Hangman: A Novel (21 page)

Her hand brushed against something plastic that went skittering away as the car turned right. An empty pop bottle maybe. It was a big
trunk. She was scrunched near the brake lights but she could feel the space behind her.

She arched her back and her hands went further, the fingers of the right hand feeling along the floor of the trunk. Lobster girl to the rescue, she joked, trying to keep the hysteria away.

An inch further, two inches. One of those tools had to be here somewhere. Her back muscles cramped with the effort. Katrina grit her teeth and her tentacle-fingers crept along the foul-smelling rug a little …

She touched something. Not steel or fabric but something else.

Her mind went white with horror. She realized the thing she was touching was bare skin.

A leg. A human leg.

Katrina’s eyes went wide and she screamed, whipping her head back and forth.

The leg twitched and pulled away.

Abbie trailed the Roadmaster, its distinctive rectangular
brake lights flashing occasionally as Riesen drove north toward Niagara Falls. Dusk was beginning to darken the sky. The Buick changed lanes and disappeared behind a chocolate brown tractor-trailer with UPS written on the side. Abbie nudged the accelerator and got into the left lane, searching for the Roadmaster. Nothing.

“Damn it,” she muttered darkly, accelerating to the right. As she whipped around a big Ford pickup, she saw the Roadmaster’s brake lights disappearing over the hump of the Cleveland Drive exit ramp.

Abbie snapped the steering wheel right as she jammed on the brakes, nearly overshooting the exit. The pickup came within inches of clipping her back as she dove toward the exit, the horn blaring as it shot past, the Saab sliding on loose gravel, nearly going into the guardrail before she straightened it out. Glancing ahead, she saw the Buick making the left on Cleveland Drive and disappearing around the corner. Abbie speared the gas pedal and zoomed down the ramp, swinging the turn just as the light turned red.

She was breathing quickly, her heart racing. The Roadmaster was two blocks ahead now. It rolled under the underpass for the 90. The car’s left turn signal blinked on and the big Buick slid up the entrance
ramp for the 90 South. Riesen was heading back the way he’d just come.

“Now why would you do that?” Abbie said, tapping the steering wheel lightly with her palm.

She let the Buick zoom up the ramp, then followed once it had disappeared onto the thruway. Once she’d made the 90, she closed the gap to ten car lengths, dropping in behind a black Toyota Prius. She followed Riesen as he retraced his route back to Buffalo, doing a conservative 60 mph, then took the exit for Delaware Avenue. Traffic was thinning out, the work crowd already reaching home. She kept her eyes on the Roadmaster as it navigated the broad avenue. College students waited to cross, on their way to the bars on Chippewa. The Roadmaster zoomed by them, heading northward.

At the main entrance to Delaware Park, the Buick’s right turn signal blinked on.

Abbie’s face grew puzzled. She wondered for a moment if Riesen was toying with her, leading her on a scenic tour of the Niagara Frontier for some obscure reason.

Riesen’s car slowed to 20 mph and slid quietly down the lane shaded by elms on both sides. Abbie slowed even further and watched the car navigate the winding park road. She saw something blue appear up on her left. “Oh no,” she said. “Couldn’t be.”

Two minutes later, Riesen pulled into a parking lot. A sign at the far corner led to a small wooden deck that reached thirty feet over the rippling blue surface of the water. A sign read
HOYT LAKE BOAT RENTALS
.

Fifteen minutes later, Abbie crept along the shoreline of Hoyt Lake, carrying her portable radio, the volume turned way down, by her side. Her boots sank half an inch with every step into the mud of the soft fringe. The lake was like a black disc laid out in front of her, with two boats floating across the surface, drifting. Behind them, the sky was dark, edged in the west with streaks of orange, the sun disappeared over the horizon. The boat closer to her was Riesen’s.

She’d watched him climb unsteadily into it, helped in by the tow-headed teenager who was manning the rental shack. She’d watched
him push off the dock with an oar, and begin to row, an old businessman alone in a green-hulled boat at 7:30 p.m. on a fall evening. Abbie had jumped out of the Saab and tracked him, ducking behind the weeping willows and small poplars that dotted the shore. To hop in a rowboat and follow would have been foolish. Riesen or anyone else on the lookout for observers would spot her immediately. She had to assume that the reason for coming to Hoyt Lake by such a roundabout way was to see if anyone was following him.

Dusk was settling over the lake, and she could hear voices from the other boat ringing softly off the water. Inside were two teenagers dressed in denim jackets, a lanky black boy and a chubby-cheeked redheaded white girl. They were chatting as the boy awkwardly set the oars in the water and tried to row, the girl sending out giggles of nervousness every time the boat tilted left or right. Riesen was silent, turned in profile, the oars pulled out of the water. He was watching the darkened shoreline.

She checked her watch: 7:32 p.m. The rental shack would be closing soon. She couldn’t imagine it would stay open past eight o’clock. Abbie scanned the fringe of land that Riesen was watching, seeing ducks waddling ashore and a jogger or two pass by on the asphalt runner’s path, but nothing sinister. Who was Riesen waiting for? Did it have anything to do with the myth of the Madeleines, which said there were the bones of female workers just below where Riesen was drifting? Or was he out on a wild-goose chase?

She heard the plash of oars. Riesen was rowing now, just a couple of strokes. The current was taking the craft toward shore, and he was pushing it back toward the center of the lake. When he’d regained his position, he pulled the oars back in, the wood scraping along the gunwale.

The teenagers’ boat turned in the water, its prow headed back toward the dock. The craft passed within ten or fifteen feet of Riesen’s, but he barely glanced at the pair.

Abbie felt a stab of annoyance. Had Riesen led her here on purpose, keeping her away from the true action? What if Riesen was here to throw himself into the lake, unable to bear the reminders of Sandy that were popping up on the local news every ten minutes?

A voice snapped her thoughts back to the radio in her hand. Abbie crouched down, turning her back to shield the sound. She turned the volume down further and brought the radio up to her ear.

“—Team 3. Thirty-four Sycamore off of Delaware. White female, Signal 7.”

Abbie closed her eyes. Stephenson was North Buffalo, maybe six blocks away. Signal 7 meant a dead body.

“Tell the chief and get the ME’s office here,” the voice said. “We’re going to check the house, see about next of kin.”

Static, with voices calling out in the background. The dispatcher came on.

“Team 3, supervisor wants to know if it appears connected to ongoing investigation.”

Just say “Hangman,” Abbie thought. Everyone knows what you’re talking about. Half the city is listening in right now and your codes aren’t fooling anyone. Just … say … Hangman.

“Uh,” the rough voice came back on. “That’s unknown at this point.”

Abbie felt like throwing the radio into the lake. If it was Hangman, she could be at the scene in ten minutes. But if it wasn’t, she didn’t want to leave Riesen alone on the lake. The radio popped with static.

Stay or go? Abbie turned and shot a glance at Riesen. He was tilted away from her, looking over the gunwales down into the surface of the water. The boat drifted in a circle. Did he see white bones down there? Were Sandy’s among them? Abbie shivered.

The channel was going to fill up with voices fast. She darted up the bank, heading toward a path that curled back toward the parking lot. When she reached the path, almost invisible in the fading light, she brought the radio up. “Team 3, this is Kearney.”

She heard yelling through the static. People were piling in already. They were going to muck up her crime scene. Abbie began running.

“Kearney?” The search team leader barked. “All right, go ahead.” He sounded annoyed. He wanted to deal with Dispatch only, and not open up the channel to every cop in the city. Too bad. She was the lead here.

“What is the method, Signal 7?” she said.

Waves of static.

“Kearney …”

Abbie climbed a steep incline on the path and saw the parking lot. She snapped the button down. “Just tell me.”

Blasts of interference, cutting to silence as the search team leader hit the talk button.

“Strangulation.”

For a moment, Katrina imagined that she was dead, that
this was the moment her spirit lifted from her body and she was given one last look at herself, lying on the ground, because she could sense that, yes, she was lying on a rough stone floor. In a few seconds, her spirit would rise and she would gaze down on her corpse and see her lifeless body, a noose tied around the neck and her hands bound.

She was out of the car, she knew that. It was over. He had taken her out of the car and hung her. The lonely death of lobster girl, she thought.

The joke didn’t help. Katrina whimpered softly.

Her body felt like it was drifting on a fuzzy cloud. It was almost pleasant. She waited for the moment when her spirit departed. It wouldn’t be long now. She felt weird, as if she was grieving for herself. She had the sense she’d been lying on this stone floor for hours.

What will I look like down here? Did he strip me naked? Am I mutilated? She felt strange that she was so unemotional, that the questions didn’t send horrific images spinning through her head. Why am I so freaking calm? It wasn’t normal.

She felt the flank of her right thigh on the floor, the cold pressing
uncomfortably through the thin material of her capri pants. How dead can I be if I can feel my leg? That makes no sense whatsoever.

He must have drugged me again, she thought, and I’m coming out of it now. I’m not in the trunk anymore.

Her left foot tingled far away, and then it was like lights winking on in a city that’s just been through a blackout. Little stabs of light all along her back and legs, numb but glowing brighter, as if each nerve in her body was lighting up one by one.

As her mind slowly cleared, fear rose over it like a black wave. Katrina closed her eyes and tried to breathe steadily. She was able to rock her shoulders forward slightly, but she couldn’t sit up.

She creaked her neck now and as she did, her gaze swept along the floor. She was in a dark little room with a small window above her head, smudged with dirt, with rusty iron bars outside the glass, just visible in the gloomy light. Katrina could see a wall made of rough stones. For a second she thought she’d been transported to somewhere in Europe, a castle or a dungeon or something like that. Where would you see old stone walls like that in Buffalo, she thought.

She was not particularly claustrophobic and in fact at home she liked to wrap herself up in her duvet as tight as they wrapped Russian babies—she’d seen this in
The Buffalo News
once. The Russians wrapped their babies up tight until they looked like little mummies, with their red faces sticking out on top. It gave them a feeling of security and it prepared them for a life of regulations. She’d used it in a Social Studies paper she did on Russia and she’d gotten an A on it.

The idea of how important that A had been to her then and how stupid it seemed now unnerved Katrina and she let out a gasp. But she caught it quick. Now I’m alone, she thought. I can escape.

Her hands, still taped together, felt the wall just above her head. It was rock, not smooth stone, but actual bumpy, jagged rocks cemented together, like Old Fort Erie that they went to on school trips. The stones were dry and large and Katrina stuck the fingers of her right hand between them, running her fingers along the cement that held them together and she was unable to even scrape off a little.

When she brought her hand away, she felt something on her hands.
She brushed it off quickly. It was an old place. It’s like he’s taken me to a faraway land, she thought. Dracula’s castle.

Think, Katrina. What buildings have I been in that are built of stone? Nardin, that’s the oldest place I know. Katrina realized she had no idea when it was built. Think of the letterhead, she thought, it must have a line saying when it was founded. She closed her eyes and pictured the letters the school sent home but she couldn’t even visualize the paper. Then she thought of the bills her mother got every semester from the school and, maybe because she always freaked out a little, wondering if her father would send the check, she saw the seal of the school, the weird-looking shield with the two lit torches beside it. She remembered the Latin words,
Pro Christi
something or other, she couldn’t recall the rest, and on top the year. Oh, but it was Roman numerals. She could remember the first four or five. M. D. And then three Cs.

So it was from the 1800s. Could she really be locked in the basement of Nardin?

Tiny slivers of light came from her left and Katrina got up unsteadily, first on her knees and then up on her feet and walked toward them, afraid that in the darkness there would be a hole in the floor and she would go plunging down. She felt ahead uncertainly with her feet, waiting to feel them touch down on solid ground before shifting her weight forward. In five steps she’d made it to the door, and she could see it was made of thick planks of wood.

Then she thought of a place older than Nardin: the tombs at Forest Lawn Cemetery by Delaware Park. Katrina rushed to the door, her breath rattling in terror, and pounded on it. What if she was in a crypt with a dead person?

Katrina screamed
Help meeeee!
again and again but there was no response. Oh, please don’t let me be in a tomb with a body, I hate dead bodies, I will freak—