Whispers at Midnight (52 page)

Trying to remember how it had felt, she stretched out on the bunk on her side with her back to the wall.

“Carly.”

She heard him: it was Matt. He stepped into the room quickly, looking around for her and then seeing her up there on the bunk.

“You okay?” He walked right up to the side of the bunk and looked at her across the mattress, and all she could see of him was about three-quarters of his face, not his chin but his mouth and nose and eyes.

His eyes. Looking at her. His eyes.

Carly began to shake.

37

S
HE WAS WHITE
as a sheet of paper, her eyes huge and unfocused, her lips parted as she breathed. Her back was against the wall and her arm was folded beneath her head so that her curls cascaded over it and she was—God, she was trembling.

“Okay, forget it,” Matt said, reaching out to clasp her arm and draw her toward him because he couldn’t stand to see her like this no matter how good the cause. It was warm in the room, the air-conditioning wasn’t much, but her skin was cold as he slid his hand around her bare arm. “You don’t have to do this. Carly… .”

“I remember.” Her voice was unsteady. She looked at him out of those lost little girl eyes and Matt felt his heart turn over. “It was the eyes. When I saw you looking at me across the mattress I remembered the eyes. They’re the eyes I see in my nightmares, Matt. His eyes—light blue. No lashes. The same eyes as the monster who attacked me. He said
‘Now I remember you.’ ”
She took a deep, shaky breath. “Well, now I remember him.”

“So tell me.” He was as tense as if he were being forced to observe her being tortured before his eyes, which, in a sense, he was. But if she remembered, if she could tell him who the perp was, it would all be over and she would be safe. He rubbed her arm once, a small gesture of comfort, then kept his hand on her as she started talking.

“It was at night. Always late at night. I got to where I was afraid to go to sleep, because then I might not see him coming. He would open the door and I would see him standing there in the opening—it was dark in here and light in the room beyond, so what I saw was this big black silhouette—and then he would come in and close the door and … and start.”

She was trembling like a leaf beneath his hand now. Matt gritted his teeth, wanting to pull her off that bunk and into his arms so badly that it was all he could do to resist, afraid of what he was going to hear, of what it was going to do to her to remember.

But he’d opened the floodgates and now he couldn’t hold back the water. Even as he was wondering if he shouldn’t just cut this off, just end it and take her out of here and go at this from another angle, she continued.

“He would go from bed to bed. He usually liked to start over there”—she nodded at the bunk against the opposite wall—“and go from bottom to top. I was last.” She was shaking so badly that she was almost shuddering. “He’d get to me, and look at me, and I would be pressed up against the wall just like this and what I remember seeing are his eyes.” She breathed in and it sounded almost like a gasp. “I would pretend to be asleep and he would put this rag over my face—it was cold and wet and smelled awful, kind of sweet—and whisper
‘Nighty-night, princess.’
I was afraid to fight, afraid to do anything, and he would put this rag over my face and I would just go to sleep.”

The bastard had chloroformed her. Matt realized it instantly. The bastard had come in here to a room full of little girls and
chloroformed them.
He was sick at his stomach. His free hand clenched into a fist.

“Only it didn’t always work. After the first night I learned to turn my head, just a little, and not to breathe, and he didn’t really seem to care all that much about me anyway. He was more interested in the other girls, they were older, developed, you know, so I was a little woozy but not
asleep,
and I would hear him get into bed with them. I could hear the springs.”

Carly shuddered so hard that she shook the bed, and he could hear the springs, too.

Creak. Creak.

“Carly …” That was it, he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t listen to another minute of this. If that bastard had touched her it was going to tear his heart out, rip his guts in two, drive him insane with grief and rage.

“I remember, Matt,” she said in a voice so small it was almost piteous, while she looked at him with an expression in her eyes that he knew was going to haunt him forever. “On the last night before my grandmother came, one of them—it was Genny, I remember Genny, she was around thirteen I think and kind of tough and I was half scared of her—woke up while he was in bed with her and she started to yell and he hit her. He hit her with his fist and then with something else and I could hear the
thunk
and then he got up out of the bunk and picked her up and carried her out of the room.”

She finished in a rush and sucked in another one of those gasping breaths. “My grandmother came the next morning. Genny hadn’t come back by the time I left.”

Matt had already dug far enough into this to know that Genny Auden, age thirteen, had supposedly run away from the Home twenty-two years ago, on the night of August 13. They were doing a trace. Last time he’d checked in, there’d been nothing at all on her after that date.

Now he figured they were looking for a corpse.

“Who was it, baby? Who did it? Do you remember a name?” Thinking of her having to go through that was killing him, his voice was hoarse and his heart was racing and he was having trouble keeping his anger under wraps enough to be gentle for her now while she needed him.

Carly gave a tiny little nod. “The Donkeyman. We called him the Donkeyman.”

Donkeyman. A name? A kids’ version of a name? A physical description? Someone who had brought the donkey to the Home, cared for the donkey, had some connection with the donkey? What?

“At the time I just thought Genny had gone away, maybe somewhere safe like I had when my grandmother came. I just didn’t think about it, it was bad and I just didn’t think about it, it was over and I
didn’t see any reason to think about it. But now …” she paused and breathed, “Now I think he might have killed her.”

“Yeah, I think so too.” He had what he’d come for. No need to put her through any more of this. Deliberately he made his voice crisp. “Okay, come on, get down from there. We’re going.”

“Matt…”

“Come on. You heard me.” When she seemed to be having trouble moving he hauled her toward him and to hell with the neatly made bunk. Then she sat up at his urging and he put his hands on either side of her waist and lifted her down. Even fully grown, Carly weighed about as much as your average preteen; as an eight-year-old she wouldn’t have been much bigger than a gnat. The thought of this guy—this big, burly guy—preying on her was driving him around the bend.

I’m coming for you, you bastard,
he promised him there and then.

Her knees gave out. If he hadn’t been holding on to her she would have crumpled to the linoleum. He scooped her up and headed for the door.

“Matt, no. Wait.” She moved in his arms. Her hands were on his shoulders, and her fingers tightened protestingly.

“What?” He stopped and looked down at her. She was breathing slowly and deliberately, trying, he saw, to get herself back under control. Her face was still pale, but her mouth no longer shook and her eyes were back in focus.

“You can’t walk out of here with me like this. Put me down.”

“If I put you down you’re going to end up in a little puddle on the floor.”

“No, I won’t.” She pushed against his shoulder now. “All these kids … Put me down. Please.”

Against his better judgment he let her slide to her feet, keeping an arm around her in case her knees gave way again. She leaned against him for a moment, an arm draped over his shoulder, letting him take her weight. Then she straightened and pushed away from him—carefully, so he knew she wasn’t sure about what her knees were going to do, either—and stood on her own two feet.

He looked at her, felt a rush of protective tenderness so strong it amazed him, and tugged at a lock of her hair to cover up.

“You’re something, Curls, you know that?”

She smiled at him, and then the matron came to the door and he had to make polite conversation while getting them out of there.

In the car on the way back to town she looked over at him. Her head rested against the seat and she looked tired and a little pale and he would have pulled over and kissed the color back into her face if he hadn’t had so damned much to do. This guy was within reach now, ready to be identified and pulled in and made to pay. All Matt had to do was connect a few more dots, just a few more, and they had him. Then he could turn his attention to Carly again.

“Matt.”

“Hmm?”

“Just so you know. Except to put that cloth over my face, he never touched me. He was interested in the older girls.”

His lips compressed and he stared unseeingly out through the windshield. It was near noon now, one more blazing hot day with heat chimeras rising up in front of the car and everything from the kids to the insects seeking to spend the worst of it in the air-conditioned indoors. Cornfields and cow pastures and small houses covered in aluminum siding flashed by. He was aware of none of them. All he could think about was Carly, helpless and eight years old and at the mercy of a hideously twisted man.

“What makes you think that was even on my mind?”

She gave him a wry little smile. “Well, for one thing, you’ve been clenching your jaw ever since we got into the car. For another, I know you.”

He glanced at her, aware for the first time that his jaw
was
clenched. Deliberately he tried to relax it. “Okay. So I want to kill the guy. So sue me.”

“My hero,” she said, those baby-doll blue eyes going all soft on his face. Then, “I love you.”

What do you say to that? He pulled over and kissed her rosy, then got back on the road and drove her back to town.

It was around one P.M. when he turned her over to Mike—there
was something up with that guy—he would get to the bottom of it when he had the bastard who preyed on women and girls securely behind bars—refusing even to stop for lunch. He nodded at Carly’s reminder that Erin’s wedding rehearsal was tonight because the church was booked for the following night, with dinner to follow at The Corner Café, and he absolutely, positively, had to be at the church in a suit at eight. The information promptly was buried by an avalanche of more urgent thoughts—weddings, even his sister’s, weren’t his top priority at the moment—as he headed out toward the Beadle Mansion. So far they were drawing a blank on finding Marsha’s body despite employing cadaver-sniffing dogs and metal detectors and such low-tech methods as prodding the ground for soft spots, but it was there, he knew it was there, and they would find it. In this case, however, sooner was better than later. Poor little Genny Auden’s corpse was going to have to wait in line. After twenty-two years, it would be able to tell them far less than Marsha’s far fresher corpse. Anyway, they knew approximately where Marsha was; with Genny the search area was wide open. The perp would have to be stupid to have buried her there at the Home, and whatever else this guy was he wasn’t stupid.

He’d just caught sight of Carly’s house when Doris Moorman’s voice crackled at him over the radio, summoning him back to the office.

Their computer search had been delayed by the ridiculously arduous process involved in securing Marsha’s password—Kenan hadn’t known it—from AOL. Now, apparently, the password had come through and Andy was in.

Matt walked into the sheriff’s office to find his sister’s boyfriend seated behind his desk with the computer glowing in front of him and Antonio, Doris, and Anson Jarboe, who’d checked himself into the jail for one of his little mini-vacations the night before, hanging over Andy’s shoulders staring at the screen.

“Get your nose out of there. This is a criminal investigation,” he said to Anson even as he came around behind Andy to look at the screen too.

“Come on, Matt,” Anson protested. “I won’t tell nobody.”

Matt shook his head and pointed at the door. “You’re released. Out.”

He looked at the screen but refrained from saying anything while Anson grudgingly complied. This investigation was too important to compromise by having the details spread all over town before he had the perp behind bars. He’d temporarily deputized Andy and sworn him to secrecy, but he’d be damned if he was going to let Anson into the loop too.

They were so close now he could feel his palms itching in anticipation of making the bust.

“So what’ve you got?” he said.

“Look at this.” Andy clicked the mouse and Marsha’s electronic mailbox popped up on the screen. Then he clicked
Mail you’ve sent
and lit on a particular piece and Matt found himself staring at an e-mail message Marsha had sent—he checked the date—a little less than a week before she disappeared.

It was addressed to Silverado42.

Heard about your good luck. I’m down on mine right now. Maybe you could share. If you do, I won’t tell.