Quiet as the Grave (17 page)

Smart woman. He couldn't have put it more succinctly himself. “Yes,” he said. “I think it's possible.
It would be nice, wouldn't it, to be able to solve two crimes at once?”

She frowned. “It would be nice to prove Loretta wasn't lying.”

“Yes,” he said. “It must have been very hard when the police wouldn't believe her.” He understood that, too.

“You can't really blame them,” Arlene said. “I didn't believe her, either, at first. She'd told crazy stories before. She was always getting into trouble, and then inventing dramas to try to get out of it. She had a no-good boyfriend. He used to knock her around. I don't know why she put up with that. Her dad was a rough one, too. I threw him out ten years ago.”

“Good for you,” Suzie put in. “That took guts.”

“Yes, it did,” Arlene agreed, and Mike could feel her pride. “I didn't even have a job. He'd always wanted me to stay home with Loretta. But I got one, didn't I? I'm making more money now than he ever did.”

“Wow,” Suzie said with a smile. “Take that, tough guy!”

Arlene nodded firmly, and ran her hand along the expensive green silk. “Anyway, Loretta took up with this boy, Sean, and he was cute, all right, but he was a bad one. She'd come home black-and-blue, swearing they'd had a car accident or a fall or whatever, but I knew better. I told her she couldn't see him anymore. When she came home that last time, and she'd been all bruised up, and…the rest…I thought it was Sean, naturally. I thought she'd dreamed the whole story up so I wouldn't know she'd been seeing him.”

Mike was momentarily, selfishly, glad he had a son. Daughters were so vulnerable. He looked at the picture right behind Arlene's head. It was a Halloween photo
of Loretta at about five, dressed up like Sleeping Beauty. When Arlene had shot this picture, could she ever have guessed that, less than ten years later, her beautiful daughter would be angry, deceitful, tormented, in a destructive relationship with a violent man?

“You've changed your mind, though, haven't you?” He eyed her carefully. “You don't think she was lying anymore.”

Arlene shook her head slowly. “No. At first I wouldn't even take her to the police. But then, a week or so later, I saw the—I saw what they did to her. Sean was a devil when he drank, but that…he didn't do that.”

She was crying, her nose running, her face red. “They bit her, all over. If I'd taken her to the police right away, they said they might have been able to prove who did it, from the tooth marks. But they didn't really care anyhow, because they thought it was Sean. They thought she'd wanted him to play rough, and then, when they'd quarreled, she'd made up a story to get him in trouble.” She let the photo slide to the carpet and put her face in her hands. “It's my fault they didn't believe her. I waited too long.”

Mike wasn't sure what to do. This was the crucial part. But was it inhuman to push her for details?

“Arlene,” he said softly. “I'm sorry, but I need to know more. Did Loretta say anything else, anything that might help us track down this bastard?”

She shook her head without taking her hands away. She kept shaking it, as if she didn't know how to stop.

Mike looked at Suzie. Her face was pale, her eyes shining.

“All right,” he said. “I understand. Thanks for—”

“No, wait!” Arlene lifted her face. She swallowed hard. “I don't know if there's anything you can use, but…would it help if you looked at her diary?”

I
T WAS
, S
UZIE THOUGHT
,
as if they could hear Loretta's voice speaking to them from the pages of her little blue journal.

Mike and Suzie both spent at least an hour in the girl's bedroom, which obviously hadn't been changed since the day she died. It was one of the longest hours of Suzie's life.

On the surface, it was the room of a typical teenage punker, with black-on-gray paisley sheets, posters of rock stars with metal-studded dog collars, and a fake bumper sticker that said, If You Can Read This, Get The Hell Out Of My Room.

But though Loretta was clearly trying, she hadn't completely shed the sweet little girl of her mother's living room photographs. The black sheets were topped with a yellow Care Bear. The DVD cabinet still had
National Velvet
and
The Last Unicorn
on the same shelf with
Velvet Goldmine
and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.

And on the computer desk, right next to a photo of a snarling sexpot who must have been Sean, a pink ceramic horse pranced, its tail and mane sparkling with cheap glitter.

For Suzie, the reality of Loretta was much stronger here than it had been downstairs. And, because she felt
real, the fact of her death seemed more terrible. This hadn't been a paint-by-numbers Mommy's Princess, the kind you might find on the pages of a Sears catalogue. This had been a complicated, intelligent, foolish girl who had jumped into the deep end of adulthood without first making sure she knew how to swim.

When Arlene showed them to the room, she had held on to the diary for a long minute, as if she weren't sure she could bear to let them look.

Finally she handed the diary to Suzie. “I think Loretta would mind less,” Arlene said, “if another woman reads it.”

She turned to Mike. “I'm sorry.”

He'd been quick to assure her he understood. He asked if he could look at Loretta's computer instead. He'd like to see what sites she'd visited, in case some clue might have survived.

Arlene nodded, as if she didn't trust herself to speak, and then she left them alone. She obviously didn't want to watch.

While Mike turned on the hard drive and began checking the temporary Internet files, Suzie sat on the edge of the bed and read.

It wasn't like any diary she'd ever seen before—certainly not like her own teenage journal, which had been full of long, self-indulgent rants against the Perilous Ps, as she'd called them: Parents, Popular People and Pimples.

Loretta's personality was so vivid mere words couldn't contain it. She didn't write every day, only when something important had happened—and her entries could be anything.

For January 3, for instance, the entry was just six huge exclamation points, each one a different color
and shape. August 25 was a movie ticket stub taped to the page, next to the word
Awesome
underlined in red. Sometimes she doodled or sketched. Sometimes she put down a quote she'd found. May 9 said, “To create something, you must be something.” Next to that she'd written, “yeah, but
what?
”

Sean's name showed up a lot. Loretta either believed her diary to be secure, or didn't care how much her mother knew, because she wrote in great detail about their sex life. Sometimes she sounded moved to the point of poetry. Other times she sounded angry. Once or twice she was actually pretty funny about the whole thing.

Her longest entries were in the few days after her abduction. Suzie wondered if the police had ever read this. If they had, how could they ever have doubted the truth of her story? These were the words of a girl who had been traumatized beyond endurance.

She didn't remember much, unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately, at least for her. She'd been angry with Sean, and to punish him she'd gone to a bar in downtown Albany, one where she knew they didn't look too carefully at IDs. She'd made herself up to look as old as she possibly could, and she knew she'd done well, because the minute she sat down guys began hitting on her.

One of them was really sexy. He was old, maybe thirty, but had a young personality. He had sexy eyes and he was fun to talk to. He had a lot of dark hair, which made her a little nervous. Her father had a lot of hair, and she associated that with a macho bullying streak.

But this guy hadn't acted rough. He'd made her laugh. They went to a table at the back, and he'd done
all the trudging back and forth from the bar, getting their drinks.

Here, Loretta switched to a red pen and began to berate herself for being so stupid. She knew that was dangerous. Everyone knew the new “roofie” rules: You didn't let a guy bring you a drink from the bar. If you had to go to the restroom, you never finished your drink after you got back. If you accidentally turned your back on your drink even for a minute, you threw it away and got a new one.

So why hadn't she followed her own rules? The red pen laid it down, three times.
You asked for it
.
You asked for it
.
You asked for it
.

After that, she remembered very little. She knew he'd taken her to his car, and it seemed as if they had driven a long time. She thought she smelled the water, but she might have been mistaken. He had been carrying her at one point, she was sure of that. She was in his arms, and she looked up, and she saw an angel floating over her. One of the angel's wings was much bigger than the other.

She wondered if she was dead. That made her begin to cry.

She drew a clumsy sketch of the angel's wings. They looked like deformed silvery-gray butterfly wings. Each one had asymmetrical whorls inside it, like the rings of a tree trunk.

The place where they took her felt like a cave, she said. She couldn't be sure, of course. It could have been a basement. She knew only that, when her fingers grazed the wall, it was hard, like stone. Everything was gray and dark and wet-smelling. And cold.

The rest, she said, was just pain. It was like you'd been given anesthetic for surgery, but inside your head
you were still awake. She couldn't see, she couldn't move. All she could do was feel.

The next couple of sentences had been scratched out with a black Magic Marker. “No melodrama,” she'd scrawled next to the blot. Below that, she'd made a completely dispassionate, nearly clinical, list of her injuries.

It was a list that brought tears to Suzie's eyes. Eight items, each more horrifying than the last. The inventory of a debased body, and a dismantled mind.

She must have made a sound, because Mike turned around.

“What is it? Are you all right?”

She closed the book. “I'm finished,” she said. To her surprise there hadn't been any more entries after the list. No discussion of taking drugs to escape the memories, of going to the police, of telling her mother, of suicide.

It was as if Loretta's life had ended with the last entry on that list.

Rape
.

She felt sick, but she tried to pull herself together. She felt Mike watching her, and she knew what he wanted to know. Were there any clues? The computer search had just been busywork, so that he didn't go crazy waiting to see what she found.

As quickly as she could, she gave him the basic facts. His face was grim.

“There's a bar downtown we could try to find,” she said. “Apparently she met the guy there, and she believes he put something in her drink.”

She read him the passage that described the bar. They both knew there wasn't enough to go on.

“Nothing else?”

She stared down at the page with the angel's wings. “Just one thing,” she said. “I don't know what it means, really. Maybe nothing. But there's something about it…”

“What?”

She felt silly. How could she say that those blobs reminded her of something? That she felt as if she'd seen them before.

She held out the book. “Loretta said she saw something like this as she was being taken to the cave. She said it glowed, and seemed to float above her like angel's wings.”

He didn't touch it, but he leaned forward, studying the sketch. “I don't know,” he said. “If she was drugged, there's no telling what she really saw. This could be a distortion of something as simple as an overhead light.”

“I know,” she said. “But there's something….” She turned the book around to get a different perspective. “I'm used to thinking in shapes, because that's how I paint. I'm more likely to see two vertical lines than I am to see two trees. Instead of a house and garage, I see two interlocking cubes. It's a habit. And I could swear I've seen these shapes before. Two similar winglike shapes, but one much smaller. The interior whorls. I can't help thinking I've seen these.”

He tilted his head, playing with the angle.

Suddenly his eyes widened.

“You're right,” he said. He kept his voice low, but excitement ran through it like electricity. “I've seen them, too.”

“Where?” She held the book against her chest. “Where?”

“They're called stromatolites. They can be very
pale, and they can really stand out in a darker stone. They don't really glow, but when the moonlight hits them, they can seem to.”

“But where?” She took a breath. “Where have you seen
this
one? One that looks like angel's wings?”

“At the lake,” he said. “In the bluffs below Justine's house.”

 

S
UZIE WOULD HAVE RACED
out there in the pitch black, but somehow Mike persuaded her to wait until sunup. It was too risky in the middle of the night. They couldn't even know for sure that the cave was empty. Did she want to end up like Loretta Cesswood?

Besides, he knew where the angel-wing formation was. They didn't need moonlight to find it, not that there was much tonight, anyhow. The rain had never quite moved on. Clouds still hung over Tuxedo Lake like a heavy woolen blanket.

She was rotten at waiting. He could almost see the adrenaline coursing through her. She fidgeted constantly, like a racehorse confined too long in the stall before the starting gate opens.

For a while, in the last hour before dawn, he thought she just might go without him. She was getting cranky. She'd slept a little, curled up on the wicker porch chair, but mostly they'd both been up all night, talking things over and watching the sky for a glimmer of sun.

“It's going to take us twenty minutes to get around to the right spot,” she grumbled. It wasn't the first time she'd made the observation. “If we start right now, it will be light by the time we find it.”

“No,” he said. “Suzie, listen. If there is a cave, it's been there thousands of years. It's not going to wash away in the next hour.”

She drummed her fingers on the railing. “You're a real pain in the ass, Frome,” she said. It wasn't the first time she'd mentioned that, either.

“I know,” he murmured. He dropped his head back against the chair and shut his eyes. He was so damn tired. He should have gone to bed, at least for a while, but he hadn't wanted to leave her. Being around her made him feel better, cleaner. It was kind of like the way he felt around Gavin.

She met her problems with so much energy and bulldog determination, as if it hadn't occurred to her there were any enemies out there she couldn't vanquish, if Mike would just let her off the leash.

He even liked her cranky complaining. It was honest. It was alive.

It was like breathing clean air after a decade of sucking in noxious fumes.

He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew she was leaning over him, her hands on his knees, trying to jiggle him awake.

“Light!” She pointed to the east, where you could finally see the outline of the tall, black pines against silver sky. “You can't deny it. Right over there!”

“Okay, Fang, okay.” He stood, cracked his neck a couple of times to get rid of the kinks, and smiled. He'd actually been dreaming about her, and when she put her hands on his knees, his dream had jumped to conclusions. “Let's go cave hunting.”

Yesterday's bad weather must have thwarted all the health nuts of Tuxedo Lake, leaving a pent-up need to jog. Even as early as this, they encountered at least half a dozen runners before they reached the other side of the lake.

Once there, he took a couple of minutes to find the
formation, which gave Suzie a chance to make a few snide comments about big talkers. But then he took her by the shoulders, positioned her in the perfect spot and pointed.

She finally saw it. The snarky attitude dropped away.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “That's it.”

He felt a ripple of excitement—or nerves—run through her. He tightened his hands to settle her down. “It certainly looks like what she described, doesn't it? But we still could be wrong. If you put your mind to it, you could probably think of a hundred things it could have been.”

Suzie shook her head. “No, this is it. I can feel it. The proportions are perfect, and—”

She covered his hands with hers. “We're going to find something, Mike. I just know it.”

He should have moved his hands right away, the minute she touched him. He knew that he was weak, and it wouldn't take much to send him over the edge. These days, he constantly fantasized about making love to her. It was almost like being eighteen again, so obsessed with getting your girlfriend naked that you couldn't think straight.

Only problem was, he wasn't eighteen. He was a grown man who knew that getting naked had consequences.

He was a father.

He was a murder suspect.

He was a fool.

Still holding her shoulders, he lowered his head to the side of her neck. She had a beautiful neck, long and pale beneath her dark hair. Her veins were like tiny blue fairy webs.

He pressed his lips against the throbbing ivory spot beneath her ear. She went very still. She stopped breathing. Her throat moved in a sudden, vulnerable swallow.