South Of Hell lk-9 Read online

  “Where was this hiding place?”

  “The cupboard,” Amy whispered. “Sometimes it took her a long time to come for me, but she always did.”

  “Did you have any other hiding places, Amy?” Dr. Sher asked. “Maybe a place you and your mother went together when things were bad?”

  “Momma has a special hiding place,” Amy said.

  A floorboard creaked, and Shockey came forward. Louis put up a hand, motioning him to stay back, to stay still.

  “Do you know where her hiding place is?” Dr. Sher asked.

  Amy frowned.

  “Do you know where your mother went, Amy?”

  “I… can’t…”

  Dr. Sher let out a breath of frustration. “It’s all right, Amy. Just stay with the memories. What happened the night your father came home and heard you singing? What happened after your mother went upstairs?”

  “It started to rain again. It was raining really hard, and it was very cold. I was downstairs by myself, and I was scared. But Momma came down to get me. She looked… she looked scared, too.”

  “What did she do?”

  “I… I knew something was different, something was wrong this time, because Momma was really scared.”

  “What did she do, Amy? What did your father do?”

  “He was yelling at her. He was yelling, and she was trying to get away from him. She grabbed me and told me to go to my hiding place. I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to leave her…”

  Amy’s breathing had become labored.

  “But she made me go, she made me go, and I didn’t want to, but then Momma told me I had to go to my hiding place, and she would go to hers. She told me when it was all right again, she would come and get me.”

  Louis felt Joe’s hand tighten on his.

  “Then… then the lights went out, and I couldn’t see her anymore. I lost her in the dark, so I did what she told me to do. I hid in the cupboard.”

  Amy drew in a sharp breath.

  “You can do this, Amy. You’re strong enough now to do this,” Dr. Sher said gently.

  “He is stabbing her with the knife, and she is screaming. It is right there in front of me, but I can’t see all of her, just pieces of her through the gaps in the boards. And when the lightning comes, I see her shoes, and everything is red, everything is red and blue, the blue floor has turned red, and I can’t see her face, just her shoes…”

  Joe pulled her hand away from Louis.

  “I can’t look anymore. I can’t look anymore, so I close my eyes and put my hands over my ears. I can’t look anymore…”

  Louis glanced at Shockey. There were tears on his face and rage in his eyes.

  “Amy? Amy, can you remember what happened next?”

  When she answered, her voice was small, as if she had become five again. “He’s gone. The kitchen door is open, and the rain is coming in. I crawl out. Momma is gone. And I… am alone.”

  “Did your father take your mother somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. Momma is gone, and I am alone.”

  Dr. Sher looked up at Louis and gave a subtle shake of her head, her eyes seeming to ask him what to do next. But he knew it was over.

  Whatever Amy had seen in that kitchen, this was all she could remember. If Brandt had dragged Jean out and buried her, Amy had not seen it.

  Louis felt Joe pull her hand away and looked over at her. Her eyes were wet. She looked exhausted.

  He heard a shuffling and then the soft click of a door closing. Shockey had left, closing the French doors behind him. Louis saw the blur of Shockey’s brown jacket as he bolted through the front door. Louis rose and went to a window, afraid the man was going to do something stupid like go after Brandt. But he could see Shockey through the window. He had stopped and was just standing on the porch, staring up at the gray sky.

  Dr. Sher’s soft voice brought him back. The doctor was bringing Amy out of her sleep state. She ended by telling Amy she would be able to remember everything she had said. Louis wondered now if that was cruel.

  Amy slowly swung her legs to the floor and looked at each of them before her eyes focused on Dr. Sher.

  “I didn’t find her,” Amy said.

  Dr. Sher hesitated, then shook her head.

  Amy looked first to Joe, then to Louis. And in Amy’s eyes, Louis saw something he had never seen there before: despair. The same aching despair that filled Shockey’s eyes.

  Amy began to cry.

  “Now I know,” Shockey said.

  They were standing out on the porch, Shockey staring out at the street, Louis at the window, watching Joe and Amy. They were sitting together on the settee, heads bent low, talking.

  “Yeah, now we know,” Louis said. He turned back to Shockey. “But given the fact that this all came out under hypnosis, there is no way they will let Amy testify against Brandt.”

  Shockey shook his head. “Then what was the point?”

  “Of what?”

  Shockey gestured back to the window. “Of that! What was the point of putting her through that?”

  Louis had the thought that Shockey meant “putting me through that,” but he kept quiet.

  “The point is, Detective, that girl needed to remember it,” he said. “And you needed to hear it. Even if you can’t do a fucking thing about it.”

  “I want to kill him,” Shockey whispered.

  “Then what would happen to Amy?”

  “I can’t do anything for her, Kincaid.”

  “You can show up in court Monday and tell the judge you think you’re her father.”

  “Father,” Shockey said softly. He looked at Amy through the window. “I don’t even know what that means. I look at her, and I…” He ran his hand over his face. “I look at her, and I don’t feel anything for her, and it’s like I’m not even really seeing her. I look at her, and the only thing I can think about is Jean.”

  Louis was silent.

  “Your girlfriend’s right,” Shockey said. “I have no business being that girl’s father.”

  Shockey walked off the porch. Louis watched him get into his car and drive away.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  It was dark. And she was alone again.

  The power had gone out forty minutes ago, and Margi had been sitting on the floor in the parlor, listening to the crack of thunder and the fierce rush of rain against the windows. Somewhere under the floorboards, she could hear the trickle of water.

  Margi drew her knees closer and leaned her head back against the wall.

  She had lived in lots of shitty places and had been in a slew of men’s beds in her twenty-nine years, but nothing had been as bad as this place.

  Had Jean Brandt sat here once in this same spot? In the dark? Heart in her throat as she waited for the door to open and Owen to come back?

  Margi wiped her face and pulled in a breath that rattled her ribs.

  How had this happened? How had she come to this? Owen hadn’t been a monster when she met him. He’d been a friend of her cousin she visited sometimes in the Ohio prison. Her cousin had told her Owen was in jail for throwing a woman from a car. She should’ve known then that he was mean. But he had been so nice to her, and she figured any man could change if he had a woman he loved enough to change for.

  Plus, she was so tired of being alone. Willy had kicked her to the curb after he sobered up and decided he could do better than a skinny high-school dropout who couldn’t have no babies.

  Owen didn’t care about babies. He told her that on one of the afternoons she spent talking to him through the Plexiglas. Told her he didn’t want any kids, because once he got out, he was going to move to Florida and get a high-paying construction job and a condo on the beach.

  She believed him.

  Eventually, he’d told her the woman jumped from the car and that she was mental or something and later ended up in an institution.

  She believed him.

  He told her every woman he ever loved had left him becaus
e he was just a poor, hardworking farmer who couldn’t provide luxuries for a woman, but deep down, he had a good heart.

  She believed him.

  He smiled a lot and told her she was pretty. And when he told her there must be a hundred other guys out there who would love on her and that he was damn lucky to have a woman like her, she believed that, too.

  A laser of lightning lit up the parlor. Outside, a piece of glass fell from somewhere and crashed to the porch. The trickle of water under the floor was beginning to sound like a running faucet.

  Owen never told her she was pretty anymore. Never kissed her on the mouth and never bought her gifts. Never even thanked her for a hot meal or for sex or for even being there outside the prison the day he got out.

  And now he brought her to this hole in the middle of nowhere, took her car keys, twisted her arm so bad it was numb, and left her alone while he walked in the rain looking for a dead woman.

  Margi pushed to her feet and felt her way along the walls to the kitchen. She knew there were some candles on the counter, and she found them, but she couldn’t find the matches. Owen hid those, too. Probably afraid she’d set him on fire one night.

  Cursing softly, she moved to the back door and stepped out onto the covered porch and into a spray of rain. She squinted into the storm, looking for the beam of Owen’s flashlight. It took her eyes a minute to adjust, and when they did, she saw the sliver of white, jumping in the darkness out in the cornfield.

  Margi watched him, more in morbid fascination than anything else. She grew wet from the rainy wind, and she felt a shiver snake up her spine, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Owen. And she couldn’t help but wonder if this particular ghost might just be real. She’d always believed in things like ghosts and ESP and UFOs. Heck, she’d had her fortune read more than once at fairs and by that psychic woman down on Burton Street in Akron.

  Not one of them had ever told her she would win the lottery or marry a millionaire or find true love. But one time, a woman dressed like a gypsy told her she would die young and that she should purchase a set of special salvation candles for sixty dollars and light them daily to save herself.

  Margi had been nineteen at the time and had brushed the prediction off as something the woman said just to suck her into buying the candles.

  But now she was almost thirty and living with a lunatic, and she wondered if the gypsy woman had been right. Was this where it would all end for her? The same way it had ended for Jean and all those other poor people buried out there in that crappy graveyard?

  “If you was going to leave him, Jean, I don’t blame you one bit,” Margi whispered to the air.

  The jumpy beam of Owen’s flashlight came closer. A few seconds later, she could hear the slush of water around his shoes and his guttural mumbling. Owen stopped at the bottom step and shined the light on her.

  “Get in the house,” he said.

  She slipped inside and stood against the cupboards as he came inside behind her. He spotted the candles and dug in his pocket for the matches. He was still muttering, but all Margi could make out was Jean’s name.

  The candles bathed the kitchen in a yellow glow, with shifting black shadows that jumped with the windy slap of branches on the windows.

  “You okay, Owen?” Margi asked.

  He spun around. His skin was slick with water, his eyes glinting like some sick animal that knew it was going to die. He held the flashlight in one hand and the broken skinning knife in the other. His palm was dripping bloody water from where he had cut himself.

  “No, I’m not okay.” He set the knife on the counter.

  Margi let out a breath, her eyes going from the knife to his face. “Owen, please,” she said softly. “You can’t keep doing this. We should leave here. We should go someplace you won’t have to think about her. Maybe Florida. You said you wanted to go to Florida. We could go there and-”

  Brandt drew back to smack her. She twisted away from him and his blow caught her behind the ear. She dropped to her knees against the cupboard.

  “Stop it!” she cried.

  He kicked her in the thigh. With a cry, Margi tried to scramble into the open cupboard. She couldn’t fit her whole body in, but the door gave her some protection.

  Brandt reached down and grabbed her hair, jerking her head back out so he could see her face. His hand went up again, but suddenly he froze.

  “Get out of there,” he said.

  “No!”

  He jerked her from the cupboard by the hair and tossed her across the slippery kitchen floor. She huddled up, thinking he would come after her, but he was just standing there, staring at the cupboard. Then he bent and looked inside. When he stood up, his eyes were glazed with something new, something that looked like it scared the hell out of him.

  He was clutching something in his hand. For a second, Margi thought it was a dead animal. Then she realized it was just a stuffed rabbit.

  “She saw it,” he said. “The damn kid saw everything.”

  “What are you talking about?” Margi asked.

  “This fucking cupboard,” Brandt said, pointing. “This is where that kid hid the night I killed her slut mother. She saw everything.”

  Margi kept silent.

  Brandt threw the rabbit down. “Fuck!” he said, pacing. “That’s why she has a damn shrink around her now. They’re trying to get in that screwy brain of hers and dig it out.”

  Brandt kicked the cupboard shut and snatched the bottle of Ten-High whiskey from the counter. He stood at the window and stared out as he drank it.

  Margi pulled herself to her feet, grateful Brandt had found someone else to be mad at but still scared at the way he was talking.

  “She was always weird,” Brandt said, like he was talking to himself and she wasn’t even in the room anymore.

  Margi stood perfectly still, her eyes riveted on the knife, still on the counter by Brandt’s elbow.

  “She always had this way about her, like knowing people were going to die before they did,” Brandt muttered. “Knowing a tornado was coming before the sky ever clouded up.”

  Margi pressed back against the wall, trying to think of something she could say to get him calmed down. “You mean like ESP, Owen?”

  He spun to her. “Don’t you understand nothing?” he shouted. “If she was in that cupboard that night, then she knows where Jean went!”

  Brandt set the bottle down and grabbed the knife. His eyes scanned the kitchen, finally finding his denim jacket. He snatched it up and started for the door.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m going to get the girl.”

  Margi wet her lips. Her heart was thundering, and she could barely find her voice. First he was chasing a ghost, and now he was going to go after a little girl. What was it about this place that turned people nuts?

  “Owen,” she said softly. “Why do you have to go after her? In a few days, a judge might give her back to you, and then you can ask her where her mother went. You get caught with a knife, they’ll send you back to jail.”

  He was shaking his head. “I told that fucking cop I wasn’t her father. This is the only way.”

  “But she’s got all those people around her,” Margi said. “You’ll never get close to her.”

  Brandt shoved the knife into his waistband, picked up the whiskey bottle, and took a long swallow that dripped down his chin. “So I’ll kill that nigger cop and that bitch woman and that stupid old doctor if I have to,” he said. “And when the girl tells me where her mother is, I’ll kill her, too.”

  Margi brushed back her hair and looked around. The candles were getting low, and soon there would be no more light at all.

  “And that motherfucker Shockey,” Brandt said softly. “I’m going to take extra special care of him. He’s going to pay for fucking my wife. He’s going to pay real hard.”

  “You going tonight?” Margi asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Brandt took another drink and tu
rned back to the window. From behind, she could see his reflection. The watery glass gave a distorted shimmer to his face.

  “Owen, please don’t go tonight,” she said. “You been drinking, and it’s raining…”

  Brandt mumbled something and took another drink, but he didn’t move away from the window.

  Margi drew a shallow breath and walked up behind him, never more scared in her life than she was right now. She reached around him and began stroking his zipper. He wasn’t responding real quick, and she knew it would be a grueling effort to get him off, since he’d already finished almost a whole bottle since dinner, but she wanted to try.

  “I’m afraid of storms,” she whispered in his ear. “Stay here with me, and I’ll suck you off real good.”

  He took another drink, quiet as he thought about her offer. She continued to stroke him. When he started get hard, he turned and faced her, put a muddy hand on her shoulder, and pushed her down to her knees.

  As she unzipped his pants, she wondered if Jean had ever knelt on this same floor and done this same thing.

  And she wondered if she had enough courage tonight to do what she needed to do. She didn’t want that little girl to die. And she didn’t want to die herself in this horrible place.

  She didn’t want that gypsy woman to be right.

  He didn’t fall asleep until after one a.m. Snoring and sated and naked from the waist down, he passed out on the old mattress in the dining room.

  It was easy to rifle his pockets for the keys to the Gremlin and easy to slip out the kitchen door and lose herself in the darkness. It wasn’t so easy to keep driving through the swirl of rain, the tiny car slipping and sliding on the muddy road and her head filled with guilt and fear and just about everything else a woman could feel when she was about to betray the man she loved.

  She couldn’t use the pay phone outside the closed Texaco, because she only had dollar bills, so she had to drive all the way into town. A couple of lights glowed in the murkiness, but as she pulled into a parking lot, she saw the stores were closed. The only thing open was the tavern.