The Dead Place (30 page)

They backtracked through the narrow corridor, but the only thing in the room where they’d left Beetleman was a spatter of Grace’s blood.

“Clara, it’s Ian Corbin,” Ian called, starting back across the yard toward her.

She waved the gun at him as if he couldn’t see it. “Don’t move!”

He stopped walking. “I came to see Laurence.”

“You’re trespassing.” Her voice was cold. “Get off my property.”

“No one answered the front door.” He aimed for a friendly voice. It sounded false and she didn’t respond. Instead, she began walking slowly toward the end of the deck without taking her eyes, or the gun, off him.

He said, “I thought I’d try around back.”

She came down the steps with the gun still held out in front of her. Her plump body bobbed in the snow, but her arms were steady, the gun fixed on his chest. The rush of fear at seeing the gun increased the closer it got. Ian walked backward, moving away from it.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Clara yelled, lifting the gun a little and squinting along its length. He stopped immediately, standing where he was in snow that had long since soaked through the lower legs of his trousers and trickled from his wet hair into his collar. She kept walking, not stopping until she was approximately four feet away.

“I need to see Laurence,” Ian said, being careful to hold his hands out where she could see them. Up close, he saw that Clara Beetleman was agitated. Her hands were steady on the gun, but under the thick hood her broad face was creased with tension.

“You can’t see him. Not today.”

“Is he in his studio?”

“He can’t be disturbed.”

“I think he knows where I can find my daughter. Do you know what’s happened to Grace?”

“You need to leave.”

“She’s vanished, just like the others. Lily Slocum, Elizabeth Hirsh.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Kate’s been looking for her. Have you seen Kate?”

She shook her head, but he saw the flicker in her eyes. Kate had been here, was here now.

“She came here looking for Grace, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but she blinked rapidly, and he could see the small white cloud from each rapid breath.

“Are they in his studio? Is that where Laurence is right now?” He looked back at the studio, then at her, and she was trembling now, her fat legs wobbling in the rubber boots.

“You can’t go in there!”

“I need to find my daughter.”

“You can shoot trespassers on your property! It’s the law.”

She knew. She knew all about what went on in the studio, Ian realized, and he felt sick as he thought of all the self-deception necessary to keep believing that her husband wasn’t a monster. Of course Beetleman wouldn’t have shared the details with her. He had probably lied to her about everything, and all these years she’d accepted the lies with the same sweet little smile so that she could go on being the contented housewife of a famous man.

Kate had been right along—Clara Beetleman
was
a Stepford wife, a fearful mouse of a woman who’d do anything, even kill, to protect the comfortable façade Beetleman had built.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll leave.” He walked slowly toward her, hands up in surrender.

Beetleman had vanished. Kate’s eyes swept the torture chamber as Grace screamed, “Where is he?”

“I don’t know!” Kate grabbed her daughter’s hand, pulling her out and back toward the stairs. Suddenly, Beetleman stepped out from the darkness to block their path.

“You can’t leave yet, the fun’s just beginning.” He’d taken off the mask and his hair stood out like a silver bush around a large face florid with excitement. He had the stun gun in his right hand and jabbed Kate with it imitating a zapping noise. She flinched and he laughed.

“You’ll dance again to its tune, cunt, all in good time.”

He grabbed her by the hair, and she cried out as he slammed her back against the concrete wall. “Like that, bitch?” he hissed. She stood by, helplessly, as he grabbed Grace’s wrist and yanked her to him.

“I’ve got a necklace for you,” he said to Grace, pulling a noose made of thick silver wire from his pocket. It’s piano wire, so I know you’ll like it.” He grabbed Grace by the hair and forced the wire around her neck. It circled her throat, and he pulled it taut using a little wooden handle attached to one end. The band dug into her flesh turning the milky skin around it an ugly red.

Beetleman held Grace by the noose and pointed the stun gun at Kate. “One move from either of you and I’ll give this a little jerk,” he said, indicating the garrote. “The slave’s neck will snap like a bean.”

He forced his thick tongue into Grace’s mouth, all the while watching Kate’s reaction out of the corner of his eye. He sucked on Grace’s tongue while she gagged and his eyes danced at Kate, delighting in her revulsion.

After a minute, he pulled away, casually wiping his mouth as Grace coughed and spit. He looked at Kate. “Strip.”

Slowly, Kate began to undress, stripping off the remnants of her sweater. “Please let her go,” she said.

“All of your clothes!” Beetleman barked.

She undid her bra and let it drop. As slowly as she could, she undid the button and unzipped her jeans. “You don’t have to kill her. You have me. Let her go and I’ll stay.”

“Keep going,” Beetleman urged. “Lovely, just lovely,” he murmured as the jeans slipped off her hips and puddled on the floor. She stepped out of them on shaky legs.

“I think you’re forgetting something,” Beetleman hissed and he pointed with the stun gun at her panties. She slid them off, her face flaming, and stood naked before him, covering her breasts with one arm and blocking her vagina with the other.

“Hands down!” Beetleman ordered, and she let her hands fall to her sides.

“Please let her go,” she begged. “You can kill me. You don’t need to kill her.”

“How noble of you to sacrifice yourself,” Beetleman said. “Really, it’s quite charming, but when you beg for something, shouldn’t you get down on your knees?”

Kate dropped to her knees, folding her hands in supplication. “Please, Dr. Beetleman.” It was an effort to say his name with respect. “Please let Grace go. You don’t need to kill her. She’s nothing to you. I’m the one you want.”

He looked at her for a long moment as if he were really considering what she said, but this tiniest bit of hope was immediately dashed as he laughed and said, “Don’t be silly, Kate. Of course I have to kill both of you.”

He jerked Grace a little closer by the wire handle. “Don’t worry. You’ll get to watch her die. The neck snaps with such a satisfying little pop. I think you’ll like it.” He nudged Kate with the toe of his boot. “Get up.”

She thought of lunging forward and sinking her teeth into his balls, but even a small twist of his hand could slice Grace’s neck. Her daughter’s eyes were shut tight with fear and the artery in her neck pulsed against the wire. Kate struggled to her feet while Beetleman watched with a lascivious smile on his face.

“It’s time for a little photography session,” he said, running his eyes over Kate’s body. Grace’s eyes flew open and her nostrils flared. She whimpered, and he glanced at her. “Don’t worry, slave. You’re going first.” He turned his gaze back on Kate. “And after you’re done, then I’ll immortalize your mother.”

Clara Beetleman walked backward, keeping the gun pointed at Ian. She couldn’t move easily in the thick snow, and he shortened the distance between them while being careful not to overtake her.

When he judged the distance to be right, he widened his eyes and pointed behind her. “Laurence?”

“What?” Her gaze flicked away from him and he leapt for the gun, his hands closing over it as he knocked her back into the snow. She cried out as she landed, but she kept hold of the gun with one hand and he wrestled with her, trying to pry it loose from her strong grip.

He forced her arm down into the snow, pounding her hand against the snow-covered ground, but she kept her grip on the gun while she tore at him with her other hand, clawing at his face with strong fingers.

“Let go!” he shouted, his grip slipping as the snow melted from the heat in their hands. She answered by pushing up with a last-ditch surge of energy, forcing his arm back as she brought the gun around to shoot him. He rose on one leg, knocking her left hand from his face as he forced the gun hand back down, bringing his knee down against her upper arm.

She capitulated, he could feel the fight leave her, but as her hand fell back against the snow, she squeezed her finger around the trigger.

The single gunshot was like the crack of a whip. Beetleman’s eyes flashed toward the stairs and Kate lunged for the stun gun, pressing it against his side and pushing the button. In the same moment she reached for the handle of the wire noose. A blue flash and Beetleman’s large body jerked like a fish on a line. He screamed and his hands splayed wide with shock. The handle of the noose slipped from his fingers into Kate’s while the stun gun clattered to the floor. He wavered for a moment before falling, his eyes gaping at her as he sank to the floor.

Kate carefully unwrapped the wire noose and lifted it free of her daughter’s neck. “We need the key,” Grace said, running her hands over the red band the wire had left around her throat. Kate knelt next to Beetleman and ran reluctant hands over his twitching body until she felt a sharp outline in his pants pocket.

“I’ve got it!” She yanked it from his clothing and thrust it into Grace’s hand, and her daughter ran toward the stairs. As Kate stepped over the twitching body, a hand closed around her ankle.

The roar of the shot deafened Ian. He pulled the gun from Clara Beetleman’s limp fingers and looked down at his leg. There was blood all over his pants, but he couldn’t find the wound. He rose to his knees, the only noise the ringing in his ears, and saw blood pouring from a small hole in Clara’s thigh. She was crying, but he couldn’t hear it, large tears running down her fat cheeks as her wounded leg twitched against him.

He struggled up, panting, and left her stranded on her back like a great green bug as he ran across the snow toward the studio.

Kate screamed and Grace turned back. “Run!” Her mother yelled at her, trying to yank free of the viselike grip. “Don’t stop! Run!”

Beetleman jerked her ankle again and she fell forward, landing hard on her palms and knees. Beetleman rolled a leg over hers. “You bitch,” he said with slurred speech. He was much heavier than she was, and she couldn’t shift his deadweight. He moved slowly on top of her, like a huge snake trying to suffocate its prey. She could smell his rank odor as he turned so that his face pressed close to hers, and she could see bloody veins running through the whites of his soulless gray eyes.

Her hands beat frantically at his sides and futilely at his body and then she scratched at the floor in search of escape. “I’m going to kill you,” he said in a slow, slurred voice just as her hand closed on the stun gun.

“No, you’re not.” She pressed it against his neck this time and pushed the button. The blue crackle seemed brighter. She smelled burning hair. His body went rigid for a split second before convulsing like it had before, and she pushed the button again, and then a third time before rolling free of him as he flopped on the ground like a fish.

Grace tugged at the door, screaming, and Kate came behind her and wrapped her own hands around her daughter’s. “It’s okay,” she said, pulling the door open. “I’ve got you.”

Wineglasses held aloft to avoid being jostled by the crowd, Kate and Ian followed a circuitous route to the front of the gallery.

People touched Kate as she passed, clapping hands on her shoulder or patting her arm as they offered congratulations. She managed not to flinch. Jerry Virgoli waved from a corner, looking as pleased as if he’d done the paintings himself. “They’re brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” a voice said, and Abigail Thorney stepped in front of her, effectively blocking Kate’s path.

“Thank you, Mrs. Thorney.”

“I can’t believe they were all inspired by that first photo.”

“Yes.”

Kate caught Ian’s eye above the crowd, and gave him a helpless shrug as he tapped his watch. He rolled his eyes and made his way back through the crowd to her side. He patted the elderly woman on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Thorney, but time waits for no woman.” He smiled as he said it and the woman looked flustered, letting them past.

Margaret caught them at the door, helping them get their coats and bussing Kate loudly on both cheeks. “Congratulations! I’m sorry you have to leave so early.”

“I’m not,” Kate said. “It’s too crowded in here.”

“There’s no such thing as too crowded at an opening.” Margaret’s eyes sparkled. “I think the entire town is squeezed into this space!” Her laughter followed them out the door.

It was refreshingly cold after the crush in the gallery, and Kate lifted her head to the crisp December air as Ian unlocked the Toyota and held open her door.

She slid into her seat and exhaled as Ian started the car.

“Tired?” he said.

“A little. I think it went well.”

Ian laughed. “I think ‘well’ is an understatement.”

She smiled and looked out the window as the car sped along the rain-slicked streets and out onto the back roads toward the high school. It was hard to make this drive without remembering her frantic search for Grace. “It’s a year next week.”

“I know.” Ian didn’t have to ask what she was talking about.

“Has Grace mentioned it to you?”

“No. I wasn’t going to bring it up unless she did.”

“Good.” Kate stared out the window, but she remembered the way Laurence Beetleman looked when he was wheeled into court for his arraignment, a drooling, whiskered old man who seemed shrunken inside the baggy pajamas. Being hit repeatedly with the stun gun had triggered a heart attack, which probably contributed to the stroke he suffered barely two weeks later.

He’d pled guilty to all the charges, answering the judge’s questions in low, slurred speech. The courtroom had been packed with Wickfield residents eager to hear him admit his crimes. In all, he confessed to eleven murders. The body of Elizabeth Hirsh was pulled from the river two days after his arrest. He told investigators the location of Barbara Lutz’s body and the bodies of his other victims, but despite a thorough search of Sterling Forest and Bear Mountain State Park, they still hadn’t been found.

Thanks to the skills of a brilliant defense team, Laurence Beetleman was deemed unfit to serve his four consecutive life terms in a regular prison and remanded instead to a high security psychiatric hospital. There’d been some outrage among townspeople over this, and a mixture of outrage and pity directed toward his wife, who was alternately referred to as his accomplice or his twelfth victim.

Kate hadn’t cared about any of it. She’d been too absorbed in the preservation of her own family to do more than register what happened to the Beetlemans. Relief came when she’d heard the house had been sold and the studio and its torture chamber razed. It would take longer to erase the memories, but time, and therapy, were helping with that.

“Ten minutes to spare,” Ian said in a pleased voice as he pulled up in front of Wickfield High School.

Kate hurried in to get their programs as Ian parked the car. A student usher pointed them to the right aisle, and they slipped into their seats toward the front of the crowded auditorium just as the lights dimmed.

“I hope she wasn’t searching for us,” Kate whispered.

Ian harrumphed. “I’m sure she’ll let us know if she was.”

The curtains parted to reveal a gleaming black piano sitting at the center of the stage. Grace entered from the left and the audience clapped as she crossed the stage, wobbling slightly on the high heels she was unused to, and took a seat on the bench.

She’d deigned to wear a dress, black of course, but velvet at least, and cut in a way that was high enough to please her parents while low enough to please Grace. She’d pulled her hair back, and Kate felt a pang of anxiety at the solemn expression on her face.

The visible bruises had taken weeks to heal. The ones they couldn’t see would take much longer. “Children are resilient,” Dr. Schneider reassured them after every session. “Families are resilient.”

Kate wanted to believe her. She’d suffered too much to believe that what didn’t kill you made you stronger, but perhaps what it could do was make you more aware of what you had to lose and much more likely to hold tight to the things, and the people, that mattered.

The opening notes of Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor filled the hall. Ian’s hand slipped into Kate’s, and she held on, smiling.

In a corner of the second floor common room at Ratston State Hospital was an upright piano. It had started its life with some dignity as an instructional instrument for a local high school, but after years of being banged on by hundreds of tone-deaf students, it had been donated to the tone-deaf inmates of the high security psychiatric facility.

It had been purchased from the high school and presented with great ceremony by the local women’s club, who were thrilled at the thought of telling their friends that they’d been in a prison. They didn’t know that the grinning inmate who’d come forward to haltingly play
Chopsticks
had sliced off the top of his wife’s skull and scooped out the innards with a spoon, arguing in court that in plenty of countries monkey brains were considered a delicacy.

The twenty-five years since had not been kind to the Baldwin. Her cherrywood case, carefully constructed and polished to a high gloss almost a century before, was now scratched and battered. There were chips in the veneer along her sides, and many of the ivory keys had been torn, like a fingernails, from their beds. The lock that had held the lid was scratched and misshapen, and the key long since vanished into the gullet of an inmate nobody messed with who was known as Sawblade.

Laurence Beetleman shuffled into the room, his large shoulders hunched up by his ears as he passed the mismatched couches crowded with inmates braying along to the canned laughter from a sitcom playing on the TV bolted and caged on the wall.

“You going to play the piano, Larry?” an attendant named Tony asked, moving slowly beside Dr. Beetleman. He was a large man, the muscles in his biceps and quads straining the seams of his white uniform, his hairless forearms and bald head gleaming like polished obsidian. His gentle smile belied the fact that he could subdue even the largest inmate by catching his head in the crook of his arm and cracking his skull like a walnut.

The leonine old man didn’t answer, but the shaggy head nodded and the side of his mouth that could still move curved upward in a faint smile, while a thin string of drool, glistening in the light, spilled from the slack corner.

The bench took his weight with the faintest of groans and he lifted the lid with a surprisingly delicate touch, his hands stretching toward the keys like a mother reaching out to her child.

The old piano seemed to know that someone with talent was playing her, for she mellowed under his touch and a haunting melody filled the air.

“What’s that you’re playing, Larry?” Tony asked, dropping into a chair beside him to listen.

“Chopin. Prelude in E Minor.” Beetleman spoke clearly, only the end of some words cut off. He worked with a speech therapist sent by the county every week.

He gazed out the tall window as he played, seeing past the steel mesh and the heavy bars behind it and looking over the farm fields that stretched beyond the guard towers and into the deep forest that rose behind them.

One high note, one low, now he was in the passage marked legato and the notes streamed together, became a river, the water running black and wild below him. The body he carried was so delightfully cold and white as he laid it like a boat in the water and watched the current carry it downstream.

“Shut up, Larry!” A deep voice bellowed and Beetleman’s hand slipped and hit a false note.

“Yeah, you dumb fuck, don’t you see we’re trying to watch TV?”

The spell was broken. Beetleman opened his eyes, but Tony patted his arm. “Don’t pay no attention to them, Larry,” he said, his voice as calm and melodious as the music. “They’re just ignorant fools.” He got up from the chair and walked slowly toward the group on the couches. “Ignorant fools,” he repeated, his voice louder, his arms folded menacingly across his broad chest.

A skinny ferret of a man giggled in a voice as high-pitched as a girl’s and aimed a cross made from two nicotine stained fingers at Tony. “Stay away, Satan!”

He howled along with the other inmates as Tony turned down the volume on the TV. “You all shut up now so Larry can play the piano,” Tony said. “You’re getting this little dose of high culture courtesy of the state.”

One inmate muttered about where he’d like to stick high culture, but Tony ignored it, moving slowly back to the piano. Beetleman was standing up, hands working in the pockets of his pants, looking ready to shuffle away. Tony put a large hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently back on the bench. “You go ahead and play now.”

The large hands moved over the keys again, and Tony sat back down to listen. So beautiful that Chopin. He’d never heard of it before; he’d have to look it up. A skipped note jarred him. A minute later it happened again. Tony looked over at the piano and saw that one of the keys made no sound when it was struck.

Tony stood up. “Hold on a minute, Larry, I think something’s gumming up the works.” He lifted the lid and looked inside.

“That’s funny,” he muttered, and Dr. Beetleman’s mouth crooked obligingly. “I think a wire’s missing.”