Slice (20 page)

F
ORTY-THREE

T
hat night, Jessie sat at the kitchen table and sipped her tea, trying to steady her nerves. She'd finally had to ask Aunt Paulette to leave her alone for a bit. The older woman had just kept going on about her dream and how the tall, dark man was a threat to Jessie and Abby. With everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, Jessie just couldn't abide her aunt's psychic babble anymore. Normally she tried to keep an open mind and not pass judgment, the way Mom used to do. But this evening Jessie just had just snapped. She was frightened. And Aunt Paulette was making it worse.

For now, there was just one thing on Jessie's mind.

Who had been in her house? And why had they gone through her drawers and closets?

She hadn't found anything missing. Of course, she couldn't be exactly sure. Was all her underwear accounted for? A few pairs seemed to be missing—but who kept track of how many pairs of panties and nylons they had? And surely some intruder wasn't going to break into the house just to steal her underwear. Rather, Jessie thought the motive had been to scare her.

If so, the intruder had been successful.

Was it the same person who'd killed Inga? Was he trying to scare her now into leaving? Or to send a message that she was next?

Emil. In her mind's eye, she kept seeing Emil.

But Emil was dead. The police of two countries, Mexico and the United States, had confirmed it.

She thought about calling the cops, but decided against it for the moment. She couldn't bear having any more policemen traipsing through the house.

But there was another reason she didn't call. Deep down, Jessie worried that she was losing her mind. She had almost done so before, during those first months in New York, when she'd hallucinated all sorts of things. She had seen Emil every time she'd looked out the window. She had seen her bloodied miscarried son screaming in Abby's crib. Might she be losing it again now, stressed out by Inga's murder and Abby's imaginary playmate? Might these things have sent her down crazy lane again?

Might she herself have overturned her drawers and emptied her closet—and not remembered it?

“No,” she whispered to herself, rubbing her temples. “I didn't do it. I'm not imagining things.”

It was Abby who was imagining things. After meeting with Mrs. Whitman, Jessie had spoken with the school psychologist, Dr. Ed Bauer. He'd told Jessie that it sounded as if Jessie's exploits the night before had been a form of sleepwalking. She may have technically been awake and aware of what she was doing, but her mind was responding to dream-like stimuli—her imaginary friend, the one she called Aaron.

But
was
he imaginary? Jessie couldn't forget Gert Gorin's absolute insistence that she had seen the boy—not once, but twice. Mrs. Whitman had said Gert wasn't to be trusted. She was a hysteric. Maybe so. But Jessie knew that Inga had seen the boy, too, on one of the first days after they'd moved here. Inga had watched Jessie and the boy wander down to the brook. Inga wasn't a hysteric. She was a sensible, very level-headed young woman. Inga had seen the boy, so Jessie had to believe he was real.

Then why did Mrs. Whitman describe Abby as talking to herself—to an imaginary friend—in class?

“Maybe it's both,” Jessie said out loud, running her fingers over the sleek titanium of her laptop, which she knew wouldn't be opened again today. “Maybe there's a real boy that Abby has met sometimes, and liked—and when he's not around, she talks to him, imagining he's there.”

Yes, that had to be the answer, Jessie thought.
Aaron must be a real kid. He just doesn't go to Independent Day. Abby imagines he does because she wishes he did. She wishes her friend could be with her in school.

Jessie's heart lifted. That had to be the answer.

So the next step was to find where this little boy lived in town.

A thought occurred to Jessie. Might Aaron have been the culprit who messed up her room? Just why a little boy would do such a thing, Jessie had no idea. But right now she was trying to force all the pieces of the puzzle together, even if they didn't fit.

A couple of hours ago, when she'd picked Abby up after school, Jessie had made no further inquiries about Aaron. She was glad that Abby didn't ask why she'd been by to talk to her teacher. But the little girl understood that there were repercussions for her behavior the night before. Jessie had explained that her punishment for leaving the house and going to the barn was that she had to stay in her room the whole weekend. She couldn't go outside and play. No swinging on the swings, no walking to the brook. Abby had accepted her punishment without protest. So right after dinner, she'd gone back up to her room, where Jessie had given her a pile of books to read.

A sudden rapping on the door startled Jessie, and she looked up quickly.

In the orange backlight of the setting sun she recognized John Manning through the window, standing on her doorstep. The fading sunlight rendered him mostly a silhouette, and suddenly fear crept back up Jessie's throat.

Aunt Paulette's warning about a tall, dark man.

That described John Manning quite aptly.

Jessie stood and went to the door.

“Hello,” she said through the screen.

“Good evening,” her neighbor said. “I hope I'm not disturbing you.”

“I was just having a cup of tea.”

Manning smiled. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. I had a visitor earlier today in the person of Mrs. Gertrude Gorin. Apparently she's going around the neighborhood trying to locate a little boy.” He paused. “She told me all about Abby's experience in the old barn last night.”

Jessie sighed. “Yes. It was a long night. And I think that means I'm turning in early tonight.”

“Is there anything I can do? Anything at all?”

Jessie regarded him. Even in the shadows, his eyes still burned. His voice sounded sincere, but could she trust him? “A tall, dark man is coming,” Aunt Paulette had told her, “and he is dangerous to you and Abby.” Had this tall, dark man been upstairs earlier today—going through Jessie's lingerie?

She shuddered. “I'm fine, thank you, Mr. Manning.”

“Please call me John,” he said.

“I'm fine, John. I appreciate your concern. But right now . . . all I want to do is go to bed.”

“Of course. I just wanted to come by and offer my services. Good night, Jessie.”

Jessie closed the door. She watched until she was certain that Manning had returned to his own yard. Then she double-bolted both her back and front doors, and made sure every window was locked. Damn that security firm for being so slow.

Then she went upstairs and, even before the sun had fully set, thankfully fell into a dreamless sleep.

F
ORTY-FOUR

A
t just about five minutes past seven, Theresa Whitman finally finished up the last of her paperwork in her office. She was glad to be done with it all—the grading and the evaluations and the forms—very pleased that she didn't have to carry it home with her to work on over the weekend. She'd been teaching kindergarten now for almost twenty years, and never could she remember having to fill in so much paperwork. The bureaucracy of the school committee was getting ridiculous. It used to be just a matter of grading a child's drawings and evaluating their first halting attempts at printing. Now she had to fill out form after form about what they had learned each day, and how each child had responded to every lesson.

Mrs. Whitman slipped the forms into a large manila envelope and sealed it. Across the front she wrote
Whitman, Morning Kindergarten
in her large, perfect penmanship. She stood up from her desk and carried the envelope out into the hall, where she dropped it through the slot on the door of the administrator's office. The school was utterly quiet. She realized everyone had gone home by now. Mrs. Whitman suspected she was the only person still at the school.

Walking down the hall to her classroom, Theresa Whitman sighed. Staying late hadn't really been an inconvenience. What else did she have to do on a Friday night? Ever since her husband, Lester, had died three years ago, Theresa had spent her nights and weekends mostly alone. Her one daughter had moved to Wisconsin. They had never been close. Theresa's whole life was her students. She fussed over all of them. At the moment, the child who concerned her most was little Abby Clarkson. Such a dear child. And yet such a loner. She'd done her best to get the other kids to warm up to Abby, but they seemed swayed by their parents against getting too close. It was so unfair. And now the poor child was sleepwalking, following imaginary friends. It simply broke Mrs. Whitman's heart.

She walked into the kindergarten classroom and tidied up the desks. She erased the letter D from the blackboard, written in pink chalk in both capital and small formations. She was about to gather up her books from her desk when she heard the sound of the door opening. She looked around.

“Yes?” she asked the new arrival. “May I help you?”

When she didn't get an answer right away, she asked, just the slightest trace of concern in her voice, “How did you get into the school?”

They were the last coherent words Theresa Whitman ever said.

Suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. She looked down to see the long metal blade that had just sliced into her flesh. She watched, in a kind of gauzy, slow-motion awareness, as the blood began to stain her white blouse after the blade was withdrawn.

Mrs. Whitman's knees crumpled and she fell to the floor.

Her eyes looked up into the face of her killer as the razor blade swung down again across her neck. Theresa Whitman tried to scream, but her throat was filled with blood.

F
ORTY-FIVE

S
itting at her dining table, reading the tarot, Paulette suddenly felt the sting of a blade against her throat. She called out in terror. Her hand flew to her throat, but nothing was there.

Rising quickly, she hurried over to the window to look out at Jessie's house. Everything seemed peaceful over there. The lights were all out. Jessie had called to say that she was exhausted and she was going to sleep early.

Let her sleep. She needed it. But Paulette would stay awake, She planned to keep a vigil all night, watching Jessie's house.

The dark man was coming.

Maybe not tonight.

But he was coming.

F
ORTY-SIX

“
S
ame modus operandi,” Wolfie told Knotts, standing over the body of the dead teacher. “Exactly the same as the German girl.”

“Well, not exactly, Wolfie,” his partner pointed out. “No wounds on the thighs.”

“But there's a wound in the abdomen.” He bent down, pointing to the hardened purple blood coagulating on the Mrs. Whitman's blouse. “This is what brought her down. Just as the wounds on the German girl's thighs brought
her
down. Then, in both cases, the killer moved in to slice open the throat.”

Wolfie stood up and let the coroner's department move in.

A janitor had found Mrs. Whitman's body around eleven-thirty. It was now almost one o'clock. Wolfie had gotten the call at home. He'd been awake, unable to sleep, watching an old Henry Fonda movie on Turner Classics. The one about the jury. Wolfie had known right away that the two murders were connected, as soon as he'd learned the teacher's throat had been cut.

“I wonder if John Manning will have a better alibi this time,” he mused to Knotts.

“You know, Wolfie, I think you might have developed a bit of an obsession with that guy,” Knotts said. “I mean, what kind of connection does Manning have to some kindergarten teacher? He doesn't have any kids. Isn't it kind of a stretch to suspect that he has something to do with this?”

“Listen to me, Knotts. I got the report back from the FBI. For whatever reason, they couldn't confirm to me that it was Manning their agents had identified in Mexico on the day Emil Deetz was killed in that police ambush. They made a lot of noise about national security classified information, and I argued back that this was a murder investigation! They got very silent, and I asked them if they could at least eliminate Manning as a suspect, by telling me he was
not
the person identified in that report. And they said they couldn't eliminate him for me.”

“That's not saying much,” Knotts argued. “That's just Bureau bureaucracy doublespeak.”

“Come on, Knotts! Manning has a dossier about Deetz and the Screech Solek murder in his house! He buys the property next door to Deetz's ex-girlfriend, and then the ex-girlfriend's nanny gets murdered with the same MO as Solek, and now the ex-girlfriend's kid's teacher gets the same treatment!”

“But what would Manning have against an old lady like Theresa Whitman?”

Wolfie gave his partner a patient smile. “That's what we're supposed to find out. That's why we're the detectives.”

Honestly, sometimes Knotts could be so dim.

“But aren't we supposed to follow the leads wherever they take us,” Knotts asked, “even if they take us off a path we thought was the right one?”

“Manning is the right path. Trust me, Knotts!”

Knotts just shrugged. “The chief isn't so sure. . . .”

“The chief has her head so far up her ass she can't see straight.”

“So when are you going to ask Manning about that collection of articles he has on Deetz? Don't you think we really ought to question him on that before he slips town or something? I mean, I know we had to wait until we got more information, but it seems we've hit a brick wall on more information. So don't you think we ought to nail him down about that as soon as possible?”

Jesus Christ, Knotts could be a nag sometimes. “Yeah, yeah, I've got that planned,” Wolfie said. “We're going out there in the morning. It's time to get some answers.” He smiled. “From both Mr. Manning and his pretty next-door neighbor.”