Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“I wouldn’t count on it. How come you have so many bedrooms if you live alone?”

Pender bowed to the inevitable. “Tinsman. The lockkeeper. He used to add another bedroom onto the end of the house every time his wife had another kid. She had seven.” A portentous pause-this was one of Pender’s set pieces. “Only six bedrooms were added on.” And another pause.

“How come?” Dorie rolled onto her side and pillowed both hands under her cheek the way she used to when she was a little girl-her daddy had been an excellent storyteller.

“The way the rangers tell it-every year they have a special Halloween program down at Great Falls: rangers in period costumes tell all the ghost stories and murder stories from the history of the canal, and they always end with Tinsman’s Lock. The way they tell it, the last kid wasn’t Tinsman’s. His wife had been having an affair with a redheaded mule driver from Rock Creek. They say the lockkeeper cut her throat, then drowned the seventh baby in the canal. Some people claim to have seen her ghost wandering up and down the banks in a bloodstained nightgown, searching for her redheaded baby.”

“Great, a ghost story,” said Dorie with a mock shudder that turned real at the end, as mock shudders often do. “Remember one thing, buster: I don’t sleep, you don’t sleep.”

Pender reached across his body with his good arm, and patted her shoulder. “You don’t have a thing to worry about. They say she only walks on Halloween night.”

“Pender.”

“What?”

“Halloween is this coming Sunday.”

“Is it really?” Wide-eyed and innocent; butter wouldn’t melt…, as his sister Ida would have said.

“Yeah-and you know what’s amazing? For the first time since I can remember, I don’t care-it doesn’t matter.”

“I remember you telling me Halloweens were always tough on you.”

“And Sunday ones were the worst. ’Cause if it fell on a Sunday, that’d be three days I’d have to hide out in my house with the curtains drawn. Couldn’t go shopping on Friday, because the store clerks might be in costumes with masks, on Saturday night people in masks might be coming and going from parties, and then of course the trick-or-treaters on Sunday.”

“No trick-or-treaters out where I live.”

“But don’t you see, it doesn’t matter anymore? I’d almost like to give it a try.”

“Ask and you shall receive. Pool, the Liaison Support secretary, she and her roommate always do Halloween up real big, costume party, haunted house and all. If you want me to take you, I have a standing invitation.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” said Dorie. She suspected it was an idea that was going to seem less and less attractive, the closer to Sunday they got.

It was close to two in the morning when Linda let herself into the house. She hung her coat on a peg in the vestibule; as she limped past the answering machine in the living room, she saw the message light blinking, and stopped to check it out.

Mr. Pender, this is Judge Heinz. I hope you’ve received my letter by now. There are a few matters we need to go over. Please give me a call at your convenience.

He’d left a number. The machine was on a small table near the vestibule, along with the wire basket full of mail Linda had been saving for Pender. She found a letter from Noble J. Heinz, Attorney at Law, LaFarge, Wisconsin, jotted the telephone number on the back of the envelope, and left it on the top of the pile. Pender was due back late tomorrow afternoon-Linda had no intention of getting out of bed until then.

Or answering any Bu-calls. She retrieved her cell from the pocket of her coat and called her own office to leave a message for Pool, to the effect that she would not be coming into work tomorrow, and that if there were any calls from media or brass or especially OPR, could Pool possibly, please, stall them, hold them off, tell them she was dead, anything-Linda would call her on Monday to explain. And, oh yeah, thanks for the invite, but she’d have to pass on Halloween, because she was going to bed now and intended to stay there, not just through Halloween, but probably through Thanksgiving as well.

And exhausted as she was, it was only the knowledge that she really could sleep in as long as she wanted tomorrow that gave Linda the incentive to prepare for bed, instead of just throwing herself across the bedcovers and collapsing in the rancid clothes she’d been wearing for over eighteen hours.

Linda undressed in the bathroom, while seated on the toilet, pulling her slacks down over her shoes and tossing her dirty clothes into the mildewy rattan hamper. Then she washed up a little, brushed her teeth, and crossed the hall to her bedroom wearing only her shoes and braces, and leaning even more heavily than usual on her cane. Tomorrow, she reminded herself, she’d have to start wearing a bathrobe for the trip across the hall. Tonight, though, she was too tired even to pull on a nightie-she untied her shoes, slipped them off along with the braces, crawled under the covers naked, closed her eyes, and was asleep within minutes.

A dream. It had to be a dream. Simon Childs standing over the bed, holding a revolver in one hand, hiding the other hand behind his back. But not the Childs from the elevator video, with the self-assured manner and the easy slouch, nor the groomed and handsome Childs of the DMV photo, looking better with his silver hair and dapper ’stash than anybody has a right to on their driver’s license.

No, this was a ragged, haggard caricature of Childs-no hair, no mustache, wearing an unzipped black leather bomber jacket over a hideous sport shirt of mustard yellow and dung brown.

“Where’s your boyfriend, Skairdykat?”

Still clinging to the hope that it was only a dream, Linda tried to open her eyes. They were already open. She closed them instead, heard the springs creak and felt the mattress shift. When she opened her eyes again, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, grinning like the happiest madman in the asylum.

“I asked you where your boyfriend was. If you don’t answer me, you’ll have to answer to my friend here.”

Slowly he drew his hand from behind his back. Linda was not surprised to see that he was grasping a snake by the neck. This was her dream: what else would he have had in his hand? She tried to draw back, but with his weight atop the covers, she found herself pinned beneath them. Not very dreamlike, she thought, trying to wriggle free-not very dreamlike at all.

“You’re dead,” she told him. “They found your body.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he replied, slipping the revolver into the waistband of his high-water slacks. “It’ll make the game more fun. But until we get started, you can avoid a good deal of unnecessary suffering by simply telling me where your boyfriend is, and when he’s expected back.”

Unnecessary suffering. Dream or no dream, Linda didn’t like the sound of that; dream or no dream, she decided to play along. “I don’t have a boyfriend, but if you mean Agent Pender, he’s on vacation-I haven’t heard from him in nearly a week.”

“My misunderstanding. And when is Agent Pender expected home?” There was nothing in Simon’s voice to suggest sarcasm-or that he had tugged the covers down to Linda’s waist.

“I don’t know.”

“I find that hard to believe.” He looked up from her naked torso, searched her eyes.

Linda held his gaze. Though those were not a pair of eyes you wanted to be looking into while you were trying to hold on to your sanity, neither were the snake’s-she could see its tongue flickering in and out at the edge of her peripheral vision.