The End of the Pier (25 page)

And the source of light was fire. A trooper was signaling him to pull over. He'd barely stopped the Jag before he flung open the door and yelled at Casey to stay back.

“What is it? What is it?” Her voice was raspy, her eyes wide and terror-stricken. “What is it, Chad?” She was starting to cry.

“An accident.” He put his arm around her and told her, please, to stay in the car, knowing she'd get out and follow him. Chad had walked on a few feet before a trooper stopped him: “No farther, bud.” Chad remembered the other cars, the two that had passed him, the teenagers, obviously high on something.

Chad swallowed. “Did anyone get out alive?”

The policeman ignored the question.

“Listen, man! Some of the people who were up ahead of me I knew. Christ, you could at least answer a simple question!”

Chewing gum, the cop adjusted his glasses. “No one would've got out of that hulk.” He nodded towards what remained of an automobile. Chad had never seen a car so completely gutted. Parts of it were flung onto the highway—a tire, a smashed door; the chassis was burnt black.

“Look, officer, can you get any information for me? See, my—mother was driving in a car a few miles ahead of me.” His tone was pleading.

“Just wait a minute.” The trooper's voice was very sympathetic. “What kinda car was she in, son?”

“BMW.” He choked from the heat and smoke.

The cop walked away, talked to a few of the others, then came back. “It wasn't a BMW.” The trooper even sounded relieved. He was probably sick of relaying nothing but bad news. “Sports car. They think a Porsche.” He stuck his hands under his armpits, went back to surveying the black hulk, adding, “Used to be red.”

C
had lunged toward the fire, but the arm shot out to hold him back was like a steel girder. “Jesus, kid, there is
nothing
anybody can do, unless you can maybe walk through fire.” Then the trooper jerked his head around and said, “Take care of your little sister.”

Casey was a few steps behind him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It's Mommy, isn't it?” Her voice was clotted; she gulped in air.

Chad put his arms around her again. Through the thickness of the bathrobe she felt small and bony.

“It's not your mom.”

In another few minutes the flames had nearly subsided. All of them—police, ambulance crew, onlookers—stood transfixed, watching the outline of the gutted car turn to cinders, smoke and ashes drifting up as the flames went down. Cars were still stopping, their drivers and passengers getting out. One of them walked slowly toward the wreck through the shimmering heat.

It was a woman. It was Eva.

•  •  •

She stopped a good ten paces from them, looking over the top of Casey's head directly into Chad's eyes, her own eyes horrified and then, in the play of the last vestige of fire, dark, hollow, gutted. Chad first put his cheek against Casey's soft hair and then dragged her arms from his waist and turned her around. Casey yelled and ran to her.

It was as if the positions had simply reversed, he thought, finding it almost impossible to keep from dropping his eyes.

His thoughts scattered, his eye traveling across the crowd, across the debris, the wet trails left by the hoses, the throbbing lights of police cars, black cars as shiny as patent and headlights streaming across the road. He had misunderstood; he had misunderstood the whole thing.

He looked back at the woman in the old coat who had come here obviously alone, whose silvery hair was suddenly whipped in a wind, and whose white scarf loosened and fluttered away.

He did not know how long they stayed there, watching the fire die in the spill of oil that had run in a jagged circle around the burned-black automobile where the still-persevering firemen in their heavy oilskin kept turning their hoses and moving about.

Under hats that seemed too big for them, the last of the flames reflected across their faces, forming delicate webs of light and dark, and Chad thought of Shadowland.

A
perfect stranger, thought Sam, looking down at the body of Elizabeth Hooper lying on the blood-caked ground. Or what was left of her. Not just her throat was slit; the whole of her had been ravaged, the knife trailing from neck to pubis. She lay in what was left of her slip, brassiere, and panties. Her white coat had been tossed aside. There was no sign of her dress.

All of Sam's men and half the Elton County force were here, even though it was Sam's territory. He had called Sedgewick and asked him for reinforcements, and to bring along his forensics people; the local police hadn't got either the equipment or the expertise that the county police had. His real reason for buttering up the sheriff was to get him over here to see firsthand what Elizabeth Hooper looked like.

Sedgewick stood there, fat and frowning, warming his hands under his armpits, shaking his head. “This here's going to get all the women in a panic. There ain't no way to keep it quiet, her being an out-of-towner. We got reporters from here to kingdom come on our backs.”

“Is that high priority? Don't you think the women around here
should
be locking their doors and not taking midnight walks?”

Sedgewick was hitching up his pants preparatory to an argument, but couldn't get the belt over the beer belly.

“Elizabeth Hooper was from the city, like you said,” Sam continued. “Very quiet, very nice. Had nothing to do with anyone. Just came through once a month on the way to visit her son. Nothing like Perry or Butts—but she was carved up like them, wasn't she? Like them and Nancy Alonzo.”

Sedgewick knew where this was heading now. “Wait one little
minute,
DeGheyn. You trying to tie this up with those others again? You still trying to clear Boy Chalmers? Shit, I'd as soon believe he ex-caped again than go along with your cock-and-bull theories.”

Angry though he was, Sam pulled out his cigarettes, offered one to Sedgewick, who took two and put one behind his ear. They lit up. “But he didn't, did he? This time Chalmers is locked up tight as a tic's ass.” He kept all traces of sarcasm out of his tone and tried to talk in Sedgewick metaphors. Anything to get the sheriff, the mayor, the state's attorney to simply admit the obvious: it'd been somebody else all along, not Boy Chalmers.

It was not going to be easy.

“
Jee
sus, DeGheyn!” Sedgewick tried to shrug it off with an artificial little laugh. “You'll not be satisfied until you can turn up a serial killer, will you?”

“I'd be satisfied, Sheriff.” Sam's smile was thin. “But would he?”

Sedgewick looped his thumbs in his wide belt and ignored that. “Four homicides in . . . what? Three years? Hardly New York City, is it?”

“Five, Sedgewick.”

“Huh?” He chewed his tobacco a little more slowly, studied Sam warily, as if Sam might try and put something over on him.

“Eunice Hayden.”

“Wha . . .
hell
you talking about?”

“Five murders in four years. Kind of a distressing regularity to it, wouldn't you say?”

Sedgewick's jaw stopped working, and he spat. “Shee-it. That girl was totally different. She was just a kid. And she wasn't raped, neither,” he added lamely. To get off the Hayden murder and to show Sam the wheels were turning, he said, “What I wonder is, where in hell's Hooper's clothes? Her dress, I mean? Now
that
ain't never happened before, so this one maybe makes me think the killer's got—what d'ya call it? Got a fetish. Yeah. A fetish.” He
licked his lips and chewed his gum faster, as if savoring the word. “Know what I think? I think this might've been one of them city psychos followed the woman here. Maybe she had problems with some weirdo back in the city. After all, what do you know about her?” He seemed rather proud of that insight and even favored Sam with a tight smile because he thought he'd put another dent in Sam's argument. Then he moved away when one of his men called him.

Sam didn't reply. He supposed he should be thankful that this homicide had happened in the woods, away from the La Porte citizens, who all still slept snugly in their beds. And the police ambulance had come from the other direction, the direction of Hebrides. Why Dr. Hooper had been walking along this narrow dirt path, he couldn't imagine. Walking this path in the woods, at this late hour . . . Maybe she couldn't sleep.

And Sedgewick did have a point. What did he know about Elizabeth Hooper? Only that she'd been stopping in La Porte for over a year, it must be, stopping on her way to her son's school. Maud had told him that. Sam had seen Dr. Hooper ten, maybe a dozen times, usually in the Rainbow, where she appeared to have carved out a little niche for herself, sitting there at the counter beside Ulub and Ubub, or Dodge, or Wade, or Sims. Being polite when Dodge addressed a question to her. Polite as could be, but not really answering.

She talked to Maud, though; whatever Sam had learned about her, he'd learned from Maud. How she'd given up custody of her son, behavior that to Maud might as well have been extraterrestrial. Otherworldly stuff, something as foreign, Maud had said, as that spacecraft in
Close Encounters.
Sam had told her he thought that was a peculiar analogy.

Well, she'd said, people just floated off, came back, floated off again, so that you'd almost think that there were these other worlds they went to, places we had no knowledge of. (It always came to “we”; Sam had to be as ignorant of these things as Maud herself,
he'd noticed.) There was this place Chad's friend lived—Belle Harbor. Maud in her fantasies would have Belle Harbor on another planet. Sam had reminded her that it was a place pretty much the size of La Porte, only a little over a hundred and fifty miles up the coast. It was inland, too, like La Porte. But it was much, much richer.

Looking down at the body of Elizabeth Hooper, he thought about Fate. Rarely did Sam think fatalistically, and never about Fate with a capital F, as he did this night. Why had she stopped here in La Porte? Elizabeth Hooper could easily have chosen the rich, chic Belle Harbor as her getting-off point. Its huge lots, spangled with lakes, were full of large, dazzling white houses, marinas, slips for yachts on the bayside—a rich person's paradise. Dr. Hooper looked rich; Dr. Hooper had class.

Dr. Hooper was dead.

Right now there were twenty or so men fanned out through the wood. No one had come up with anything. Sam stood there looking down at the body, at the face that bore no sign of a hellish attack. He always thought she'd been a truly beautiful woman, and likable too, even though she didn't start up conversations, just came into the café once a month, like clockwork. He heard the soft plop of a pine cone, thought about her son. Jesus, how was the kid going to handle this?

Was there anything much worse than the death of your mother? Mothers weren't supposed to die. He thought of the way his own mother had one night slipped away in her sleep. It was he who'd found her, and he went on and on, talking to the woman in the bed, raising the window blind, telling her it was a perfect October day, denying, denying, denying. When his sister had come into the room, Sam was still talking, asking questions.
“Right, Mom?”
Stuff like that. His sister was ten years older, and strong, but it took all of her power to get her screaming seven-year-old brother out of the room.

The stretcher bearers had moved the body onto the canvas and
were taking Elizabeth Hooper away. It just didn't make any sense; there was no order in it. Maybe, he thought, as he watched the stretcher disappear into the woods, he could get Sedgewick to postpone the inevitable telephone call, either to the ex-husband or (God help us) to her son. He could drive up there. Maybe he could get Maud to go with him; if anyone could feel her way into a kid's head, it was Maud.

Sam wondered if he should call Chad. Maud was going to be horribly upset about the murder of Elizabeth Hooper. Elizabeth Hooper was perhaps Maud's favorite person, next to Sam, next to Chad. Sam was unreasonably irritated that Chad wasn't here right now, as if in some way Chad's presence could cancel out the terrible sorrow of Elizabeth Hooper's son. For Sam bet that in the last analysis the boy probably loved his mother, who'd left him, more than his father, who'd stayed.

And he wondered, as he had often done, what it would be like to be a father, a parent. That kind of love was very strange. It was almost like the better you were at it, the less you were needed. It was like a judgment.

“Well, well, I do declare. Never seen a grown man cry.”

The sheriff was back. Sam's collar felt damp, and when he put his hand to his face it came away wet.

“Even you, Sedgewick—even you must have had a mother. Fuck off.”

Sam turned and walked to his patrol car.

H
e had washed the blue dress carefully and was nearly finished ironing it, and just as carefully. He wasn't used to ironing, and it would be sacrilege to leave a scorch mark on it.

Finally, he held it up. Clean as clean could be. Not a wrinkle.

He took pillows from the couch and from one of the other bedrooms and, together with the blue dress, went to his own bedroom.

Very carefully, he stuffed the dress. The smaller pillows he shoved up to near the neck to fill out the bustline. The bigger ones he put up the skirt. He wished he'd taken the bra and panties, too, but he hadn't, so you make do with what you have.

Once it was stuffed, he laid it down on his bed. Then he undressed and got into the double bed himself. He wound his arms around the blue dress and started crying, crying for all he was worth.

She
would understand.
She
would say the right thing.
She
could explain how life wasn't crazy, even if it looked that way, that God had a pattern and, crazy as life seemed down here, it would all come out. It would come out almost like sins did in the confessional. How he wanted to crawl inside her. He could cut a hole in the first pillow underneath the skirt; he could get the scissors and cut a hole, he could