Malevolent (14 page)

“I know what you’re thinking,” Griffin said.

“I’ll bet not.”

“I’m innocent.”

It came out flat, totally void of Griffin’s usual awkward attempt at boyish charm. His spoon rattled as he let it loose in the bowl. He set a pair of hairy forearms on the table and leaned into them. “The disk was a regular movie, except for that one god-awful scene you saw. Then back to a regular movie. I never deleted the scene—even if I knew how—and I didn’t switch disks. I think the woman in it is Germaine Marberry, though I didn’t get a good look. Sounds like her, though.”

There it was.

Griffin’s eyes jumped. They pierced the air between them, flaming up occasionally with tiny flares of panic.

“I’m pretty sure I believe you,” Tim said haltingly. Lukewarm, but all he could offer at the moment.

“I’ll accept that. So the next step’s gotta be figuring out what’s happening.”

Which didn’t match Tim’s figuring at all. Way he saw it, while there had undoubtedly been some strange goings-on lately, it was both possible and preferable to slip
around
it, rather than
in
it. Easy as circumnavigating a pothole, rather than taking the trouble to patch it.

“Come on, man, it’ll be fun,” said Griffin, obviously seeing through his host’s doubts. “What do you do with your days anyway? Anything more exciting than what I have in mind?”

The implications stung, but he’d made a good point, Tim thought. While the rest of the world worked—most emphatically including Patty—he rode his bike or hung out at the mall.
“Like you’re fifteen,”
Patty had told him once while not in the best of moods.

“The first thing we do,” said Griffin, “is exchange information. I think the church is at the center of it. How ’bout you?”

Tim said nothing. The last thing he wanted was to have to go up against something darkly religious and unfathomable. Besides, he’d been in the church and had found no place more peaceful or less suspicious.

“Here’s how I see it,” Griffin continued. “The church is where I met this Marberry broad in the first place. Its members belong to some fundamentalist sect that sets me up to take the fall for a crime I didn’t commit. Why? So they could close me down. Which, to them, is like sealing one of the gateways to hell.”

It was weak. Truly weak. When Tim found a verbal opening, he said, “I can see how a church of the kind you describe would want to kill your smut room. But how’d they manipulate the DVD? The scene that’s here one moment, gone the next?”

Griffin’s brows fell heavily over his eyes. “They couldn’t.” He played with the spoon in his empty bowl. “
That
I can’t explain.” He locked stares with Tim. “But you have to decide if you believe me when I say what happened. And that I didn’t do anything. And I can’t blame you if you don’t.”

Tim wished he had more time to think about it, but when he spoke he was surprised at his judiciousness. “I don’t know where this thing is going, but I
think
I’m with you. It seems to me that you’re innocently caught up in something I can’t begin to explain. I’d rather ignore it, to tell the truth, but I’ll help out however I can.”

Although he’d left himself with some wiggle room, it still felt to Tim like he’d just crawled out onto one wing of a perfectly healthy plane.

It was obviously what Griffin wanted to hear, judging by the grin plastered on his face. “Thanks, big guy. Oh. While I gotcha in such a trusting mood, I guess I better tell you about the blonde bimbo I’ve got behind my black curtain. Keep an open mind, though, okay?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Quite cheerfully, Vincent said, “Now, Germaine, we can’t have this, can we?”

She gasped as the tall preacher strode out of her kitchen. She’d been dozing, she supposed. Or daydreaming. Just rocking and waiting. Waiting for what? It was so hard to remember things—and why was that?

Dolly came stumbling out of the kitchen, hard on Vincent’s heels. Gibbering and pawing the air for the cereal box he held aloft. As she gave a weak little hop for it, Vincent would stretch just a wee bit higher, easily keeping it out of reach. His playful smile never left his lips.

Germaine’s mouth opened as she thought about this scene, so heavy with
deja vu
. She’d seen it before, hadn’t she? Had she dreamed it? Her stomach churned with uncomfortable sensations she couldn’t rightly identify. Hunger was, of course, one of them, but she’d grown almost used to the feeling.

“If I hadn’t decided to check up on my three favorite women, Dolly here would be chowing down on stale Fruit Loops and ruining everything.”

Germaine’s sister bleated as she launched herself weakly off her feet. Her fingers brushed the cereal box held so high, but she fell back, heavily, without it. Mewling pitifully, the youngest Marberry headed down the back hall. Vincent and Germaine listened to the sound of a door slamming and her whines turning to muffled, hitching sobs.

“She’s not responsible for her actions,” said Germaine.

“Oh, I know that,” Vincent said breezily. “God is ever so merciful to her kind. But that’s why
 
He made
you
responsible. If any of you were to break an ordained fast with hoarded food, well, the punishment must be upon you and your mother.” He offered her a sad smile. “I hate to put it that indelicately, Germaine, but I’m afraid that’s how things stand.”

Her mother. Germaine panicked momentarily before finding the older woman to be, surprisingly, in the rocking chair next to her. How could she not have been aware of her mother nodding off not five feet from her?

“Scat, Bandit,” she told the tall yellow cat perched in the rocker beside her mother. It glared, showing red-stained teeth as her mother twitched and groaned in her sleep. Twin trails of blood scurried down her wrinkled arm.

Germaine cried out, slapped her hands and stomped her feet, finally getting the glowering cat to drop to the floor and slink from sight.

Wait. It hadn’t been Bandit feeding on her mother. It
 
was Tampa Jack. The two cats looked nothing alike. How could she confuse…?

She stared dully at the open wound causing her poor mother to mutter in her troubled sleep. She’d have to do something about it. Disinfect it. Patch it.
Something
. And she would, as soon as she could muster the energy.

“You’re doing fine,” Vincent reassured her. “Just don’t forget the importance of this fast for all of us at the church. Your sacrifice, it will send the demon right back to hell, where it belongs. Just a few more days and we’ll see a breakthrough. I promise you, Germaine.”

“Yes,” she whispered. She believed him.

Her mother groaned louder. Dolly sobbed from behind her closed bedroom door. A cat growled.

Mustn’t sleep. The cats were all a mite restless, especially Bandit. Or was it Tampa Jack causing the most trouble? Couldn’t remember.

“Tell me again, Vincent,” she said, her voice thick, “why the cats have to fast alongside us. They’re getting nasty. I’m not complaining, but if I could just put them outside…”

He wasn’t there.

She thought about this while catching her breath from her long-winded appeal. She rose with difficulty from her wobbly rocker and hobbled into the kitchen. She yelped when something slithered across her ankles.

Holly snarled, as startled as Germaine. The cat slashed at her exposed ankle flesh, drawing three thin beads of blood. Germaine drew back her foot and kicked the heavy cat away. For the brief moment her foot made contact with the pregnant calico’s twitching belly, she felt its unborn mass quivering against the blow.

The cat howled as it backed into a corner where Germaine could keep an eye on it.

The kitchen, she told herself, looking around. Now why had she come into this room? Supporting herself against the stove, she raised her throbbing foot slightly off the floor and examined a few drops of blood dripping to the dirty linoleum floor. She walked unsteadily along the countertop to the paper towel rack and tore off a couple perforated sheets.

She dabbed at the claw tracks on her skin while three scrawny cats appeared from nowhere to lick clean the puddle from the floor.

Ah, yes, now she remembered—Vincent. That’s who’d drawn her here. The kitchen was where Vincent kept making his surprise appearances into their lives. But the room was empty now.

The kitchen door was locked.

“Vincent?”

Nothing.

From somewhere in the house, a hungry cat growled low and long.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The well-built man in the suit studied the deli display case while absently rocking his grocery cart on its squeaky wheels. He hunched forward in such a way that only the thatch of sun-lightened hair at the back of his neck stood out distinctly. He seemed unaware of the man observing him.

Vincent, the observer, squinted against the supermarket’s harsh white lighting. Fifty feet away, the man by the deli display wore a crisp khaki suit that pulled tightly against his impressive width of shoulders. His golden hair hadn’t seen a stylist lately, but the tousled mass helped him carry off an air of distracted perfection.

Vincent’s grip tightened on the spaghetti sauce jar. It was
him
. Vincent hadn’t the slightest doubt that he’d chanced upon the man he’d seen exiting the Applegate family home the previous week.

It hadn’t gone well with Sandy and Jason that afternoon. Harsh words had been exchanged by all until Vincent backed off and admitted he might have somehow been mistaken in what he’d been so sure he’d seen. After all, what possible reason might wife and son have for conspiring to hide the presence of a total stranger? He’d seen wrong, figured wrong, accused wrong.

Yeah?
Then what the hell was this?

The well-built, well-dressed man gave up a side view as he made his smiling request for corned beef and shaved ham to a flirtatious counter girl. The same guy, no doubt about it

This is ridiculous, he thought as the man claimed his deli meat and walked away.

Got as far as his shopping cart. Got behind it and wheeled it toward beauty products, where he picked up toothpaste and shaving cream and shampoo, Vincent watching from the top of the aisle. Watching as the handsome stranger rounded the corner.

As casually as possible, Vincent pushed his cart into the late Monday afternoon store traffic and started to tail his man. He, too, took the beauty products aisle rather than intercepting his quarry in the coffee aisle. It wasn’t face-to-face confrontation he was after. Better to follow at a distance.

He wheeled into the adjoining aisle. At the powdered sugar shelf, he braked to a sudden stop behind a square woman with broad-striped shorts and tree-trunk legs.

The only shopper in the coffee and baked goods aisle.

Vincent tossed his spaghetti sauce jar in the air and caught it. Tossed it, caught it.

As if suddenly aware of the dazed man behind her, the woman with the tree-trunk legs turned with a scowl. “Yes?” she snapped.

“Sorry. I…”

She sighed heavily, as though used to being followed by strange men, and wheeled away.

Vincent placed the spaghetti sauce jar carefully in his cart. He centered himself behind it and resolved to bury the subject of golden-haired men in khaki suits. It was ridiculous, certainly not worth the embarrassment he’d gone through of late.

The man peeked at him from the coffee mills at the top of the aisle.

Vincent slowly pushed his cart forward. The man was standing half in and half out of the aisle so Vincent only caught a glimpse of his tan face, his clipped goatee and one wide shoulder swathed in khaki. Half of a dazzling, white-toothed grin.

He’s mocking me, Vincent thought of that grin as he drew closer. Perfect teeth, naturally. But the one hazel eye peeking at him was hard, devoid of humor. When Vincent came close enough to speak, the hard eye slid from view behind the bank of coffee mills. Cart wheels squeaked unseen into the next aisle.

“Shit.” Vincent gripped both hands on his grocery cart handle. It felt like he could easily slip off of the reeling world if he wasn’t tightly anchored to something. He breathed in. Breathed out. Breathed in.

He propelled his cart forward and made a wide turn past an old woman coming his way and inexplicably wearing a rain hat. He listened. Concentrated on the store and heard no squeaky wheels but for his own.

There was no one in the next aisle, canned goods. “Shit,” he said again. Not too loud. He wasn’t crazy, after all.

Someone chuckled.

Two women, marked as mother and daughter by their impeccable genes, country club attire and confident air, wheeled into the aisle from the other direction and watched him as he rolled past.

Vincent braked and spun to confront the sound of quiet laughter. The mother and daughter swiveled their heads in unison to take him in, their expressions thick with suspicion. If either had laughed a moment ago, they looked lacking in amusement now.

He trained his glance in the direction in which he’d been headed and was rewarded with an answer. The pudgy young couple coming his way was dressed in matching white shorts, Kelleys Island T-shirts and sunburns.

A low chuckle.

Steady breathing.