Helltown (21 page)

Lynette stopped before the door to Spencer’s study. She turned the brass knob and found it locked, as she knew it would be. Last year Spencer began locking it whenever he went out. The reason, he told her, was to protect confidential patient information he kept in his filing cabinet in the rare chance the house was broken into and burglarized. Initially Lynette accepted this explanation. But when he started spending more and more nights at the “hospital,” she decided there was another reason altogether why he locked the study: to hide evidence of his affair.

She had been tempted on several occasions to search the study while he was in the shower or outside planting in the garden. However, she could never bring herself to do this, fearful she wouldn’t have enough time to conduct a proper search, or Spencer would appear unannounced and catch her in the act. Instead she decided to remove the study key from his keychain and search the study while he was at the asylum. This carried risks as well, as she didn’t know whether he would notice the missing key while at work, or whether he would head straight to his study when he returned home, before she had a chance to replace the key. Nevertheless, it was the best option she could think of.

So earlier today, when Spencer informed her that he would be going to the asylum later, she slipped the study key from his keychain while he’d been in the garage changing the oil in the Volvo. She kept it in her pocket all evening and was irrationally convinced Spencer knew it was there, could see it through the cotton of her dress. But of course he couldn’t, he was none the wiser, and now he was gone, and it was time.

Lynette removed the key from her pocket and stuck it in the keyhole. She half expected it not to work, or for it to break in two. It turned easily. She eased open the door. The study was dark. She reached a hand inside and patted the wall until her fingers brushed the light switch nub. She flicked it on.

The room resembled something you might see in a men’s club. Maplewood paneled walls, stodgy button-tufted furniture, a wall-to-wall bookcase. Two stuffed gray wolves stood on either side of the stone fireplace, trophies from one of Spencer’s hunting trips. She had always hated them. They reminded her of that three-headed dog in Greek mythology that guarded the gate to the underworld.

Lynette went directly to the oversized desk and opened the top drawer. She sifted through the sundry items, careful not to disturb their positions. She uncovered nothing more interesting than stationary supplies and hospital memos, certainly nothing incriminating. The contents of the three smaller drawers proved equally unremarkable.

She went to the antique wardrobe next and opened the mirrored doors. Several starched white shirts and dress pants hung from the clothes rack. Spencer kept these here instead of the bedroom closet so he could change without waking her if he had to leave for the asylum early. She checked the shirts for lipstick, smelled them for any trace of perfume. They were all freshly laundered. She stuck her hand into each pant pocket. They held nothing.

There was a shelf above the hanging space, but it was too high for her to access. She dragged a wooden chair over, climbed onto the seat, and discovered three shoeboxes. The first contained several envelopes bursting with receipts, though none from jewelry purchases or expensive out-of-town dinners. Most, if not all, were utility bills from AT&T, the Ohio Edison Company, and Aqua America. The second shoebox contained stacks of aging photographs wrapped in rubber bands. Lynette’s chest tightened with nostalgia as she shuffled through photos taken when she and Spencer were twenty years younger, smiling, in love. She promptly moved on to the final box. It held nothing but miscellaneous junk Spencer hadn’t been able to throw out: broken watches, a torn wallet, a faded issue of
Playboy
magazine, a suede brush, a personal grooming kit, a toy pistol, a silver napkin ring, a bottle of still-corked glycerin.

Lynette stepped off the chair, closed the wardrobe doors, and looked around the study. Where next? she wondered with a growing sense of desperation. Her eyes paused on the bookcase. Could Spencer have hidden a telephone number or a love letter inside one of the books? She gritted her teeth in frustration. This would have been much easier had she known what she was looking for. Still, she wouldn’t quit; she would make the most of this opportunity while she had it.

The first three bookshelves contained hardback tomes on psychiatry and psychology and science and medicine. She found nothing inside them any more interesting than a bookmark or an underlined passage that was meaningless to her. She retrieved the chair and climbed on it again so she could reach the uppermost shelf. She frowned at the first book she examined. It was bound in leather and titled:
The Book of Baphomet
. She flipped through the pages and discovered shocking illustrations of grotesque demons and people wearing animal heads and naked women in submissive poses. Her revulsion turned quickly to confusion, then fear as she realized all the books on the shelf were dedicated to the occult, books with titles such as
The Left-Hand Path
,
Arcana
,
The Infernal Text
,
Blood Sorcery
,
The Lost Art
, and so forth.

Why did Spencer have books on devil worship?

Why so many?

Was he—could he be—?

While stretching her arm for a large red book just out of reach she lost her balance and leapt off the chair. She stumbled when she landed and collided into the ottoman, bumping it across the floor. Something inside it rattled.

Kneeling, Lynette discovered the padded, upholstered top lifted away to reveal a hollow storage space. She frowned at the contents it held. There was a silver chalice, black candles, incense, what might have been folded black robes, and a stack of photographs bound by an elastic band like those in the shoebox.

Lynette swooned, momentarily lightheaded. What did all this mean? Was her husband a
Satanist
? And if so, what did he do with this stuff? Sacrifice virgins to his dark god? For a moment she experienced a strange mix of relief and disappointment. Was there no affair after all? Was this the reason he went out at nighttime, to play dress up and
Dungeons & Dragons
with a group of like-minded associates at the asylum? Yet this seemed so unlike Spencer…

The stack of photographs was facedown. She picked it up and turned it over—and gasped.

The top one was a headshot of a young woman. Her eyes were open and unseeing, her skin pale. She appeared to be lying on a slab of stone.

She almost looked dead.

Heart suddenly pounding, Lynette removed the elastic band and cycled through the rest of the photos. There must have been three or four dozen, all females, all headshots, all closed-eyed, all pale-skinned, all—

Dead
, she thought as the photos fell from her fingers.
Not almost. Definitely. Definitively. Dead. All of them, dead, dead, dead.

And then she recognized one of the women: the teased hair, the heart-shaped face, the beauty mole on her chin. She had gone missing from Boston Mills the year before. What was her name? Debra? Darla? Her fiancé, Mark Evans, owned the auto repair shop in town—or had owned it. After he admitted to police that Darla went missing the same evening she caught him having sex with an employee from the ski resort, rumors swirled that he’d murdered her. Although no evidence could convict him of any crime, none could clear his name either. His clientele stopped patronizing his shop. The townsfolk whispered about him behind his back and avoided him on the street. Children invented stories of how he fed Darla into a woodchopper, or buried her dismembered body parts in the national park, or tossed her off the top of Brandywine Falls, where you could see her haunting at midnight on a full moon. Eventually Mark sold his business and moved out of state. No one had heard from him, or Darla, since.

But Spencer has a photograph of her face—her dead face.

Had he killed her?

Had he killed all these people—?

Lynette buried her face in her hands and found herself wishing her husband had been having an affair after all.

CHAPTER 17

“Somebody once wrote, ‘Hell is the impossibility of reason.’ That’s what this place feels like. Hell.”

Platoon
(1986)

In the current nightmare, Beetle was back on the beach in Grenada. However, there were no bullets whizzing past his head, no Marine Corps Sea Cobras decimating the quaint beachfront hotels and cafés with machine gun fire, no fighter-bombers flying gun runs overhead. Instead the beach was ominously deserted. He stood there alone, the sun burning in the sky, the surf foaming at his feet, the palm trees waving in the breeze. He began to walk, pretending not to see the blood staining the bright sand, or the drag marks where the tide had ferried bodies to their watery graves. Eventually the beach tapered to an end. Sarah stood where the sand met the jungle, waiting for him. At the sight of her his heart raced. He wanted to embrace her and tell her he was sorry and promise her he would change. But she wouldn’t let him get a word in. She yelled at him for being covered in blood, for killing the Russian diplomat, for drinking so much, for becoming a stranger to her.

He became enraged. Didn’t she understand what he’d been through? Couldn’t she understand that and empathize with him? No, no she couldn’t. All she could do was yell and accuse, yell and accuse—

Suddenly the USS Caron, a destroyer armed to the teeth, towered beside him, an impossibility in the shallow water, but there nonetheless. His lieutenant, a brown-noser who looked like a dentist and often pulled rank, yelled to him to put down the pistol, to turn himself in. Beetle pressed the barrel beneath his chin and squeezed the trigger—

Beetle jerked awake bathed in sweat, disorientated, gutted, afraid. It took him a moment to realize he was sitting on a rickety wooden chair on the balcony of the room at the Hilltop Lodge. The full moon hung in the black sky, a moldy white disc poking out from behind a smudge of dark clouds. It had started to rain, which had cleared away some of the fog, or at least thinned it, so he could see much of the forest stretching away below him. He swallowed, discovered he was parched, and picked up the bottle of vodka on the ground next to him. He took a three-swallow belt.

“Yuck!” a woman’s voice said. “That would make me puke.”

Beetle fell sideways off the chair, though he somehow managed to keep the bottle from spilling or breaking. He looked to where the voice had originated and found the woman leaning on the wooden banister that separated the two balconies.

She was tall and had lidded, amused brown eyes beneath arched eyebrows. Her features were too long, her face too gaunt, to be considered beautiful, but she had an unusual attractiveness. “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to startle you so much.” She had a strong German accent.

“It’s okay,” Beetle said, pushing himself to his feet and returning the chair upright. He remained standing, looking at the woman, waiting for her to go away.

“What terrible weather,” she said. “It reminds me of the weather in Bavaria. That’s where I’m from, in Germany. My name’s Greta.” She stuck her hand out over the banister.

Beetle hesitated, then shook. “Beetle.” His head was spinning from the booze. He had to concentrate on standing straight and enunciating clearly.

“Like the…” She made a crawling motion with her fingers.

“Yeah, like that.”

“Better than earthworm, I suppose,” she said, smiling. “No, I’m kidding. So what’s going on? You’re having a big party by yourself?” Her eyes went to the bottle in his hand, then back to his face.

“I think I’m going to go inside.”

“Is that an invitation?”

He blinked at her.

She laughed. “I’m kidding, Herr Beetle. But don’t go inside. Help me smoke this.” She produced an elegantly rolled joint from her pocket.

Beetle’s eyes came awake. He didn’t merely want to get high; he suddenly realized he needed to.

“I’ll take that as a yes?” She lit up, took a couple short drags, and passed the joint to him.

Beetle inhaled, pulling hard and closing his eyes. His mind rode the smoke as it tickled down his throat and floated in his lungs. He exhaled in a long stream.

“Hey,” Greta said. “Did you see the blood on the carpet?”

“No,” Beetle replied, thinking about Shylock and his sons for the first time since waking. The knuckles of his right hand, he realized, ached dully. He took another, longer toke from the spliff, then handed it to the woman.

She accepted it and said, “Yeah, there is. Blood. There’s a trail leading all the way to the stairs. And I swear it wasn’t there before I went to dinner.” She offered him a sly smile. “Maybe it has something to do with the legends?”

Beetle frowned, wondering what legends she was talking about, and why he thought he should know.

“The legends,” she repeated, seeing his confusion. “Like the church.” She pointed.

Beetle followed her finger. The fog had continued to dissipate even as they spoke, eradicated by the rain, and all that remained of it were whiffs of white condensation drifting up here and there through the roof of the moonlit forest. Squinting, he could make out a white structure atop a small rise some distance away.

Beetle remembered the two kids in town telling him something about upside down crosses. He mentioned this.

Greta nodded. “Creepy, right? Everybody says the church was built by Satanists to perform black masses in the basement.”

“Who’s everyone?” he asked, eyeing the joint. She held it between her fingers, letting it burn, wasting it.

“Well, just these two English backpackers I bought the pot from. I met them last night in a hostel in Cleveland. They said this place is called Helltown. It sounded neat, so I drove down this morning to check it out for myself. But the fog was so bad I decided to stay overnight and try again tomorrow.” She finally took a drag of the joint and passed it to him. “Finish it,” she said, and retrieved a paper cup from the table behind her. She held it up for him to see. “Wine. Classy, I know. But it was the only glass in the room. I think you’re supposed to use it to rinse toothpaste out of your mouth.”