Bone Orchard (6 page)

“They’ll catch you.”

“Who?”

“The police. You must have left a trail.”

Kitty held up the lamb splitter. Lazarus looked away.

“Oh, I’m not that stupid. I’ve been planning this for years.”

She considered the cleaver, then Lazarus. “No, not quite right.”

Lazarus exhaled as she set it aside. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.

“See, my parents were total shits. Drunk assholes that only cared about themselves.”

She picked up a long, slender metal skewer. Its tip was the fine, sharp point of a dart.

“This might work.”

The skewer whipped through the air as she turned and brandished it, as if it were nothing but a child’s toy and she had no intention of inserting it into his body.

“My sister took care of me. When my parents went on really bad benders, we’d lock ourselves in our room and listen to your CDs over and over.” Kitty’s demeanor turned wistful. “She was the best sister ever.”

Lazarus felt along the underside of the chair arm with his fingers and discovered the point of a short nail sticking up.

“You’ll get caught,” he said. “Someone will have seen you.”

Kitty snapped out of her reverie. “No, they saw Kathleen, a sweet, pretty, preppy girl.”

Lazarus began to work the rope against the tip of the nail.

“You’ll have left a trail. You probably told someone in town where you were headed.”

“I told them I was going to Granger. There’s no way they’d think I’d be here.”

Lazarus scoffed. “Granger?”

“There’s a lovely medieval church there. Kathleen was going to do some rubbings.”

Lazarus didn’t particularly care for the way she’d begun referring to herself as two distinct people. The nail was proving ineffective. He shifted in the chair.

“There’ll be a paper trail… a bus ticket or a taxi receipt.”

“I walked.”

Feigning discomfort, he stretched against the ropes hoping to find a weakness in them.

“You must have told a friend.”

“Nope,” Kitty shot back.

“Surely.”

“You know the saying, ‘Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead?’”

That didn’t particularly sit well with Lazarus either, but he nodded just the same. What he needed to do now was buy some time and he knew it.

“I’m a firm believer,” Kitty continued. “See, after Lacey disappeared, it was obvious to me—”

“She ran away?”

Kitty shoved the skewer in his face. The tip hovered millimeters from his eye.

“She didn’t run away!”

Lazarus twisted his head to the side trying to avoid the sharp point. It would pierce his eyeball like a grape tomato on a kabob. He almost wished she’d go back to threatening his balls.

He could feel her coarse respiration on his neck like garnet paper. This rage was real. Even if all the rest was some kind of bullshit act, this anger… this wrath… it was no game.

Kitty calmed. The skewer drew away from his face and she circled him.

“Stop trying to confuse me.”

Like hell I will.

She rubbed her forehead. Why? What did her body language mean? He had to start picking up on those signs. Was she actually confused? Was she just playing the part? Was it a sign of deep thought? Massaging her fucking brain to get it working? Was she getting a goddamn headache?
What??

“I knew when she didn’t come home that something had happened.”

“Why didn’t you tell your parents?”

“I did! And the police! They didn’t believe me.”

She tapped the skewer against her open palm like Patton’s riding crop.

“And that’s when you decided I was to blame?”

“I didn’t
decide
anything! It was obvious.”

Lazarus felt the point of the skewer against his neck.

“She’d never leave me there,” she continued. “She would have come back for me.”

Lazarus shifted in the chair, and when he did, the knot that bound his left hand picked up the tiniest bit of slack.

Kitty eyed him with suspicion. “What are you doing?”

“The ropes. They hurt.”

She furrowed her brow. “Good.”

Lazarus repositioned again. He could feel her eyes on him still.

“Perhaps if you told me more about…”

Kitty’s eyes narrowed. “Lacey.”

Keep her angry. Angry is better than suspicious. Angry is stupid. Angry is careless.

“Right. Perhaps it’ll jog my memory.”

She nonchalantly rolled up one of his shirt sleeves.

“She told me about the time she got backstage. She wanted to meet you but you were with another girl.”

The dart tip of the skewer dragged the shape of an “L” over his bicep, scoring two thin beads of blood.

“She tried to get your attention but you didn’t notice her.”

“See? I told you I didn’t know her!” Lazarus surged forward for dramatic emphasis, camouflaging the fact that he was simply stretching more slack in the knot.

Kitty jabbed savagely into his arm. “The first time she went backstage! That was the
first
time!”

He cringed, trying to pull away from the skewer. Blood ran down his arm in a rivulet.

“She looked like me in my passport picture. Pretty. Sweet.”

An expression of utter boredom washed over her face. She wiped the skewer off on his shirt, leaving a vibrant stripe of blood across the shoulder.

“She saw the kind of girl you liked. Dark. Mysterious.”

Damaged.

Kitty turned and wandered languorously toward the table. Lazarus seized his window of opportunity and flexed against the ropes. This time, the knots gave way.

“She changed for you.”

She smiled and picked up the tarnished lamb splitter. The cleaver bore an unsettling resemblance to a shark, its torpedo blade forming the head, the hole in the meat of its steel, the eye.

“And once Lacey put her mind to something… that was it.”

She slunk back over to Lazarus.

“We’re a lot alike that way.”

Lazarus was no longer certain exactly who the “we” was that she was referring to. Somehow it seemed there were now several more people in the room than just the two of them.

Things were getting very crowded, indeed.

It had never really occurred to him why the longcase grandfather clock in the parlor always succeeded in startling anyone within earshot. There were, in fact, two reasons.

Firstly, the precursory Westminster quarters had been disabled. The familiar, soothing four to sixteen note melodies that marked each fifteen minutes as they passed had been deemed too bothersome to the manor’s previous occupants, and Lazarus would most likely have come to the same conclusion within hours of taking up residence himself. The clock was now limited to the abrupt, full hour “Big Ben” chimes, which somehow could never be anticipated, despite the fact that they adhered to the most perpetually rigid schedule ever devised.

Secondly, the acoustics of the parlor acted as a natural resonator, which explained why any music that came from the Krell tended to sound similarly as if it were being performed at Madison Square Garden.

When Kitty picked up the shark-bladed lamb splitter in the basement room directly beneath the parlor exactly one minute before nine o’clock, she had put her mind to something all right. She was going to cleave deep into Lazarus Walker’s bicep with it, severing just above the elbow joint where she had scored the bleeding “L” to mark her target with the skewer. She was going to section him like a spring lamb.

And fifty-nine seconds had passed.

CHAPTER 9

When the spade of the clock’s minute hand advanced and tripped the star gear on its dial face, the over-torqued chime hammer pulled back and struck with the force of a flintlock.

The ensuing bong was so startlingly loud in the room below that it made Kitty’s teeth vibrate. She felt her heart flitter up in her chest like spider legs and lodge in her throat, spurring an impulse to run the door and peek around the corner while Lazarus frantically slipped free of the ropes behind her.

She laughed in discomfited shock.

“Shit! That thing almost gave me a heart attack again.”

By the time she turned back, Lazarus was already on his feet, two strides into a full-court press. She spun, drawing the stun gun with the fluid dexterity of a gunfighter. The flash of a blue warning spark sent him into a cringing back-pedal, crashing into the table and sending a tumult of clattering cutlery to the floor. The thought of another excruciating jolt alarmed him, but shrinking away in fear from this little bitch
infuriated
him. 

He grabbed the table and hoisted it over his head as he charged again. She brandished the stun gun, but this time he held his resolve. The table came crashing down and exploded into brittle kindling. Her reflexes had been quick enough to throw up a defensive forearm, but the blow sent her reeling.

Lazarus bolted from the room, snatching up one of the chairs on his way out. He slammed the door and jammed the scooped top rail of the chair beneath the knob as a brace.

“I’m gonna kill you!” Kitty raged from the other side. She scrambled to get up, clutching her arm across her body in pain.

He glanced toward the narrow stairs that led up to the entrance hall, but ducked into an adjacent room instead and quietly slipped the door closed behind him.

It was a bedroom, but not the same one that Kitty had explored earlier. This was larger, perhaps a butler or housekeeper’s quarters. A single large bed was pushed against the wall, its ticking mattress stripped bare and a stack of folded sheets laying on top, both splotched with the same tie-dyed, calico patchwork of mold.

Lazarus dropped to the floor and slid silently under the bed.

Kitty twisted the doorknob and the chair fell inward as the door swung open into the room. It startled her, but she stumbled over it into the hallway with the chef’s knife in hand.

“Hey, baby! That’s not cool!”

She looked up and down the hallway at the staggered flock of doors. It was like being inside a giant flute. With a growl, she started toward the first door.

It was the room with the twin beds. Nowhere to hide. She gave it a cursory glance and slammed the door back shut.

Lazarus couldn’t shake the flinch reflex. He jumped at the slam as he lay beneath the molding mattress. Perhaps it was the result of nerve damage, he thought. Ten million volts and counting. Or maybe he really
was
just a pussy. The thought instantly fired the burner of his blood and he felt his fingers contract into the same claw-like gnarls the stun gun had left him with earlier. His fingertips scraped across the thick layer of decades-undisturbed dust that blanketed the floor beneath the bed, and with mounting horror, he realized that the dust extended to all four corners of the room. He had left a perfect trail of crisp footprints directly from the door to where he now lay.

Kitty tried the storage room once again. This time, she tiptoed in among the bins and crates and saw that not everything was the time capsule she’d first assumed it to be.

A large, elongated cardboard box lay tipped on its side behind the bins.

Lazarus crawled out from under the bed and carefully back-stepped across the room, carefully planting his feet in the same prints he’d made crossing it the first time. If it worked for little Danny Torrance, it could work for him.

He listened at the door, but heard nothing. Not a sound.

Kitty stepped gingerly to the box, no simple task in Doc Martens. She silently raised the kitchen knife and let out a banshee shriek as she plunged it to the hilt through the cardboard nine times in four seconds. Yanking the blade free, she looked curiously at the bloodless blade.

She kicked the box and a wave of foam packing peanuts poured out onto the floor.

“Crap.”

Lazarus darted across the hallway and slipped through another door a split second before Kitty emerged from the storage room.

Bedroom number three. It contained another asylum-grade bed frame and lumpy, bare mattress, but also a large, waxed pine armoire. Unlike the other rooms, the floor was not stone but wood plank. It was not the same lake-surface-at-dawn plane of undisturbed dust. He’d been in this room before. Many times, in fact.

A tarnished key stuck out of the lock on the armoire door. He went to it, opened the door and crawled inside with the key in his hand.

He locked the door again from the inside and rested against the back of the cabinet. A sliver of light bled in through a long crack in one of the side panels, and dust swirled around him in the shaft of illumination.