In This Skin (10 page)

    Benedict raised the lid. There it was. The secret obsession. The obsession that dominated his life. It was the reason why he'd moved here to Chicago from Atlantic City. It was the reason he freelanced from home so he could drop what he was doing the moment the call came.

    ”The call for what?”

    The answer crept up on him. The call that tells me what happened to my ex-fiancee Mariah Lee. Yeah, past events were like filthy great nails, fixing him to the cross of love.

    He shook his head. Melodramatic phrases aside, he knew he couldn't move on in his life or form new permanent relationships until he could answer the one question that obsessed him.

    What happened to Mariah Lee?

    These boxes contained files, correspondence, computer disks, photographs, videotapes. The result of three years' work when he turned himself into a detective to learn what had happened to the love of his life (even though she'd walked out on him: another truth he found hard to face). Really, he could reduce all the known facts relating to her disappearance to a few stark words: On the night of April 19, ten years ago, Mariah had gone to a concert at the Luxor alone. She'd gone in. He, Benedict West, had secretly watched from his car as she passed through the Egyptian-style entrance into the Luxor. Doormen, the girl in the box office, bar staff, even the band's bassist who'd tried to buy her a drink, could testify that she'd spent the whole evening in the club, sitting alone in the corner as if waiting for someone that had never shown. Then at the end of the night she'd never left the building. As simple as that. A great big hole could have opened up on the dance floor and swallowed her into some bottomless abyss. No one saw her leave.

    Benedict, sitting in the car, his eyes locked on the entrance, never saw her leave either. Of course, the police assumed she'd done just that.

    They argued with Benedict that she'd slipped out some back way (maybe with the horny bassist, who seemed a little wacko to them anyway). After all, a search of the building with dogs never revealed a trace of Mariah. Although, one cop did later admit that the dogs went crazy in the building. They threw back their heads and yowled. When they were slipped off their leashes with a command to search, they'd scuttled outside with their ears flattened to their head. Then they'd even tried to bite their handler when they were hauled inside again.

    But that was that. Benedict knew the police believed that Mariah wanted to make a clean break from Benedict by moving to Chicago (their glances at one another suggested they figured Benedict might just be another possessive ex-lover who couldn't take ”It's over”for an answer). What's more, Mariah Lee was an adult. There was no sign of a crime being committed. She'd already closed down her bank accounts (and probably opened new ones under a different name- that was the police line anyway).

    ”So, Benedict, old buddy, it was all down to you.”He'd rented an apartment here and became his own private police force of one. He didn't find a trace of Mariah in all those years of searching. But he found out secrets about the Luxor. What he learned repeatedly drew him back.

    Hell… if the Luxor was shaped like a cross and he, Benedict West, was nailed to it by the hands and feet, he couldn't be any more closely fixed to it.

    He pulled out a wad of letters and began to read. At that moment he knew the drive to the lake was on hold. This box of files was pulling him back in time to the years when he'd spent every waking moment searching for Mariah.

    

    

    ”Robyn?”The voice of her best friend on the telephone rose in surprise.

    ”Robyn? Haven't you thought of the obvious?”

    ”I'd planned to make an appointment with my doctor in the morning.”

    ”First things first,” her friend said. ”Meet me outside the supermarket in half an hour.”

    ”The supermarket? Gillian? What on earth for?”

    ”They have a pharmacy."

    

    

    With his father snoring on the sofa and his mother asleep in her room, Ellery Hann moved through the apartment like a ghost. His brother had taken the opportunity of stealing a twenty-dollar bill from the wallet the stranger had returned yesterday. Now big bro had gone bowling with his buddies. If you were interested, you could flip a coin to see whether he would be home by midnight or they'd get a call from the police. The odds were the same. Ellery's brother had a knack of getting into fights or being accused of petty theft or criminal damage. Last week it was trashing a pay phone with a tire iron, just for the hell of it. Not that Ellery bothered about the twenty-dollar bill. Ever since he'd started spending time at the Luxor, stuff like money and personal possessions had become unimportant. He should have learned the lesson years ago because of the times his elder brothers and father took the cash grandparents gave him or smashed his toys… He shrugged. No, that didn't matter anymore. Silently he walked into the living room, where his father grunted through forty winks on the sofa. Ellery checked the mirror. He looked at the line of his own delicate jaw, then glanced at his father's chunky slab of bone that formed his bottom jaw. His elder brothers could have been delayed clones of the snorting bear of a man, but Ellery looked nothing like him. Ellery's cheekbones were high and molded silky fine skin. His father's were buried beneath bulging flesh blemished with red veins that looked like pen doodles. The woolly mane of crinkly hair was nothing like Ellery's either. His was pure black, fine and absolutely straight.

    Ellery's gaze roamed the apartment that his mom had battled to keep clean for so long it had broken her health. Bronchitis and a heart murmur kept her bedridden for most of the day. The only time she rose was to cook meals or tidy at least a little of the mess his father and brothers made. For the last half hour Ellery had ghosted through the place, silently washing the dishes, straightening drapes, wiping away dust and grease spills on work tops, emptying ashtrays. He'd lived here twelve years. It seemed no more like home now than the day he walked through the door.

    In elementary school his teacher had asked the class to draw a picture of home. Ellery had turned in a detailed and precocious drawing of a vast structure that lay in ruins beneath clinging shrouds of moss, vines, spindly bamboo canes, and olive trees whose thick limbs were somehow apelike. Beneath the growth and the decay his pencils had sketched an uncanny trace of domes, towers and bizarre external staircases that climbed across the face of ancient walls. In Ellery's mind's eye that was the place he saw when he thought the word: HOME.

    

    

    Robyn stood in Gillian's bathroom staring at her own reflection. Her eyes looked back at her. It's strange; even though you've had the biggest shock of your life and your mind's in turmoil, you can look calm. Untroubled, even. It was so weird. She should be screaming or beating her head with her hands.

    But look at that, she thought, not a flicker of emotion.

    The sound of fingernails clicking on wood reached her. Robyn realized that Gillian had tapped before, trying to attract her attention.

    ”Come in”Robyn told her in a voice that sounded strangely flat to her ears. ”It's not locked.”

    Gillian slid her head around the edge of the door as if uneasy about walking into the bathroom. ”Everything OK?”

    ”I guess it must be. At least it explains why I felt so weird.”She forced a smile. ”And it proves I'm not dying.”Then Robyn held up the pen-sized cylinder of plastic from the pregnancy test kit for Gillian to see.

    Her friend took one look, then put her hand to her mouth and cried, ”Oh my God! I don't believe it!”

    

    

    Robyn Vincent was in no state to take the train home. Instead, Gillian drove her.

    Robyn knew the question would sound idiotic beyond belief, but she found she had to voice it. ”Pregnant? How on earth can I be pregnant?”

    Gillian glanced at her but said nothing. The answer was blisteringly obvious.

    ”I-I know how…”Robyn shook her head in disbelief. ”But pregnant! It doesn't make sense.”

    ”Don't beat yourself up over it, Robyn. These things happen.”

    ”You don't have to drive so slowly you know? My condition isn't that delicate.”

    ”Sorry ”This can't have happened. It can't have. You know me, Gillian. I'm so damn careful about everything. I don't cross the road unless I've looked both ways a zillion times.”

    ”Rubbers?”

    Robyn shook her head. ”Birth control pill.”

    ”You might have missed taking one.”

    ”Aw, please, Gillian, that's the oldest excuse in the book. Sorry, dear, I forgot to swallow the pill one night. I'd have thought anyone with a scrap of sense…” She pushed her knuckle against her lips. She realized she was pouring scorn on herself now, not on some wide-eyed high-school student who insisted she was pregnant because of industrial sabotage in the condom factory or the pill she took must have come from a dud batch. ”Shit, how can I have got into such a mess, Gillian?”

    Her friend gave her a sympathetic glance.

    ”You know this is just crazy… absolutely crazy…”Robyn stared out the side window. Suddenly sidewalks seemed to be full of pregnant women or young couples with strollers that contained screaming babies. ”We were careful. I never missed a single pill.”

    ”I'm sorry Robyn. You shouldn't be going through this.”

    ”Sheesh, it all happened so quickly. I'm on the pill and I take a pregnancy test and I get a positive result. That's not physically possible, is it?”

    Gillian could only make a painful hop of her shoulders.

    ”It's too early to know I'm pregnant. Unless the tester kit was faulty”Robyn saw a glimmer of hope. ”They're not one hundred percent accurate, are they?”

    ”You'd best make an appointment to see your doctor, Robyn.”

    Ahead lay Robyn's house on a street of mansions with swimming pools.

    Hell, soon she couldn't even call this home. The bank would repossess within the next few weeks. What then? Raise her child in a two-bed apartment with Mom and Emerson? Good God. What a start in life. She shuddered.

    The sound of Gillian's car slowing down at the house brought reality kicking its way savagely back.

    ”I'll have to get it over with and tell Mom now”Robyn unbuckled the seatbelt. The fluttering movements sprang up in her stomach again. Jeez, there could have been a bird in there beating its wings like crazy.

    Another thought struck her. ”And how on earth do I tell Noel?”

    ”Robyn, it's not easy but my advice is as soon as possible.”

    ”I don't know how he's going to take it. He's only just started college.

    He'd even planned to take a year off when he qualified to travel around the world. Now with this…” She rubbed her stomach. ”My God, what's he going to say, Gillian?” Tears welled up in her eyes.

    Gillian hugged her. ”My sister was a year younger than you when she had Benjamin.”

    ”Eighteen? She was still a kid herself.”

    ”She coped… no, more than that, she did great. She's so happy you'd think she'd burst.”

    Robyn dabbed her eyes. ”Okay. Time to face the music.”

    

    

    At home Benedict West drew the blinds to shut out the sun. Down in the yard the old man's dog was barking at birds in the sky. Butch did that when he saw the migrating bird flocks in the spring and fall. Maybe Butch had been born with the soul of a bird and wanted to join the flight. Benedict loosened a button on the Hawaiian shirt, then poured himself another coffee. With that done, he switched on the Betamax VCR.

    He'd had to hunt through many a junk shop to find a Betamax machine that still worked. All those years ago after failing to interest the police in making a serious search for Mariah, he'd returned to the Luxor, determined to discover the truth himself. By that time the place had closed. The receivers had nailed boards over the doors and windows and erected a sign at the entrance to the parking lot. for sale: redevelopment site.

    Nothing short of fury erupted inside him. He wasn't going to take these kinds of setbacks anymore. Not from disinterested cops. Not from a boarded-up building. He'd pried off one of the boards guarding a rear door, then kicked through a door panel. They were only ply, so he smashed a large enough hole to crawl through. The place had been stripped bare of fixtures and fittings. But in the lobby he'd found stacks of cartons. Someone had scrawled the word trash on them. In one he found six of the old-style videotapes with typewritten labels glued to them that read Benjamin Lockram. Volume 1-A Memoir and so on, right up to volume seven. Volume five was missing.

    That's how one Benedict West had turned detective. But how the hell do you start investigating a missing persons case? He didn't know. All he could think of was that the first step would be to take all these cartons home and sift through them for clues. After all, he was convinced of one thing: Mariah Lee had walked into the Luxor. Mariah Lee had never walked back out.

    So, as the hot spring morning became a hotter spring afternoon, with the sounds of Chicago enjoying that first taste of summer, Benedict slotted volume 1 into the hulking case of the ancient Betamax machine with its chromed levers and knobs. Then he sat down to watch Benjamin Lockram, one-time manager of the Luxor, give him a guided tour of the building that had devoured Mariah Lee.