Dead Voices (31 page)

“I really do want to talk to you. And no — it’s not about ... us.

After considering a moment, Elizabeth flashed Frank a “hold on” signal with her hand and dashed back into the house. She hurriedly dialed her mother on the kitchen phone and, luckily, Rebecca hadn’t left yet. Elizabeth told her not to bother coming out into the storm and hung up and went back outside. Pulling her jacket collar tightly around her neck, she ran down the steps and around to the passenger’s door and got into the cruiser.

“Whew!” she said, wiping streams of water from her face. “I wasn’t expecting this kind of weather.”

“Maybe we should change the poem to say, ‘May showers bring June flowers,’” Frank said, laughing as he shifted the cruiser into gear and, cocking his arm over the back of the seat, backed out into the road.

Elizabeth tried to settle down and relax. The steady rhythm of the wipers was almost soothing, but still, she felt wound wire-tight. The bunched-up muscles in her shoulders and neck just wouldn’t unwind.

Frank started driving down Main Street, holding the steering wheel loosely with both hands, and he was smiling gently, as though privately pleased with himself. But Elizabeth could sense that there was something bothering him in spite of his cheerful exterior; there was a held-in-check tightness about him that, try as he might to hide it, Elizabeth could feel. Maybe she knew him just a bit too damned well!

“So what is it you have to talk to me about?” she asked.

Frank was silent as he slowed for the left turn onto Brook Road. Elizabeth couldn’t help but notice that, in his silence, his eyes drifted up to the black iron gate of Oak Grove Cemetery as they drove slowly past. Low black rain clouds hung like funeral curtains over the tombstone-littered hill, and the twin-rutted dirt road was mired with running streams of rain water, and the grass that only yesterday had looked so green and spring fresh now looked gray and beaten, as though winter had never left.

“Well ... ?” Elizabeth said.

Frank grunted, cleared his throat, and took a deep breath.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with what Detective Harris was asking me about the other day, does it?” Elizabeth asked.

“Harris? When did he talk to you?” Frank snapped. His hands clenched the steering wheel so tightly the knuckles turned white.

“He came out to the house a few days ago and was asking me all sorts of questions. He said something else has happened. Tell me — what?”

Frank considered for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low and resonant. “Something else has happened. Look, Elizabeth, I don’t quite know how to say this.”

“Well you’d better hurry up,” Elizabeth said with a grim smile, “because we’re almost to my house.”

“Let’s go around the loop once, then. This is important.”

“Does it have anything to do with Caroline?” Elizabeth asked. Her voice cracked on the last word, and she felt a passing wave of dizziness.

“It’s ... important,” Frank said.

“Just tell me! What’s so
damned
important?” Elizabeth said sharply.

They rounded a curve in the road. Straight ahead they could see the white siding of Elizabeth’s family home. Frank took a deep breath and said, “I think I know who was out at the cemetery that night.”

Elizabeth sagged back into the car seat and watched, almost helplessly, as they got closer to the house.

“Keep driving,” she said, surprised that there was enough air in her lungs to force out
any
words. When Frank drove past her parents’ house, the familiar, comfortable surroundings slid silently past her in the rain with the dissociated distance of a dream landscape. Turning and watching the front porch fall behind her, Elizabeth had the sense that the house, not she, was slipping away. In a momentary flash of fear, she could imagine a bent, withered figure standing in the darkened shelter of the porch as she held up a wrinkled shopping bag and slowly opened the top ...

“
Want to see what I have in here now . .. ?”

Frank turned left onto Nonesuch Road, named after the river it crossed, then turned right onto Mitchell Hill Road. For an uncomfortably long time, the only sounds in the cruiser were the wipers slapping back and forth and the steady whir of the heater. In spite of the heat in the car, Elizabeth felt cold, steely fingers wrapping around her throat and squeezing ... squeezing ever so slowly.

“So ... tell me,” Elizabeth finally said. Her voice croaked, like the old crone in her nightmares.

“This isn’t official ... in any way,” Frank said. “And I’m only telling you this as one friend to another. “ He was sawing his front teeth over his lower lip, and there was a tightness, a distance in his eyes that Elizabeth found unnerving.

Getting a grip on herself, she straightened up in the car seat and said, “Okay — fine. I won’t hold you to it in a court of law. Will you just tell me what the hell is going on?”

Frank flashed her a harsh glance and said, “I wouldn’t joke about it if I were you. I think you’re in trouble — a lot more trouble than you realize!”

“You told me that before.”

“Well,” Frank began haltingly,”: after the first incident ... you know, I wasn’t so sure, but now —”

“Cut through the bullshit, Frank, and tell me!” Elizabeth said, her voice threatening to break with every word. “First Harris and now you are saying something else happened. What the fuck was it?”

“Yeah ... there was something else,” he said. He eased over onto the dirt shoulder on a stretch of road with no houses on either side and slipped the shift into park. Twisting around and resting his arm on the back of the car seat, his fingertips just touching Elizabeth’s shoulder, he faced her.

“Last Monday night,” he began, his voice low and halting, ‘someone was out by your Uncle Jonathan’s grave again. We’re pretty sure it was the same person, because of what we found.”

Elizabeth was just about to ask what it was they had found, but then, with a jolt of horror, she realized what it must have been. She gasped and then said, “His ... hand?”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “Whoever it was left your uncle’s severed hand out there.”

“Oh, my Christ!” Elizabeth whispered.

“There’s more,” Frank said. “A lot more. He didn’t just leave it on Jonathan’s tombstone, you see. He was doing some kind of … of magical ceremony or something. Norton and I almost caught him, too, but he got away. Do you know what a Hand of Glory is?”

Flooding with fear as she stared out at the rain-drenched trees, Elizabeth numbly shook her head and rasped, “No.”

“I did a bit of research on it. It’s got something to do with certain magical rituals. Usually, at least in the old days, when people actually believed in this kind of stuff, the Hand of Glory had to be that of a hanged man. It was used to get control of someone so the person using the Hand could ... I guess sort of hypnotize him so he could then rob his house.”

“If someone was using my uncle’s hand for something like that, then I’d guess at least one person still believes in this stuff,” Elizabeth said. She almost said something about Aunt Junia’s arrangements for her to meet with a spiritualist friend of hers, but then she thought better of it.

“There’s more,” Frank said grimly.

“Jesus Christ — what is it?” she said, even as she wished to heaven none of this was really happening.

“The magical ritual, at least as far as he got, was done at —” Frank stopped and took a deep breath, but before he could continue, Elizabeth interrupted him.

“ — At Caroline’s grave!” she said.

Frank nodded and slid his hand firmly onto her shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and his heart went out to her. Elizabeth let out a sharp gasp, only distantly aware of the tears that were flowing from her eyes. Frank’s words drove into her ears like a sledgehammer.

“No ... did he ... “

She couldn’t finish the terrifying thought she had, but Frank knew what she meant. Shaking his head, he said, “No — he didn’t ... dig her up. But you see, the hand was stuck into the ground over Caroline’s grave. He had soaked the fingertips in something flammable because they were burning, like candles.”

“Oh,
Jesus
!” Elizabeth gasped. A sudden gust of wind blew some wet leaves against the cruiser’s windshield, where they stuck like fat leeches.

“I haven’t figured out exactly what was going on,” Frank said, assuming a commanding tone of voice if only to keep from feeling too deeply what Elizabeth was feeling. “I mean, you can bet that Harris and Lovejoy are working on it, but still, you’ve got to understand, what happened out there is not that serious a crime —”

“What do you mean ‘not that serious’! Jesus Christ, Frank! Someone ... someone
desecrated
my daughter’s grave, and you’re telling me it isn’t serious?” Slouching against the car seat, she buried her face in her hands.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Frank said soothingly, wishing as always — that he could say the right words to her. “It’s just that — you have to keep in mind that there’s quite a bit of other work these detectives have to do. Even something as ... as horrible as this is classified only as a misdemeanor by the state.”

“You mean to tell me that performing a black-magic ritual over my daughter’s grave is like a ... like a Goddamned speeding ticket? Jesus!”

“All I’m trying to do is explain why Harris and Lovejoy can’t put all of their time into investigating this,” Frank said. “There are plenty of other more serious crimes committed that they —”

“How can you say this isn’t serious?” Elizabeth burst out. Her voice was raw and broken. “What are you talking about? Someone dug up my uncle’s body, for Christ’s sake! They cut off his left hand, and now they’re doing some kind of ritual over my daughter’s grave, and you try to tell me it isn’t serious!”

If it hadn’t been pouring rain, she would have gotten out of the car right then and walked away, no matter how far she was from home. A numbing chill was gnawing at her gut like sharp, animal teeth. Deep muscle tremors rumbled inside her like an earthquake; she didn’t dare move, and she knew that if she looked at Frank she would completely dissolve.

“What can it ... What does it mean?” she asked. Her voice warbled faintly as she fought to control it. She stared blankly ahead at the rain-slick road.

Frank wanted to be sympathetic and tell her comforting lies, but he knew he couldn’t. This was the part of police work that he hated the most — being “professional” when a close, personal friend was involved.

“What it means is, there’s at least one honest-t0-Christ class-A wacko in town or nearby who’s doing shit like this,” he said, forcing his voice to stay measured and even. “And there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s directing it right at you. “

“But ...
why
?” Elizabeth asked. Her eyes were wide with fear and shock as she turned to him.

“That’s what I want to find out,” Frank said. “Who’s doing it and why.”

“You keep saying ‘he.’ How do you know it’s a man?”

“From the evidence — the footprints we lifted that night out at the cemetery and some other clues, Harris is fairly certain there’s at least one man involved — possibly two — but there’s really no way of knowing conclusively with the evidence we’ve gotten so far. But I want you to think about it a minute. Is there someone — anyone — you can think of who might be mad enough at you to do something like this?”

Elizabeth gave her head a quick, tight shake. “The only one I can think of is Doug, but he wouldn’t —”

“I know you got upset with me the other night when I suggested he might be involved, and I’m not saying it
isn’t
him, but can you think of anyone else who could have ... well, enough hatred for you that he —
or
she — would be trying to terrorize you this way?”

Elizabeth’s breathing came in short, shallow gulps. The tips of her fingers were tingling as thoughts and fears collided in her mind. She was gripped with the sudden fear that she was going to pass out.

“
Someone
is doing this, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s because he honestly believes this black-magic bullshit really works. I think it’s just as likely he’s doing it to try and freak you out, maybe so much so that you’ll —”

“Go crazy,” Elizabeth said raspily. “Or maybe kill myself or something. “

“Maybe,” Frank said, stroking his chin thoughtfully.

“You said this ... this Hand of Glory had to be that of a hanged man, right?” Elizabeth said. She knew she was a breath away from completely shattering.

Frank grunted and nodded.

“Did you know that my Uncle Jonathan killed himself?” Elizabeth said. “I just found out this last week. My Aunt Junia told me that they found him hanging from a rafter in his barn.”

“Jesus H.,” Frank said. “I never knew that. I mean, it was — how long ago? I remember when he died, but we were just kids — what, nine or ten years old? I’d never heard he killed himself.”

“Neither had I until just a few days ago,” Elizabeth said, a slight measure of control returning to her. “He didn’t leave a suicide note or anything, and the family kept it pretty much hushed up. I mean, all my life, I never even had an inkling.”

“So — who would know something like that?” Frank asked.

Elizabeth shrugged. “I dunno. I suppose just my family-you know, my mother and father and aunts. The police must’ve been told, too, bur they must have helped my family keep it hushed up. I suppose there might be something in some old records or something, maybe a police report that anyone who might be interested could look up.”

“That’s not unreasonable,” Frank said. “Especially in a small town like Bristol Mills, where everybody seems to know everybody else’s business. But you’d think there would have been at least some gossip about it.”

“None that I ever heard,” Elizabeth said. “That must rule out Doug, because if I didn’t know, he certainly couldn’t have.”

‘‘I’m not going to rule out
anyone
until I find out who did it, and can prove it,” Frank said. “But you know — all of this is getting us nowhere fast. I mean, as cruel as it sounds, what we’re talking about isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans for either your uncle or your daughter. What we’ve got to be concerned about is your safety, because if this is directed at you ...”