Edward Lee - Ghouls

Bard looked like a limp sack in the seat. “For two days straight I’ve been praying that girl would turn up.” Then his voice roughened. “I should’ve known she’d turn up like that.”

“And how are we going to find out what happened to her?” Kurt drew on the complaint. “Unless we find something at Belleau Wood. We don’t even know the cause of death. How can we get a line on who’s responsible?”

Glen spoke for the first time since they’d entered the morgue. Dark circles under his eyes looked like smudges of soot. His voice was dull as wax. “What makes you think there was even a crime committed? Looks to me like she just got dragged off by some dogs or something. A crippled girl wouldn’t stand a chance against wild dogs, even in front of her own home.”

“Yeah, but she wasn’t in front of her own house,” Kurt reminded him. “She wasn’t even outside. Harley Fitzwater said her wheelchair was still by her bed, so even if she wanted to go outside for some fresh air or something, she would have been in the chair. There’s no way this is an accident. Someone entered that trailer and physically removed her.”

Bard and Glen finally surrendered to the conclusion. A drape of silence followed them down the corridor and out into the abandoned parking lot. They walked tilted, like drunks, still slightly warped by the state of affairs in Greene’s shop of horrors.

“I’ll have to call Choate, give him a complete report,” Bard complained. “The fucker’ll have county shirts all over my town.”

Emptiness amplified Glen’s otherwise subdued voice. “Somebody’s going to have to tell Harley Fitzwater that that skeleton back there is probably his daughter.”

“We’ll wait till positive ID is official,” Bard said. “And you’ll have to do some writing for this. County, too.”

“I know,” Glen said, and pulled open his Pinto’s door.

“You log trespassers at Belleau Wood, don’t you?” Kurt interjected.

“Sure.”

“Anything out of the ordinary last night?”

“No. No one on foot, at least.”

“Any smoochers?”

“A few, but that’s not out of the ordinary. I’ll give you the plate numbers tomorrow, and all my logs for the last couple of weeks.”

Kurt and Bard slid into the T-bird. Bard made no attempt to turn the ignition. Instead, he stared past Kurt, out the passenger window. He seemed to be staring at Glen.

“Something’s really starting to smell like a can of shit around here,” the chief said as Glen weaved off the lot.

“Elaborate, huh?”

“You know what I’m talking about.” Bard singled out the ignition key in the dark. “A dug-up coffin, a missing cop, and a crippled girl stripped down to the bones. And look what they all have in common.”

“Maybe I’m just naturally stupid this time of the morning,” Kurt said. “So how about telling me what you’re driving at.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kurt. Open your fucking eyes. All this shit’s gone down at Belleau Wood. And Glen just happens to work there, and he just happens to be the one finding it all of a fucking sudden.”

“Unless I’m reading you wrong, you’re saying Glen’s got something to do with it, aren’t you? Look, Chief, I’ve known the guy for damn near my whole life; he’s practically a brother, and he’s straight. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but whatever it is, the idea that Glen’s involved is ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” Bard retorted, finally starting the car. “Just ’cause we’re friends with the guy doesn’t mean he can’t drop a few bolts. Now, I don’t know what he might be up to, and I’m not saying he’s the perper or anything. But one thing’s certain. Glen sure as hell knows something he’s not telling us.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dawn broke faultily, changing the spectacle of first light into a blunder. Low and gray, storm clouds massed in the sky and crawled like swollen tumorous creatures ready to burst. Fog hung adhesively between the trees, and a chill breeze made the forest shiver, while animals hid from the certainty of rain.

By 5:30 a.m., Kurt had traveled the length of Route 154 several times. He’d gone back to bed after Bard had dropped him off, but found sleep impossible, thanks to the residual images of Greene’s morgue. Next, after a steaming, nearly painful shower (he felt sure the formalin fumes had seeped into his pores as well as his clothes) he paced the front porch, smoking, thinking, and staring across into the fog-filled woods until his solitude and the silence chased him out. He got into his car and drove, randomly and quite conscious now that the Ford had become a sanctuary against the private paranoias which seemed to be circling him over the past week. He lost track of time. He drove. And thought.

He thought about Vicky. He thought that he should be happy, since she was getting out of the hospital today. Instead, he felt cold and dry inside. For years his inhibitions had kept his feelings for her safely distant. But with her release from the hospital—and her departure from Lenny—Kurt knew that this was his last opportunity to confront her with the truth. It would be the first positive move he’d made with her, yet the prospect filled him with a sudden, certain dread.

Then he thought about Bard’s suspicions of Glen. Kurt knew both men well but knew Glen better. Glen was a loner, he’d always been. He’d once told Kurt that he preferred just a few friends, choosing them carefully to maintain quality friendships rather than superfluous ones. Lots of people misinterpreted this idea—along with his preference to work at night—and tended to dismiss Glen as peculiar. “I’ll always work at night,” he’d once laughed to Kurt. “No traffic jams, no rush hour, no hot sun to make your upholstery simmer and your ass burn. And at night I don’t have to be around lots of people and catch their colds”—an antisocial notion perhaps, though Kurt could not remember Glen ever being sick.

No, Glen wasn’t a flake, he was just set in his ways. And despite a few flukes, he was the most honest person Kurt had ever known. He was the kind of guy who returned lost dogs and declined the reward, and who left other’s forgotten change in pay phones. If he found money in the parking lot and was unable to locate the owner, he would drop it in the Jerry Lewis bottle at 7-Eleven, because the idea of spending money he did not earn seemed as bad as stealing.

So why did Bard link Glen with Belleau Wood’s recent mysteries? Bard had always been a fussbudget, a walking case of anxiety; he lived to worry and to suspect. Kurt acceded almost immediately that a progression of mishaps had piled up against Glen’s favor, had made him victim to coincidence. It was a rational conclusion, but Bard, though, had never been one to demonstrate rationality. And exactly what did Bard suspect? That Glen was a closet sociopath? A necrophile? A murderer? Outlandish.

Kurt turned around at the Liquor Mart, the very end of Route 154. Left of him, at the intersection that marked Tylersville’s boundary, intermittent vehicles blew through the traffic light, barreling away down West Street, strangely silent in the queer darkness of early morning. This was the secret pre-rush hour of Annapolis, pickup trucks mostly, or watermen on their way toward the docks center of town. Kurt parked here for a time, the Ford’s headlights stressing the fog which blurred 154’s most northern end. Just yards ahead, the road descended like a narrow tunnel, or a maw. Mist grew on the windshield. The fog seemed to be moving toward the car, thickening, as if the maw were expelling breath on him.

It was an eerie passage of minutes. With the rumbling of the Ford’s engine, he tensed at his own perceptions and sensed something ominous in the fog, as though some malignant entity had slipped into his town unnoticed and was pulsing there now, steady and content.