The Ferryman (35 page)

“But Ralph Weiss came back for you.”

David nodded slowly, a melancholy smile on his face. “Thanks, Annette. Thank you.”

As Annette watched, Janine reached out and squeezed David's hand. They locked eyes for a moment; then David sighed and they all drifted back to the books in front of them.

After a time, Father Charles came in and cleared his throat.

“Hey, padre, what've we got?” Annette asked.

The priest swallowed, then shook his head slowly.

“Nothing, I'm afraid. Father Jessup's theories are merely that, theories, and he knows nothing more specific about Charon. The others I spoke to thought I needed time off. And I don't suspect you're going to find anything in those books, either. Needless to say, I waltzed around this subject as best I could, but nobody has ever heard of anything like it. I asked an old friend, a Greek Orthodox theologian who also knows his mythology, how you would stop a creature out of legend, like the Medusa or what have you, if it wanted to hurt you. I asked hypothetically, of course. He reminded me that Medusa was defeated by having her own power turned against her. Her own reflection turned her to stone. Somehow, though, I doubt we're going to be able to drown Charon the Ferryman.”

“Shit,” David said, his voice low.

“That's what I said,” Father Charles replied.

“Wonderful. The priest is swearing. That's a great fucking sign,” Annette muttered.

They were all silent for several moments after that.At length, Janine rose from the table.

“I'm going to check in with Larry, see if he's heard anything from the police about my mother.”

 
A now familiar dread had seeped into Janine as she had listened to Father Charles speak. Now she went upstairs to David's bedroom and picked up the phone, barely aware of what she was doing.

Escaping,
she thought. It was not only that she wanted privacy to speak with her stepfather. It was that she was running away from the ominous truth the priest had revealed without actually speaking the words.

They were fucked.

Nothing, not even a clue how to deal with Charon. No way to defeat him. He could come for them at any time. In truth, she wondered why he had not done so already.

Distraught, she wandered the second-floor corridor as she dialed the number of the Parker House.The front desk rang Larry's room for her, and as she listened to it buzzing in her ear, her eyes chanced upon the stairs that led up to the third floor.

Escaping,
she thought again. And what better place than the one to which David had always retreated to think, or to be sad, or simply to relax or wax nostalgic.

The first time they had made love, years earlier, had been in the turret room. David was not the only one who felt safe there. The urge to retreat there now was too much for her to resist.

Janine went up the steps to the third floor.

“Hello?”

“Larry, hi.”

“Janine. Have you—”

“No, no. I just ... I wanted to check in with you. So you haven't heard anything either?”

A pause. In his silence she had her answer, and she could hear all the pain that he would never put words to.

“Nothing. I talked to the police again, and they're looking into it. I've got people putting flyers up. And I was on the news tonight. Channel five.”

“I didn't see it,” Janine told him as she reached the third floor.“But that's great, Larry. If anyone saw her, they'll call.”

It sounded hollow even to her, and Larry didn't respond.

“Anyway, look, I just wanted to tell you I'm at David's. Do you have a pen?”

As he searched for something to write with, she wandered around the third floor. It was chilly up there, and the rooms were little more than storage space, which she thought was a shame. In the back of her mind, Janine could not look into those rooms without seeing children's bedrooms, even a study room, or a sort of rec room for the kids she hoped to one day have with her lover.

She squeezed her eyes closed as she thought of the child she had carried in her belly, the one who had died. The one she had wanted to name David. Janine bit her lip and pretended that the numb, dead space inside her was only temporary, that it would go away.

“Okay,” Larry said.

She gripped the phone a little tighter as she gave him David's phone number. There was an awkward moment before they hung up, as though each of them knew there was something missing, some endearment they ought to trade before signing off, but their relationship had never included that, and so eventually they said only good-bye.

With a sigh, Janine turned and walked up the few steps to the turret room, with its windows all around, its view of the night and the moon and the stars.

Her mother's corpse lay sprawled in a chair, positioned in a grotesquely lifelike fashion. Ruth Vale's eyes were wide and staring, almost completely white, and her mouth was slightly open as though in shock. Her flesh was blue and bloated, her skin the texture of raw dough, as though she had drowned and then been dredged up days later.

“Mom,” Janine whispered, her throat burning with the word.“Oh, God, Mom.”

As if to make certain it was not a ghost before her, or some abhorrent hallucination, she reached out to touch her mother's arm. At that gentle prodding, the corpse's head sagged to one side and stagnant water poured out of her mouth.

Someone screamed.

It took a moment for Janine to realize that the voice was her own.

K
indzierski jerked awake, banged his knee on the underside of the Toyota's dashboard, and swore loudly. Then he frowned deeply, blinked a few times, and listened to an echo that lingered only inside his head. He had turned off the radio so as not to drain the battery, and the street outside was quiet, almost eerily so.

Silence.

But a moment before, there had been a scream. It had cut through the veil of half sleep behind which he had retreated. Even while dozing, his mind was attuned, listening for something out of the ordinary.

A scream fit the bill.

“What the fuck was that?” Kindzierski muttered, rubbing his sore knee.

He bent forward to peer through the windshield at David Bairstow's house just up the street. Some of the lights were on, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. In the windows of the turret room at the peak of the house, shadows moved in partial darkness, a zoetrope of flickering motion, but he could not make out any more than that.

Still, the sleep-memory of the scream was fresh in his mind, and it had not been a dream. Of that he was certain.

Even as he mentally cataloged the various excuses he might use for dropping in on Bairstow unannounced, Kindzierski grabbed the keys from the ignition and stepped out of the Toyota. He craned his neck, trying to get a better view of the turret room, but could not. It was simply too high.

Reluctant to reveal to the subjects of his surveillance that he had been observing them, he knew that he had no choice but to investigate that scream. It was possible that it might have come from another house, but every instinct he had honed during his years on the job told him that was just whistling in the dark. His scalp tingled as though an illicit lover had been running her fingers through his hair, and his stomach felt as though he'd swallowed half a dozen live goldfish.

Something was going on.

Kindzierski bounced on his feet several times before finally making up his mind. Then he strode across the street and began to walk along the sidewalk toward Bairstow's place.

Two houses away, he halted and shook his head, disgusted by his own foolishness. Whatever lame excuse he might make up to explain his sudden appearance at the door, it wasn't likely to be convincing if he left his car parked down the street. Somehow his error seemed to increase his anxiety, for he hurried now as he jogged across the road toward his car, a big man in a dark leather jacket who was obviously a stranger to the neighborhood.Too conspicuous, yet somehow he was no longer worried about attracting unwanted attention.

The door was locked.

Kindzierski cursed himself in a low voice and fished his keys out again. He had programmed himself to always lock the car. Usually it wasn't a big deal, but more and more, a dark urgency filled him.

He slipped the key into the driver's door and unlocked it.

Then he froze. A shudder scurried up and down his spine. Kindzierksi frowned, wondering where the sensation came from. It did not go away, either. Instead it lingered like skunk scent, carried to him on some malevolent wind. But it wasn't an odor. It was a feeling. And there was no wind. In that moment there was no breeze, no rustling of leaves in the trees, not even the distant barking of dogs.

Headlights washed over him where he stood by the driver's door of the Toyota, but Kindzierski had heard no engine. Though he knew he ought to pretend he was leaving, get in the car and watch the other car pass from inside, something stopped him. Drew him with as much magnetic pull as a strikingly beautiful woman or the wreckage on the side of the highway after a car accident.

He turned, blinking away the brightness of the lights as the car slowed soundlessly to a stop in front of David Bairstow's house. It was only when the headlights snapped off that something else occurred to him: The engine had made no noise at all.

With the headlights off, Kindzierski could make out the vehicle. It was a brand-new powder blue Lexus, just like the one Ruth Vale had been driving when she disappeared.

Get in the car,
he chided himself.
Watch from the fucking car.

But he couldn't look away. The doors on Ruth Vale's car opened, and three men stepped out. Even from that distance, Kindzierksi suspected he knew who they all were.The driver was a black-haired kid, maybe eighteen, who perfectly matched Bairstow's description of the driver who had forced him off the road. The guy in the passenger seat was much older, late sixties at least. The old guy had white hair and a beard, but he didn't look a damn thing like Santa unless Santa had slimmed down and was seriously pissed off. He matched the eyewitness description of the man who murdered Spencer Hahn behind the wheel of his car in a Cambridge parking lot.

Riveted to the pavement, Kindzierski stared openly at them, almost guaranteeing that they would see him. In his mind, he scrambled frantically to put the pieces together, to try to figure out what the hell these people were doing at Bairstow's house, if it meant Bairstow was involved, or in trouble. But neither his astonishment nor his confusion accounted for the way he abandoned all common sense, not to mention his training as a police officer, and just stood there out in the open.

No, his seeming paralysis, the shutdown of the part of his brain that dictated logic and self-preservation, could be attributed to the third guy, the one who climbed out of the backseat and followed the other two across the driveway and the front lawn toward Bairstow's front door, none of them sparing even a glance for the linebacker-sized middle-aged cop in the leather jacket who stood staring at them sixty yards away.

The third guy was Spencer Hahn.

But Spencer-fucking-Hahn was dead, his throat slit by the white-bearded guy with whom he now seemed pretty damned chummy.

“Holy shit,” Kindzierski whispered.

The sound of his own voice was the catalyst he needed. The astonishment that had frozen him shattered and he could move. A minivan came down the street from the other direction and with it the world came back to life. A door slammed somewhere nearby, and in the Federal Colonial his car was parked across from, the radio began to blare, much too loud.

Kindzierski hurried across the street again, picking up speed as the three men went up the front steps of David Bairstow's house. The other two hung back as if intimidated by the old man, who rapped angrily on the door. As he jogged faster, Kindzierski reached into his back pocket for the small leather wallet that held his badge.Almost unconsciously, he reached inside his jacket and unsnapped the tiny strap over his gun. He had always thought it strange how, with the strap on, he could forget all about the gun.Yet with it unsnapped, the sensation of danger emanated from the weapon all through him.

The old man knocked harder now, impatient. The other two grinned at each other. Kindzierski's gaze was drawn again and again to Spencer Hahn. Someone in Cambridge P.D., never mind the M.E.'s office, had seriously screwed up.

No one in the house seemed to be responding to the knocking. The old man raised his fist a third time, but by then, Kindzierski had reached the edge of Bairstow's lawn, maybe forty feet away from them. He slowed to a walk, took two long breaths.

“Good evening, gentlemen. Can I help you with something?” the detective asked. He hung his badge out for them to see as he walked across the grass.

Hahn and the kid glanced up at the old man, who rolled his eyes as though he found Kindzierski's arrival tiresome.

“Get rid of him,” the old man said.

Kindzierski frowned, but before he could even respond, Hahn and the kid started down the steps toward him.

“You picked a bad time to get curious, Officer. The wrong place. The wrong time,” Spencer Hahn said.

There was something off about his voice, something bizarre. Like a ventriloquist drinking a glass of water while the dummy talked. But the observation had no time to take root in Kindzierski's brain. The two of them strode toward him with malice gleaming in their eyes.

The detective felt the ominous weight of his gun. He reached up and drew it with a speed he knew surprised anyone who saw him do it. These guys didn't even blink.