Текст книги "Within These Walls"

Автор книги: Ania Ahlborn

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

WASHINGTON STATE POLICE ACCIDENT/INCIDENT REPORT

REPORTING OFFICER: Eugene Vetter

BADGE NO: 2874

DATE OF INCIDENT: April 1, 1986

TIME: 11:54 PM

INCIDENT LOCATION: US HWY 101, 4 MI N of Schneider Creek, Thurston County

VEHICLE(S) INVOLVED: Silver 86 Lincoln Continental

INJURED PARTY #1: Terrance Roosevelt Snow, deceased

INURED PARTY #2: Susana Clairmont Snow, deceased

REPORT: I received radio confirmation of an accident while just south of Taylor Towne, doubled back, and arrived approximately ten minutes after the call. Upon seeing the vehicle in question, I immediately radioed for paramedics. The vehicle appeared to have been heading north on US 101 during initial impact. Markings on the driver’s side of the car, as well as damage to the back bumper, suggest a possible sideswipe situation. Closer inspection of the damage suggests the second vehicle involved was red in color. Upon approaching the vehicle, it became clear that the car veered off the road after said impact and hit a tree. The vehicle sustained extreme damage, most likely traveling at an excess of 60 MPH when impact occurred. Both driver and passenger were unresponsive. The driver was slumped against the steering wheel with severe bleeding and facial trauma. The passenger was partially ejected from the vehicle via the windshield with severe bleeding, possible skull fracture, and multiple lacerations to the face, neck, and arms. Paramedics arrived on scene at approximately 12:08 AM. Paramedics marked both driver and passenger dead on the scene shortly after arrival. No witnesses.

26

IT WAS THE second morning that Jeanie refused to talk to him—though there was one slight improvement: she’d bothered to come downstairs for breakfast. They sat across the table from each other. Jeanie kept her head bowed over her bowl of cereal, surfing the web on her phone. Lucas chewed his bland toast smeared with cheap grape jelly—the kind that rolled around on top of the bread rather than spread the way it was supposed to. The bruise beneath her eye looked better, and perhaps it was just the blue glow of her screen, but the girl herself looked as though she hadn’t slept in days.

“Jeanie?” Lucas waited for his kid to reply, to at least look up at him. It took her a minute, but her eyes eventually flicked up from her phone. “Can we talk?” She looked down again, flicked her thumb across her screen, and shoveled another spoonful of soggy Cocoa Puffs into her mouth.

“Look, I know I screwed up,” he said. “All I can say is that I’m sorry, and that we’re going to move as soon as I can find us another place to go.”

She shot him another look, sat up in her seat, abandoned her spoon against the rim of her bowl, and sighed. “No,” she said.

Ah, she speaks. “No, what?”

“No, I don’t want to move.”

He gave her a skeptical look.

“Why don’t you just write your book?” she asked, her tone flustered, as though his stalling was cramping her style. “You wanted to move here, right? Because this house is, like, you know . . .” She waved a hand in the air. A crime scene. “Just do what you came here to do and forget about it.”

Do what you came here to do. That was easier said than done. Lucas dropped his toast onto his plate and leaned back in his seat. He glared at the table’s wood grain, contemplating whether this would be the right time to discuss future plans—the possibility of the book not getting done at all, the potential of him getting a job other than writing full-time, of doing something else for a while.

“What?” She could see the trepidation on his face.

“I was just thinking that maybe this whole thing isn’t the best idea.”

Jeanie stared at him.

“You know that guy I was supposed to talk to? The one in prison?”

She gave him a pensive nod.

“Now he won’t talk to me even though he said he would. He completely bailed on me.”

“So you’re just going to give up?”

Lucas grimaced. “You’re not hearing me. I don’t know that I have any other real option, kiddo.”

She looked away from him, stared down at her hands. A moment later, she was gathering up her bowl of half-eaten cereal and trudging toward the sink. She stood there for a while, peering out the window at the orchard just beyond it. It reminded him of how Caroline had acted the night he had told her that he wanted to move to Washington to write, how she had gripped the edge of the sink before turning to give him a look of disbelief.

“Let’s go somewhere today,” he told her, his fingers crossed for a truce. “We can go down to the beach, see what’s going on . . .”

Jeanie didn’t respond. He watched her shoulders slump as she continued to stand there, seemingly transfixed by the copse of cherry trees. Just when he was sure she wasn’t speaking to him again, she turned and frowned at him from across the kitchen.

“I think you should try harder,” she said. “Giving up isn’t going to get Mom back.”

He sat in stunned silence as he watched her step out of the kitchen, hardly able to believe what he’d just heard. Jeanie was prone to bouts of moodiness, but her statement right now had been unusually cruel.

That angst is going to be fun, Caroline had warned. Back at the airport, he had been sure that he and Jeanie shared a bond that Caroline didn’t understand. He’d been certain that, no matter how cranky Jeanie got, she’d spare him the worst of it. Sitting at the breakfast table with half-eaten toast decorating his plate, he realized that he had been dead wrong. Welcome to the teenage years, pal.

But Jeanie was right no matter how much it stung. He couldn’t just give up. He still had a week and a half left to reach out to Jeff, to get into Lambert and get that goddamn interview.

You’re a writer, Lou.

He had to try harder, couldn’t allow himself to lose sight of the point: he wasn’t doing this for himself, he was doing this for them. If he gave in now, it was like telling his kid that even the most precious things weren’t worth fighting for.

And there was nothing more precious than family.

27

EVERY NUMBER LUCAS tried for his final lead, Sandy Gleason, came up dry. The first two were disconnected. The third belonged to a person who claimed to have never heard of Sandy at all. The fourth was Sandy’s place of employment—a small mom-and-pop dog groomer that had gone out of business a year before. As if he might get a different answer the second time around, Lucas tried all three disconnected numbers once more before slumping back in his seat.

Scoring an interview with Sandy Gleason would have almost been as good as talking to Jeffrey Halcomb himself. Lucas wanted to know about Jeff’s attempt to get her pregnant. He wanted to figure out if Halcomb’s advances toward Sandy had been a onetime thing, or whether he had a thing for trying to knock girls up. He also wanted to know if Jeff had mentioned anything about the Veldt, Kansas, incident that resulted in his excommunication. Had Halcomb mentioned a belief of being able to bring people back from the dead? Had he somehow convinced his small tribe of followers of that very idea, resulting in the suicide of eight? Or had the whole back-from-the-dead thing been made up by Veldt to excuse Pastor Gregory Halcomb of any wrongdoing . . . because what kind of a man exiles his own son from the town of his birth?

When Lucas’s final lead resulted in nothing but disappointment, he sat staring at the linear wood grain patterns of his desk. That all-too-familiar dread was creeping back into his blood, poisoning him with anxiety from the inside out. He was at the end of his rope. His options were spent. If he wasn’t able to get in to see Halcomb within the next few days, his chances of talking to Halcomb twice were whittled down to once. And if he couldn’t get into that visitation room even once, the entire project was screwed. By then he’d be packing up his stuff, ushering his kid out of a goddamn house he should have never agreed on dragging her to in the first place. For all he knew, the current owner of the house on Montlake Road was in on Lucas and Jeffrey’s deal. Maybe as soon as Lucas vacated the premises, the property management company would alert the owner, who in turn would let Halcomb know. Boom, suddenly Lucas was in breach of their little contract and Jeff wasn’t obligated to see or hear from him ever again.

The possibility of the home owner being in on the deal nagged at him. Grabbing his cell, he called the property management company and asked for the owner’s information. This could have been a lead he’d nearly let slip through the cracks. But the damn place was listed under an LLC, not an individual name. It seemed that someone had done their homework to conceal their identity. Lucas could only hope that they had done so because of the house’s dark history and not because of what he and Jeff had going on.

Hitting yet another dead end, Lucas clenched and unclenched his jaw, trying to keep his frustration under control.

But the sudden memory of Kurt Murphy standing in the airport terminal waiting for Caroline pushed him over the edge.

His wife was gone. His relationship with his kid was fading. He still didn’t understand the point of Halcomb promising him one thing and doing the opposite.

His leads were gone. The project was dead.

He was fucked. Everything was fucked.

Abruptly, he rose from his chair. His arms shot out in front of him and did a violent sweep across the top of his desk. Papers flew in a burst of fluttering white. Books that had been at the corner of his desk hit the side wall, and his lamp crashed to the floor. The only thing that survived the onslaught of Lucas’s anger was his coffeemaker, the machine standing steadfast and true like the Little Engine That Could.

You are Lucas Graham.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

You can do anything.

“Fuck!”

It nearly startled him how loudly and forcefully the profanity shot out of his throat. It had been a full-fledged yell, a thunderous exclamation skirting a scream. What if Jeanie heard? He couldn’t bring himself to care, sure that his daughter had yelled that very same word at least a few times in her short life. Not that it mattered. He’d blown his chance at nurturing that relationship when she found him out. Because what kind of a father forced his kid to reside at a major crime scene? What kind of a dad was comfortable letting his preteen daughter live in a house steeped in blood, in a possible satanic ritual, in undeniable cult sacrifice?

The kind of father that could also run his only child out of town.

A selfish, single-minded sociopath.

The correlation skittered down his back like a spider.

“Fuck.” The word was more subdued this time, dripping with defeat. He shoved his hands through his hair, took a moment to try to steady his nerves, and shot a look around the room he had hit with his pent-up rage.

The coffeemaker seemed to wink at him from the corner of the desk.

Come on, Lou, just wait it out. Keep pushing. Keep trying. What else is there to do?

He fell back into his seat with a sigh. Plucking his cell off the floor, he speed-dialed Lambert Correctional. Halcomb was going to give him his fucking interview, and Josh Morales was going to return his fucking call.

“Hi, this is Lucas Graham.” He didn’t even bother to attempt at a friendly tone. “I have media clearance for inmate Jeffrey Halcomb. The last time I—”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Graham.” He recognized the voice. Lumpy Annie wasn’t feeling particularly friendly, either.

“Hi. I had an appointment for an interview, and he canceled on me.”

“Yes, Mr. Graham, I’m aware of that.”

“Has someone talked to him about this?”

“About what, sir?”

“About a reattempt at an interview.”

Lumpy Annie sighed heavily into the phone. “Sir, I told you . . .”

“And I don’t care what you told me, lady. I drove three thousand fucking miles—”

“. . . sir . . .”

“—just to talk to this fucking guy—”

“Sir.”

“—and this isn’t just a matter of him not feeling like it, okay? This is a matter of him telling me one thing and doing something else. I don’t care about his fucking rights, you get me? We had a goddamn deal.”

“Mr. Graham. I’ve already told you, the inmate isn’t taking any visitors right now.”

“Right, of course he isn’t. Except for some woman . . .”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

“And what about the message I left for Josh Morales? Why hasn’t he called me back yet?”

“I really don’t know the answer to that, sir.”

“Can you at least make sure that he got it?”

Another sigh. “Yes, sir, I’ll make sure that Officer Morales gets your message.” Lucas left his number with Lumpy Annie for a second time and jabbed his finger against the phone’s LCD screen, ending the call.

He paced his study, waiting for his aggravation to taper off.

It didn’t.

He needed a drink.

Stalking across the house, he pulled open the refrigerator door and grabbed a sweaty Deschutes. But rather than trudging back to his study—he was still too worked up to get a damn thing done—he remembered the cross Halcomb had passed on to him a few days before. He’d nearly left the thing in Selma’s Toyota. She had tucked it into the mail slot before driving back to Seattle. Before Mark had left his Honda in exchange for the U-Haul rental truck, in exchange for Lucas’s Maxima, which he had yet to pick up. Goddammit.

That was when he heard something crunch up the driveway. Mark?

Maybe his friend had grown tired of waiting for his car to be returned. And now Lucas would feel like an asshole for yet another thing he’d promised to do but hadn’t. This is my life, he thought. Nothing but an endless train of feeling like a dick.

Pulling open the door, he prepared his apology. I’m sorry, man. Seattle just keeps getting pushed to the back burner. But rather than Mark, he found his weird neighbor Echo standing on the front doorstep. She held a small photo storage box nestled against her chest.

“Hi.” She flashed him a wide smile.

Oh, what the hell? He felt like slamming the door in her face. As though he didn’t have enough aggravation, now he had to deal with this chatty Cathy.

“Hi.” Lucas tried to be positive in return, but he couldn’t help being on the defensive. He wasn’t in the mood for company, but clearly this chick hadn’t taken a hint on her previous visit.

“So . . .” She cleared her throat and peeked around his shoulder. Her long brown hair swept across the folds of her billowy poet’s shirt. She ducked her head in an almost coy sort of way. “Is it safe to talk, or is your daughter . . . ?”

“She’s upstairs,” Lucas said. “And honestly, I’m not in the mood—”

“Okay,” she said, cutting him off. “Sure, I understand. But I have something for you.” She lifted the box and shook it enticingly.

“What’s this?” He nodded to the box.

“Consider it a favor.” She casually sidestepped him and slipped inside, then slid her Birkenstocks off her feet and left them neatly beside the front door.

Lucas opened his mouth to protest. Hey, man, just because you’ve come bearing gifts . . .

He wasn’t sure he wanted this stranger inside the house. She was an oddball. Who knew what kind of shit she was into, living way out here on her own. But before he could ask her to leave, she twisted where she stood and gave him a knowing look.

“You’re going to flip when you see this stuff,” she said. “Do you have a place we can sit down for a minute?”

He furrowed his brow but motioned to his study anyway, his gaze not wavering from the box held against her chest.

Echo followed him and stepped into his study. She pulled open the box top, slid the carton across the desk, and pulled her hair back with her hands. Her attention slithered along each of the walls. The slowness in which her gaze traveled across the room was disconcerting, as though she was seeing a completely different room from the one they were standing in. He didn’t like the way she was looking at his things. It almost felt as though she was putting the space to memory, as if she was planning on sneaking in through a window when he and Jeanie were sleeping and didn’t want to trip over a piece of furniture while robbing the place. As though I’ve got something to steal, he thought, giving her a moment to soak the place in despite his own misgivings. Finally, he took a swig of his beer and issued a reality check by clearing his throat. Her attention snapped back to him.

“Sorry, zoned out.” You don’t say. She turned to the box as if about to dig through it, then clasped her hands together, looking back at him. Her temporary embarrassment had dissipated beneath the tight line of her lips. “There are different types of people in this world,” she began. “Leaders, muses, healers. I’m a helper.”

Lucas gave her a questioning look. “A helper,” he repeated, hoping like hell this wasn’t about to turn into some mumbo-jumbo lesson in new age philosophy.

“Yes.” She squared her shoulders. “Like my mother.”

Echo looked almost prideful at the statement, and he could only assume that she and her mother had been close. But it didn’t leave him with much to work with, so he nodded and encouraged her to go on with a plain “Okay . . . ?”

“I’ve been really contemplating this, and I know you’ve been thinking about taking off. You’ve been having a hard time with the writing, yeah?”

Lucas canted his head to the side, not sure whether to admit that he’d been toying with the idea of surrender or to take offense to her astute observation. She was nosy, assertive. She made him feel on edge.

“Like I said before, I’m not here to make trouble,” she told him. “But I can’t help but think that what you’re doing is great. I looked you up.” Her half smile made his skin prickle with nerves. A phantom buzzer went off inside his head. Warning! Was this chick a stalker or what? “That sounds weird,” she said. “I’m not crazy, I swear. I just wanted to see what kind of stuff you wrote. I bought one of your books.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep.” Here it comes. “Bloodthirsty Times, the one about the Night Stalker. It’s great. You’ve got real talent.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway . . .” She took a step away from the box and motioned to it with an open palm, imploring him to take a look inside.

Still unsure, Lucas watched her carefully before stepping farther into the room. The wood-paneled walls and green carpet usually gave the place a man-cave sort of feel, especially with his big old desk dominating the center. But it suddenly felt smaller, as if the walls had lost a square foot during the split second he had blinked his eyes.

He sidled up to the desk, placed his half-drained bottle of Deschutes onto the coaster he used for his coffee cup, and peered into the box.

He didn’t know what he expected to see—maybe a quintet of severed fingers despite Echo’s peace-and-love vibe. Some of the world’s most vicious killers came out of the sixties. They slashed throats and dismembered their victims while everyone had their eyes focused on DC, FDR, Vietnam. The most notorious were the ones you’d never suspect. Maybe Echo was an ax murderer moonlighting as a Washington coast hippie. The cops would never think to look for bodies in her vegetable patch.

There were no human remains, but there was a yellowed envelope marked “DO NOT BEND” in black Sharpie. Lucas reached in to retrieve it. A small stack of photographs was tucked inside.

The first picture was of a tall, overly serious dark-haired girl standing next to a guy smoking a cigarette. The man wore a cowboy hat and matching boots. There were pine trees behind them. The pair in the photo hung off each other like siblings. The second photo had those same two people in it, but they were now joined by a cute blonde with a crooked haircut, and who looked to be little more than a child. She couldn’t have been much older than Jeanie. By the third photo, Lucas had lost his breath. He knew these kids, knew them from the countless pictures he’d seen on the Internet and in old articles. Except these were nothing he’d ever be able to match in an image search. These were someone’s personal items, photos they had taken of Halcomb and his brood.

“Holy shit,” he whispered, his throat suddenly dry. His eyes darted to Echo’s face, and the moment their eyes met, her mouth curled up in a satisfied smile. “Where did you get these?” He went back to the photos in his hands, afraid that if he looked away for too long they’d disappear, too good to be real. What he was holding was true-crime gold. If Lucas could publish them in his book, John would push for a blockbuster, one-day laydown release. Screw the writing—people would buy the damn thing just to get an eyeful of these never-before-seen pictures. But the real question wasn’t where Echo had obtained such items; it was how she had known to time her arrival so perfectly. It was strange, as though she hadn’t just googled him but had been peering through the window of his study, waiting for the precise moment to introduce him to his own salvation.

“My family has owned the house down the road for a long time,” she said. “My mom lived there in the early eighties.”

“Your mom? You mean . . .”

Echo nodded. “She knew them. She and Audra Snow were best friends.”

Lucas’s stomach flipped. “You’re kidding me.” Was this really luck? Could serendipity truly be this fortuitous?

She shook her head with a little laugh. “I swear I’m not joking.”

Setting the photos aside, he reached into the box once more and drew out a stack of brittle newspaper clippings, most of which he’d read before. But that didn’t matter. If Echo’s mother knew Audra, really knew her, it was another lead.

“Why are you showing me this?” He shot her a look, unable to keep his suspicions at bay. “We don’t even know each other. You realize this stuff . . .”

Echo held up a hand, assuring him that he didn’t have to finish his statement. She knew. The contents of this box would change everything. It would, perhaps, even change his life.

“I told you, I’m a helper. I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do, at least to pay homage to Audra in my mother’s name.”

Shit. That meant Echo’s mom wasn’t around anymore. But he still had Audra’s best friend’s daughter. Hell, maybe Audra was like an aunt to Echo when she was a kid. Maybe Echo had met the group herself. She’d been young, but that didn’t mean she’d forgotten it all.

“When I came to introduce myself, you put out this vibe,” Echo explained. “You were in distress. I picked up on it right away. I suppose I’m just a good guesser.” She shrugged. “I figured that maybe, since you said you were going to move away from here, that distress had something to do with your job. And so, here I am.” She lifted a shoulder, smiled. “Just remember me when you finish your book. Give me a mention. Maybe even offer me one of those beers.”

“Oh God.” Lucas shot a glance at his nearly empty bottle. “I’m sorry, do you—”

“It’s okay.” She cut him off. “Next time. I just wanted to drop that off. After all, you have a lot of work to do.”

Lucas shook his head, hardly understanding any of this. It was impossible, a situation that only happened in movies—a happy coincidence that could never occur in real life. Too perfect. But he decided to put his trepidation aside. This was too much of a good thing to lose to his own paranoia. “Hey, I can’t just let you give this to me,” he told her. “Let me pay you or something.”

“I’m not selling them,” she said. “You’re borrowing them, that’s all.”

“No, no, I understand, I just don’t . . . I don’t feel right. I don’t think you understand how incredible this stuff is. It’s invaluable. Priceless. This is like . . .” He struggled to find the words.

She finished his sentence. “It’s the Halcomb Holy Grail, yes, I’m aware. If anyone will put it to good use, I’m confident it’s you. I’m a helper, remember?” Echo lifted her hands, wiggled her fingers at him as if summoning some unknown, mystical force. “The color of your aura is already changing. That distress is dissipating, which means I’ve done my job.”

He didn’t know what to say. It was a kindness that he couldn’t begin to understand, especially after not being that accommodating a neighbor. He hadn’t been on his best behavior when Echo had paid her first visit, and yet here she was, fulfilling her spiritual role. He took a breath and slowly exhaled. “Beer,” he said. “A thousand bottles of whatever you choose—just tell me what you like and come over whenever you want.”

Echo smiled at the offer. “That would be nice.” She cast a look around the room again and nodded. “I’d like that.”

“Then that’s what it’ll be,” Lucas said. Good fences make good neighbors, his father would have grumbled, but this time his dad would have been wrong. This strange granola girl had made his day. His year. Possibly his career.

And even though he had been cursing Halcomb not a half hour before, now he couldn’t help but think, Thank God he talked me into moving to Pier Pointe. Because without Pier Pointe, he wouldn’t have met Echo, and without Echo, there would be no hope. Suddenly, his dead project was alive and kicking.

Screw Jeffrey Halcomb. If he didn’t want to talk, Lucas would talk to Echo, the next best thing, instead.