Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (25 page)

Lize broke the long silence. “I take it you enjoyed his companionship?”

“Companionship. Now that’s a term I been hearing on my tv. Got no way of tellin’ if this has anything to do with real life or what. Seems like they have them actors do what they think people ought to be doin’, rather than what they really do. Like when you get down to real companionship … you want it to be natural. Well, so … the natural state of affairs is that when this particular cow comes in heat, she wants a bull, and if there’s none
at home she’ll bust down a fence and get into the neighbor’s herd. I been a widow for three years. Thought when my old man died I couldn’t sleep …”

Miz Adam’s voice seemed to be drawing away from her. Everything was receding to a pinpoint size, but all edges were highly magnified, sharply detailed, as if seen through a reducing glass. The image was blurred, as if there were two lenses, one slightly to the left of the other. It gave a shimmering quality to the whole scene, the kitchen, the cookstove, the thick coffee mugs seemed to be painted on a screen, and the screen was peeling away to reveal the candlelight dancing on the dog-toothed roof of a cavern.

She heard a harsh breathing in her ear, closer than the sound of Maude’s voice.
You hear me, Liza? DO YOU HEAR ME? ANSWER!

And to Maude Adams, or rather the spot on the cavern wall where she thought Maude would be sitting, she said: “Are there any caves around here?”

“Caves?” The voice came out of the smoky darkness. “Sure, there’s a couple on the bluff, just below the barn. There’s more in the bank along the creek. Used to be an underground river, before the roof fell in …”

“Where’s Danny’s cabin?”

“That’s down to the creek too …”

Down
… down, down. Maude’s voice slowed like a rundown victrola. The room tilted, trembled, then straightened itself out. Maude sat across from her frowning. “Why’d you look at me so funny a minute ago?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your eyes went out of focus and you got as white as a sheet.”

“White as a sheet?” Liza could only repeat the phrase inanely and try to remember: Why did I look like that? A momentary feeling of being someplace else. I
don’t like it much
.

“Just a … dizzy spell. Could I use your bathroom?”

“It ain’t working. A tree root growed down into the septic tank, got it all clogged up. Sorry.”

“I see.” Looking down, Liza saw the old gnarled blue-veined hands gripped tightly around the cup. She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’d better be going then.”

As she started out the kitchen door, she glanced up and saw two wooden pegs about three feet apart. Between them was the clean silhouette of a rifle, clearly outlined by dust and grime. She turned to look at Miz Adams, who sat obliquely on her chair, not facing Liza directly, but watching her from the corner of her eye. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Like what?”

“Oh … call somebody, deliver a message, anything.”

“If I wanted to call I’d use the phone, wouldn’t I?”

Liza saw a black gleaming plastic box attached to the wall of the screened porch, just outside the kitchen door. “Yes, I suppose you would. Goodbye.”

Elizabeth drove out the lane and turned right at the mailboxes. At the bottom of the hill she stopped and got out. Sycamores arched over the road, cicadas shrilled, mosquitos hung in the air as if suspended by invisible wires. She took off her shoes and walked across the concrete causeway, feeling the round pebbles under her feet, the cool water licking her toes.

Just follow the creek …

The water had cut a channel down to a layer of yellow sandstone; here and there were pools covered with darting waterbugs, then stretches of sandy gravel. Several times she had to climb over trees which had fallen across the channel.

Silence hemmed her in. The forest seemed to press on her from every side, clumps of elderberry lined the banks, thickets of willow and birch choked the sandy bed of the stream.

Scattered through the gravel were sharp chunks of flint which slashed her tender feet. She stopped to put on her shoes, then trudged on. Sweat streamed from her armpits; sweatbees, gadflies and gnats fought for control of the air around her head.

She unzipped her tunic and pulled it off, squatted down
to soak it in water, then bathed her face and forehead with the cool, damp cloth. She stood up and noticed that her pants were splashed with mud and streaked with green slime. She took them off and rinsed them out, then hung them on a willow branch and sat down on a moss-flecked granite boulder. She felt stifled, hot. Spiky limbs and gnarled branches stuck out of the forest from all sides, a message saying: DO NOT ENTER. The stony ground was full of hard edges and glittering points. You had to be hard and quick. But she was soft, tender and … naked. She had not been naked in the woods since … how long was it? Some distant memory of pain and pleasure. Oh yes, that last year in high school, the field trip in biology, and she had gone off with her math teacher, that shy, serious, diffident man. They had been doing it for … oh, weeks, but he had never seen her nude. They talked that way in those days:
NOOD
. But someone had followed them, the girl told, and he had left the school. Ever since then the woods had awakened an erotic urge in her—the smell of leaf mould, the lush ferment of rotting crab apples, the sharp prickly fragrance of sumac … but always with a sense of dread, the feeling that somebody lurked behind the bushes, looking at her …

She lit a cigarette and debated going back to the road. She couldn’t be sure she’d ever reach the cabin by following the creek; she wasn’t positive this was the right creek. Miz Adams had been lying abount something; best thing was to go back, gain her confidence, tell her what she planned to do about Danny …

What do you plan to do?
I’ll think of something.

She walked for another twenty minutes before she realized she’d taken the wrong fork. The stream dwindled as it rose in a series of cataracts dropping from limestone slabs. Finally the creek disappeared entirely; she stood in a marshy swale filled with shoulder-high saw-grass. Ahead of her loomed a limestone bluff; rising above it was the roof of the barn she’d seen from Miz Adam’s house. She recognized the open hayloft door with the hay
Spilling out. Now she was seeing it from a different angle; the barn lay between herself and the house.

A cowpath zigzagged up the steep slope. As she climbed, she heard the dogs barking. She reached the top of the bluff and froze. Three dogs loped around the woven wire fence of the feedlot; their tongues hung out and flecks of foam flecked their lower jaws. Several cows stood inside the fence chewing their cuds, gazing at Liza with large complacent brown eyes. Three huge hogs, black and spotted, with ugly curved snouts, rooted and snuffled in one corner of the lot. As she walked closer, she saw muddy torn strips of denim fabric. Her heart stopped as she saw the white flesh of an arm protruding from under a water trough. Two of the hogs were fighting over the gray-blue coil of an intestine. Half-buried in the mud, near the fence, was something that could have been a large gourd, or a soccer ball—but it was covered with sun-streaked blonde hair …

The sun seemed to flicker like a candle blown in the wind. She thought: If I
faint now, it could be the end of me
.

She turned and ran toward the house.

This time she was greeted by silence. The picket gate hung open. She walked around the house and took hold of the screen door. Her heart jumped when she saw a reddish-brown smear on the sill. With shaking hands she opened the door, saw another long wet smear on the concrete floor of the screened porch.

The phone had been ripped from the wall. It lay beside the door, the plastic case cracked open to reveal the coiled wires inside.

She felt her heart thumping at the base of her throat. She knew her pulse rate must be over ninety, her blood pressure up at least twenty points. The potted plants and the vines growing under the eaves seemed full of ominous rustling and brooding silence. The fleshy leaves of a rubber tree rattled as she walked past.

The disorder of the kitchen confronted her: A chair tipped backward, coffee cup shattered on the floor. She
walked back outside, closing the screen door softly while she eyed the scattered clumps of rose-of-sharon in the back yard. As she followed the path to the gate, she saw signs she had missed before: streaks of disturbed gravel, flagstones tipped out of their slots, dried brown stains on crushed blades of grass …

The stains ended at the slanting wooden door of the cellar. Liza seized the wooden handle in both hands and lifted, smelling the cool musty fragrance of vegetables and potatoes. Crumpled at the bottom of the concrete steps was the figure Liza had last seen sitting across the kitchen table.
The killer must have been in the bathroom
, thought Liza. She forced herself to go down the steps, touched the woman’s shoulder, felt the cool nonresilience of her flesh. She knew, even before she turned her over and saw the hilt of the butcher knife protruding from her chest, that Miz Adams was dead.

She had gone only a hundred yards along the dim path beside the creek before she realized she was not alone. She couldn’t see the person, nor even detect the quiver of a leaf to show where he was hiding. Yet she could feel the eyes, sticky, malevolent,
hating …

Her shoes crunched on the dead twigs that had fallen beneath a giant oak. The tree seemed sentient; the spiraled knots on the massive trunk were like toad’s yes, observing her actions with total indifference. She walked around the tree and backed up against the gnarled bark. “Come out! I won’t hurt you!”

The trees stood silent; their ranks reached back to infinity. Not even an echo of her voice returned to her.

“I’m unarmed,” she called. “Come out and talk!”

She felt the puff of the shock wave in her face, then heard the harsh crack of the firearm. The bullet went
pweeeeng!
and chattered off into the woods behind her. She stood frozen as fragments of bark sprinkled down on her head; she glanced up to see an oozing white scar in the reddish-brown bark.

Later she realized she must have dropped to the ground and dragged herself around to the opposite side of the trunk. Now she lay face down between two exposed roots, her heart hammering like a trapped rabbit’s, her buttocks clenched and quivering as she tried to burrow into the dead leaves.

She stopped moving, and listened for sounds that the attacker might be shifting for another shot. She had taken the back trail, assuming that whoever had killed Miz Adams would be watching her car. So much for logic, she thought. In the back of her mind lay a vague satisfaction that her survival reflexes had functioned so well. If she had depended on intellect, she might still be standing in front of the tree, gape-mouthed with indecision. It was also a relief to know that she had crossed a certain barrier to understanding; she knew for the first time how it felt to have somebody trying to kill her. Never again would she regard combat as some esoteric initiation that men had to undergo: it was an enlightenment of the first order. She knew it would be a long time before she felt fully secure.

She looked around for some way to protect her exposed rear. The oak stood on a knoll, and a gully snaked up toward her, fading out about ten feet away. It deepened sharply enough to provide cover, if she could just cross that ten feet of open space …

She made a running leap and rolled into the ditch. The matted leaves broke her fall; without pausing she crawled, scuttled and rolled down the ravine, dragged herself through a scummy pool, and stood upright on the sandy creek bottom.

The creek had dwindled to a shallow brook which carved a sinuous channel through the packed alluvium. She stretched out her legs in a sprint, leaping pools and ignoring the cottonwood leaves which whipped her face, using her arms to fend off the larger branches.

She ran until she could hear the harsh rales inside her chest and taste what must have been last week’s tobacco smoke churning up from the depths of her lungs. She sprawled beneath the undercut roots of a giant sycamore and lay panting, her cheek pressed against the cool sand. After a minute she unzipped her tunic, reached inside to unfasten her brassiere, then stripped it off to give her lungs more freedom. As her breath slowed, she listened. She remembered reading that there was some way to tell
when one was being followed. Oh, yes, the birds and animals. But wasn’t that the jungle? Here it was dead
quiet …

No, she heard the distant chirr of a frog. Then the fluting shriek of a bluejay. She looked up through the trees and saw two turkey buzzards spiraling down in a slow glide. It was a common sight, so familiar that she’d forgotten they were carrion eaters. Their destination seemed to be Miz Adam’s hoglot. For a moment her brain was filled with the horrid memory of Lona’s dismembered body, scattered about in the mud. Why—? She clamped off the thought. Such speculations were better left until she’d saved her own precious flesh from the same bitter end …

She stepped into the ankle-deep channel and waded downstream for two hundred yards. She climbed out on a fallen log and stepped into the bank. Water squished inside her shoes, spurted out around her ankles. She scooped up a handful of mud and smeared it over her white tunic, then stained her trousers and rubbed it on her face. The vile muck smelled like dead turtles. She thought of the girl who had drowned in the pond.

Her name was Colleen. She came to Danny for love, in whatever form it was offered, and for her trouble got a rank-smelling mouthful of mud. Will they never learn?

The breeze blew like a sigh through the dead branches:
Never-never-never …

She walked on, ducking and turning to avoid the branches. She didn’t try to keep the creek in view, but listened now and then to the gurgle of water. After a time she noticed that the clouds overhead were tinted with gold. The sun had set; already the deepest parts of the forest were shrouded in twilight.

The growing darkness caused her to seek the heights, where the last light might give her enough visibility to find the cabin. What a fool, she thought—no flashlight, no compass …

The ridge was higher than she thought. Her legs ached when she reached the crest—a sparsely-treed wedge of
rocks and grass marked by a tilted spine of weathered granite. She climbed to the top of a boulder and looked around. Panic caught at her throat. The ridges stretched endlessly, one after the other. Forested humps rose on all sides, hiding whatever towns or roads might lie behind them. This was how the land had been before the white men, an undulating carpet of trees stretching from the Atlantic to the prairie. She tried to recall how large the national forest was: at least a hundred miles long, and probably half that in width. A person could wander for weeks …

Then she realized she was looking at a path—a dim yellowish streak of faded grass, twisting through the darker green. She climbed down and followed it for several minutes, then stopped and gasped with relief. It looked like a magical apparition stretched out below; the stone arch of the Japanese bridge, the little pond, paved with hexagonal cakes of dried mud, the stone cabin rising like a woodsman’s cottage on a finger of land …

She felt that she stood at the end of the world. A soft warmth struck her face. Convection current, she thought … but it seemed like magic to her. Night fell like soft blue smoke drifting down through the trees. She looked up and saw mounding billows of cloud topped with gold, and the sky around them like the blue in fine porcelain. She looked down at the bridge, and saw that it was an echo of the arch of heaven. Of course, that’s what Dan meant it to be. She wondered if that was the source of her certainty that he was innocent—the belief that the ability to create beauty and the urge to kill do not go together …

But then she thought of the artist Dadd, who had created beautiful paintings—and had also murdered his father. There were also Wain’s
Cats
, those exquisite studies which grew steadily more stylized and unreal as the artist’s mind fell apart. And the Austrian Messerschmidt who had sculptured the horrible beauty of his nightmares …

She started down, and thought of another reason to be
frightened. She couldn’t be sure that the unseen marksman hadn’t gotten past her and was waiting at the cabin.

“Don’t go any further. It’s staked out.”

A ragged gasp tore from her throat. She whirled to look for the source of the voice. She glimpsed the shadow moving out from behind the bush, but before she could react, the figure was gliding toward her, swift and silent as smoke. She felt her wrist clamped in an iron grip. Another hand seized her throat.

Unable to speak, she looked up into his eyes. They were glittering, hard, fixed on hers with such hypnotic intensity that her glance shied away. She tried to pull free, but his grip on her wrist tightened, the fingers squeezed her throat, not enough to hurt, but enough to let her know that her life was in his hand.

“Don’t fight,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

“Dan—” She choked. “Let me go.”

He dropped his hands to his sides. “I had to be sure you wouldn’t scream.”

She looked up into his face. The slack, withheld coldness of his expression chilled her. “Did I scream last night?” The question was rhetorical; she didn’t wait for an answer. “What are you doing here?”

He said nothing for a minute. “Thinking about what you said. The only way I can get out of this is to find the real killer.”

“And so you came here?”

He nodded. “I thought it might be somebody who lived out in these woods. Some of these ridge runners aren’t but about half-civilized.”

She wondered if he knew about Lona and Miz Adams. If he did, he was hiding it from her, and her danger at this moment was greater than ever.

“Dan, don’t.” She put out her hand and touched the hinge of his jaw. “Your search is a pose, and not a very good one.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know who killed those girls.”

He gripped her wrists and looked down into her eyes. “Can you say the name?”

“Debra.”

His grip tightened, hurting her wrists. His eyes drilled into hers, their colors shifting in the dim light. They were deep brown, then chocolate, then the pale gold of wheat straw. She felt the leanness of his body against her, the hard thrust of his hips; she heard her own heart pounding against the walls of his chest. In her mind she felt a sense of boundaries fading, reality crumbling, rules and regulations floating in the air with nothing attached to them. She seemed to be floating down a deep dark well, and it was only by an intense effort of will that she managed to step outside the scene and see herself.
Elizabeth Bodac, reputable psychiatrist, locked in a hip-to-hip clinch with a mass-murder suspect
. She felt the heat spreading out from her chest, creeping up her neck and burning her ears. Her breasts swelled out against her tunic, making it hard to breathe. Her nipples stood painfully erect and a tremulous weakness pulled at her knees. She could feel the message shooting along her nerves:
Extend the arms, put your hands and take his head, pull it down between your breasts …

“No.” He pushed her away. “You could have convinced me yesterday. Not now.”

“Why not now.”

He seemed about to speak, then shook his head and turned away. Beckoning with his hand, he started descending the slope which led downstream from the cabin. She followed. It was almost totally dark. The moon had not yet come up, but the eastern sky was lit by a pale orange glow. She glanced back and saw the flick of a searchlight beam arching across the sky.
Please God, a little more time …

The hill was steep; a rock turned under her foot and she pitched forward against him. He seized her waist and held her until she found her footing. “Grab hold of my pants. I still don’t have a belt. Sorry.”

She slid her fingers inside the waistband of his trousers
and felt the smooth sliding muscles of his lower back. His flesh was hot and sweaty; she felt a sudden surge of physical desire.

The terrain flattened out; they shuffled through dead leaves. Suddenly he stopped and bent over. She heard the muffled clunk of rocks, then he straightened up and stood beside her. “Here.” He pressed a folded matchbook into her hand. “You look. I’ve seen it already.”

She struck the match, held it at arm’s length, and looked down at her feet. The object resembled those in the photos the sheriff had shown her: rotted flesh, wrinkled leathery skin, grinning death’s head. She gasped as the match burned her fingers. She stepped backward until she bumped against him.

“Who is it?” she asked in a whisper.

“Patricia. The girl from Texas. She had Mexican jade earrings which I recognized.”

“You remember the last time you saw her?”

“Sort of. We were high, playing hide and seek in the woods. If I found her I got to … well, you know the game. Anyway I never found her. That’s what I told myself.”

“What are you telling yourself now?”

“Well, I must have—” He paused, and she heard him swallow. “—caught her. I knew exactly where she was buried.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since yesterday. That’s when I broke through my amnesia. It started coming back when Kossuth put me under hypnosis …”

She thought:
Jeff, you’ll pay for this
. But that didn’t solve the problem of what to do now. The odor rising from the shallow grave was fetid. She took Dan’s hand and drew him away. “Danny, isn’t it possible you picked up the location of this grave from Debra? She tuned into your mind, why couldn’t you tune into hers?”

“Don’t start that again.”

“Why not?” She felt her anger rising. “You always took the blame for her, didn’t you? Debra was good and
you were bad. It was really the other way around, but you gave up trying to convince anybody. You accepted the part they gave you to play. Isn’t that the way it was?”

She felt him standing, silently, in the darkness. Off in the far distance she heard the faint baying of hounds, the angry bawl of a bullhorn. She strained her ears, but couldn’t hear what the voice was saying. Apparently Danny couldn’t hear it or didn’t connect it to himself. After a minute he gave a hollow, humorless chuckle:

“Mama always said I was a lover, not a fighter. But Dad wanted his boy to be a man—”

“So he made a killer out of you.”

“No. I didn’t—” His voice choked off.

“Didn’t what?”

“I didn’t kill the dog. I broke down and bawled. Debra picked up the gun and plugged him, right between the eyes. It didn’t bother her a bit, she said. But we let Dad think I had done it so he’d be proud … shit!” He gripped her shoulders and held her tight, with quivering hands. “Listen—I don’t know how I knew the body was there. But Debra couldn’t have done it. She didn’t even know Pat existed.”

“She knew Christina existed.”

“Because she saw us on the bridge. But not the others.”

“Isn’t there someplace she could have hidden and watched the cabin?”

“Like where?”

“Like a hole in the ground. Like a cave.”

She heard him move in the darkness, felt him grasp her hand. “It’s right above us. Take it slow.”