Enter, Night (47 page)

“I went over his house at lunchtime. I knocked, but no one answered.
That was the last time, until this morning.”

Christina took a deep breath and tried to marshal her thoughts. “All
right. OK. One step at a time. Morgan, shouldn’t you be getting ready for
school?”

“It’s
Saturday,
Mom.” Morgan rolled her eyes. “There’s no school
today, even in Parr’s Landing.”

Jeremy frowned. “Morgan, did you check on your grandmother like
I asked you to?

“No, Uncle Jeremy. I was talking to Finn. I’m sorry.”

“It’s almost nine and I haven’t seen her at all this morning. Have you,
Chris?”

“No,” Christina said. “She hasn’t been down. And Beatrice didn’t
come in this morning, either. I made breakfast, and no one came into the
kitchen to tell me what a disaster I was, or how I was doing it wrong, or
what a mess I was making.”

Jeremy smiled wanly, then sighed. “All right, I’ll go up and check on
her.”

Jeremy rapped lightly
on the door of Adeline’s bedroom and called out,
“Mother? It’s me, Jeremy. Are you all right? It’s almost nine o’clock.”

He expected to hear a stinging rebuke of some sort issuing through
the mahogany door, but there was only silence in the gloom of the
upstairs hallway. He gently turned the cut glass doorknob and pushed.
The door swung easily into the room. Jeremy blinked.

The bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in. The bedspread was
smooth, the pillows—fluffed up every evening by Beatrice before she
was allowed to leave for the day—were propped against the ornate
headboard of Adeline Parr’s bed. Her perfumes and brushes were lined
up on her dressing table the way they always were.

More, though—there was a sense of dry airlessness in the room, as
though the door had been left shut for much longer than just the night.

“Mother?” he called out again, in case she was in her bathroom. But
no, the door was open. He saw that the bathtub was dry, as were the
sinks and the floor.

Glancing guiltily around him, Jeremy crossed to Adeline’s dressing
table and opened the bottom left-hand drawer. He lifted up the file
folders he found there and saw that the money he’d found yesterday—
almost a thousand dollars, as he’d told Christina—was still in place.

Joy rose in him. The money was still there, which meant that they
could leave whenever they wanted to. Adeline’s absence would have
been completely fortuitous in this regard, except that now this Miller
kid had disappeared and he doubted very much that he would be able to
pry either Christina or Morgan away from the Landing until he surfaced
again.

Jeremy only prayed that his mother didn’t return anytime soon from
whatever errand or assignation had taken her away from the house so
early this morning. It would just make stealing her money and escaping
from her house that much easier. He considered pocketing the money
now, but realized that if Adeline came home abruptly and saw that the
money was missing, the consequences of her fury would be unthinkable.
No, better to take it at the last possible minute, before Adeline had time
to even realize it was gone.

In the least emotionally involved and most tangential way, Jeremy
wondered where his mother was. But Jeremy was a child of Parr House,
and he realized that the times when he could enjoy Adeline’s absence had
been few enough in his years here that he should appreciate them when
they occurred. Better not to risk breaking the spell by asking questions.

The three of them ate
breakfast in the kitchen, not the dining room.
They mostly ate in silence, each deep in his or her own thoughts.

Jeremy tried to signal with his eyes to Christina, to remind her
about their escape plan, but she stared at her plate of scrambled eggs
and barely touched them.

Morgan was thinking about betrayal and how her thoughtless
dismissal of Finn at his most vulnerable had sent him fleeing from the
house at the moment he needed Morgan the most. And now he was
somewhere outside, afraid to go home, terrified that the vampires in his
comic books were real, and that they had laid siege to his family and his
dog.

Then Christina said, “I’m going to call Billy Lightning. I’m going to call him at the motel and meet him in town and talk about this.”

Jeremy looked surprised. He laid down his coffee cup. “You are?

Why?”

“Because I trust him, Jeremy. Aside from you and Morgan—who frankly don’t know any more than I do about what’s happening here—he’s the only person in this town I trust. He knows a lot about this town and the things that have happened here over the years. And he has a truck. We may need it to look for Finn later, especially if he’s gone into the woods to look for his dog or something.”

“Mom, I told you, his dog is dead,” Morgan said. “Finn said the dog burned up.”

“Morgan,” Christina said patiently. “Finn’s dog didn’t ‘burn up.’ Dogs don’t ‘burn up.’ He’s probably so rattled by what he saw last night—and I can’t believe we’re not talking to the police about this because the Parr’s Landing police detachment forgot to come in to work today—that he’s imagining it. He’s probably had a spell of some sort. Anyway, Billy might know what to do, so I’m going to call him.”

“Christina,” Jeremy said, rolling his eyes surreptitiously. “Remember what we talked about . . . ?” He mouthed
today,
his head angled in a way that Morgan couldn’t see his face. Christina shook her head almost imperceptibly and walked out of the room, towards the phone.

Morgan and Jeremy heard her dialling, then asking to be connected to Billy Lightning’s room. There was a brief, muffled conversation, then Christina returned to the dining room carrying her purse.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Morgan, would you please stay here until we figure out what’s going on? Jeremy, would you keep an eye on her?”

“Mom! I’m not—”

“Yes, Morgan, I know you’re not a baby. So please, do as I ask and don’t leave the house until I get back. All right?”

Morgan sighed theatrically, then softened when she saw the fear on her mother’s face. “All right, Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay here.”

“You can take advantage of your grandmother’s absence to do some exploring,” Jeremy said. “It’s a big house, and you haven’t seen much of it so far. With Adeline away, the mice can play.”

“Thanks, Jeremy,” Christina said gratefully. “I won’t be long.”

Behind the wheel of
the Chevelle, Christina noticed how empty the
streets were for a Saturday morning—how she passed no other cars
on the road and there was no one hurrying along the sidewalks. Even
with weather this raw, there ought to be people living their lives. Parr’s
Landing was a tough town—weather was what they lived with, not what
dictated how they lived.

That damnable cold rain began to fall again, and she turned on the
windshield wipers.

When she pulled up in front of the Pear Tree, she saw Billy Lightning
huddled under the awning by the front entrance, waiting for her. When
he saw her, he brightened visibly and hurried over to the car. She rolled
down the window. “Why are you waiting out here in the rain? Climb in
before you get soaked.”

Billy shrugged, opening the door and sliding into the passenger seat.
“It’s closed, I guess. Locked up tight as a—” He blushed furiously. “Well,
it’s closed.”

“Really?” Christina was surprised. “The Pear Tree is always open for
breakfast.”

“Closed today,” Billy said. “Let’s go to the Nugget. I passed Mr. Marin
sitting at the counter having coffee on the way here.” He grinned. “How
about a lift? I walked over there before the rain started.”

“Sure thing.”

“Pretty dead today, isn’t it?” Billy said mildly, looking out the
passenger-side window. “I haven’t seen many people out today, even
with the rain. Is there some sort of town ordinance about people staying
indoors on Saturday mornings in the Landing?”

Christina squinted through rain streaming across the windshield as
the sign for the Golden Nugget came into view. “I noticed that myself on
the way over here. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

Again, they were alone
in the diner. Billy wondered idly how poor
Darcy Marin, the owner of the Nugget, made enough money to live,
between his nearly empty motel and this albatross of a diner than never
seemed to have any customers in it. But the coffee was hot and it was
warm inside, in sharp contrast to the rain that was now falling in earnest,
and cold enough to become snow before sunset.

“Something very odd is happening in Parr’s Landing and I don’t
know what, exactly. But I need to talk to you,” Christina said.

Billy raised his eyebrows. “I love a mystery. And it sure wouldn’t be
the first mystery that ever occurred here.”

“It’s sort of serious,” she said. “Have you seen the police today?”

He smiled. “No, why? Am I in trouble—again? Is McKitrick going to
arrest me for having dinner with you the other night?”

“Billy, please,” Christina pleaded. “I’m serious.”

Billy sighed. “OK, I’ll bite. No, Christina, I haven’t seen the police
today. Why?”

“Early this morning, a friend of Morgan’s woke us up at the house,”
she began. “Finn, his name is. He said his parents had been killed—to be
precise, he said that his father had murdered his mother. Jeremy went
over to check the house. He said the front window was broken and that
there was blood on the floor. He went to report it at the police station,
but no one was there—not Elliot, not his sergeant. Jeremy said the lights
were on and the door was unlocked.”

“So someone
was
in the station at some point that morning?”

“Jeremy told us it seemed like the lights had been left on all night.”

Billy regarded her skeptically. “How does he figure that?”

“He said all the lights were on,” she said, “When you come in, in the
morning to open up an office, you don’t turn all the lights on—just the
ones you’ll be using.”

“So what are we to assume, then? That the Parr’s Landing police
department has taken a holiday?”

“I don’t know, Billy,” she said fiercely. “But I do know that there’s a
little boy out there who claims he saw his mother get killed by his father,
but there’re no police around to report it to.”

Billy was silent for a long moment. To Christina he seemed about
to share something, but the moment passed. Instead, he reached for his
coffee cup.

“Billy, what is it?” She reached for his hand and touched it lightly.
“Why did you come back here?” Christina said. “What did you hope to
find here? I mean, in Parr’s Landing. You hinted at it the other day, but
you said you didn’t want to talk about it. Do you still not want to talk
about it?”

He sighed. “You’ll think I’m crazy and paranoid.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t. I don’t think you could be either of those
things.”

“I think my father was murdered by that graduate student I told
you about, Richard Weal. I think Weal was the one who killed him, and I
believe he either has, or will, come back to Parr’s Landing. I feel it in my
bones. Listening to this story scares the crap out of me.”

Christina looked at him dubiously. “Billy, even if that’s true—even if
it’s true that this guy killed your dad, why on earth would he come back
here?”

“You didn’t see him that summer, Christina,” Billy said impatiently.
“You didn’t hear him raving about the voices he heard coming from under
Spirit Rock. You didn’t see his face when they found him hiding out after
he hurt Emory Greer. This is where he first ‘lost it,’ as they say. This is
where he went crazy. Like a lot of other people over the years have gone
crazy here and killed people.”

“Again—I’m sorry, Billy, but how would you find him, even if he
did return? What would you do with him? You’re not a cop; you’re not
a private detective. You’re a university professor.” Christina hesitated,
unsure how best to phrase what she was about to say next. “I don’t have
a home to go back to. You do. Wouldn’t the best way to honour your
father’s memory be to go back to your teaching life? I wish I could leave
here, but Jeremy and I are stuck, at least for the moment. You’re free as
a bird. Is this town really where you want to be?”

“Christina,” he said slowly. “I saw a hockey bag. Some kid found it
up by Spirit Rock when he was looking for his dog, apparently. It was
full of hammers and knives. There was blood on them. And there were
some—some personal artefacts of my father’s. Some documents. The
police have the bag. They’ve sent it off for fingerprints. I think they hope
they’ll find mine on it, but they won’t. They’ll find his.”

“Wait a minute. Oh my God. Did you say the kid was looking for his
dog? Is that what you said?”

Billy was confused. “Yeah, that’s what the cops told me. Why?”

“Because that’s Morgan’s friend—the one who came to our door this
morning.” Christina’s voice had jumped an octave. “He lost his dog up
there on the cliffs. Sadie, her name was Sadie.”

Billy let out a low whistle. “You’ve got to be kidding me. The same
kid who found Weal’s hockey bag was banging on your door this morning
claiming he saw his mother murdered, but there are no cops around?
They’re around to harass me for just daring to be in Parr’s Landing, but
when there’s an actual crime, they take a break from police work?”

“Can you really picture Elliot McKitrick taking ‘a break’ from being a
cop, Billy? Do you really think he just flaked off the job? My God.”

Privately, Billy couldn’t picture it, no. Not a chance. That young tight ass wouldn’t know how to take a break from being a cop, not even for
money.
Especially not with me in town,
Billy thought. But neither did Billy
want to escalate this situation—whatever it was—by giving Christina
any further reason to panic. At least not yet.

Billy didn’t believe the kid had mistaken Richard Weal for his father,
but it was 1972, not 1872, or even 1952. Surely whatever madness had
historically afflicted the inhabitants of this place wasn’t still afflicting
them after all this time? The anthropologist in him had always been
intrigued by the persistent legends of this part of northern Ontario, but
Billy didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or the Wendigo.