Unhinged (29 page)

Sure, after this guy had broken Harry by killing the women he loved and loading Harry with guilt. Grief made my throat close. Meanwhile the house continued silent: nobody home.

Just us chickens. “Then, though,” the man below me went on, “a funny thing happened.” He shook his head with remembered wonder. “It turned out
I
missed Harry.”

A smile of pure pleasure, charming and bright. I recalled how unlike their cartoon stereotypes the bad guys always are. The man looking up at me with such happiness in his eyes might have dropped in just to recall old times.

Instead of to kill me. “Harry gave me a purpose in life,” he said. Shockingly, he spat on the new floor, and when he looked up again his eyes were dead coals.

“Useless, lazy, drunk son-of-a-bitch. Supposed to be the goddamn hero, ace freakin’ detective.”

Uh-oh. Things were trending uglier. “He failed you somehow?” I guessed, taking a step back. But he looked up, caught me at it.

His right hand was behind him. I eased forward again and his arm relaxed. “Goddamn right he did. Big explosions, cute little kid, get in the papers. Get his picture on all the front pages.” Deep breath. “Oh yeah, he loved that stuff. When it came to your ordinary cop grunt-work, though, couple nobodies happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, killed in a stickup, I guess that wasn’t
glamorous
enough.”

Bob Arnold had been right when he said it all probably started with a grudge. And this guy had already told me about it; I just hadn’t understood what he was really saying.

“They were your folks, weren’t they? The nobodies who died in a stickup that Harry didn’t solve.”

“Didn’t
try
to solve,” he corrected. “Didn’t
bother
to. He got it as a cold case, sure. Part of a routine housecleaning. Still, at first it gave me hope. I understood that it was a long shot that he could solve it after so long. But did he even
try
? No. Good working people, not famous. Not
important
. Just my parents.”

“So after your hopes were dashed yet again, you decided to show him what it’s like. Him and the rest of the cops. By killing people
they
cared for.”

What would happen, I wondered, if I just walked down the steps and past him? But the way his dead-coal eyes had begun smoldering again made me decide not to try to find out.

“The story you told me . . . it happened. But it was
you
pushing that woman off the roof. You taunting Harry, getting away.”

The thought sent a chill through me; shivering, I plunged my hands reflexively into the pockets of my heavy old cardigan. And was astonished by what I found there:

I left something for you
.

It was a gun, a .25 or maybe a .32 semiautomatic pistol. I’d handled them enough so I could tell by the feel of it.

Where the hell my old buddy Mr. Ash had gotten it, or what he’d been thinking when he left it in my sweater pocket, were questions for another day. My question now was: loaded? Or not?

Please, god. “The other night, you made the prank call from the pay phone. And it was you in the kitchen, you came in through the hole in the foundation in the cellar wall, didn’t you? Up the cellar steps. You left the knife with the fake blood on it, and the note.”

A new thought hit me. “But how’d you get in? I locked up and the cellar door was hooked, just like today.”

Like a magician he produced a thin strip of celluloid: the kind that still comes in the collars of new dress shirts. Keeping my face blank, I found the gun’s safety, thumbed it. I needed to shoot him where he stood, or try. Take a chance on the gun being loaded; my only chance.

But even as I thought this, his own hand came out with a gun in it, too. I stared at it, hypnotized.

He waved it, breaking the spell. “Let’s get this over with.”

Getting this over with wasn’t on my to-do list. “You haven’t told me why, yet. What got you to Eastport? And why me, now?”

He studied me as if this were the stupidest question he’d ever heard, waited for me to come up with the answer for myself. When I didn’t, he said:

“You made a big impression on old Harry. Even while he and I were doing our little dance together, back in the city—”

Where this bastard was killing people, murdering them just for spite, and Harry was desperately chasing him—

“. . . he never gave up on the other thing. All those clippings in his room? Notes and a diary of his hunt for some old dead guy he had a bug about, didn’t believe the guy was really dead. And that guy’s daughter, that kid who Harry’d made such a big deal of saving.”

The kid being me.

“And afterwards, with Harry gone, hey, I had a lot of time on my hands.”

That charming smile again, a little gesture as if appealing to my common sense, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world. “So then I started looking for . . .”

“For my father.” I finished his sentence crisply. The pieces fell together like glass in a kaleidoscope.

“You picked up where Harry left off,” I said. “Did your homework, thought my father might be here because I’m here. That was why you came to Eastport, wasn’t it? But once you arrived . . .”

Ellie’s words came back to me:
He had a reason at first. But now . . . now he’s doing it because he
likes
it
.

So this was probably not a fruitful conversational angle. Meanwhile, the little gun felt like a cannon in my hand but it wasn’t. Even if it turned out to have bullets in it, I’d have no time to get it out of my pocket. And I’d thought Wade had exaggerated about needing a large caliber to put a guy down, in a situation.

But looking at this guy now, I thought I could’ve parted his hair with a bullet and he wouldn’t’ve flinched. Slowly, he began mounting the stairs.
No time . . .
I took a wild guess:

“As for Harriet, her problem was never what she wrote, all those letters to the
Quoddy Tides
. Her problem was what she
read
. Old newspapers . . . When you told her who you were, she knew better. Just like she’d known Wyatt. She’d seen the real Harry’s picture in the tabloids. She
knew
you weren’t him.”

He stopped. “Very good,” he said in faintly mocking tones.

“And the tourist . . . a shrink, Wyatt Evert told me. A retired psychiatrist from New York. Could he have been . . . Harry Markle’s psychiatrist? The tourist didn’t know you, but you knew him. And for you, that was enough.”

Now that I knew so much, the rest was easier to figure. “The boots were just misdirection. Just something to confuse the whole picture, assuming anyone even paid attention to them. You never got into his room. You followed him to the marsh. You found him alone and you drowned him.”

His face said that I was right again. But he couldn’t resist bragging a little more about it, letting me know how smart, how
superior
he was.

“The damn boots were the only hard part. The switch for my own, which I’d messed up in advance so they’d look sabotaged. Same size, but I had to struggle in the marsh getting them on him. Him not being able to help me and all. Now, stop stalling and come down here.”

Not on your tintype, buster
. Stalling was the name of the game, at the moment.

“How’d you kill Harriet? No wounds, no poison . . .”

But just then Sam’s gauze sling on the newel post caught my eye again. At the sight a vivid mental picture rose up, of the night he’d gotten it.

Of the ambulance technician punching Sam in the chest to get his heart started again. But it was a punch in the chest that had stopped it, too, from the broken steering column.

“Your fist,” I said. “You punched her in the chest? You didn’t know it would kill her outright. But you were . . .”

“Lucky,” he finished. “Yeah. I just wanted to put her down, shut her up until I could figure out a good way to do it. Turned out I didn’t have to.”

“The blood on the porch?” It
had
been there, I realized; the gossip—about that much, anyway—had been right.

“Scalp wound, when she fell.” He shook his head impatiently. “Got people talking before I noticed it myself and got it cleaned up. That, and that damned boot
she
was wearing.”

Harriet’s boot, the one that had been found in the compost heap. “Dragging her through backyards in the middle of the night,” he went on. “Freakin’ thing fell off, I couldn’t find it in the dark. Although”—he brightened hideously for an instant—“it
was
exciting.”

Yeah, the risk of getting caught with the corpse of a harmless old woman you’d just murdered must’ve been a thrill. I felt a strong urge to punch this guy, myself, right in the nose.

“Why’d you put that paper in her hand? And . . . where the hell did you get the mortar to put her in the wall?”

He shrugged carelessly. “Men painting the Danvers’ house left a window open to air it out. I just spotted it, climbed in. I dragged her in the cellar door and closed it behind me.” He was enjoying this. “The mortar was a stroke of luck, it was down there already, couple bags. I didn’t know she’d be found so soon, but that turned out to work pretty well, too, didn’t it?”

Uh-huh. Just ducky. He came up another step. At this range he could put a hole the size of a Pontiac in
my
chest, and if I turned to run it would be all over instantly.

And I still didn’t know if my gun was loaded.

“As for the newspaper, well, I’m always the funny man. I just couldn’t resist the joke.”

Hilarious. So while we’d been working up one theory after another, he’d been winging it, improvising day by day, trusting in his wits and a benevolent universe to pave his path.

“It was fun while it lasted,” he went on expansively, “but now . . . happier hunting grounds, that’s what I need. There’s plenty of small towns where I’d fit right in, don’t you think?” His eyes were fixed on mine. “Move in, do my thing, and—poof!”

He smiled brilliantly. “Here today. Gone tomorrow. After I finish up here in Eastport, of course. Your son, his girl, your husband. And that friend of yours, that Ellie.”

His voice lingered on their names, touched their images in my mind with a filth-dipped brush. He was getting disorganized, unraveling at the edges; it showed in the way his face changed so fast, in his jittery energy. And in the way he kept slapping new names onto his victim list:
somebody likes it
.

Not that it was going to help me any, that his emotions were running haywire.

Somehow I had to look down long enough to make sure something more than a dry-fire would come out of that damned gun if I shot him through my sweater pocket. And I had to do it without him figuring out that I had the thing.

There was also the interesting little matter of shooting a person at all. Now that push had come to shove, I saw the difference between me and this guy. He was hardwired for killing people; I wasn’t.

On the other hand, Sam would be home soon, with Maggie. Wade too, maybe with Ellie and George.

None of them knowing what I knew. They’d all walk right into the house. Into my death scene, and then into their own.

Unsuspecting. I breathed in quietly, centered myself.

Focused down, as I had on the shooting range. Praying that the damned thing was loaded; begging heaven, because it was my only way out of this.

“Yeah, good old Harry,” my opponent reminisced. “Kept a diary, Harry did. And you were on every page. It was all he wanted in life, to find your old man. He wanted to tell you the truth about what happened back then, and how it all turned out. ’Cause he figured you
deserved to know
.” He gave the words a sour twist. “Damned old fool.”

The thought kept nearly dropping me: the notion, previously unimagined, of a life lived in service to the child I had been. But while he’d been talking, the monster before me had also been climbing the stairs, and now he was nearly on me.

I could almost hear his heart beating, feel his short, hot exhalations on my face. Then the cellar door opened, metal latch clicking; not hooked anymore, I realized. Because this guy had already come through, slipped the hook with his handy-dandy strip of celluloid.

At the click he turned alertly, scuttled back downstairs, the gun in his hand. “Make a peep and I’ll shoot whoever it is in the face,” he grated, and moved out of sight across that newly finished floor.

Without thinking I rushed down the steps after him, in time to see him backing toward me again, hands raised, the gun now dangling from one of them. Coming toward him was Lian Ash, the weapon in
his
hand the twin to the one in my own.
I left something for you . . .

But Lian had kept something too; good for him.

Suddenly his meeting with Wade took on a new meaning. Lian had bought the guns from Wade. Suspecting . . . or had he known? “Get out of the way, Jacobia,” Mr. Ash told me. “Quick, now.”

But not quick enough. A second later my personal nightmare had an arm around my throat; his other hand pressed what felt like the end of a cannon barrel to my forehead. Worse, when he turned, he slammed me against the wall hard before he dragged me partway up the stairs again.

And that was bad, but much worse was the whole world tilting abruptly, whirling and spinning, so that without warning, six images of Lian Ash turned like a nightmare Ferris wheel at the foot of the stairs.

“Hi,” I gasped, trying and failing to make the images one.

“Hi,” said the turning wheel of faces. So
dizzy . . .

Still halfway up the stairs and in the madman’s grip, I felt myself being held at arm’s length like a rag doll and shaken. “Shut up! Get up here, old man, or I’ll—”

My captor shoved me against the wall, my head smacking it so hard I heard plaster crack, then flung me away. By then I had such vertigo I could barely tell up from down.

“I said come here!” he shouted at Mr. Ash. He was losing it.

But I wasn’t; losing it, I mean. Even then, to my own immense surprise, I was still in the game. Hill country, tenements, waitressing, numbers running, getting Sam out of the city, even Victor: sometimes all you can do in this world is hang on. Just . . . hang on.