Malevolent (29 page)

“So,” she said, her smile a prod.

“It’s going to sound weird.”

His next words proved the point. He inexplicably led with Griffin’s blonde phantom, seen by a stranger. Then he backtracked into Patty’s bizarre shoot-’em-up story, featuring Melinda Dillon herself, and finally admitted to the unsettling events at the Davenport party. And while he hadn’t even thought to mention it, the kid’s birthday party got him thinking about the earlier creepiness at the Sturvinski-Koontz wedding reception. He relayed Griffin’s theories and all the thoughts that had come to him while sacked out the previous night on the uncomfortable sleeper sofa in the tiny office. And finally, he related it all back—as well as he could—to Germaine Marberry and the suicide of Travis Kendall and maybe even the murder of the young woman nights before.

In short, he told her everything. He finished up with, “I think at this point we have to admit there’s something very wrong here. We’re not
all
cracking up in different ways.”

She studied him while creaking back and forth in a rustic rocking chair. “So you spent the night alone in a haunted video store with your blonde ghost?” she said.

Was she making fun of him? Hard to tell.

“She’s not mine, the ghost. The blonde behind the curtain, she’s Griffin’s.” Not sure how much sense that made.

“But this other man—”

“Donovan something. Yeah, he saw her too. But from what I gather, this guy’s worse than Griffin. Much more shy and creepy around women. Let’s just say that both men share similar—not identical—chinks in their emotional armor. Therefore, they can be exploited in the same way.”

“Exploited by whom?”

There was the rub. “I can’t say this any way that makes sense, but the church on Utica Lane is responsible. Or involved somehow.”

“That’s not good enough,” she told him. “You can’t arrest a church. Are you saying that Vincent Applegate—the church’s minister—is behind this?”

“I don’t know if it’s any one person,” he said, mentally wincing at how weak that sounded.

“So it’s built on an old Indian burial ground? Something along those lines?”

The sarcasm couldn’t be missed this time.

“Maybe it
is
Vincent,” he said, shrugging. “I have no idea what he’s actually doing, but he’s the guy who reopened the building and kick-started this whole thing, so to speak.”

“No. Things have been happening there longer than he’s been around.” She broke off whatever else she started to say and took to carefully examining the ice cubes clinking in her glass.

“All right, tell me everything,” he snapped. Then he recalled the story he’d dumped in her lap days ago, and his eyes lit. “The minister who wiped out his family or whatever…you looked into that, didn’t you?”

First she refilled from the icy pitcher. “Melvin Frost. He severely beat his wife and killed his daughter seven years ago. I interviewed him two days ago.” She sipped through a mouth set so grimly it seemed barely able to accommodate the sip. “He wasn’t much help. I don’t get the feeling that even now he knows why he did it, except for the vague notion that his little girl was getting too worldly. What’s most frightening is that, in some ways, the Reverend Frost seems rather normal.”

“He blames the church, doesn’t he?”

He knew he’d asked the right question when Melinda looked away. Warming to the subject, Tim said, “He’s a conservative kind of guy, a fundamentalist preacher, right? And his little girl was growing up too fast, kissing boys and whatnot. He’s got these mental pictures of her wrestling in backseats, pregnancy, abortion, condoms and all that. But here’s the question. Who—or what—was feeding him those images?”

Tim moved to the edge of his chair and fixed her with his gaze.

Melinda crossed her arms over her chest in a textbook gesture of denial. “If it’s this…I don’t know, satanic force emanating from the church, finding and exploiting human weaknesses, what did it find in you, Tim? What you told me about the birthday party doesn’t stick to script unless you hate kids. Do you?”

Now it was her turn to stare
him
down. He tried reaching for an answer that seemed beyond him. She gave him plenty of time to think about it.

He took a breath and said, “I like loud music and fast cars and beer and girls. I’m loud and obnoxious and selfish. In other words, I’m a thirty-one-year-old teenager.”

He set aside his tea, no longer even pretending to drink it. “When you think about it, there are worse fates than being stuck in a time warp of sex, drugs and rock and roll, right?”

“Unless the woman you’re with wants you to grow up, get a real job and start a family,” Melinda said quietly.

Tim let slip a sad smile. “Ergo, fear of kids. Fear of midnight feedings and mortgage payments. No wonder Patty threw me out.”

After a moment Melinda said, “So the suggestion to harm children could be triggered by your resentment of Patty’s pressuring you to assume more responsibility and take on this new phase of your life. As, potentially, a father.”

He laughed and Melinda asked him what was so funny.

“Believe me, nothing,” he said. “It just hit me how calmly we’re discussing possession by child-hating manifestation. And that’s after we’ve explored the topics of phantom seductresses, demonic rapists and an evil doppelganger of you chasing my girlfriend—
ex-
girlfriend—around the house with a gun. How much of this do we actually believe?”

Melinda set her glass down. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.” She walked out without another word, but returned a moment later jingling a set of car keys. “I’ll drive.”

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t get an answer because she’d left the house by then, again leaving the front door open in an invitation to join her. Tim caught up at the Dodge Charger, sensing that she would have left him standing stupidly at the curb if he’d waited around for an explanation.

She roared down the driveway and seemed to take the first turn on two wheels. Tim watched her distractedly driving with one hand and pressing the other against one breast, a move that would have been erotic in other settings. Here and now, it looked a little strange.

She said, “If there’s any truth to what we’re saying, then the church’s victims might be empowered by knowing that their minds are being manipulated. That what they’re seeing and feeling isn’t real. Does that make sense?”

Tim thought about how strong Patty felt after “defeating,” or at least surviving, whatever it was that she thought she’d been up against. “I suppose so,” he said, a little doubtfully.

“Then I know someone who needs to hear what we have to say.”

“Who?”

“Germaine Marberry. By double-teaming her, we just might convince her that she’s not losing her mind or facing some unbeatable foe. But we have no time to lose.”

Tim found his foot stomping an imaginary brake as they careened around corners and swerved through traffic in her muscle car. “We couldn’t have called first?” he asked.

“She wouldn’t have picked up. She doesn’t have a cell phone and I don’t think her landline’s even plugged in anymore.”

“Let’s get there alive,” Tim muttered.

She picked up her BlackBerry and started scrolling through it.

“Please tell me you’re not into texting and driving,” Tim said.

“One of my errands this morning,” she said, “was to start making phone calls from a list that Melvin Frost put together prior to my visit.”

“What kind of list?”

“The former members of his congregation. I rounded up addresses and phone numbers wherever possible. Some had died and others had moved out of state.” She dropped the phone as she hauled on the steering wheel and fought it into a turn that shook the car and rattled the contents of Tim’s stomach. Tim groped for the phone and gave it back to her before she tried to do the same. “Anyway, I made eight or nine phone calls and actually spoke with four former congregants.”

Tim couldn’t decide if he wanted to hear it. “What happened?” She’d tell him anyway.

“One guy died seven years ago, but I chatted with his daughter. A heart attack did him in, right around the time of Frost’s outburst. You could make the argument, I suppose, that
something
gave him the coronary. If you know what I’m saying.”

“Yeah. Something like heredity, poor diet and lack of exercise,” Tim grumped.

“Okay, but that’s not all. I also talked with a woman who proved to be something of a busybody. Lot of time on her hands. I didn’t tell her much except that I was a police officer closing the file on the Frost case, but that was more than enough to get her going. Nothing bad had happened to her personally, but it turns out she’d kept in touch with several former church members. One cancer death, two divorces, several job losses.”

Cancer. Family dysfunction. Unemployment. Demons of modern living, Tim thought. Nothing you could pin on the supernatural—if that’s what they were trying to do.

Melinda glanced at him. “Don’t look so glum. I saved the best for last.”

“I need it.”

“I almost didn’t get it from the busybody, a Mrs. Phelps.” Melinda played with the window and fidgeted with the airflow knob. Tim wondered if she was building up the suspense on purpose or merely too nervous to jump right in. “Just before hanging up the phone, Mrs. Phelps recalled an incident that had happened a couple months before Frost went off the deep end. Let’s see.”

Melinda raised the BlackBerry to her face, evidently the storage depot for her notes, while the Dodge shimmied about, more or less in its own lane. “Oh, that’s right,” she murmured. “The DA’s office took its time deciding whether to prosecute, and when they dropped the case the story just fizzled.”

“Just tell me,” said Tim, annoyed.

“Okay…it goes something like this. This couple’s married for like, I don’t know, fifteen years? Things seem to be going okay until they join the Church of Christian Whatever, different sect, same building on Utica Lane. Soon, the police start paying regular visits because of all the shouting, loud enough to scare the neighbors. There’s heavy drinking involved, but apparently no physical violence. So early one morning this guy calls the police, still sounding bleary and hungover, but quite troubled, according to the 911 tape. Almost there.”

The sudden transition threw Tim until he saw that they were almost on Broadview Road.

“Anyway,” she continued, “the couple’s car is in the garage, out of gas. Garage door’s down, ignition switch is on, the guy’s wife stiff in the passenger seat.”

Tim felt his stomach flop. “Go on,” he said as Melinda wound her way down one residential street, then another.

She shrugged. “He says they got home drunk the night before, so plastered that he doesn’t recall much. They’d been bickering and he supposed he might have stumbled out of the car without shutting off the engine. According to him, she was still alert and sulking at the time, so he went inside without her and almost immediately passed out.”

They pulled up to the curb in front of the Marberry bungalow on Natchez. The lawn was overgrown and the dandelions had taken over.

“Funny he remembered to shut the garage door, but not to turn off the engine,” Tim said.

“Lots of things funny. If we could have proven she was passed out when he left her sitting there, we might have pushed for at least negligent homicide. But even though her blood-alcohol content read high enough that blackout was possible, that cuts both ways. A good defense attorney would have used it to suggest it meant she was fully conscious but had the hindered judgment to stay in a garage rapidly filling with fumes. Besides, his blood alcohol reading would have more or less matched hers, proving they were both just alcohol stupid. I think most folks would have figured they both got punished enough.”

Tim listened to the car tick down as he scanned the curtained bungalow windows for signs of life. “This guy, the widower,” he said. “Have you talked with him?”

“Not yet, but I had a nice little chat with his wife.”

Tim watched her, stunned. “His what?”

Melinda chuckled. “No, not at a séance. His
second
wife. He remarried a couple years ago. She didn’t really open up to me at first, but once I won her trust she admitted that hubby walked out on her awhile ago and went back to his old house.”

“His old house?”

Melinda sighed. “Apparently he never sold the place after his first wife’s death. Probably tried, but look at the real estate market. Add to that the fact that the previous owner died under mysterious circumstances in the garage. That, or he just simply couldn’t let go. Probably a pretty tragic tale if I had the time for it, but the long and the short of it is that the current marriage isn’t going so well, so he moves back in with the memories of his dearly departed.”

Tim thought about it. “With this guy’s association with the Reverend Frost and the church way back when, I’d love to talk with him.”

“You already have.”

“You lost me.”

She smiled. “He’s not real memorable, but I believe you’ve already met him.” She tossed her phone behind her as she reached to the backseat to retrieve her briefcase. She buried her head in it, shuffling through file folders and loose pages. “I met him at the church memorial service for Travis Kendall, and I saw you exchanging a word or two with him too, at some point.”