Twice Dead (44 page)

Sam. What was she going to do? There was something very wrong, triggered, she supposed, by Krimakov's kidnapping of him. She heard Tyler walking back toward the kitchen. She had to clear this up, quickly and cleanly. She had to think what she could do to help Sam.

She'd gotten the name of a really good child psychologist in Bangor from Sherlock. She would start there.

But she didn't have a chance to start anything because Tyler said from the doorway, “I love you, Becca.”

THIRTY-TWO

“No, Tyler, no.”

Tyler smiled at her, an intimate smile that chilled her to the bone. “I've loved you from that first time I saw you in Hadley's freshman dorm at Dartmouth. You were looking lost, wondering where to find a bathroom.”

She smiled at that, no recollection at all of that meeting. “You didn't love me, Tyler. You dated lots of girls in college. You married Sam's mother, Ann. You loved her.”

He came into the kitchen and sat down across from her. “Sure I loved her for a while, but she left me, Becca. She left me and she didn't plan to come back. She was even going to take Sam, but I didn't let her.”

What was he talking about? Of course things couldn't have been smooth between them, since Ann had ended up leaving him. They'd faced off about it? There'd been a confrontation? But that didn't concern her now. She said, “I'm really sorry if you've gotten the wrong idea, Tyler. Please believe me. I am your friend and I hope I always will be. I would like to see Sam grow up.”

“Since you're going to be his mother, of course you'll see him grow up. You'll make him well again, Becca. He's been silent and withdrawn ever since his mother left.”

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure, if you're going to make some.” He watched her measure the coffee into the machine, then pour in the water. He watched her press the switch, watched it turn red.

“Tell me about Ann,” she said, wanting him to remember the woman he'd loved, distract him from her. Why had Ann left him? Had there been another man? Why hadn't she taken Sam with her? So what if Tyler had tried to fight for custody? Sam was still her child, not his. But she had run away without him.

Tyler was still watching the coffeemaker. She watched him breathe in the aroma. Finally, he said, “She was beautiful. She'd been married to a guy who left her the minute he found out she was pregnant. We hooked up kind of by accident. She couldn't get the gasoline cap off her car. I helped her. Then we went to Pollyanna's Restaurant.” He shrugged. “We got married a couple months later.”

“What happened?”

He said nothing for a very long time. “The coffee's ready.”

She poured each of them a cup.

He took a drink, then shrugged. “She was happy and then she wasn't. She left. Nothing more, Becca. Listen, I swear I'll make you happy. You won't ever want to leave. We can have more kids, yours and mine. Sam was Ann's kid anyway.”

“I'm going to marry Adam.”

He threw the coffee at her. He roared to his feet, sending the wooden chair crashing against the wall, and shouted, “No, you're not! You're mine, do you hear me? You're mine, you bitch!”

The coffee wasn't scalding anymore, but it hurt, splashing on her neck, on the front of her shirt, soaking through to her skin.

He leapt toward her, his hands out.

“No, Tyler.” She ran, but he was blocking any escape out the back door. There was no place to go except down to the basement. But she'd be trapped down there. No, wait, there was another small entry on the far side of the basement where long-ago Marleys had had their winter cords of wood dumped. She saw it all in a flash, and ran to the basement door, jerked it open, then pulled it closed behind her. She locked it, flipped on the light, saw the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling by a thin wire, even as she heard him pulling on the knob on the other side, yelling, calling her horrible names, telling her that he would get her, that she wouldn't leave him, not ever.

She ran down the wooden stairs. She looked at the wall where she'd found Sam propped up, bound and gagged, then at the far wall that still gaped open from when the skeleton had fallen out of it after that storm.

She heard the basement door splinter. Then he was on the stairs. She pulled and jerked at the rusted latch that held the small trapdoor down. It was about chest high.
Move, move,
but she was shrieking it in her mind, not out loud. What was going on with him? It had happened so quickly. He had snapped, turned into a wild man, a crazy man.

She heard his feet clattering to the bottom steps. The latch wouldn't give. She was trapped. She turned to see him running across the concrete floor. He came to a stop. He was panting. He smiled at her.

“I nailed that trapdoor shut last week. It was dangerous. I didn't think we should take the chance that a kid could open it and fall through. Maybe hurt himself. Maybe even kill himself.”

“Tyler,” she said.
Be calm, be calm.
“What's going on here? Why are you acting like this? Why this rage? At me? Why?”

He said, all calm and serious, and he actually waved his finger at her, like a lecturing teacher, “You're like the others, Becca. I hoped you would be different, I would have wagered everything that you were different, that you weren't like Ann, that faithless bitch who wanted to leave me, wanted to take Sam and go far away from me.”

“Why did she want to leave you, Tyler?”

He shrugged. “She thought I was smothering her, but that was in her mind, of course. I loved her, wanted to make her and Sam happy, but she started pulling back. She didn't need all those other friends of hers, they just wasted her time, took her away from me. Then she told me that night that she had to leave me, that she couldn't stand it anymore.”

“Stand what?”

“I don't know. I tried to give her everything she wanted, both her and Sam. I just wanted her for myself, wanted her to commit herself only to me, and all I asked was that she stay close to me, that she look to me for everything. And she did for a while, and then she didn't want to anymore.”

“She left?”

In that instant, Becca knew that Ann McBride hadn't gone anywhere. She was still here in Riptide.

“Where did you bury her, Tyler?”

“In Jacob Marley's backyard, right under that old elm tree that was around when World War One began. I dug her deep so no animals would dig her up. I even gave her a nice service. She didn't deserve anything, but I gave her all the religious trappings, the sweet and hopeful words. After all, she was my wife.” He laughed, remembering now and said with a smirk, “Old Jacob had been dead by then nearly three years so I didn't worry about getting rid of him that time.”

He started laughing then. “I killed that ridiculous old dog of his—Miranda—a long time ago. The bitch didn't like me, always growled when I came near. The old man never knew, never.”

She remembered the sheriff telling her how much Jacob Marley had loved that dog, how she'd just up and died one day. Her heart was pounding, slowly, painfully. Somehow she had to reach him. She had to try. “Listen to me, Tyler. I didn't betray you. I would never betray you. I came here to Riptide because of what you'd told me about it. I was here to hide out. This was sanctuary for me. You helped me, so very much. You don't know how much I appreciate that.” Were his eyes calmer now? Maybe, but he frowned and she tried to still her fear, said quickly, “That madman was trying to kill both me and my father. The last thing I wanted to think about was falling in love with anyone. I never meant for you to believe there was more to it than friendship.”

His eyes were darker now, a barely leashed wildness that scared her to her soul. He said, his voice sarcastic, “You didn't want to fall in love, Becca? Then why are you marrying Carruthers?”

For a moment, her brain refused to work. He was right. She had to think, she had to do something. She was alone in the basement with a man who wasn't sane, a man who was somehow twisted, a man who had murdered his wife and buried her in Jacob Marley's backyard. Sheriff Gaffney had been certain that Tyler had murdered his wife. Everyone believed that the skeleton that fell out of the basement wall had been Ann McBride. But it wasn't.

She couldn't bear it, just couldn't. She had to know, all of it. “Tyler, the girl in the wall. Was it Melissa Katzen?”

He said, his voice indifferent, bored, “Yes, of course it was.”

“But she was young, not more than eighteen when someone killed her. That was more than twelve years ago. Did you kill her, Tyler?”

He shrugged. “Another faithless bitch, little Melissa. Everyone thought she was so sweet, so giving, so yielding. And she was with me, at first. I gave her attention, small presents—lots of them, all clever, imaginative. I told her how pretty she was and she soaked it up until one day she turned down my latest gift to her. It was a Barbie, all dressed to travel, ready to elope.

“She didn't want to tell anyone about us, and that was okay by me. I was going to laugh my head off when we came back married. She called me that night, asked me to meet her. She gave me back the Barbie, then told me she didn't want to run away with me after all. She whined that she was too young, that her parents would be hurt if she ran off with me. I told her that she had to marry me, that no one else would, that I was the only one who really loved her.” He shook his head then, frowning at something he was remembering, at what he was seeing. He said slowly, “She became afraid of me. She tried to get away from me, but I caught her.”

She could see him with Melissa in her Calvin Klein white jeans, the cute little pink tank top, see him, hear him trying to convince her, then screaming at her, then killing her. She knew she had to keep him talking. She couldn't let him stop now. When he stopped talking, he would kill her. She didn't want to die. She remembered then that Sheriff Gaffney was coming over, at least he'd told her he was. Sometime during the evening. It was evening, right in the middle of evening. Where was he? What if he left when no one answered the door? She was so afraid, she stuttered. “B-but Jacob Marley was here, wasn't he?”

“True enough.” He shrugged. “I put her in the shed out back, and then the next day, I got Jacob Marley out of the house with a phone call. He had a very old sister who lived in Bangor. I called and told him she was dying and asking for him, begging him to come to her. The old jerk left and I dug out the wall and put Melissa behind it. Then I bricked it back up. My dad was in construction before he fell off a building and he taught me a whole lot. I knew all about bricklaying. Then I left. You want to know something funny? Jacob Marley's ancient sister died the very day he showed up at the old folks' home in Bangor. He never even realized that it had been a fake call.”

“Tyler, why did you bury Melissa in the basement wall? Why Jacob Marley's house?”

He laughed, and that laugh chilled her. “I was thinking maybe I'd call in an anonymous tip, tell everyone I saw Jacob Marley kill Melissa, then saw him with cement and bricks.”

“But you didn't.”

“No. Maybe I'd left fingerprints somehow on her. I couldn't take the chance.” Then he slashed his hand through the air. His voice lowered, his eyes darkened, became as intense as a preacher's in a revival tent. “I wanted you to marry me, Becca. I would have taken care of you all your life. I would have loved you, protected you, kept you close forever. You could have been Sam's mother. But once you were with me, you wouldn't have spent all that much time with him. Sam would have understood that you were mine first, that he really had no claim on you, not like I did.”

She was cold, so cold her teeth would soon be chattering. This lovely man who'd seemed so kind, so gentle—he was crazy, probably he'd been born crazy.

“Melissa was only eighteen, Tyler. Both of you were too young to run off.”

“No,” he said. “I was ready. I believed she was. She was faithless. She would have left me, just like Ann did.”

How many other women had he believed to be faithless? How many others had he killed, then hidden their bodies? Becca looked around for some sort of weapon, anything, but there was nothing. No, she was wrong. There were about half a dozen bricks stacked against the gaping open wall, about six feet away from her.

She took a step sideways.

He said thoughtfully now, “I think I'll bury you close to Ann. Out under that elm tree. But you don't deserve a nice service, Becca, not like the one I did for Ann. She was Sam's mother, after all.”

“I don't want to be buried there,” she said and took another step. “I don't want to die, Tyler. I haven't done anything to you. I came here to be safe, but I wasn't ever safe, was I? It was all an illusion. You were just waiting, waiting for another woman to love, to possess, to imprison so she'd want out and then you could kill her, do it all over again and again. You need help, Tyler. Let me call someone.” She took another step toward the bricks.

He began walking toward her. “I would rather have held you close, Becca. If only—”

There was the sound of a car pulling up outside.

“The sheriff's here,” Becca said quickly. “Listen. It's over, Tyler. The sheriff won't let you hurt me now.” She took another quick step to the side. Three feet, just another three feet. Tyler looked up and frowned when he heard a car door slam. He cursed even as he ran toward her, his hands outstretched, his fingers curved inward.

Becca leapt toward the pile of bricks, went down on her knees, and grabbed one. He was on her then, his hands around her neck, and she slammed the brick against his shoulder. His fingers tightened, tightened, and his face was blurring above her. She raised the brick again, brought it upward slowly, and he twisted as she heaved it toward him. It struck his face and he howled with agony, and his fingers loosened for just a moment. She gulped in air and struck again. He sent his fist against her head, and she saw blinding flashes of light, felt the pain sear through her head, knew she couldn't hold on. She was losing and she would die because she wasn't strong enough. She tried to raise the brick again but she couldn't.