The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (25 page)

Peck nodded and made a gesture for her to continue.

“I’m telling you what happened, for better or worse. You don’t need your police hat right now. You need your
believing
hat. This little slice of family history shows that I’m done hiding, and I got no interest in lies. You might want to bear that in mind as we move along.”

Peck nodded again.

“I kept being pregnant from Daddy for as long as I could. But a woman will usually show sooner with her second child, and by four months not even the biggest of my dresses could hide the bump. Daddy didn’t take it well. I never told him that Gordy was the father—never told nobody, until now—but he wanted blood, just the same. He got into a lot of fistfights around town, and I guess he spent a few nights in those cells you have downstairs. I tried to stay out of his way. There’s a clearing in Brack Wood where the sun shines in and the flowers grow long and pretty, and I’d go there all the time—just sit and daydream with my hands curled around my belly. I wouldn’t go home ‘til after dark when I knew Daddy would be passed out drunk. But I couldn’t avoid him all the time and he found ways to hurt me. One time he suffocated me with a pillow. Held it over my face until the whole world faded, then took it away at the last moment. Another time he pinned me to the kitchen floor and shouted hateful things at my belly—shouted until his throat split like old wood. I’ve never hated him more.”

Mary took one hand from the table and stroked her stomach. A soothing, circular motion. She looked at Peck and then away. The tears came again. These bigger, slower. She let them run down her face and drop from her chin.

“Ain’t life a string of woe?” she said.

“It can get better,” Peck said.

She shook her head as if she didn’t believe that, and Peck could hardly blame her. She could live until everything about her withered, but might always feel that contentment was like the clothes they’d appropriated from the lost and found: not hers by right, something she’d never grow in to.

“If the best God can do for me is a few tall flowers in the wood, I fear He may be outgunned.” A stiff, bitter smile. Her yellow teeth gleamed. “The devil has cast a wider net, and left a deeper mark.”

Peck bridged his fingers. He still smelled smoke when he inhaled.

“Heavenly is a small town and people talk. I could hear the whispers from my house. A sound like bugs in the grass. And the way you all looked at me. Part wonder. Part sympathy. The way you’d look at someone born with a deformity. It’s no wonder I didn’t come looking for help.” She uttered a brittle laugh. “But for all the talk, you got no clue how bad it was. I spent my days in fear and always crying. Then Cindy came along and I feared for her, too. But abuse isn’t like an uncomfortable pair of boots you can just kick off. It’s like being the passenger in a car speeding the wrong way down the highway. You know there’s hurt ahead, but you’re too scared to jump out. All you can do is hope it slows down, or better still, that it stops completely. Maybe it’s different for other victims, who have more family and friends, or who live in a bigger town. But I don’t know of much beyond Heavenly and Daddy. This is all I got. This is my life.”

Mary drew a long breath. Spittle glimmered on her lips and she wiped her face with baggy sleeves. A little time passed. Peck thought about his wife and boys, relieved to erase—if only for a moment—Beau Roth from his mind. He’d take the boys fishing this weekend, he decided. And tonight, instead of sitting on the porch with a beer or two, he’d hold Gracie. Hold her tight. Grateful that he could.

“Seeing Daddy with Cindy, the way he treated her—the way he
mis
treated her—was bad. Feeling that I couldn’t protect her was worse. And knowing that
I
brought her into this…” She trailed off, wet eyes rolling to the ceiling. “She used to beg me to run away with her. She had it all planned out. We’d leave while Daddy was at work. Hitchhike to Carver, then catch a bus to New York City. We’d be dancers, she said. Pretty as flowers, she said. I recall a time when she took her makeup box and made us both up, and we sat for a long time looking at one another in the mirror. Painted like dolls. It was like looking through a window into what
could
be. Then we turned the radio on and danced until we were short of breath. I’ve never known such joy. Couple nights later, Daddy rolled in drunk and took to us both. He knocked me out cold and when I came to, I saw his ugly bull of a body atop Cindy, pounding into her while she cried and bled. Her eyes met mine and I remembered how we’d looked in the mirror, and I knew then that I had to do something. But Cindy beat me to it. She was gone two days later. Up and left—jumped out of that speeding car. I found a note in her makeup box and it read GONE DANCING with a little X for a kiss. Fourteen years old. I thought the world would tear her to pieces and my heart just broke for her. For
me
, too. I was alone with the monster again. I didn’t think life could get any worse. But I was wrong about that.”

Mary placed her damp hands on the table and they left prints that glimmered in the light. Her breath hitched twice in her chest like a cold engine starting. Tears, still, running from some deep reservoir.

“Cindy came home a few months later.”

#

Flowers with petals like lace, their stems withered, placed in a bunch on the ground. Peck thought:
He cried a lot and died in the night. Daddy buried him in the garden, like a dog with a bone.
Had a feeling that if he dug down just a little way, he’d find a tiny human skeleton. He shook his head and made a note to get on that. Give the boy a decent burial, stone and all, even if he had to pay for it himself.

A pale morning after a night of stripped sleep and Peck was at the Roth place early. Beau’s body had been removed and now all that remained was the burned shell surrounded by yellow tape. It rippled with a sound almost lonesome. There was more at the head of the driveway, tied between trees, where officers had been posted in shifts to keep away prying townsfolk. Peck received the call last night that state police were taking over the investigation, which meant that he could go back to pushing his pen around and attending fundraisers. He turned from the little grave marked only with dry flowers and approached the blackened house. That ammonia smell still touched the air. He looked through the charred window where he had seen Beau’s body hanging. Reddened and blistered but not burned through.
Makes no sense,
Joe Neath had said. Peck looked at his watch. Five of eight. State police would roll in at noon, suited and clean. Until then, this was his.

Perry Horne, the county fire marshal, had called him last night, too. His investigation was hindered by anomalies, cause of the blaze chief among them. “This’ll take some time,” he said. “I’ve known you twenty-some years, Peck, friend and colleague, and I don’t mind telling you I’m at a loss. There’s no obvious origin point, direction of melt is not consistent, and the char patterns—normally clear as footprints—have got me in circles. There’s no evidence of an electrical fault or accelerants, and every room is evenly damaged. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the entire house spontaneously ripped into flames.”

“Can that happen?”

“Well shit, no.” Perry had made an exasperated sound. “Every fire has cause and origin, Peck. But not this one. Not that I can see.”

Peck had asked about Beau’s corpse.

“I’ve got no answer for that, either,” Perry replied. “Second-degree burns are not consistent with the damage to the house. Temperature in there would have been over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. He should have been barbecue.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“The way I see it, the house was deep in flames—the fire department likely rolling into the yard—before Beau was strung up.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Yeah, it is.” And Perry had barked a short, humourless laugh. “This whole thing is one big question mark.”

“There has to be an explanation.”

“When you find it, you let me know.”

Peck walked away from the house and the hard thoughts associated with it, but couldn’t get distance from the latter. They followed him like hungry children. The sun lifted from behind a shelf of cloud on the horizon and his shadow sprang ahead of him. He skirted the infant’s grave and made through the high grass toward a cluster of trees—Brack Wood—with leaves catching the morning light. A vague trail linked the edge of Beau’s lot to the trees, marking Mary’s frequent passage. Peck followed it. The woods smelled of pine and turned earth and the light was a cool, watery green. After a time he came to the clearing Mary spoke of and the flowers were tall. Snakeroot and bellwort and Carolina lily. They nodded their bright, pretty heads. The only sounds were birdsong and the branches whickering.

This was where Mary—and perhaps Cindy, too—had come to escape the monster. A shallow scoop of serenity within their troubled lives. And the earth was fuller, the needles greener, for having absorbed so many daydreams. Peck sat with his back propped against a yellow pine and gathered his knees to his chest. Eyes closed, he sought patience and open-mindedness. Guidance, too. He inhaled the forest smells and they were kind. After a long moment, he opened his eyes and tears spilled onto his cheeks. It occurred to him—and not for the first time—that he could have helped those girls a long time ago.
Should
have.

Peck linked his hands and brought his knuckles to his forehead.

“God hear me…”

He’d tried praying last night. He’d prayed with his wife, their hands joined, but he hadn’t sensed God and it was the same now.

The sun rode higher as he walked back to the house. The day’s heat was already hard. Peck rounded the field and approached from a different direction, more northeasterly. Here the ground was patchy, long grass in places but mostly bare earth cracked and polished by the sun. Peck kept an eye out for carelessly discarded evidence—anything Tyler may have missed. They still hadn’t found Beau’s severed head. The thinking was that—unlike the rest of Beau—it had burned up in the blaze, and that Perry Horne would find his blackened teeth, or the tough knots of his skull, while sifting through the ashes.

Closer to the house, Peck discovered several black tracks in the dry grass. He squatted to his haunches to examine them in more detail. They were each about ten inches long, as wide as his hand and arched on the inside. Eleven in total, tracking away from the Roth place. Peck measured them against his own stride. He touched the scorched grass and smelled his fingers.

Yes, they were burn marks, but they were also footprints.

#

She wore the same clothes as the day before and the same haunted expression. Her hair wasn’t clasped but looped onto her shoulders. It looked a shade lighter.

Peck’s finger paused over the red button on the audio recorder.

“Listen, Mary, the state police will be here this afternoon and they’ll want to question you. They don’t know Heavenly, and they have little patience for small town ways. They’ll be stiff-necked and businesslike. That’s the way they work. The more you tell me now—the more we get on tape—the less you’ll have to tell them. Do you understand?”

Her eyes were heavy and dark. Peck thought she might be the only person in all of Heavenly who’d had less sleep than him.

“You don’t live with Daddy for thirty-two years,” she began with a dry smile, “only to be intimidated by a couple of suit-and-tie cops from the city. They can ask their damn questions, and they can be as businesslike as they please. I’ll tell them everything I know, just like I’m telling you. This investigation won’t depend on my cooperation, but on how quickly you can explain the unexplainable.”

Peck recalled Perry Horne declaring this whole thing one big question mark. He felt something like a knot in his chest.

“Just thought you should know,” he said.

She nodded.

Peck pushed the red button. The tape rolled.

“Do you know how your father died, Mary?”

Her hands were clasped in her lap and she looked at them and when she looked up her eyes fixed on Peck and did not waver. She shook her head once and then, realising this wouldn’t come across on tape, said, “No. I was in the yard at the time.”

“Do you know who killed him?”

“The devil,” she said, still looking at him straight.

“You get a good look at him?” Peck asked. “The devil?”

“
Her.
”

“I’m sorry?”

“Devil’s a she,” Mary said. Another dry smile. “And yeah, I got a good look. She slept under the same roof as me. Baked bread with me. I cooked her meals and washed her clothes.”

“You’re talking about Cindy?”

“I’m talking about the devil,” Mary said. “She just
looked
like Cindy. Same hair, same eyes, same skin. But inside… not my little girl. No, sir.”

Peck took a calming breath. Any other time he would have applied a little pressure—let Mary know that neighbourly indulgence only carried so far. This was not a game, and he was not going to be played with. The mystery of this all stood before him, though, and he could not as yet see around it. He remembered the clearing with its tall flowers, and how he’d prayed for open-mindedness.

“Help me out, Mary,” he said.

Mary sat back in her seat. She still looked at Peck but didn’t really see him. Her expression glazed as her mind drifted elsewhere. Peck sat back in his own seat and it creaked and he waited. Mary shook her head. The tears came again and she didn’t try to wipe them away. It looked like she had her face turned up to the rain. Just her face. She started to speak, but then stopped and broke down. “Not my little girl,” she managed between sobs, and didn’t say anything else for a long time.

Peck fetched her Kleenex and hot coffee in a paper cup and gave her a moment. The clock inched toward noon.

She said once her eyes were damp but not dry, “Cindy came home, but she wasn’t the same. Something had happened to her out there. Wherever she went. She’d moved from being a young girl to a young woman, but it was more than that. A mother knows.”