Authors: Al Sarrantonio
To the little girl he would murder in cold blood.
He awoke with the taste of dried scotch in his mouth. He had made it to the bed but had not taken off his shirt or shoes. The headache was still there, just out of reach and waiting to pounce.
His cell phone was ringing.
It was not in his pants pocket or jacket pocket (at least he had hung his jacket on the back of the chair) but it was tangled up in the bedcovers on the floor.
He sat on the bed and pushed the call button. The headache was beginning to make its move.
“Yes?”
“Detective Grant?” a voice he knew but couldn’t place said.
“That’s right.”
“Janet Larson,” the no-nonsense voice announced.
He still couldn’t place it—then suddenly he could.
“Yes, Mrs. Larson, how are you? How’s Baby Charlie?”
“He’s no baby anymore. First grade. And Baby Louis is in preschool, thank God. It’s almost quiet around here. Too quiet, to tell you the truth.”
Grant said nothing. What should he say? That’s nice? Sorry your sister died in my house giving birth to a monster? Sorry you had to deal with the Lord of Death?
The silence stretched, and then Janet blurted, “I never thanked you for trying to protect my sister. I heard you got shot.”
Grant didn’t know what to say, so he said, “It healed nicely. No pangs in wet weather.”
“To be frank,” Janet went on, “it’s taken me five years to make this call. I blamed you for a long time. I should have blamed myself.”
“For what?”
“For not knowing. For running away.”
“Samhain would have hurt your family.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. I always prided myself on being strong, and I wasn’t strong. I was weak. It’s been a . . . very difficult five years, Detective.”
“Samhain hasn’t . . .”
“Nothing like that.” She laughed nervously. “I just mean . . . personally. Chuck and I divorced about a year ago, and I haven’t been as . . . tough as I once was.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Believe me, I’m sorry to say it. It’s been . . . tough not being tough, if you know what I mean. I’ve had nightmares about Marianne and that . . . baby. And, well, I haven’t been the best mother to Baby Charlie and his brother. The thing is, I wanted to tell you that there was nothing you could have done.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“Absolutely nothing. That Samhain creature had things sewed up from one end to the other. I’ve thought
long and hard about this, and it’s true. Either you and I are both to blame or we’re not. And I’ve decided we’re not.”
Grant was silent.
“That’s all I’ve got to say about it,” Janet said with finality. “I was wrong to harbor bad thoughts about you.” She paused, and Grant could feel a change in the air. “But that’s not the real reason I called you.”
A tingle, the slightest breath of hope, brushed along the back of Grant’s neck.
“I talked to someone at the police station who said you had just been fired.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I almost told him what I wanted to tell you, but something told me not to. Chip Prohman was a dope in high school and for all I know—”
“Believe me, Janet, he’s worse than a dope now.”
Grant waited, his anticipation building. He found that he was holding his breath.
“I think I might know where Marianne’s baby is. Though she would be, what? Almost as old as Baby Louie.”
Grant could not keep his voice steady. “Yes, five.”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“Yes, I very much want to know. Where is she?”
“Well, I’m not sure, exactly. This was almost a year ago, last summer, when I was still pissed at you. Chuck and I were going through the last of our problems. We had separated, and he had moved everything he wanted out of the house. I threw all the rest on the front lawn and put out a rummage sale sign one Saturday. This was . . . just after the Fourth of July, whatever Saturday that would be.”
Grant waited while she took a breath. His hand was
clutching the phone so tight he could hear the plastic case threatening to break.
Come on, come on . . .
“Anyway,” Janet Larson continued, “we were having this rummage sale, and Baby Charlie—who I just call Charlie now, I mean you don’t call a six-year-old ‘Baby’ in front of his friends or nasty things happen—Charlie was helping me and we must have had a hundred cars show up before noon, parked all over the street, in the driveway, up on the curb, you should have seen that pill Mrs. Jakes next door with her sour face, and a mob scene for a while. I guess some of Carl’s crap was worth something, because by noon most of it was gone. In the afternoon we had a few more cars, and one in particular caught my eye because it passed the house twice before parking across the street. Big black thing, not a limo exactly but along the lines of a Lincoln Town Car, those big boats. The windows were tinted all around and it just sat there, nobody got out. Some woman was arguing with me over the price of one of Carl’s old golf clubs, not the new ones which he took with him, and I was distracted, and when I looked back the window in the backseat of the Town Car had rolled down and a face as white as the moon was staring at me. Just for a second but it was ghastly, pale as a sheet with two dark eyes and hair that hung down in a straight ugly cut. I’ve never seen a more ghastly looking little girl. Just for a second, because the window was already going up and then the face was gone. But that girl looked at me, the face blank, and I knew who it was. It was Marianne’s baby, I’ll swear on it. I didn’t see that Samhain, the one in the cape, and I didn’t feel his presence, but for all I know he was driving the damn Lincoln. It started up then and pulled away from the curb but I
went down to the street and I’ve got good eyes and I took down the license plate number. Maybe that’ll help you.”
Grant began to breathe. “Yes, it might. Can you give it to me?”
Janet Larson read out numbers and letters. “I hope it helps. That face was so . . . I don’t know, dead. Not dead, like that Samhain’s face, but something worse. If you can be worse than dead. What will you do when you find her?”
“I don’t know,” Grant lied.
“Whatever she is, she’s half my sister, you know.”
“That’s true.”
“If you find her would you let me know? I’d like to know if she’s anything like Marianne, if anything of my sister, my family, is inside her. I don’t know. It’s just that I thought you had the best chance of finding her.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Larson.”
“Since Chuck and I divorced, I’ve been thinking a lot about what family I have. Maybe I’m nuts.”
“Anything but, Mrs. Larson.”
Janet Larson laughed. “Anyway, I hope you can find her.”
“Me, too.”
“And I hope you believe me when I say I’m sorry for the way I felt about you. You did what you thought was right.”
Grant let her ramble on a little more, spilling out her apologies and regrets, and then he gently got her off the phone after lying again that he would get in touch with her when he found the girl.
He stared at the cell phone and pushed the off button, watching the LCD screen go blank after flashing the word “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, indeed,” Grant said out loud, filled with the first hope he’d had in five years.
It took twenty minutes to trace the car, and only that long because he was no longer employed by the Orangefield Police Department, and had to talk one of the uniformed cops—who turned out to be Paige, who had escorted him home yesterday—into running the plate number for him.
It matched up to St. Bartholomew’s Church in Newton, Massachusetts. Grant found the phone number of the rectory. After speaking with Mrs. Finch, and then a deacon named Brandywine, he was eventually put through to a priest they thought might be able to help him.
“Father Coughlin?”
There was a cough on the other end, followed by a pronounced throat clearing. Detective Bill Grant expected the voice, when it finally spoke, to be raspy or weak. It was neither—it was strong and clear as a bell.
“Yes?”
Grant identified himself, and briefly stated the reason for his call.
“Do I know you?” the priest asked.
“No, but you will.”
The brief silence ended in a snort. “You ended my afternoon nap. We used to call fellows like you wisenheimers. Did you by any chance go to Catholic school?”
“Wrong religion. Episcopalian.”
Another snort. “Virtually the same thing, though neither of us likes to admit it.”
“Except for the nuns. And we still use the communion rail.”
“I wish we did, too. Would you be willing to drive over so we can have a proper talk?”
“That would be fine. Though I’d like to ask you now—”
“A proper talk, like I said. You don’t by any chance follow football, do you?”
“No. Baseball fan.”
There was something artificial and almost scripted about the way the priest was talking. He sounded like a movie cliché—Barry Fitzgerald in
Going My Way
.
“Good. Then you won’t be looking at your watch. We’ll have a nice long talk. Say, tomorrow at three in the afternoon?”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“Me, too, Detective Grant. Me, too.” Grant expected the priest to chuckle, but there was only silence.
The line went dead before Grant could say good-bye.
It was a beautiful Sunday morning in October, with a high, bright blue cloudless sky, when Grant left early for the drive to Massachussets. On his way out of town to the Northway entrance ramp, before hooking up with Interstate 91 down through Vermont and then eventually over to the hated I-95, he stopped at Riley Gates’ fallow farm. The faded sign,
RILEY GATES: PUMPKINS FOR SALE
, was long gone.
He drove up the rutted long lane and braked the car. The lawn chair was still there, facing the now-empty pumpkin field.
Grant touched the chair, and then turned to look at the gutted skeleton of what had been Riley’s house. The things that had happened in that house, and, later, as he had waited in this chair . . .
Something new and sleek cut the sky above the yawning blackened cavity of the roof.
Grant moved ten yards to the right to get a better look. It was a curving structure, the top of a dull gray wheel set high into the sky.
Halloweenland.
Grant remembered the story in the paper. So that was where they were erecting it.
After taking a final look at the fallow pumpkin field, Grant got back into his sedan and drove back to the main road.
Hope things are better where you are, podna
, he said to himself, thinking of Riley Gates.
Halloweenland had a better gate, with a bold shiny
KEEP OUT
sign bolted to it, but it wasn’t locked. Grant parked next to it and pushed it open, entering the property. No ruin here; the chain-link was brand new.
There wasn’t much to see, but plenty to imagine. Already a huge parking lot had been set up to the right, paved and marked out. To the left what looked like the beginnings of an arcade, with a boardwalk, and a few tents, probably for amusements and skill games, had been erected. And straight ahead was the Ferris, a half-completed monster, with the beginnings of a massive main tent, outlined in steel girders. As Grant got closer he saw that there were plots laid out for more thrill rides, and a trailer marked
OFFICE
up on blocks. On one the brightly colored cups of a cups-and-saucers ride lay on their sides. They were spanking new, the engraving on one proudly boasting that it was manufactured in Germany. It was painted a deep red, and beside it on the grass lay its saucer, pearly enameled white. They looked like props from some giant monster movie.
He felt the presence of the man behind him before he heard the voice, which was low and toneless.
“Can I help you?”
Grant turned around and blinked. The newspaper
story had labeled Mr. Dickens as scary as one of his attractions, and it hadn’t exaggerated. Dickens was bald as an ostrich egg, his eyes impossibly small and dark. Still, they managed to look hooded. He had no eyebrows, and his lashes were short and the lightest ash blond. And yet he wasn’t albino, and a dark patch of facial hair, a “soul patch,” lay under his lower lip. His body was medium-sized but seemed squat. His large hands looked as if they would feel moist if you shook them. He gave the appearance of something that didn’t live on land all the time, an underwater creature, perhaps.
Grant pulled out his auxiliary badge, the one he hadn’t turned in.
“You must be Mr. Dickens.”
The other didn’t look at it. “Just Dickens, if you don’t mind.”