Silent Screams (21 page)

Kylie slept during most of the drive back to the city, but as they neared Jekyll and Hyde, she woke up and began craning her neck for a better look at the restaurant.

“There it is!” she shrieked as the car shot up Sixth Avenue.

Jekyll and Hyde was a theme restaurant aimed at out-of-towners and the Harry Potter crowd—seven- to twelve-year-olds. It occupied all four floors of a curiously stubby building on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, snuggled tightly between towering banks and office buildings. The ornate sign on the neo-Gothic façade was in crimson lettering dripping like spattered blood.

The Jekyll and Hyde Club

Actors roamed the restaurant’s four floors dressed in a variety of roles straight out of grade-B horror films—the mad scientist, vampiric hostess, dotty professor, lusty chambermaid—while grotesque statues of gargoyles and skeletons spoke and moved. The creepy portraits in ornate gilded frames lining the walls had eyes that really did follow you around the room.

As they walked toward the restaurant, Kylie bounced from foot to foot and chanted softly to herself. “Chicken
nug
gets, chicken nug-gets.”

Kylie adored fried chicken strips, but Lee’s mother refused to buy them for her, calling such food “rubbish.”

They stepped into the building and were absorbed into the heavy Gothic atmosphere of the restaurant. Red velvet wallpaper lined the walls, and thick Victorian drapes blocked out any shred of sunlight that might sneak in through the floor-to-ceiling French windows. The club was in a state of eternal twilight, with only the flickering of thin yellow flames from gaslights to illuminate the patrons as they wandered through the dim, spooky hallways.

A cadaverous actor dressed as a vampire met them at the door and escorted them up the stairs to the second floor. They were seated at a table in the corner, underneath a portrait in an ornate gilt frame. The face in the picture was of a middle-aged man with heavy features, and he wore a fur-lined red velvet cape and hat, suggesting a nineteenth-century courtier. The man’s eyes, under their heavy brows, actually moved. Lee supposed this was done by remote control. Perhaps there was one person on the staff whose job it was to move the eyes in the paintings. As he and Kylie sat down, he saw the eyes follow their movements.

Kylie saw it too. “Look!” she squealed. “He’s watching us!”

“Yes,” he replied, looking around the restaurant. He had the disquieting feeling that they were actually being watched. But the place was filled mostly with families, the children squirming in their chairs, watching the costumed staff work the room, weaving in and out of the tables as they chatted with customers.

Kylie nudged Lee in the ribs. “Here comes the professor.”

Lee turned to look as the actor playing the mad professor approached their table, coattails flapping. Sinister instruments protruded from the pockets of his white lab coat, which was splattered with suspicious-looking red splotches. His hair was teased into a spiky disarray, and his rumpled lab coat suggested someone who, more often than not, slept in his clothes.

“Hello there,” he said in a fake-sounding English accent. “What’s your name?”

Kylie leaned back in her chair and looked up at him. “Kylie.”

The professor raised an eyebrow. His face was angular, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Under the character makeup, Lee could see that he was young, probably in his early thirties.

“Kylie? What kind of a name is
that
?” he barked hoarsely. Lee wondered if his voice was overworked from talking over the music and the din of the customers, or if it was naturally raspy.

“It’s a
nice
name,” Kylie replied, thrusting her chin forward in a challenge.

“A nice name? A
nice
name?” the professor bellowed. “Did you hear that?” he said, addressing a nearby table, occupied by a family with towheaded, pink-cheeked children. “What do you think?” he said, descending on one of the boys, a stout lad in a green Pokemon T-shirt. “Do
you
think Kylie is a nice name?”

The boy blinked and looked at his mother, a plump woman with a face as innocent as a cornfield. She looked embarrassed. She gave a weak little smile and poked at her penne primavera.

“Well?”
the actor demanded. “Speak up, boy!”

“Uh, sure—I guess,” the boy said at last.

“You
guess
? Could you
be
any more indecisive?” The professor looked at Kylie. “Looks like I didn’t pick a very brave lad to defend you.”

The boy looked at Kylie, who laughed. Relieved, he smiled. “Yes, it’s a nice name!” he declared, crossing his arms over his plump chest.

“I don’t know what’s happening to our young people today,” the professor lamented in exaggerated tones, pulling out a plastic scalpel from the pocket of his lab coat. “Maybe I should dissect one of you to find out, eh? What do you think?” he asked Kylie. “Should we cut up your friend here and see what makes him tick? What do you say?”

“No, leave him alone!” she answered, trying to grab the scalpel, but the professor was quicker. Moving out of range, he replaced the instrument, ran a hand through his fright wig of a hairdo, muttering to himself as he moved on to the next table.

“Young people today,” he said, shaking his head. “I just don’t know.”

Kylie smiled at the boy and then leaned her head on Lee’s arm. “He’s funny. I’m hungry. Can I have chicken nuggets?”

“You can have whatever you want.”

“You won’t tell Fiona?”

Lee leaned in and whispered in his niece’s ear.

“She won’t hear it from me.”

Kylie picked up her silverware and began drumming on the tabletop.

“Chic-ken nug-gets, chic-ken
nug
-gets.”

The mother at the next table shot a look at them, disapproval stamped on her bland face.

Lee wrested the fork and knife from Kylie.

“Look, the show is starting,” he said.

The lights around the stage flickered, and a puff of white steam shot up from the fog machine as the slab bearing the body of Frankenstein’s monster rose up from its underground home. The whirr of the hydraulic lift was drowned out by the thundering bass line of the music piped through the sound system loudspeakers. Colored strobe lights danced across the monster’s inert form, slashing through the haze of stage fog, cutting it with long ribbons of yellow and blue shimmer.

The music was replaced by the equally loud voice of the MC.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen and everything in between, it’s showtime! Please direct your attention to our stage at the front of the restaurant.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Kylie said.

“Okay. Hurry back or you’ll miss the show.”

She slid down from her chair and headed toward the back of the restaurant. Lee watched her until she turned the corner into the foyer. He considered following her, but didn’t want to embarrass her. Kylie was only six, but she was stubborn and independent, and resented being fussed over.

When the waiter came, Lee ordered chicken nuggets and Thai stir-fry for himself, then turned his attention back to the stage, where the mad professor hovered over the supine body of his monster. Jets of steam billowed up from the fog machine and hung clustered around his head. The scientist released a burst of maniacal laughter and turned, laying a hand on a large wall switch, preparing to turn on the “electricity” necessary to animate his horrible creation.

Lee wondered if Mary Shelley realized what she had stumbled onto that night she set her troubled dreams down on paper—the creation of life from death, inert matter transformed into a living, sentient being. Did she know that she, too, had created a “monster” when she wrote
Frankenstein
, and that 150 years later the story would spawn endless imitators and retellings?

“And now, behold!” the professor cried, whipping the sheet from the body with a single sweeping motion. The lights shuddered and went black for an instant, then came back on to a blue background with a single scarlet spotlight on the monster, who sat up stiffly, arms outstretched. The children at the next table watched, their eyes fixed on the monster—the child abandoned by the parent who gave him life.

Lee was sorry Kylie was missing this part.
Come to think of it, hadn’t she been gone too long now?
A thin river of panic welled up inside him.

He got to his feet and walked to the ladies’ room, trying to control the panic that seared the lining of his stomach like vinegar. He knocked on the door and, receiving no answer, opened it and called inside.

“Kylie! Kylie! Are you in there? Kylie!”

There was no answer. He turned and headed for the restaurant’s front entrance. Adrenaline raced up his spinal cord, filling his head. He felt as if he were drowning.
Oh, no—first Laura, now her! This can’t be happening!

He lost the ability to think clearly. He forced himself to breathe as he rounded the corner into the hallway. There, inspecting the various mugs and T-shirts for sale, was Kylie. Relief flooded Lee’s bloodstream and made his knees soften and go weak. He stumbled and almost toppled over.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

“What is it?” she whimpered, frightened. He wanted to slap her, to scream at her, to hug her, all at the same time.

“Kylie,
never
go off without telling me!”

“But I was only looking at the T-shirts.”

He didn’t want to frighten her, but the words came out harshly.

“Never!
Do you understand?”

Kylie’s lower lip quivered, and tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.

“I won’t run off—I was right
here
,” she said as a tear slid down one cheek.

“Do you
understand
?”

Kylie let loose the righteous tears of one wrongly accused.

“
I wasn’t running away!
” she wailed, choking on the words as her throat thickened with tears.

“I couldn’t stand to lose you too!” he said, hugging her to him. “Can’t you understand that?”

She greeted his words with a long, loud wail that caught the attention of a couple of women as they came out of the ladies’ room. One of them wrenched Lee away from Kylie and planted a well-aimed slap across his face. The other one hoisted Kylie into her arms.

“Is he hurting you, poor thing?” she said, wiping the girl’s tears with a red polka-dotted handkerchief. Lee stared at the red dots, imagining them to be drops of blood.
Circular blood spatter patterns indicate dripping as opposed to flung splatter
.

The other woman looked as if she was about to hit Lee again. She was tall and hefty, with shoulders like a linebacker and a helmet of thick, gray-streaked hair. Lee backed away from her, bumping his ribs painfully against a pay phone on the wall.

“I’m her uncle,” he said to the woman holding Kylie. She was shorter than her friend, but also thickly built, with fat wrists and ankles, and a plump, dimpled double chin. Both women were wearing the kind of polyester pantsuits only seen on out-of-towners. The shorter one’s was geranium red. The linebacker’s was marigold orange.

“You may be her uncle, but that doesn’t give you the right to engage in child abuse!” the taller one said, squaring off again as if just waiting for an excuse to hit him again.

“It’s okay,” Kylie said.

“The victim always protects the abuser,” the shorter one said, folding her flabby forearms over her formless bosom.

“He was just upset because he didn’t want me to disappear like my mommy,” Kylie said.

Both women stared at her.

“What?” one said.

Lee considered telling them about his work with the NYPD, but since he had no badge and no gun, felt it would be unconvincing. Instead, he explained about his sister’s disappearance.

“Just leave us alone, please,” he begged.

With a sniff, the polyestered protectors of justice relented, albeit reluctantly, and retreated back to the dining room, leaving Lee and Kylie alone in the hallway.

“Look, I’m sorry I got upset,” he said to her. “It’s just—”

“I know,” Kylie replied. “Fiona says when you act strange it’s because of Mommy.”

And what’s her excuse when she acts strange?
he thought, but said nothing.

“When do you think she’ll come back?” Kylie asked.

Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, as though she were asking when her mother would return from the grocery store. The question put Lee in an impossible position. If he answered it, he would be lying. But if he disagreed with the premise—that his sister was still alive—he would be going up against his mother. Kylie was much too young to be burdened with the disagreement between him and Fiona. He also would be doing his best to shred any lingering hope that Laura could still be alive and might return some day. He bit his lip and took the coward’s way out.

“Tell you what, Kylie, why don’t we go back in and see if we can catch the last part of the show?”

Kylie took his hand in hers.

“I know why you were being weird. You didn’t want to lose me—right, Uncle Lee?” she said as they passed a grinning skeleton hanging on the wall. The skeleton wore a crimson fez and a matching bow tie.

He felt his throat thicken. “That’s right. I didn’t want to lose you.”

When they left the restaurant, there was no sign of the plainclothes officer who had been tailing him. Lee figured his shift had ended and the cop who was supposed to relieve him hadn’t shown up. He should have called it in, but he was glad to be alone for a change. He drove along the dark country lanes in rural New Jersey as Kylie slept in the backseat. He had promised his mother to bring her back that night so she could go to a school fair the next day. It was a long drive to make at night, but he didn’t mind. It gave him a chance to think.

The dark sedan was upon him before he registered what was happening. It seemed to come out of nowhere, its headlights on full high beams, so close behind his car that they reflected into his rearview mirror, blinding him. At first he thought it was his surveillance protection, catching up to him, but when the driver remained close, high beams on full, he realized it wasn’t a cop behind him.

“Christ, what
is
it with these people?” he muttered as he adjusted the mirror.

His first thought was to pull over and let the car pass him, but that thought was shaken out of his head when he felt the jolt. The sickening realization came instantly: the other car had hit him.

There was no doubt in his mind that it was intentional.

His hands gripped the steering wheel tighter, squeezing it hard as sweat oozed from his palms.

“Oh, God,” he said under his breath.
“Goddamn it.”
This time it was more of a prayer than a curse.

The car hit him again—harder this time. He heard the crunch as the bumpers met, metal against metal.

In the backseat, Kylie stirred and woke.

“Uncle Lee? Are we there yet?”

He took a deep breath and tried to will the panic out of his voice.

“No, honey—go back to sleep.”

Another bump, this time sending his car into the opposite lane, so that he had to fight to control it.

Kylie’s voice came from the backseat, wide awake now, sounding as panicked as he felt. “Uncle Lee, what’s going on?”

He had no idea what to say to her, how to explain that there was someone trying to kill them both.

“Go back to sleep, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.”

Even as he said the words he could feel how hollow they were. Everything wasn’t going to be fine.

The headlights glared into his side mirror, the beams bouncing back into his face. He squinted and rolled down the window, pushing the mirror away. A blast of cold air hit his face. He heard the engine behind him rev, and braced himself for another jolt. Instead, the headlights disappeared, and he saw the car pull up next to him. The two-lane road twisted and wound through the Jersey countryside, the solid double yellow line indicating that passing was forbidden. Even at this time of night, he knew, this was suicidal behavior. There was no way for the other driver to see an oncoming car before it was too late.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath. His leg trembling, he rammed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The little Honda jerked and shifted into first gear, spurting ahead of the car next to him.

“Uncle Lee,” Kylie whimpered, “what’s happening?”

“There’s a crazy driver following us,” he replied, trying to sound casual. “Maybe he’s drunk or something.”

This was a route he had driven countless times, from the day he got his license at the age of sixteen, and he knew every twist and turn in the road. He had often joked that he could drive it in his sleep. It was the one advantage he had over his unknown pursuer, and he prayed that it would count for something now. If the other driver managed to pull in front of him, Lee knew, he could almost certainly force Lee to stop. If Lee attempted to pass him, he could force Lee off the road.

He pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The Honda’s engine revved, and the car pulled ahead of his pursuer. The Honda’s engine was small but efficient, and had good pickup speed. Lee offered a silent prayer of thanks to Japanese engineering.

The headlights reappeared behind him once again, and he heard the other car’s engine gun as its headlights got closer. He prayed that the other car was not a more powerful machine than his four-cylinder rental Honda.

The road lay in front of him, a dark, curling ribbon of concrete. Ahead of him loomed McGill’s Hill, curved as the back of a whale, barely visible in the darkness.

He gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward.

“Okay, you bastard,” he muttered, “let’s see how you like this.”

With an abrupt twist of the wheel, he pulled off the road and headed for the stream at the bottom of the hill, his headlights on full beam. The car shuddered and shook as it hit the uneven ground, bumping and jerking along the frozen earth. He could hear Kylie whimpering in the backseat, but he gritted his teeth and drove on at a steady speed. Seeing the frozen stream—shallow enough to be frozen clear through, he knew from experience—he steered the car toward it.

His tires slid onto the frozen stream. The car fishtailed, then righted itself. He pressed the accelerator steadily, in search of what traction was possible with the car’s front-wheel drive.

The sedan continued its pursuit, weaving as its tires hit the ice.

Lee’s headlights picked up the copse of trees at the bottom of the hill, the grove of poplars so dangerous to generations of sledders. The stream was at its deepest point there, and on the other side of the trees was a deep ditch—invisible at night. He gunned the engine and then jerked the wheel all the way to the right, just missing the first tree. With the wheels spinning in the thin layer of snow covering the ground, he turned the car in a tight circle and avoided the ditch.

His pursuer was not so lucky.

Lee heard the crunch of metal as the other car glanced off the first tree. He glanced out of the rearview mirror just in time to see the car land headfirst in the ditch, tires spinning uselessly in the air.

Anxious as he was to know the identity of his pursuer, his instinct to protect his niece was stronger. He knew that if the driver was wearing a seat belt, he might be only mildly injured. He longed to go back for a look at the license plates, but what if their pursuer had a gun? He couldn’t take that chance. He turned the Honda in a tight circle and headed back to the road. A wave of nausea threatened to overcome him as he pulled back onto the road, but he took deep gulps of the icy air coming in through his still open window and sped off into the night.

Kylie had grown very quiet in the backseat, so when he had gone a mile or two, he looked back at her to see if she was all right. She sat staring at him without speaking, her hands clutching the stuffed dinosaur he had bought for her earlier.

“Kylie? Are you okay?” he said.

“What happened to the other car?” she asked. “He hit the tree. Is he going to be all right?”

“I don’t know, honey, but I’m going to call the police as soon as I can so they can go rescue him.”

“Why did you go off the road like that?”

Because he was trying to kill us.

“Well, I just wanted him to stop following us.”

“Why was he following us?”

“I think he must have been drunk or something.”

Kylie began to cry. “But what if he died?”

“Don’t worry, Kylie—it’s going to be all right. The police will take care of him. Everything’s going to be all right.”

But the more he said the words, the less he believed them. Someone was after him, and he suspected that whoever it was, they wanted him off the case—very, very badly.