A foreign language? If it was, it was a language Claudia couldn’t identify.
“Whadyouthinkyou’redoing?” Lainie screeched, whipping around and pointing a finger at them. “Get back in the house and shut that door right now!” The two children scurried back inside, but not before Claudia caught their frightened stares.
She wondered whether she ought to call someone about them. There was something poignant in the way they clung to each other that roused her suspicions about the way they were being treated. “Cute kids,” she said. “Are they yours?”
Lainie turned back to her as if nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had. “I’m babysitting,” she said. “What is it you want?”
Claudia repeated her story about the car. From the corner of her eye, she saw the old man turn off the hose and move out of sight, returning a moment later with a pair of electric hedge trimmers.
“Well, let’s see now,” Lainie shouted above the sudden clatter as he switched on the clippers. “I’m not sure I noticed . . .
Hey, Pop!
Would you wait a minute?” Another drag on the cigarette, another cascade of ash into the shrubbery. “Lemme think. Wasn’t there on trash day. Nope, I would of seen it when I brought in the bins on Thursday. That’s right, it must’ve been over the weekend. Friday night. Yeah, Friday night, ’cause it was there yesterday.”
Even at a distance of ten feet Claudia could smell the stale smoke clinging to the woman’s clothing. “So, you’re pretty sure it was Friday?” she asked.
“Nothin’
pretty
about it. It wasn’t there Thursday night.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Claudia asked, thinking of the rain on Wednesday. “It’s really important.”
The woman glared at her. “You calling me a liar or are you saying I’m stupid?”
Claudia put up her hands, “Okay, okay. Never mind.”
The old man laid his clippers on the grass and limped up onto the porch. “You and that foul habit,” he snarled, pointing at his daughter’s cigarette. “It can’t be doing my bushes any good, now, can it?”
Lainie turned and went back inside the house, slamming the door shut behind her.
“She’s lying,” Claudia said after walking back over to Kelly’s Mustang. “That car has been here over a week.”
“Why would she lie?”
“How should I know? Probably just wanted to get rid of me.”
Kelly said, “Tuesday is when they were reported missing.”
Claudia nodded. “But they were last seen on Christmas Eve, which is a week ago yesterday.”
“Time to call the cops,” Kelly said.
Claudia started walking away. “I’m going to look around. You coming?”
“No way, grasshopper. And neither should you. Let’s call the cops,
now
.”
“We
will
call the cops, as soon as we see if either of them is here.”
“For crying out loud, Claud, you’re not still trying to save Annabelle’s hide, are you? She’s a lost cause!”
Claudia shot her a look of disgust. “I’ll be right back.”
She mounted the front porch and stepped onto worn outdoor carpet. She pressed her face against the dirty window glass and peered into the two empty rooms whose windows faced the street.
To the left of the front door was the living room, its carpet littered with bits of paper trash. Someone had left a wrinkled heap of mustard-colored draperies on the floor next to an open Yellow Pages. She could see a room divider, beyond which was the kitchen. To the right, a small empty bedroom.
“What would they be doing at a place like this?” Kelly said when Claudia returned to the Mustang. “Talk about a fixer-upper.”
Claudia dropped into the passenger seat. “Okay, let’s call the cops.” She got out her cell phone and dialed 911. “Shit, it’s a recording!”
Recent news stories had complained about real emergencies going unanswered due to the glut of unnecessary 911 calls. She handed the phone to Kelly. “If they ever answer, you tell them. I’m going to look in the backyard.”
Kelly stared at her. “Are you crazy? What if someone’s back there?”
“What if someone’s hurt?”
More than anything, Claudia wanted to know whether Annabelle was in that house. She got out of the car and walked across the grass on the other side of the house from the driveway, where she could see a gate at the side of an overgrown six-foot hedge.
When she reached over to open the latch, the dilapidated hasp broke off and fell to the ground. The gate groaned in protest as she pushed it open. She glanced around to see whether any of the neighbors was watching. The old man from next door was nowhere to be seen and the street appeared empty.
Just a quick peek through the windows, she told herself. Breaking and entering wasn’t part of the plan. Not that she really
had
a plan, but something was urging her forward.
Weeds ran riot in the yard and vied with the crabgrass for control. Two chains hung forlornly from the crossbar of a rusty swing set, remnants of a weathered canvas swing seat dangling from one of them. It all added up to a picture of inattention and neglect.
The sudden loud beep of a car horn startled her—Kelly. Had the 911 call been answered? Then the rustle of leaves and an explosion of sound.
Claudia spun around, her heart pounding against her chest wall like a jackhammer on steroids. The elderly neighbor was peering through a gap in the hedge that he had just created with his hedge trimmers. “Yer friend’s car ain’t back there,” he yelled.
Ignoring him, Claudia went on toward the back porch, where a stack of battered cardboard boxes made luxury accommodations for what smelled like a thriving community of rats.
The broken glass in the windowpane of the back door was her first warning. The stench was the second.
A wave of nausea nearly sent her running back to Kelly’s car. But Annabelle’s pale little face nagged at her without mercy. The self-portrait she had drawn depicted her as alone, faceless, turning away from the world. A child abandoned by everyone. Claudia knew how that felt.
A feeling of resolve hardened in her, stiffened her backbone, and pushed her forward.
You are not alone this time, kiddo,
she muttered under her breath. Yet despite her brave words her mouth dried up and each step forward screamed at her that something horrible waited inside.
Pulling a tissue from the pocket of her jeans, she pinched her nostrils and covered her mouth in an attempt to block the smell of decay. Never before had Claudia been in the presence of death, but standing on that porch, she had no doubt she was about to be introduced.
The back door had been left ajar. Conscious that she was trembling all over, she nudged the door open with her foot and stepped across the shards of broken glass. She passed an antiquated Kelvinator washer and dryer on the service porch, then went through the kitchen and into the living room. The odor was making her eyes water.
It was early afternoon, but little light penetrated the house and left the interior shrouded in gloom. Although she felt certain that no living thing occupied the place, Claudia walked softly as she moved through the living room. Coming to a short hallway with a closed door on either side, she realized that door number one on her left must be the front bedroom she had seen from the porch. On her right would be the master bedroom, which faced the backyard.
As she reached for the knob of door number two she heard the sound of glass crunching underfoot and Kelly’s quavery voice calling her name. She twisted the doorknob and opened the door.
From behind her, a scream that chilled the blood in her veins, a scream that seemed to go on and on.
Kelly stood there, her eyes dilated with shock, staring into the room. She clapped her hand over her mouth but that didn’t stop the shrieks emanating from it.
Claudia turned to the bloated, discolored thing lying on the floor that had once been Paige Sorensen. Her dazzling blue eyes were now empty in death. The tongue protruded, purple and swollen, from the mouth.
At the instant of recognition, a black, buzzing cloud rose from the eyes.
Flies.
Kelly ran for the door, still screaming, then retched up her breakfast on the grass. Claudia followed, bile flooding her mouth as she tasted what she had seen, felt it permeating her skin. She leaned on the old gatepost for a dozen heartbeats, gulping clean air.
Shock had given her a brief reprieve from the horror, but now it caught up with her.
Oh my God, Paige—poor Paige.
Then came relief tinged with guilt:
Thank God Annabelle wasn’t in there.
Chapter 22
When it was all over—the arrival of the patrol units, the recalling of how they’d discovered Paige’s body, and all the rest of it—Claudia tried to get everything straight in her head, but the details had melded into one big amnesic blur, and she found herself unable to remember the day with any kind of clarity.
Several hours into the evening, long after she’d crept upstairs and pressed herself into the comfort of the big, soft cushions of her office sofa huddled in her grandmother’s afghan, long after she’d stopped weeping for Paige, and long after she had given up on not tormenting herself over Annabelle, she made a focused attempt to recall the order of things.
Once Kelly got past the recording, a black-and-white unit had arrived within ten minutes of the 911 call. Two more black-and-whites followed, painting the sunny Sunday-morning street with a surreal, zebralike quality. Claudia had a hazy recollection of that, anyway.
Funny,
she thought,
it felt like there should have been a bigger response.
In fact, there seemed to be more media than law enforcement, with the news helicopters overhead and satellite trucks nudging as close to the yellow crime-scene tape as they were allowed.
The brass arrived later in unmarked Crown Vics, the detectives in their own vehicles. Between them, the Sorensen and Giordano names were big enough to roll out the big shots. They stood around looking important, pretending to know what was going on, while the detectives and the crime-scene team got down to the serious business of investigating a brutal murder.
The first officer on the scene sat Kelly and Claudia in the backs of separate patrol cars and took their statements. Their stories would be cross-checked to see if they matched.
By the time a young female officer began unfurling the crime-scene tape and marking off a boundary, a flock of neighbors and onlookers had congregated on the street.
The people next door—Lainie and her father—were conspicuously absent, but Claudia saw the curtains twitch in their front window. Was it odd that they had remained cloistered behind closed doors with the two little children while their neighbors packed the sidewalk? She wasn’t sure. They wouldn’t be able to avoid being interviewed later by detectives.
The detective in charge had identified himself as Investigator Michael Pike. She remembered that because, even in the ghastliness of the situation, she’d had an absurd desire to giggle about his name: Mike Pike. It didn’t seem to match his manner, which was cool, businesslike. Like Jovanic when she’d first met him a few months earlier, under circumstances not so very different from these.
Jovanic.
If only he were here now. She would lean in to him, feel his arms protecting her. No talking, just his strength comforting her. But he was five hundred miles away, working his case with Alex the Beautiful. He wouldn’t be pleased that trouble had found her again, and that it involved Annabelle.
Claudia had repeated everything for Detective Pike in a dull voice. She had not cried then, just recited it all over again, while in the other patrol car, Kelly had sobbed her heart out. Kelly had never met Paige—not alive, anyway—but it didn’t take much to make Kelly cry at the best of times, and this was about the worst it could get.
Unless, of course, Annabelle
. . . Claudia shut down that thought before it could become whole.
Her mind ricocheted from one image to another—a freaky patchwork that had nothing to do with what she’d seen inside that empty house. Impossible to equate the decomposing corpse with the beautiful, vivacious woman she had come to know and like, despite her foibles.
A heightened alert had been put out on Annabelle, but not an Amber Alert. While she sat in the patrol car, Claudia overheard Pike talking with another detective. Like everyone else she had spoken with, the cops didn’t believe Annabelle had been kidnapped. As a juvenile her records should have been sealed, but somehow they’d dug out her background and she was considered a prime suspect in Paige’s death—at the very least, an accessory.
Then the two detectives had started chatting about their personal lives and Claudia listened for ten minutes to Pike complaining about his divorce attorney being too soft on his soon-to-be-ex-wife. She listened because it gave her mind something else to do besides gnawing on the question of where Annabelle was now.
Much later, lying on the sofa in her office, bathed in the glow of the desk lamp and the track lighting, she began to stare into the enormity of what she’d witnessed. She couldn’t bring herself to get up and turn off the lights. There was already too much darkness in the world.
At eleven thirty, the phone rang. Again. Jovanic’s voice came on after the “leave a message” tape.
“Claudia, are you there? What the hell’s going on? Where the hell
are
you?”
He’d called her office number a half dozen times, her cellular the same. The first messages were tender, concerned: “Claudia, honey, are you okay? I tried your cell phone. Call me, baby.” She could hear the frustration in his voice grow with each message, but she couldn’t bring herself to pick up the handset. Didn’t want to hear the stink she was afraid he would raise about Annabelle. Mostly, though, she needed him there physically, not just his voice.
She hadn’t answered Pete’s calls either, not even Zebediah’s. Certainly not the newspapers or the television stations.