The Devil in Gray (18 page)

“No, no, everything's fine.” Although she still looked as if she had seen something that disturbed her.

“I could eat an elephant,” Hicks said, rubbing his hands in relish.

Rhoda said, “Would you like to say grace, Lieutenant?”

“Hey, please. Call me Decker.”

Rhoda gave him the tightest of smiles. “
Decker
,” she repeated.

“Are you sure everything's okay?” he asked her. She definitely looked uneasy.

“Yes. Great. I've had a busy day with Daisy, that's all.”

Decker clasped his hands together and closed his eyes. He hesitated for a moment and then he said, “Oh, Lord, thank You for this food, and thank You for bringing us together to share it. We pray for Your guidance and Your protection, and most of all we pray that. You open our eyes so that we can see our way to bring justice to those who cry out for it.”

“
Amen
,” Hicks said, looking at him in surprise.

“What?” Decker said.

“It was just that—well, that was quite some prayer.”

Decker helped himself to a chicken thigh. “I'm not embarrassed to call on the Almighty for extra assistance. Just like I'm not embarrassed to call on the FBI.”

“Wine?” Hicks asked. “It's only Wal-Mart Red, I'm afraid.”

“Sure, why not? This chicken is great, Rhoda. Just like my mother can't make. She can never get the fried to stay on the chicken.”

They ate and drank in silence for a while. Decker noticed that Rhoda didn't seem to have much of an appetite. She prodded at her potatoes but never actually ate any of them.

“Not hungry?” he asked her.

She looked up and said, “How's it going? This investigation?”

“Well, I don't usually like to talk shop at the supper table, but we're following up one or two interesting leads. Hicks here—Tim—he's had some very creative ideas.”

Rhoda put down her fork. “It's just that—ever since Tim came home last week and said that you'd been assigned to the Maitland homicide, I've had a really strange feeling.”

“Rhoda?” Hicks said, with his mouth full. “You never told me nothing about this.”

“I didn't want to upset you, that's all.”

“I know you've been under the weather, but I thought that was just because you were homesick.”

“What kind of a feeling?” Decker asked.

“Maybe it's stupid, but I keep thinking that something really terrible is going to happen.”

“Something terrible like what?” Hicks asked her, frowning.

“It's hard to describe. I've had a feeling that lots more people are going to die, and that Tim's in danger. I didn't want to tell him, because I know it's his job and I didn't want him to be looking over his shoulder all the time just because of me and some fool premonition.”

Hicks said, “Honey … you should have said something. Nothing's going to happen to me, you know that.”

“I keep trying to tell myself that, but the feeling won't go away. It's like—I don't know—it's like when you're lying in the dark and you think there's something in the room with you. Something that wants to do you harm.”

Decker took hold of her hand. “Rhoda—these homicides we're investigating, they're very unusual and they're very scary. You're bound to feel frightened, it's only natural. You think that
I'm
not frightened? But we're well trained and we're well armed and we believe that we could be making some progress. Tim and me, we're going to catch this guy, whoever he is, and then you won't have anything more to be frightened about.”

Rhoda shook her head. “It's not like any feeling I've ever had before. It's like a real
dread
. And when we sat down tonight I had it again, only much, much stronger, and I still have it now. I can't ignore it, Lieutenant. It's like a kind of darkness, all around us, and I'm scared.”

“When you say
darkness
—”

“It's real. I can
see
it. It isn't my imagination. I can see it now, all around us, and it's especially dark around
you
. It's like there's a shadow falling across you.”

Hicks put down the chicken leg he had been eating and sat back in his chair. He said, as if he were admitting that there was hereditary weak-mindedness in the family, “Rhoda's grandmother, Rhoda's mother, Rhoda … they all claim to be sensitives.”

“Sensitives? You mean like mediums?”

“Kind of like that, yes. They say they can sense a storm coming, or when somebody's going to die. They say they can hear voices from the spirit world.”

“And this is what you're feeling now?” Decker asked her.

Rhoda nodded. “It's so strong it's like standing in the ocean when the tide's pulling out and you think that you're going to get dragged away.”

“Do you have any idea what could be causing it?”

“I don't know. But I started to feel it on the day that Alison Maitland was killed. I felt it even before Tim came home and told me about it.”

She hesitated, twisting her napkin, and then she said, “I heard a noise in the nursery and I went up to make sure that Daisy was okay. There's a long mirror on the landing and as I came up the stairs I
saw
somebody. Only for a split second. But it was like the mirror was an open doorway instead of a mirror and somebody walked across it, so quick that I couldn't see who it was.”

Hicks said, “Honey … the lieutenant's right. This is a really gruesome case and you're letting your imagination run away with you.”

“But this happened before I even knew about it.”

“Come on, honey, what you saw in the mirror, it was a trick of the light.” Hicks stood up and put his arm around her. “There was nobody there, was there?”

“I saw somebody, I swear it.”

“And how about this darkness that's falling on me?” Decker asked. “Can you still see that?”

“It's not just the Maitland case. It's something that happened to you a long time ago. Something that you never allow yourself to remember.”

“What, specifically? Do you have any idea?”

“I'm not sure. I'd have to do a reading to find that out.”

“Oh, come on,” Hicks protested. “The lieutenant came here for supper, not for mumbo jumbo.”

“No, I'm interested,” Decker said. “What kind of a reading?”

“I can use an
okuele
.”

“An
okuele?
”

“Jesus,” Hicks said, burying his head in his hands.

Rhoda got up from the table and went across to a small side table. She took out a carefully wrapped package of purple tissue paper. She laid it on the table and opened it up. Inside lay what looked like a necklace, eight tortoiseshell medallions connected together by a dull metal chain.

“My grandmother taught me to use it. It's like the tarot except that it explains the past as well as the future, and it's much more personal than the tarot. Through the
okuele
, the spirits prompt you to tell them what's troubling you, instead of the other way around.”

Hicks sat down and stared at his half-eaten supper. “I don't believe this. All I wanted was fried chicken and what do I get?
Ghostbusters
.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Rhoda cleared the table and spread a plain white cloth on it. Hicks stood on the opposite side of the kitchen with his arms folded, looking deeply unhappy. Decker said, “I'm sorry … I didn't mean to spoil your supper. I'm not sure that I believe in this dark shadow any more than you do, but there must be some reason that Rhoda feels so strongly about it.”

“I guess.”

“There's another thing …
Sandra
said she had a premonition, too. She said she really believed that something bad's about to happen.”

Hicks watched as Rhoda placed a silver-plated candlestick in the center of the table, with a tall white candle, and lit it, and arranged a sheet of paper and a pencil beside her chair. “I really don't like this, Lieutenant. I don't like Rhoda getting involved in my work. Especially when we're dealing with some kind of total freaking psychopath.”

“If she's got some kind of intuitive feeling about it, sport, I think we need to know what it is.”

Rhoda said, “You can sit down now. This is only a very simple reading, so that we can find out why Decker is walking in darkness.”

Rhoda switched off all the lights so that the only illumination came from the candle, and then they sat down. “Do we have to hold hands or anything?” Decker asked.

“No. It's enough that we're sitting here together.”

Rhoda closed her eyes and said nothing for what seemed like forever, although it was probably no more than two or three minutes. Hicks glanced at Decker in discomfort, but neither of them spoke in case they disturbed Rhoda's concentration. There was no draft in the room, and the candle flame burned steady and bright, without wavering.

At last, Rhoda tossed the
okuele
onto the table. Some of the medallions fell with their shiny side upward, others with their dull side upward. All of the medallions were marked on their shiny side with the sign of the cross. Rhoda picked up her pencil and marked a line of crosses and zeroes.

She picked up the
okuele
and threw it again, and again she marked down the way that the medallions had fallen. She repeated this process four times.

At last she said, “Something terrible happened and you won't allow yourself to remember it. Your mind has closed its eyes and it refuses to open them.”

Decker said nothing. He didn't know what she meant. What had he ever refused to remember?

Rhoda hesitated a moment more, and then she said, “It's raining, and you're standing outside a black door. Do you remember that?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, I must have stood outside hundreds of black doors.”

“It's dark. The number on the black door has two fours and a seven.”

Decker uneasily sat back. “I remember, 1447 Duval Street, five years ago. We were on a drug bust.”

“You're not alone. You have a partner with you.”

“That's right. Jim Stuart. Just made detective first grade.”

Rhoda touched her fingertips to her ears. “You say something about the back of the house.”

“‘Cover the back of the house. Anyone runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.'”

Decker recited the words as if he were giving evidence. He looked at Hicks and Hicks was staring at him apprehensively, as if he were seeing a side of Decker's personality that he had never been aware of before.

Rhoda said, “You open the black door. You walk into the hallway. It's very dark inside the house.”

“I can't see my hand in front of my face, that's how dark it is.”

“You feel a door handle on your left. You open it.”

Decker didn't say anything. He could remember opening that door because he had opened it time and time again, and wished that he hadn't.

“You enter the room. It's just as dark in here. You can smell people sleeping. You raise your gun in your right hand and your flashlight in your left. Just as you switch on your flashlight, you hear the click of a gun being cocked, right behind you. You turn round. You fire.”

“It was dark,” Decker said, hoarsely. “I told him to cover the back of the house. ‘Anybody runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.' I specifically told him not to come inside. Specifically. A specific order.”

Rhoda closed her eyes again and picked up the
okuele
, passing it through her fingers like a rosary, and gently rubbing every one of its tortoiseshell medallions.

When she spoke, her voice was unnervingly whispery, as if she were making a guilty confession to a priest. She didn't even sound like Rhoda. “
Saint Barbara knows what you saw
.”

“Saint Barbara? What are you talking about?”

“Saint Barbara is the shadow who is following you everywhere. She knows everything about you. She knows who your father's father was, and what sign you were born under, because she wants her revenge. She knows every bone in your body and she knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart.”

“What do you know about Saint Barbara? Hicks—did you ever tell Rhoda about Saint Barbara, that thing on my wall?”

Hicks shook his head. “Come on, Rhoda. Enough of this shit.”

But Rhoda stared at Decker and whispered, “Saint Barbara wants you, Decker. She knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart. She knows everything about you.”

For a fraction of a second, Decker saw his flashlight jump across Jim Stuart's startled face. Wide-eyed, because of the dark. A little blondish moustache. But his finger had already pulled the trigger and it was
bang!
and Jim Stuart went down.

“It was dark. I couldn't see who it was. He had a specific order not to enter the house.”

Another long silence. Rhoda's eyes were open, but it looked to Decker as if she were focusing right past him, and listening to somebody else, because she gave occasional nods of her head.

“Saint Barbara can see right into your soul,” she whispered, and then, in her own voice, “Not yet.” Then she turned directly to Decker and said, “There's a spirit here … a spirit who's trying to warn you.”

Decker became aware that the kitchen was gradually growing colder, and he had the strangest sensation that the floor was slowly sinking beneath them, and the walls stretching, like the elevator in the haunted house in Disney World. Hicks must have experienced it, too, because he looked up toward the ceiling and then down at the floor, and then back up at the ceiling again.

“I wish to speak to you,” Rhoda said. “I need you to tell me more about Saint Barbara.”

The kitchen was now so cold that Decker could see his own breath. He could faintly hear a high-pitched sound, like a steel wire being drawn across the back of a saw. It grew louder and louder and higher and higher, until he could feel it in the fillings in his teeth, and his saliva started to taste salty.