Bone Orchard (5 page)

Kitty ran her hand along the table, fingers tracing the gouges in the wood. The thick sole of her boot caught on a drainage grate in the floor and she tripped, but the quick reflexes of youth saved her from a fall. She grabbed the edge of the tabletop and regained her balance.

“Dammit!”

She limped in a circle briefly before deciding it hadn’t actually hurt anything but her pride. Her eyes fell back to the grate. It had sparked a thought, and she filed it away like the contents of the binder.

Most of the cupboard drawers were empty, she discovered. All but one, in fact, the largest. It was stubborn, and resisted her repeated attempts to rifle it. But the rattling of its contents was too tempting to abandon, and with one last primal grunt, she managed to yank it open.

It was a cutlery drawer. Inside were chef knives, butcher knives, paring knives, fillet knives, sharpening steels, carving forks and the
pièce de résistance… an evil looking twelve-inch cleaver with a pointed blade. To be precise, it was a lamb splitter, and it brought a smile to Kitty’s red lips.

“Bingo.”

Lazarus flipped the binder pages with his foot, horror mounting with each subsequent turn. Random words and dates were highlighted. Crudely drawn diagrams created senseless data.

The real zinger was the familiar name that kept popping up with alarming frequency throughout. His own.

He turned a page and recoiled at what he saw. A photograph of himself, at the height of his fame in the early two-thousands. His eyes had been blacked out with ink, his face bore the pockmark jabs of repeated attacks with a sharp object, and a single word had been scrawled across his chest, the letters traced over again and again until they had scored through the page like stencils…

“KILLER.”

Lazarus slumped back in his chair. “Oh, dear Lord.”

His sweat had turned cold. He was shivering. And a cold realization washed over him like an arctic wind.

He had absolutely no fucking idea what to do.

The door slammed open and Lazarus nearly shouted out in shock. He sat frozen as Kitty dragged both him and the chair back to their original spot. It wasn’t graceful, but she did it.

“I see you’ve been doing your homework. Good boy.” She patted him on the head as she walked away.

He thrust his foot out and kicked the book, sending it sliding across the floor toward her.

“What is this?”

Ignoring the question, she sauntered back out of the room, returning a moment later with a bundle wrapped in cloth.  There was a loud, metallic clatter as she heaved it onto the table.

“What’s the deal with this basement, anyway? These rooms are crazy!”

“Upstairs, Downstairs.”

“Huh?”

“The servants lived below, the people of the manor, above.”

“That explains the creepy-ass kitchen down here.”

She perched herself on the chair opposite Lazarus.

“I mean, really. It’s like a maze down here or something.”

Lazarus motioned to the binder. “I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know what your book has to do with me.”

Kitty opened to the first page. A photograph of a pretty brunette smiled back.

“Lisa Connors,” she said expectantly. She watched Lazarus for a reaction. He gave none.

“Okay,” he offered back.

She frowned and turned the page. “Jennie Tolliver.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what you want me to say.

Kitty slammed the next page over. This time, a raven-hared beauty. “Susan Miles.”

Lazarus shrugged. “Sorry.”

She leaped from the chair and stung his face with a brutal slap.

“Don’t play dumb!” she screeched, shoving the page at him. “Susan Miles, last seen walking down I-35 outside of Dallas after a fight with her boyfriend.” She turned the page back.

“Jennie Tolliver. Snuck out of her house one night and no one saw her again.”

Kitty continued, certain something would draw the response she clearly expected. Another page, another girl.

“Lisa Connors. Told her friends that she was going to run away and travel the world.”

Sounds like someone else we know,
thought Lazarus, but he bit his tongue. Kitty turned to one of the bizarre diagrams. A nonsensical flowchart. An attempt to impose logic onto the random.

“What’s the common thread, Lazarus?” What links these girls?”

“I don’t know,” he said flatly.

“The were all Black Ryder fans. And your band was playing in every city the night of their disappearance.”

“That makes no sense!” he exploded.

Kitty flipped through the book. “You don’t recognize
any
of these girls?”

“No!”

She turned to one of the final pages and lingered there. The same look of detachment washed over her face again, and Lazarus sat staring at it with dread roiling in the pit of his stomach.

“What about her?” she asked, rotating the book to show him. A school photo had been pasted in. This face was sad. No… angry. The girl glared at the camera with a surly expression that did, in fact, spark a memory for Lazarus. It reminded him of the embroidery on Kitty’s skull bag.
Fuck the world.

“Sorry,” he said. It was maddeningly toneless.

“I know for a fact she got backstage. You
know
her!”

“I don’t.”

She sprung from the chair, face clouded with confusion. Her feet shuffled restlessly, spinning an inkless spirograph on the stone floor with her Doc Martens. He could see it so clearly now, the gears and rotors of her mind turning endless roulettes around the same singularity of focus. He imagined her thoughts as the parabolas of some planetary orbit, incapable of breaking free from the gravitational pull of her conviction, merely able to swing fleetingly and return to center, like the pendulum of some psychotic clock.

Then, she surprised him. The clouds dissipated and a brightness of clarity returned to her eyes. She looked at him, and for an instant there was a purity that shined through. It wasn’t Kitty looking at him, it was Kathleen Van Winkle, the innocent girl from the passport photo.

“Oh,” she said. It was humble and soft-spoken. “Okay.”

She tried to smile, but it was heavy with apologetic shame. Tucking her hair behind her ear, she gathered her things. She saw the knife on the table and picked it up.

Lazarus felt the gallop of his heart and braced himself as she approached. She thrust the knife forward and the blade began to saw at the ropes around his wrists. He stared at her, completely dumbfounded.

“I must have made a mistake. Just give me a couple minutes head start, okay?”

She did not cut all the way through the ropes, but left a thin tether on each. It would take some effort to break them, but for all intents and purposes, he was free.

Kitty set the knife back down on the table, and without turning back, picked up her book and walked out the door.

Lazarus waited. He listened until her footsteps faded into silence and the air was left with nothing but the muted rushing of the wind against the house above. He clenched his fists and pulled against the weakened ropes. His stronger, right arm snapped free first, then the left.

The pins and needles in his legs took a moment to shake out, but once they had, he walked to the table, picked up the knife and followed her path out the door.

Emerging from a winding, servants’ stairwell into the entrance hall on the main floor, Lazarus stood and listened. A soft hiss bled from the open parlor door, underscoring the stalwart ticking of the grandfather clock. His first instinct told him it was running water, but then he realized it was the stereo speakers. It must have been cranked to ear-splitting levels, but for now at least, the party was over. 

He walked to the front door and opened it. The cool, damp air was a welcome sensation on his face. He framed himself in the doorway, scanning the courtyard and driveway as far as his eyes would allow in the dark. The knife handle was warm in his hand and he gave it a squeeze to reassure himself.

He sensed nothing as Kitty slipped silently from the parlor behind him and melted into the shadows. The familiar hiss of overdriven speakers was driving his pulse faster. It filled him with the inexplicable, almost carnal longing for the electric crackle and hum of a guitar cable jacking into the raw power of a wall of amplifiers.

“Where are you, you little bitch?”

She drove the stun gun between his shoulder blades and sent five million volts through him for the second time that day. He crumpled to the threshold and spilled onto his back. Kitty snickered. Not because the stun gun had rendered him unconscious again, but because Lazarus Walker had an erection.

“I’m right here, baby.”

CHAPTER 7

Screaming Black Ryder fans surge against security guards.

Lazarus strides past the girl in black.

Her presence draws his eyes like the pull of gravity.

She raises her head. The dark hair falls away from her face.

She is everyone to him. She is no one.

He struggles to remember the face, but the other girls are laughing.

He knows her, but the laughing…

She is…

The laughing…

CHAPTER 8

He was not dead and he was not asleep. He was somewhere in between. The darkness and the light pulled at him like a wishbone. He was the buoy again, hostage to the chaotic pitch of the surf.

The laughing…

It filled his ears, layer upon layer of it. It ricocheted in his head like bullets in a box.

A tingle of nerves quivered through the muscles of his back and exploded into shockwaves of excruciating spasm. It ripped him from his death-sleep and hurled him headfirst into the light. By the time it finally passed, Lazarus was lucid enough to take stock of his condition.

Constricted breathing. Paresthesia. Uncontrollable convulsions. Blurred vision. Fingers clenched like talons.

Great, nothing to worry about.

He squinted. He could make out the vague shape and features of her face. What he saw bore less resemblance to the girl than it did the skull on her duffel.

Kitty found it all quite hysterical. Watching him claw his way back to consciousness had quickly become her favorite pastime. The laughing ceased.

“Really?”

It was basted with a nice, thick shellac of sarcasm.

Lazarus forced his hands to unclench. They throbbed with an arthritic ache. Not surprisingly, the ropes were back.

Kitty assumed a “little girl” voice. “Oops, sorry. I’ll just go.”

Her face tightened to a sneer. “Please. Your day of atonement is at hand.”

His vision cleared, and Lazarus fixed his glare on her stonily.

“What did I do, Kitty? Enlighten me.”

“The last time my sister went to a Black Ryder concert, she never came home.”

Opening the binder, she showed him the last picture. The surly girl.

“The cops said she ran away.”

She pulled the stun gun back out and wagged it in his face. A single blue spark arced between the electrodes and Lazarus jerked backward reflexively.

Kitty smiled. “I think she’s dead.” She leaned close to Lazarus, their lips almost touching.

“And you think I had something to do with it?” he asked.

“I think you had
everything
to do with it.”

Lazarus shook his head.

“I don’t remember your sister. I’m sorry.”

“Her name was Lacey Van Winkle.”

“There were loads of girls in loads of cities. You can’t expect me to remember them all.”

Kitty grabbed him by the hair and twisted hard. Lazarus cried out in pain.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.” She released her grip. “I think I need something else to jog your memory.”

She slunk around the chair, fingernails raking along his shoulders and leaving long scratches on his skin. Her face suddenly lit up.

“Oh! I almost forgot!”

She practically skipped over to the table.

“I found some things to play with in the kitchen.”

Lazarus felt his stomach churn as he watched her unroll the bundle of cutlery.