Malevolent (15 page)

No, not the pudgy, back-from-vacation couple. Someone else. In the adjoining aisle.

Vincent backed away from a high stack of canned soups and stared intently into it, as if he could train his vision through it. He took a hurried step forward, leaned as close to the cans as possible and began to paw through them. To passersby, he must have looked like a nearsighted shopper who absolutely had to have the last can of Chunky Chicken Noodle.

In reality, he was digging a tunnel through the shelf wall.

Yes…he definitely heard steady breathing on the other side. Somebody was in that aisle, frozen. Unmoving. Waiting.

Vincent reached a hand into that wall of aluminum, pressed on until his hand struck a solid object. A wall composed of more than produce cans.

The man on the other side chuckled softly, the sound muffled by the obstruction between them.

Vincent stepped back, glared at the sunburned couple as they wheeled slowly by. What were
they
staring at?

He studied the soup display. It was a game of sorts to the bastard on the other side. He obviously wanted Vincent in pursuit, but for God’s sake why? He looked to his left, then to his right. Two kids raced past, pumping skinny arms.

He was in about the middle of the aisle. Meaning that whichever way he chose to go, the man in the khaki suit could evade him by dashing the other way.

Or…

No, he wasn’t about to do this, was he? Apparently he was. Vincent was now swatting aside soup cans with his foot so he could step on the bottom shelf. It trembled with his weight, maybe even bent slightly, but held. He gripped the top shelf with white fingers and pulled himself up, knocking aside soup cans as he scaled the wobbly shelved wall. As it groaned, he tried ignoring the sounds of metal fatigue and imminent collapse. With a grunt, he raised himself so he stood at eye level with the top of the shelving unit. From here he stared down Frito-Lay chip packages stacked on the other side. He still couldn’t see anything on that adjoining aisle—anything but snack food packaging—but he could hear just fine.

Another infuriating chuckle.

He felt a shelf begin to buckle and his right foot started to sink slowly along with the weakened metal. Soup cans slid to the shelf’s new center as support braces bent.

Uh oh.

Vincent had little time to think about it. He grabbed a family-size can of stew and tossed it over like a grenade.

He was rewarded with a satisfying grunt from the other aisle as a support brace under him snapped like a small, contained explosion. More cans shifted toward Vincent’s foot, but he hopped off the structure and nimbly danced out of the way as a cascade of aluminum cans rained to the floor. He ignored them, ignored the open-mouthed mother with newborn carrier wedged into her cart, ignored the small man with twitching mustache and supermarket uniform who stared at him.

Vincent raced to one end of the aisle and made a tight turn. He’d show the bruised bastard what he was up against messing with
his
family. He skidded to a stop at the top of that adjoining aisle.

“Goddamn, what the hell happened here?” The grizzled man was rubbing his crown and wincing while four or five cart-pushers surrounded him. Vincent watched as the onlookers shifted glances from the old man to Vincent to the incriminating dented stew can on the floor.

“I’m…sorry,” he said, the words choking him as they came up his throat. “Did any of you see a well-built man in a khaki suit?”

The onlookers continued to stare. More of them now, all nervously awaiting his next move.

“I knocked over a can,” he said. “Accidentally.” It seemed from the looks he was getting that he would have been better off without explanation. “I’m wondering if anyone saw—”

“Sir?” The twitching man with the mustache said nothing else, as though nothing else needed to be said.

Vincent backed up and crept quietly out of the aisle. He walked past other aisles, looking for one familiar face. Some were empty, some contained shoppers he’d never seen before. He ignored them all until he got to paper products.

He stopped. Stared. Moved slowly down the aisle, creeping closer to the empty cart. Not too close, though. He stayed back as though fearful that it might be ticking. He walked around it, scrutinizing its contents. Fourteen items, he observed.

A small woman with a huge bag of dog food teetered by.

“Is this your cart?” he asked her, hoping he sounded breezy, cheerful, unconcerned.

She smiled at him, shook her head, told him it wasn’t.

Vincent swallowed. He was breathing heavily now and his face glistened. He knew he was acting odd, but maybe the fact that he recognized the oddness of his behavior meant there was nothing wrong.

All fourteen items in that grocery cart, they were his. Topped by that jar of tomato sauce he’d tossed in, landing it, unfortunately, on the package of wheat crackers he’d earlier claimed. He looked up, as though for the first time, and knew without doubt that he hadn’t trundled his cart down the paper products aisle.

“Son of a bitch,” he said as he hustled back to the canned goods aisle where his grocery cart should be awaiting his return.

It wouldn’t be there, he told himself. Wouldn’t be there because the man in the khaki suit had moved it for reasons known only to him. Because he was unbalanced, that’s why. But why was he doing these things? What had Vincent ever done—?

There it was. His cart. Exactly where he’d left it. Right by the saggy and nearly empty soup can shelf that had drawn a crowd of onlookers and scowling supermarket personnel. They looked up at him. Someone pointed him out.

Vincent felt woozy. He only half-heard the footsteps coming his way.

“Sir?” said the twitchy-mustache man, like before. “Sir, I think you’d better—”

“Thank you,” said Vincent. Something to say, he supposed, before taking off again.

He sprinted down the aisle, past the aluminum can earthquake. He tripped over an institutional-size can of baked beans, absentmindedly bent and tossed it into his cart.

See? He’d done his part to help clean up the mess that had
accidentally
occurred.

So the man in the khaki suit wanted to play, did he? He’d stolen Vincent’s cart, then outraced him to return it to its proper place. Or…or…or…

Maybe it was easier than that. He hadn’t stolen Vincent’s cart at all. He’d merely duplicated Vincent’s purchases so that the two would be mistaken for one and the same.

Why? Head games, of course. Because he was fucking nuts and wanted to make Vincent the same way. Well fuck that. That was
not
going to happen.

“Excuse me, sir?” This voice was deeper than twitchy-mustache man’s. He was taller too. Broader. Much broader. And wore a gun on his hip.

Vincent sped past him like a running back creating his own holes.

“Listen, fella!” the armed guard shouted.

Vincent ignored him. He was very, very frightened, might just as well admit it. Back at the paper products aisle again, thundering footsteps coming up behind him, he saw the same cart he’d seen before. The cart that had been diabolically duplicated by the well-built man, for reasons only he would know.

Only now the cart had been almost imperceptibly altered. Fifteen items now. The institutional-size can of baked beans had landed on top of a package of dry noodles.

As his hands were twisted painfully behind his back by the burly security guard breathing heavily behind him, Vincent had no idea what the fuck to think.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Mrs. Lascic had kept her distance for three or four glorious days, but the streak ended on Monday afternoon. She hailed Tim as he coasted up the drive on his bike and he answered with a lilt to his voice that was a complete lie.

She came down from her porch and strolled across her walk, arms crossed over her ample bosom. “Been out riding again, I see. Nice pleasant day like this, I see why you’d want to be out playing. We’d all like that.”

Tim had just left Griffin’s mother’s house in Parma where he and Griffin had spent a good part of the day talking. They’d watched a little television, played a little Xbox 360 and stared at a chessboard, but mostly it had been
work
. Developing theories and countertheories about the mystery DVD, the phantom blonde and the rest.

“It’s a terrible thing, but not so surprising,” Mrs. Lascic was saying. “I warned Gina Kendall about that place, but I’m just a superstitious old woman, I could practically hear her think the words.”

Tim returned from wherever his thoughts had taken refuge. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lascic. What did you say?”

“Which part of my conversation do you wish me to repeat? At what point did I lose you?”

Tim spit out an apology like it was bad tuna. “Can you start over again, please?”

She sighed heavily. “Sara Lamplighter learned from Mrs. Davenport, who lives across the way from the Kendalls on Hilland, that Travis Kendall—Gina’s husband, of course—that he put a gun in his mouth last night and pulled the trigger.”

His confusion showed, and drew another sigh from the heavy woman. “You know the Kendalls.
Should
know them. Your Patty knows Gina, met her the other night over at that godforsaken church.”

Tim, still straddling his bike, squeezed a hand brake a couple times. Curious that Patty had discussed her church visit with Mrs. Lascic, of all people. And not with him.

He hated himself for having to ask, “Who’s Sara Lamplighter?”

Mrs. Lascic shook her head grimly. “It used to be, people knew their neighbors. Knew their mailman, milkman, the man who delivered the coal and ice. Now they hide behind their locked doors, join chat groups on the Internet. Facebook. Think that’s socializing.”

“About the church,” he prodded, determined to get her back on track.

Mrs. Lascic peered up and down the street as she muttered, “Sara and Kent Lamplighter, two more I warned, but they wouldn’t listen. Do these people think I talk only to hear the sound of my voice?”

Tim let that one go without comment. He said, very slowly, so he’d get it right, “Travis Kendall killed himself recently. He’d been a member of the Utica Lane Church of Redemption.”

“What I’ve been trying to tell you. He was having money problems or something,” she said breezily.

Hey, who wasn’t?

“But you had earlier warned Travis’s wife and the Lamplighters away from the church—is that what you’re saying?”

She sighed again, as though he was hopeless. “After that minister, Melvin Frost, killed his daughter and nearly murdered his own wife seven years ago, he told everyone it was the church made him do it. No one else believed him, but I did.”

Mrs. Lascic crushed her immense breasts between her folded arms. “Everyone else, they were so ready to blame mental illness, that great explanation for everything that goes wrong in people today. The devils and demons the world used to know, they’ve been replaced by troubled childhoods and chemical imbalances. But the evils, they don’t just go away because everyone ignores them.”

She was just warming up.

“These people with their scientific explanations, I don’t see them traipsing to that church. I don’t see nobody in there till that Vincent Applegate plucked that
For Sale
sign from the front yard and opened the doors and stirred things up again, and now look what’s happening. The biggest fools are the ones who were there before, and now they’re coming back for more.”

Mrs. Lascic paused for breath. Took her time, because she knew she could. Tim, as badly as he wanted to leave her, couldn’t move. She said, “And to make matters worse, they’re going to hold Travis Kendall’s memorial service in that same building that killed him. Will you catch me stepping inside that damn church? Hah!”

Tim tried holding back because he really didn’t need to know the answer to his next question, but had to ask it anyway. “When did you say this memorial service was going to be held?”

Don’t bother telling me,
he silently pleaded his landlady, but of course she was more than happy to do so.

Part Three

Phantoms

Chapter Twenty-Five

To her, there was nothing more terrifying than the prospect of self-inflicted death. She had a hard time imagining circumstances or emotional disorders that would override the instinct for self-preservation and cause someone to pull the trigger, inhale the fumes, swallow the pills or drive off the cliff. That Travis Kendall had somehow taken that last, nonnegotiable step terrified Patty Kimmler as much as it seemed to affect the others who paid their respects that evening at the Utica Lane Church of Redemption.

Mercifully, there was no body. Patty had always felt the exhibition of loved ones in pancake makeup and formaldehyde to be a gruesome tradition.

“The strangest thing,” said a small, lifeless woman in a folding chair in the church vestibule, “is that, deep inside, Travis was still very Catholic.”

Meaning, Patty imagined, that suicide had been thought to be out of the question.

The woman in the chair had the pink cheeks and washed-out blue eyes of an overworked Irish scrubwoman. Surrounded as she was by pitying glances and patting hands, Gina Kendall was easily identified as the shocked widow even if Patty hadn’t vaguely remembered her from her last church visit. The widow sniffed her pink nose with a tattered tissue.