One Door Away From Heaven (61 page)

Still on her knees, bracing the can between her thighs, Micky pried at the stubborn lid. Over the years, the plastic had pressure bonded to the aluminum. Micky clawed in frustration, but at last tore it off.

At least a hundred small pale crescents, varying in color from white to dirty yellow, spilled out of the can, onto the floor at her knees, before she corrected its tilt. Thousands of little quarter-moons filled the container, and Micky stared in bafflement for a second, not because she failed to identify the contents, but because she couldn’t wrap her mind around the scope of Teelroy’s obsessive hoarding. Fingernail and toenail clippings:
years’
worth.

Not all had come from the same two hands. Some were smaller than others and bright with nail polish: a woman’s trimmings. Maybe the whole family had contributed in years past when there had been more people living here than just poor Leonard with his needful, desperate eyes. Multigenerational obsession.

She set the can aside, worked loose another one. Too light. Not likely to contain anything of use to her. She clawed it open anyway.

Hair. Oily hair clippings.

When Micky popped the lid off a third can, a clean calcium scent wafted up, a sort of seashell smell. Peering inside, she cried out and let the container drop from between her thighs.

The can rolled across the floor, spilling the tiny white skeletons of six or eight birds, all as fragile as sugar lace. They were too small to have been anything but canaries or parakeets. The Teelroys evidently had kept parakeets, and every time one of their little birds had died, they had somehow separated feathers and flesh from the bones, saving those blanched and brittle remains for…For what?
Sentimental
reasons? The papery bones crumbled as the skeletons rattled across the floor, and the skulls, none bigger than a cherry tomato, bounced and tumbled and rattled like misshapen dice.

Maybe she had too quickly dismissed the idea that she was dead and in Hell. This place had surely been a hell of sorts for Leonard Teelroy and evidently for other Teelroys before him.

These coffee cans weren’t going to yield anything of use.

This foul room didn’t contain a clock, but she could hear one ticking nonetheless, counting down to Preston Maddoc’s return.

CLUTCHING the rain-soaked journal, Polly reached the Fleetwood, opened the door, climbed inside, paused on the steps, turned to urge Leilani to hurry—and saw that the girl had vanished.

Having disconnected the utility hookups, Curtis appeared around the front of the motor home just as Cass, ensconced in the driver’s seat, started the engine.

“Trouble!” Polly shouted, tossing the journal into the lounge and then plunging out of the Fleetwood, once more into the downpour.

She surveyed the rain-washed campgrounds, numb with disbelief. The girl had been right behind her. Polly had looked back, and the girl had been trailing by no more than fifteen feet, and Polly had sprinted the rest of the way to the Fleetwood in maybe
five seconds,
for God’s sake; and yet the girl was
gone.

THE WINDSHIELD WIPERS were barely able to cope with the torrents that streamed down the glass, but Noah piloted his rental car through the campgrounds and located site 62 with little difficulty, though he wondered if he should have made arrangements for an ark instead of a coupe.

He gaped in amazement at Maddoc’s motor home, a behemoth that appeared to be almost as big as the average roadside diner. It rose in the deluge as a galleon might loom out of the mists on a storm-tossed sea, and Noah’s Mazda seemed like a rowboat riding a deep trough windward of the great ship’s starboard hull.

His intention had been to scout site 62 and find a place from which he could maintain surveillance on it at least for fifteen or twenty minutes, until he had gained a better sense of the situation. That plan had to be discarded, however, when he saw that the door to the Prevost stood wide open in the tempest.

The wind pinned the door against the wall of the vehicle. Rain slashed into the cockpit, and during the minute that Noah watched, no one appeared to close up.

Something was wrong.

LIGHTNING BARED its bright teeth in the sky, and its reflection gnashed in the mirrored blacktop surface of the county road.

Nun’s Lake lay two miles behind Preston, the farmhouse just a mile ahead.

In spite of having been washed thoroughly by the rain, he felt dirty. The desperate nature of the moment had required that he touch the Hand, including the most deformed parts of her, without a chance to pull on a pair of gloves.

Unless he could find work gloves at the Teelroy house, he would have to touch her again, more than once, before the afternoon drew to a close, if only to carry her into the filthy heart of the living-room portion of the maze, where he had left the Slut Queen. There, he would secure her to the armchair, which would allow her a front-row seat for the murder of her friend.

She herself would die in that armchair, after he had indulged the brute within and had done a satisfying number of hurtful things to her. He had been born for this, and so had she. Both of them were broken spokes in the dumb grinding wheel of nature.

Those tortures could be conducted without touching the Hand directly, using imaginative instruments. Therefore, the moment that he had secured her, he would vigorously wash his hands with a strong soap and lots of water nearly hot enough to scald. He would feel clean then, and the coiling nausea in his stomach would relent, and he would be able to enjoy his necessary work.

He worried at the possibility that the Toad might not have soap, and then he let out a short sharp bark of laughter. Even as slovenly as that bearded geek had been, it was more likely that he would have
thousands
of slivers of soap-bar remains, carefully stored and maybe even cataloged, than that he would have no soap at all.

Slowly regaining consciousness, the Hand groaned softly on the seat beside him. She was sitting up, restrained by the belt, her head slumped against the window in the passenger’s door.

The plastic Hefty OneZip bag lay on the console, folded but not sealed. Driving with one hand, he fished the anesthetic-saturated washcloth out of the bag and spread it over the girl’s face.

He didn’t want to apply it continuously, for fear of killing her too soon and too mercifully.

Her groaning subsided to an anxious murmur, and her hideous hand stopped twitching in her lap, but she didn’t grow as still as she had been previously. Once exposed to the air, the homemade anesthetic in the cloth had begun to evaporate, and the rain had further diluted the chemical, even though he had quickly returned the cloth to the bag after initially felling her with the fumes.

Repeatedly, he checked the rearview mirror, expecting to see the shimmer of headlights through the silver skeins of rain.

He remained confident that the storm had adequately screened him from observers when he had captured the Hand. Even if other campers, at their windows, had been able to glimpse anything of significance in the bleak light and the occluding cloudburst, they would be likely to interpret what they’d seen as nothing more sinister than a father scooping up his errant child and carrying her through thunderclaps and thunderbolts to safety.

As for the two women and the boy from that Fleetwood, he had no clue who they were or what they had been doing in his motor home. He doubted that they were associates of the Slut Queen, because if she’d come to Nun’s Lake with backup, she probably wouldn’t have stationed herself alone in the woods to watch the farmhouse.

Whoever they were, they could not have gotten past the alarm system unless the Black Hole had let them inside. When Preston had left for the Teelroy farm, he’d told the stupid bitch to keep the
Fair Wind
buttoned up tight. In the past, she’d always done what he required of her. That was the deal. She knew the deal well, all the paragraphs and subparagraphs and clauses, knew it as well as if it actually existed in a written form that she could study. It was a good deal for her, a dream contract, providing a fortune in drugs and a quality of life she couldn’t otherwise have known, guaranteeing the aggressive and unrelenting dissolution for which she hungered. In spite of how crazy she was—crazy and venal and sick—she’d always upheld her end of the bargain.

Occasionally, of course, the Hole stuffed herself with so many contraindicated chemicals that she didn’t remember the deal any more than she remembered who she was. Those depths of indulgence rarely occurred this early in the day, but nearly always at night, when he usually arranged to be present to manage her with a whiff of this same homemade anesthetic if she could not be calmed by words or by a little physical force.

He removed the cloth from the girl’s face and threw it on the floor instead of bothering to return it to the plastic bag. She still groaned and rolled her head against the back of the seat, but the job was done: They had reached the turnoff to the Teelroy farm.

THE DRIVING WIND gave way to hard shifting gusts that blew from more than one point of the compass, causing the door to rattle and bang against the side of the big Prevost, but still no one rushed to secure it.

Drenched during the few seconds that he was exposed while racing from the car to the motor home, Noah Farrel entered cautiously but without pausing to knock. He ascended the steps, stood beside the co-pilot’s seat. He listened to the door thumping behind him and to the mad drumming of the rain on the metal roof, seeking other sounds that might help him to analyze the situation, hearing nothing useful.

An unfolded sofabed occupied most of the lounge. One lamp cast light down upon three hula dolls, two motionless and one rotating its hips, and sprayed light up on a dreamily smiling painted face that filled most of the ceiling.

Disregarding the daylight, which settled as gray as a coat of wet ashes on the windows, the only additional illumination issued from the rear of the vehicle, past the open door to the bedroom. The light back there was subdued and red.

Saturday afternoon, when he’d left Geneva Davis’s place to do some final research on Maddoc and to pack a suitcase, and again this morning during his flight to Coeur d’Alene and then during his drive to Nun’s Lake, Noah mulled over numerous approaches to the problem, each depending on different circumstances that he might encounter when he arrived here. None of his scenarios included
this
situation, however, and after all his mulling, he was forced to wing it.