Still Lake (8 page)

Zebulon King strode into the living room, an old-fashioned wooden toolbox in one huge hand. His wife scurried after him, head down, dressed in some kind of faded dress with an equally faded apron covering her lumpish body. The apron was crisply starched.

“You start in the kitchen, Addy,” Zebulon ordered. “Perley and I will see what's up with the roof. Miz Averill says there might be water damage.” He made it sound like the plague had struck.

Griffin didn't bother to enlighten him. He'd spent the last truly free summer of his life doing carpentry and yard work for Peggy Niles—he knew one end of a hammer from another and knew just how bad the water damage was. Nothing that a skilled carpenter couldn't fix in a day or so.

He'd spent the first year in prison in the wood shop, as well. At one point he'd been good, damned good. He'd built a picnic table and a fanciful gazebo for Peggy just before he'd been arrested, and it had been some of his best pieces—more art than lawn furniture. The day he got out of jail he turned his back on woodworking and never picked up a hammer again. It was too deeply ingrained in the nightmare that had been his life.

There were times when he missed it. Since he'd taken up residence in the ramshackle Whitten house he'd been itching to work on it—to replace a rotting windowsill, reglaze the windows before the panes of glass fell out. He hadn't touched anything, though. He could hire people to do those things nowadays—he didn't have to do them himself. And he didn't want to remember the boy who'd found satisfaction and pleasure from the feel of tools in his hands.

“Suit yourself,” he said. Zeb's “boy” moved past him into the house, thirty-five if he was a day, looking just as grim and not nearly as smart as his father. “Just keep out of the bedroom for now. I've got work laid out and I don't want anyone messing with it.”

“We ain't interested in your work,” Zeb said. “We're just here to fix the place. And you keep away from my woman.”

At that point Addy rushed into the kitchen. The woman was in her sixties, built like a sack of po
tatoes, with iron-gray hair tucked in tight little pin-curls that had probably never been in fashion in her entire lifetime. “I'll resist temptation,” Griffin said dryly.

Zebulon King wasn't the sort to find humor in a situation. “See that you do.”

The woman jumped a mile when he walked into the kitchen. She had already begun scrubbing the oilcloth-covered table, and she looked at him as if he were a hound from hell. Or the man who murdered her daughter.

He had no idea whether she'd been at his trial. He hadn't owned any glasses besides his shades, and his court-appointed, totally incompetent lawyer frowned on a teenage malcontent wearing sunglasses on the witness stand. For all he knew Addy King could have been sitting there glaring at him, memorizing his features and branding them into her soul with a fiery hatred.

She looked too beaten down for anything that energetic. She focused on scrubbing the table while he started a pot of coffee for himself.

“Gonna need new oilcloth,” she muttered in a barely audible voice.

“Do they even sell oilcloth nowadays?” He made an effort to sound pleasant and unthreatening.

She didn't look up. “Audley's does. Audley's sells everything.”

“How about a new life?” he muttered to himself.

“What?” Her head jerked up. “I'm hard of hearing.”

“Just talking to myself,” he said, leaning against the sink and staring out at the lake as it glistened through the trees. It looked deceptively peaceful, as if it had never held the blood-soaked body of his murdered girlfriend. Looking at it didn't remind him of death and despair—it had a curiously tranquil effect on him. But he still hadn't talked himself into actually swimming in it.

He looked at the timid little woman. Her dour husband wouldn't have been much comfort when she lost her daughter, he thought. She looked as if she'd never had much comfort in her life.

He racked his brain, trying to remember what he knew about the King family. They'd been in Colby since the 1700s, but the blood had grown pretty thin by the twentieth century. “Lived here long?” he asked casually.

“My husband said I wasn't to talk to you,” the woman muttered, still scrubbing. The oilcloth tore beneath her fierce handling, and she let out a mournful cry.

“There's no harm in talking, Mrs. King,” he said. “And don't worry about the covering—as you said, it needs replacing.”

She looked up at him, with eyes filled with such deep sorrow that for a moment he felt ashamed of himself. Only a moment. “I don't talk to strangers,
Mr. Smith. I don't trust them. I've lived in Colby all my life, and I know everyone I need to know.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said meekly. The coffee was ready, and he poured himself a mug, black the way he liked it. She was a tough one, and he didn't expect he'd get very far with her. He might just as well head out to the porch and drink his coffee in relative peace, despite the hammering that had started from behind the house, joining in with the distant buzz of the chain saw.

He tried one more time. “That's a fine son you have, Mrs. King,” he said, heading toward the screen door that was barely attached to its hinges. “It must be nice to have your children close to home when they grow up. You have any other kids?”

Her reaction reminded him what a bastard he really was. Her tired face crumpled for a moment and her milky blue eyes filled with tears. “He's the only one we were blessed with,” she said.

He couldn't bring himself to push her any further. He'd always been considered rapacious in court—he could destroy a witness in a matter of minutes, no matter how carefully they'd been coached or how firmly they believed in their particular truth. But he just couldn't do it to a tired old woman who'd had enough pain. He wasn't that much of a bastard, at least on this peaceful August morning. Maybe later.

In the meantime he'd better make sure that anything incriminating in his bedroom was out of sight
in case King or his son wandered up there. It wouldn't do to have them find a pile of books connected to serial killers in general and the Colby murders in particular.

He set his mug of coffee on the newel post and took the steps two at a time.

For a moment he thought the upstairs was deserted, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Only to see Perley King standing in the middle of the room, peering at the notebook Griffin had left on the bed, a confused expression on his face.

Shit, Griffin thought. I am totally screwed. And he cleared his throat, racking his brain for a plausible explanation.

“W
hat are you doing?” Griffin said, and the man turned bright red, dropping the notebook on the bed.

“I d-didn't mean no harm,” he stammered. “I was just checking the water leaks by the chimney like my pa told me to do.”

“By reading my private notes?”

“Can't,” the man mumbled.

“Can't what?”

“Can't read,” he said in a slow, expressionless voice. “Never had much call for it, I guess. Pa says I do just fine without. I can write my name.”

“I'm sure you can,” Griffin said, crossing the room and picking up the notebook. It was opened to his list from the day before, written in his dark scrawl. Perley King seemed unperturbed, and Griffin had no choice but to believe him. If he'd understood the words on the notepad he wouldn't have the pleasantly vacant expression on his face.

He'd already upset a battered-down, grieving mother, Griffin thought. Why not move on to someone mentally impaired for good measure? Just so he
could feel really good about himself on this warm summer morning.

“You like living here, Perley?” What the hell kind of name was Perley, Griffin thought absently. The tall, shambling man/boy hardly seemed pearl-like.

Perley squatted down by the chimney, poking at the wood with a screwdriver, checking for rot. “It's okay,” he muttered. “Kind of lonely, though, since Valette's been gone.”

It shouldn't be that easy, Griffin thought. He moved to the dresser, making a show of looking through the drawers. “Who's Valette?”

“My sister. She was real pretty. She went away a long time ago. Satan took her.”

“Satan?”

“She was a sinner, Pa said. We aren't to speak her name ever again. But I miss her. She used to get after Pa when he beat me. Made him stop. But then when she was gone, Pa was saved and gave up liquor and he didn't take the belt to me no more, nor to Ma, either, so I guess things are all right. She was pretty as a picture, Valette was.”

“What happened to her?”

Perley had given up stabbing at the floor and was now attacking the ceiling around the chimney. Sooner or later he was going to come upon the soft spot in the back, but Griffin wasn't in any hurry to enlighten him.

“I told you, Satan took her,” Perley said with great patience. “Mama said God wanted another an
gel in heaven, but Pa said it was Satan, and Pa's always right. Still an' all, I woulda thought Satan had enough to keep him company with them other ones.”

Bingo. “Other ones?” Griffin prompted.

“I'm not supposed to talk about it,” Perley muttered. “That was long ago, and we didn't have nothing to do with it. Pa says it's nobody's business.” He stabbed at the wood, a steady, methodical jabbing motion. Was Valette the one who'd been stabbed to death? Griffin watched the rhythmic plunge of the long screwdriver with a kind of sick fascination.

“It sounds very sad,” Griffin said, his voice noncommittal.

“I go to her grave sometimes. Pa beat me when he caught me, even without the liquor, so now I go when he's off on business. I'm not the only one who goes there.
He
does, too.”

“He? Your father?”

Perley shook his head slowly. “Nope. Satan. He goes to visit those girls and he leaves flowers on their graves. He was real sorry to take them, I know he was. He leaves them on other graves, too. That's how I know which ones were taken by Satan and which ones by the Almighty.”

Griffin managed to keep the excitement out of his voice. “So someone leaves flowers on the graves of the three murdered girls?”

Perley didn't stop his stabbing, didn't stop to wonder how a stranger would know about the three
girls. “More'n three. He took them,” Perley said patiently. “I didn't say he killed them. And he leaves flowers on their graves. All of them. By the lake, in the village. I seen him there, sometimes, in the dawn, when he thinks no one is around.”

A cold shiver ran across Griffin. “What does he look like?”

Perley's long screwdriver sank deep into the rotten ceiling, and he let out a visceral grunt of satisfaction. “Found it,” he muttered. He moved to the casement windows and called out. “Pa, I found the rot!”

“Coming, boy!” Zeb King was already on his way up the stairs, and it wouldn't do for him to catch Griffin interrogating his slow-witted son. But he couldn't just leave without getting the answer to his question.

“What does Satan look like, Perley?” he asked again.

Perley turned his innocent face to him. “Just like God, only different.”

Great, Griffin thought, plastering a tight smile on his face as he scooped the papers from his bed, moving them out of sight just as Zebulon King walked in the room.

“You bothering Mr. Smith, boy?” he demanded, eyeing them both suspiciously. “I told you you were here to work, not to flap your jaw.”

“I wasn't, Pa,” Perley said, hanging his head. “I was just telling him about some things.”

“What things?”

Shit, Griffin thought, steeling himself for disaster.

“I told him about the fishing. He wanted to know where the best place was to catch a rainbow trout, and I told him.” Perley looked as guileless as a puppy. He might be simple-minded, but he could lie with the ease of an expert.

“Takes more than the right spot to catch a rainbow,” Zeb muttered, making it more than apparent that he thought Griffin didn't have the right stuff for such a task. “A man shouldn't hunt for something he's not ready to eat, and I reckon you don't know much about dressing a rainbow, now do you?” His contempt was almost genial.

As a matter of fact Griffin had caught many a rainbow trout during the last summer of his youth, and he was more than adept at cleaning and cooking them. “Just a thought,” he said. “I probably won't get around to it, anyway.”

“Too busy being on vacation,” Zebulon said with a barely disguised sneer. “We'll be out of your way as soon as we can. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you didn't talk to my boy. He's a mite slow, and he can't concentrate with someone yammering at him.”

There was no mistaking the warning in Zebulon King's flinty eyes, and Griffin gave him a slight nod. “No more yammering,” he said. “Maybe I'll just get out of your way for now. Go for a drive, maybe find a place to eat.”

“The Village Diner is open in Waybury,” Zeb said, suggesting the next town over.

“Maybe I'll just take a picnic and go wander through the town. I'm particularly interested in old graveyards.” It was deliberate, and he half expected Zeb to react.

He'd underestimated the man. If Perley looked distressed, Zeb just shrugged. “Suit yourself. Can't imagine what a grown man would find interesting about a bunch of tombstones, but there's many who find them of interest. Just be careful.”

“Careful?”

“The one on the lake road gets a bit swampy at the edge. That old rattletrap of a car wouldn't have too good a time in the mud. Wouldn't want you to get stuck.”

Like hell, Griffin thought. “Nice of you to warn me,” he said.

“Doesn't hurt to be too careful,” he said in his iron-hard voice. “You take your time, and we'll be finished for the day by three.”

It wasn't even eight-thirty in the morning, which made for a long, empty day, but Griffin couldn't very well object. He couldn't go up to the inn—people were crawling all over the place at this hour, and he didn't expect Sophie to greet him with open arms. Besides, there were three or four cemeteries in the old town, some going back to the 1700s when the town was first founded. Finding the graves of the murdered girls might take some time. Particularly if it included looking for other, unidentified murder victims.

The two King men were looking at him, clearly
waiting for him to take his leave. “Can I shave first?” He didn't bother keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.

“If you make it snappy. I've got work to do in the bathroom.”

Griffin managed to take almost a full hour showering and shaving, a petty revenge that nevertheless left him inordinately pleased with himself. By the time he got back to the kitchen Addy King was busy sweeping the back porch, and she didn't look up when he filled a travel mug with the last of the coffee. Maybe she was deaf.

He didn't think so.

He grabbed his keys, heading for the front door, then came to an abrupt halt.

Sophie Davis was standing on the porch, a plate of cookies in her hand, a wary, determinedly pleasant expression on her face.

Griffin leaned against the doorjamb, barring the entrance. “What's this?”

He frightened her. It was fascinating how easy it was to unnerve her, but it suited him just fine. Sophie Davis didn't strike him as someone who'd respond to charm or seduction, both of which he could turn off and on with sublime ease. She didn't trust him, wisely. And he couldn't rid himself of the notion that she had something to hide.

She was too young to have remembered the media coverage of the murders. She was maybe in her early thirties at the latest, more likely late twenties, and she'd been in Colby for only a few months. Not
really time enough to develop secrets, unless she'd brought them with her.

He knew nothing about her, apart from the fact that she didn't particularly like him. Normally that wouldn't have bothered him, but he couldn't afford to ignore any anomaly while he was here. So he managed a faint, predatory smile, just to see her squirm.

“I brought you cookies,” she said in a nervous, breathless voice.

“I can see that. Why?”

“To thank you for bringing my mother home.”

“I could hardly let her wander around alone at that hour, could I?”

“You strike me as the kind of man who'd do just that,” she said.

He didn't blink. She'd taken her white kid gloves off, ready to get down and dirty. He was more than willing to join her. “So this isn't really a social call,” he said. “You want to tell me why you're really here?”

There was a muffled crash behind him as Addy dropped something in the living room. He didn't bother to turn and look, but Sophie turned pale. “Who's here?”

“Marge Averill sent the people you recommended out here to do some of the maintenance. You haven't answered my question. Why are you here?”

“I need to talk to you.” She looked about as happy as a woman facing a firing squad.

“Fine. We can't talk here—too much going on. I was going for a drive—you can come with me.”

“I've got things to do….”

“You want to talk to me or not?”

She hesitated. “All right. Where should I put the cookies?”

“Bring them with you. I haven't had breakfast yet.” He moved past her, onto the porch, noticing with wry amusement that she backed well out of his way, just to make sure he didn't get too close to her. You'd think she suspected him, the way she was acting. He hadn't had people treat him like a leper since he'd gotten out of the Chittenden Correctional Center. It wasn't a pleasant feeling.

But she followed him, anyway, ten paces back like a dutiful Muslim wife, only to come up short at the sight of his car.

He was prepared for her caustic reaction. Few people understood or appreciated his attachment to his car—even Zebulon King had thought it was an old junker. Old it certainly was. Worth more than Zebulon King probably made in a year. The simple fact that it was a Jaguar was far outweighed by its advanced age and seeming state of decrepitude. The damned thing ran like a top, and he kept it in prime condition. The interior was perfect, from the refurbished leather seats to the burled-walnut dashboard. Only the outside looked disreputable—a mangy collection of bondo, rust and dark gray paint.

He went to the passenger door, opening it with an exaggerated flourish. “Not what you're used to, I
know, but it will have to do. Your carriage awaits, madam.”

She approached it cautiously, as if she were expecting spiders to jump out at her. But when she spoke, her voice held a totally unexpected note of reverence.

“It's an XJ6,” she said softly, her voice husky. “What is it, a '74, '75?”

“It's a '74,” he said, startled.

“It's beautiful,” she breathed, totally entranced. She handed him the plate of cookies and slid into the soft leather of the front seat like an angel entering heaven. She closed her eyes and took a deep, appreciative breath. “It even smells right.”

He didn't move, just stared at her. Annelise had always hated his car, insisting on taking her Mercedes or his more respectable Lincoln SUV. If he'd ever really needed the four-wheel-drive, it would have been in Vermont, but he'd decided to take the Jaguar on a last-minute whim. The Lincoln Navigator was huge and ominous; the Jaguar deceptively battered. And he'd wanted the excuse to take the Jag out on the highway, see what she could do after all the work he'd put into her.