“My lips are seals, as my niece is fond of saying.”
“Can I tell you something else?” Tommy asked.
“Okay.”
He realized that for the first time in as long as he could remember, he trusted someone completely. The feeling that he’d known Dani his entire life wasn’t quite true—he’d been aware of her for most of his life, but he was only getting to really know her now. Everything she told him made him want to know more. She got all his jokes. She didn’t necessarily like all of them, but she
got
them. Mostly he knew that with Dani, what you saw was what you got, and he really liked what he saw. She wasn’t hiding anything. She was such a decent person.
“I swore I wouldn’t tell anybody, but given the circumstances, you’ll understand. I can’t swear you to secrecy because it’s relevant to the case, but I know you’ll do the right thing.”
“Okay,” Dani said.
“It’s about Liam,” Tommy said. “He told me in confidence, and I told him I wouldn’t tell anybody. Summer before last, he had sex with a girl. They were both lifeguards at Lake Kendell. The point is, Liam didn’t turn sixteen until the end of August, and the girl had just turned eighteen. So he was a minor and she wasn’t.”
“And he felt weird about it?” Dani asked. “According to the law, he’s not considered capable of giving consent at fifteen.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “All he knew at the time was that this girl who was older and cool liked him, and he liked her. He was . . . let’s just say he was consenting. But she was extremely aggressive. So much that it really scared him. And afterward she got weird. She started calling him, but he wouldn’t go out with her again. He thought she was crazy. Eventually, she said she was going to go to the police.”
“That makes no sense,” Dani said. “She was the one who—”
“I know,” Tommy said. “That’s how little he knew about what was going on, but she said she was going to claim he’d been the aggressor.”
“What did Liam do about it?”
“He told me,” Tommy said. “He couldn’t tell his parents. The girl was the daughter of his parents’ best friends. I handled it.”
“How?”
“I talked to her. Privately, but in a public place where I had witnesses.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her she was being unreasonable,” Tommy said. “I’m telling you this because there’s a possibility someone is going to say Liam had trouble with a girl before. He sent her a letter that said, ‘Leave me alone or else.’ He was trying to sound tough, but a prosecutor could turn that around and use it against him. That’s why he called me instead of his mother when the police brought him in for the Bull’s Rock Hill murder. He knew I knew all this, and Claire didn’t.”
“How did you explain to the girl that she was being unreasonable?”
“Something about people fitting each other like pieces of puzzles, or not fitting, I don’t recall exactly, but it’s one of the stranger benefits of being famous,” Tommy said. “People give you a
lot
more credit than you deserve. I told her she needed to get help. She was just really messed up.”
Dani turned around to face him, their faces six inches apart. He was 99 percent certain that she wanted to kiss him, and 100 percent sure he wanted to kiss her.
“Can I just say—” she began.
They were interrupted by the sudden blare of a police siren, then by the white light of a squad car’s spotlight, its flashers flashing blue and red.
“Everything all right?” said a voice over the loudspeaker.
Tommy shielded his eyes with his hand.
“That you, Tommy?” the amplified voice called out.
Tommy told Dani to wait where she was and approached the squad car. Frank DeGidio was in the passenger seat. The cop behind the wheel was another local Tommy knew from the gym.
“Sorry, Tommy,” Frank said. “I didn’t know it was you. Is that that lawyer from the DA’s office?”
“Forensic psychiatrist,” Tommy said.
The cop in the driver’s seat turned off the flashers.
“She don’t look like any shrink I know. Sorry to bother you—we got a call from the neighborhood watch,” DeGidio said. “Somebody said they saw a suspicious motorcycle abandoned under a bridge.”
“It’s a Harley, Frank,” Tommy said. “What’s suspicious about a Harley?”
“Vigilance is one thing,” the cop said, “but I swear, somebody is going to hear a squeak on the front porch and shoot the paperboy. Crazy night. The wind blew a tree down on the lines and knocked the power out north of here, which happens like four or five times a year around here with all these old trees, and people are acting like it’s a sign of the apocalypse. Sorry to bother you.”
Dani met Tommy at the bike and offered him his jacket back.
“I should get home,” she told him. “It looks like the rain has stopped.”
“Keep it until we get to your place,” he told her. The moment had passed, but he felt confident there would be another.
But in case there’s any doubt
, he thought,
show me a sign
.
He put the bike in gear, let out the clutch, and accelerated slowly, then slammed on the brakes. The motorcycle skidded sideways and slid to a stop just as two dark shapes charged from the woods. He saw a pair of horses, one black, the other gray, eyes wild with fear, running without direction. The black horse slipped on the wet road, hooves clattering and screeching like fingernails on a blackboard. Then the big stallion righted himself, regarded the two humans with a snort, ears laid back, threw his head up and whinnied, kicked his front hooves out, and followed the gray across the road. The animals jumped the ditch and leapt over the stone wall, disappearing into the trees opposite as if they were being chased by something unseen.
“You okay?” Tommy asked Dani.
“Give me a second,” she said.
He felt her hands, inside the pockets of his rain shell, squeezing him and trembling.
“What was that?”
“A sign,” Tommy said. “But not the one I was waiting for.”
“Should we call somebody?” Dani asked.
“I’ll let the police know after I drop you off,” Tommy said. “This whole town is going crazy.”
26
.
When she got home, Dani checked her BlackBerry and read an e-mail from Irene, who’d been busy obtaining subpoenas for Logan Gansevoort and Amos Kasden. Dani called Kelly to make sure she’d gotten to Philadelphia safely. She called Ed Stanley, her grandfather’s friend from the State Department, and left a message to make sure he had both her phone numbers and all three of the e-mail addresses where he could reach her.
When she checked the Friends of Julie Leonard Facebook page, the posts confirmed what Tommy had said about the town going crazy, a collective paranoia that fed on itself. Three women proposed forming a drum circle to perform a healing ceremony, while several men proposed different solutions, variations on a theme of “If the person who killed Julie Leonard is reading this, we’re going to find you and take the law into our own hands.” There were dozens of reports of supposedly “suspicious activities.” A girl said her dog wouldn’t stop walking in circles. A woman said her tap water had turned brown. A man said he’d recently parked his Mercedes in the driveway, where it had been damaged in the night by hail, even though there were no hailstones on the ground when he discovered the damage.
Hysteria had more than a foothold in East Salem.
Dani started running the tub upstairs, then went to the kitchen to check and refill the cat’s dishes. After she took a hot bath to chase the chill from her bones, she went back downstairs to turn off all the lights and only then noticed that her cat hadn’t touched his food or water.
“Arlo?” she called out. “Here, kitty kitty kitty . . .”
She listened but heard no yowling in reply.
She opened the back door. Sometimes the cat sneaked past her in the morning and made his escape without her knowing it.
“Arlo!” she called out loudly. “Here, kitty kitty . . .”
Now she was worried. She reminded herself that there was no connection between a missing cat and a town gone mad, but that was how paranoia worked. If you looked for things to be afraid of, you could find them everywhere.
In the kitchen, she called again. She called upstairs. She called into the living room, came back to the kitchen, and opened the door to the basement.
She screamed as the cat darted past her, racing to his food.
“There you are!” she said, profoundly relieved. She picked him up and stroked his fur. “You scared the daylights out of me, you bad boy.”
She set him down and left him to his meal, closing the door to the basement.
Then she remembered, clearly, that when she’d left the house in her usual hurry that morning, the basement door had been open. She was certain of it. She’d noticed the door, slightly ajar, and said, “Don’t go into the basement, Arlo—there are scary things down there.”
Arlo couldn’t have locked himself in the basement, because he would have had to pull the door shut behind him.
So who locked the cat in the basement?
27
.
“I need you to come over right away,” Dani said. Tommy looked at the clock. It was almost midnight. Her voice held an urgency bordering on panic. “I think there might be someone in my basement.”
“Hang on,” he told her. “I’ll be right there.”
This time he went to his dresser, left his Boy Scout knife where it was, and took the .45 caliber automatic from its case, shoving the gun into the pocket of his leather jacket where Dani wouldn’t see it.
She was waiting for him at the end of her driveway, wearing her bathrobe over her pajamas and a pair of men’s Canadian Sorel winter boots. This time, Tommy had taken the Jeep. She climbed in, shivering. He turned up the heat.
“Love the outfit,” Tommy told her. “You look like a spokesmodel for the Hudson Bay Company.”
“My dad kept the boots in the garage for when he shoveled snow,” she explained, then told him about the basement door. “Just to rule out the obvious, it could have been the wind, right?”
“You get a lot of wind inside your kitchen?” Tommy asked. “Who else has keys to your house?”
“My sister, Beth, but she wouldn’t use them without telling me.”
“Do you have a spare key outside the door, maybe hidden under a rock?”
“I wouldn’t be so stupid as to hide a spare key under a rock.”
Tommy parked away from the house. She’d left the lights on. They sat in the Jeep for a moment. In his pocket, he moved the safety on the gun from the on position to off, then on again, just to make sure he remembered how to do it.
“Are there any lights on now that weren’t on when you ran to the garage?” he asked.
“Whisper!” she whispered.
“Dani, we’re fifty yards from—”
“Whisper!” she commanded.
“No one can hear us,” he whispered.
“Yeah—now,” she said.
Tommy told her to wait by the car. She followed him anyway, her hand lightly touching his back, the way a blind person might.
“Wait by the car—no way!” he heard her muttering. “Everybody knows it’s the girl who waits by the car who ends up hanging upside down from a meat hook. Wait by the car . . .”
As they approached the house, Tommy saw nothing suspicious. Walking softly, he mounted the back steps. When he tried the doorknob, it wouldn’t turn.
“It’s locked,” he whispered to Dani.
“I locked it behind me accidentally. The key is under the rock,” she admitted, pointing. “That one.”
Tommy went first. Dani clutched her robe closed at the throat. He kept his hand on the gun in his coat pocket.
Dani pointed to the basement door. Tommy put a finger to his lips and gestured to her to stay put.
“You’re not going to leave me here, are you?” she whispered.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s got to be one or the other.”
“I’ll wait here,” she said.
Tommy searched the basement. He found nothing out of the ordinary, other than that the glass fill indicator for her boiler was below that red line. He turned the valve and restored the water to the required level so that she wouldn’t run out of heat in the middle of the night.