“So you timed it for the tour group?” Riker turned to see Alma at the edge of the cemetery. She fell down again and did not get up this time, but crawled down the path on her hands and knees. “Very effective, but a bullet would have been quicker and cleaner.”
Charles jammed his hands into his pockets, and lowered his tell-all face to hide his thoughts from Riker. He stared at the ground, as though he might find salvation there.
“I understand,” said Riker, sounding almost genuine in his consolation. “It’s not your fault. The devil made you do it, right? And just where is our little Princess of Darkness?”
“The truth, Riker? I don’t know. I don’t think she’d trust me with that information.” And now he let Riker see his face as naked proof.
“But you can get a message to her, right?” Now Riker smiled, gleaning an affirmation from Charles’s silence and averted eyes. “I have to talk to her, and real soon. The kid must have been in a hurry to pull information out of government files. She got sloppy. The feds found her little footprints in a highly classified computer. That’s a federal rap, but they’re willing to cut a deal.”
“But you know she’s compulsively neat. So, our government said Mallory was sloppy, and you believed that?”
“Nice try, Charles. Tell Mallory to get in touch while I can still run interference for her, okay?”
“I don’t think she’d appreciate interference just now. Perhaps if you – ”
“How many people do you figure that kid has on her hate list, Charles? Twenty? Maybe thirty people? That’s bad, real bad, because Mallory wouldn’t waste time hating anyone she couldn’t destroy.”
Charles didn’t consider the import of these words beyond wondering if Riker knew he was mangling a quotation of Goethe’s. He had always suspected Riker of being much more than he let on. Beneath that incredibly awful suit, the badly spotted tie, the slovenly, crude, unshaven veneer, was a -
“I’ve known her longer than you have,” said Riker. “I watched her grow up. You know how much I love that kid, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then believe me when I tell you, for the last time, Charles – Mallory is a freaking sociopath. I know at least one of your degrees is in psychology, so why do you still have so much trouble with that? And don’t give me any of that ‘little lost soul’ crap. She doesn’t have a soul.”
“She does.”
“Doesn’t! She lost her soul before Lou Markowitz found her. Lou’s wife tried to knit her a new one, but the kid wouldn’t wear it.”
Charles was casting around for some defense of Mallory, and failing in this, he offered, “But did you know that she could play the piano when she was only six years old?”
Riker looked up at the sky for a moment. And then he shrugged in surrender and inclined his head as a bow to the absurd. Without another word, he turned around and walked away.
Now Henry was standing by Charles’s side, words flying off his fingers asking why this man said all these things about Kathy. “I’ve only known her to tell one lie. She said she was seven years old while she was still six.”
“She told a similar lie to a friend of mine,” said Charles. “When he was filling out papers for her foster care, she told him she was twelve when she was only ten. They compromised at eleven.”
However, that had not been her best piece of work. Louis Markowitz had brought the child home one night, after arresting her for theft. It was to be a one-night arrangement for his own convenience, or so he said. But he was a very warm and decent man, so that part of his story had always been suspect.
By Louis’s account, when young Kathy appeared at the breakfast table the following morning, her glittering eyes were cold, and she wore a very unnerving smile. His wife had stood behind Kathy’s chair and explained to Louis that he would not be taking the little girl off to Juvenile Hall, or anywhere else – not ever. Kathy was here to stay, Helen told him flatly, and that was that. And then poor Louis realized that the baby thief had casually pocketed his wife and one mortgaged wood-frame house in Brooklyn.
Until the day Louis died, he never underestimated Kathy Mallory again. Or so he said.
When Tom Jessop came home to visit his bed for the first time in thirty-six hours, he walked in the back door and found a package was sitting on his kitchen table.
How did it get there? The cleaning woman was not due back for days, and the evidence of her absence was the load of dishes in the sink, the hamper filled to overflowing and dirty socks trailing out the door of the bathroom.
Distrustfully, carefully, he untied the string and opened the brown paper wrapper. Now he looked down at the gun he had lost to his erstwhile prisoner. A sheet of paper was rolled around the barrel. He spread the curling paper flat on the table. He was so tired, his eyes were closing to slits as he read her letter:
You wanted to know what my mother said to me when she was dying. She wrote a lot of numbers on the back of my hand and told me to run to the public telephone on the highway and dial that number. She said a woman would come for me. Most of the phone number was smudged, so I never did get through to anyone. I just kept running. I wanted to run to you, but she said, ‘No, don’t go near the sheriff’s office, you’ll get hurt.’ So I always figured you were part of it. Until tonight, I didn’t know the deputy was in the mob that stoned her. That must have been why she wanted me to stay clear of your office. She was afraid Travis would hurt me before I could get to you. If I could get to you now, I would – because I want my pocket watch back.
He slipped the gold watch from his shirt pocket, opened the case and speculated on the name engraved above hers. Was this the man who had raised her? She must have loved him, she prized his watch so much. So it was Louis Markowitz who had been there for her when she needed help. It might have been himself, if only he had stayed in town that day. But Cass had known that he wouldn’t be back before dark – not in time to save her daughter.
A cascade of images overwhelmed him: the blood on the floor of Kathy’s bedroom, the small red handprints inside the closet, Cass’s flesh on the rocks in the yard. And now he saw Kathy as a badly frightened child, all alone on the road and grieving for her mother.
He walked around the house in the slow shuffle of a much older man, closing all the curtains. It wouldn’t do for any passerby to glance in a window and see the sheriff crying.
CHAPTER 17
Few creatures began life in November; it was largely a killing season. But in the hour before dawn, owls and bats were folding up their wings. Insects and small animals enjoyed a respite from the carnage before the balance of power shifted and the daylight predators opened their eyes.
The cemetery was at peace, but one of its angels was missing.
The chilly air of a sudden cold front had mixed up a low-lying fog, and the sheriff’s feet disappeared in the mist as he stood before the bare stone pedestal and read the dates of Cass Shelley’s life and death. Seventeen years ago, he had meant to add a line to this engraving, a bit of poetry perhaps, but the right words had always eluded him. All these years later, he was still thinking about this unfinished business.
He turned to his deputy, who blended so well with the dark. Lilith’s ghost-white father had been the most superstitious man Tom Jessop had ever known. If old Guy Beaudare had been here yesterday and seen that angel weep, he would have been down on one knee in a heartbeat, rattling rosary beads and chanting prayers like a madman. Apparently, Guy’s daughter was more at home in the solid world and not a big believer in miracles.