The windows were boarded up tight, but the front door lolled unnaturally and ominously opened. As if it had been pried open only recently. Only thick blackness lay beyond it.
Where Mara, my childhood girlfriend and former lover, now by those strange twists of fate and fancy in adulthood my brother’s fianc
ée
, waited inside. A rumble of thunder shuddered in the distance, and I shivered.
I leaned back through the window of my SUV and tossed the radio back onto the driver’s seat. I didn’t have time to give Donny directions through the labyrinthine back roads of the bayou, and I didn’t have time to argue with him about going in alone, either. They’d find the house, eventually.
Mind made up, I walked quickly through the front yard and up the decaying porch steps, pushed the front door open, and crossed the threshold into the house’s dark interior.
I found myself in a long foyer. By the time I reached the other end of the hallway, the light from the open front door was a small rectangle of light behind me. I opened the hallway door to the dark inside of the house and waited for my eyes to adjust, but soon realized they never would. Every window in the house was boarded up. There was no light to be had, not even a sliver. I felt about and found a light switch on the wall and flicked it just in case, but did so to no avail. Out of options, I removed a penlight from my side pocket, flicked it on, and slowly advanced toward the small circle of white light shimmering on the far wall.
“Mara?” I said aloud, but her name came echoing back all wrong in the dark. “Murder?” bounced off the walls ahead.
The penlight soon illuminated a doorway across the room that I recognized as the basement door. Basements were an anomaly this far down South, especially in the bayou, but a few old antebellum homes still had fruit cellars. At that moment a thump, barely discernible, echoed from below. And at that moment I realized that ever since the phone call, I’d envisioned Mara underground in a basement somewhere.
Maybe, I thought, it had seemed so because of the echoing quality of her voice on the call. Or maybe it had just been the most frightening place I could have imagined her to be.
I pulled the door open slowly and stepped down the stairs, my boots creaking on the sawdust-covered steps of the cellar. With each step a new, unfamiliar odor of musk and dampness mixed with dozens of other smells mostly impossible to place (honeysuckle, formaldehyde, varnish?) became stronger and stronger. At the bottom the penlight revealed nothing but a rusted water heater. I heard a rustling sound and turned the flashlight to my right.
Huddled in the corner not twenty feet away, Mara sat cross-legged and shivering in a torn dress. Adrenaline released inside me as I realized she was still alive. A dark blindfold covered her eyes, and her wrists were handcuffed to a pipe along the concrete wall. She held a small dark object in her left hand, probably the cell phone from which she’d called.
Her head bobbed nervously back and forth as she strained to hear. She shifted her position on the floor, and the penlight revealed dozens of cuts and abrasions along her legs.
“Mara. It’s me. Lucas.”
She jerked her blindfolded head in my direction, her feet digging backwards into the dirt floor, compressing herself farther into the corner at the sound of my voice.
After a beat of silence, she began to scream.
The animalistic howl built in intensity and the pitch rose, until the dreadful wail transformed into a high-pitched, continuous shriek that refused to stop. The cellar filled with the sounds of terror.
I couldn’t think. The only thing in my head was the screaming, echoing in the damp basement and growing louder each second. Goose pimples rose vehemently on the back of my neck.
“Mara!” I yelled, but to no avail. I couldn’t even hear my own voice.
I gave up and scrambled to her.
When I grabbed her shoulders, the screaming finally stopped, as though some newer, deeper fear had taken her breath away. A moment later she coughed and began breathing in great, gasping sobs.
“Mara,” I said, “we have to get out of here.” I lifted her blindfold with my left hand and attempted a comforting smile as her eyes adjusted to the small beam of my flashlight. “Come on, let’s go.”
She looked at me, long black streaks of mascara running from her eyes. She was filthy. A gray film covered her body, her raven-black hair lay matted and tangled, and more cuts covered her arms as well as her legs.
The past and all its pain fell away in a moment, and the only thing I felt was compassion, and a desire to save her.
“Lucas,” she whispered.
“Mara, it’s okay. I promise.”
She flinched. “Lucas,” she begged, “please don’t kill me.”
I touched her face and she froze. “What are you talking about? I’m not going to hurt you. But we have to get out of here.”
She nodded with a single shake of her head, but remained in a rigor mortis–like state inspired by my touch.
I peered at her a second longer, then looked back at her wrists. “Hold still,” I whispered, “so I can get you loose.” The handcuffs securing her wrist to the pipes weren’t police issued but the cheaper kinds you could get in sex shops. I considered wire cutters from my car trunk, but noticed a weak U-joint in the pipe above her head.
“Lucas?”
“Stay still. I’m going to lift these handcuffs to a point where I can get them off this pipe, okay?” I illuminated the pipe with my penlight, moved her wrists over to the weak U-joint, and pulled.
The crumbling pipe gave way and we tumbled backwards as her wrists pulled free. The penlight fell to the floor, flickered off, and the cellar plunged into darkness. After we landed on the dirty floor Mara’s body sprawled across me, her hair across my face. A pain seared through my ankle. I pushed her aside and groped for the flashlight until my fingers closed around it and flicked it on. The beam revealed Mara already sitting above me, staring down as I tried to sit up and speak. “Okay. Let’s go, Mara. You’re free.”
She spoke in a hoarse tone. “No, Lucas. You said you’d do this. You know what you told me to do.”
“Mara, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. Just get off me so I can get up. We need to get out of here.”
At that moment footsteps echoed above our heads, and the basement door swung open with a loud creak. I grabbed my Luger but couldn’t extricate myself from my vulnerable position beneath Mara. As my fingers found the familiar handle of my gun, a flashlight from the top of the stairs illuminated us where we sat on the floor. I lifted the Luger into the air and tried to twist my torso around to face the light, but I couldn’t break free of Mara’s entangled limbs.
A voice I didn’t recognize called my name from the stairwell. “Detective Madden? This is the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department! Detective Madden?” Relief flowed through me. I managed to twist from beneath Mara and we both stumbled to our feet.
“It’s me, we’re okay,” I said, but at that moment a tremendous thud in my back pushed me violently forward. It didn’t hurt, and I turned to look backwards at Mara, wondering why she’d pushed me. I tried to inhale and heard a strange gurgling noise. I felt warmth descend and spread along my waistline. I felt like I was tipping.
I landed heavily on the floor a few feet away, face forward. I rolled onto my back. In the darkness I tasted the dirt of the floor and realized that I’d lost the flashlight again.
The warmth continued to descend into my lower back. A burst of light from behind me revealed Mara’s face illuminated by the powerful police flashlights. A series of footsteps filled the air, and a strong voice called out, “Police! Drop the weapon!”
The flashlight bobbed up and down on Mara’s face. The last thing I remembered was a bloody knife in her still-handcuffed left hand, and her voice filling my head as though I were underwater, as though I were falling away from her into a dark and placid lake of unknown depth.
Her black pupils drew me in, even as I felt myself vanishing into the hole, and her muffled voice descended through the darkness. “You told me to kill you, Lucas, if you came back to set me free. You made me promise that I’d kill you.”
With that, she lifted the bloodied knife again, and everything went black.
Mara leads me through the graveyard of our childhood church, to her grandfather’s tomb. Everything is just the way I remember it, except Mr. Horace’s mausoleum now sits in the middle of an apple orchard. A familiar one. Though I’ve never seen the orchard in which my mother was killed, I’ve reconstructed it a million times.
Mara smiles back at me as we walk through the graveyard. She tugs on my hand, pulling me along.
I suddenly notice that at the base of every tree in the orchard, dead girls with bloody letters smeared across their foreheads stare from all sides.
Ahead of me, Mara’s hair covers her face. For a moment I’m struck by the sensation that it might not be Mara who leads me by the hand. And I’m terrified by the immovable certainty that my mother’s grave site is our new destination in this displaced orchard of dead girls.
“Mara, where are you taking me?”
She turns, hair still covering her face, but a voice other than her own fills my head, tearing me from the dream.
* * *
“Going somewhere, Madden?”
I struggled to wake up through the gray haze surrounding me. The steady electronic chirp of a monitor slowly ascended into my consciousness, and the odor of a sanitized environment crept through my nostrils.
I opened my eyes to find Alan Parkman’s face suspended above the end of the bed. I tried to understand my surroundings, thinking backwards. The dream. Mara. The basement.
Almost on cue an electric spike of pain crackled up my spine and jolted my short-term memory. I recalled the thud of the knife in my back, and how Mara had assured me that I’d somehow told her to kill me.
I looked around. Two chairs and a table were the sole furnishings in a small hospital room. Parkman sat in one of the chairs, twirling the corner of his mustache above a smile. Without a doubt, one of the last people on earth I wanted welcoming me back from the near-afterlife.
“What’s going on, Alan?”
He raised his eyebrows in glee. “Well, hell, Lucas, that’s what we all want to know.”
“Did Mara stab me?”
“Ah, the short-term memory’s intact. Yep, that pretty little thing shoved a knife in your back and was about to hack you to little pieces until the local cops showed up.” A smirk crawled across his lips before he continued. “Showed up a few seconds too early, if you ask me.”
“Where are we?”
“Gulfport. Garden Park Hospital.”
“Why the hell are we in Gulfport?”
“You lost a lot of blood. The EMTs had to get you to a town in Mississippi that could accommodate a blood transfusion. Not many down heah ’round dese pahts,” he said, in a mocking, slow Southern accent.
“Why are you such an ass?”
“Why did you tie your girlfriend up in that basement?”
“What the hell are you talking about? I don’t have time for this.” I tried to sit up, but a blinding pain forced me back onto the pillows beneath me.
“Well, you better make time. Your girlfriend Mara says you’re the Snow White Killer.” Parkman let the words sink in, stood and walked to the hospital room door and opened it, but then looked back at me. “You may want to call any redneck lawyer buddies you might have down here, when you get a chance.”
“You’re retarded if you think I’m the Snow White Killer. Mara isn’t the world’s most reliable witness, you jackass.”
Parkman laughed. “No, she isn’t, I’ll give you that. But funny how that suits you in this situation.” He paused. “Hey, I’m going down to get some coffee, then maybe you’ll open up about this whole thing, Lucas. Better just admit everything up front. How long has this been going on?”
“Fuck off.”
“Ah yes, I think you take cream. I’ll be right back.”
* * *
Ten minutes later he returned with a white Styrofoam cup in hand.
“So, you’ve had a chance to think about it. Got anything you’d like to admit?” He smiled, not genuinely, and swirled the steaming coffee with a flat wooden stirrer. He stopped, licked it, and tossed the stick into a small trash can near the door.
I managed the most remorseful face I could muster. “Well, Parkman,” I whispered, “I’m at the end of my rope.” I cast my eyes downward. “Yeah,” I breathed, “I guess I do have something to tell you.”
My change in attitude caught him off guard. “Really?” he whispered from beneath his mustache.
I cleared my throat, drawing out the admission for as long as possible, just to heighten his sense of anticipation. I half-closed my eyes, and lowered my voice. He leaned even closer, “Parkman. I had sex with your mother last night. She was terrific. A little kinky for my tastes, but a fun gal all the same.” I lay back in the bed and smiled up at him pleasantly.
He didn’t speak for a moment. He held his left fist clenched at his side until he finally found his voice. “You think you’re funny, don’t you, Madden?”
I nodded and began to accept the accolade, but he cut me off.
“Look, dummy, we know you didn’t do this shit. That girlfriend of yours? She’s crazier than a poop-house rat and her story’s full of holes. But you won’t think it’s funny if this gets leaked to the press.” He looked back at the door, making sure that he wouldn’t be heard, then continued. “They’ll have a field day with it. Headlines galore. Just think, little tickers at the bottom of CNN and MSNBC. FBI agent a suspect in the Snow White Killer case. Renowned neuroscientist who cloned the ripper gene, foiled by his own genetic code. The author of
The Killing Mind
thinks he can ‘beat the system.’” Parkman paused, letting his imaginary tickers run rampant through my mind. He took a sip from his cup. “I’m not only busting your balls, Madden, although it’s been fun. Even if it’s all bogus, you’re still in a precarious situation.” He paused, then added, “Not to mention the FBI.”
I gazed out the window instead of humoring him with a response.
Parkman continued. “This is serious, Lucas. Your girlfriend is running around telling everyone that you kidnapped her, raped her, then told her that you were coming back to kill her after you had your fun with the other girl.”