The Voice of the Night (31 page)

“‘Fraid not. We close at nine, sweep the floor, dust the furniture, and open again at ten.”

“What for?”

“We’ve having a private, invitation-only showing of a new artist.”

“At ten o‘clock at night?”

“It’s supposed to be an elegant after-dinner affair. Guests will have their choice of brandy or champagne. Sound swell to you?”

“I guess.”

She put a daub of mustard on her plate, rolled up a slice of ham, dipped the ham in the mustard, and nibbled daintily. “All of our best local customers are coming.”

“How late will it last?”

“Midnight or thereabouts.”

“Will you come home after that?”

“I expect so.”

He tasted the cheesecake.

“Don’t forget your curfew,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“You be home before dark.”

“You can trust me.”

“I hope so. For your sake, I hope so.”

“Call and check if you want.”

“I probably will.”

“I’ll be here,” he lied.

After she had showered and changed and left for the evening, he went into her room and took the pistol from the dresser drawer. He put it in a small cardboard box. He also put the tape recorder, two flashlights, and a squeeze bottle of ketchup in the box. He took a dish towel out of the linen closet and cut it in half, the long way. He put the two strips of cloth with the other things. He went out to the garage and fetched a coil of rope from the wall, where it had been hanging ever since they moved into the house, and he added that to the bundle.

He had some time to kill before he could set out for the Kingman house. He went to his room and tried to work on one of his monster models. He couldn’t do it. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

An hour before nightfall, he picked up the box that contained the pistol, the tape recorder, and the other items. He left the house and strapped the package to the carrier on his bicycle. He followed an indirect route to the abandoned Kingman house at the top of Hawk Drive, and he was certain he was not followed.

Heather was waiting just inside the front door of the ruined mansion. She stepped out of the shadows when Colin arrived. She was wearing short blue shorts and a long-sleeved white blouse, and she was beautiful.

He put the bicycle on its side, out of sight in the tall dry grass, and he carried the cardboard box inside.

The house was always a strange place, but perhaps even stranger than usual at twilight. The slanting copper sunlight streamed through a few broken, shutterless windows and gave the place a somewhat bloody look. Motes of dust spun lazily in the fading beams. In one corner a huge spider web gleamed like crystal. The shadows crept as if they were living things.

“I look terrible,” Heather said as soon as he joined her in the house.

“You look great. Terrific.”

“My shampoo didn’t work,” she said. “My hair came out all stringy.”

“Your hair is nice. Very nice. You couldn’t ask for prettier hair.”

“He’s not going to be interested in me,” she said, quite sure of that. “As soon as he sees that it’s me you’ve got here, he’ll just turn and walk out.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I really do.” He gave her a warm, tender, lingering kiss. Her lips were soft, tremulous. “Come on,” he said gently. “We have to get the trap set.” He was involving her in an extremely dangerous situation, using her, manipulating her, not unlike Roy had manipulated him, and he hated himself for it. But he didn’t call it off while there was still time.

She followed him, and as he started up the stairs toward the second floor, she said, “Why not down here?”

He stopped, turned, looked down at her. “The shutters have fallen or been torn off almost all the windows on the first floor. If we staged it down there, the lights would be visible outside the house. We might attract someone. Other kids. They might interrupt us before we’ve gotten what we want out of Roy. Some of the rooms on the second floor still have all their shutters.”

“If something goes wrong,” she said, “it would be easier to get away from him if we were on the first floor.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” he said. “Besides, we’ve got the gun. Remember?” He patted the box that he was carrying under his right arm.

He started up the steps again and was relieved to hear her following him.

The second-floor hall was gloomy, and the room he was interested in was dark except for threads of late-afternoon sun around the edges of the bolted shutters. He switched on one of the flashlights.

He had chosen a large bedroom just to the left of the head of the stairs. Ancient, yellowed wallpaper was peeling off the walls and hanging in long loops across the ceiling, like old bunting left over from a festive occasion a hundred years ago. The room was dusty and smelled vaguely of mildew, but it wasn’t littered with rubble as many of the other chambers were; there were only scattered pieces of lath and a few chunks of plaster and a couple of ribbons of wallpaper on the floor along the far wall.

He handed Heather the flashlight and put down the box. He picked up the second light, turned it on, and propped it against the wall so that the beam shone up at the ceiling and was reflected back down.

“It’s a spooky place,” Heather said.

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” Colin said.

He took the tape recorder out of the box and placed it on the floor, near the wall that was opposite the door. He gathered up some of the rubble and carefully arranged it over the small machine, letting only the head of the microphone in the open, and concealing even that in a shadowy little pocket of tangled wallpaper.

“Does it look natural?” he asked.

“I guess so.”

“Look at it closely.”

She did. “It’s okay. It doesn’t look arranged.”

“You can’t see the recorder at all?”

“No.”

He retrieved the second flashlight and shone it on the pile of trash, looking closely for a glint of metal or plastic, a reflection that would betray the trick.

“Okay,” he said at last, satisfied with his work. “I think it’ll fool him. He probably won’t even give it a second look.”

“Now what?” she asked.

“We’ve got to make you look like you’ve been roughed up a bit,” Colin said. “Roy won’t believe a word of it unless you look like you put up a struggle.” He took the squeeze bottle of ketchup out of the box.

“What’s that for?”

“Blood.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’ll admit it’s trite,” Colin said. “But it ought to be effective.”

He squeezed some of the ketchup onto his fingers, then artfully smeared it along her left temple, matting her golden hair with it.

She winced. “Yuch.”

Colin stepped back a couple of feet and studied her. “Good,” he said. “It’s a little too bright right now. Too red. But when it dries a bit, it ought to look just about like the real thing.”

“If we’d really struggled, like you’re going to tell him we did, then I’d be rumpled and dirty,” she said.

“Right.”

She pulled her blouse half out of her shorts. She stooped, wiped her hands over the dust-covered floor, and made long sooty marks on her shorts and blouse.

When she stood up, Colin regarded her critically, looking for the false note, trying to see her as Roy would see her. “Yeah. That’s better. But maybe one more thing might help.”

“What’s that?”

“If the sleeve of your blouse was torn.”

She frowned. “It’s one of my better blouses.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

She shook her head. “No. I said I’d help. I’m in this all the way. Go ahead. Tear it.”

He jerked on the material on both sides of her left shoulder seam, jerked once, twice, three times. The stitching finally parted with a nasty sound, and the sleeve sagged on her arm, torn half away.

“Yeah,” he said. “That sure does it. You’re very, very convincing.”

“But now that I’m such a mess, will he want anything to do with me?”

“It’s funny ...” Colin stared at her thoughtfully. “In a strange way, you’re even more appealing than you were before.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I’m all dirty. And I wasn’t all that fabulous when I was clean.”

“You look great,” he assured her. “Just right.”

“But if this is going to work, he really has to want to ... well ... he has to want to rape me. I mean, he’ll never get the chance. But he has to want to.”

Again, Colin was acutely aware of the danger into which he was putting her, and he didn’t like himself very much.

“There’s just one more thing I can do that might help,” she said.

Before he realized what she intended, she grasped the front of her blouse and tugged hard on it. Buttons popped; one of them struck Colin’s chin. She tore the blouse open all the way, and for an instant he saw one small, beautiful, quivering breast and a dark nipple, but then the halves of the blouse fell part of the way together again, and he could see nothing more than the soft, sweet swell of flesh that marked the beginning of her breasts.

He looked up, met her eyes.

She was blushing fiercely.

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

He licked his lips. His throat was suddenly parched.

At last, trembling, she said, “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t help much to have my blouse open a little. I mean, I don’t have much to show.”

“Perfect,” he said weakly. “It’s the perfect touch.” He looked away from her, went to the cardboard box, and picked up the coil of rope.

“I wish I didn’t have to be tied up,” she said.

“There’s no other way,” he said. “But you won’t really be tied. Not tightly. The rope will just be wrapped around your wrists a few times; it won’t be knotted there. You’ll be able to get your hands free in a flash. And where there are knots, they’ll be the kind that slip open easily. I’ll show you how. You’ll be able to get out of the ropes in a couple of seconds if you have to. But you won’t have to. He won’t get anywhere near you. He won’t get his hands on you. Nothing will go wrong. I have the gun.”

She sat down on the floor, with her back against the wall. “Let’s get it over with.”

By the time he finished tying her, night had fallen outside, and there were not even threads of light at the unraveling edges of the aging, splintered shutters.

“It’s time to make the phone call,” Colin said.

“I’m going to hate being alone in this place.”

“It’ll only be for a few minutes.”

“Can you leave both flashlights?” she asked.

He was moved by her fear; he knew what it was like. But he said, “Can’t. I’ll need one to get in and out of the house without breaking my neck in the dark.”

“I wish you’d brought three.”

“You’ll have enough light with one,” he said, knowing that it would be pathetically little comfort in this creepy place.

“Hurry back,” she said.

“I will.”

He stood up and walked away from her. At the doorway he turned and looked back. She was so vulnerable that he could hardly stand it. He knew he should return and take the ropes off her and send her home. But he had to trap Roy, get the truth on tape, and this was the easiest way to accomplish that.

He left the room and went down the stairs to the first floor, then out of the mansion by way of the front door.

The plan would work.

It
had
to work.

If something went wrong, his and Heather’s bloody heads might wind up on the mantel in the Kingman house.

Colin stepped into a telephone booth at a service station, four blocks from the Kingman mansion. He dialed the Borden number.

Roy answered. “Hello?”

“Is that you, blood brother?”

Roy didn’t respond.

“I was wrong,” Colin said.

Roy was silent.

“I called to say I was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“Everything. About breaking our blood-brother oath.”

“What’re you after?” Roy asked.

“I want to be friends again.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“I mean it. I really want to be friends again, Roy.”

“It isn’t possible.”

“You’re smarter than all of them,” Colin said. “You’re smarter and tougher. You’re right; they’re all a bunch of jerks. The grown-ups, too. It’s easy to manipulate them. I see that now. I’m not one of them. I never was. I’m like you. I want to be on your side.”

Roy was silent again.

“I’ll prove I’m on your side,” Colin said. “I’ll do what you wanted to do. I’ll help you kill someone.”

“Kill someone? Colin, have you been popping pills again? You aren’t making sense.”

“You think I’ve got someone listening in on this,” Colin said. “Well, I don’t. But if you’re worried about talking on the phone, then let’s talk face to face.”