work to do.”

Kate made a sympathetic noise and a little color came to Mrs. Joy’s gray cheeks. She sat, forward in her seat and leaned her elbows on the desk, suddenly relishing the conversation. “And don’t get me started on Harold Trowle. The man thinks that there’s no such thing as a bad kid. He thinks they’re just misunderstood.” She snorted. “I can’t stand that do-gooder sort. It’s no wonder, though—he’s from California. The whole state’s full of weirdos.”

Kate laughed despite herself, and Mrs. Joy’s lips curved upward in what could almost be called a smile. “Wait a sec—I can tell you when he came.” She pulled open a drawer in a file cabinet behind her. “Let’s see. Thomas, Tipton, Trowle. Here it is.” She pulled out a file and flipped through it. “Yep, that’s what I thought. He was hired in 2003.”

So he couldn’t have killed Ann Henke or those other young women in the past. Or Lily Slocum. Not if it was the same killer. The police said it was the same person, the clues were the same, but weren’t there copycats? If it was the same person, why had he waited so long between killings?

Anxiety and despair washed over Kate in equal measure. She put the yearbook back with the others and made a show of checking her watch. “I think I’ll come back another day when there isn’t an assembly.”

“Suit yourself.” Mrs. Joy turned back to her computer. “You should call first, you know, and actually make an appointment.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that.” Kate was at the door when she thought of something else. “Do you know if the Henke family still lives in Wickfield?”

“I heard the marriage fell apart after what happened. They say that lots of marriages can’t sustain the loss of a child.”

The house where Ann Henke had lived was on the opposite side of Wickfield on a street similar to the Corbins’ with its old homes and mature oak and sycamore trees stretching enormous boughs across to touch their neighbors.

Kate checked the slip of paper on which she’d scribbled the address given by Mrs. Joy, and saw that the house she wanted was the last one on the block. She parked, the slam of the car door echoing slightly.

There was no one around. She had the sudden feeling that it was as if time stopped when Ann Henke disappeared and like some aberrant version of
Sleeping Beauty,
everything and everybody on this street had died with her.

The concrete walkway was crumbling in places, and the lawn looked patchy and colorless even for December. The brick of the house needed to be repointed. One of the black shutters hung askew. Two stone urns flanked the front door, empty except for a scrim of dust.

Kate rang the bell, shivering in the cold and waiting in silence so complete that she could hear the drone of a lone holdout fly. When no one responded, she pulled open the creaking screen door and used the brass knocker.

The face of the woman who opened the door was an older version of the smiling photo from the yearbook.

“Are you Beth Henke?”

“Yes?” The woman held onto the door as if she were using it for support. She was pretty, like her daughter had been, with the same dark hair, though hers was graying and her face looked prematurely worn.

“I’m Kate Corbin. My daughter is missing and I think she was taken by the same person who took your daughter—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” The woman’s face crumpled and the door started to swing closed. Kate stopped it with her foot and a hand.

“Please, Mrs. Henke, I need your help.”

“I can’t, I’m sorry.” Mrs. Henke pushed against the door, but Kate held on, pushing back.

“If you could just tell me a little about Ann,” she said, speaking rapidly. “Please. I’m begging you, Mrs. Henke.”

The woman hesitated, pinching the bridge of her nose with thin fingers that trembled. “All right,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know what I could possibly tell you, it’s been so many years. Ten minutes—that’s all I’ll give you.”

She showed Kate into a hallway with a dusty console table. The mirror hanging above it also had a film. Heaped on the table were a woman’s handbag, a nondescript jacket, and a pile of mail. “I just got home from work, I only work part-time most days,” Mrs. Henke said, one hand straying to the mail before moving away to twist a button on her blouse instead. It was plain cotton, as were the black slacks she wore. They hung on her thin frame. She stared at Kate with a look torn between pity and confusion. “I suppose we could sit down.”

The living room didn’t appear to be used by the living. A stiff brown sofa and two patterned armchairs faced each other in front of an empty fireplace. It might have been very pretty, probably once was, but time and neglect had changed things. Dust lay on all the surfaces and a fern on a corner plant stand shriveled from want of water and sunlight. Huge floor-to-ceiling curtains were drawn across the windows, muffling light and sound.

Kate’s heels sank in plush carpet that looked like dingy cream. She took a seat in one of the armchairs and tried not to sneeze.

“I used to keep this place spotless.” Beth Henke’s voice was flat as she switched on a lamp before sitting down on the sofa. “I guess I got busy.”

Her hand strayed to her blouse again. “Are you Elizabeth Hirsh’s mother?”

“No, my daughter is Grace Corbin. She’s been gone for three days.” Four hours, twenty-five minutes, Kate added mentally.

As if she could read her mind, Beth Henke said, “I’m sure you’re counting the time.”

“Yes.”

“I did that, too.” Grief had cut deep lines on either side of Beth Henke’s mouth. She twisted the button on her blouse until she noticed what she was doing, and folded her hands in her lap instead. “I must have missed your story on the news. I don’t like to watch much; it’s too depressing.”

Kate didn’t correct her, unsure if the woman would believe her.

“I don’t know how I can help you,” Beth Henke said. “Ann’s been gone a long time.”

“I hoped that maybe there was some overlap somewhere—that maybe the girls knew the same person, or had met someone on campus.”

“That seems unlikely after such a long period of time.”

“What was she studying?”

“History.” Beth Henke smiled a little. “Her father said she’d never do anything with that degree. He wanted her to major in business or computer science or something like that.”