Dead Harvest (33 page)

  The clack of my shoes against marble echoed through the entryway. I froze, straining to hear a response in the darkness, but there was none. I looked around. To my right was a massive staircase that curved upward to the second floor. A crystal chandelier dangled in the center of the room, its chain disappearing into the gloom above. Beneath the chandelier sat a round antique table. The vase that once rested atop it now lay shattered on the floor amidst a muddle of flowers, now withered and dead. A bloody handprint, matte brown against the high gloss of the tabletop, now sat where the vase had once stood. As I approached, I noticed the fingers of the hand were impossibly long, extending outward toward the elevator, as though whoever had made them had been clawing their way toward the exit, only to be dragged backward toward their horrible end. By the size of the print, I'm guessing it was the mother. I glanced back at Kate, her own delicate fingers wrapped around the elevator jamb to prevent the door from closing, and I thought – not for the first time – we were crazy to have come.

  I whispered for Kate to follow. Another clatter of footfalls as she darted to my side. Behind her, the elevator door slid shut, plunging us into darkness. Kate made for the light switch, but I stilled her with a touch. We stood that way for what seemed like forever – listening, waiting.

  Eventually, our eyes adjusted, and shapes appeared in the darkness. The faint glow of the eggshell walls, broken here and there by squares of black: by daylight, art, no doubt, and originals at that. Ribbons of manmade starlight, extending from floor to ceiling: the city lights, peeking through half-drawn curtains. The bulk of furniture: a high-backed chair, a low-slung chaise, more felt than seen in the darkness.

  Kate gestured toward one of the hallways that extended outward from the entryway. We crept its length in silence, Kate clinging to my side.

  At the end of the hallway was the largest kitchen I've ever seen, all granite and stainless and cherry, the surfaces gleaming blue by the light of the microwave display. It wasn't until I saw the place that I realized how hungry I was, how long it had been since I'd last eaten. I could've spent all night in there, chopping, roasting, sautéing – the place was a cook's dream. Then Kate turned on the lights, and that dream became a nightmare.

  It was my fault – she'd asked me with a glance, and I'd acquiesced, my reluctance evaporating at the thought of something hot to eat. But when the lights came on, I lost my appetite.

  The place was a fucking mess – cupboards emptied, drawers upturned, their contents scattered across the floor. A set of stools were tossed haphazardly into the center of the room, their cushions slashed, their batting stained brown-red.

  In fact, the whole place was covered with blood: the floors, the counters, the walls. Even the tray ceiling above, a tasteful buttercream trimmed in purest white, was spattered with flecks of blood.

  I looked to Kate, expecting to see her recoiling in horror, but she wasn't. Instead, she stood stock-still, her eyes glazed and faraway, her face slack and emotionless.

  "This is where I killed them," she said.

  "No."

  "But it is," she said. Kate gestured toward the piano across the room, a baby grand. A bowl of cereal was perched atop it, half-empty and moldering. "Connor was sitting over there in his cowboy pajamas, banging away on the piano. He was supposed to be eating his breakfast, but as always, he had other plans. Dad was in his study, calling Tokyo, and he kept shouting at Connor to keep it down. And Patricia – Mom – was in the kitchen, making lunches for the both of us. She knew she didn't have to – our school provides lunch daily for everybody – but she always insisted. 'There's no
food
in their food,' she'd say. 'It's all fat and sugar and preservatives.' And that's when it happened."

  "Kate–" I said, but she just ignored me.

  "Connor was the first. I picked him up like he was nothing, and I tossed him across the room. When the piano stopped, Mom looked up. When she'd seen what I'd done, she started screaming, and Dad came rushing in. That's when I found the knife."

  "Kate," I pleaded, "don't do this."

  "Dad tried to stop me, of course, but I just shrugged him off. Connor was crying, I remember, and screaming for his mother. Then all of a sudden he wasn't crying anymore."

  She nodded toward the far wall, where a streak of brown led downward to a floor crusted thick with dried blood. "There was so much blood," Kate said, "in my hands, my hair, my mouth. And so much screaming. My mother, my father – me, too, maybe, although that may have only been in my head. When Dad tried to stop me, it was bad. What I did to him made Connor's death seem merciful.

  "But it was Mom that got the worst. I tied her to a chair, and fetched some rubbing alcohol from the bathroom. A tiny cut, a splash of alcohol, over and over again. Do you have any idea how excruciating that is?" Kate glanced down at the stab wound on my leg, seeping red-black through my ruined jeans, and smiled: thin, humorless. "But of course you do. Although at least you had the benefit of blacking out. I allowed her no such luxury."

  She clenched shut her eyes, fighting back tears. When Kate opened them again, that faraway look was gone, replaced with one of sadness and regret. "Mom screamed for hours, you know. Screamed until her throat bled, until she forgot her own name. Screamed in fury and in agony, and eventually, she even screamed for mercy. But in the end, it didn't matter. I just kept cutting and dousing, cutting and dousing, until finally the police arrived. Only then, when she was of no more use to me, did I end her pain."

  "That wasn't
you
, Kate. None of what you're saying was
you
."

  "What does that matter? What does it matter when the three of them are dead, and all I'm left with is the memory of their blood on my hands?"

  I pulled her close, and held her tight. Kate resisted at first, but then the tears came, and she buried her head in my chest, sobbing for what seemed like hours. There was nothing I could say, so I just let her cry.

  Finally, her sobs diminished; she dried her eyes on my shirt and let me go.

  "It was a mistake, coming here," I said.

  "No," Kate replied, "this was something that I had to do."

  "Still, we shouldn't stay for long. It's not healthy. It's not
safe
. I think we should try to get some sleep, and then head out in the morning. We can grab some clothes, some food, maybe a little money, and then we'll see about getting out of the city."

  Kate nodded, folding her arms across her chest and suppressing a shiver. "Yeah," she said. "Maybe getting out of here is not the worst idea."

 
 

The problem was, I couldn't sleep.

  I mean, the bed was plenty comfortable, and probably cost more than the average car, and the pajamas I'd borrowed were cool and clean against my skin, but I just couldn't stop my thoughts from racing. Maybe it was this place keeping me awake, with its echoes of the recent dead reverberating through its halls. Maybe it was the fact that, despite what I'd said to Kate, I hadn't a single fucking clue what we were gonna do next. Maybe it was the lack of food, or the phase of the moon, or any of a thousand mundane things that hold sleep just out of reach, but I doubt it. No, I think that maybe, just maybe, I couldn't sleep because I had a sense that something wasn't right.

  I wish I could claim I'd listened to that feeling, that I'd posted myself at Kate's door and kept watch throughout the night. I didn't, though. We'd set up camp in a couple of guest rooms on the second floor – Kate, of course, could've slept in her own bed, but she'd opted not to, and who could blame her? I'd given the apartment a once-over before we retired to our rooms, but rather than allaying my fears, it only served to amplify them. The place was too big, too labyrinthine, with too many closets, nooks, and hidey-holes in which a would-be assailant could hide. Even with Kate by my side, I probably couldn't have checked them all, and after the scene in the kitchen, I didn't want to put her through all that again; so like an idiot, I'd gone it alone. To keep my worries at bay, I'd resolved to stay alert, to keep my ear to the ground – and I would have, had exhaustion not gotten the better of me.

  But it did. And not just your garden-variety weariness, either; this was an exhaustion born of running balls-out for going on a week without a moment's peace, not to mention a decent meal. So as I watched the hours go ticking by, lying sleepless in my bed, I made a dumb-ass move. As the clock struck 3am, I dragged my ass out of bed and walked right past Kate's guest room to the bathroom down the hall. Just off the master bedroom, this bathroom was clearly an oasis for Kate's mom – all soft and floral and littered with make-up, a ginormous jetted tub wedged into the corner beneath a bubbled skylight. Like any self-respecting Upper East Side socialite, her medicine cabinet was a veritable pharmacy. I shook a couple sleeping pills from their amber bottle and washed them down with water from the tap. Then I stumbled back to my bed, not even bothering to pull back the covers before collapsing onto it.

  I guess the pills did the trick, because that's the last thing I remember – at least until I jerked awake, panicked and sweating. Something had roused me from my slumber, but my brain was fuzzy, dulled from sleep and pills, and I couldn't focus. What was it that I'd heard?

  Nothing, said my pillow. Just forget it and come back to sleep. But that pillow was a liar. I'd heard something – I knew I had. If I could just focus…

  There. Again. A frightened whimper. A muffled thud. The fog lifted – not much, but a little – and I sat upright in bed, sliding the gun out from beneath the pillow as my feet found the floor. The scrap of fabric I'd used to hold in the powdered remains of the catshard protruded comically from the gun barrel, like a kerchief from a magician's sleeve, as though mocking me for putting my faith in so ridiculous a weapon. But it was too late to worry about that now. I crept over to my open bedroom door and peered out into the hall, but it was dark, and there was nothing to see.

  I approached Kate's bedroom, gun held ready. The lights were off, the curtains drawn, but by the faint illumination of the alarm clock, I could tell the bed was empty. I padded barefoot down the hall to the staircase. At the top, I stopped, straining to hear what might be going on below. There, faintly – the whisper of something heavy being dragged across the floor. Something like a body.

  The time for waiting had passed. I bounded down the stairs, two at a time, making for the source of the noise. The problem was, the whole damn place was marble and hardwood, and sounds bounced off the walls like an echo chamber. I ducked into three empty rooms before I was forced to admit I had no idea where the sound had come from. It was then that I heard the voice.

  "Hello, Samuel."

  It echoed through the darkened apartment as if from everywhere, or from nowhere at all. The voice itself was unfamiliar, but there was no mistaking that smug tone, that knowing sneer.

  "Bishop," I said.

  His laughter reverberated off the penthouse walls. "Of course, that's not my name of choice, but for now it should suffice."

  I listened closely to his words, not caring a damn what they meant. No, all I cared about was where he was. The problem was, I still had no idea. If I wanted to find out, I was gonna have to keep him talking.

  "Where's the girl, Bishop?"

  "The child is fine," he replied, "for now."

  I ducked into the living room, where brocaded high-backed chairs and a silken chaise gleamed dully by the city lights that trickled through the half-drawn curtains. But Bishop and Kate were nowhere to be seen. I leaned heavily against the mantel, trying to shake the cobwebs from my drug- and sleep-addled brain. If I couldn't focus, Kate was good as dead.

  Once I gathered my wits, I tried again. "Let her go!" I called. I always wondered why people in the movies always said that; it's not like it ever works. Turns out, it doesn't matter. You say it because it buys you time. You say it because that's all there is to say.

  "I don't think so," he replied, oblivious to my game, or perhaps not caring. "I rather like her where she is."

  Another open door, this one to a darkened office. But they weren't there. I wondered how long it would be before Bishop tired of this game and ended her. I prayed I wouldn't find out.

  I returned to the foyer, and called out to him again. "How did you know where to find us?"

  "It was simple, really. The violent are so predictable, you see – so eager to return to their killing grounds. They always return eventually, desperate to reclaim that thrill, that joy, that ecstatic rush that only comes from taking a life. Tell me, dear, how did it feel when you bled your brother dry? When you snapped your father's bones in two? How did it feel when your mother begged for mercy as you tortured her? She did beg, didn't she? They all do, eventually. Even the biggest and bravest among us cower before the altar of suffering."

  Kate whimpered, but didn't speak. It sounded like Bishop had her gagged. But suddenly, I realized where they were. I should've known from the start. He'd brought her back to where it had all begun. He'd brought her back to make Kate face what she had done. He'd brought her to the kitchen.

  I snuck toward the kitchen hall, my bare feet noiseless against the hardwood floor. Before I began my approach, I ducked my head into a bathroom and shouted, "Don't you talk to her, you son of a bitch!" It was better, after all, if I was something less than expected.

  "Son of a
bitch?
Oh, no, Samuel – you could not be more wrong. It was God himself that plucked me from this mortal coil, so pleased was he at my cleansing of the unrighteous."

  I paid his words no mind, creeping down the hall toward the kitchen with my finger on the trigger.