Poe (23 page)

Jennifer and Mike are so engrossed adjusting the dish that neither notices as I slip away with my hands deep in my jacket pockets, making off with the weighty camera. The air’s so cold that my breath forms a mist in front of me, but strangely I’m not cold at all—I feel distant from reality, like I’m having some kind of lucid dream. I follow the footprints, making my way up the sidewalk past a small group of worried onlookers—none under sixty. I glance at the alley behind the motel and see two local cops standing by the back door. I keep walking.

But when I get to the street corner, the prints stop abruptly, like whoever made them melted into thin air. A frigid gust of wind pushes across the deserted street, and I catch a slight movement to my right—a blue scrap of cloth that’s stuck in a frozen pile of debris. I walk over to it, reach down, and pull it free.

A navy-blue baseball cap. White letters on the front: FBI.

Hot damn,
that
can’t be random.

“Not bad, Poe,” I whisper. “Not bad at all.”

I put the hat on my head and then casually stroll back to the alley behind the old motel. The local cops take one look at the hat and the
camera and say nothing as I brusquely push past them, opening the door with ease. The lock, I notice, has been crudely broken.

Inside, deep voices echo down the fire escape stairs.

“What’s the score?”

“Fuck if I know.”

A haze of cigarette smoke drifts past the one small window, so dirty it lets in only a few dim rays of winter sunlight. I climb the stairs to the second floor, then the third, where two more cops lean against the unpainted cement block wall. I nod at them, they nod in return, and then I open the heavy metal door.

The hallway is wallpapered with a spidery, shiny metallic print, like someone took a sledgehammer to a glass windshield. The carpet is a dirty, well-trod brown. A couple of interested elderly neighbors wearing bathrobes stand in their doorways, their silver hair wrapped in identical pink plastic curlers, excitedly shocked.

“She
never
locked her door.”

“Never.”

As if Mrs. Chesterfield somehow brought this on herself. It’s a conversation that’s familiar. At my parents’ funeral there was much discussion about their decision to buy a convertible, as if the karma of owning a sports car did them in.

I actually breeze into the crime scene. The first room is packed with police officers, busy field technicians wearing latex gloves and men in dark suits with long black coats. And this room has to be the saddest I’ve ever seen in my life. It has a dusty, gray quality, as if the windows haven’t been opened in decades, and it smells of wet dog. All the furniture is obviously cheap motel décor circa 1950. The thin, olive-green sofa sags in the middle, the chrome-accented linoleum table in the kitchen is rusting, and the amber glass lamps are adorned with beige, spidery shades, continuing the theme from the wallpaper in the hall. There were some attempts, primarily with knitted lace, to cover the worn spots on the chairs, and a crystal vase is filled with blue marbles and red plastic roses.

The carpeting is the same dark brown from the hallway. And dead center in the room is a darker stain. Blood.

One of the men in dark suits glances over; his blond hair is military short—obviously FBI. I raise my camera and take a picture of the bloodstained carpet. He’s about to come over and say something when his cell phone rings, so I dart into the adjacent bedroom.

A pink polyester bedspread covers the single twin bed. Two unrolled stockings are strewn on the floor, looking like discarded snakeskins, but other than that the room is shabby but impeccably neat. It doesn’t look like anyone
lived
here, certainly not for fifteen years, as Alice had done, week to week. She could have easily packed all of her personal belongings into a single suitcase and been gone in thirty minutes. But maybe that was the point.

A cop pokes his head in, so I take another picture, this time of the stockings on the floor. And then something catches my eye—a lone photo in a cheap brass frame leaning against another amber lamp. I can tell that it’s old, black and white. I slowly walk over and pick it up.

Aspinwall, of course.

A party, probably in the forties, judging by the hairstyles. Everyone is wearing a costume and sitting around a long rectangular table covered with elegant white linen. In the center is Amelia Aspinwall. (She would never be anywhere but the center.) She wears a tight-fitting sequined gown, and her face is covered with a peacock Mardi Gras mask; its feathers fan out and partly obscure Captain Aspinwall, who’s dressed as a pirate, with a real parrot on his left shoulder. Sitting next to Amelia is the needy platinum blond from my dream, dressed like Little Bo Peep, with round circles of rouge on her cheeks and a dainty, painted mouth. In her right hand is a white staff and in her left she cradles a lamb that looks like it would rather be anywhere else. Next are two women wearing black wigs and dressed as geisha, their identical faces blanched white and mirroring the same
solemn expression. There’s a man dressed as a Roman soldier, and another dressed as the Tin Man.

But it’s the woman at the far left who catches my attention, partly because she seems more aloof, more regal than the others, but also because she seems strangely out of place. Her costume consists of a plain black mask and a pair of demon horns, as if she hadn’t thought through her outfit or had been handed some props at the last minute. There’s a visible edgy space between her and a man dressed as Zorro on her right. He leans toward her; she leans away. She’s also the only one who isn’t smiling.

I hear a deep voice in the kitchen say, “I thought he was with you.”

Quickly, I slip open the back of the glass frame, pop out the photograph, turn it over. A shaky scrawl in pencil.

Halloween, 1940. Right before the fire. Me as Little Bo Beep. Mrs. Aspinwall & Captain A., center, Blaine as Zorro, Edgar, the Tin Man, Sidney pretending to be a Roman. Fitzgeralds as geisha, and K.G., the psychic
.

I pull out my notebook, writing down all the names as quickly as possible, but just as I write the initials “K.G.” I hear a shout.

“Hey you! Turn around, turn around! On your knees, on your knees!”

Two things happen next.

One, the lights flicker, then go out, which is interesting.

Two, I hear but don’t see the click of a gun’s safety being released.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: DANIEL’S ESCAPE

J
ail is not a good place to be. There are no snacks in jail and people, police people, feel perfectly free to drink coffee in front of me without offering me a single cup. And it smells like really,
really
good coffee; I have a feeling the good people protecting and serving know their Colombian from their French roast. Plus a jail cell smells like piss and lead paint. There is a single thin and rancid mattress in my cell, which is so disgusting I wouldn’t even think about sitting on it unless I was wearing a hazmat suit, which I’m sadly not. So instead I sit on the concrete floor, pressing my head against the cool wall, trying not to imagine all the ways that Daniel might have killed Lisa while I was out playing crappy detective. The FBI weren’t too impressed with my theory that Daniel is behind the murders; apparently, he doesn’t match their profile for the spleen-eating serial killer, but judging from their hard stares and even harder line of questions—“Would you call yourself a loner?” “Have you ever impersonated an officer before?”—I might.

They did give me my one phone call—on a device called a “pay phone”—and even the
phone
smelled like piss; amazing considering it was made of plastic and stainless steel. But then who to call? It’s not like I’ve bothered to memorize anyone’s phone number when they’re all stored in my cell phone, which the police unfortunately confiscated—as if I would be able to disassemble it and use the parts to pick the lock of New Goshen’s city jail,
MacGyver
style. Lucky for me, Lisa answered the phone for Crosslands, a number that was readily
available in the battered yellow pages hanging from the pay phone, and she accepted the collect call.

But I don’t feel particularly lucky when I see her expression as the guard walks her down the hallway. Furious doesn’t even begin to describe it.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a joint like this?” I say doing my best Bogart impression, which is really not all that good, I admit.

She inhales
deeply
and glares. Even the guard looks a little leery, as if he’s half expecting her to throw a punch—I bet he has more than a few stories. He keeps one eye on her as he opens the cell door, which whines in protest.

Lisa opens her mouth, as if she’s about to say something—something which I, in all likelihood, don’t want to hear—but then anything would be better than this frigid silence. She visibly struggles to find the words, then gives up and turns on her heel to leave.

Shit, I haven’t told her about Daniel. “Lisa, wait…”

She ignores me completely, briskly walking back down the hall. I start after her, but the guard grabs my shirt.

“Gotta sign you out first.”

“
Lisa
!”

The door slams shut behind her.

“Damn,” says the guard. “It might be safer for you to stay here.”

“You don’t
understand
—” I say desperately.

“She likes you enough,” says the guard, giving me a friendly thump on the shoulder. “They don’t get mad if they don’t like you.”

There’s an agonizing wait in line—then the printer is out of ink, then they realize they’ve given me the wrong form and must call upstairs to get the right one. I plead with a cop to send a car to check on Lisa, that her brother is dangerous, schizophrenic—at
least
let me make one phone call—but he just ignores me until I annoy him to the point where he tells me to shut up or I’ll be arrested again for disorderly conduct. A teenager accompanied by his harried mother
walks sullenly by. I saw him being booked earlier; there was a party, underage drinking.

“If your father was here,” she says.

“Well he’s not,” he replies bitterly.

Something about the teenage angst resonates with me, or maybe it’s just the fact that he still has a mother to care. And without Lisa, who really gives a shit these days about Dimitri Petrov, errant obituary writer and college dropout? No one. Why the
hell
didn’t I pick up Lisa from work and keep her safe when I had the chance? What was I
thinking
?

Finally after what seems like an eternity, my name is called—scratch of pen on paper—and they hand over a manila envelope with my phone, watch, notebook, keys, and wallet. The ring never left my hand, since no one could pry it off my finger. My cell phone is, of course, dead.

“We’re holding the camera as evidence…” they start to say, but already I’m through the glass doors, running down icy steps.

The jail is only two blocks from The Hurry Back Inn, where I left my car. The sky is dark as I sprint through the deserted streets, past empty storefronts, the cold air pumping through my lungs. It’s like an urban version of my dream in the snowy wood; I can almost feel Daniel watching me. Laughing.

Race you
.

Oh God oh God, I hope I’m not too late.

Every single blazing light inside the farmhouse is on, casting a warm radiant circle in the lonely field of desolate snow, and I catch a glimpse of Amelia through the curtains, happily drawing. Life—signs of life. I pull my Mustang into the frozen driveway, hydroplaning on a new layer of thin snow and knocking over a fence post before the car comes to a stop.

I take a breath and lean my throbbing head against the front wheel for a moment. I hadn’t realized my heart could beat so fast without going into arrest. I sit up, run my hand through my hair so Elizabeth doesn’t think she’s got a complete lunatic on her front porch, and get out of the car.

What’s immediately striking is the ethereal and nearly complete silence; I can hear my boots crunch the icy snow beneath my feet, a lonely sound that seems to echo across the field and into the frigid night sky. Not a single dog barks, even the chickens are eerily silent, and there is no wind to speak of—the trees stand like quiet sentinels. Like the calm before the storm.

Just as I put my foot on the porch step a distant loud crack breaks the silence, like a tree limb has fallen in the woods, something that happens when the ice gets thick and heavy. But we haven’t had freezing rain for weeks.

Little Amelia is waiting for me just on the other side of the door. “Dimitri’s here! He’s here! He’s here!” She pops open the door and immediately rushes for my legs, hugging them tightly, and almost causing me to tip over. Buddy grunts from the entry and gets to his feet, his stumpy tail wagging.

“How’s your point of view coming?”

She gives a heavy sigh. “Nana says I’m still too literal. What does literal mean?”

Before I can answer, Elizabeth steps into the entry from the back kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Tonight she looks her age; there are dark, puffy circles under her eyes and her skin is sallow. “I’m actually cooking spaghetti tonight. It could be dangerous.”