With Every Breath (39 page)

there’s some resolution to this mess. And without a body, that’s a little tough."

"Oh."

"So there’s probably still blood all over the wall in the dining room. Maybe a little bit of gray matter, too," he went on cruelly, though that would more or less mean that Graycie had died on the spot, so he should have been found there. He went on anyway, hoping she wouldn’t figure that out too quickly.

"To tell you the truth, I was a little shook up myself when I was in there, so I can’t say with any certainty, but presumably his bowels gave out when he died and—"

"
Stop it!"

He watched her evenly. "Just thought you ought to know what you’re letting yourself in for."

"I know. I understand. I’ll stay out of the dining room."

Joe finally nodded. It made him feel better. Having her go in there, having her see Graycie’s blood, bothered him as much as anything.

"Try not to touch anything," he cautioned finally.

Maddie nodded. "Okay."

There was nothing else to say, he realized. "All right. If you’re so damned determined to do this, then let’s get it over with."

Gina got into Cassie’s battered old Ford, grimacing. The engine chugged and complained a moment before turning over, and Gina thought it probably hadn’t had a tune-up since Moby Dick was a guppy. She pulled out of the lot and followed Beach to Fifteenth, then she turned west and parked half a block back from Joe’s condo.

She took her compact out and made sure her lipstick wasn’t smudged. The Ford’s clock wasn’t working, but her watch told her that it was almost nine-thirty. Joe

was late going to work, but he’d be leaving any minute. She’d catch him on his way out. She worked a brush through her hair, thinking hard, trying to figure out the best way to approach him.

Tears over Lucy would be good. Old, tired, but good. That always got to him.

She looked up and her heart leaped as he finally came out the carport door. He always looked so good, she thought, even when he limped. She’d always thought the limp wasn’t half-bad. It made him look like some kind of mean, dangerous desperado, and it reminded everybody of how famous he’d been.

Oh, she loved him. She loved him so much.

Then, in the next second, her heart went to shattering stone.

A kid—Maddie’s kid—came outside after him, and he picked him up like he was his own—no, no, no!— and swung him over his shoulders, giving him a piggyback ride to the truck, as he used to do with Lucy. And even as he buckled him in, Gina knew what she was going to see next. Her own harsh breath filled Cassie’s car in desperate, little pants.

Maddie Brogan came outside.

She was staying with him. Living with him? Gina understood then. As soon as they’d gotten her out of the way, the bitch had moved right in!

"No," she whispered aloud, moaning. "Joe, no, baby, no! Didn’t you understand?"

The Pathfinder backed out of his driveway.

Gina couldn’t even breathe.

Her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel as she watched the truck turn north. She had to do something. she thought, despair raging in her head.

But what? What was left?

Chapter 32

They stepped up onto the deck at 110. "So what exactly is it that you’re going to do?" Joe asked. He reached down and took Josh’s hand with the subconscious thought that if Maddie reached suddenly to open the door, he wanted to hold the boy back.

But Maddie only played with her camera and frowned.

"I’m not sure," she said finally, "not beyond what I’ve already told you. I think I’ll just photograph anything that even remotely makes me squirm, anything that makes me feel uncomfortable ... or feel good, for that matter. Then we’ll have to go over to Jonesport so I can develop the film. What I’m thinking is that when I see the pictures, something about the way
I photographed things will key me off. I know it sounds farfetched, but—"

"No," he said shortly, as he had the first time she’d mentioned the approach. He thought of the work of hers that he’d seen, and he realized that it made all the sense in the world.

"What about you?" she asked.

"I’ll be on the road and the beach to start with. What I’m thinking is that in order for anyone to have come here to your house—Rick or anyone else—they had to get onto The Wick in the first place, right? Which leaves the bridge and the road, or an approach by water."

Maddie shook her head. "Wouldn’t those men from the county have thought about that?"

"Who knows?" Joe shrugged. "They think on their own terms sometimes. Seventeen routes in and out of the city, that sort of thing."

"Oh."

"You all right?"

"No. But I will be once I get this over with, one way or the other."

He nodded and reached past her for the front door. He rattled the knob and swore. It was locked.

"My keys are inside," Maddie moaned. "I didn’t think to take them that night."

He shot her a look. "I guess not. Cassie’ll have an extra set. Let me try the back door, and if it’s not open, we’ll just have to drive down to the big island again."

He dropped Josh’s hand and went around the corner of the deck. Maddie listened to his heels thump away, and felt a panicky moment of abandonment again. Almost before she could fight it, he opened the front door from inside.

"I opened one of the back windows," he said. "Open a few others, too, so I can hear you from the beach. And Maddie ..."

She looked at him.

"They gave it a swipe here and there, but it didn’t go a long way toward cleaning things up. It smells."

She felt herself sway a little. "I’ll be okay."

"And I’ll be as close as a shout." He took Josh’s hand

again. "Come on, sport. I need you to help me play cop."

He went down the driveway again, determined not to look back at her, knowing that he had to let her go, had to let her be strong and independent, and do whatever it was that she had to do.

By the time he and Josh reached the road, he thought it was one of the harder things he had done in his life.

Sheila scribbled down yet another message for Joe and cursed him six ways to Sunday. It was one thing for him to be having a little fun without Gina running interference—Sheila could understand him taking advantage of that, she really could. But, Sheila thought, he was carrying on like a lovestruck puppy. He was the chief of police, for God’s sake, and he had barely set foot in the office all week!

She liked Joe, she really did, even when he was being short and rude. And even though Zack Morgan was old enough practically to be her father, she’d been happily married to him for a good many years, so she didn’t feel that kind of tug for Joe. Mostly she just pretended to be annoyed with him. But this time, she was really getting mad.

She gathered his messages together and took them down the hall to his office. She cursed again when she saw his desk. It was piled with what looked like a thousand more of the little pink slips. Who had been on desk duty last night to leave a mess like this? Lou Paul, she remembered. She started straightening the desk. Then one of the top messages caught her eye.

"Oh, Lord." She wondered why Lou had just left it there, why he hadn’t raised the alarm. Then Sheila realized he had probably been drinking again. It was getting long past time that one of them ratted to Joe about how much he did it.

Sheila grabbed the telephone and punched in Joe’s home number. It rang and rang.

She hurried back to her own office and tried to raise the Pathfinder on the radio. Nothing. Joe wasn’t in it. Hector was there, somewhere in the station. She went looking for him and found him coming out of the bathroom.

"Hey-lo," he greeted her cheerfully.

"Listen, Hector, I need you to scoot around the island some and see if you can spot the Pathfinder. Tell Joe I need to talk to him ASAP." She thought briefly of just passing on the message through Hector that Gina Gallen had run away from the hospital on the mainland. Sheila decided she didn’t want to complicate things too much.

"Yeah, sure," Hector answered. "He’s probably at the diner this time of morning." He thought he could stop by there just as soon as he checked on things at home.

"Whatever. When you find him, tell him to call in. It’s urgent."

The man paused in the entryway to listen to the squeak-squeaking at the back of the house. He’d been doing it with utmost vigilance for days, while he tried to figure out what to do. The sound had become oddly soothing. Each time there was that rubbery-metallic sound, he was comforted to know that she was still safely at home.

She was probably wrestling with that old, gnawing hatred, but at least she was there, he thought. He went to his study. He would leave her alone, as always. He would just listen for a while.

It wasn’t until sometime near ten o’clock that he realized he hadn’t heard the squeaking in a while. He’d gotten absorbed in the ledger he was studying. The feeling that came over him was slow, cold, and faintly nauseating.

She wouldn’t, he tried to convince himself. Not now. Not when she knew he was listening for her, that he was right here at home. She would have seen his car outside.

But before he even went back out into the hallway, he knew that somehow, she had gotten away.

How? She was no longer able to drive. He should have heard a cab, something. She’d gotten out because she had been determined to be very quiet, he realized. Because she had known he would try to stop her.

The man made a sound of disbelief, of helplessness, of rage. He had one prayer, one chance. She hadn’t had that much of a head start. And she couldn’t easily get to The Wick without him.

The smell hit Maddie first. Joe had warned her, but she took a fast step backward anyway, moving instinctively away from it, turning her head to the side.

Death. She had never understood what it smelled like before, but as soon as it came to her she knew she could have identified it anywhere, under any circumstances. And she knew Joe was right.

Rick was dead. He had to be dead for there to have been so much blood that it smelled this bad.

She went back out onto the porch for a moment, gagging. From somewhere distant, she thought she heard a faint buzzing sound. She looked up vacantly and saw nothing that could account for it—except the truck. It must be Joe’s police radio, she realized. She wondered if she was allowed to answer it.

She took a hesitant step down off the deck. By the time she had decided she would, it had stopped buzzing.

She took another shaky breath, braced herself, and went back inside. This time she had the sense to breathe through her mouth. She carefully circumvented the dining room and went down the hall to Josh’s room.

It must have been her old room. The other one was bigger, and almost certainly her parents would have claimed it, just as she herself had when she and Josh moved in. It also had an adjoining door to the bath. They wouldn’t waste that on a kid. At least, she didn’t think Beacher Brogan would have.

She stepped slowly inside and sat down on Josh’s unmade bed. She sat in silence for a while, not really trying to feel anything. Her gaze coasted. There was only the small single bed and a dresser. A closet. And a high window, depressingly small. It didn’t let in much light.

She looked down at the bed again, at the crumpled covers wadded up beneath her.

She got up, walked around it, and realized suddenly what might be wrong. She slung the camera around her neck and pulled the bed out from the wall. It had been sitting flush against the back one, and she turned it outward so that the headboard was there and the foot thrust into the room.

Maybe, she thought. Close.

She struggled with the dresser, pushing it out of the way, and moved the bed again so that it stuck out from the southern wall. Then she nodded almost to herself, and put her camera to her eye.

She moved around, clicking, lowering the camera, thinking, her head cocked to the side. But if anything was going to jog her memory, she thought again, it really would be after the film was developed, when she

saw the pictures and how she had taken them. She went back out into the hallway and passed beneath the attic door in the ceiling before some instinct made her look up.

She considered the possibility that her parents had left something behind, something that might still be there. Doubtful, she thought, but worth a shot.

She pulled the stairs down and climbed up cautiously. It was cold in the attic. She sat on the rim of the opening and looked around. There was a vent at the far northern side. Light seeped in there, just barely enough to tell her that there was nothing up there, nothing at all, just clouds of pink insulation and frigid, dusty air.

She wondered who had cleaned the place out, if it had been Aunt Susan. She started back down the stairs again, not willing to think about that.

She was eye level with the attic floor, fishing for the next step down with her toes, when she saw something. It stuck out from beneath the insulation near the opening. Her heart started pounding, booming hard enough to make her feel faint.

She reached for it.

It was a photograph, an old one. It was black-and-white, and it had the sort of scalloped edges that developers had used a good many years ago. Maddie wiped the insulation dust off on her jeans and went back downstairs.

She took it to the front of the house. Even though the smell was stronger there, the light was better. She held her breath and studied the picture.

It was her mother.

Her throat closed as hard and suddenly as if someone had wrapped a rope around it and jerked. Her mother, and easily twenty other people, were gathered on the beach just outside. She recognized the rocks that