Triple Witch (19 page)

But at the door, Ellie stopped short.

“Can we,” she inquired gently, “see Hallie’s room?”

28
“This,” I told Ellie, “is ridiculous.”

We climbed the narrow stairs, which were covered in torn brown shag carpet. The paneling was wood-grained Contac paper, scarred to expose the particleboard beneath. Quinn’s efforts to keep his house in repair extended only to the portions of it that others might see; the comfort of his family, clearly, was not a concern.

“We’re not going to find anything useful in her high school yearbook,” I said, “or her makeup table. She would not have left anything here for anyone to find.”

As we went down the narrow hallway my momentary glimpse of the Quinns’ bathing area did not raise my spirits. Soap and a scrub brush can only go so far; after that you need paint and new fixtures, ceramic tiles to replace the cracked ones, and a shower curtain held up by something other than twists of coathanger wire.

“Patience,” Ellie advised, as we approached the door Mrs. Quinn had described to us. We’d left her downstairs obsessively washing the teacups.

“Probably if he finds a dish in the sink, he smacks her,” I muttered.

This, you see, is the trouble with carrying a loaded weapon: meeting a guy like Harley Quinn, whose head just absolutely begs to be blown off. Grimly, I followed Ellie into Hallie’s room.

And stopped, feeling a small sigh escape me.

The curtains pulled back from the glitteringly clean windows were the same delicate white eyelet we’d seen at Ken’s trailer. But while Ken’s place had been clean, this was another ballgame entirely, so spotless Victor could have done surgery in it. And that wasn’t the half of what Hallie had managed to accomplish.

The walls were covered in floral wallpaper, the trim and the closet door enameled crisp white. Spread across the bed was a white handmade sampler quilt, the patterns bright primary colors, the border dark blue. The rug was thick blue wool, the bedskirt crochet-edged.
On the night table stood a white china lamp, a vase of wilted flowers, and a book:
On the Road
, by Jack Kerouac.

Hallie had done all this herself, I felt sure after seeing the bath and her parents’ spare, motel-like bedroom, and knowing it stabbed me with another sharp pang of regret over her death. But her creation also made me wonder again about money, because this stuff didn’t come cheap.

Meanwhile, Ellie made straight for the night table and pulled a drawer out, setting it on the quilt.

“What are you doing?” I whispered, glancing at the doorway.

“I had a nightstand just like this when I was Hallie’s age. There’s a shelf.” She reached into the opening where the drawer had been, felt around, and pulled out a manila envelope.

Inside was a sheaf of lined paper, pages torn from a spiral notebook. The pages were covered with writing.

“ ‘Why can’t you accept that we belong together?’ ” Ellie began reading aloud. “ ‘I will never stop loving you. You think you can keep secrets, but I am always watching. You can’t escape so why not embrace your fate?’ ”

And more of the scary same, including descriptions of how the writer had peeped in her window by climbing a tree, each letter signed in a boyish scrawl: “Peter M.”

“Mulligan,” I said, remembering Sam’s description of the kid who was “stalking” Hallie. “Peter Mulligan.”

“Sounds pretty intense. And creepy. ‘embrace your fate.’ Who does he think he is, Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Sam says he’s a nerd. I’d say he’s reading beyond his grade level, all right. But I can’t say much for his penmanship.”

The writing, literate in spelling and sentence structure, was otherwise the equivalent of a drawing made
by a disturbed child: a bizarre mix of upper- and lowercase letters leaning forward and back, pressed down so hard that in places the pen had gone right through the paper. It was as if Mulligan had not just written the words, but carved them.

Footsteps sounded on the hall stairs. Swiftly, Ellie shoved the letters into her bag and the drawer back into the nightstand, as Mrs. Quinn entered.

“Isn’t it beautiful in here? She could do that. Want something a certain way, make it that way. It wouldn’t occur to her to think she couldn’t.”

Mrs. Quinn bit her lip. “I don’t blame her, you know. For wanting to go somewhere, be somebody.”

She picked up the book from Hallie’s nightstand, glancing at it with puzzled sorrow before putting it down. On a low shelf stood Hallie’s other volumes: Ayn Rand, the
I Ching
, and
Why I Am Not a Christian
by Bertrand Russell. I bet old Harley had blown a gasket when he got a load of that one.

If he ever had. Gazing around again, I felt that it was probably rare for him to come in here, that the feminine decor, perfectly worked out to the last detail, had been a sort of talisman against him.

And on second look, I saw the other striking thing about the room that Hallie had imprinted so heavily with her personality: monograms.

Like the earrings she’d been wearing when I last saw her, nearly every object here bore initials—usually Hallie’s alone, but sometimes entwined with others, almost always accompanied by a date. Stitched, carved, painted, engraved; she had personalized the quilt squares, lamp bases, pillows, even the stuffed cat reclining at the head of her bed. Mrs. Quinn saw me looking at it.

“Hallie and the boy she was seeing won that, at the State Fair two years ago.” She picked it up and showed me the stitched letters and numbers memorializing the event.

“I don’t know where she got her obsession with initials,” the dead girl’s mother went on. “But from the time she was a tiny thing, she put them on practically anything she touched. Yours, too, if you were with her when she got it, or found it.”

She put the stuffed cat back in its place. “Hallie wasn’t sleeping with that Mumford fellow,” she added. “She had another boyfriend, I don’t know who. Mumford, she had some reason why she hung around with him. Maybe because he let her boss him around. But the other one—”

She stopped, frowning over how to say it.

“You think,” I hazarded a wild guess, “that this other man, whoever he is, he’s probably more like her father than Hallie realized.”

Mrs. Quinn glanced up gratefully at me, our eyes meeting in the dresser mirror. “Yes. Someone determined, but …”

She shook her head. “Hallie loved Portland, went there all the time. Hitchhiked, though I warned her a hundred times against it. She had friends there, and they were bad enough. But this fellow, whoever he is … she must have thought he was strong enough to get her out of here, into the life she wanted. But I think she didn’t know, yet, what she was really seeing.”

Mrs. Quinn’s reflection in the mirror laughed defeatedly. “Oh, aren’t we all just such fools?” she asked.

But she’d long ago stopped expecting an answer.

29
Outside, I resisted the impulse to rush home, take a shower, and wash my clothes. The atmosphere that hung like a toxic cloud in the Quinn house seemed to have seeped into my bones.

Ellie, however, was having none of this. “I want a word with this Mulligan fellow,” she announced. “He sounds like some kind of real weirdo.”

Passing the Mexican restaurant with its bright strings of Christmas lights looped around the houseplants that grew like jungle vines in the windows, I inhaled the sweet aroma of corn tortillas frying in lard, fresh fajitas smothered in shredded beef, and the pot of black beans and rice that the cook kept simmering on the stove. Next door, Frank’s Pizza tempted me with similarly delicious odors, reminding me that I had not had lunch.

Fortunately, the picnic table outside Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand is a great place for keeping an eye on the kids who hang out on the seawall across from Leighton’s Variety.

Also, Rosie serves hot dogs smothered in cheese, onions, and chili, tucked in a roll toasted to light, crispy perfection, then slathered in real butter. The whole thing arrives on a cardboard holder to keep the spicy-hot chili from falling off before you have managed to devour it; with it come a Pepsi and onion rings.

Ellie said she wasn’t hungry. “Also, I don’t have a death wish,” she commented at the sight of the chili, rich with meat and beans and redolent of hot pepper, onions, and tomato.

The cheese was thick and cheddary. “Victor would have a heart attack if he saw this,” I said, glancing around in case I could spot him and make him look at it.

“Victor,” said Ellie, “is having a midlife crisis. You know, wondering about the meaning of his existence.”

“I could tell him what his existence means.” I crunched into an onion ring. “But I don’t use that kind of language.”

Ellie scanned the seawall across from Leighton’s.
Half a dozen high school kids stood there, drinking sodas and smoking the cigarettes that Arnold would fine them for if he saw them. But he wouldn’t because they all had teenager radar, a sixth sense that let them detect his approach from a mile away.

“Which one is Mulligan?” Ellie squinted. “I don’t see anybody who looks strange enough to have written those letters.”

They all looked strange to me, because I am too old to comprehend the dress code of baggy jam shorts, loose-laced high-tops, and T-shirts so ragged they resemble fishnets.

“Wait a minute.” I spotted a pair of khaki trousers, a knit polo shirt, and a pair of loafers. “That’s him.”

I gulped some Pepsi, and tossed the hot-dog wrappings in the trash. “You want weird? That—”

I angled my head at the kid’s neatly trimmed hair, the book stuck into his back pocket. “That’s weird.”

The other kids eyed us coolly from beneath lowered eyelids, moving aside to let us pass. But the boy I’d spotted walked away as we approached, as if remembering an urgent errand.

“Wait,” I told Ellie. “Let’s not scare him too far off by chasing him.”

Instead we went into the store, where I bought a Bangor newspaper whose front page trumpeted “Murder in Eastport.” Outside, we loitered by the door as if we had nothing better to do but watch the tourists. Finally, we strolled casually back.

“So,” I said to the cluster of boys smoking their cigarettes, “any of you know Hallie Quinn?”

They looked at each other. I might as well have been talking to Willoughby’s llamas.

“Come on, guys. I’m not trying to get you in trouble. Hallie Quinn? Anybody?”

“Uh-huh.” One boy flicked his cigarette into the street.

“Too bad about what happened to her. Any of you see anyone giving her trouble? Last night?”

No response, except for the sidelong looks passing between them: Who is this woman and why is she hassling us?

“Because,” I went on, “she was a friend of mine.”

Shrugs all around, faces as blank as squares of wall-board.

“I’d like to know what was going on with her, is all. Not to get anyone in trouble.”

They knew how to talk; just not to me. So they responded by shutting down, all except for one boy, older and sharper-looking than the rest. He had a fox face, dark hair, and long, ropy arms poking out from a regulation T-shirt.

“Ask Mulligan,” he said, and the other boys laughed.

I turned to fox-boy. “It doesn’t look as if Peter Mulligan wants to talk to me.”

A few yards away, the clean-cut kid we had spotted lingered, glancing over at us while trying to act as though he weren’t.

“He’ll talk to you.” The boy pulled a Marlboro from his T-shirt pocket and lit it, squinting against the smoke in a perfect, unconscious James Dean imitation. “He’ll dance you around first. That’s how he is. But he will, ’cause he’s such a candy-ass little suck-up.”

The boys laughed again, unpleasantly, moving away in a pack as a beat-up Chevy pulled alongside of them, rumbling and roaring its engine. They piled in and were gone.

Mulligan scowled, but by waiting we’d let it seem as if he were making the choice, so he didn’t run when we approached.

“Idiots,” he said, watching the car pull away. The look in his eyes said he wished he were in it. But he might as well have wished he were on the moon; guys
like Peter Mulligan, scornful and superior, never got to ride in cars like that.

“Yeah, well,” I told him consolingly, “someday when you’ve got a great job and you’re driving your Mercedes, they’ll still be trying to keep that piece of junk on the road.”

He brightened, straightening. “That’s right. I’m going to college. In two years. I’ve already started visiting campuses.”

“Very good. Listen, Peter, I’m sorry about Hallie. My son, Sam, says you and she were pretty close. You must be upset.”

“Sam.” He frowned, as if trying to slot the name into his memory banks. “Oh, right. In the tech program. Yeah, I remember. He works on boats.”

He said this as if it were as significant as collecting Pez dispensers. “Some of the guys in the technical program are smart, though,” he assured me patronizingly. “In their own way.”

“Yeah, he’s smart in his way,” I replied, and of course I didn’t swat him with my rolled-up newspaper. “But about Hallie.”

Mulligan’s face clouded abruptly. “If she’d listened to me,” he said, his fists clenching, “if only she would have
listened
.”

“About the drugs, you mean? And her other boyfriend, not Ken Mumford but the other guy, the older man?”

He looked up, startled. “How do you know about that?”

Across the street, another bunch of boys had collected, looking on with interest. Peter wasn’t doing himself any favors with his peer group, talking to us. I angled my head minutely at them. “Why don’t you meet us down on the breakwater in a minute?”

Not that I thought Mulligan was missing out on his chance to be captain of the football team, but we didn’t
have to help him in his bid to be chosen Most Likely to Get Stuffed into a Locker.

“Those losers,” he pronounced with too-elaborate disgust. But he agreed to talk with us in a place where we would not be under such direct observation, and a few minutes later he did.

30
“Hallie loved me. She was confused, but she did. She knew I was the one who would be there for her, that I was the only one who really cared.”