Chill Waters (21 page)

The metal sign over the door of the dry-cleaning shop swayed precariously in the wind, creaking above her head as she walked beneath it. Out on the street, a teenager was executing some fancy moves on his skateboard.

That increasingly familiar feeling of eyes on the back of her head, her made her look around. But there was only the boy on the skateboard behind her, presently performing an impressive three hundred and sixty-degree twirl in mid-air. Once inside her car, she locked the doors.

'You always did look sexy in black.'
Someone she knew?

Even in Iris’ studio, working with the clay, she was unable to dismiss the dark thoughts from her mind. How could she? After all, it was Iris who had first warned her that she was in danger? For the first time, the work wasn’t having its usual calming effect.

From time to time, she sensed Iris looking at her. She was glad when the lesson ended.

That night, Rachael tossed and turned in the bed but sleep eluded her. She tried to read, but the words rang together in a meaningless jumble. When she did finally drift off, she dreamed of bloated corpses, disembodied voices whispering her name. Hands resembling starfish reached out for her, and when she tried to escape them, her legs would not move.

***

He called her at midnight, then again at one. Her phone rang and rang in his ear.
She’s there! I know she’s
there.
The bitch has unplugged the phone. He slammed the receiver down, furious.

She shouldn’t ignore him. That was a big mistake. As he turned to leave the phone booth, he came face to face with a hulk in overalls and a soiled checkered shirt, a wide grin on his bulldog face.

“Don’t break it, okay, buddy,” Nate said, brushing past him, giving off a stench of body odor and booze that made him want to heave his guts. “This is my office since the lightning knocked hell out of the phone. Been more’n a month now and they ain’t fixed it yet. Working late. Promised a guy I’d finish up a welding job on his snowmobile. Nate Prichard, by the way.”

“Sorry, Nate. Didn’t mean to hold you up. Just calling to let the little woman know not to wait up. I’m working a little late myself tonight.” He winked conspiratorially, an afterthought. Nate responded as he’d anticipated. With a crude knowing laugh, the man waved him off.

The two men had recognized each other. Brothers under the skin.

Twenty-Six

Despite the bad dreams and lack of sleep, Rachael rose next morning in a good mood and more determined than ever not let some sick jerk destroy her new-found serenity, the independence she’d worked so hard for. Sitting on the edge of the bed tying her sneakers, she decided to simply ignore the whole
stalker
business. If she got anymore calls, she’d just hang up, as Detective Mason had suggested.

In spite of her resolve, she didn’t get very far on her morning run when she felt someone watching her. Darting a look over her shoulder, she lost her rhythm, stumbled and nearly fell.

No one there. Just the trail of her own footprints reaching back along the stretch of beach. Other footprints pushed to the forefront of her mind. Those she had seen on the beach that first day. A man’s.

Forget it, Rachael. Let it go. And on this perfect fall morning, with brilliant blue skies overhead, sun sparkling on the water, she managed to do just that.

When she was gone from his view, he lowered the binoculars, picked up the squirming canvas bag at his feet and headed for her house.

***

Iris sat in Doc Stetson’s office thumbing through a recent copy of Newsday waiting for the vet to finish checking Cleo over, and give her a booster shot. She absently turned a page, and suddenly, shockingly, there she was—the girl who had appeared to her during the seance, or whatever you wanted to call it, with Helen. For a moment she could not believe her own eyes. It can’t be the same girl, she told herself. But it was. Definitely her, absolutely no doubt about it in Iris’ mind.

The headline screamed out at her: HIGH SCHOOL PROM ENDS IN MURDER:

Against every instinct in her, Iris had given in to Helen’s pleadings. She knew how it was supposed to work. Her mother had owned an Ouija board that she and her friends sometimes used to scare themselves with, while Iris’ grandmother would sit in her chair, in a shadowy corner of the room, rocking, looking on in bemused detachment. A mother watching her children at play, her wrinkled old face bathed in mystery.

Everyone always said
she
was the one with the ‘sight.’ But to Iris’ recollection, she took no part in these games.

Iris could guess why not.

At Helen’s urgings, she had asked the Ouija: “Is anyone here?” At first, as she’d expected, nothing happened. She’d hoped the effort alone would satisfy Helen.

Iris asked the question a second time. Suddenly, beneath her fingertips, the planchette began to move. Iris clutched at the obvious explanation. It was Helen. Helen was making the pointer move with the pressure of her fingers. Unconsciously, no doubt, but still doing it.

And then Iris had felt a change in the air around them and knew they were no longer alone in the room. Someonesomethinghad joined them.

The feverish light in Helen’s eyes was brighter still, her face cast in an evangelical glow bordering on madness. “It says yes,” she whispered.

Cleo meowed fretfully. She too had sensed the presence.

“It says yes,” Helen repeated. “I knew she’d come. I knew.”

But it wasn’t Heather who had entered their midst.

The flame from the candle nearest them on the coffee table blew sideways, all but went out. Iris felt the coolness against her heart. Had a door opened somewhere in the house, letting in a draft? But she knew better.

“Iris, ask her…” She clamped a hand over her mouth, cutting off the question, making a choking sound in her throat. Tears seeped through closed lids, even as her fingers remained on the planchette. “Ask her if shesuffered. I need to know.”

Iris had done as she asked. At once, the pointer began to move in a diagonal line toward the upper right corner of the board. Iris’ disbelieving eyes tracked its brief journey.

It stopped at
Yes.
She knew then that it was not Helen causing the planchette to move. What mother would want the burden of knowing that her child died in a desperate fight for her life? Cruelly. Wasn’t it the first question people always asked after an unexpected death? Did my loved one suffer? All the while praying to hear the word
No.
Never felt a thing.

“It’s not Heather,” Iris said, but Helen was beyond reasoning with. A righteous fury had filled her eyes. “Ask her who murdered her?”

Knowing it was futile to try to convince her it wasn’t Heather, she asked the question. At once the air at her back had turned cold. Candles flickered and Iris felt an overwhelming urge to send the Ouija Board flying across the room, to end this dangerous game she had so foolishly agreed to play.

Once more, the pointer began to move. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, dispelling any remaining thought of Helen’s influence. Darting like a live thing from letter to letter, Iris could scarcely keep her fingers on its smooth, warm surface, or follow its path with her eyes. An unpleasant prickling had started up in her hands, and she was about to follow her initial inclination to send the thing flying, when it stopped abruptly.

Then, as though a movie screen had unrolled before her eyes, Iris found herself watching a scene in which a young woman in a strapless dress was walking along a narrow path toward a house glimpsed through trees. Swept-up dark hair, wispy curls fallen down past her ears, a dreamy smile on her face. She appeared to be almost floating.

As a cloud passes beneath the moon, the girl’s smile disappeared. She stumbled on the walkway. Something had startled her. Yes, someone else in the picture now, face hidden in darkness.

The vision ended as quickly as it appeared. Iris blinked as one does when the lights come up in the theatre. But the vision of the girl remained imprinted behind her lids.

There’d been something familiar about the girl.
And
the faint scent of perfume in the air, mingling with the candle-wax smell.
Evening in Paris
. Iris recognized the fragrance easily because it was the first perfume she’d ever owned, a birthday gift from her dance teacher, Miss Dalling, when Iris was twelve. It had made her feel so grown up. She could still see the pretty cobalt blue bottle. Iris hadn’t come across that particular perfume in years. Yet in life, this girl had worn
Evening in Paris
. At least on the night she was murdered.

By someone named Charlie.

A good thing I’m sitting down, she thought, as she scanned the lengthy article. Two paragraphs into it, she learned it was written by the reporter who had covered the murder trial seventeen years before. The reporter had apparently picked up on the victim’s mother’s recent passing in a nursing home, and parlayed it into a rehash of the murder.

The face now had a name—Marie Morley. Her older brother had raped, then drowned her in a ditch behind their house. He was sent to an institution for the criminally insane. As she read, a sense of foreboding spread in her breast like dark wings. She recalled the crow outside her store window that day. A harbinger of death. Lord, when had she become so superstitious? When had she become her mother?

Iris looked back at the photograph and knew now why the girl in the vision looked so familiar to her. She looked like a young Rachael.

Her dress was the same one she’d worn in Iris' vision Iris of her. A prom dress. A pink corsage adorned her slim wrist. The caption beneath said: Photo of Marie Morley, taken earlier that evening by the victim’s mother.

She was smiling in the photo, but Iris could see the deep sadness behind the smile. She read further. Her date for the prom that night had been a dentist’s son named Harold Johnson, and a prime suspect in the case until Ruth Morley’s own suspicions, and later indisputable forensic evidence, pointed to the adopted brother, Charlie Morley.

Neighbors were questioned. A Mr. Ralph Nealey was quoted as saying: “Always was a mean bugger to the little girl. I was working in the yard one afternoon and I saw him whip a fistful of rocks at her because she was crying to go with him. She was crazy about her big brother. Damned if I know why. Pretty little tyke, she was.”

The article continued onto the next page. Reading Ruth Morley’s own words saddened Iris. The distraught woman had told the reporter, “I only adopted him to please James. He’d always wanted a son. I thought I couldn’t have children, until Marie. I always suspected there was bad blood in that boy…”

Why would anyone adopt a child only to mistreat it so? But then Iris recalled a case in which a woman, for reasons known only to herself, had singled out one of her biological children for horrendous abuse, while the rest she treated quite normally.

Despite the systematic torture at his mother’s hands, however, the boy somehow managed to grow up and make something good of his life. He even wrote a couple of bestselling books. Maybe it’s in the arrangement of chromosomes, Iris thought. Not even the experts agreed on what went into the making of a killer.

Iris didn’t know how this old murder case was connected to Rachael, but was quite certain that it was. I was meant to find this article. Not for a moment did she believe it was mere coincidence that she’d come here today, or that she’d picked up this particular magazine. The irony was that the magazines in this waiting room, but for this one, were always at least two years old.

The only other person waiting with her was a young man with a cage on his lap, an injured dove inside. He was making cooing noises at the agitated bird.

Iris rolled up the magazine and stuffed it into her bag. She didn’t think Doc Stetson would mind.

At home, Iris reread the article until she could have recited it by heart. She studied the girl’s face until it seemed the teenager might open her mouth and speak to her of the secret horrors she had suffered in her young life, even to the end.

But it was the killer’s face she needed to get a better look at. In the photo shown on the page opposite the article, Charlie Morley, with his head down, might have been any young man being led away in handcuffs by police. He was thin, dark-haired. Face obscured in shadow.

There had to be other photographs taken during the time of the trial, didn’t there? And those photographs would have appeared in magazines and newspapers, just as this one had.

***

The instant she opened the door Rachael sensed someone was in the house. She stood unmoving. Then, slowly, she reached behind her, closed her hand around the doorknob, ready to bolt if she needed to.

In the lengthening silence, a soft whimpering issued from the direction of the kitchen. It lasted only a moment, then fell quiet. When the whimpering came again, she let her hand fall away from the doorknob, moved cautiously toward the sound. Halfway across the floor, she hesitated, looked around for something to defend herself with. Spying the stove poker propped against the wall beside the fireplace, she picked it up. It would do. Gripping it by the handle, she took a few hesitant steps.