Phantom Prey

Phantom Prey

Prey 18

Chapter
1.

Something Wrong Here,
A Cold Whisper Of Evil.

The house was a modernist relic, glass and stone and redwood, sixty years old and gone creaky; not all haunted houses were Victorian. Sometimes at night, when she was alone, she'd feel a sudden coolness, as though somebody, or some
thing,
had just slipped by. This was different. She couldn't pin it down, but it was palpable.

She thought about stepping back into the garage.

"Who's there?" she called. She got nothing back but an echo.

The house was dark,
except for desk lamps in the front room and in the study, which were triggered by photocells at dusk. She could hear the furnace running. Nothing else--but the hair on her forearms and the back of her neck stood upright. Some atavistic sense was picking up a threat.

She looked to her right. The arming light on the security panel was steady, so the security system had been disarmed. That was decisive. The house should be empty, the security system should be armed.

She stepped back, moving quickly, around the nose of the Jaguar to the Mercedes. She yanked open the driver's-side door, reached unde
r t
he front seat to the storage bin, popped the lid, and lifted out the Ladysmith .38.

Stood listening again, the gun cool in her hand, and heavy. Couldn't even hear the furnace, now. The Mercedes's engine pinged, cooling down. The overhead garage lights were still on and she watched the door to the house. Something wrong, but the house felt empty
.

Her nose twitched. She could smell exhaust from the car, but when she'd stepped through the door to the house, there'd been something else. A subtle stink that shouldn't have been there. Not sweat, not body odor, not perfume, not flatulence, but something organic. Meat?

She had her purse over her shoulder, her cell phone right there. Call the police? What would she tell them? That something was not right? That something smelled a little funky? They'd think she was crazy

She put her purse on the hood of the Jag, held the gun in front of her, like the handgun instructor had shown her. She was an athlete, and a professional athlete at that: swimming, dance, martial arts, weights, Pilates, yoga. The hard stuff: her body control was nearly perfect. She'd shot the eyes out of the gun-instructor's bad-guy target.

He'd been mildly impressed, but only mildly. A cop for most of his life, he'd told her that every shooting he'd ever seen had been a screwup.

"The question is not whether you can hit something at seven yards. The question is whether you can sort out all the problems, when you've got a loaded gun in your hand," he'd said, a rehearsed speech that might have been written on a 3x5 card. "You have no time, but you have to figure out what's happening--what's going on. To shoot or not to shoot: it all comes down to a tenth of a second, in the dark. You don't want to shoot your kid or a neighbor. You don't want to
not
shoot a junkie with a butcher knife coming for your throat."

There wouldn't be
a neighbor in the house. The neighborhood was private, standoffish. People drew their friends from their businesses, from their schools, not from the street. The housekeeper was long gone.

Her daughter? Frances had the security code but she always called ahead.

She called out: "Francie?"

No response.

Again, louder. "Fran? Are you there?"

Starting to feel foolish, now. Then she remembered what the gun instructor had told her. "About the time you start to feel like an idiot, that's when they'll get you. If you're scared enough to have the gun out, then the situation is serious enough that you can't be
abashed."

She remembered the word. Abashed. Was she abashed?

She was back
at the door. Kept the muzzle of the gun pointing straight ahead, called out, "Frances, I've got a gun, because I'm scared. Don't jump out, if this is a joke. Frances?"

She let go of the gun with her left hand, reached around the door
-
jamb and flicked on the lights. The entry was clear, and as far as she could see, the kitchen. She was inside now, the house still giving off the empty feel. Edged forward.

The hair on her arms was up again and she reached inside the kitchen door and hit another block of lights. They came on all at once, three circuits' worth, fifteen lights in all, the kitchen as brightly lit as a stage. She glanced behind her, at the garage, then back toward the dark door beyond the kitchen.

Not right;
a few lizard-brain cells were screaming at her.
Not right.

"Frances? Fran? Are you there? Helen? Are you still here, Helen?" Helen was the housekeeper.

No answer. She let the gun drop to her side. Then, remembering what the cop said, brought it back up, and let the muzzle lead her through the house. Halfway through, she knew she was alone. There was no tension in the air, no vibration. She cleared the last bedroom, exhaled, smiled at her own foolishness.

This hadn't happened before. There was something . . . She got to the kitchen, sniffed, and looked around. Put the gun on the counter, opened the refrigerator, pulled out the bag of pre-cut celery sticks, took out two and crunched them.

Huh.

Alyssa Austin leaned
against the counter, a small woman, blond, fair-complected, but not delicate: she had a physical density to her face and hands that suggested the martial arts, or an extreme level of exercise. She looked at the gun on the counter, and half-smiled; it was dark and curved and weighted with presence, like a successful work of art.

She was finishing the second celery stick when she noticed the dark streaks on the wallpaper at the edge of the hall that led from the kitchen to the dining room. The streaks were broom-straw-length and -breadth, splaying out from a center, dark but not black, like flower petals, or a slash from a watercolor brush. Not knowing exactly why, she stepped over and touched them--and felt the tackiness under her finger.

Pulled her finger back and found a spot of crimson. She knew instantly and without a doubt that it was blood, and relatively fresh. Saw a small, thinner streak farther down the wall. Backed away . . .

Scared now.
Picked up the gun, backed into the kitchen, groped for the phone, punched in 9-1-1. She did it with a bloody finger, not realizing, leaving red dots on the keys.

The operator, an efficient-sounding woman, asked, "Is this an emergency?"

"There's blood in my house," she said.

"Are you in danger?" the operator asked.

"No, I don't . . . I don't . . ."

"Is this Mrs. Austin?"

"Yes." She didn't know how the operator had gotten her name, didn't think about it. "I just came home."

"Go someplace safe, close by."

"I need the police."

"We are already on the way," the operator said. "Officers will be there in about a minute. Are you safe?"

"I uh . . . don't know." She thought,
The police. I should put the gun away.
"Tell them . . . Tell them I'm going to the garage. I'm going to lock myself in the car. The garage door is up."

"Okay. That would be good," the operator said. "Don't hang up. Just drop the phone and go to the car. We should be there in less than a minute now."

She dropped the phone and backed toward the garage.

She could hear sirens in the distance--and not another thing.

The cops went
in with guns in their hands, cleared the house, looked at the blood and called for a crime-scene crew.

Alyssa went looking for her housekeeper, and found her. Hele
n w
as utterly confused by the blood; it hadn't been there when she left.

The crime-scene crew, from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, spent two days in the house. They found more signs of blood, on the tiles in the kitchen and hallway, enough that it had apparently been mopped up. Alyssa and the cops spent the next two days looking for Frances. They found her car, found her last grocery list, but they never could find her. Then the blood tests came back from the lab: it was Frances's blood, all right.

According to the lab techs, there'd been a pool of blood on the floor, which had been cleaned up with a product called Scrubbing Bubbles bathroom cleaner and paper towels--there were little spit
-
ball, or blood-ball, remnants from the towels stuck in the cracks of the Mexican tiles. The blood spatters on the wall had simply been missed by the killer or killers, who hadn't noticed the thin sprays of blood entwined in the floral pattern of the wallpaper.

Frances was gone, and probably dead, and they all knew it.

Alyssa cried, sporadically and unpredictably, for four weeks, caught in the bureaucracy of mysterious death, a slow-motion nightmare.

No body, just the blood--and the cops coming around, and the reporters, and the cameras, and then the lawyers and the accountants, trying to work through the law. What to do about Frances's car?
I'm sorry to have to ask at a time like this but Frances's belongings are still in the apartment, and if she's not going to be able to pay the rent next month we have a young couple who are looking. . .

When her husband,
Hunter, had been killed, he'd managed to die with his typical neatness. Trusts in order, will in place, lists of assets and debts, a file of real estate holdings, careful records of stock
-
purchase dates, garnished with instructions for everybody. He'd been a control freak right to the end. He'd probably never felt a thing, his silly seaplane dropping like a rock into the Ontario woods, witnesses all around.

When he'd died, she'd been stricken, but had recovered, and knew even on the day of his death that she would recover. They were married, but they'd been psychologically split for years, living separate lives in separate rooms; with a little sex now and then.

Frances, though,
was different.

She hadn't had her life yet; she hadn't died--if she were dead-- doing something voluntarily. And she was Alyssa's blood. Whatever their conflicts--and they'd mostly concerned the father and husband, Hunter--they would have been worked through. They only needed time, and they hadn't gotten it.

So Alyssa cried, short violent jags at unexpected moments. And she looked for her daughter, the only ways she knew: she called people, politicians, who called the cops, who whispered back that
something was going on here. . . .
The politicians apologized and temporized and shuffled away. She'd become a liability.

And she looked in the stars. She did her astrological charts, using the latest software, she talked with a master on the East Coast, who wondered aloud if Frances might still be
alive.
His chart for the girl showed a passage of darkness, but not death. Nothing that big.

"Alive?"

"It's a possibility that has to be examined," he said, in tones portentous even for a wizard of the Zodiac. "I see an instability, a hovering, a waiting . . ."

The cards said the same thing. Alyssa had picked up the Tarot as
a t
eenager, believed in the cards, used them at all-i mportant business junctures--and she'd done so well. So well.

And though the cards and the stars agreed that Frances, or some part of her, remained in this sphere, there was never a sign of her.

The burden,
the insanity of it all, was crushing. Alyssa lived on Xanax and, at night, on Ambien. Then she began to take Xanax to lay down a base for the Ambien; and then a glass of wine as a base for the Xanax, as a base for the Ambien; and still she didn't sleep.

She rolled and turned and her mind cranked twenty-four hours a day, a long circle of jangled thoughts. Sometimes, during the day, from the corner of her eye, she'd see Frances sitting on a couch. She'd come downstairs in the middle of the night, having heard Fran's music playing on the stereo, only to have it fade as she came closer.

She felt cool breezes where there should be no drafts, as though someone had walked past her. And she saw omens. Crows on a fence, symbols of death, staring at her unafraid, but mute. A fireball in the sky, when she happened to be thinking of Frances. Fran's face in crowds, always turning away from her, and gone when she hurried to them.

Was Frances alive? Or dead?

Or somewhere in between?

Fairy had some
of the answers, or believed she did.

Alyssa was a blond, good-hearted, New Age modern woman. Fairy was dark, obsessive, Pre-Raphaelite--and where Alyssa floundered, trying to comprehend, Fairy knew in a moment what had happened to Frances, and focused on revenge.

Fairy stepped out of the shower, toweled off as she walked into the bedroom. When she was dry, she threw the towel on the bed and chose Obsession from the row of perfume bottles on the dressing table. She touched the bottle to her neck and the top of her breasts, judging herself in the dressing mirror as she did.

She didn't call herself Fairy; others did. But it fit--with a pair of gossamer wings, she could have been Tinker Bell's evil twin.