The Timer Game (15 page)

It had turned out exactly as she’d feared, which had given her the time to find a pink princess costume at Costco and hand-stitch bunches of satin, puffs of organza, streamers of ribbons, onto every available surface. She was smart enough to have removed the tags, and if Katie had figured it out, she never said. Her eyes had glowed when she’d slipped it on.

“Am I pretty?” she’d asked.

“Way past,” Grace had answered. “You’re the most beautiful birthday princess anybody has ever seen.”

Katie had smiled back and Grace had thought that she’d sew a hundred costumes to see that smile again.

A small piece of folded paper winked from under an upturned rock. Katie pounced, her hair an electric cloud under her crown. “Got it!”

Grace stopped the timer and reset it. “Ninety seconds on the clock, guys.” She set the timer down on the table next to the clown package and trotted back inside.

The cake was shaped like a pumpkin, deflated on one side where it had fallen in the oven. She yanked open cabinets, looking for candles. Her life was chopped into the smallest, bite-sized pieces. Her memory was jumbled, too, as if all those bits had been heaved into the nearest box, willy-nilly, tossed like a salad mixer and thrust under the bed. She was sure she had candles. At least she thought she did. Maybe that was an old birthday.

“Candles?” Marcie pulled a pack out of her pocket and Grace yelped her thanks. They worked silently, counting out five candles and one for luck.

Grace marched the cake through the sliding glass door and set it on the picnic table. Jeanne’s gravelly voice was reading the clue out loud for Katie’s team:

“It used to have red little bulbs that we ate

We washed them and sliced them and got out a plate

But now it is fall and the message is clear:

Find the vine that is dying; you’ll find a clue here.”

“Radishes,” Benjy said. He lifted the eye patch on his pirate costume.

He was Marcie and Frank’s boy, a year older than the girls. His sister was in Katie’s class. He’d be tall like his mother, with shots at basketball scholarships, which was a lucky thing, considering what he had in the brains department.

Katie shook her head and bolted with her team around the side of the house toward a graveyard of tomatoes. They returned in a flash, Benjy gripping a desiccated tomato vine while his sister, Elsa, dressed as a cat, waved the clue.

“Reset it! Reset it!”

Grace reset the timer as Jeanne read the clue out loud:

“Congratulations! You’ve come to the end!

Gold glinting bounty to share with a friend!

It’s tucked in a corner but still is in view

Climb up to the plate. It’s waiting for you!”

“A plate, a plate. Something in the kitchen?” Amanda, a sweet-faced Raggedy Ann, looked at Katie.

“Or a baseball diamond,” Benjy offered. “You have one of those here?”

Katie shook her head, thinking, and Grace could see the gears shifting as she coolly evaluated the backyard.
Climb up to the plate.

“Up there.” Katie pointed into the dim cavern of the tree house that sat in a notch of a pepper tree. “It’s got to be something to eat and it’s on a plate, I bet. Come on, Amanda, I’ll help you up. You want to be first?”

Amanda beamed and Grace felt a small glow of parental pride that her daughter was playing nice. Amanda lifted her striped skirt, gripped the bottom wooden slat, and one by one they climbed up the tree, where chocolate coins glinted in shadow.

Katie leaned over the edge, holding on to her crown, and grinned upside down before settling next to her friends. Empty gold wrappers rained down from the tree house.

“Sorry to interrupt, Grace.” Jeanne stood tensely. “But you need to see this. Alone.”

Jeanne had taken it off the picnic table to make room for the cake, only the wrapping paper felt damp. She went into the kitchen and put it into the sink.

A wise choice, considering the blood.

It was a doll, chest split. Blood welled in the cavity, sloshed over the side, oozing from the doll’s small marble eyes, spilling out of its dainty mouth, staining its tiny porcelain teeth, and even without touching it, Grace could see it came from flesh stuffed into the cavity.

A heart.

Had to be pig, she told herself. Part of one.

Twine bound the doll’s wrists over the bloody hole, bending the arm sockets so that blood poured out the armholes onto the wrapping paper. A small slip of paper curled next to one wrist, attached with a paper clip and rubber band. Grace used the tine of a fork to unfold it. It was handwritten in ink, a jaunty jingle:

She’s five years old! And soon you’ll see

The game she gets to play with me!

All Hallows’ Eve you’ll play a part.

Ere midnight tolls, I cut your heart.

Chapter 16

Saturday, 1:15 p.m.

“Katie, how you doing in there?” Grace couldn’t keep the anxiety out of her voice as she waited outside the bathroom door.

“Fine. You don’t have to wait for me.”

Grace checked her watch. “It’s getting late, honey. I want to get on the road.”

“Why are we leaving again?”

“It’s an adventure, that’s all.”

“But where are we going to go trick-or-treating?”

“I bet the hotel has something nice.”

“Mommy, I want to be
here
tomorrow on Halloween.”

“I know, honey, but this is going to be great, too. Different, that’s all, but still great.”

“I want to still wear my costume.”

“You mean in the car? Okay.”

She’d agree to anything if it got Katie moving.

After opening the package, Grace had called her crime lab boss and insisted he stop by after the party. Frank had herded Katie and his two kids into the backyard to pick up trash. Jeanne supervised from a lawn chair while Marcie waited inside with Grace. Their boss, Sid Felcher, took one look at the doll, the note, the paper, and sniffed.

“Grace, you really need counseling,” he said finally.

Grace shot Marcie a look of disbelief. Marcie shook her head as if to clear it of a slight ringing noise.

“Are you insinuating that Grace planted this doll? Is that what you’re saying?”

Sid studied his fingernails as if noticing for the first time he bit them. He became aware they were watching and he slid his hands into the pockets of his high-rise pants. He was wearing a shirt with koala bears on it, and the round, chubby faces accentuated his own.

“I’m not suggesting anything,” he said in a bored voice, “I just think—”

“But you’re not,” Grace snapped. “That’s exactly your problem, Sid, the thinking part.”

Marcie shot out her hand and gently squeezed Grace’s arm. “I’ll take them in and analyze them.”

“You have plenty to do.” Sid’s finger stole to his mouth and he gnawed.

“I’ll do it on my own time,” Marcie said.

“With government supplies?” He put his hand in his pocket again.

“I’ll pay for it.”

Sid breathed through his nose, his gaze flicking from one to the other. “Fine,” he said abruptly. “But I’m serious, Grace, if you think this little stunt—”

“Stunt?”

“—is going to make anybody forget you shot an emotionally fragile kid—”

Grace pushed him toward the door. “Get out of here. Out. I mean it. Now.”

Marcie stared stone-faced at the door as it closed on Sid. “I’ll do it today. I’ll have Frank drive me home and I’ll pick up my car and go in.”

“Thanks.” Grace smashed her fist into the door and leaned her forehead against it.

That was less than an hour ago. Grace had called all Warren’s numbers but couldn’t reach him. Marcie and Frank had pleaded with Grace to come with Katie to their house, and Jeanne had made the same offer, but Grace didn’t want to involve her friends in whatever darkness had come for her.

She only knew she couldn’t spend the night at home. She ran through a list of possibles, ruling out places that were far away or too remote, and deciding finally to treat her daughter to an overnight stay at a fancy hotel in Laguna Beach overlooking the water, two hours away and surrounded by the luxury of capable hotel security and locked doors.

Grace heard the front door open and she moved to the head of the stairs and looked down. Jeanne came into view. “I’ve got both suitcases in your car and Helix loaded into mine.”

“She’s dawdling.” Grace glanced back at the closed door.

“You want me to gas up your car? One less stop.”

“That would be great, thanks. Take my purse, it’s on the sofa. Try my Visa. I don’t think that one’s maxed.”

“I’ll take Helix along. Get him used to riding shotgun with me.”

Grace nodded her thanks and took up her post again at the bathroom door. Far off, she heard the sound of her car start and pull out of the driveway. She rapped softly on the door.

“You okay?”

“I’m drinking lemonade,” Katie said through the door. “Can I take my bike?” It was Grace’s big present to her this year, a Barbie bike with training wheels, exactly what Katie had wanted. Grace hesitated.

“Please, Mommy?”

“Sure.”

“And the other stuff? All the new stuff I just got? The Pretty Ponys and the beads and—”

“Sure, okay. I’ll get everything together. Just push it along in there, honey, okay?”

Grace went downstairs past the wall of photos on the stairwell. Their lives were tracked in frozen images, everything she held dear. Katie swinging a bat. Katie, a chubby three-year-old ballerina in a pink tulle tutu, looking faintly like a joyous hippo in
Fantasia
. The bike was on the back patio, next to the barbecue grill. The party seemed a lifetime ago.

Grace wheeled it inside, relocking the sliding glass door. The presents had been stacked on the sofa in the family room and Grace made several trips through the house, depositing them at the front door in the darkened living room. The blinds were shut on the leaded windows flanking the window seat, bathing the room in a gloomy stillness. She wheeled the bike through the house and stood it up next to the presents.

There had been silence upstairs, not even a toilet flushing, and Grace felt a small flick of unease dart up her spine.

“Katie?” No answer. Grace moved to the stairs and called up. “Katie?”

She climbed the first stair, listening. Silence.

“Katie Marie. This isn’t a good time to play a game. You need to answer me.”

Still the silence.

“Katie?” She gripped the newel post. Adrenaline surged through her body. She started climbing, taking the stairs two at a time, her heart banging. The bathroom door was locked.

She leaned on the door and pounded, twisting the knob. “Honey?”

Fear tightened in a band across her chest and she ran into her daughter’s room; there was another access to the bathroom that way.

“Katie!” Grace slammed into the door, trying to open it and failing. She rammed harder and felt the old lock give way, bursting into the small bright bathroom.

She wasn’t there.

The bathroom had white tiles and an ornate sink. The toilet paper had unrolled slightly, the end on the tiles, fluttering lazily. The seat was up. Katie’s hairbrush lay on the counter, along with a glass that had held the lemonade.

She couldn’t breathe. She literally couldn’t take a breath. The window was open.

The window looked out over the service alley separating Grace’s house from the osteopath’s next door. That side of his house contained no windows, only skylights.

A ladder leaned under the bathroom window, the open bathroom window. In the hedge separating her house from the doctor’s, Grace saw a bright slash of pink tulle.

Grace had sewn that tulle onto the sleeves of Katie’s costume not more than two days before. Next to the tulle was a footprint. It was large, heavy, a man’s print.

Fear shot up her body and she gripped the side of the sink to keep herself from falling. She leaned out the window and screamed her daughter’s name. Silence.

Somebody had taken her daughter out the bathroom window, down the ladder in a split second. And gone where?

Grace whirled and ran. Boats in back. Or the street in front.

One or the other.

She hadn’t heard a car start up in front. So the back.

She ran down the hall into her bedroom and tore back the blinds, unlocking the sliding glass door and racing onto the balcony that looked down over the boats.

A family was rowing by in a dinghy, the father good-naturedly paddling as his two daughters trailed their fingers through the water. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“Katie!” she cried shrilly, and the family glanced up, puzzled. “Have you seen a little girl? A five-year-old girl in a princess costume? Pink. She was just…”

The father shook his head, bewildered, and Grace retreated, racing down the hall, pelting down the stairs, flinging open the front door, running into the street, looking wildly back and forth. She was panting, taking great deep gulps of air, not able to catch her breath.

A quiet, peaceful day. Nobody out.

She ran into the house again, up the stairs, checking, rechecking, blindly ripping back curtains in Katie’s room, her face numb, turning, hoping to see her, find her. The quilt lay bunched on her bed.

I’m back,” Jeanne called from the front door.

“Jeanne, was there anybody outside? Anybody driving by when you came back?”

“What’s going on?”

“Anybody driving anything?”

“Grace?” Jeanne climbed the stairs.

“She’s gone, Jeanne. Somebody took her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know what to do. Call the police. I have to call the police.”

“Oh, my God.” Jeanne pointed toward Katie’s bed. The quilt bunched at an awkward angle and Grace ripped it back.

A single sheet of paper lay spiked to the bedsheet.

It was a real spike. It pierced the sheet and impaled the thin sheet of paper, holding a typewritten message.

Grace knew then. The Spikeman and whoever had taken Katie were the same. The paths converged here, in a peppy jingle pierced by a spike.