The Girls He Adored (46 page)

A single tap eighteen inches above floor level in one corner supplied water for drinking and, apparently, washing hair, because lined up against the wall nearby were at least a dozen bottles of shampoo and creme rinse. No soap, just lots of shampoo. The only other amenity in the room, the privy, was a doorless four-by-four alcove, with a wood-grained plastic toilet seat mounted on a hollow platform over a deep pit.

“Over here,” whispered the taller of the two women, seizing Irene by the elbow, attempting to pull her toward the tap. “Please, it's best to do as he says.”

“Why?”

“To avoid unnecessary pain,” the smaller woman explained patiently, taking Irene's other elbow. “He's very good at pain.”

And what Irene saw in their eyes, glancing from one woman to
the other as they gently tugged her toward the corner of the room, sent the terror welling up inside her again. Because what she saw was pity—for some reason too frightening even to contemplate, these two walking cadavers felt sorry for
her
.

When she understood that they meant for her to kneel naked on the steel grate set into the concrete floor under the tap, Irene balked. Even together, they weren't strong enough to force her down; as they urged her, their eyes kept glancing back to the door in the opposite corner of the room. When it opened, they stepped away from Irene.

“Kneel,” called Maxwell, striding across the room naked, with the sewing basket over one arm, and gesturing to Irene with the barrel of his pistol. She knelt.

“You two, over there.” He waved the gun in the direction of the door; they obeyed, but instead of crossing the room directly, they scuttled sideways around the perimeter, blankets drawn around their throats, giving him as wide a berth as possible without turning their backs on him.

“Get your head under the faucet, close your eyes.”

After the fear, and the shock of the cold water, came the humiliation. Kneeling naked and powerless left Irene feeling not so much angry, or even despairing, as defeated. No more praying, no more bargaining, no more affirmations, no more scheming. She closed her eyes and let her head loll while Maxwell, his touch as sure and gentle as her own hairdresser, lifted and separated the strands of her hair, parting and sifting them with his fingers to rinse out the mud and leaves from the riverbank, the pale green clinging seeds of meadow grass.

Under the rushing water, a sort of peace came over Irene. And although the pychiatrist in her couldn't help putting a name to it— traumatic dissociation—Irene knew that what she was experiencing was beyond classifying, beyond analyzing. How presumptuous of her, she thought, to insist on dragging her patients back to reality all these years. Because in the not-here, not-now, she had somehow managed to distance herself from the pain and the unbearable fear. The once overwhelming emotions were still there, but at a remove; hers, but not her.

And not even the gentle tugging at her scalp as Max gathered her twice-washed, creme-rinsed, strawberry blond hair in one hand, or the annoying buzz of the portable clippers as he harvested it, reached Irene in the no-place to which she had retreated.

A
FTER POPPING DOWN TO
the basement to switch the power to the perimeter fence back on, Maxwell hurried upstairs to deliver the sewing basket with its precious cargo of human hair. Miss Miller's bedroom door was closed; he tapped lightly.

“Woman of the house!” John Wayne to Maureen O'Hara in
The Quiet Man
, one of their favorites.

“
Man of the house
, Miss Miller was supposed to respond. Instead, silence. He opened the door and saw she wasn't there, that the bed was barely rumpled. Max crossed the hall to his bedroom, slipped on a pair of shorts and a fresh hula shirt, and went to look for her.

But Miss Miller wasn't up by the chicken coop. Maybe the kennel—she might have gone for her minimum daily requirement of hugs. Her lovies, as she called them—how Miss Miller loved to get her lovies from her doggies. And they loved her too. Somehow they knew to be patient and gentle with her—they never roughhoused the way they did with him, but absorbed her endless caresses with wiggly-assed delight.

Max knew Miss Miller wasn't there long before he reached the kennel next to the sally port. Something was seriously amiss. None of the dogs came rushing to the fence to meet him, not even Lizzie with her waggling tail. He opened the kennel gate, saw three dogs whimpering in the shed, crossed the kennel yard, stepped into the sally port through the side door, and stared dumbfounded at a dismal sight.

His three senior dogs, Jack, Lizzie, and Dr. Cream, lay in pools of blood on the blacktop, the backs of their heads gone, blown
off, exploded from the inside out. He stooped next to Lizzie's body, stroked her short, greasy coat. His hand came away covered with blood and white flecks of bone and brain matter. He wiped his palm on her tail, which would never waggle again, then lifted what was left of her head and saw that she'd been shot through the underside of her muzzle. The top of her skull had been carried away, practically atomized by the exit wound of what must have been a hollow-point round fired from extremely close range.

But what sort of monster would do such a thing, slaughter three dogs in cold blood? Although Maxwell knew that law enforcement often carried hollow-point man-stopper rounds, Black Talons, Gold Dots, that sort of thing, it didn't occur to him that this was the work of cops. Cops didn't pick a man's lock, sneak onto his property, shoot his dogs, and carry off his teacher.

For the first time since the lights of Deputy Terry Jervis's patrol car began revolving in his rearview mirror, Maxwell experienced pure, mind-numbing panic. Crowd noise, confusion.

“EVERYBODY SHUT UP!” His cry filled the sally port; the crowd noise stilled. “I'll take care of this.”

Time to play detective. Max examined the lock on the outer gate: open but undamaged. He—it had to be a man: no woman would do that to a dog—had picked it, slipped inside. The dogs had ambushed him as they'd been trained to do, knocked him down and held him. He'd shot three, then blown off the other lock to get through the sally port and enter the property.

It had to have happened when Max had been down in the drying shed, which had been soundproofed, not to keep noise out but to keep it in. Freaking goddamn irony.

Anyway, Miss Miller must have surprised the intruder somehow. . . .

But that's where Max's scenario stopped making sense. If Miss Miller had surprised a burglar, where was she? Burglars didn't carry off old women. Rapists, maybe, but not even the most desperate rapist would consider Miss Miller a likely victim. Perhaps he'd killed her and hidden the body. Or—

Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw a flutter of white. He turned his head, focused in on the piece of paper caught in the dense ivy growing up the fence. It was a MasterCard receipt from— he squinted in the dim light under the sally port—the Shell station
just outside Umpqua City. And the name of the purchaser was E. L. Pender.

Pender. Thick-skull motherfucker. God double fucking damn the man again. Now time was
really
of the essence: Max had to know whether Pender had snatched Miss M and gone for help, or whether they were still on the property. But he couldn't just leave the sally port open and unguarded, so he found a twenty-foot length of dog chain in the kennel, wound it around and around the outer gate, secured it to the gatepost, and locked it with a rusty old padlock, to which the key had long since disappeared. He then hurried back into the kennel, dragged out the three remaining dogs, and closed them into the sally port.

If Pender were still on the property, Max reasoned, this would be his only way out. And if the FBI man shot the remaining dogs to get through, at least Max would hear him, and could sneak up on him from behind while he struggled to unwind the chain. And then may God have mercy on his soul, because Max would have none.

And if Pender wasn't still on the property? Grab the cash and haul ass.

But Max was always one to look for a silver lining. And there was one, he told himself, locking the inner gate of the sally port behind him with the lock from the outer gate and trotting back up the blacktop toward the house with the Glock in his hand. Much as he'd miss only the third home he'd ever known, much as he'd miss Miss Miller, he could almost convince himself that in a way, this might be the best thing that could have happened.

Because without Miss Miller to pander to—and pander for—the system known collectively as Ulysses Maxwell would no longer be restricted to picking up only strawberry blonds, or forced to keep them happy while hauling them halfway across the country back to Scorned Ridge. And no more having to fuck terrorized, halfstarved skeletons, either. The system would be free to—how had Jules put it in
Pulp Fiction?
—to walk the earth. To choose any girl who caught its fancy, and do with her what it wished, when it wished.

Didn't sound half bad. But first, Max had to find out whether Pender was still on the property, and he had to find out fast. How, though? Scorned Ridge was big, with dozens of places to hide. Then it came to him. He veered off the blacktop and raced through the trees, then cut across the meadow to the drying shed.

“C
ALLING
D
OCTOR
W
ILL.
Doctor Will to Live.”

Irene, lying on her side on the damp indoor-outdoor carpet, ran her hand over her stubbly scalp, then opened her eyes to the same nightmare she'd shut them against. The emaciated imp in the army blanket was squatting in front of her, silhouetted against the white glare of the ceiling, spouting nonsense, patting Irene's hand. Irene realized with a weary sense of resignation that the comforts of traumatic withdrawal were not for her: her mind was woefully clear.

She sat up. “Which one are you?”

“I'm Dolores—that's Donna.”

“Dolores Moon and Donna Hughes.”

“He told you?”

“I'm his psychiatrist.” Irene looked around the room, struggled to compose herself. “Was his psychiatrist. He murdered a girl down in Monterey. I was assigned to evaluate him—he broke out of jail and kidnapped me.”

“And now you're just another strawberry blond,” Donna pointed out. “Welcome to the drying shed.”

Dolores shushed her. “Donna, don't you see—if they caught him and he broke out of jail, at least they know he exists. They're probably looking for him.” She turned back to Irene. “Right?” she said hopefully.

“I'm sure they are. They don't know who he is yet—”

“Oh.” A dismayed sound.

“—but they have to be closing in,” Irene hurried on. “He killed a highway patrolman in northern California on Saturday morning.”

“What day is it now?” asked Dolores.

“Tuesday, the thirteenth.”

“What month?”

“July.”

A pause. Reluctantly, Dolores asked one last question: “What year is it?”

“Nineteen ninety-nine.”

In the silence of the drying shed, the echoes of both question and answer lingered for all three women. Dolores realized that she was well into her third year of captivity—one way or the other, she knew it would be her last. Donna understood that the first anniversary of her disappearance had come and gone. She wondered if they were still looking for her. Or if anybody missed her, for that matter. Not Horton, that was for sure. Nor that treacherous, husband-stealing Edwina Comb, either.

As for Irene, she was struggling to hold on to the last shreds of her composure. At no time during his interminable recitation of atrocities this morning had Maxwell hinted that any of his victims was still alive, much less only a few hundred yards away, underground. What
year
is it? Oh dear Jesus, what
year
is it?