Poe (21 page)

Poe
. She stands at the edge of the dance floor, haughty and thin, like a severe ballerina. Her clothes are dripping wet, her hair clings to her wet, cold face, and something greenish and slimy drapes around her neck like a silk scarf. None of the partygoers see her; none give her a second glance. She stares at me and her eyes are like glittering diamonds, void of warmth and expression.

I quickly look away, down at my plate. But instead of roast duck, I find the severed head of a puppy sitting in a sauce of bright red blood. A spasm of blinding white light hits, and the world tilts to one side, then the other.

“It was amazingly expensive to get her to come, Khioniya, which doesn’t sound like a Russian name, does it? More Italian I would think. She said she already had an engagement for Halloween—a duchess, I believe—but I told her about the funny book and the gardener, and she changed her mind. She’s on a ship right now—it takes
forever
to cross the Atlantic. I’m very good on the water. I never get ill.”

The dancing crowd parts, and standing next to Poe I see little Delia, her innocent eyes now equally hard—she holds a large kitchen knife in one hand; blood drips to the soft grass beneath. Delia giggles the same ethereally evil giggle I last heard coming from Maddy before she fell through the floor.

Then her eyes turn completely black.

The world tilts again. I feel like I’m going to vomit.

I clutch the white tablecloth, try to steady myself—there’s so much I want to know,
need
to know, but Amelia’s blurry face is stretching into a whirl of color, and I’m falling again—where, into what, I’m not sure.

“No one will forget,” says Amelia. “Everyone will hear about my Halloween party. I’ll be famous…”

Delia’s small, haunting voice sings.

Take her by the lily-white hand
,

Save her from the water
,

“… I’ll be famous forever.” Amelia’s voice is distant now, has a floating quality.

Leave her and you might just find
,

There’s no end to the slaughter
.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: FOOTPRINTS

T
he old woman’s body was found under an old railroad tunnel that was once used to transport coal and timber. The fingers were frozen solid but not the heart, which the truck driver thought might still have been beating when he put his hand to Alice Chesterfield’s cold neck to check for a pulse, despite the frozen puddle of blood. Despite the gaping hole in her stomach.

“One of these days your fuckin’ luck is going to run out, Shakespeare,” Nate mutters irritably into the phone after giving me this delightful news. I wish I hadn’t picked up. I’m still groggy from my dream, my head is throbbing like I have a massive hangover, and a lingering visual of the puppy’s head served on a silver platter isn’t exactly helping. But now there’s a frozen dead woman missing most of her internal organs and I’m lucky—how?

“What are you
talking
about?”

Nate either ignores, or doesn’t hear, my question. “Just because you’re, like, my dad’s new favorite reporter, doesn’t mean I’m not still the editor. You might think you’re hot shit ’cause you get to go cover a fuckin’ murder, but if you don’t fuckin’ get me copy by noon, then I’m gonna tell Dad you’ve blown your deadline. And no fancy words.”

None of this is making any sense.

“Nate—”

“Turn on the TV,” he says. “Noon.”

Click. I look at the clock—10:10
A.M.
; that gives me barely two hours to get it done. And, oh right, I was supposed to get Mac an
article by Saturday, which is today. Nate is obviously setting me up for failure, the little fucker.

Of course my TV is crap and the cable bill hasn’t been paid, so I have to experiment with a pair of bent bunny ears (thank God New Goshen still is on analog) until I get a fair, if sporadically fuzzy, picture. There are two reporters covering the murder, one all the way from Albany and the second from Rochester, New York. They both have concerned, serious tones but can’t hide their excitement, because it’s not just a murder, I discover, watching the B-roll of downtown New Goshen and accompanying narration, it’s a
slaying
, the difference being the viciousness of the attack—multiple stab wounds—and the rumored ritualistic removal of the spleen.

The slender reporter from Albany is standing at the top of the tunnel, wind whipping her hair in her face, which she professionally ignores. It’s so strange to see a place I drive by every day framed and flattened into two dimensions.

I turn the volume up.

“Police are not verifying whether satanic rituals played a part in this tragedy, although we have a report from a first responder that many of the details
are
bizarre. There is also no confirmation whether this death is related to a recent homicide which claimed the life of fifty-six-year-old Celia Jenks. Two murders in one year would be a record, given the town’s elderly population and traditionally low crime rate.”

A record and an advertising bonanza for the paper. No wonder they want the story in an hour.

“No arrests have been made in that case, and police say they cannot comment on an ongoing investigation. An autopsy report of today’s victim is expected to be released by Grace Memorial Hospital later this week. We’re waiting to hear if the autopsy report of Celia Jenks will be reexamined as well.”

They show a picture of Celia sitting at a kitchen table, smoking a cigarette.

“Holy shit,” I whisper. I jump to my feet and race to my wall of clues. There she is again—the woman from the morgue; the woman whose picture I snapped at a crosswalk. I reach out a tentative finger and trace the edge where the photo is torn just below her hand, as if she might just reach back. “Celia,” I whisper. “Your name is Celia Jenks.”

It’s another piece in the puzzle, and a thrill runs through my body. Of course I just solved Mystery #2 on my list, but now I have another. How the hell is she connected to this new dead woman?

Did they say the autopsy report would be released by Grace Memorial?

I gasp like I’m now the lead in a cheesy detective show, grab my jacket and keys without explaining further to my female (albeit dead) partner, and don’t even bother to look back as the door slams behind me.

“I can’t talk to you,” hisses Jessica, patently ignoring me as she strides down the hall holding a stack of thick manila folders. The now-familiar hospital fluorescent lights flicker above us, and a nurse passes by in blue scrubs.

“Can I carry those for you?” I ask in my most chivalrous voice. I don’t wait for her to respond and pull the folders from her arms. Jessica is pencil thin and probably in her early thirties, but the glasses and mousy brown hair make her seem a decade older.

“Give those
back
—”

“C’mon, all I’m going to do is take a quick look at the files. Five minutes, I promise.”

“I can’t talk to you,” says Jessica, trying to pry the files out of my arms. “We’re not supposed to discuss the results with reporters.”

“Five minutes. Four.”

“No,” she whispers. A doctor walks by holding a clipboard, and she gives him a tense smile. “I’ll get fired.”

“You won’t get fired—I’m the morgue guy. You can say you were talking me down from filing a lawsuit. You’d be a hero.”

Now she glares at me. “You know what a long drive it is to Albany for fried wontons?” She grabs the files back in a way that’s surprisingly manly and heads for the elevator doors, which just opened.

“I’m sorry,” I add, trying hard to keep up. “I was emotionally traumatized.
By almost being flayed alive
. And there isn’t any decent Chinese food in New Goshen, unless you know someplace and you’ve been holding out. Hey, did you just get your hair cut? Looks really nice. And those glasses—what can I say but
wow
.”

“Will this man not
shut up
,” Jessica mutters under her breath. She stops, looks around. Everyone is suitably busy. “If I let you borrow the files, will you promise to never talk to me again?
Ever
?”

I hold up my right hand. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

She snorts. “I should be so lucky,” she says, shoving the bottom three files at my chest in what can only be described as a hostile manner. “Three minutes. Janitor’s closet across the hall. Any longer and I’m calling security.”

“You’re a doll,” I say, and her eyebrows rise in surprise. I must be still channeling my debonair dream alter ego—next thing you know I’ll be saying she’s the bee’s knees.

Inside the cramped closet, I prop open the first file, marked “Alice Chesterfield,” on a steel cabinet next to a red plastic box labeled “Hazardous.” Probably contains leftover radioactive waste or infected needles. Lovely.

The photos from the morgue, in full color, are quite shocking. An old woman’s nude body is splayed out on a metal table, and there are circles on the photo highlighting wounds, with arrows pointing to the smaller ones on her hands—“defensive” is written in black Sharpie above them. Her eyes and mouth are still open. Mrs. Alice Chesterfield was ninety-five, a widow, and apparently lived alone
in an old motel on Harrison Street called The Hurry Back Inn that mostly rents on a weekly basis, due to the lack of tourists. Room 306.

I check my watch. Two minutes.

I grab my notebook and start jotting down details. Flipping quickly through the images, I note that one is a close-up of her abdomen where her spleen should have been, another shows a bite wound circled on her thigh, and the last is of a series of numbers, scribbled hastily on her arm with a black marker.

Impossible
. Jessica raps on the door—one minute.

But there’s something else—what is it about her, she looks familiar… And then it hits me—I’ve been looking at that face for months. It’s the face of the old woman crossing the street in the other black-and-white photograph—one of the two tossed across the room and torn in half by Poe. How is it possible I have photos of the two victims? I don’t get it.

There’s no time to think—I can feel Jessica getting nervous on the other side of the door—so I hurriedly open the second file. This one’s a little dusty. Celia Jenks—spleen gone, attributed to a pet cat that hadn’t eaten in the week it took for someone to notice the smell. Just seeing the first photo makes me gag, and for a moment I’m back in the morgue, overwhelmed by the smell of shit, pizza, and formaldehyde, but I have to keep looking for something, a confirmation. And there it is—the fourth photo. A close-up of her right hand clenching a note with another set of numbers.

My heart slowly petrifies as I recognize the tight, furious handwriting, then the numbers—they’re the first row from Daniel’s magic square. And I would bet my life that the numbers written on Alice’s back match the second row.

The floor beneath my feet seems to tilt, and I drop the files on the floor as my stomach reels. Schizophrenic knife-wielding brother
is
back. There were six rows in his magic square—does this mean four more people will die?