Companions of the Night (16 page)

"You don't like English composition?"

Ethan shrugged.

Kerry took a deep breath and asked the important question. "Do you think he has my family?"

"Yes."

Finally, an unequivocal answer. She pressed on. "At his house or someplace else?"

"Hard to say."

"What are we going to do," Kerry asked, "when we get to his house?"

Ethan gave her another grin.

"You're not going to tell me because I'm not going to like it?" she guessed.

His expression softened to a more honestly amused smile, but he still didn't answer.

"I hate when you do that," she told him. She put her back to him, determined not to answer any of his questions—if he asked her any—and stared out the window till they reached Canal Street.

It was just after 6:30. Lights were on, most people were probably still preparing for or cleaning up after dinner. Number 147 turned out to be the one house that had no lights. It was a single-story house, much too ordinary looking a place for its owner to have chopped off someone's head and run a school bus off the road.

Ethan slowed almost to a stop, then cruised past.

"What are we doing?"

"Circling the block"

The next time around, he pulled up in front of the house. The lights were still off.

"Nobody's home," Ethan said.

"Was the plan to knock on the door and ask to go in?" Kerry asked.

He looked at her but didn't answer.

"My father and brother could be in there. Prisoners. He wouldn't have left a light on for them. He'd leave them in the dark." She didn't add that Ian was afraid of the dark.

"I'd hear their heartbeats," Ethan said.

"From out here? With the engine running?" If they weren't here,
where were they?

"Yes," Ethan said.

"Even if they're in the basement? Even if they're in a closet in the basement? You know, maybe one of those cedar-lined closets with big, thick walls, so—"

"Kerry, they're not there. Nobody is." He pulled away from the curb.

"No!" she said.

He grabbed hold of her by the shoulder, perhaps thinking that she was planning on opening the door and jumping out. Which wasn't a bad idea, she thought. "We'll park farther down the street," Ethan said.

It took a few moments for the meaning to sink in: They
were
going in.

"All right?" He looked at her apprehensively. "We'll leave the car where he won't see it when he comes home and get suspicious."

She nodded, still afraid that he just wanted to get her out of there quietly.

He finally let go of her.

Somebody on the next block was having a party. Cars were parked on front lawns of houses on either side of the road for a four- or five-house stretch. Ethan just pulled in, the last in line on the right-hand side.

If he could hear heartbeats from inside houses, he must be able to hear hers now, Kerry knew. He must be able to tell it was going at a frantic rate; he kept giving her anxious looks, perhaps concerned that she would panic and get hysterical or do something desperate and stupid.

They walked back to 147, right up the front walk, to the front door. Ethan pulled his lock-picking tools out of his pocket as calmly and matter-of-factly as an accountant going for pen and calculator, the image reinforced by his clean-cut good looks and white shirt. He had a pair of thin gloves in the pocket with his tools, and he pulled these on before setting to work.

She heard the click of the lock opening. "Don't touch anything," Ethan warned as though she were too dumb to know about leaving fingerprints, and in a moment they were in the dark entryway. The house turned out to be a raised ranch, so that they were faced immediately with a decision between two sets of stairs, one going up to the living area, the other leading to the basement.

Ethan pushed the door shut behind them. Standing there, waiting for her eyes to adjust themselves to the dark—which they never would, not to the extent that his already had—he said, "They're not here."

"Could they be"—she'd had the thought so long, she was able to say it—"dead?"

"Not here," Ethan repeated.

He'd told her before that he could smell a quantity of spilled blood How much constituted "a quantity"? On second thought, she didn't want to think about that.

He took her hand, leading her through the house, probably just as much to acquaint himself with the setup as to reassure her.

The basement, the first place they looked, was empty compared to Regina's. There were neatly stacked boxes, whose labels she could read from the glow of the neighbor's driveway floodlight: halloween, christmas, easter, thanksgiving. Even, way down at the bottom, one marked St. Patrick's Day, though "Marsala" certainly didn't sound Irish.

"No Valentine's Day," Kerry observed. "No Mrs. Marsala?"

"I think she ran off to Tahiti or something two or three years ago. Before I came to Brockport."

Kerry was distracted by the realization that the Nowickis and the Marsalas had something in common. She thought of her own mother, somewhere in Florida. Had the police contacted her to tell her that her family was missing? Did she care? "There is a Marsala Junior though?"

"Not...," Ethan started, but then he spotted what she was looking at, a child's Bigwheel, parked on top of a stack of boxes all marked J
OE
or J
OEY
: J
OE'S BOOKS
, J
OE'S TROPHIES
, J
OEY'S SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT
, J
OEY'S SCHOOL PAPERS, CLOTHES
—J
OE'S
. "...that I ever heard of," Ethan finished. He ran his gloved finger across the top box. The light wasn't bright enough for Kerry to be able to see, but the way he rubbed his fingers afterward told her there was dust.

"What's the matter?" she asked because he seemed to be spending a lot of energy thinking about something.

He shook his head and finished the circuit around the basement: laundry area, including what looked to be a sauna room; window screens leaning against the wall; four dusty bicycles, then the furnace, and so back to the stairs, where Ethan nudged her.

"What?" she demanded. "I can't see a thing."

"Do you see the shelves under the stairs?"

"Yeah...?"

"Do you see the spray can of red paint?"

Kerry stepped forward, trying to make it out in the dark, but she knew enough not to get her fingerprints on it. "Lots of people use red paint," she pointed out. But she was convinced.

"We don't even have to plant evidence," Ethan said, obviously pleased with himself and the world. "Shall we check upstairs?"

Upstairs revealed nothing that seemed important to Kerry. There were three bedrooms. The master bedroom had a huge walk-in closet, which was practically empty—just four or five shirts, a couple pairs of pants, a tweed sports jacket, and one pair of dress shoes. Apparently Professor Marsala hadn't adjusted very well to his wife's leaving. The second bedroom seemed to be a library—a lot of books, mostly nonfiction. The third bedroom, whose door had been closed, was empty. A rug and drapes, but absolutely nothing else—not even a light.

The kitchen had what looked to be breakfast dishes in the sink and a package of chicken breasts on the counter. The package had leaked, and when Kerry poked at it, she discovered it was not only thawed out, it was room temperature.

Looking exasperated with her, Ethan used his glove to rub at the spot she had touched.
Fingerprints,
she remembered.

"He didn't come home last night," she said.

"Doesn't look like," Ethan agreed.

"Is that good news or bad for my family?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think he was injured in the accident?" An awful thought struck her "What if he has them someplace and he's died and they can't get out, and they're running out of food, maybe they're running out of air—"

"Kerry." Ethan shook his head. "There was nothing in the paper about his being injured."

"Then where is he? And where is he keeping Dad and Ian?"

"I don't know."

The living room had more books. No tapes, records, or CDs, but a piano, with its cover closed and pictures where the sheet music would go. Kerry guessed that whoever used to play the piano no longer did, or no longer lived there.

Ethan picked up one of the framed pictures. Kerry looked at it over his shoulder. A man who might be Professor Marsala stood with his arm around a young man who looked enough like him that Kerry suspected he was Marsala's son—Joe, she supposed Joe wore a T-shirt that read: B
ROCKPORT
H
IGH
S
CHOOL
C
ROSS
C
OUNTRY
T
EAM
and he was holding aloft a trophy. Both men were smiling. Joe, especially, had an infectious smile.

Ethan put that one down and picked up another that was lying face down on top of the piano. Joe again, this time wearing huge white rabbit ears, a waistcoat, and a pocket watch. Behind him was a poster that said
Alice!
Kerry remembered going to the student production with her class three years ago. It took her several seconds to realize that the woman holding possessively on to Joe's arm—the one wearing the sweatshirt proclaiming, B
ECAUSE
I
'M THE
D
IRECTOR
, T
HAT'S
W
HY
—was Regina.

Ethan studied the picture silently for several long seconds, then suddenly brought it down sharply against the edge of the piano.

"Sorry," he said, seeing her jump. The momentary flash of rage on his face disappeared, and he tossed the smashed frame to the floor.

"You know him?" Kerry asked. "The young man?"

"Never saw him before," Ethan answered with a straight face.

She felt her own flash of rage. She was furious about all Ethan's evasions and lies. But what were her options? Her dependency on his goodwill, her inability to survive on her own—were driving her into a fury.
And what about Dad and Ian?
she wanted to scream at him
What about what
YOU
promised
ME
?

Ethan said, "Come. Surely after yesterday Marsala suspects that we, or the police, have guessed who he is. He won't be back. There's nothing for us here."

I
N THE CAR
once more, Ethan sat back in the seat, staring straight ahead, without turning on the engine.

When she could stand it no longer, Kerry asked, "Now what?"

"I don't know," he admitted.

It was a terrifying thought. She expected him to lie and to not tell her things. But at the same time, she assumed he'd know what to do in every situation.
Ethan?
At a loss?

After a long moment, she said, "Somebody's going to start wondering about us just sitting here. Where should we go next?"

He shook his head.

Enough was enough. "Where would he be?" Kerry demanded from between clenched teeth. "Obviously he wants me to find him. That's why he took my family: to get to me What good does it do him to hold my family hostage if I can't give myself up to him?"

Ethan rubbed his forehead as if she were giving him a headache. "I don't know."

"Maybe we should go back to my house," she suggested. "Maybe he's left another message there."

Ethan considered. "All right," he said in a since-we-don't-have-anything-better-to-try tone.

They drove to Fawn Meadow Circle, where Kerry found her house surrounded by yellow plastic Crime Scene tape.

"Nobody here," Ethan said, and in the next breath, before she could protest, "We'll circle around to the back. Under the circumstances, your neighbors would be sure to report a strange car parked in the circle."

He parked instead on Frandee Lane, a block away from the Hill family's house, whose yard they cut through to get into her own backyard.

"My key's only good for the front door," Kerry said, but by the time she'd finished saying it, Ethan had jimmied open the sliding-glass door and was ducking under the police tape that blocked this entry, too.

It was a strange sensation, sneaking through her own house. Distracted, she took several moments to register the state of the rooms. They were perfectly normal. Family room, kitchen, dining room—nothing was out of the ordinary in any of them. It was only in the living room that she found what she remembered and expected, the furniture toppled and slashed, the broken lamps on the floor.

"He only ransacked this room," she pointed out in a whisper, as though Ethan could have missed it.

"
Ransacked
implies he was looking for something," Ethan said, whispering, as she had "I can't think what he could have been looking for. More likely he was just trying to get your attention, prove that he meant business."

She put her hand out to touch the wall spray-painted with the words, V
AMPIRE, WE HAVE YOUR FAMILY
.

Ethan caught her wrist and shook his head.

Fingerprinting powder,
she realized. The walls, the furniture, everything was thick with black dust where the police had checked for fingerprints. She didn't need to touch the wall, anyway. The message was just as she had remembered it: V
AMPIRE, WE HAVE YOUR FAMILY
. And, beneath that, L
EV
17:10. She realized what she had subconsciously been hoping for was that a second message would have been added:
Come to the Newman Chapel at midnight,
or
Meet us by the cemetery gate,
or
We'll be at the laundry where it all started.
"Do you think there's really more than one of them?" she asked. "Or is the 'we' only to throw us off?"

"I thought there were only five of them to begin with," Ethan said, by which she took him to mean he didn't have any idea.

She spotted Ian's bear, Footy, on the floor, half under a couch cushion, and all the courage and resolve ran out of her She knelt on the floor to pick him up and began to cry, rocking back and forth, unable to stop.

Ethan gave her about fifteen seconds. "Kerry. Kerry, there's nothing here." He took the bear from her and set it back down. "If the police return, we don't want them to know somebody's been in here " He forced her to get up, walked her through the house to the back door But he gave her another few seconds to stop crying, so that her noise wouldn't attract the neighbors' attention.