Dean Koontz - The Mask

The nightmare had no climax, no peak of terror. It simply went on all night long at a continuously breathless pace until, a few minutes after dawn, Grace finally wrenched herself out of the hot, clutching arms of sleep and woke with a wordless cry, flailing at the mattress.

She sat up on the edge of the bed and held her throbbing head in her hands.

Her mouth was filled with the taste of ashes and bile.

The dream had been so vivid that she had even felt the high-necked, long-sleeved, blue and white gingham dress binding at her shoulders and across her bust as she had hammered on the cellar doors. Now, wide awake, she could still feel the dress binding her, even though she was wearing a loose nightgown, and even though she had never worn such a dress in her entire life.

Worse, she could smell the house burning.

The smoke odor lingered so long after she had awakened that she became convinced that her own house was ablaze. Quickly, she pulled on a robe, stepped into her slippers, and went from one room to another, searching for the fire.

There was no fire.

Yet for almost an hour, the stench of burning wood and tar stayed with her.

FRIDAY morning at nine o’clock, Paul sat down at his writing desk, picked up the phone, and called Lincoln Werth, the police detective in charge of the Jane Doe case. He told Werth that Carol was taking the girl out of town for a few days of rest and recreation.

“Might as well,” Werth said. “We don’t have any leads, and I sure don’t think this is going to break wide open anytime soon. We keep expanding the search area, of course. At first we just put the kid’s photo and description out to authorities in the surrounding counties. When that didn’t do us any good, we put it on the wire to police agencies all over the State. Yesterday morning we took another step and Wired the same data to seven neighboring states. But I’ll tell you something, just between you and me. Even if we expand the search area all the way to Hong

Kong, I got a feeling we ain’t never going to find anyone who knows the kid. I just have a hunch. We’re going to keep coming up empty-handed.”

After talking to Werth, Paul went down to the garage, where Carol and Jane were putting their gear in the trunk of the Volkswagen. To spare the girl grief, Paul didn’t pass along Werth’s pessimistic assessment of the situation. “He said it’s all right to leave town for a few days. The court didn’t restrict you to Harrisburg. I told him where the cabin is, so if anyone turns up to claim our girl here, the Harrisburg police will contact the county sheriff out that way, and he or one of his deputies will drop by the cabin and let you know you’ve got to come back.”

Carol kissed him goodbye. Jane kissed him, too; hers was a shy, chaste kiss, lightly planted on his cheek, and when she got into the car, she was blushing brightly.

He stood in front of the house and watched them drive away until the red Volkswagen Rabbit was out of sight.

After almost a week of blue skies, clouds had drifted in again. They were flat, slate gray. They matched Paul’s mood.

***

When the kitchen phone rang, Grace steeled herself for the sound of Leonard’s voice. She sat down in the chair at the small built-in desk, reached up, put her hand on the receiver that hung on the wall, let it ring once more, then picked it up. To her relief, it was Ross Quincy, the managing editor of the Morning

News, returning the call she’d made late yesterday afternoon.

“You were inquiring about one of our reporters, Dr. Mitowski?”

“Yes. Palmer Wainwright.”

Quincy was silent.

“He does work for you, doesn’t he?” Grace asked.

“Uh.. Palmer Wainwnght has been an employee of the Morning News, yes.”

“I believe he nearly won a Pulitzer Prize.”

“Yes. But of course. that was quite a while back.”

“Oh?”

“Well, if you know about the Pulitzer nomination, you must know it was for the series he did on the Bektermann murders.”

“Yes.”

“Which was back in 1943.”

“That long ago?”

“Uh. Dr. Mitowski, exactly what is it you wanted to know about Palmer Wainwright?”

“I’d like to talk with him,” she said. “We’ve met, and we have some unfinished business that I’m rather anxious to take care of. It’s a.. personal matter.”

Quincy hesitated. Then: “Are you a long-lost relative?”

“Of Mr. Wainwright’s? Oh, no.”

“A long-lost friend?”

“No. Not that either.”

“Well, then, I guess I don’t have to be delicate about this. Dr. Mitowski, I’m afraid that Palmer Wainwright is dead.”

“Dead!” she said, astounded.

“Well, surely you realized there was that possibility. He was never a well man, downright sickly. And you’ve obviously been out of touch with him for a long time.”

“Not all that long,” she said.

“Must be at least thirty-five years,” Quincy said. “He died back in 1946.”

The air at Grace’s back seemed suddenly colder than it had been an instant ago, as if a dead man had expelled his icy breath against the nape of her neck.

“Thirty-one years,” she said numbly. “You must be wrong.”

“Not a chance. I was just a green kid back then, a copyboy. Palmer Wainwright was one of my heroes. I took it pretty hard when he went.”

“Are we talking about the same man?” Grace asked. “He was quite thin, with sharp features, pale brown eyes, and a rather sallow complexion. His voice was several notes deeper than you’d expect from just looking at him.”

“That was Palmer, all right.”

“About fifty-five?”

“He was thirty-six when he died, but he did look twenty years older,” Quincy said. “It was that string of illnesses, one thing right after another, with cancer at the end. Jt just wore him down, aged him fast. He was a fighter, but he just couldn’t hold on any longer.”

Thirty-one years in the grave? she thought. But I saw him yesterday. We had a strange conversation in the rose garden. What do you say to that, Mr. Quincy?

“Dr. Mitowski? Are you still there?”

“Yes. Sorry. Listen, Mr. Quincy, I hate to take your valuable time, but this is really important. I believe the Bektermann case had a lot to do with the personal business I wanted to discuss with Mr. Wainwright. But I don’t really know anything about those murders. Would you mind telling me what it was all about?”

“Family tragedy,” Quincy said. “The Bektermanns’ daughter went berserk the day before her sixteenth birthday. Her mind just snapped. Apparently, she got it in her head that her mother intended to kill her before she turned sixteen, which was not true, of course. But she thought it was true, and she went after her mother with an ax. Her father and a visiting cousin got in the way, and she killed them. Her mother actually managed to wrench the ax out of the girl’s hands. But that didn’t stop the kid. She just picked up a fireplace poker and kept coming. When the mother, Mrs. Bektermann, was backed into a corner and was about to have her skull cracked open with the poker, she didn’t have any choice but to swing the ax at her daughter. She hit the girl once, in the side. A pretty deep cut. The kid died in the hospital the next day. Mrs. Bektermann only killed in self-defense, and no charges were brought against her, but she felt so guilty about killing her own child that she had a complete breakdown and eventually wound up in an institution.”

“And that’s the story that won Mr. Wainwright his Pulitzer nomination?”

“Yeah. In the hands of a lot of reporters, the piece Would have been nothing but sensationalistic garbage. But Palmer was good. He wrote a sensitive, well-researched study of a family with serious emotional, interpersonal problems. The father was a domineering man who set extremely high standards for his daughter and very likely had an unnatural attraction to her. The mother was always competing with the father for the girl’s heart, mind, and loyalty, and when she saw she was losing that battle, she turned to drink. There were extraordinary psychological pressures brought to bear on the daughter, and Palmer made the reader feel and understand those pressures.”