Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

But I couldn’t reason, I just kept walking and sweeping the ground with that beam of light, seeing nothing, nothing.

“Roe, what’s wrong? I was just on my way over to your place!” Robin loomed above me in the dark.

“Phillip’s gone, someone’s got him! He left to get his baseball, he ran out the back door, he didn’t come back!”

“I’ll get a flashlight,” Robin said instantly. He turned to go to his telephone. “Listen-” he half-turned back but kept moving, “he wouldn’t think it was funny to hide, would he?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I would have loved to have thought Phillip was giggling behind a bush somewhere, but I knew he wasn’t. He couldn’t have stayed hidden this long in the dark. He’d have jumped out long before, screaming “boo,” his grin of triumph making his face shine. “Listen, Robin, go ask the Crandalls if they’ve seen Phillip, and call the police. Perry Allison’s mom just called and he’s loose somewhere. She may not call the police. I’m going to work my way around to search the front yard.”

“Right,” Robin said briefly, and vanished into his place.

I walked quickly through the dark (and it was full dark now), the beam of the flashlight on the sidewalk before me. I’d pause, and swing the flashlight, and step on. I passed the Crandalls’ gate, and had found nothing. I opened Bankston’s gate. The flashlight beam caught something on Bankston’s patio.

Phillip’s baseball.

Oh, God, it had been here all the time, no wonder Phillip couldn’t find it. Bankston had probably picked it up out of the parking lot to keep it to give Phillip tomorrow morning.

I lifted my hand to knock on Bankston’s back door and my hand froze in midair. I thought about Melanie pulling out of the parking lot so strangely-she must have heard me scream.

And I’d told Phillip to think of where he’d seen it last. He’d seen it last in Bankston’s hands.

Had Bankston been lying down in that car? Had he been lying on top of Phillip, to keep him quiet?

A long brown hair had been found in the Buckleys’ house. Benjamin didn’t have long brown hair. He had thinning blond hair. Like Bankston. He was medium height, like Bankston, and he had a round face. Like Bankston. It was Bankston the young mother had seen in the alley, not Benjamin Greer.

Melanie had long brown hair. Together . They had done the killings together .

And then I remembered that niggly little thing that had been bothering me. When John Queensland had described his golf bag, he’d said it had stickers all over it. That had been the golf bag Bankston was carrying into his place on Wednesday, so long after my lunch hour he hadn’t expected me to be around at all, much less popping out of the Crandalls’ gate. Bankston had stolen them from John Queensland.

Had Phillip been in Bankston’s townhouse? I turned my flashlight on my key ring. You couldn’t call it breaking and entering, I told myself hysterically. I had a key. I was the landlady. I turned it in the keyhole, opened the door as quietly as I could, and stepped inside.

I didn’t call out. I left the back door open.

The kitchen light was on, and the kitchen/living room was a mess, but an ordinary mess. A library book was lying open on the counter, a book I had in my own personal library, Ernlyn Williams’ Beyond Belief . I felt sick, and had to bend over.

This time they were patterning themselves after Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the “Moors Murderers.” They were going to kill a child. They were going to kill my brother. The monster was not sitting in a jail cell in the Lawrenceton City Jail. The monsters lived here.

Hindley and Brady had tortured the children for a few hours first, so Phillip might be alive. If he’d been in the car, if they’d taken him to Melanie’s place, wherever that was- right, the same street where Jane Engle lived-he might have left some trace.

Abandoning silence, I raced up the stairs. No one. In the larger bedroom there was a king-sized bed with a coil of rope beside it, and a camera was on the dresser.

Hindley and Brady, two low-level office workers who’d met on the job, had tape-recorded and photographed their victims.

The extra bedroom was full of exercise equipment: the source of Bankston’s newly bulging muscles. There was a file box with its lid hanging back, key still in the lock. Anything he locked up, I wanted to see. I knocked it over and the magazines inside spilled out like a trail of slime. I looked at an open one in horror. I did not know it was possible to buy pictures of women being treated like that. When I had heard of the anti-pornography movement, I’d thought of the usual pictures of women who at least were apparently willing, being paid, and still healthy when the photo session was over.

I ran back downstairs, glanced into the living room, opened the closets. Nothing. I opened the door to the basement. The light was off, so the steps were dark from halfway down to the bottom. But something white was on one of the lower steps, just visible in the light spilling down from the kitchen.

I went down the stairs and crouched to pick it up. It was a baseball card.

I heard a muffled noise, and had time to think, Phillip! But then I felt a terrible pain across my shoulder and neck, and I was falling forward, my arms and legs tangled, my face scraping the edge of the steps. The next thing I knew I was on the floor of the basement and looking up at Bankston’s face, stolid no more in the dim light but grinning like a gargoyle, and he had a golf club in his hand.

There was another switch at the bottom of the steps, and he turned it on. I heard the noise again, and with great pain turned my head to see Phillip, gagged and with his hands tied, sitting on a straight chair by the dryer. His face was wet with tears and his whole little body was curled into as tight a ball as he could manage on that chair. His feet could not touch the floor.

My heart broke.

I’d heard people say that all my life; their heart had broken because their love had deserted them, their heart had broken because their cat had died, their heart had broken because they’d dropped Grandma’s vase.

I was going to die and I had cost my little brother his life, and my heart broke for what he would endure before they finally tired of him and killed him.

“We heard you come in,” Bankston said, smiling. “We were down here waiting for you, weren’t we, Phillip?”

Incredible, Bankston the banker. Bankston with the matching almond-tone washer and dryer. Bankston arranging a loan for a businessman in the afternoon and smashing Mamie Wright’s face in the evening. Melanie the secretary, filling up her idle time while her boss was out of town by slaughtering the Buckleys with a hatchet. The perfect couple.

Phillip was crying hopelessly. “Shut up, Phillip,” said the man who’d played baseball with him that afternoon. “Every time you cry, I’ll hit your sister. Won’t I, sis?” and the golf club whistled through the air and Bankston broke my collarbone. My shriek must have covered Melanie’s steps, because suddenly she was there looking down at me with pleasure.

“When I pulled in, the Scarecrow was searching the parking lot,” she said to Bankston. “Here’s the tape recorder. I can’t believe we forgot it!”

Gee, what a madcap couple. She sounded for all the world like a housewife who’d remembered the potato salad in the fridge just as the family was leaving on its picnic.

I decided, when the pain had ebbed enough for me to think, that “the Scarecrow” was Robin. I managed to look at Phillip again. God bless him, he was trying so hard not to make sounds, so Bankston wouldn’t hit me again. I tried to push the pain away so I could look reassuring, but I could only stare at him and try not to scream myself. If I screamed, Bankston would hit me quite a lot.