The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (17 page)

“When you were last here, was there a car out front?” Karin asked, and her voice had the tiniest waver to it. The dark woods had unnerved her.

“No. It looked just like this.”

They parked, and both got out of the car. George had expected it to be even cooler in the piney darkness of the woods, but the air felt muggy, as though the humidity of the past week had somehow been trapped beneath the close-knit trees. Despite being so near to the ocean, there was no discernible breeze. They walked toward the door together, and George rang the bell. As before, he heard a deep gong from inside the house. They waited, silently, for half a minute. He rang the bell again and pressed his face to one of the narrow windows that ran the length of the door. The house was a split-level; a carpeted landing led to two short stairwells, one going up and one going down. Nothing moved.

Karin reached for the door latch, but it was locked. They looked at each other. “Should we peer through other windows?” he asked.

“I was going to suggest we break in.”

“Let’s just walk around the house, see if anything’s open, or if anyone’s here. Do you want to go that way and I’ll go the other and we can meet on the other side?”

“Why don’t we stick together?” Karin said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

They began to circle the house, moving clockwise. The garage door was locked, so they rounded the corner. There was a short stretch of yard that separated the house’s dark siding from the encroaching woods, but the yard had probably not been tended to since winter: its grass was knee-high, and it was filled with weedy flowers. George waded into the grass, walking splay-footed to press it down while he walked. Small clouds of bugs rose from the undergrowth. Karin, close behind him, said, “I fucking hate nature.”

“All of it?” George asked.

“I don’t mind looking at it, but I don’t want to be in it.”

There was only one window along this side of the house, a horizontal rectangle fronted by a mossy wooden window box with some scrappy vegetation protruding from it. Propped along the foundation were several faded plastic milk crates and a wooden pallet that was black with rot and mildew. “If I stand on a crate,” George said, “I could probably look into the window.”

He lifted one of the crates, exposing some wet black soil where it had rested for a very long time. A small green snake darted away into a fissure in the foundation. Karin let out a single choked scream and grabbed George’s arm. “It’s just a garter snake,” he said. “Our official state reptile.”

“I don’t care. I’m wearing sandals. Let’s go around to the back and see if there’s a lower window to look through.”

George agreed and put the milk crate down.

The small yard at the back was equally overgrown, with a brick patio extending the length of the house. Scattered over the mostly broken bricks was all the detritus of a once-furnished patio. A glass-topped circular table was covered with a thin scrim of black water; two of the chairs were tipped over on their sides. A large Weber grill had been left out for way too long; its metal handles and legs were spotted with rust, and an abandoned beehive was nestled in the joint of one of its legs. Between the patio and the house was a wide pair of sliding-glass doors. Karin went over and tried them, but they were locked. They both looked through the glass into the living room of the house. The state of the patio had led George to believe that the house’s interior might be equally derelict, but the living room looked habitable. It was a low-ceilinged room with several large pieces of upholstered furniture, a bookcase-lined wall, and a brick fireplace. A low table in front of the sofa was cluttered with glasses, ashtrays, and dirty plates.

“It gives a little,” Karin said, tugging at the door again.

“I think we should probably just leave,” George said.

“Why? There’s no one here. If we find anything that makes it look like your friends were staying here, we’ll call the police.”

George grasped the handle and pulled hard. It didn’t feel locked so much as obstructed; he was able to pull the door open about half an inch, enough to see that it was unlatched. He crouched and looked at the interior track. A thin wooden dowel had been placed inside of it. Telling Karin to pull extra hard on the door, he watched as the dowel bent up and out of the track. Knowing that he was being foolish, George decided that it would be okay if they briefly looked in the house. “I think we can break it,” he said, “if we pull hard enough.”

They each got a hand around the door handle, planted their feet, and leaned all of their mutual weight into snapping the thin wooden security measure. It held for a brief moment before there was a surprisingly loud snap and the door slid open. George fell backward onto the patio, and Karin fell on top of him. She rolled awkwardly off as they both laughed nervously.

George shouted “Hello” into the dim interior of the house, even though he felt certain that the house was empty. He stepped inside, Karin right behind him, and let his eyes adjust for a moment. The air had a stale smell with something behind it, a tang of rot. He walked toward the low coffee table, covered with several dirty dishes, some smeared with what looked like the remains of food and some cigarette butts and ash. On top of a cigar box was a pair of spoons, each with blackened hollows in which, George assumed, heroin or cocaine had been cooked. He was tempted to move the spoons and open the cigar box, but some instinct cautioned him to touch nothing in the room.

Karin had entered the kitchen, which led directly off the living room. George could see her through a pass-through window. She was standing still and looking around. “What’s in the kitchen?” he asked.

“It’s disgusting,” she said.

“No uncut diamonds?”

“Not in plain sight.”

George flicked a light switch to see if the electricity was still on in the house. An overhead fan began to stir, and he switched it off. “Electricity works,” he said. “You want to search up here, and I’ll go down a level?”

Karin walked back into the living room. Her arms were held tightly to her sides, as though lifting them might expose them to the filth of the house. “Why do you keep suggesting we split up? I’m not walking around this house by myself. Let’s look up here first.”

A hallway led directly from the living room. Without windows, it was close to pitch-dark, and when George flipped a switch, two of the three recessed lights built into the hallway’s low ceiling turned on. The walls were painted a dull industrial gray, and there were no pictures on them. The carpet, which, as far as he could tell, covered the entire top floor of the house, was a deep forest green. He could only imagine the dirt and grime hidden by its dark color. At the end of the hallway, two doors faced each other. One was open, and George leaned in to look. It was a bedroom, wallpapered in a print of tiny flowers and covered with pinned-up posters and framed photographs. He stepped inside, and Karin followed. It appeared to have been a teenage girl’s room. The posters on the walls were band posters, and the framed photographs were group shots of girls in prom dresses or field hockey uniforms. There was a small pine desk in one corner and above it a bulletin board that was overrun with pictures cut out of glamour magazines. In the opposite corner was a narrow single bed, but instead of being made up with sheets and blankets, it had just a puffy sleeping bag and a single pillow without a cover.

“You saw the woman who lives here,” Karin said. “How old do you think she is?”

“It was hard to tell. She’s some kind of drug addict, so for all I know she’s in her early twenties and looks forty. She’s not a teenager, though. I’m pretty sure of that.”

Karin was at the desk. She had picked up a spiral-bound notebook and was looking at its cover. “Does the name Kathryn Aller mean anything to you?”

George told her it didn’t.

Karin put the notebook down. “Should we keep looking around the house?”

They went back into the hallway, where George opened the door across from the bedroom. They were immediately assaulted by a rank smell. It was a small laundry room, filthier than anything else they’d seen in the house. Besides a grimy washer and dryer, the tiled room was filled with several large trash barrels, all overflowing with trash bags. One of the overstuffed bags had fallen onto the floor and split open. Unidentifiable black ooze had spread from the tear, surrounded by large clumsy flies. “I guess this is the trash room,” George said.

“Why doesn’t she put it outside?”

“I don’t know.”

Without quite stepping into the room, George cupped a hand around his nose and mouth and leaned in to get a better look. Between the washer and dryer was a deep cube-shaped sink of white plastic, flecked in black mold. Flies buzzed around the sink. Against the far wall was a cylindrical roll of clear plastic sheeting the size of a large rolled rug, about six feet long. Each end of the roll was tied securely with yellow nylon rope. The effect was of a giant Tootsie Roll, with the wrapper still on. The room was well illuminated by a window above the sink, but George slid his hand along the wall to look for a light switch anyway. When he couldn’t find one, he held his breath, stepped farther into the room, and pulled the string that hung from an overhead fluorescent light; the room was more hideous in its flat, harsh light. “What’re you doing?” Karin asked from behind him. As he had moved into the room she had stepped farther back into the hall.

“I want to see what this carpet thing is.”

He crouched beside the roll of plastic sheeting. More flies were disturbed, and they bounced erratically around the small enclosure, sputtering like live wires. There were many layers of plastic sheeting, but he could make out a dark form at the center, about five or six feet in length. He knew with sudden certainty what it was.

“What did you find?” Karin asked from the hallway.

“I don’t know yet,” he said, and the intake of breath from the act of speaking made him start to gag.

George willed himself to lean over the top of the plastic cylinder and pressed a hand down on the dark form beneath. As the plastic sheeting came together the image of what was contained came swimming up. A dark face, the forehead visible, plus the shadows of the eye sockets. He could also make out the fanned hair around the head. George pulled his hands away from the plastic, but the disturbance of the body, in its temporary coffin, had caused a full rank smell of decomposition to flood the tiny laundry room. He stood and bolted toward the hallway, then stopped when he realized he wasn’t going to make it. He leaned over the deep plastic sink and vomited. Karin was oddly silent from the hallway, but when he had finished, she murmured, “What’s in there? It’s a dead body?”

“Yes,” he said. “Wrapped in plastic. We have to call the police.”

He turned the tap on, and it sputtered several times before emitting a thin stream of water. He knew he shouldn’t be disturbing the crime scene, but he desperately wanted to swish some water into his mouth before getting as far away from this house as possible. He bent and took in a mouthful of the rusty-tasting water, then spit it into the sink. He emerged from the laundry room into the hallway. Karin had moved a couple of steps away; there was a dull, glossy look to her eyes, and he wondered if she was in shock.

“We need to call the police,” he said again.

“Right.” Karin looked around the hallway as though a phone might magically appear.

“Do you have your cell?”

“I left it in the car. In my purse.”

“I saw a phone in the kitchen. Let’s check it.”

Karin followed him toward the kitchen. Having thrown up, he now felt not just purged of his nausea but somehow purged of all his fear. Future events unfolded before him with a deep clarity. They would call the police and await their arrival in the car, being careful to not disturb the scene any more. He would also try to get in touch with Detective Roberta James as soon as possible. He was sure she would want to view an undisturbed murder scene. The phone in the kitchen was wall-mounted. He placed the pink handset to his ear, but there was no dial tone. He wasn’t surprised. “We’ll have to call from your cell,” he said to Karin. Her face, in the light of the open kitchen area, was flushed of color. Her lips silently opened and closed like a goldfish staring dumbly at its own reflection. She turned and went down the four steps toward the front door. He thought it would be best to leave the way they had come but decided to let that go and follow her. She unlatched the heavy door and pulled it inward and they found themselves facing the white Dodge parked behind Karin’s Audi, blocking its exit, and Bernie MacDonald/Donnie Jenks walking toward them with a long rifle held casually by his side.

Chapter 20

T
he day after seeing Liana at Palm’s Lounge, George woke at just past dawn. Liana was coming at noon, and he wondered if he could wait that long to see her.

After showering and getting dressed, he walked to Shoney’s and got a large coffee and a Danish to go. He also bought a fresh pack of cigarettes. Liana wasn’t due at the motel for another five hours, but George wasn’t going to take any chances on missing her. He pulled open the shades in his room and cracked the door. He drank the coffee and ate half the Danish, then peeled the cellophane off the Camel Lights. When noon came and went, he wondered if he should go to the Emporium, borrow the Buick he had come to think of as his own, and swing by Liana’s father’s house. By one in the afternoon, George was in a full-blown panic, pacing the motel room, and almost halfway through his pack of Camels. He tried the phone number at the father’s house, and there was no answer.

He decided to get the car, but as he stepped out into the warm, overcast day a dark gray Crown Victoria slid into the parking lot. George recognized Detective Chalfant behind the wheel.

Chalfant parked, turned the engine off, and stepped out onto the pavement. He was alone. “George, do you have a moment?”

They went back into the motel room, where the air was thick with the smell of cigarettes and unwashed clothes. George perched on the edge of the unmade bed, while Chalfant sat on the room’s one chair. He smoothed out his trousers, then picked something off his knee. “Cat hair,” he said and smiled toward George. “I’d like to ask a few questions, and then I have a favor to ask. Do you have a minute? It looked like you were going somewhere?”

“I was going to see if I could get a car from next door. Drive around maybe.”

“I don’t suppose you were planning on returning to Chinkapin, going back to Eighth Street, seeing if you could find Liana?”

George said nothing.

“That’s okay,” Chalfant said after a moment. “You don’t need to tell me what we already know. I should be thanking you. You did our legwork for us, even though I like to think we’d have gotten there ourselves. Officer Wilson followed you from the station yesterday to Chinkapin. He called in the address that you were at, and we got the name Decter. The yearbook did the rest. I need to ask: Have you made contact with Liana? Have you seen her?”

George hesitated, thinking hard about how much to tell. “I’ve spoken with her. She called me here. We were supposed to meet today at noon.”

“Has she called today?”

“No. Just yesterday. She’s scared. She knows that people found out about the switch with Audrey Beck.”

Chalfant breathed in through his nose. “George, I’m sorry to have to tell you that we have a warrant out for her arrest. If you have any information on her whereabouts—”

“What’s the warrant for? I know she lied about who she was, but that’s more of a school issue, don’t you think?”

“It’s not for that. You’re right. That is hardly a police matter. The warrant is for suspicion of murder. We don’t believe that Audrey Beck committed suicide. There’s compelling evidence that someone else was in the car with her in the garage on the night that she died.”

“It wasn’t Liana. I spoke with her about that. She was with her earlier that night, at a bar, but they left separately.” George realized that he was speaking rapidly, his voice rising in pitch.

“George, relax. If you’re right about that, and I hope that you are, then finding Liana will make it that much easier to clear up. There’s no evidence, specifically, that Liana was in the car with Audrey in the garage, but there was someone else besides Audrey in that car. We know that much. We also know that Liana and Audrey drove to Palm’s Lounge together, so it makes sense that they left together.”

“How do you know they drove there together?”

“Audrey’s brother, Billy, saw them leave. He identified Liana by the yearbook photograph that we have. George, you can help me out here. If you are so convinced that Liana’s innocent, and I’m sure you’re right about that, then the best thing for her to do is to turn herself in, clear this mess up.”

“You looked for her at her father’s house?”

Chalfant’s eyes shifted a little, following a black fly that was buzzing at the windowpane. “She hasn’t been back to that house since early yesterday evening. We have reason to believe she’s fled. Now, if you have any information on her whereabouts, or where you think she might be going, then you’re going to need to tell us that information. Otherwise, you’ll be aiding and abetting. Do you understand that?”

“I have no idea where she would go, or why she would suddenly take off.”

“She didn’t tell you anything when you spoke with her? She didn’t mention a person or a place she might go to?”

“No. Like I said, she was supposed to be coming here at noon to see me.”

“I believe you, George. I believe that’s what you think. But we’re pretty sure that she’s no longer in the area.”

“Why would she do that?”

George watched Chalfant’s eyes shift again, just a little. He was pretty sure that Chalfant had not lied to him before. Why did it seem he was lying to him now? “Is she okay? Does this have anything to do with Dale?” George asked.

Chalfant looked up. “What can you tell me about Dale Ryan?”

“Not much. I didn’t even know that was his last name. He was at the house in Chinkapin yesterday.”

“Okay, George. I am going to tell you what’s going to happen. I need you to come to the station with me and answer some questions. Just what we’ve been talking about here. Nothing to worry about. You aren’t in any trouble. Then I’m going to need you to pack your things and head back up to college. Liana isn’t coming back here, but there is a chance that she will be heading toward Connecticut. You need to be there in case she makes contact. And you need to let me know as soon as that happens. Can you do that for me?”

Listening to the detective talk, George began to feel a sense of comfort and safety that he hadn’t felt in days. Chalfant was an adult, and he was telling George what to do. The decision was out of his hands. And suddenly he wanted to be back at Mather with an almost painful intensity. It wasn’t just that Liana might show up there looking for him. It was that Mather, even without Liana, felt like his home. George could feel the tightened muscles in his back and neck relax. “Okay,” he said to Chalfant and stood.

Together they went once again to the Sweetgum police station.

And afterward, George returned to college to wait for Liana Decter.