GRAVEWORM (29 page)

“
Whew,” Jan finally said. Still, no good humor had touched her usually smiling face. “And what can I do for you, Steve?”

“I’m looking for Tara.”

Again, that pinched look. “She’s not here today, Steve. In fact, she said she wouldn’t be in the rest of the week.”

Hmm. “Did she say why?”

Jan shook her head. “No.”

And was it him or did Jan seem just ever so slightly uncomfortable talking about Tara? She was like some soldier, fresh from the front, her eyes mirroring some secret atrocity that she could not bring herself to put into words.

“
Listen, Jan,” he said. “Something’s going on with Tara and I don’t know what it is, but it’s scaring the shit out of me. If you know something,
anything,
please tell me what it is before I go out of my freaking mind here.”

“Then it’s not just me?”

Steve felt a spike of dread in his chest. Vindication of his formless fears, yes, but it hardly put him at ease. Something
was
really happening, but what?

Jan sighed, picked up her coffee mug, realized it was empty, and set it back down. “I don’t know what’s going on, Steve. But she called in yesterday morning. I thought maybe it was my imagination or maybe I hoped it was, but there was something in her voice.”

“What kind of something?”

“
I… I’m not sure.” Jan shook her head. “She sounded… I don’t know…
weird.
I mean, Tara is always intense, but this wasn’t that… it was almost hollow… empty, you know? Like a prerecorded message when a computer calls you or one of those dolls where you pull the string and they talk. I don’t know, it makes no sense.”

But to Steve it made all the sense in the world. He had gotten much the same feeling from Tara himself. Like she was just going through the motions, saying what she thought he wanted to hear but with no feeling behind any of it. As if the real Tara was light years away and the one he saw was just a dummy reciting a script. Though, now and again, that veneer would crack and something else would peer through and whatever it was, it scared the shit out of him.

Monsters, Steve. Fucking monsters. When the lights go out, that’s when the monsters come.

“
Something’s going on, Jan. Something bad, only I don’t know what.”

Jan was concerned too, so he told her about his visit with Tara. Maybe he was betraying Tara by doing it, but he didn’t really think he was because Jan was her friend and she deserved to know how bad things were getting. Besides, the way he was seeing it, the more people who cared about Tara who stood behind him the better.

“
I don’t like any of it,” Jan admitted, tapping her lacquered nails nervously on the desk blotter. “Like I said, she’s always intense, but not like this. Do you think… I even hate to say it… that she might be, you know, having a nervous breakdown?”

But Steve could only shrug. “I just don’t know, Jan. But I’m worried. Hell, I’m scared to death.”

“I called her this morning.”

Steve sat forward. “Did she answer?”

“
Yes. She sounded very weird and I asked her if she was feeling okay and she said she was feeling under the weather. So I asked her if there was anything I could do for her, anything I could help her with.”

“And what did she say?”

Jan chewed her lip. “She said
nobody
could help her. Then she hung up.”

Well, that was all he got from Jan and it did little to calm him and even less to make him understand just what in the hell was going on. He was more worried than ever after he left the Teamsters Hall. This was big and ugly and he honestly did not know if he was up to it, but he had to be. He had that feeling when he spoke with Tara that something inside her was calling out to him, begging for help, and that feeling was growing stronger by the moment.

It wasn’t until three that he got over to the Starlight Lounge where Tara put in four hours a night hustling drinks. The Starlight didn’t open until five, but some of the employees came in at three. Steve knew they used the back entry, so he parked in the alley and waited.

About five after, Bobby Drew pulled up in his Cadillac convertible and adjusted his toupee in the rearview mirror, pulling off a Pall Mall that was longer than a pencil.

“
Steve,” he said, puffing smoke and exuding cologne. “How’s the boy?”

“
Okay. Has Tara been in lately?’

Bobby pulled off his cigarette. “Tara? No, not last night.”

“Did she call?”

“
Hell, I think so. Lucky it was slow. She not coming in again?”

“I don’t know, Bobby.”

Bobby just stared at him, then he smiled. “Oh, one of
those
things, hey, Steve? Lover’s spat. Shit, it’ll work itself out. They always do.”

“
I hope so. Who would have taken the call?”

“From Tara? Probably Linda.”

They went through the bright red backdoor and into a supply room stacked with cases of beer and liquor. Steve followed Bobby into the barroom. The smell of old booze hung in the air like a yellow memory. The juke was already thumping with old rock and roll.

“
I said c’mere!”
Bobby shook his head and Steve waited for the toupee take wing. “Jesus, these broads.”

“
I’m coming, I’m coming! Keep your shirt on!” Linda appeared from the back carrying a case of potato chips. “Oh, hey, Steve. How’s Tara doing? Still under the weather?”

Is that what she told you? She’s under the weather. That’s good, I like that.

As Bobby went on his way, Linda set her case on the bar, jotted a few things on a sheet of paper and Steve stood there, his mouth filled suddenly with dry cotton, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. There were words in his brain, but they would not come. And even if they did, they would scratch dryly in his throat like a stick dragged through desert dust and his lips would never be able to give them form.

Linda was looking at him, seeing the darkness clinging to his face and knowing, as all women knew, trauma and terror and anxiety when she saw it. “Steve? Are you all right?”

“What did Tara say when she called?”

Linda sighed, gave a noncommittal shrug of her shoulders… then dispensed with the pretense and let herself go tense to her roots. “There
is
something going on with her, isn’t there?”

“
Yes,” Steve said. He sketched out a few things for her and asked her to keep it all to herself.

“
I thought so.” Linda leaned against the bar as if her body was suddenly too heavy to support itself. “She called and said she wouldn’t be in, that she’d be gone all week. Said that she was under the weather. At first I didn’t even know who the hell I was talking to. It didn’t sound like Tara. It sounded… I don’t know, like a different person, someone much older, you know?”

Oh, Steve knew, all right. “What did she say exactly?”

“
She said she was sick, you know, under the weather.”

“
Nothing more than that?”

Linda shook her head. “I asked her, but all she said was… I don’t know… something kind of strange like if she got better, she’d call.”

If she got better, she’d call.

If.

If…

There. Did he need much more reason to be afraid? Tara was unhinged and the evidence was abundant. But if that were so, then what exactly unhinged her? There had to be a catalyst.
Something.
Standing there, Linda’s words echoing through his head with a dull rhythm, he was gripped by the oddest sensation of fear and unreality. It seized him and would not let him go. On the surface things seemed to be quite normal—she was under the weather—but he, like Tara, was no longer a surface dweller. To know her and understand what had happened, he had to crawl on his belly through her murky labyrinth now, get his nose in the dirt and soil on his tongue.

I’ve come down with something and I feel like shit.

That’s exactly what she had said to him. There was truth in that statement, yes, but only a hint of it. He’d known it at the time, that blankness living in her eyes, shrouding what was really going on inside her skull.

“
Hey, Linda!” Bobby called out. “I need you over here! Did you order two cases of pizzas? There’s a guy here with two cases of fucking pizzas!”

Linda shook her head. “I gotta go, Steve. You let me know how things turn out. She’s probably just in a mood or something.” Linda uttered a quick laugh at that but it was dead before it left her lips. “Let me know if I can do anything.”

“Linda!”

“
I’m coming! Jesus
Christ
!”

Then Steve was alone, feeling things he did not want to feel and knowing absolutely nothing. He felt weak in the belly and dizzy in the head and he stumbled out into the alley, gulping in fresh September air, a perfectly awful taste in his mouth.

55

Bud Stapleton wasn’t sure when he started getting a bad feeling about Tara Coombes, only that it was there and maybe it had been from the first. Like catching a whiff of rotting meat, once it was in his head he could not get it out of there… something was wrong, something had gone bad in that girl or around her and he knew this without actually having any evidence to the same.

His mind kept going back to the day Margaret had disappeared.

He’d been in the garage working on that old rocking chair Marge had picked up at a flea market. He was on his second coat of varnish, following the grain of the wood with sure, easy strokes. That’s when Marge had called out to him. He could even hear her voice:
“See ya later, Bud. Be home late like usual.”
There was no doubt of it in his mind now. If she had been going anywhere but over to the Coombes’ house she would have told him.

So either something happened on her way there (which was highly unlikely being that they were only six houses apart) or… or something had happened to her
at
the Coombes’ house. But Tara said she had not come over, that Lisa was down in Milwaukee. Bud could hear Tara now as easily as he could hear his wife:
“No, she’s not here, Bud. I mean, I can go look around, but no one was here when I got home last night. Lisa’s down in Milwaukee with her Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire for a week, so I just figured Margaret didn’t come over. No reason for her to.”
That’s what Tara had said on the phone that night. But Margaret must have gone over there. Something was screwy with this whole business. Something was wrong about it.

But Tara wouldn’t lie.

Christ, she was a good kid. Raising her sister up right, working two jobs, she was true blue. And that’s what he was having trouble with. He
knew
that Margaret had gone over there but Tara denied the same. If you ruled out abduction, then Marge
had
gone over there and that meant… that meant Tara was lying.

But why?

Why?

Think, old man. You were a cop, so act like one. Okay.

He went over what Tara had said to him. The way she had said it. He looked for anything in her voice that might clue him in that she was lying. She sounded a little funny… but it was late at night and he woke her up. Yet…
yet,
for a groggy person, she had her story down pat. That gave Bud a moment’s uneasiness. You woke most people up out of a dead sleep and they were confused. They made little sense. But Tara had seemed quite alert.

Now you’re jumping to conclusions. You know Tara. For chrissake you watched her grow up. You bought Girl Scout cookies from her. You gave her candy on Halloween. You watched her go from being a shy, brainy kid in rollerskates to becoming homecoming queen.

Yet… in his belly, there was a slick of grease when he contemplated the sound of her voice… too quick, too easy, too practiced. In the old days he used to get that feeling from perps.

But Tara?

He picked up the phone, dialed the Coombes’ house. It was picked up on the third ring.

“
Tara?” he said. “Tara? You there? This is Bud Stapleton from down the block.”

Nothing.

No… not nothing, there was
something
there all right—a heavy, distant breathing that made a chill run down the middle of his back.