Quiet as the Grave (24 page)

He finally recognized it for what it really was. Not merely a nightmare, not a flare-up of guilt, like a showy but essentially harmless St. Elmo's fire of the subconscious.

It was the beginning of true insanity.

He sat in his study and stared out at the lake, something he did more and more these days. He hardly ever went to work, though the money was drying up. He couldn't seem to make himself care, not even when his wife tried to prod him out of his lethargy with tears or insults or threats.

They all bounced off him, as if he were floating, fetal and inert, inside an invisible bubble. The walls of the bubble were thickening, the real world receding.

He wondered if, eventually, they'd have to put him away. Would they come in here one day and find him completely unreachable, standing at his window, staring at the green lake but seeing only the gray, torchlit cave, listening to Mozart, but hearing only the screams?

Or would his madness take a more active form? Would the bubble finally pop? Would the dream finally convince him—as it seemed to be trying to do—that everyone connected to the cave deserved to die?

Had it begun already?

He wished he could be certain where he'd been last night, when Richie Graham was killed. He believed
he'd been in bed. But he'd come to consciousness standing at the door to his room, his heart pounding. And he'd felt a compulsion to run outside, as if he already knew something dreadful had occurred.

Perhaps this was the nature of madness: the person afflicted was always the last to know.

When the telephone at his elbow rang, he didn't even think to answer it. His wife did that these days, because he didn't want to talk to anyone. He couldn't be sure what would come out of his mouth if he dared to open it and speak.

The shrill sound screamed through the room, over and over. He felt his nerves burning, his chest tightening.
Shut up
, he thought.
Shut up.

But he'd forgotten. His wife wasn't here. There was no one to make it shut up.

It stopped. And right away began again.

Maybe he should answer it. It might be important. It might be his wife. Or…it might be—though he had no idea what form this could take—salvation.

He forced himself to pick up the phone. He felt it vibrate in his hand, still ringing. Suddenly, illogically, he was terrified that the caller would give up, would disconnect before he could answer.

With clumsy fingers he pressed the button that said Talk.

“Hello,” he said. His voice didn't sound right. He tried again. “Hello?”

“Phil, is that you? It's Mike Frome.”

“Mike?” Phil felt a sudden onslaught of emotion. But he was so confused. He couldn't tell whether the emotion was relief or fear.

“Phil, I need to talk to you. Can I come over?”

“No,” Phil said, though he knew that wasn't the
way normal, civilized people answered polite questions. He should have offered an excuse. “No. What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you. It's serious, Phil. Whatever appointments you have, they're not as important as this.”

Appointments.
He almost laughed. The only appointment he had was with the dream.

“What do you want to talk about?”

There was a silence. Phil gripped the phone, waiting for an answer. He stared at the sparkling green lake and saw smoky firelight.

“I want to talk about Justine,” Mike said finally, in a voice so tired and sad that Phil wondered whether he, too, might have dreams. “I want to talk about the Mulligan Club.”

Phil put the phone down for a second. He bent over and put his head down, riding through this sudden racing heartbeat as if it were a roller coaster. When it subsided enough for him to breathe, he picked up the phone again.

“All right,” he said. “I'll tell you. I want to tell you.”

He didn't know why he hadn't thought of this before. He'd been silent so long, thinking that would save him. But the dream had warned him. Silence was no protection anymore.

“Meet me in an hour, Mike. I'll tell you everything you want to know.”

He heard Mike's exhale, and he knew the other man had been fighting a bucking heart, too.

“All right,” Mike said. “Where?”

“I don't know….” He frowned, trying to think. “Not here. I don't—no… Yes. Meet me at Justine's house.”

Phil felt something shatter inside him, and relief flooded through the spaces between the cracks.

“Yes,” he said, nodding to himself. He looked out his window, and to his amazement he finally saw the lake again. He felt something warm on his face. When he put his fingers to his cheek, he realized it was tears. “That's where it all began. That's where it should end.”

“S
O, NOT TO INSULT
your nice neighbor or anything,” Suzie said as they walked up to the mansion, “but you do have your gun with you, right?”

Mike nodded with a grim smile. “Phil's kind of a sad sack, and it would be hard to imagine him hurting anyone, but yeah, I've got it. Frankly, I don't trust anybody anymore.”

She knew what he meant. It was particularly strange, she thought, that they couldn't even trust the police. In Firefly Glen, the sheriffs and deputies weren't your enemy. They were your neighbors, and they came over for macaroni dinner with your parents.

Out here it was different. They couldn't be sure what Keith Quigley's agenda was, or how far his power extended. They couldn't bring him speculation and half-baked theories. He was perfectly capable of using your information to weave the rope he'd hang you with.

By the time they reached the front door, Suzie felt as if she'd eaten a hive of bees. Her stomach was all wings and stingers. But she stayed as poker-faced as she could. You couldn't really insist on coming along and then start whining about how scary it was.

Phil answered right away. This was the first time Suzie had seen him, and the bees subsided a little. Mike's description of a “sad sack” was perfect. He
wasn't ugly, but he looked weak and unhappy, with dark, drooping eyes, a long, fleshy nose and very little chin.

He wasn't at all threatening. He had no muscles beyond the ones required for walking and sleeping and lifting the remote control. He was half Mike's size. Except in diameter.

He looked out the door in both directions furtively, like someone in a cartoon. “No one saw you come, did they?”

Mike frowned. “Why would it matter if they had? You have every right to be here. Millner gave you and your wife a key, didn't he?

“Yes, but just for emergencies. And you—”

“My car's out on the street, Phil, for all the world to see. People are dying around here. I'm not making any secret rendezvous in dark alleyways with anyone, not even you.”

Phil nodded, but his face was contorted with anxiety. “Yes, but they'll see you. They'll
see
you.”

“Who?”

“I don't know,” Phil said. “That's just it. They could be out there right now. They always wore hoods, so I never saw their faces.”

Mike looked behind him, and Suzie did the same. Phil Stott's cringing fear was contagious. “Are you talking about the cops? Did they leave someone guarding Richie's apartment?”

“No.” Phil cast a glance toward the driveway, where the yellow tape warned that this was a crime scene.

Obviously, Suzie deduced, the cops had already searched the apartment and, while they might not want anyone messing with the place, they didn't think it was important enough to station a guard.

Mike had told her that Rutledge was still in custody. Probably the cops thought they already had their man.

“They were here all day,” Phil said. “But they're gone. Thank God.”

Mike put his hand on the door. “You're getting yourself all wrought up. Let us in. You said you have information for us about the Mulligan Club.”

“Yes.” The man pulled his eyebrows together, as if he might be going to cry. “I'm sorry, Mike,” he said. “I'm so sorry.”

Suzie glanced up at Mike. She wasn't sure this Phil guy was coherent enough to be very helpful. She was starting to wonder whether he might be the murderer after all. What else could have him in such an agony of guilt and fear?

“The police know we're here,” she said suddenly, though no one had spoken to her.

Mike looked at her. He knew it was a lie, but he didn't contradict her.

“Do they know why?” Phil's eyes were wide. “Do they know about the Mulligan Club?”

“Phil, you're supposed to be giving us information, not the other way around.” Mike pushed open the door. “Let's get started.”

“Yes.” Phil moved away. Clearly he couldn't stand up to the slightest bit of pressure. Suzie's internal murderer-meter swung back to the “no” position. If Phil Stott had killed Justine, even by accident, they would have found him two days later, still standing over the body and wringing his hands.

Once in, Mike led the way. He headed toward the living room, and Suzie was reminded that this used to be his home. She tried to imagine him in these fussy marble-and-gilt rooms and just couldn't do it.

“Not in there,” Phil said, holding out one hand. His fingers were very pale, and his nails were a half inch too long, as if he hadn't clipped them in quite a while. They didn't look quite clean, either.

“Too many windows,” he said. “We should go to the library. I have to show you my tape. I don't know if we all got the same one. But it's the only way to prove—”

“What?” Mike turned, his face taking on that extra measure of calm that Suzie knew meant he was shocked. “You have a tape? Of the Mulligan Club?”

Phil frowned. “Don't you?”

“What makes you think I do?”

“I—” Phil looked confused. “I don't know. I guess I thought you must, because—because if you weren't one of us, how did you know about the club?”

“Someone told me about it.”

Phil's mouth fell open. “Someone talked about the Mulligan Club? That's not possible. The rules require silence.”

Suzie felt her flesh creep a fraction of an inch across her bones. She didn't like the way he said that last sentence. It had a really icky cult-programming sound.

“The person who told me wasn't exactly a member,” Mike said. “The details will have to come from you. First tell me where you got this tape. Is that one of the perks of membership? You get to relive your fun on videotape?”

“Fun?” For the first time, Phil looked angry. “You think it was
fun?
”

Suzie was afraid that Mike might upset Phil so much he clammed up. This guy was on the edge, and he needed gentler handling. Mike must be incredibly tense, she thought, if
she
had become the subtle one.

“Look, Phil,” she said. “You have to understand that we don't know very much about the club. We just know that you've got a lot on your conscience, and that you'll feel much better when you've shared it with someone. Why don't you begin by telling us where you got the videotape?”

Phil nodded. “He made one for each of us, just to prove he had it. He had to prove it, or we wouldn't have paid him, of course.”

“Who?” Mike's voice was flat. “Who made the tapes?”

“Richie.” Phil looked surprised that Mike had to ask. He had obviously lived with this situation so long he'd forgotten it was new to other people.

“Richie Graham? The Richie who just got shot here last night?”

“Yes, of course. That must be why someone shot him, don't you think? He was blackmailing us,
all
of us, or at least that's what he said. He must have hidden a camera in the cave. There were a million secret places in the walls, and he—”

Phil began to cry. “He gave us copies of the tape and said he'd send it to the police, and our families, our
wives
, if we didn't pay.”

The police? Suzie's bad feeling got much worse. That one sentence told her that she and Mike probably hadn't been wrong about Loretta Cesswood. The Mulligan Club hadn't been just some overgrown former frat boys playing games with well-paid strippers and hookers and maybe a manacle or two just for kicks. If it had, why would the police have been interested in Richie's tapes?

But a fifteen-year-old girl, a drugged, unwilling participant in what amounted to torture, was another story altogether.

And so was a beautiful, foolish young mother who came for a sex game and ended up dead.

“I can't tell you all the things that happened,” Phil said, lowering his voice. “I can't say those things out loud. You wouldn't believe me, anyhow, not if you weren't there. You'll have to look at the tape. The tape will show you. You'll see that I tried to stop them.”

He moved toward the hall. Mike began to follow him, his face dark and rigid, but Suzie grabbed his elbow. “Wait. This is crazy. What's on that tape, Phil? You're not asking us to watch someone murdering Justine?”

Phil froze in his tracks. “Murdering Justine? What are you talking about?”

Man, this level of kookiness was really getting on her nerves. “Justine was murdered, remember? Is that what you were being blackmailed about? Did someone in the Mulligan Club kill her?”

To her surprise, Phil looked as if he might cry again. “I don't know who killed her,” he said. “It's not on the tape, but of course it could have been one of us. She knew all our secrets. She mocked us, and we kept coming back anyway because she gave us what we wanted. But deep inside we hated her.”

He looked at Mike. “I thought it might be the same for you.”

“No,” Mike said, and his voice was more kind than Suzie had expected. “I probably hated her as much as you did. But she didn't have anything I wanted.”

Phil smiled sadly. “You are one of the lucky ones, then,” he said. “If you don't have anything twisted inside, anything that the world doesn't understand, for her to exploit.”

“God, Phil, what do you—” But Mike took a breath
and appeared to decide against finishing his question. “Maybe you'd better just show me the video,” he said. “It might be easier than trying to explain.”

Phil nodded. He looked at Suzie. “We should go alone,” he said. “You don't want to see this.”

“The hell I don't. And besides, everything that happens here today gets a witness. You're not taking him off into some room alone, and that's final.”

Mike came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. “It probably will be pretty nasty. You know I can take care of myself.”

“He won't have to.” Phil smiled sadly. “I'm weak. But I'm not a killer.”

“Great.” Suzie squared her shoulders and moved toward the library. “I'm glad to hear it. Now why don't we get this over with?”

The library was just as pretentious as everything else about this house. It was a large room, self-consciously decorated with green leather furniture and lined with color-coordinated, leather-bound books. Suzie couldn't imagine that any of the paperback novels by Mike's bed at the boathouse would ever have been allowed on these shelves.

A huge television hung on the wall at one end of the room, with leather chairs arranged around it for elegant conversation. Phil stood close to the screen, operating the remote. Mike stood just behind him. Suzie hung back a little, closer to the door. Phil had drawn the curtains and turned off all the lights, so the place had a gloomy, claustrophobic feel and Suzie, for one, felt more comfortable the closer she was to the exit.

Phil slid the videotape into the slot below the television. Suzie couldn't help wondering how often he'd
come over here, using his “just in case” key, and lounged in the library, a king in a borrowed castle.

She crossed her arms, lifted her chin and prepared to handle whatever this tape had to offer.

Like most dirty movies, this one didn't waste any time on the setup. It began with a shot of four men, at least she guessed they were men, standing in the cave. They looked ridiculous, and her first instinct was to laugh. They all wore identical black hoods that completely covered their faces, except for eye slits and mouth holes. They all wore the same black, flowing robes.

They looked like a bunch of jerks playing naughty monks at an Alpha Dorka Psicko fraternity costume party.

But she glanced at Phil, and she saw that he was mesmerized, staring at the television and kneading his hands around the remote. And she knew that it wasn't really a joke. These head-cases took their dress-up games very seriously.

The cave looked much as she and Mike had imagined. Torches hung in sconces on the walls, their blue-orange fire dancing along the walls and rising in gusts of black smoke toward the cave ceiling.

The camera must have been hidden somewhere toward the opening. It had been positioned high, so that it filmed down and caught almost the entire central portion of the cave.

The video itself was clear, although the lighting was low. And of course Justine's television was the best money could buy, so no detail was lost in translation.

The one surprise in the scene was a very large plywood box that stood in the center of the open area.
Unlike the monks, it didn't have any of the trappings of a Halloween party. It wasn't dressed up to look like a coffin, or a crypt. It was just a very large, very primitive box.

Suzie mentally redrew the cave as she'd seen it, and suddenly she felt something cold wash through her veins.

The box was directly over the place where they'd found the drilled holes. The manacles waited in there.

“That's me,” Phil said, his voice cracking on the
e.
He paused the tape and went right up to the screen to touch one of the hooded figures. Suzie squinted, trying to figure out how he could even tell. The figure he pointed to might have been a little chubbier, a little shorter, than the others, but the robes rendered everyone anonymous.

He pointed to another short monk. “I'm pretty sure that's Quigley,” he said thoughtfully.

Mike and Suzie exchanged stark glances. Then Mike turned to Phil. “Why would you think that?”

“I always thought so,” he said, growing agitated as he stared at the video. “I always suspected. There was something…” He touched the monk's hood with his finger. “But then, when I heard his body had been found last night, I knew for sure.”

“What?”
Suzie couldn't help it. She wasn't a stoic Frome. When someone shocked the heck out of her, she squealed. “His
body?
”

Phil nodded. He didn't seem to be able to take his eyes off the screen. It was as if he was in this room, and in that cave, simultaneously.