Evil at Heart (10 page)

           
It was in his dresser.

           
He traced his fingers up along the dresser drawers, feeling for the telltale vibration. The buzzing stopped.

           
He opened the second drawer down.

           
The phone was half covered by a pair of pants, but it was there, clear as day. Archie glanced up at the camera mounted in the corner of the room. The camera didn’t have the right angle to see it.

           
He reached into the drawer and pretended to be fascinated by an imaginary stain on a pair of corduroys while he fumbled with the phone with his other hand. He didn’t take it out of the drawer. Five hundred and thirty-eight missed calls. One text message. Archie clicked on it.

           
“DARLING,” it read. “FEEL BETTER?”

           
Archie’s body stiffened. Gretchen.

           
She’d gotten someone to put it there, some hospital employee who probably thought the phone was for Archie to keep in touch with a loved one.

           
It was the second phone she’d found a way to get to him. He’d discovered the first one the second week he’d been there. It was taped under the sink in the bathroom. He’d thrown it away in the bathroom trash, jamming it under half a roll of toilet paper so the custodial staff wouldn’t see it.

           
This time Archie slipped the phone out of the drawer, and put it in his pocket.

           
He was Level Four. Rosenberg had said he should go for a walk.

           
C H A P T E R 11

           
Three-nine-seven North Fargo was the scariest house in sight. The old bungalow sat abandoned on an empty block that had long ago turned to urban meadow. Its asbestos siding was painted a shade of brown that even in its prime must have embarrassed the neighbors, and its asphalt roof was more moss than shingles. Sheets of plywood covered the windows. The words KEEP OUT were spray-painted across the plywood that covered the front door. If Susan had been scouting locations for a horror movie, she would not have had to look further.

           
It had to be a prank. It was too perfect.

           
Susan sat in her car at the curb and craned her head around to look up and down the street. It was late morning, and no one was around. There were no other houses on that block, and the church parking lot across the street was empty. She considered the possibilities. What if there was a body in there? It was feasible. Some PBR-fueled college kids had sneaked inside to party or to read Longfellow or something, and found some dead junkie or homeless person and then didn’t want to report it because they didn’t want to get hassled for trespassing.

           
Sure. That made perfect sense.

           
Or maybe it was a trap. A Herald headline flashed in Susan’s mind: INTREPID REPORTER MURDERED AFTER WALKING INTO BEAUTY KILLER AMBUSH. Journalist, Susan corrected herself, remembering Henry’s joke.

           
Susan pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and stared some more at the house.

           
This was ridiculous. She was being dramatic. Get it over with, Nancy Drew.

           
She tossed her cigarette out into the rain, grabbed her purse full of mace, and got out of the car.

           
Look like you’re supposed to be there. Quentin Parker had taught her that. Look like you’re supposed to be there and no one will ask you what the hell you’re doing. He had always kept a clipboard in his car. No one questions a man with a clipboard, he’d said.

           
Susan went around to her trunk, where she kept her emergency reporter kit, and got out a flashlight and notebook, which she put in her purse, and an old clipboard. If someone in the church across the street was watching, she would look like she was trying to Rock the Vote, or maybe conducting a survey. And how many corpses do you have inside, sir?

           
She was wearing black jeans, black lace-up boots, and a black tank top. Add the purple hair and red lipstick and she looked more like she should be working at the MAC counter than conducting door-to-door surveys.

           
Did people even use clipboards anymore?

           
Stride confidently. That’s the other thing Parker had taught her. Susan tried to stride confidently, but it was a challenge since it was raining pretty hard and she had to tramp through a lot of dead weeds to get up the overgrown front walk.

           
The house, up close, was even worse off than it looked from the street. The porch, along with the stairs up to it, leaned slightly to the right, while the house itself seemed to lean slightly to the left. Susan walked around the side through knee-high grass. She put the clipboard under her arm. It was pointless. No one could see her anyway. Behind the back of the house she saw what she was looking for—a piece of plywood lay on the ground in front of a basement window that had been broken. You couldn’t keep people out of abandoned houses. Not in this neighborhood.

           
Susan got her flashlight out of her purse, flipped it on, and squatted near the window. The broken glass had been knocked out clean, so the window frame was free of shards. The natural light coming through the window illuminated a diffuse rectangle of concrete and broken glass below. Susan poked her head in, bracing herself on the window jamb with one hand, and reached the flashlight in as far as she could. It didn’t reveal much. Pipes.Ducts.Concrete. It looked . . . basementy.

           
“Hello?” she said into the darkness. “Did someone here order a pizza?”

           
The only sound she heard was a bus going by at the next intersection. Was it breaking and entering if the window was already broken? Or was it just entering? If she went in and didn’t find anything, she’d go straight to the paper and never tell anyone. Susan couldn’t believe she was actually considering this. And at the same time, she felt a shiver of delight. Six months ago, she was writing human-interest stories about zoo animals. This was a lot more exciting.

           
“I’m coming in,” she said. She stowed the flashlight back in her purse, dangled her legs through the window, and dropped down to the floor below. Broken glass crunched under her boots.

           
The house was quiet. Weirdly quiet. No central air, no water heater, no humming fridge, none of that ambient house sound.

           
She got the flashlight out again and turned it on. The flashlight illuminated so much dust in the air that the beam looked almost solid. A corner of the basement floor was flooded with brackish groundwater that had seeped in through the foundation. Beer cans, cigarette butts, and broken liquor bottles littered the floor. There was a vague smell of urine.

           
Susan shuddered. Suddenly covering an elephant’s birthday party didn’t seem so bad. She looked longingly up at the window she’d just come through. The sill was chin-high. She was skinny, but not strong. There was no way she’d be able to lift herself up to climb out. She was committed.

           
She took a few tentative steps and aimed the flashlight up the stairs. There were lots of things that could kill you in a house: radon, asbestos, toxic mold, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, lead, polyurethane foam, fiberglass insulation. This house wasn’t any more dangerous than any other.

           
“Anyone home?” she called. “I’m gathering signatures,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow and nervous. “To legalize pot?”

           
Nothing.

           
She saw something move. Just a flash. She jerked the flashlight beam to the left just in time to see the back end of a rat skitter past a beer can.

           
She made it halfway up the stairs in two steps. Not that she was scared of rats, she told herself—she was just suddenly in a very big hurry. The stairs led up to the kitchen. With all the windows covered, the first floor was even darker than the basement. She knew it was the kitchen only because of the cracked speckled linoleum on the floor. There were footprints in the dust on the floor, seemingly dozens, in random patterns, like there’d been a scuffle there, or a square dance.

           
There were no appliances in the kitchen anymore, just empty wooden cupboards and fittings for gas pipes sticking out of the wall where an oven used to be. The sink was filled with more beer cans. There were no dead bodies.

           
Susan squeezed the flashlight in her armpit, and got her notebook and pen out of her purse. She had to hold the flashlight under her chin to see what she was writing, but she managed to take a few notes. Footprints. Miller High Life cans. Really fucking spooky.Also, rat.

           
She put the notebook and pen away, took the flashlight back in her hand, and followed the beam out of the kitchen into a dark hallway and toward the front of the house until she came to a bedsheet that blocked the entrance to the next room. The sheet had been nailed to the ceiling and hung to the floor like a makeshift door. Classy.

           
Rat-borne illnesses killed almost thirteen thousand people a year.