Disembodied Bones (41 page)

Leonie was a smart lady. He knew it by
speaking to her. He knew it by listening to her, and he knew it
because Dacey had told him so. So far Scott had nothing on her, so
he was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But…

I cannot believe that I’m actually
thinking about that psychic stuff like it’s real
, Scott thought
with disgust.

•

Dacey had two numbers for Elan Carter and got
them for Scott about twenty minutes later. One was an answering
service with a simple and anonymous recording. Another was a
cellular number. Elan answered the cell on the third ring. Crisply,
he said, “Carter.”

“Mr. Carter,” said Scott. “It’s Sheriff
Haskell here. I wonder if I can ask you a few questions about
Leonie Simoneaud.”

Elan’s voice was sardonic. “You still suspect
her of something, sheriff. Personally, I think she’s just what she
says she is. A real live psychic and if you don’t stop persecuting
her, I’m going to find her a good lawyer who will sue your asses
off for harassment.”

“Mr. Carter,” Scott repeated, carefully
modulating his voice to keep the exasperation out of the tone.
“There has been some concern about Ms. Simoneaud’s
whereabouts.”

“Her…whereabouts?” Elan echoed. “She isn’t at
the store?”

“No, sir,” Scott answered. “Nor is she at
home. Her partner is somewhat concerned, considering yesterday’s
events.”

“Of course, Dacey’s concerned. She called me
right off the bat to tell me that Leonie needed some support, and
we went right over there.” Elan paused. “Leonie seemed a little
shaken, but basically all right. I called last night but there
wasn’t an answer, so I figured she’d gone to bed.”

“What time did you call?”

“Around ten. I wanted to make sure she was
okay.”

“Did you leave a message on her machine or on
her voice mail?” Scott made a mental note to go back and look for
the answering machine at Leonie’s home and to call her telephone
service.

“She doesn’t have one. One of the last people
in the world not to have one.”

“So why didn’t you go over there, then?”
Scott persisted.

“My mother,” Elan answered dryly. “She’s got
Alzheimer’s and her day nurse had gone by that time. I couldn’t
leave her alone, which is why I telephoned.” The emphasis plainly
was on telephoned and Elan Carter couldn’t have made it clearer
that he was sincere about Leonie’s well-being. “I don’t know what I
would have done if that man had harmed Leonie.”

Scott was momentarily at a loss to say
anything. “I’ll give you some phone numbers, Mr. Carter. You’ll
call if you hear from her?”

“Certainly. If she gives me a call I will let
you or Dacey know.” Elan hesitated. “It’s not like her to up and
disappear, you know. She’s organized, methodical even. She plans
things down to the minute. She’s got a whole timeline schedule for
restoring that cottage of hers that you wouldn’t believe. X amount
of money saved for Y period to pay for new kitchen cabinets and
countertops, which will be achieved in six months. For her to just
vanish, well, it makes the hackles on the back of my neck stand
up.”

Scott said nothing.

“That guy who was in her house yesterday
didn’t make bail, did he?”

“No, sir,” Scott responded. “Just call me if
you hear from her.”

“Sure. What numbers are those?”

•

Gideon was kept in solitary all of Saturday.
He was questioned by two detectives and one from Shreveport about
his nephew and the backpack found on Leonie’s porch. He kept
stubbornly silent to their questions. When they returned him to the
tiny isolated cell he tried to concentrate on Leonie. Wherever she
was, she was unconscious.

It was almost midnight when he woke out of a
fitful doze, knowing that Leonie was waking up. She was a sick as a
dog and her head spun like a panhandle tornado. Even Gideon could
feel the bile rising in her throat as she fought to regain her
sense of self.

He called out to her.
Leonie
.
But
she wouldn’t answer. She wouldn’t or she
couldn’t. It was as it
had been previously. He could hear her, feel her, sense her, but
her mind was blocked from him. It was strictly a one way
transmitter and he was receiving everything. It was dulled as if
far, far away, and whatever was affecting her was making it seem
like a cloudy dream.

There was pain in Leonie’s shoulder and she
struggled to take back her person. Once he called to her, a
headache roared through her brain, and the pain made Gideon wince
with the force of it all. “Jesus,” he muttered, rubbing his head in
an attempt to ease the ache. “At least she’s alive.” But it was a
biting relief, really not consolation at all.

But then she opened her eyes and the fear
began. He couldn’t see the familiar room the way that she did, but
the terrifying knowledge came to him all the same. Leonie was in a
room that was the duplicate of the one that she had found him in.
In Whitechapel’s home. Tied to a metal hasp and waiting for death
to approach with bated breath. And there was Keefe, alive and
breathing. Her relief was palpable to him and he prayed she could
feel his.

But there was much more and Gideon took it in
silently. Her inner fear was showing him everything and after long
minutes, he almost wished that he could not see it all. Unless she
discovered where she was, or who it was that had taken her, he
wouldn’t be able to do anything. Furthermore, he began to suspect
that it had been an injected drug that had caused the pain in her
shoulder, and what he could sense of her was beginning to fade away
from him, like a distant memory. A chilling electronic voice from
the walls spoke to her that made her tremble. A riddle waited for
her for solve.

The final thing that came to him was when she
managed to open the door and Leonie’s tangible dread was like a
bullet streaking through the night into his naked flesh. It wasn’t
merely the room that was the same. It was the entire house. It was
Whitechapel’s house all over again and Leonie was trapped inside
it, with Keefe to protect, and some anonymous madman who was
laughing uproariously at her plight.

Gideon turned rapidly to the little metal
toilet and threw up every bit of the cardboard tasting food he’d
eaten for dinner.

-

Each morning I appear

To lie at your feet,

All day I follow

No matter how fast you run,

Yet I nearly perish

In the midday sun.

What am I?

I am your shadow.

Sunday, July 28th

They can be harbored, but few hold water.

You can nurse them, but only by holding them against
someone else.

You can carry them, but not with your arms.

You can bury them, but not in the earth.

What are they?

“You upped my timetable,” said the electronic
voice matter-of-factly.

Leonie stared at the hallway with
unadulterated horror. In that sparse second she forgot herself and
reached out to Gideon. The fear that flooded through her body
caused her to disregard what had happened before and she paid
dearly for the transgression. The headache that had begun to fade
from her mind returned in full, pounding away at the interior of
her skull like a jackhammer. She thrust her hands up to the sides
of her head and tried to prevent the pain from causing her brain to
explode. She cried out with the incredible hurt that made her head
pulsate like a heart gone wild. Sinking to one knee, she cradled
her head in her arms and desperately wished the fierce aching away.
In the fuzziness that was background noise she could hear the voice
continuing to speak but only could hear the sound and could not
make out the words.

It was a long time later that the words
started to come together in some comprehensible fashion. “…Better
now?”

Leonie let go of her head and thought that
she might be able to make it through the next hour, if she didn’t
try to use her abilities in any shape or form. She felt a little
movement of moisture at her nose and touched a dribble of blood
that escaped there. Wiping it away with the hem of her T-shirt, she
hoped it would stop quickly.

“I said, you upped my timetable. You weren’t
supposed to be in the barn last night. I couldn’t let you get away,
call attention to me by crying out to the real deputy, now could
I?” Electronic noise crackled. “So you had to come with me. I was
planning on killing the child and dumping his body on some of
Gideon’s property. He owns a hundred acres lakeside property in
eastern Texas. A wonderfully undeveloped place where a deviant
would dispose of a child’s body. The sheriff’s department will hear
about it as soon as I need them to know. But first I had to leave a
riddle for the police…and for you. However, it wasn’t
necessary.”

“So I jumped the gun,” Leonie said. “What,
you had some more stuff in mind for me?”

“I was planning on using Olga again. Her
mother is amazingly stupid in her care giving, even after the child
had been kidnapped once. You seem to be remarkably fond of her.
This child-” Leonie swung her head around to look at Keefe’s still
body as the nameless persecutor continued-“doesn’t mean anything to
you.”

Leonie wasn’t about to deny his statement. If
she could save the child, then save him she would, at the cost of
her own life. Clearly, it was she who he was angered with. For the
moment, he felt like bragging to her and she wasn’t about to stop
him. However, she suspected that he already knew that she would
protect the child, no matter whom or what he was, simply because he
was a child.

“It’s amazing what money will provide,” the
voice went on. “A duplicate of a dead man’s house, replete with the
things that he should have had but didn’t. Once upon a time, Monroe
Whitechapel was afraid of people coming into his house, of seeing
what they shouldn’t. I hire contractors from Dallas and Houston. I
pay them small fortunes. They don’t ask questions and they don’t
talk to the locals. Of course, I also have to do some of the work
myself. Even distant contractors would ask uncomfortable questions
about some of that.”

Struggling to comprehend the situation,
Leonie’s mind swirled. The pain was thankfully beginning to recede
again, leaving her thoughts coherent once more, but it felt as
though a great blinding spot was fluttering in between in her eyes
and her ears. For all she knew Whitechapel’s bullet had come loose
of its tissue enwrapped prison and was rattling around in her
brain. She wiped away another drop of blood from her nose.

It was time to think of the owner of the
anonymous voice instead. This person had had a house built to
replicate Whitechapel’s house. All for the express purpose of
torturing Leonie Simoneaud and the people who had the mistake of
being too close to her. Revenge motivated this man and Gideon’s
previous conversation came to her.

The horror of what had been done was as
painful as the knee-buckling headaches.

The mental conversation replayed like a cd on
the radio. She remembered each word as if it were thought only the
minute before. Leonie had asked the question
, If Whitechapel had
a place to hide you, why weren’t you there? Why were you in the
house instead?

Gideon had responded with,
I’d forgotten
until now. I wish I hadn’t remembered. When I saw my parents
running across his yard all I could think of was that I was glad to
be free, I was glad to be alive. I was so happy that I could see my
parents. I pushed everything away. Even what he’d said. Even
you.

Leonie’s answer had been appalled.
Forgotten. The riddle on Olga. The last lines. Even if you
perceive me, you know me not. Before you can tell me…

What I’ve forgotten.

He didn’t put you in his hidden place
because he had something else there. He had another child
there.
Leonie hadn’t wanted to believe it. It was simply too
terrible to grasp. It was a fate that no one should ever face.
Alone in the darkness without knowledge, without understanding of
what was happening to him, what would happen to him. She wanted to
dismiss it as improbable; the police, who had dug up every inch of
Whitechapel’s grounds, would have surely found such a prison.

And Gideon had been equally horrified.
He
said he had something to do first. Something to take care of.
Something to get rid of. Oh, my God. I hope he was dead already.
They never found anything like that. Roosevelt would have told me.
So perhaps he was dead already so he didn’t…suffer.

But he had suffered. The proof was the place
that Leonie now sat within.

When she looked up again, the electronic
speakers were silent. She hadn’t realized it but when she had been
mentally replaying the revealing conversation, she had muttered
some of the words aloud. “Forgotten?”

“Clever girl. How did you come to that
conclusion?”

“It was something Gideon…said,” Leonie
replied slowly. “Something he remembered about Whitechapel. And
your riddles.”

“What did he say?”

“That on that day, Whitechapel had something
to do, something to get rid of.” Leonie’s gold eyes sparkled with
unshed tears, for the boy who had been left behind. “If he had put
Douglas Trent there, then the other boy would have known he was
about to be killed, and might have resisted.”

“I suspected regardless.”

Leonie’s mouth opened in silent incredulity.
How could that child have survived? And in a place so well
hidden that the police couldn’t find it? How is it possible? And
how long had he held his silent grudge against me? Against Gideon?
How many years did it take to plan this Machiavellian deed and how
much money would that mean?

Blocking the door to the room that she awoken
in so that it couldn’t be locked again, Leonie decided that it was
time to find a weapon. It was time to see how much this house
resembled the first. She had been in it a long time ago and the
memory still haunted her nightmares. She hadn’t forgotten and she
would use it to her advantage.