One Last Scream (29 page)

A few times, Uncle Duane came with them. Those nights always took longer. And he smelled bad in the car on the way home.

Her father always called it his
work
.

It wasn’t until a few years after her mother died that her father began to take his work home with him. The longest he ever kept one of them in that fallout-shelter-turned-dungeon was eleven days and nights and that was Tracy Eileen Atkinson. There was something about her that he liked more than the others. For a while, she’d thought he’d never grow tired and bored with Tracy. But he did.

She’d snuck down into the basement and peeked in on her father as he finished Tracy off with his hunting knife. One quick stroke across the neck. She still remembered the startled look in Tracy’s eyes, the thin crimson line across her throat that suddenly unleashed a torrent of blood.

That was when she first coveted her father’s hunting knife. She was thirteen years old at the time.

She still hadn’t tried it out on anyone, yet. Karen was going to be her very first kill with the old knife. She’d had it in her robe pocket when she’d
accidentally
stumbled into Karen’s bedroom late last night. But the joke had been on her. She’d had no idea Karen had been sleeping with a gun beside her.

Two days before, she’d thought she had Karen cornered in the basement of that rest home. But Blade had botched it.

Returning to Karen’s house this afternoon, she’d figured the third attempt would be the charm. But she hadn’t figured on finding Karen gone, and the housekeeper with those two brats here in her place.

She stared at Jessie, hovering over the counter, her back to her. Outside, the children were howling, trying to get the dog to bark. She glanced inside her purse again.

No reason she still couldn’t break in her father’s old hunting knife, no reason at all.

“So honey, where have you been all day, for Pete’s sake?” Jessie asked, pulling something else out of the cupboard. “Karen and your uncle have been calling just about everyone and asking if they’ve seen you. They didn’t leave one turn unstoned as my Aunt Agnes used to say….”

“I borrowed Shane’s car and went for a long drive,” she replied coolly. She studied the way the chubby housekeeper was bent over the counter, and how she had the glasses lined up. She couldn’t see what Jessie was doing. Something was wrong.

Getting to her feet, she stepped up behind Jessie, and purposely bumped her in the arm, hard.

Jessie let out a little gasp, and a prescription bottle flew out of her hand. It rolled across the kitchen counter, and about a dozen light blue cylindrical tablets spilled out.

“Oops!” Jessie said, with a jittery laugh. “Look what you went and did. My arthritis medicine, I forgot to take it this morning.”

She swiped the prescription bottle off the counter, and glanced at the label. “This is diazepam,” she said, locking eyes with Jessie. “It’s a sedative. And they’re not yours. They’re for the old man in the rest home, Karen’s father. That was a silly mistake.”

Jessie nodded and laughed again. “I’ll say. I must be getting senile.” She stirred the lemonade in the pitcher, and the ice cubes clinked against the glass.

She put the prescription bottle down. “The lemonade’s ready, Jessie.” She reached inside her purse again. “Why don’t you call the kids in? And leave the dog outside, okay?”

“They have old yearbooks there at the high school library, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” George allowed.

Her back pressed against the phone booth’s glass wall, Karen nervously tugged at the metal phone cord. “Could you get Annabelle’s teacher to show you pictures of those girls who disappeared, and then make photocopies? You said she taught some of them….”

“Yes,” he answered tentatively. “But why do you want their pictures?”

Karen hesitated. She was thinking about one of Amelia’s earliest memories: waiting alone in a car by a forest trail at night and hearing a woman scream.
When the screaming stops, then we can go home.

“It might sound a little crazy,” she said at last. “But I think if we showed pictures of those young women to Amelia, she might remember some of them.”

“Karen, these girls were all abducted between Salem and Eugene,” he pointed out. “I told you, the Schlessingers put Amelia up for adoption while they were still in Moses Lake. How do you expect her to remember things that happened in Salem when she’s never even been here? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But I think Amelia has some sort of window into what’s happening in her sister’s world. She might even believe it’s happening to her. I’m not sure I even understand it myself. But I have a feeling Mr. Schlessinger was somehow involved in the disappearance of these young women. If Annabelle knew about it, then Amelia might recognize one of those yearbook portraits. It might even trigger a memory. It could be the key that unlocks a lot of doors.”

George sighed on the other end of the line. “I think I understood about ten percent of what you just said. But I have every confidence in you, Karen. I’ll make the photocopies for you.”

“Thanks, George,” she said.

She didn’t know how to explain it to him. She didn’t understand it herself. How could Amelia have these premonitions, recollections, and sensations when all the while these things were happening to her sister, Annabelle? If Annabelle had indeed killed Amelia’s family and Koehler, why did Amelia blame herself for those murders?

She’d told Karen that she’d felt the blood splatter on her face while shooting her parents and aunt. She said she’d used her dad’s hunting rifle. “It felt like someone hitting me in the shoulder with a baseball bat every time I fired it.”

Karen wondered how Amelia could feel those sensations.

Yet, it made sense somehow. During their first therapy session together, Amelia had described one of her early phantom pains—a severe burning sensation on the back of her wrist. She’d said it felt like someone was putting out a lit cigar on her. And just minutes ago, George had told her about Annabelle’s bracelet. She’d worn it to hide an ugly burn mark on the back of her wrist from a childhood accident.

George obviously thought she was crazy to imagine Amelia might
recollect
those missing young women, because of her special connection with Annabelle. There was no easy way to explain. It was a phenomenon that had mystified Karen years before she’d even met Amelia, back when she’d been in graduate school. Trying to explain it was almost like solving an old riddle:
Why did the twin in Zurich have a fever and feel abdominal pains?

“Karen, are you still there?” George asked.

“Um, yes, I’m here.”

“So, you think Amelia and Annabelle’s father was somehow involved in these disappearances,” he said. “Well, I’m with you on that. Sure seems like an awfully weird coincidence to me. The first girl vanished about a year after Lon and his family moved here. And the last one disappeared a week before the fire that killed him. Plus, if what you say is true, and Annabelle is still alive out there killing people, well, it would explain some of her behavior, wouldn’t it? The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Like father, like daughter,” Karen said. “Another thing, if young women started to disappear after Lon moved to the Salem area, they must have
stopped
disappearing somewhere else.”

“Moses Lake,” George murmured.

“Caroline mentioned that in Moses Lake a neighbor man had molested Amelia.”

“That’s right,” George said. “The cops later found out he was also responsible for abducting and murdering a waitress. Do you think Lon was somehow involved in that, too?”

“Maybe,” Karen said into the phone. “It’s worth checking out.”

She thought about those memory fragments from Amelia’s childhood. In one of them, Amelia’s mother had her in the bathroom and she was asking the child, stripped to her underwear, “Did he touch you down there?” But Amelia had no memory of ever being molested.

“Can you ask Caroline if she knows whether or not this neighbor man was a Native American?” Her hand tight around the receiver, she listened to George murmuring to Annabelle’s teacher.

After a moment, he got back on the line. “No, Caroline says Joy didn’t mention anything about race, just that he was a neighbor.”

“Then Caroline probably wouldn’t know the name of the Moses Lake waitress who was murdered,” Karen concluded.

She heard George talking to Annabelle’s teacher again. Then he came back on the line. “Sorry. Joy didn’t go into that much detail when she told Caroline the story.”

But Karen wanted the details. The incident with the neighbor in Moses Lake had traumatized Amelia to the point that she had to be separated from her family. And yet, she had no clear memory of it or of the family she’d lost.

Lon Schlessinger had shot the neighbor dead. And this neighbor had apparently abducted and killed a local woman. Such a story would have been in the newspapers, at least, the local newspapers.

“Listen, George, I’m heading to the Wenatchee library,” she said. “I want to find out more about this incident with the neighbor. Maybe there’s something about it in the old Wenatchee papers.”

“If it’s any help,” he said, “Amelia was officially adopted in April of ’93, and she spent a few weeks in foster homes before that. So the incident with the neighbor couldn’t have happened any time after February.”

“Thanks. I’ll start in February ’93, and work backward until I find something. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for young women missing-person cases in the area, too. I’ll call you the minute I find something. I should be able to reach you on my cell once I’m out of these woods.”

“Okay. Be careful,” he said.

“Don’t worry about me, I’m fine,” Karen said.

“Be careful anyway. I keep thinking about Helene Sumner, and how she spotted Amelia at the lake house this morning. It could have been Annabelle, you know. And she could still be around there.” George paused. “Watch out for yourself, Karen.”

Karen had been right about Amelia. There was something wrong with her.

She stood too close, still clutching her purse and occasionally peeking inside it as if she were hiding some secret treasure in there. And then that strange smirk on her face, it was so unlike the Amelia she knew.

“Oh, let’s give the kids a few more minutes outside with Rufus,” Jessie said, forcing a chuckle. She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “They’re having a blast, and that pooch hasn’t seen this much attention since God knows when.” She nervously gathered up the light blue pills from the kitchen counter.
Nice try, old girl
, she thought.

Karen had cautioned Jessie that Amelia might be dangerous, and said to call her immediately if she should happen to run into the 19-year-old. Jessie hadn’t taken the warning too seriously.
Amelia, dangerous? That sweet thing
?

But then, suddenly, the young lady showed up in Karen’s kitchen. No doorbell, no knocking, she just waltzed right into the house, bold as you please. Brazen as the guts of Jesse James, as her Aunt Agnes used to say. That was the first sign that something wasn’t right.

So Jessie closed the kitchen door, to discourage Jody and little Steffie from coming inside, and to keep them out of harm’s way.

The young woman in Karen’s kitchen seemed too hard-edged and cold. Though unable to put her finger on it, Jessie detected something
off
about her, the strange way she acted, looked, and talked. Then Jessie caught a glimpse of something glistening in her purse. It was a knife.

She remembered Karen’s warning. She also remembered where she’d last seen those light-blue pills that had made old Frank so dopey and tired. They were in the spice cabinet, beside the aspirin and Karen’s vitamins. She thought she was being so clever with the lemonade routine. If Amelia was indeed dangerous, sedating her was one way to nip the situation in the bud and not do anyone harm. Jessie figured that once Amelia was down for the count, she could call Karen, and the police, if necessary.

But she’d been foiled even before slipping the stuff in her surprise guest’s glass.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Trying not to shake, Jessie dropped the diazepam tablets back inside the prescription bottle. She could hear Jody and Stephanie in the backyard, laughing, and barking along with Rufus.

Leaning against the counter, the young woman picked up one pill Jessie had missed. “Why were you trying to drug me, Jessie?” she asked. She handed her the tablet. “Did Karen warn you that I might be unstable?”

“What in the world are you talking about?” Jessie put the prescription bottle away, and then moved to the refrigerator. “That’s just silly,” she added, plucking a lemon from the shelf. She closed the refrigerator door, and reached for the knife rack.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Suddenly the girl grabbed her by the wrist. She hit Jessie in the chest with her elbow. Whether or not it was an accident, it hurt like hell.

Jessie staggered back, and the lemon rolled across the floor. “Good Lord! I was just going to cut up a lemon for the lemonade!” She rubbed her chest and winced.

“It’s a mix. You don’t need to do that,” she shot back. With a quick jerk, she released Jessie’s wrist. “Now, go call the kids in, Jessie. They’ve been out there with that mutt long enough. I’d like to see my little cousins.”

Trying to catch her breath, Jessie glanced toward the backyard.

Rufus started barking furiously. A second later, the front doorbell rang.

Jessie turned toward her. “Well, I—I better answer that before Rufus has the whole neighborhood over here,” she said loudly, competing with all the yelps and barks. Jessie didn’t wait for a response. She swiveled around and quickly headed for the front door, almost expecting the young woman to grab her.

Rufus was going crazy outside. Jessie could hear Jody talking to him. “What is it, boy? What’s going on?” His voice, along with Rufus’s barking, seemed to come from the side of the house now.