Sketched Page 4

  * * *

  July 23rd 2012 9:35 pm

  3353 Forest Glen Place - Forest Heights, Dixon City

  “Piper, I’m in the middle of dinner.” Harrison paused on the other end of the line. “With the mayor. Remember?” He announced his dinner companion with a passive aggressive weight. She was intruding.

  “I’m sorry. Obviously, you’re busy. He’s an important guy.” Piper was breathless, watching the raindrops divide like virus cells on her windshield.

  “Yes, I am, and yes he is. Laura’s fundraising bullshit wouldn’t be the same without him. What are you doing calling me anyway, shouldn’t you be resting?” Piper could hear the muffled sound of voices and laughter in the background. She could make out the bass tones of Dixon’s mayor and the equally gruff laughter of the chief of police. Of course. Harrison had been complaining about having to be a part of his wife’s showcase and charity dinner for weeks. All of Dixon’s major players had received their embossed invites.

  “I did.” She took a breath to steady herself. “Harrison, I uh…” Even though the voices in her head had silenced as soon as she wrote the address down, the din still echoed. Her head spun slightly as she focused on drowning it out. “I took a nap,” she said dumbly. Is that what that was? She thought again of the torso from her dream, creaking and dripping in front of her like a sacrifice.

  There was the sound of braying laughter in the background again. Piper could make out Harrison’s wife Laura’s tinkling response. Harrison sighed.

  “Laura’s expecting that Entler woman any minute and I’m supposed to keep the old bitch busy. Please tell me you didn’t call me just to tell me you had a nap.”

  “No. Not exactly.” Piper swiped the condensation off the driver side window and looked out into the night. 3353 Forest Glen Place was indistinguishable from the other houses in this neighborhood.

  A suburb still attempting to cling on to its last vestiges of respectability, the area had been abandoned by most of the families when the Entler factories had begun to shut down. Foreclosed upon by banks and seized by shady lenders, the sturdy little brick homes had transformed from family dwellings to gravestones practically overnight. 3353 was no different than 3354, with its boarded-up windows and overgrown lawn.

  “What do you mean, not exactly? Look Piper, I’ve really got to get back to this thing. The chief wants me shaking hands and kissing babies for some bullshit reason. Laura is waiting. Seriously.”

  Piper swallowed her nerves. There had been a note of desperation in Harrison’s tone. His wife was a formidable woman. Piper had always been slightly afraid of her and if he was honest with himself, Harrison might see that he was too. She was just as sprawling and ostentatious as the family estate she lived in.

  “I’m at a house in Forest Heights,” she said simply.

  There was another pause wherein Piper could hear Laura’s practiced peal of laughter.

  “What do you mean you’re at a house? Piper, what are you doing?”

  “I had a dream or something. I know, another one. But this was…it was brutal Harrison. I know we’ve already gone through this today and I can’t really explain any better than I did this afternoon but,” Piper took a deep breath, “but I think I know where the other girl is. Beth McDonald’s friend.”

  “Come on, Piper.”

  She found herself compulsively clearing the steam from her own nervous breathing off the window as she spoke.

  “I know it doesn’t sound good. I must sound nuts, I really must. I don’t expect you to believe me, Harrison. But when I woke up, I just…I knew the address where she is. Where she was. I heard it.”

  Harrison had moved deeper into the house and away from the party. There was the sound of a door closing and the background of jovial voices came to a plush halt.

  “Honey.”

  Piper blinked. The last time he called her that was when he was assuring her they were doing everything they could to find her mother. Years later and the platitudes, as well as the sympathetic pet names, had fallen to the wayside.

  “Piper, sweetheart. What do you mean by you heard it?”

  Piper bounced her head impatiently against the headrest.

  “I’ve got to get in there. I know you can’t leave, but maybe you could send someone along?”

  “What, no! You’re not going in anywhere. You don’t have a warrant, you don’t have anything to go on except for whatever the hell has been going on in that brain of yours. This is dangerous territory, Piper. Look, you’re passing out, drawing these pictures. I shouldn’t have sent you in there.”

  “It’s not like that Harrison. I’m not losing it. It sounds ridiculous when I say it but I swear.”

  “Well, you’re hearing voices now, aren’t you? Tell me you’re not hearing voices. Are you sure it wasn’t just in your head?”

  Piper spoke before she could think and immediately regretted it.

  “It was my mother’s voice. Alright, it started out as her at least. Then it kind of grew.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. When Harrison finally spoke, he breathed the word rather than saying it.

  “Shit.”

  “I have to go in. I have to at least try. Just send someone. Please.”

  Piper took her hand off the steering wheel where she had been clutching at it. Her fingers ached from the intensity of the grip. She slipped her hand into the pocket of her jacket, wrapping her fingers around the gun. Her uncle had given it to her years ago when she moved out on her own and she could count on one hand the times she’d touched it. Some families give bottles of wine or candles as housewarming gifts, hers gave weapons.

  “Just in case.” Her Uncle Chuck had smiled at her with his wide, gap-tooth grin. “This city ain’t getting any better and little things like you are pretty much a sitting target.” He had given her a few lessons on how to use it, but in all honesty, it had been doing nothing but collecting dust in her bedside table since she moved in. It felt strange in her hand and she had a moment of hesitation.

  Little things like her were sitting targets.

  Harrison had been babbling in her ear for the last few minutes. Pleading with her to go home, to wait for him there. He was telling her she needed to relax. He was telling her that it was all her in head, that she was traumatized.

  Well, obviously.

  “Harrison. We’re probably already too late.” She opened her door, the rain scrambling into the car.

  “No, there’s no ‘we’ here Piper. It’s just you. This is insane. It’s a hunch and a dream and god knows what else. Can you just stay where you are at least? Let me come and get you.” He was sounding legitimately upset now. She could hear his voice hitching as he no doubt paced whatever velvet lined hallway he was trapped in.

  “3353 Forest Glen Place.” She snapped her cellphone shut and slid it into the other pocket of her wool peacoat.

  Gripping the gun in one pocket and her phone in the other, she squinted through the rain at the house before her. Like the homes on either side of her, the two large front windows of the house were boarded up from the inside. The window to the right of the front door had been broken and the wood was warped from months of exposure.

  There was a streetlight above Piper, stretching upward into the quiet suburban night. The light it cast through its dirty glass shade was barely enough to illuminate the path that led from the cross-hatched metal fence to the front door.

  What if it really was a hunch? What if she really was finally losing it? She’d been through enough. No one escapes an adolescence like hers unscarred. Isn’t that what Harrison always told her?

  She pushed the gate open. It complained as she slipped into the yard, creaking and jangling against itself. The concrete pathway was in pieces where weeds were growing through. As she approached the house, she noticed the stairs were littered with glass that had fallen from the broken window beside it. It glittered in the dim light, picking up the icy lights that stood guard on the street.
/>
  Someone had been here. The glass was crushed almost to sand. The pattern of destruction on the window showed large missing pieces that had obviously fallen to the stairs and then been trampled. Repeatedly.

  She gripped the gun tighter and made her way up to the awning. The address displayed to the left of the door was the kind of black metal cursive appliqués that had been popular when optimism and money had initially founded the neighborhood. Piper closed her eyes involuntarily as she heard the voices begin buzzing the address in the back of her skull like a restless nest of wasps. She willed it to stop.

  Harrison was right. It’s my own voice. She told herself. Not the voice of my missing mother or a chorus of lost souls. I should turn around and go back to the car. I should put the key in the ignition and roll my crazy self back home.

  Piper put her hand on the doorknob and twisted. It was open.

  She froze in the doorway, her hand still on the rough metal of the knob. Someone was here. The front room was almost completely dark except for the light that slashed in from a window in the kitchen ahead of her. She could make out the shapes of two overstuffed sofas covered in matching sheets and a coffee table coated with a coordinating layer of dust. There was a candy bowl in the center of it, the kind with a heavy glass top that coyly shielded whatever congealed mass of sugar lay under it.

  Barely breathing, Piper waited for her eyes to adjust further. She could make out a flock of brass birds on the wall before her and a single coffee cup on a side table beside the hibernating furniture. Whoever had lived here had thought they were coming back. Perhaps they already had.

  Reassured by the almost painful indent of the gun in her palm, Piper began to walk forward. The smell of the house changed as she approached the kitchen. An undercurrent of grease and ancient cooking doors began to overcome the dust. The kitchen was in the same dated style as the front room. The window over the sink and back door were also boarded up and the light from the dirty fixture above cast sharp shadows over the countertops.

  Piper stood in the center of the room, her senses grasping at the house around her. She heard nothing but by the way her stomach was tied in a sickly knot, she knew there was something there. It was as if the entire house was holding its breath. Any second it would breathe out.

  There was a neat pile of brightly colored wrappers in the center of the kitchen table. So new and bright, they were in harsh contrast to the rest of the room. Piper stepped closer to examine them. She immediately recognized them all as popular brands, the packages torn open and the interior cardboard casing and brown paper wrappers still smelling of their contents. She was about to pick one up when a soft thud came from beneath the floor.

  There was someone in the basement.

  Suddenly full of adrenaline, Piper drew the gun from her pocket. She turned slowly to face a door that opened up onto a set of narrow steps leading downstairs. She waited, the gun held at her side. Waited for what? Sirens? It was becoming clear to her that the only emergency services Harrison was willing to send for her would be a couple of burly psychiatric nurses. She was alone in this endeavor.

  Piper worked to slow her breathing, staring at the open door to the basement in front of her. Maybe it was just an animal? A stray cat who worked its way into the basement via a vent? Comforted by the thought and the silence beneath her feet, Piper took a few steps forward.

  There was another thump, only this one was followed by a murmur. Cats didn’t murmur.

  “Oh god,” Piper breathed. She lifted her gun and pointed it in front of her. There was no confidence in her grip, her aim shaking slightly as she took her first few steps toward the stairs leading down to the basement.

  Bright white made even brighter by the stark light above her, the stairwell was as tight as a coffin. Still working to calm her breathing she took each step as slowly as she could. She could feel her lip and chin go numb as she began to hyperventilate. Stay calm. Her voice echoed in her head. It was hers, this one. For sure. Thank God. Stay calm and breathe.

  She came to a landing on the stairs that turned sharply to the right. She stopped abruptly, her heart seeming to halt.

  Avocado green shag carpeting.

  The stairs opened out into the basement, the floor a broad sea of the same carpet she had seen in her dream earlier that day. Every inch of her demanded she turn around. Her nerves screamed and she saw herself, as clear as if she’d just done it, racing back up to the kitchen and out into the rain.

  She continued down the stairs.

  The carpet swallowed up her thin white sneakers. Her head throbbing, Piper looked around the room in awe. She recognized it all immediately, from the wood paneling, and the floral velvet couches to the monolith television set. It was the exact room she had seen only hours earlier. Even the eyes that stared out at her from the Entler’s Department Store Photo Studio portraits were the same.

  Another mumble brought her to a complete halt. She raised her gun higher, trying to ignore the way it shook in her palm. The voice was unmistakably masculine and much louder now that she was in the basement.

  Not surprisingly, it was coming from a half-closed accordion door across the room.

  Her heartbeat hammering so hard, she imagined she could feel her flesh vibrating, Piper slowly moved forward.

  She raised her other badly shaking hand and prepared to pull the door back. It was going to make a big noise, she knew that. Any kind of cover she had was about to be blown. She placed her hand on the plastic handle.

  It was suddenly ripped backward. The violent rattling almost as loud as Piper’s scream, the accordion door tented outward, knocked off its rails by the force.

  A hand shot out of the dark room. It grabbed the sleeve of her jacket and with surprising force, twisted her entire arm backward. Piper screamed again as pain shot up through her shoulder. She felt herself twirled backward and squished against a body, so bony Piper had trouble distinguishing it as human. A second hand grasped her neck, the skin sticky against hers. Piper’s gun rattled to the floor, spinning where it landed.

  “Feel that heartbeat!” A man’s voice, soft and amused, spoke to someone in the room behind them. “It’s like a little bird.”

  “Idiot. You are such an idiot. I told you! Didn’t I tell you not to take your time?” A woman’s voice responded. Unlike the man’s, it was rough and phlegmy. She sounded as if she was recovering from an infection or had a heavy smoking habit. Piper knew right away it was the mumbling female voice she had heard above. “Who knows who is following her? A girl with a gun just wanders in off the street? This is out of hand now. You’ve really done it. This place will be filled with police in no time.”

  Piper gasped as the hand moved from her throat to her hair. He grabbed her ponytail and she felt him wrap it around his wrist like a bridle. Her head was yanked back painfully, causing a tearing sensation in her back to scream out with neon flashes in her brain.

  “You don’t have anyone following you, do you?” Piper’s head was yanked to the side and her captor craned his own face around to look into her eyes. A strangled gasp of fear came from somewhere inside of her.

  She knew the impossibly large hollows of the man’s face. She knew those cheekbones. His skin seemed to be as thin as wet tissue stretched almost to the point of tearing across the deep valleys of his skull. She knew them because she had drawn them earlier today. She had already been introduced to this monster.

  He smiled.

  “Or did you just flutter down the fireplace by accident, little bird? You know what I think? I don’t think anyone is following you at all.” His eyes were bright enough to sear out of the darkness of their sockets, pale grey and fearsome.

  Piper was dumb with shock. She struggled to speak but her chest was hitching too badly with the shaking that ran through her. “Hmmmm?” he said. “I’m sorry, did you want to say something?”

  “Oh Kingston, for god’s sake, just kill her. We need to get out of here. Why must you make me repeat myself? I shoul
d’ve just finished you off years ago. You know, I knew you were sick all the way back then? But oh no, I always supported you. Even when your father found what you had been doing with his cats.” The woman from the room behind them spoke again. There was fury in her voice, but Piper could sense a mounting panic as well.

  “Fuck, mother!” the man yelled over his shoulder. “How many years ago was that? I was a baby! Jesus, you hang on to things, don’t you?” He turned back to where he held Piper’s stiff body against him. She could feel his breath on her face as he examined her closely. “Go on,” he whispered. “I’m listening. Just the tiniest little tweet? For me? Where did you come from?”

  Piper swallowed, her throat aching where it was stretched back.

  “I know you,” she managed finally.

  “You know what’s funny?” The man spun her around again. He chuckled to himself. “And I think mother will think this is funny too. Which is saying something, believe you me.” Still holding her arm at an excruciating angle, the man the woman called Kingston cupped her face in his other hand and stared at her intently again. The stickiness she had felt on her neck coated his hands and arms like crimson satin.