Nightshade (33 page)

Her sister’s voice turned venomous.
“He didn’t,”
she whispered.
“Nobody loved you, Joan. Not Mama, not Daddy, not Bill — not anyone!”

“They did,” Joan protested, but even as she uttered the words, she knew they weren’t true.

“Daddy left us.
Don’t you remember? When you were still a baby, Daddy left us! He left us because of you! That’s why Mama hated you!”

“She didn’t,” Joan cried. “It isn’t true — none of it is true!” She covered her ears, trying to shut out the sound, but she couldn’t blot out her sister’s relentless voice.

“It is true. You know it’s all true!”

“No!” Joan screamed, rising to her feet. “You’re lying! It’s all lies!” She stumbled toward the door, but there was no escape from her sister’s voice.

No escape from her terrible accusation.

“Your fault, Joan,”
Cynthia whispered.
“Your fault! All of it is your fault!”

Joan shambled through the living room, then came to the foot of the stairs. Cynthia’s voice was coming from everywhere, and now she could see her too: standing at the top of the stairs, gazing down at her, her lips twisted into the cruel smile Joan hadn’t seen since she was a child. “I’ll kill you,” she screamed, staring up at the looming visage. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you!”

As peals of Cynthia’s mocking laughter filled the house, Joan started up the stairs.

And with every step she took, she felt a little more of her sanity slipping away.

*                                     *                                     *

IN HIS FIRST year as Chief of the five-man force, Dan Pullman had discovered that the ire of those who considered themselves the town’s leading citizens wasn’t reserved for those they perceived as underlings, such as his deputies. “In the end, you’re responsible,” the Gerry Conroes, Marty Holmeses, and Bill Hapgoods of the town had explained during the years he’d headed the department. On the other hand, he’d noticed that though they held him responsible for anything they considered a failure on the part of the department, they rarely gave him any credit for its successes. He’d been smart enough never to complain about that, which he thought was probably the reason he’d held the job of police chief longer than any of his predecessors.

So now, though his mood was as foul as a mid-winter storm, and had been since the tongue-lashing he’d taken from Gerry Conroe the evening before, Dan Pullman understood that no explanation of why he couldn’t immediately devote his entire energies to searching for Kelly Conroe would satisfy Gerry. Not as editor and publisher of the local paper, and certainly not as the missing girl’s father.

But what did annoy Pullman, and accounted for the mood he was in this morning, was the continuous stream of phone calls that had ruined his chances of getting any sleep at all last night. And he’d needed the sleep.

From the moment he left the Conroe house last night, he’d been examining Kelly Conroe’s disappearance from every angle. Despite his reassurances to Gerry and Nancy, which were at least statistically accurate, he agreed with them that Kelly probably hadn’t simply taken off somewhere. Over the years, he and every man on the force had come to know each kid in Granite Falls, and whenever something happened — some minor theft or vandalism — the town’s cops usually knew where to look first. Most of the problems stemmed from only a handful of kids, while the rest rarely got involved in anything more serious than the traditional — if illegal — keg party that invariably followed high school graduation. And until now, Kelly Conroe had never been in any kind of trouble whatsoever. Her family was stable, and it would be hard to find a soul in Granite Falls who wished her ill. So, despite what he’d told Gerry and Nancy last night, Pullman figured the odds of her having simply run away as being somewhere between slim and none.

Still, as he drove home last night, he knew it wasn’t feasible to mount an effective search effort until morning. And then, after being kept awake by considering where Kelly might have gone, his sleep had been interrupted by the constant stream of phone calls from irate parents demanding action.

Before midnight, the callers had identified themselves, and were at least somewhat rational. They were worried, and though Pullman was careful not to say anything that would make them more worried, he tended to agree that they might have something to worry about.

After midnight, the calls had been anonymous, and the message varied only in the number and variety of obscenities the callers used to make their point: “If we can’t sleep tonight, why should you?” Pullman, using the caller I.D. feature of his phone, mentally noted which of the crank callers were rudest, but had not bothered to actually write down any of the names. Still, by the time dawn broke, he’d had no sleep, and figured out he was thoroughly pissed off at about ten percent of the town’s population. Had he been in a mood to reason more clearly, he would have calculated the true figure as closer to a tiny fraction of one percent. On the other hand, most of the callers were related to at least a few dozen other people, every one of whom would be urged to vote against him come next election.

Unless he found Kelly Conroe. Alive. This morning.

And that, he was one hundred percent sure, was not going to happen.

As soon as it was light enough he called Tony Petrocelli, and the two of them went over the route Kelly would have followed from the school to her house, searching for a sign that she’d run into trouble — a dropped book, maybe a handkerchief, anything that might have been hers. They examined both sides of the road leading from the edge of town out to the Conroe house and found nothing. In the town itself, it would have been nearly impossible for Kelly to have run into trouble without someone noticing; if not from a car, then from one of the houses.

Now, like Eric Holmes and Pete Arneson — and Matt Moore — Pullman was out by the waterfall, repeating a search that was eerily similar to the one for Emily Moore that had been abandoned only the day before. As they had with the road, Pullman and Petrocelli split the area in two, each of them searching half of it, then switching and searching the area the other one had already gone over. The only signs of violence they saw were a few spatters of blood in the area where the fight between Matt and Pete Arneson had taken place. As Petrocelli photographed the area, Pullman carefully collected as many samples as he could scrape from the rock. The lab in Manchester would quickly tell them if any of the samples could have come from Kelly Conroe.

Once they were finished with the area immediately adjacent to the pool and falls, they began working their way along the trail leading to the Hapgood house.

“But if I were Matt, and I was dragging Kelly Conroe, I wouldn’t use the trail,” Tony Petrocelli objected. “Anybody could have come along.”

Pullman shook his head. “That’s the whole point — according to Matt, he was looking for Kelly, not carrying her or dragging her. And if he was looking for her in the dark, he’d sure use the path. Which means we should find footprints going both ways, and they should be very fresh, and they should match the shoes Matt was wearing last night, which looked like Doc Martens, maybe about a size nine, or ten.” He stopped abruptly. “Like these,” he said, squatting down.

Petrocelli hunkered down beside him, and both men studied the clear imprint that a deeply cleated shoe had left in the soft earth. It was recent enough that the brand name and a logo were clearly visible, along with the sole pattern. It took only a moment for Pullman to decipher the mirror image of the brand name: Redwing. The logo, set in the center of the heel, looked like a spider, or maybe a large tick. Pullman sighed. “Well, so much for my theory that they were Doc Martens.”

“Nearly the same thing,” Petrocelli replied. “Redwings are Australian — good for hiking, and look almost like Doc Martens.” He carefully placed his own size twelve foot alongside the print. “About the right size too.”

They moved farther down the path, searching for more prints, and now that they knew what they were looking for, it didn’t take long to find them.

And every one of them pointed toward the Hapgood house, not away.

“So if these match Matt’s shoes,” Petrocelli said as they came in view of the house, “then we know Matt used the path only to go home.”

Pullman said grimly, “Time to see if we can find the shoes Matt was wearing last night.”

CHAPTER
23

CRAZY.

She was going crazy.

She was going crazy, and she knew she was going crazy, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Cynthia’s voice was everywhere now, following Joan wherever she went, laughing at her, taunting her, mocking her.

“Never yours,”
Cynthia kept repeating.
“Don’t you understand, Joanie-baby?”
she whispered, using the belittling nickname Joan had always hated.
“Nothing you have was ever yours. It’s mine. All of it!
Bill is mine, and this house is mine, and everything in it is mine. I was only letting you use it! But now I’m taking it back!”

A whimpering moan escaped Joan’s lips, and her head felt like it would explode from the pressure of the churning emotions building inside her. “No,” she whispered brokenly. “It isn’t true. None of it’s true. Bill loved me. He wanted me. He — ” But her words died in the cacophony of Cynthia’s scornful laugh.

Destroy her! That’s what she had to do! She had to destroy Cynthia.

Obliterate her from the guest room.

Obliterate her from the house.

Obliterate her from her mind.

“You can’t,”
Cynthia whispered, as if she’d read Joan’s thoughts.
“You can never get rid of me, Joanie-baby. Never!”

Joan came to the top of the stairs. She was only a few feet from the closed door to the guest room — Cynthia’s room — and she could feel the nearness of her sister’s spirit.

“Go ahead,”
Cynthia taunted.
“Try it. Try it, Joanie-baby, and see what happens.”

A strangled cry of fury erupting from her throat, Joan lunged toward the door, twisting the knob and hurling it open so hard it crashed against the wall, cracking the plaster and shattering the glass knob.

Ignoring the glass shards on the floor, she went to the closet where her sister’s clothes, arranged by color to form a brilliant rainbow, hung on their padded hangers — clothes her mother had cared for so perfectly that they looked like they’d never been worn. “Why didn’t you take care of
me
like this?” she cried out, her voice choking on her sobs. “Why couldn’t you love me even as much as you loved her damned clothes?” Snatching one of the dresses off its hanger, she ripped its bodice with one quick jerk, then hurled it aside as she grabbed another one. One after another she tore the dresses from their hangers, until she stood in the midst of a tangle of torn and mangled material.

Material that could never again be put back on the hangers as a memorial to her sister.

“They’re only clothes. They’re not me, Joanie-baby,”
Cynthia whispered.

“Don’t call me that!” Joan screamed. She reeled away from the closet and began ripping the pictures from the walls, hurling them to the floor, the glass covering the photographs shattering.

Cynthia only laughed.

Joan moved on to the desk, sweeping the surface clean, sending her sister’s books and pens, her stuffed animals and favorite Barbie doll, skittering across the floor.

Then, through the turbulence of her own emotions, she heard something. She froze, and a strange silence fell over the house. Then she heard it again.

The doorbell.

Someone was ringing the doorbell.

A wave of panic crashed over her. What should she do? She glanced at herself in the mirror — her face was ashen, her hair a tangled mess. Maybe she shouldn’t answer the door — maybe she should just wait for whoever it was to go away.

The doorbell sounded again, as if to deny the possibility that whoever awaited would leave.

What if they came in?

What if they came in and found her like this?

What if they told her mother she was playing with Cynthia’s things?

Her mother would beat her again, and lock her in the cedar chest in the basement.

No! Don’t let them catch you! Don’t let them tell on you!

She ran from Cynthia’s room, hurried down the stairs, then paused in the entry hall, trying to catch her breath. She ran her fingers through her hair, clumsily brushing it away from her face.

The doorbell sounded again, and at last — knowing she could put it off no longer — she turned the knob and pulled the door open just wide enough to peek out.

A policeman!

A policeman, wearing a uniform.

She wanted to slam the door and run and hide in her room. But even if she could hide from the policeman, she couldn’t hide from her mother. Her mother would find her and —

Fear galvanized Joan’s mind, pulling its fragments back together, jerking her out of the past and the memories that had held her in thrall. Hearing her name, she pulled the door open wider and recognized Dan Pullman standing next to Tony Petrocelli.

“Can we come in for a moment, Joan?” the police chief asked.

Matt,
she thought.
They want to ask Matt more questions.
“I — Matt’s not here, and I — ” Her mind cleared further, and she remembered what her lawyer had said last night. “I don’t think I’d better talk to you until I talk to Trip Wainwright. He said — ”

“I know what he said, Joan,” Dan Pullman said quickly, sensing that she was about to shut the door. “I was just wondering — does Matt have a pair of Redwing shoes?”

A veil of suspicion dropped over Joan’s face, and her eyes flicked from Pullman to Petrocelli, then back to the chief. “I’m not really sure,” she said. “I don’t pick Matt’s shoes out for him.”

She heard Cynthia’s laugh.

“Maybe if you could — ” Pullman began, but before he could finish, Joan shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, starting to close the door. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”