Last to Know (29 page)

Again, he found himself looking into a pair of eyes.

Diz was perched on a small outcropping about twenty feet down, held from tumbling farther by a sturdy fern which probably had been growing there for decades.

Diz said in a trembly voice, “Are you going to kill me too?”

“No,” Len said. Then, “Do not move. I will be right back.”

He jogged swiftly down to his boat, took out the fishing line he always kept there, jogged back to the well, where he doubled up the line until he was satisfied it would take the boy’s weight, then lowered it down the hole.

“I want you to tie this around your chest, right under the shoulders,” he instructed. “I want you to tie a knot so tight it will take shears to cut it off. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, I understand.”

Len thought it was good the boy obviously still had his wits about him. “Then here it comes.” He began to lower the line. “Do not make any jerky moves, do not reach out for it, trust me I’ll get it close to you.”

“Yes, sir,” Diz said again. He sounded frightened now.

The line touched Diz’s chest. “I got it, sir, thank you,” he called.

Len thought it a tribute to Rose that the kid remembered his manners even at a time like this. He thought of the dead bitch in the woods behind him, and of this poor innocent kid who she had meant to use to bring Rose Osborne down to her own evil level, to cut Rose to her heart, if not with a knife, then with despair and sorrow. And all under the guise of friendship.

“Now, tie it like I told you,” he said. He wasn’t sure but he had to trust his line would hold. “Test it, give it a tug, a real hard one. So, okay, now, swing your legs out first, then let the rest of your body follow, keep your hands on the wall, get any grip you can, push upwards with your feet against the wall … that’s right … that’s it. You got it, son,” he yelled triumphantly as Diz’s head appeared over the edge of the well.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Diz said, sprawling on the ground next to Len. “You’re fuckin’ amazing.”

Diz heard Squeeze barking. He looked over his shoulder. Saw Harry heading up the hill toward him, and behind him came his brother, Roman.

“Oh look,” he said, turning to Len, his savior. “They’ve found us.”

But Len had gone.

56

Diz couldn’t help crying, sitting on the ground next to the gaping hole of a well where he had so nearly died. Len had simply disappeared into the thick undergrowth. He hadn’t even been able to say a proper thank-you to the man who saved him. And he was scared because he didn’t know where Bea was either.

Squeeze loomed suddenly over him, giving his face an encouraging lick. Then Harry appeared, running, with Rossetti and Roman, like a pair of fullbacks coming in for a touchdown, Diz thought. It brought a smile back to his face.

Panting, Harry inspected him. “You’re a friggin miracle, y’know that?” he said. “All you’ve gone through and now you’re smiling?”

“I’m smiling because you and Rossetti looked so funny puffing up the hill,” Diz said, almost becoming his old perky self again. “Only thing is I lost my binoculars.”

Roman glanced around for them.

“In there.” Diz pointed to the well.

The men went and looked down it. “Was it Len got you out of there?” Harry asked.

Diz nodded. “Yes, sir. He did.” He explained about the fishing line still tied around his chest. “He saved my life,” he added. “That and the old fern, growing in there. It stopped my fall after Bea pushed me in.”

Harry did not allow his feelings about what might have happened to Diz to show on his face. He knelt next to the boy and began hacking off the fishing cord with his Swiss Army knife, rubbing Diz’s shoulders to ease the cramp, wishing he could also erase the pain that, despite Diz’s bravery, he knew the boy must be suffering. The mental anguish of almost being murdered was the kind of trauma few people survived to remember.

“Diz, if you can, if you are able to even think about it right now, to remember, I would like you to give me some idea of what happened.”

Roman was holding on to him, and Diz saw the tears in his eyes. He hid his face in Squeeze’s thickly furred neck. “It was Bea,” he said. “She knew I’d seen her, with my binoculars, y’know, and that I’d guessed what she had done to her mother, and to Jemima, and what she wanted to do to my mother. I don’t know it all, only what I caught in my glasses. But I couldn’t be sure. And then she said she wanted to talk to me, she had something special to tell me. And I listened and she did. She talked about my mom, said what an angel she was … and then…” Diz stopped. He buried his face deeper into Squeeze’s fur. He began to sob. Harry glanced at Rossetti. “It’s okay, Diz,” Harry said quietly, “You can talk about it later.”

“No. I must tell you now, because what Bea said was she hates my mother, she said she was going to kill me so she could watch my mom suffer, then she would kill her too. And now I don’t know where she is and I’m afraid she’s going to do that.”

On the shore road, Harry saw the flash of lights on the sheriff’s car. He picked Diz up and carried him carefully down the hill.

“Jeez,” Diz said, awed. “You mean I get to ride in a cop car?”

You couldn’t, Harry thought, keep a small boy down for long.

When he’d sent Diz off home, he called Rose.

“Where is he?” she demanded, frantic.

“On his way to you, and then you’ll take him to get checked out. He seemed okay to me, Rose, no real need for worry. Except for the mental anguish of what he’s been through.”

“And where is she?” Rose asked, in a voice so quiet it was, Harry thought, almost a threat.

“That’s what we intend to find out, right now. Take care of your son, Rose.”

He turned to Rossetti, who had spotted a trail of blood. He’d pulled back the undergrowth and they both looked at the large red stain, almost beautiful in its scarlet depth.

“Somebody died here,” Harry said, already on his phone to summon reinforcements, and forensics, and ambulances. “Either Bea, or Len Doutzer. Personally, knowing the clever Bea, I’m betting it was Len.”

The two men waited until the reinforcements came wailing along the shore, bringing vacationers out of their cottages once again, wondering what was going on. Within the hour cops were combing the hillsides, going one more time through the wreckage of the Havnel house, searching the guest cottage where Bea was living, the woods, the fields, preparing to dredge the lake if necessary.

Standing on the hill, looking at the damage that young woman had wrought, Harry grieved not only for those she had killed, but for his beloved tranquil Evening Lake. The place where he had once come to rest his troubled soul.

*   *   *

A couple of hours later, he and Rossetti drove the dust-embraced BMW up the path that led to Len’s cruddy A-frame, swirling to a stop with a honk of the horn right outside the always-padlocked front door. Squeeze was first out.

The dog stood for a minute, nose pointed in the air, sniffing, then without so much as a backward glance, he headed behind the house, to the shed.

This time the door was not closed. It swung open on its hinges. Ten feet away from it, Squeeze stopped dead. Ears flattened, he took a couple of paces back. Harry caught up to him, put his hand on the dog’s neck.

“What’s the matter, my friend. What’s wrong?”

The door creaked, swinging gently back and forth.

Harry looked at Rossetti. He was right there, Sig Sauer already cocked.

“I fuckin’ hate this place,” Rossetti was muttering. “Gives me the fuckin’ creeps.”

Harry said, “What do you think we’re gonna find in there?”

“I hate to think.”

“Come on, Squeeze, let’s go take a look,” Harry said, but the dog backed away. It gave a long howl.

Harry looked at Rossetti again. “It’s gonna be bad,” he said. Rossetti nodded and the two walked together to the shed.

Harry opened the door, they looked inside, then stepped back. Rossetti walked round the side of the shed and vomited into the bushes. The dog hunkered, way back, near the car. It was the first time Harry had seen his dog afraid.

He had to go in. Into that dreadful place. Check it all out. It was his duty. He was the cop.

He propped open the door with a couple of large stones and called to Rossetti. “You don’t have to go inside,” he said. “Just take a look from here.”

Tethered to the cross beams of the ceiling swung the eviscerated carcasses of several dead animals. Their pelts gleamed, their teeth shone yellow-white, their eyes were stitched shut.

Behind them dangled the naked body of Bea Havnel, strapped by her hands and feet, slit from belly to throat. She too had been eviscerated. Her entrails smoldered in a bucket in the corner. Her eyes had not been stitched shut though. They were wide open and seemed to Harry to be gazing straight into his. He was looking into the pale blue eyes of pure evil.

He went back outside, got his emotions together, his thoughts organized. He had never seen anything as macabre, as horrifying. Then he remembered Jemima with her throat cut, and Lacey Havnel with the knife sticking out of her right eye, and he thought whoever did this removed evil from this earth, by his own act of evil. He knew it was Len. What he didn’t know was where Len was.

*   *   *

Within half an hour the place was surrounded by cops. Forensics were there again, “Having a field day,” Rossetti muttered darkly. Photographers took their own pictures, detectives took their own pictures, videos were being taken, the ground searched inch by inch for evidence, for the knife, for blood. And the search was on for Len.

They soon found him, lying in his small boat, drifting across the lake. Dead from a shot wound to the chest. Right where his heart must once have been.

It was over.

57

Rose looked around, at the people sitting at her kitchen table, mugs of coffee, glasses of wine, bowls of her leftovers soup in front of them. Tonight it tasted strongly of basil because the plant outside the back door had suddenly gone into overdrive, sprouting all over the place so she’d had to put it to good use. Rossetti, the good-looking homicide detective who looked more like an Italian male model, told her it was as good as his mother’s. “Better, even,” he’d added with a grin that she knew he hoped would make her feel better about everything she had just gone through; she and her entire family, who were all also at the table.

Roman sat next to Diz, offering more soup, more bread, more Coke. The big brother was taking what had happened hard, having trouble keeping his emotions under control, while the girls, of course, did not even bother to try. They ate their soup silently, reluctantly, not seeming to notice when the odd tear rolled into their spoons. They ate only because Rose had told them they had to, adding with a smile the childish threat that otherwise there would be no ice cream.

Wally was another matter. Rose had thought Wally would die when she had told him what happened to Diz, the whole terrible story of Bea, and the well. They were in their bedroom, the French doors were open onto the porch with the view over the lake, so tranquil it seemed nothing could ever ruffle its timeless surface. Rose had read stories where people’s faces “turned white with shock.” This was the only time she ever experienced it. The blood seemed to drain from Wally’s summer-tanned face and his eyes went blank, dark as though he were looking into that well, could see his boy there.

Wally sank onto the bed, put his head in his hands. “How could I have allowed this to happen?” he said. “Diz could have been killed and it was my fault.”

Rose went and sat next to him. She put her arm around his shoulders. Her husband was crying. “It was no one’s fault,” she’d said quietly. “No one is responsible for a madwoman like that. That’s what she was, who she was. If it had not been us she targeted it would have been some other family. It’s over. Diz is safe, that’s all that matters now.”

Even as she said it, Rose knew Wally would always feel responsible for allowing Bea into his home, into his family. Rose was very glad Bea was dead.

Now her husband sat in his usual place at the head of the table, his notebook and pen at hand as always, in case he was struck by an idea for a location, a character, a twist in the plot. She thought, though, even Wally could never have figured out the twist in this plot. The next morning Wally was to leave for a place somewhere in Arizona that took care of people with his kind of problem. Not that Wally was “using” anymore, but he had been more than a “recreational user,” as the euphemism went, of cocaine. It was his own choice to take this course, to be reindoctrinated into the world of normal living. “To become myself again,” was what he said to Rose, and she agreed. She was no longer that young girl in the white bathing suit leaping into the lake, into his arms, thrilled with the very idea of “love,” but she loved Wally. Always would. She was his and he was hers. The day they had made those vows still stuck in Rose’s mind. She, and, she also believed, Wally, had made them till death did they part—and they would keep them. Rose was very glad of that.

Homicide Detective Harry Jordan was sitting next to her; well, almost next to her. In fact Squeeze had pushed his way between them and was leaning against her legs, his long head on her lap, eyes raised adoringly to hers whenever she looked down at him.

“I swear my dog’s in love with you,” Harry said, leaning back in his chair. Her eyes met his. “And I don’t blame him,” he added softly.

Rose gave him a smile, lowered her eyes, willed herself not even to go there. Not to think of Harry. Ever. Again. In that way. She turned to look at Diz, who had his brand-new binoculars slung around his neck, whose eyes were bright with the optimism and resilience of extreme youth, and whose black eye—a true purple shiner—and scabbed limbs were a lingering reminder of what he had gone through.

“He’ll be okay.”

It was Harry who said it to Rose, not her husband.

“How can you know that?”

“I’ve been through violence before, with kids. Some of them can work it out. Others can’t. I’m guessing Diz is one of the ‘cans.’ All due to you,” he added. “With a mom like you he’ll be able to release the terrible memories, not all at once, of course, but we have people in place who’ll help him.”