Spackled and Spooked (37 page)

“What were you voted in high school?” I asked Derek when he came back into the living room.

“Voted? Oh, most likely to have the crap beat out of me by the Stenham twins.”

“Really?”

“Sure. That and most likely to become an MD. No surprise there.” He looked around, nose wrinkling at the mess and the sour smell of old beer.

“Holly was voted most likely to marry well. She was in the drama society, and a cheerleader and prom queen.”

“I’m not surprised,” Derek said, wandering over to look over my shoulder. “She was a knockout, wasn’t she? Are there any more pictures?”

“Of Holly? Probably.” I flipped pages until I found photos of the cheerleading team and the drama society. “Here. Feast your eyes on this. Looks like they did
Grease
that year.”

Holly was dressed in skin-tight capri pants, an equally tight halter top, and high heels, with her hair teased to monstrous heights.

Derek nodded. “She wasn’t cast in the lead, obviously. That’d be this girl; the chubby blonde in the poodle skirt and little white blouse in the middle. Candy, isn’t it? She’s lost some weight, hasn’t she?”

“Candy Millikin as Sandy,” I recited from the caption under the photo. “Holly White as Rizzo. Rizzo was the trampy one, the one who thought she was pregnant. Travis Robertson as Danny Zuko. So that’s Denise’s husband.” He was good-looking, dressed in the obligatory leather jacket and jeans, with his hair slicked back with Brylcreem. “No wonder she wanted to hold on to him. And look at this.” I pointed to one of the other young men peering over Travis’s shoulder. “Here’s Lionel.”

Derek chuckled. “He looks kind of like Opie, doesn’t he? Can’t be fun, having the voice to play the leading man, but to miss out because you look like an overgrown kid.”

I nodded. “It hasn’t hurt Ron Howard, but yeah, I bet nobody ever took him seriously. No wonder he never had a girlfriend; he probably never dared ask anyone out.”

“He asked Candy to the prom,” Derek said.

“But it’s not like he was interested in her. She said he always ogled everyone else. Including Holly.”

“Whatever.” Derek took the yearbook out of my hand, closed it, and put it on the table. I took it back, opened it, and left it on the floor, where I’d found it. “I think we’ve done all we can do here. Let’s go check out Lionel’s house.”

He headed for the door. I followed, making sure to flip the lights off as we exited the house and pull the door shut behind us.

The TV was on in Lionel’s house, but no one was watching. There was a gap in the curtains allowing us to see most of the living room and dining room combination, all the way into the kitchen. There was no sign of Brandon, but Lionel himself was sitting at the dining room table, eating dinner. He must have been really hungry, or else in a hurry to get somewhere, because he was scarfing down his food in a way any doctor in the world would tell him was unhealthy. Here I’d always thought Derek ate fast, but he had nothing on Lionel. And he kept glancing over his shoulder, furtively, as if he was afraid someone was sneaking up on him.

“Should we knock?” I whispered. Derek shook his head.

“Let me have a look around first. I want to go around the house and see if I can see in through the other windows. Stay here. Let me know if he moves.”

I nodded. “Be careful.”

“Always.” He grinned and disappeared. I put my eye to the window again.

Lionel didn’t seem to be aware of being observed. I didn’t know what Derek was doing on the other side of the house, but whatever it was, it didn’t alert Lionel, who just kept the fork going at warp speed between plate and mouth.

We’d had no qualms about knocking on Irina’s door, and Arthur Mattson’s, and Denise’s, but here, by tacit understanding, we were sneaking around, peering through the windows. Derek’s thoughts must have followed the same paths mine had, and he’d come to the same conclusion: that Lionel bore looking at extra carefully. He’d known Holly, and he might have been in love with her. Candy hadn’t seen anything romantic in his constant attentions and his devotion, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t had romantic feelings toward Holly. He’d talked about wanting to go to New York to pursue a career in theater, but instead he was here, working as an electrician. Venetia knew him and would probably open the door for him. He knew Brandon, knew where Brandon lived, and he also knew where Derek and I lived, and where Derek’s truck would be parked. He saw our empty house every day of his life—so he’d known that it would make a perfect place to stash a body. And I didn’t like the way he was behaving. He seemed jumpy, nervous.

At this point in my cogitations, Derek came sidling around the corner again and crouched next to me.

“There’s no sign of Brandon,” he whispered, his mouth so close to my ear that his breath tickled, “although Lionel’s mom’s in the kitchen, cleaning up. There are no curtains anywhere, just blinds, and I was able to look into pretty much every room. I even peered into the bathroom, just in case. I don’t think Brandon’s in the house.”

“Damn.”

He nodded. “This is interesting, though: Lionel’s room looks like a shrine to Holly. There are several pictures of the two of them, from school plays and field trips and such.”

“You’re kidding? That’s creepy.”

“Totally,” Derek nodded, with a faint grin. I opened my mouth to say something else, but before I could, Derek’s cell phone chirped. He slapped a hand to it, but it was too late: Lionel looked up and at the window, alertly. We both ducked out of sight.

“Damn,” Derek breathed. He glanced at the display. “It’s Wayne. Maybe he’s found Brandon.”

I nodded. “You need to take it. Run. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Right.” Derek scooted away from the window and faded into the darkness, up toward our house. I did the same, but before I could clear the yard, the front door opened and light flooded out onto the stoop and grass.

Lionel’s small frame stood outlined in the light. I threw myself flat on the ground and held my breath.

He looked around, suspiciously. I concentrated on not moving and on not making a sound. Lionel did the same. After a moment, his head turned. Away from me, up the street. Derek had opened the door to the truck, and the light inside had come on. I could see him standing there, cell phone to his ear, but of course he was too far away for me to hear what he was saying. Lionel watched for a moment, then ducked back inside the house.

He left the door open, so I figured he’d be coming back out, and I thought I might not get a better chance to move. So I got up into a crouch and made for the driveway, where I planned to duck behind the van. It was only a few yards from where I was; I didn’t think I’d have any problems getting there.

And I didn’t. The problem came when I arrived. I was slinking along the back of the van, preparatory to darting into the next yard and behind some bushes, when I heard a faint banging noise from inside.

Electrical tools don’t move around on their own, so obviously someone—or something—was inside Lionel’s paneled van. It wasn’t Derek, who I could see farther up the street. And it wasn’t Wayne, who was on the phone with Derek. And I couldn’t imagine Denise or Irina or Linda White scrambling around in the back of Lionel’s van. But Brandon was missing, and this was somewhere we hadn’t looked for him.

In retrospect, it might not have been the smartest thing to do. What I should have done was go get Derek and then make him check the inside of the van. But in addition to the banging, there were weird, muffled moaning or keening sounds coming from the van, and I was worried. What if Brandon was hurt? Or choking? What if he couldn’t wait another minute? I pulled open the back door and crawled in, pulling the door shut behind me. Gently, so it wouldn’t make a noise.

No sooner was I inside and had located the dark bundle that was Brandon, than Lionel came back out of the house and headed for the van. I looked around the dark interior. It was too late to get out, but was there somewhere I could hide so he wouldn’t see me?

Lionel decided to come to the back door, and I just barely had time to throw myself into the corner closest to the doors and make myself as small as possible. I closed my eyes, in the age-old belief that if I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me. As it turned out, I was right. He didn’t see me. I was squished as far into the corner as I could get, and he looked right past me, seemingly concerned only with making sure that Brandon was still there. The beam of his flashlight illuminated a long bundle, the top of a fair head, and a pair of blue eyes blinking woozily. Every other part of Brandon seemed to be rolled in a tarp and a couple of blankets, and judging from the muffled sounds he was making, Lionel had gagged him, as well.

After a second, Lionel closed the door again. As his steps continued up the side of the van, I moved, as quietly and noiselessly as possible, to crouch next to Brandon. Hopefully any noises I made would be attributed to Brandon’s thrashings. When Lionel went back inside, I’d get us both out.

It was a fine plan, as far as it went. It was even successful, to a degree. Lionel didn’t realize that I was there. He did not, however, go back inside. Instead, he opened the driver’s side door. I threw myself sideways, into the space directly behind the driver’s seat, praying that once again, he’d look right past me. Jumping up into the seat, Lionel chuckled, a highly unpleasant sound, made all the worse for the words that accompanied it. “Ready to go for a ride, Brandon, old buddy?”

And that’s where the brilliance of my plan blew up in my face. I’d expected Lionel to go back inside after reassuring himself that everything was okeydokey out here. He didn’t. Instead, he cranked the key over in the ignition. The van hiccupped, and we bumped backward out of the driveway onto Becklea and, with a grinding noise, barreled down the street toward the corner.

22

It was a supremely unpleasant ride, one of the worst I’ve ever had to endure, and that includes the 350-mile trip from New York City to Waterfield that I took with my mother at age five, when we had to pull over every twenty minutes so I could throw up.

I didn’t get carsick this time, in spite of driving with my back to traffic. It was probably because I was too worried about where we were going and what would happen when we got there to have time to think about anything else. Not to mention that I was worried about Brandon. I couldn’t risk examining him, for fear that Lionel would notice me. And he couldn’t talk, but every time the car went over a bump in the road, he groaned. I hated to think what the drive was doing to him; maybe he had internal injuries, maybe Lionel had shot him and he was slowly bleeding to death. Whatever was wrong with him, it didn’t sound good.

And where was Derek? Hopefully he had realized I was inside the van and was following us. Hopefully he had called Wayne to report what had happened. Hopefully the police were closing in on us even now. Hopefully they’d reach us before Lionel murdered us both. He didn’t have much to lose at this point, if indeed he had killed Holly and Venetia, as I thought he must have. There was no doubt that he’d abducted Brandon, and I didn’t think it was so he could bring him to a surprise party. If he planned to kill Brandon, and I thought he’d have to, he likely wouldn’t have any qualms about killing me.

I had no idea where we were going, and I couldn’t raise my head up high enough to look out the front window, for fear that Lionel would notice me. The back of the paneled van had no windows. The road we drove on felt smooth, paved, but beyond that, I had no idea whether we were going east or west, north or south. Toward the coast or away from it. Occasionally I’d hear the humming of another car passing by, coming closer then fading, but other than that, I didn’t hear a thing.

I also couldn’t tell how much time had passed. I’m not good at telling time without a clock. A couple of months ago, I’d been locked in an underground tunnel with a rotting corpse for fifteen hours, and it had felt like days had passed before I finally got out.

After a while the van slowed, and the surface under the wheels changed. Now it felt more like we were bumping over a rutted track of some sort, or at least a less-trafficked road. Eventually the van rolled to a stop, and Lionel cut the lights and the engine. He sat for a second in the dark, maybe bracing himself for the task to come, then took the key out of the ignition and got out.

As soon as the driver’s side door closed behind him, I was on the move, slithering between the seats into the front compartment, squeezing myself into the space under the dashboard on the passenger side. If he remembered something he’d forgotten, and opened the front door again, I didn’t have a hope of remaining undetected, but chances were good he was on his way to the back doors, and I didn’t want to sit there in plain view when he opened them.