Hand Me Down Evil (Hand Me Down Trilogy) (8 page)

And then everything went blank.

“Get up, Celia, get up!”

A voice was calling my name from far away.

“Celia, wake up!”

“Huh?” I said. “Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

I opened my eyes slightly, and everything was a blur. Someone was standing over me. When I finally came to my senses, I realized that it was Mark.

M
ark was taking off his jacket.

“Here, put this on. You look cold,” he said.

Trembling, I tried to form words with my mouth, but only spurted a strange gurgling sound.

“Here, hold my hand and get up. You ran right into that tree,” he said.

He grasped my arm, helped me get to my feet, and wrapped his jacket around my shoulders. We then walked to his black pickup truck that was parked directly ahead at the edge of the woods on the other side of the road.

“Do you need to go to the hospital? That’s an awful bump on your forehead,” Mark remarked.

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” I responded.

When we were inside the car, Mark turned the ignition and drove toward Catherine’s house. I wanted to tell him about the person chasing me in the woods, about the lit candle, about Cuddy Boy, but there was such a throbbing in my head that I could only sink back in the passenger seat and peer at the woods.

It was odd, though, that Mark did not ask me why I was in the woods.

Three patrol cars were parked in front of Catherine’s house. An officer was examining the damage to the Lincoln. Two other policemen were heading toward the backyard.

“What happened here?” Mark asked.

“Wait, how did you know I was here?” I asked, giving him a suspicious look. I rubbed my temple. It ached terribly.

“I had a feeling you were in danger.”

“Did you talk to Eleanor?” I asked him. “How did you know where I was?”

Mark pursed his lips but said nothing. He pulled up behind the last patrol car.

Officer Ken was standing next to the Lincoln holding the keys I had dropped hours earlier. Henry was taking finger prints off of the front driver’s side door.

As we approached the Lincoln, Ken noticed us. Turning to me, he said, “Celia, I’ve got a bunch of questions I’ve got to ask you. But for now, you should go home. It’s dangerous here. It looks like someone really damaged your car.”

“Whoever it was shot at me with a bb gun while I was trying to get into the Lincoln. Problem is I did not get a glimpse of who it was,” I responded.

“I’ll bring the Lincoln to your house in a few minutes after we pull some fingerprints off the car. Now go home,” Ken said.

Mark thanked Ken, and we started to drive away. As we whizzed past Catherine’s house, I glanced back. The sun had peeked out from behind the clouds and illuminated the colonial at just the right angle. Out of the periphery of my vision, I glimpsed the silhouette of a person in the upper bedroom window who appeared to be looking down at the pickup.

“Stop!” I yelled.

Mark pressed the brake.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Look, do you see a person standing at the bedroom window?”

“Where?”

“Right up there,” I said, gesturing toward the window. I glanced up again, but the shadowy figure was gone.

“Celia, are you alright?” he asked, as he started driving again.

“I know someone’s at the house. Someone was shooting at me with a bb gun,” I explained. “And then the cat, Cuddy Boy. Catherine’s cat. It had been tortured.”

Mark glared at me with astonishment. “And do you remember me telling you not to do anything foolish?”

I closed my eyes, embarrassed, vaguely aware of the aching in my head. Thoughts of Mark cautioning me crept into my mind. If only I had listened to him.

Mark had given me that dire warning before he went to the hospital. Surely, he must have known that I would go to Catherine’s house. But how? I had not even thought of heading there until just before Eleanor arrived. And he had still not answered my question about whether or not Eleanor had revealed my whereabouts.

Mark steered the pickup past Mitchell’s Market and down the dirt road toward my house.

“How did you know where I was?” I repeated.

Mark did not seem to hear me. He was fumbling with the radio, searching for the news channel. Or was he pretending to be distracted so that he could avoid the question altogether?

“Are you going to answer my question?” I asked.

He hesitated for a moment and bit his lip. “ I had a feeling you were in danger. So I called the police and told them to rush to Catherine’s house.”

“But how did you know I was there?” I asked.

“Honestly, I had a feeling you had gone there,” he said. He sounded sincere, but his comment did not make much sense. Why would he have a feeling that I was there unless Eleanor had told him? Maybe he was trying to protect Eleanor.

“I won’t get mad if Eleanor told you. I was actually hoping she would tell you where I had gone. Things got pretty strange over at Catherine’s house.”

Mark avoided making eye contact with me. He parked the pickup in my driveway, climbed out, went around to the passenger side, and opened the door.

As we walked toward my house, a gust of icy wind blew the red and yellow leaves and some dust around the front yard.

Eleanor opened the door for us. “Hi, Celia, I was worried sick about you. I almost started to call the police,” she said. Then she glanced up at Mark and said, “Hello. You must be Mark. Celia told me to expect you. When neither of you showed up, I got quite worried.”

Mark greeted Eleanor and smiled politely.

I stood there gaping at Eleanor and then at Mark in bewilderment. So Mark had not yet met Eleanor. He could not have known where I was and that I was in danger.

Even if he had a strange hunch that I had gone to Catherine’s house, he could not have known my exact location in the woods. His car was parked directly across the roadway close to where I was hiding. I would not have been visible from across the road because of the thickness of the woods. Yet there he was.

A
wicked thought started to take shape in my mind. Maybe Mark had something to do with Amber’s disappearance. After all, he was standing outside Mitchell’s Market when my sister disappeared. What if Mark had not gone to the hospital to see Catherine after all? He could have gone to Catherine’s house instead. What if he was the person chasing me in the woods? I felt sick to my stomach for allowing myself to think of such awful thoughts, especially since Mark was so handsome and seemed so innocent.

Mark was talking softly with Eleanor in the kitchen near the sink. Weary and anxious, I collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table and buried my head in my hands. But I could hear everything he and Eleanor were saying.

“Celia has not had anything to eat with the exception of half a doughnut that she had this morning. Perhaps I should make her a couple slices of toast,” he said.

He looked so gorgeous, so sincere.

But there were so many unanswered questions.

I was still wearing the jacket that he draped around my shoulders in the woods. I smelled the aroma of the jacket, a light, pleasant scent.

Could there be a dark side to Mark? In school, he did not care to interact with any girls. He mostly kept to himself. But then again, he was known for earning perfect grades, and so he could have spent all of his time studying. Still an introverted, handsome, smart person could have a sinister side. Plus, he was so evasive. He still had not answered my question as to how he knew my exact location in the woods behind Catherine’s house. And he was not budging.

“Where’s Tally,” I asked Eleanor.

“She’s in her bedroom playing with her dollhouse,” she replied. “She keeps asking me when Amber is coming back. I’m running out of things to tell her. Have you heard anything from the police?”

I shook my head. As I recounted what had happened at Catherine’s house, Eleanor’s eyes opened wide in surprise.

While I was talking, I met Mark’s gaze, but he did not seem at all amazed by what I was saying. It suddenly occurred to me that he had not bothered to ask me what had taken place at Catherine’s house. He did not even ask me why the window of the Lincoln had been shattered. His behavior was very odd. It seemed as if he already knew what had happened since he was not even listening to me as I spoke.

When the two pieces of bread popped up out of the toaster, Mark pulled them out, smothered them with peanut butter, and set the dish in front of me on the table.

“You should eat something,” he said. “You need all the energy you can get.” Then he poured me a glass of orange juice.

“Thoughtful young man, isn’t he?” Eleanor said, smiling broadly.

I could tell that she liked Mark. The problem was that I liked Mark, too, but I was worried about his behavior, about the gnawing uneasiness that I felt at the pit of my stomach when I realized that Mark knew way more than he was telling me.

“Mark, with all the commotion, I’ve forgotten to ask you if you talked to Catherine at the hospital. Was she conscious?” I asked.

Mark shook his head from side to side. “No, when I got there, Officers Ken and Henry were already beside her bed. She had fallen into a deep sleep, and the doctors would not permit us to wake her up. We waited around for a couple of hours. Then a nurse came in and tried to rouse her, but Catherine had slipped into a coma again.”

Just as I bit into a piece of toast, the doorbell rang. Mark went to see who it was and then reappeared with Officer Ken.

“Here are your keys,” Ken said, plopping them down on the table. “Your car is in the driveway. I suggest you get the car in the garage as soon as possible. The storm apparently missed us last night, but another one is heading our way. You don’t want rain getting into that busted out window,” he cautioned.

As I explained to Ken what had happened to me at Catherine’s house, Eleanor grabbed the keys and headed outside to drive the Lincoln into the garage. When she left, Kenneth told us that the officers did not find anything at Catherine’s house except for a lot of bb gun pellets on the driveway and in the garage.

“We’ve called the Crawford County Sheriff’s Department for assistance,” Ken said. “Just before I came to drop off the Lincoln, our headquarters received a call from the hospital indicating that someone had apparently paid Catherine a visit a few minutes ago and had tried to suffocate her with a pillow. This person must have heard a nurse coming and fled in a hurry because whoever it was left the pillow right on Catherine’s face!”

“D
o you have any idea who it is?” I asked.

“The detectives are scanning the television monitors and planning to investigate every person who entered the hospital at that time,” Ken replied. “The problem is that monitors are only placed at the hospital entrance door, not on every floor. Many people go to Grayling Hospital on a given day. It’s going to be rough. But since this is a small town, we may have some luck. We’re particularly trying to see if Edgar Humphries entered the hospital today. That crazy man won’t leave Catherine alone, but we can’t find any evidence to pin anything on him. And he is so elusive that we don’t know where he stays. Mostly, I think he goes from homeless shelter to shelter. During the day, he stays in bars or walks the streets and alleyways. He manages to make ends meet with his little Social Security disability check.”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

“Grubby,” Ken said, with a look of disgust on his face. “He’s up there in years but looks younger than his age. He’s got brown and gray hair and sometimes sports a beard. Believe me, you would notice him with that unkempt beard. Edgar’s got small dark beady eyes and bushy brown eyebrows. You could pick him out easily in a crowd. The problem is he never stays in one place. He is always on the move, searching for who knows what. And when he walks around, he talks to himself. It seems like he has to think out loud. And you know what’s the scary part?” Ken asked.

“What?” Mark asked.

“Sometimes when Edgar is in his female personality mode, all dressed in female clothing, Edgar doesn’t even know what the female personality is doing or thinking. It’s like the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing,” Ken responded.

“Really,” I chimed in.

“Yeah, we caught him numerous times outside Catherine’s house snooping around, and we have arrested him for trespassing when he actually goes onto her property,” Ken explained. “But he never has any recollection of what he did when he was dressed that way. I personally don’t dislike the guy. He’s just strange, that’s all. And if his other personality is doing these terrible things, then we’ve got a real psychotic on our hands.”

“Why don’t you just arrest Edgar?” I asked.

Ken chuckled. “I’m afraid that’s not how it works. We have to have evidence that he has done something wrong. Just because we believe that a man dressed as a woman is peeping through your window at Amber and Tally does not mean that it is Edgar. We need to catch him in the act. We would never be able to get a conviction unless we had something concrete against him. Right now, all we have is speculation,” Ken said.

“And what about Catherine’s house?” I asked. “I thought I saw a shadow of a person wearing a hat in the upstairs bedroom window looking down at me when Mark and I were driving away from Catherine’s house this afternoon.”

“I saw the same shadow, Celia, when I was outside walking the perimeter of the yard. But when we went to investigate upstairs, all we found in the window was a hat rack with one of Catherine’s hats on it. That’s what could have been the shadow you thought you saw.”

“Oh,” I said. I was not convinced.

Ken moved toward the sink, glanced out the window and said, “Anyway, we are looking for Edgar at this moment, not to arrest him, but to question him. Of course, if his other personality was the one lurking around Catherine’s house, he won’t know anything about that. If Edgar’s other personality had shot at you with a bb gun, Edgar would not know about that either. The only thing we can hope to find is that Edgar’s fingerprints match those that we lifted off the window panes at your house earlier and on the Lincoln. Every police officer in Crawford County is on high alert for Edgar. We have circulated his photo around the entire department. The Crawford County Sheriff’s Department is helping out as well.”