Dead Voices (36 page)

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered as her focus blurred. In the haloed blue glow of the streetlight, she could see the front of the church that stood to the left of the intersection. The road ahead, forking left and right, was silvery with moonlight, and the breeze wafting in through the car window sent a chill dancing up her arm.

Elizabeth licked her lips as she recalled the events of that horrible night. Her mind filled with sharp bursts of color and deafening noise, and every image was ghoulishly underlit in flashes of brilliant light. Elizabeth swallowed with difficulty, her throat as dry as if she had just now inhaled those flames that had consumed her daughter.

“Come on, Elizabeth,” she whispered, surprised at how distant and distorted her voice sounded to her ears. “Get your stupid ass
out
of here!”

She wanted to start up the car and drive the hell away from there, but she couldn’t will her hands to move from the steering wheel. Through her tears, her eyes were focused on the lit intersection ahead. Everything got hazy with dim light, and she almost convinced herself that she had been magically transported back in time. With just a little kick of imagination, she could see that the moonlit landscape ahead of her was really covered with blowing, drifting snow.

Elizabeth’s pulse raced faster and faster as she imagined —
soon! right now!
— that she would see headlights appear in her rearview mirror. It wouldn’t be Frank Melrose, following her; it would be her own Subaru, with Doug at the wheel ... herself sitting in the front passenger’s seat ... and Caroline, strapped safely —
so she thought!
— in the backseat.

“No ...
No
!” Elizabeth said, her voice tight with tension. “
Stop it!
Stop it right
now
!” Her fingernails pressed into the plastic rim of the steering wheel.

But there was no way to stop the rush of her imagination! She had to sit there, replaying the accident in her mind, overlaying it onto this warm spring evening. She stared ahead in stark horror, waiting breathlessly, watching their Subaru speed down the road from behind her, approach the intersection, and, just as it started to take the curve, slide into the head-high plow ridge. The flashing lights of the snowplow appeared from around the curve ahead of her. She and Doug scrambled out of the way as the plow swept the car up over the snowy embankment. She could see the flashing lights of the plow underlighting the branches of the trees as it bulldozed the car down into the ravine. She wondered as she stuck her head out the window —
out into the blizzard that had been raging then
— whether she would be able to hear the shrieking crush of metal, the roar of the explosions, the tormented echoes of her own screams ... and Caroline’s ... ?

Help! ...

Mommy! ...

Then the intersection began to glow with yellow light, bleeding out of the darkness and quickly overwhelming the faint blue glow of the streetlight. A jolt of horror seized her as she stared helplessly ahead, her mind filling with a cold blast of terror.

Is this really happening? Can I really be seeing this?

Her eyes were stinging. Her lungs burned from lack of air. She tried to take a breath but couldn’t.

Is it possible
? she wondered, as fear, sharper and stronger than anything she had ever felt before in her life, gripped her.
Can I really be seeing what happened on that night? Do the ghosts of people who died suddenly and violently reenact the scene of their deaths in the place where they died?

The steadily brightening yellow light infused the night, exploding and swelling until it looked like dawn bursting over the scene. In the harsh light, Elizabeth could see every detail of the intersection in mind-numbingly sharp clarity. The rippling grooves of tree bark — the deep blackness of every shadow under each clapboard of the church — every curled and peeling strip of paint on the church doors and windows-the pebbled smoothness of each crushed stone in the asphalt surface of the road ...
everything
stood out in bright relief and cast ink-deep shadows ... shadows as dark as death.

“
Help ... “

The single word zipped through Elizabeth’s awareness like a feather, blown and tossed on a gale-force wind. The flood of light intensified. Unable to blink her eyes or look away, Elizabeth noticed something reaching up over the tufted grass from behind the crest alongside the road. Something ... something white and thin ...

“ ... Mommy!”

... was reaching, clawing up over the embankment. Elizabeth clearly saw ... something trembling like a bleached branch in a strong wind as it struggled upward, clawing toward the night sky.

“
Help! ... Mommy! ... “

“Oh, my God!” Elizabeth heard herself say. “My
God! No
!” Even as the words slipped from her mouth, they disappeared in the roaring, rushing noise that filled the night. Elizabeth wanted to scream, but there wasn’t enough air in her lungs to begin to make a sound. From over the far edge of the road, she saw a hand! — a human hand! — reaching up, groping, clawing at the night as though the hand could snag onto the blackness of night, as if the night were a dark, funereal curtain, and pull that hand’s owner up ... up and back into the world. The flood of yellow light got brighter, jabbing Elizabeth’s eyes like fiery spikes.

“No! It can’t be!” Elizabeth wailed, staring at the clawed hand struggling to reach upward. She watched in horror as the fingers worked futilely, clenching and unclenching in spastic twitches.

Suddenly, Elizabeth’s ears filled with a blasting sound that shook her. Light exploded into a blinding glare, and then, with an airsucking roar, a trailer truck zoomed past her parked car. The suction of its passing shook the car as dust and small pebbles blasted through the open window, stinging the side of Elizabeth’s face. She raised her hands to protect herself, thinking in one mind-freezing instant that the truck hadn’t passed her by; it was, even now, crushing down on top of her, and she —
like Caroline!
— would die in a fiery explosion that would rattle the nearby church’s doors and blowout its windows.

The truck was already a hundred feet or more down the road, the whining of its engine trailing behind it with a quickly diminishing wail, when Elizabeth snapped back to reality. A stinging coldness spread out from the pit of her stomach as she groaned and collapsed forward, barely aware of the pain when she banged her forehead against the steering wheel. All of her misery came out in one long, tortured groan, and she cried so hard her chest and stomach hurt. Her eyes felt bathed in acid.

Elizabeth lost all sense of time as she hunched over, crying out her pain and misery. The night, so recently alive with menace and terror, settled peacefully back into a dark lull. She knew if she looked up toward the intersection she would see no trace of the accident of a year and a half ago, and she realized that she had only imagined seeing a white hand ... reaching up into the night ...
reaching for her
! And as she looked through the fish-eye lens of her tear-filled eyes, she told herself that Caroline was gone ... dead and gone ...
forever
!

“Forever...” she rasped. Her throat sounded as if it were lined with sandpaper. “I’m sorry, baby! You’ve got to believe me, honey. I’m sorry! I never
wanted
you to die!”

Her voice hitched painfully in her chest as a flood of sour-tasting acid kicked up from her stomach into her throat. Unconsciously, she loosened her aching hands from the steering wheel and, with the fingertips of her right hand, started to rub the inside of her left wrist, where she could feel the puffy welt of scar tissue.

“You
have
to believe me, honey,” she whispered, her voice almost a snakelike hiss. “Your father’s not the only one who misses you! Baby, I wish I had died that night instead of you! I just wish I could have ... could have said good-bye.”

3.

When Norton still hadn’t shown up at the station by three-thirty, Frank called his home. Frank couldn’t shake the feeling that Norton was faking it for another day off. He didn’t sound all that bad over the phone-certainly not as bad as he said he felt. Frank figured he was just pulling a few extra days off for personal reasons, and wasn’t about to clue in the police chief to his suspicions. Actually, he was looking forward to the prospect of patrolling alone tonight. He had gotten rather tired of working with Norton; enough so that he was even considering a request for either a different shift or a new partner. This would give him plenty of time alone ... to think.

And he sure had plenty to think about.

Frank wanted to think about Elizabeth’s situation from as many angles as possible, and not be blinded by the feeling he had for her. Most of all, he wanted to understand what she was going through and help her as best he could-probably in spite of herself, he thought, bitterly remembering their recent phone conversation.

Since she had accused him of following her and her aunt out to Raymond and back, Frank had been bordering on panic. He knew it
hadn’t
been him, and he was tormented, wondering who the hell it
had
been! He hadn’t told Elizabeth the truth, figuring if that’s what she thought... no amount of convincing was going to change her mind; and secondly, he might be better able to watch her and help her if she thought, however wrongly, that he was the problem.

But this latest development only reinforced his conviction that Elizabeth was the object of some crazy person’s obsession. Certainly, anyone who would dig up a corpse and cut off its hand, use that hand to choke the local cemetery caretaker to death, and then use it as a five-flame candle on Elizabeth’s daughter’s grave had to be considered dangerous. Frank was also convinced that the fire at Henry Bishop’s house had not been accidental. As far as he could tell, Harris and Lovejoy’s investigation was going nowhere, partly due to the lack of clues and partly because they were swamped with other work. Investigating Barney Fraser’s murder had to take precedence over everything else, even the “supposed” threat to Elizabeth. Frank was thankful that — so far — he hadn’t been brought into the official investigation because, just as he thought he would be more help to Elizabeth if she thought he was the one following her around, he thought he might do better work if he wasn’t directly involved with the investigation.

After finishing up some paperwork, he got into his squad car and drove through town, heading out to Brook Road. Like every other patrolman, he had been told to keep a watchful eye on Oak Grove Cemetery. Although it would be nice to have some backup handy if anything happened, Frank particularly didn’t miss Norton whenever he drove out this way.

Throughout the evening and on into the night, things around town were fairly quiet. Frank picked up two speeders north of town on Route 22. About eleven, Frank took another spin out past Oak Grove Cemetery just to have a look around. With a bold confidence which he figured insured nothing would happen, he pulled up in front of the cemetery gate, got out, unlocked it, and then cruised up and down the rutted cemetery roads. Everything was peaceful and quiet; no sign of any disturbances ... not even late\ night partying teenagers.

On the crest of the hill at the far end of the cemetery, well away from Caroline Myers’s grave, Frank parked, snapped off his headlights, and killed the engine. For several minutes, he just sat there, listening to the static on his patrol radio and letting his confused thoughts cascade through his mind. The serenity of the cemetery didn’t help him sort anything out, however, because his eyes kept shifting over to the knoll where Caroline was buried. He felt a bit unnerved whenever he considered what, if she could talk, she might have to tell him about what was happening.

Finally admitting that he wasn’t going to come to any resolutions tonight, he radioed in his intention to head back to the station for a break. Just as he was reaching for the ignition key, a car moving down Brook Road caught his attention, It slowed as it approached the cemetery gate and pulled over to the shoulder of the road,

Based on nothing more than a policeman’s hunch, Frank decided to wait and see what the driver did. “Who knows,” he whispered, squinting as he watched the car down by the cemetery gate. “Might get lucky.”

The sloping hillside was dusted with a faint skimming of moonlight that cast long, thin shadows between the tombstones. The streetlights lining Brook Road glowed with thin blue light, and even though it was a warm, pleasant spring evening, the wind moving between the tombstones had a chilly hiss in it. Frank felt a jolt when he recognized Elizabeth Myers’s car as it crept forward and finally came to a stop directly in front of the cemetery entrance.

“Goddamn son of a bitch,” he muttered, studying the idling car, waiting — and dreading — that the driver would turn and enter the unlocked cemetery. Is this the story after all? All along it’s been Elizabeth!

Of course, before now he had considered that Elizabeth might be involved more than he cared to admit; but he had never allowed himself to follow that line of thinking very far because ... it simply was too terrible to contemplate. He couldn’t help but think how much Elizabeth had changed over the years. Certainly, everyone changes as they get older, and in the line of duty he had seen how life has a way of hardening and testing people, often past their breaking points. Until now, Frank hadn’t allowed himself to admit the depth of the changes he had seen in Elizabeth. He knew it was foolish to think she was immune to change; but if there was any kind of fairness in the universe, she would have remained the happy, pleasant, and trustworthy person he had known all those years ago.

“Whoever said life is fair,” he said aloud, letting his thoughts take form on the night breeze that blew in through the open car window. Faintly, he heard the steady rumble of Elizabeth’s car, down by the gate.

Sure, it was possible that after everything that had happened to her — first losing her daughter and then her marriage — her mind could have snapped and gone sailing around the bend. In the short time they had spent together recently, especially while they were out on their date, she had seemed withdrawn, tense, at times openly hostile to him. Maybe she had been harboring all of these black secrets all along — that she had dug up her uncle’s corpse, that she had killed her accomplice Barney Fraser, that out of revenge for the discovery of Fraser’s body she had burned Henry Bishop in his house, and that she had performed that magical ceremony on her daughter’s grave. Christ, she might even have been responsible for her daughter’s death! Maybe all along she’s been privately teasing and taunting him to find her out.