Unspeakable (3 page)

Olivia moved over to the window. Raindrops started slashing at the glass. She had a view of the sidewalk—two stories below, in front of the building's entrance. Biting her lip, she spotted him wandering away from the building. His shoulders were drooping, and he kept wiping his eyes. A woman passing him on the sidewalk stared. Olivia realized he was crying again.

All at once she felt horrible for throwing him out of her office. Maybe it wasn't an act after all. Maybe the poor kid was genuinely in trouble.

She noticed someone on the other side of the street who seemed to be watching him, too. When Collin or Russ or whatever he called himself stopped to blow his nose, the man across the street stopped, too—behind a phone pole. Olivia wished she could see his face. “What the hell?” she murmured to herself.

Collin took out his cell phone and started walking again. The man on the other side of the street from him began to move, too—in the same direction. Collin stayed close to the storefronts, their awnings shielding him from the rain. Olivia looked for the man across the street, but she didn't spot him. Was he hiding again? Her breath fogged the window as she leaned close to the glass and searched for the man. There was still no sign of him. Meanwhile, Collin turned down a side street.

Olivia heard a little click behind her, and swiveled around. The light on the base of her cordless phone was blinking. She'd shut off the ringer for their session, so all calls went directly to voice mail. She checked the caller ID:

“Good God, kid, leave me alone,” she muttered, nervously running a hand through her auburn hair. She waited until the light went off. Then she picked up her phone and pressed four digits.
“You have one message,”
the automated voice told her.
“Press one to play messages. . . .”

Olivia almost deleted it, but decided to listen to what the kid had to say. Maybe she'd end up playing it for the police. She pressed one:
“Hello, I—I'm really sorry to bother you again.”
He sounded a bit throaty from crying.
“I know I must have scared you in your office. But that wasn't me. If you're scared, please, think for a minute about how scared I must be. I don't understand why this is happening to me. You—you deserve to know the truth. My name's Collin, like I told you—but I'm Collin Cox. I don't know if you've heard of me. I'm an actor. But—well, what happened in your office, it was no act. It happened before when my friend hypnotized me, and I'm worried it might have happened again while I was sleeping. Please, call me back at this number, okay? You're the only one who can help me. I really don't know what else I can—”

The machine cut him off, and then there was a beep.

Olivia set the phone back in its cradle. She listened to the rain tapping at her window.

Of course she knew who Collin Cox was. That was why he seemed so familiar. He was the little boy from that thriller
The Night Whisperer
several years ago. Everyone knew the scene in which he was sleeping and suddenly sat up in bed to announce,
“The killings are about to start.”
He hadn't made many movies since then. But he'd been in the news four months ago. While she'd been going through her own nightmare in Portland, Collin Cox, the former child star, had been making headlines for his part in a grisly double homicide.

“You're the only one who can help me,”
he'd said.

Her office seemed so still all of a sudden—with just the gentle rain outside and her rock-sculpture waterfall trickling. The door was still locked, and the boy was gone. Yet Olivia felt the walls closing in on her again.

O
n the night of the murders, Collin couldn't sleep.

His mother and her boyfriend, Chance, were having a party downstairs with a bunch of Chance's sleazeball friends. Even with the tower fan on high speed beside his bed, it didn't create enough white noise to drown out the racket down there. They were really getting rowdy.
What a bunch of a-holes
, he thought, pulling the sheet over his head. Though he was hot and sweaty, Collin figured the sheet might muffle the racket a bit.

But he could still hear them. He thought about reading some more. He'd recently watched
The Diary of Anne Frank
on TCM. Shelley Winters had won an Oscar for it. So now he was reading the book. But he just couldn't concentrate tonight.

He thought about getting up and sleeping in the storage area off the closet. It might not be as noisy in there. But a part of him was stubborn. It wasn't so much the noise keeping Collin awake and annoyed. It was the presence of Chance's creepy friends in the house.

He and his mother lived in a dilapidated two-story white stucco in South Seattle. It was a rental. A check for the landlord came every month from his grandparents, who lived in Poulsbo. Collin and his mother had moved up from L.A. last year at his grandfather's request. “Old Andy wants to keep an eye on us—or on
me
rather,” Collin's mother had explained with a roll of her eyes. “So Seattle, here we come. Otherwise, your grandfather won't be sending us any money, and then we're totally screwed.”

His mom had already gone through all of his earnings from the film and TV appearances. With the Screen Actors Guild safeguards for child performers, Collin was never sure how she'd managed to get her hands on his movie money. He suspected she'd been sleeping with his lawyer or his accountant—or both. Anyway, the money was history.

So was his career—pretty much. Collin was a has-been at age sixteen.

Back when he was eight and supporting them both as a child model, he'd beaten out scores of other boys auditioning for a horror film about the occult,
The Night Whisperer.
It was Collin's first film. His agent had said there might be some idle time on the set. But no one had counted on all the delays and mishaps. The house where they shot several scenes caught on fire and burned to the ground. One of the technicians was electrocuted in a freak accident, landing him in the hospital for nearly a week. A stuntman lost a leg filming a car crash scene. Collin hadn't known him. Nor had he known the director's brother, who drowned in a boating accident during the third week of production. But Collin had been devastated when Marianne Bremer, the seventy-four-year-old actress playing his grandmother, died of a heart attack midway through filming. Ironically, her character was supposed to perish from a heart attack in a particularly scary scene. Collin had come to like the nice lady. Her replacement had been a crusty, chain-smoking old hag who had warned him up front,
“I hate kids, so don't try any cute stuff in our scenes together.”
She was some big-name actress from Broadway or old Hollywood. Everyone else on the set had seemed to think she was incredibly funny and cool, but Collin had never warmed up to her. For his reaction to her death in the movie, he had to think of Marianne—and that made the tears come.

With everything that had gone wrong while filming, rumors had spread about a curse connected to
The Night Whisperer
. People said it was because the movie dealt with the occult. But Collin couldn't help thinking something inside him had brought on this curse. These terrible things were happening because he was bad.

The anxieties he'd experienced at the time must have contributed to his performance.
Entertainment Weekly
had said:
Collin Cox, the incredibly cute kid at the center of these creepy goings-on, delivers a remarkable performance in his film debut. He's unaffected and endearing in every scene.
Collin had had to look up what
unaffected
meant.

The Night Whisperer
had become an instant classic. His line,
“The killings are about to start,”
whispered when he sat up in bed after a nightmare, was almost as famous as the movie itself.

Despite winning the People's Choice Award for Most Promising Newcomer, Collin's career had fizzled after three more films. It was disheartening, because his directors and most of his costars had seemed to like him.

But then there was his mother. It was embarrassing to hear what people said about her. Apparently, she'd made all sorts of demands from the studio during the production of each of his films. Those demands had included: her pick of rental cars—always the most costly models, one of which she totaled; an expense account for her own personal wardrobe; and lodgings at the plushest Hollywood hotels. The studio managed to hush it up when they were kicked out of the Chateau Marmont after the police busted up a party in their bungalow. “When the cops showed up, that was about four thousand dollars' worth of coke down the toilet,” Collin had heard his mom tell a friend later. “I'm sure it didn't do the Chateau Marmont's plumbing any good.”

Collin couldn't entirely blame his mother for his foundering career. He blamed himself, too. He hadn't realized how much his looks had changed in the three years after
The Night Whisperer
. But one afternoon at a newsstand, he'd seen a current, unflattering candid photo of himself on the cover of
The National Examiner
. He was at a film premiere, sporting a bad haircut and sprinklings of acne. Inset was a publicity photo of him from
The Night Whisperer
, a picture his mother had once described as “absolutely adorable.” The headline above the two photos read:
What Happens When Child Stars Are No Longer Cute?
The caption below said:

Of course, Collin had picked up the tabloid at the newsstand and turned to page three to find himself in the company of other child actors—some from two or three decades back—who had become overweight or bald or drug-addicted or just plain homely, like him. The captions were cruel. Not only that but all sorts of nasty items and blog posts about his declining looks had popped up on the Internet.

“You're just going through an awkward phase,” his mother had told him. “The preteen years suck. I promise, by the time you're sixteen, you'll be beating the girls off with a stick.”

It wasn't what a twelve-year-old needed to hear. Four more years of everyone thinking he was ugly? The movie deals dried up. He guest-starred on some TV shows, but those stints did little to advance his career. It was as if he'd become this great big disappointment to everybody—including his mom—simply because he'd gotten older.

Or maybe it was
The Night Whisperer
curse?

By the time they were ready to leave for Seattle, the only work Collin could find in Los Angeles was at supermarket openings and horror film conventions. At each one, after being introduced, he was required to say,
“The killings are about to start!”
It usually got a laugh and some applause. But he always felt like a jerk at those things.

Starting as the new kid at his Seattle high school, Collin figured he wouldn't have too much trouble making friends because, after all, he used to be sort of famous.

To his utter humiliation, the kids in his new school regarded him as a freak—and a failure. Even the theater arts gang snubbed him. He wasn't sure why, maybe out of jealousy or spite. Or maybe because he'd had a chance they all would have killed for—and he'd blown it.

He spent a lot of his free time riding on different Seattle bus routes, exploring the city. At home, he holed up in his bedroom, drawing. He revived a cartoon he'd created back when he'd been a little boy,
Dastardly Dave & the Shilshole Kid
. Dave and the Kid were good-guy cowboy outlaws—just like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, from his mother's favorite movie. In his new, PG-rated version, Dave and the Kid were wronged by characters patterned after Collin's unkind classmates. These villains always met a gruesome end. It was usually a somewhat comical, justified demise, too—like something out of
Willy Wonka
.

Once in a while, Collin would run away to a little shack by Shilshole Bay, which he'd discovered during a visit to Seattle years ago. He and his mom had been walking along some beach property his grandfather owned. In the woods, he'd found the shed, which he'd cleaned out and turned into a fort over the weekend. When he'd returned to Seattle earlier this year, he'd been amazed to see the place still standing. He'd cleaned it out again and bought a lock for the door. Whenever it got too awful at home, he'd take the bus to Shilshole and camp out in the little shack. He felt safe there—away from his mother's creepy friends.

His mom had started seeing Chance about four months ago, and he'd moved in with them shortly after that. She'd made Collin swear not to tell his grandparents about their new lodger. Chance had long, dirty gray hair and a neck tattoo. Plus he always smelled like stale cigarettes. Collin did his best to avoid him, which was easy, because Chance slept all day and went out most nights. But his seedy friends would drop by the house at all hours. It didn't take long for Collin to figure out Chance was a drug dealer. He was also a damn thief. A week after Chance moved in, Collin's People's Choice Award disappeared from the bookshelf in his bedroom. Collin confronted his mom, who swore Chance would never steal from them.
Yeah, right
. If it wasn't Chance, it was one of his scuzzy, drug-addict friends who had made off with the lead crystal prize. Collin figured his award must have ended up in some pawnshop or on eBay.

Chance was always inviting over his buddies to party—as if the place were his. Those were the nights Collin felt safer in a sleeping bag in a shack in the middle of the woods.

He wished he were there now—instead of tossing and turning and trying to ignore the noise downstairs. They all roared with laughter about something. Collin pulled the sheet down from over his head to squint at the digital clock on his nightstand: 1:36
AM
.

Downstairs, his mother shushed the others and whispered something.

“Oh, who gives a shit?” he heard Chance reply. “He doesn't have school in the morning. It's summer. The smart-ass ex-movie-star can sleep late tomorrow. . . .”

Collin listened to them laugh about something else. Then there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and after a few moments, his bedroom door yawned open. Collin sat up and frowned at the silhouette in the doorway.

“I thought that last round of laughter might have woken you,” his mother said. “Chance said the funniest thing about—”

“I've been trying to fall asleep for the last hour,” Collin interrupted. “But I can't, because of all the stupid noise downstairs. When are they leaving?”

She shrugged. “I wish they'd leave, too. But I can't exactly kick them out.”

“Yes, you can, it's your house. How many people are down there anyway?”

“Just Chance and me and four of our friends,” she replied.

“They're
his
friends, not yours,” Collin said. “And they're scumbags, let's face it.”

With a sigh, she strolled into the room. He could see she had a bottle of pills in her hand. From the hallway light, he also saw the lines on her face. Blond and petite, she used to be so pretty. Now she looked kind of beat up and wore way too much makeup. She had on a black T-shirt and jeans. She kept touching her nose and her lips, a sure sign that she'd just recently snorted some cocaine. The pills rattled in the bottle as she sat down on his bed.

“What happened to you?” she asked. “You used to be so sweet. My sweet little boy, that's what you were. What happened?”

Sitting up in bed, Collin said nothing. His eyes avoided hers. When he was mad at her, he always had a hard time looking at her.

“Listen, I'm sorry about the party,” she finally said. “It was a crazy, last-minute thing. If I'd known we were having company, I would have sent you to stay with Grandpa and Dee for the weekend. . . .”

Collin remained silent. Lately, he'd thought about asking if he could go live with his grandparents—full-time. Maybe then he'd have a normal life.

A woman downstairs let out a screech of laughter, and the others joined in.

“Christ, it sure is loud down there,” his mom admitted. She opened the bottle of pills and shook one out. “No wonder you're so pissy tonight. You just need a little help falling asleep. I'll try to hustle them out of here soon. Meanwhile, have one of these. . . .”

He knew the pill was Ambien. She used to give him half a pill whenever he was too keyed up the night before a morning call on the movie set. He'd been ten years old at the time. She'd give him a whole pill when leaving him alone for the night. He'd once overheard her telling a friend on the phone, “Hey, I need to have a life, too. And where can you get a sitter? It's either knock him out with a pill or tie him down in his bed until I return home. And I'd just as soon not tie him down, thank you very much. Besides, why do you care all of the sudden?”

A few years back, Collin had read stories about some of the pill's side effects—like sleepwalking, people preparing and eating food while asleep, sleep-
driving
, and even having sex while asleep. After that, Collin had refused to take any more Ambien.