Chain Letter Page 18

  Neil’s ravished body quivered. He looked to each of them, into them, and love, the old Neil, glimmered. But shame claimed it too soon, and the tip of the blade came to rest on the soft flesh beneath his sunken ribs. Tony went to grab the knife, but Neil raised his other hand, stopping him before he could try. “I’ve done enough,” he said.

  Tony shook his head, beginning to choke up. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Always, Neil, always, I thought you were the best of us. Don’t end it this way, please?”

  Neil leaned his head back, his eyes falling shut, lifetimes of care etched in his face. “The doctor didn’t say the word,” he whispered, “but I knew what it was, I had read about it. When I went to bed at night, when it was dark, I tried not to think about it. Then I began to get sore, everything hurt, and I got scared. They gave me so many drugs, I was sick all the time. I kept wondering and worrying and I tried, but this thing got in my head and I couldn’t get rid of it. I don’t know where it came from. It was like a voice, saying this is true and this is a lie. It wouldn’t shut up! I had to listen, and I did listen, and then . . . I did all this.” He winced as though he had been struck and his grip on the knife tightened. “I’m sorry, Tony, I just can’t take it.”

  Then I will take it from you, Tony thought. He could do that for his friend. He could kill him, and stop the pain. Fortunately, it was an offer he wasn’t given a chance to make.

  “Neil,” Alison said softly from the corner. Neil’s exhausted eyes opened slowly and followed her as she ignored the knife and came close enough to touch him. “I gave you back the gun because I really did want to be in your dreams.” She brushed a strand of hair from his face. “Live a while longer, for me?”

  Her concern, which hurt him, and saved him, was the final stroke. The switchblade dropped from his hand onto the floor as he sagged against the wall, the last of his strength departing. “Take me away, Tony,” he moaned, sobs convulsing his body. Tony caught him as he fell, and cradled him in his arms.

  “I’ll take care of him,” he told the others, and carried him out of the room.

  Epilogue

  It was a fine day to move into a new house. Although the sun was warm, the afternoon continued to savor the morning’s freshness, the last traces of dew sparkling on the recently planted lawns, cool air pockets clinging to the shade and fanning Alison on each of her brief and repetitious treks from the moving van to the front door. As Mr. Hague, her new neighbor, had said, “It’s the kind of day Adam and Eve probably used to enjoy.”

  Tony had reappeared this morning, looking fit and at ease, and she had been relieved. He was presently helping Mr. Hague, a jolly middle-aged man with a huge pumpkin head and an ingratiating laugh, maneuver an overstuffed refrigerator through a dieting front door. Tony had already helped Mr. Hague with three quarters of the house. In fact, had he not lent a hand, Alison figured her new neighbor probably would have had trouble unloading the drawers and cushions—which was OK, Mr. Hague was a most appreciative gentleman. She was looking forward to meeting his family.

  “Can I help?” she asked, holding a box of books, standing on the walkway in shorts, the sun a sensual delight on the back of her bare legs, enjoying how Tony’s muscles strained and bulged through his sweat-soaked green T-shirt—he was such a hunk.

  “No,” Tony breathed, positioning his body against the overloaded dolly for a burst of effort. “Ready, Mr. Hague?”

  “What should I be doing?” Mr. Hague called back, hidden inside the house behind the bulk of the icebox. Tony looked at her and winked.

  “Just step back,” he said, and flexing his biceps and using a bit of he-man magic, the refrigerator did a tiny hop and rolled into the entrance hall from where he was able to easily wheel it into the kitchen. She followed on his heels, depositing her burden on the couch they had earlier squeezed through the window. Tony unstrapped the dolly belt and walked the appliance into the proper corner while Mr. Hague stood idly nearby, shaking his head in awe.

  “I’d like to say when I was your age,” Mr. Hague remarked, “I could have done that. But I was more of a wimp then than I am now.” He laughed and picked up the loose electrical cord. “But I suppose I can manage to plug this in.” He accomplished the simple task and reached for his wallet. “Let me give you a little something for saving me a couple of hernia operations.”

  “You spared me my afternoon workout,” Tony said. “Let’s call it even.”

  “Come, I insist, a few dollars.” Mr. Hague pulled out two twenties. “You can take Alison to dinner.”

  She smiled. “But I’m on a diet.”

  “How about when I have to move,” Tony said. “I get to call you?”

  Mr. Hague scratched his big head, thought about that for a moment, and decided that that sounded fair. The heavy articles were all unloaded, and the three of them shared a pitcher of lemonade before Mr. Hague walked them to the door. Standing half inside, half outside, Alison glanced at the stucco ceiling. Not far from the entrance, there was a sloppy patch job—her second missed shot. Mr. Hague noticed her attention.

  “The realtor told me the contractor’s spray gun went on the blink,” he said. “They’ll be out soon to smooth out the spot.”

  She could understand why a salesman wouldn’t have been wild about telling a client that their brand-new home had been shot at. “Nothing like a gun on the blink,” she said, and Tony looked at the floor.

  Mr. Hague thanked them profusely for a couple of minutes before letting them go. She had not had a chance to talk to Tony before he had started in on the furniture and she was anxious to get him alone. But as they walked down the driveway, they were stopped by a swiftly decelerating Camaro. A straw blonde with an excited face and a skimpy top bounded out the door. All of about sixteen chewing gum years old, she wasted no time raking Tony over with her dizzy blue eyes.

  “Hiya!” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Kathy, your new neighbor!”

  Tony shook her hand—Kathy had obviously been hoping he was a local boy—and introduced the two of them, adding quietly, “Alison is actually your neighbor. I’m from the other side of town.”

  Kathy let her disappointment show briefly, then turned and took in the empty street. She threw her hands in the air. “Lord, this place looks dull!” She popped her gum. “When are all the other people moving in?”

  Alison hugged Tony’s arm, noticing all of a sudden the faraway look in his eyes. “Soon,” she said.

  “Then again,” Kathy mused, taking a different slant on things, “it’s kind of neat, kind of spooky having all these empty houses to ourselves, huh?”

  Alison pointed at the bedroom that overlooked the garage. “Is that going to be your room?”

  “Hey, yeah, it is. Why ya ask?”

  “Just wondering.” She tugged on Tony, who was hardly listening. “Catch you later, Kathy.”

  “Nice meeting you! You, too, Tony. Great to see you.”

  Tony nodded silently.

  They strolled up the middle of the street, hand in hand, not speaking, the brown fertilized plots on either side of them spread with bright green blades, sparrows skipping between the young grass, searching for unsprouted seeds. The sun was hotter out here on the asphalt, and she would have preferred short sleeves to complement her short pants. But her parents didn’t know about the stitches and bandages on her left arm and she was still working on a good excuse. Fortunately, Kipp had helped her replace the back door, her bedroom door, the hall closet door and the glass panels next to the front door. The new back door was a distinctly lighter shade of brown than the old one, but neither her mom or dad had so far noticed.

  She had spoken to Harvey Heck the day after all the excitement. He had been on duty solid for the last week, he had told her, but he had looked hungover and she hadn’t bothered asking why he had failed to answer his phone at a certain crucial moment.

  “I’ll have to tell you about Fran’s and Kipp’s explanations to the police,” she said finally. “They were pretty funny.
Fran told them that she got kidnapped by a deaf and dumb old man who took her to his house in the desert and forced her to draw obscene pictures of him all day long. Of course they wanted to know where he lived and what he looked like but she just told them she couldn’t remember. She told them she escaped when he wasn’t listening. Want to hear Kipp’s?”

  Tony brightened. “This should be good.”

  She laughed. “Not one, but three beautiful girls were responsible for his kidnapping. He told the police he put up a good fight, that’s how he lost all that blood in his bedroom, but they wrestled him down and tied him up and dumped him in their plushly carpeted and heavily perfumed van. They didn’t take him to any one spot, just drove him all over the place.”

  “For two weeks?”

  “Yeah! And whichever two weren’t driving would amuse themselves by doing all sorts of atrocious things to his naked body. There was an amazon blonde, a large-chested redhead, and a tireless brunette. And here’s the weird part—the police swallowed the whole story! It seems they have several adolescent male kidnappings on record that fit the same pattern.”

  “I don’t believe any of this.”

  “I’m not so sure I do, but this is what Kipp has been telling everyone, that is, in between asking them if they aren’t real glad that he’s still alive.”

  Tony let out a hearty laugh, and she was happy to hear it. They reached her house a moment later and then decided that, since it was such a nice day, they would circle the tract on foot. Before continuing, however, she reached into the back seat of her car and pulled out two green vinyl folders. “I’m sure you hadn’t forgotten, but graduation was a couple of days ago. I accepted your diploma for you.” She handed him the two certificates, adding, “Fran accepted Neil’s.”

  He glanced at both briefly, his expression unreadable, before setting them on the car roof. “I’ll get them on the way back.” He took her hand and they resumed their walk. “How was the ceremony?” he asked casually.

  She shrugged. “Boring, for the most part. They held it in the stadium, and had us sitting on fold-outs in the center of the football field. But there were a couple of neat things. One was that they had Brenda sing a song. To do that, they had to lift her suspension, but you know, she’s the only one in the whole stupid school that can sing. I guess they figured they didn’t have much choice. You’ll never believe what material she chose! Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out for Summer’! And it was Mr. Hoglan who accompanied her on piano!”

  He smiled. “Did Kipp give the valedictorian’s speech?”

  A huge silver-collared German shepherd with a dinosaur’s bone in his mouth leisurely crossed their path, regarding them suspiciously out of the corner of his eye. Another family besides the Hagues must have arrived. “He did,” she said carefully.

  “What did he talk about?”

  “Neil. A recording was made of it, if you want to hear it later.”

  “You tell me.”

  “Just like Kipp, he tried to keep it light, but he said some real neat stuff. In fact, right in the middle, he lost his voice for a couple of minutes. He said afterward it was because his throat got dry, but everyone could tell there had been another reason.” She bent low as they passed a beginning planter, plucking a white daisy. Simply remembering had brought a lump to her throat. She continued, “He started off with the obvious stuff, how Neil had helped out at the football games and the track meets, what his favorite subjects had been, how he would have graduated on the honor roll. But then he just . . . started to talk about Neil.” She sniffed. “He quoted you, sort of, saying that of all those at school, he had always seen Neil as the best example of what a person should be. He finished by telling this story of how you three guys were out hiking in the desert one day when suddenly he slipped and fell and twisted his ankle and wasn’t able to walk anymore. He said that while you went searching for help, Neil stayed and took care of him. But then you were gone so long, and it was so hot, that Neil decided he had to try to carry him back to the car. He went on about how Neil wasn’t very strong, but how he tried anyway, giving it everything he had, and how it almost . . . killed him.” Her eyes burned with unshed tears and she had to take a couple of deep breaths to keep from crying. “I know it sounds mushy and I know Kipp probably made up the story, but when he told it at the graduation, it was just . . . perfect.”

  “I like the story,” Tony said, hugging her as they walked.

  She hesitated. “Can you tell me how it was?”

  He did not answer right away and for a moment she was afraid she had trod where she shouldn’t have. He was listening, however, to a train far off, miles it must have been, its fast and heavy passage rolling toward them like the thunder of a distant but approaching storm. Perhaps it reminded him, as it did her, of that terrible night. But of course no rain followed in its wake and soon it had vanished all together.

  “We went to the mountains,” he said finally. “It was a pretty place, next to a lake. Neil liked it. I used my parents’ credit card and rented a cabin. I called my mom and dad and told them that I needed to be alone for a while and, what with all that had been going on, they thought that was fine. We stayed there the whole week, had great weather. In the morning, these deer would come right up to the door and we would feed them. At least Neil would—they always ran when they saw me.” He shook his head, squeezing her arm. “Hey, this shouldn’t sound so soapy. Neil was happy this last week. He was in a lot of pain, he refused to take any drugs, and he got so he couldn’t walk, but he was his old peaceful self. The Caretaker, the man, all that garbage was gone. We didn’t even talk about it. We just talked about old times: movies we’d seen, music we liked, places we’d gone. And we talked about you.”

  “What did he say?” she asked, smiling, wiping her eyes.

  “Nice things. You would have been pleased.” He let go of her and stretched his arms and spine backward, drinking up the sun like a man who had spent too long in a dark place. “Mainly, though, we just sat by the lake and skimmed rocks and that was good. I fixed him up this old cushiony chair next to the water and he was comfortable enough.” A shadow, neither long nor deep, brushed over his face. “He was sitting in it yesterday morning when he died.”

  Their walk was taking them into a dead end and she pointed to a break in the wall that enclosed the tract, and they passed through it out into the tall dry grass and the low gnarled bushes, the field stretching practically unchecked to the mountains. Insects buzzed at their feet—none appeared bloodthirsty—and a large orange butterfly circled above their heads. Far to the right atop a low bluff, a clan of rabbits gave them a cursory glance before continuing with more important business. She felt her eyes drying and noticed that Tony’s smile had returned.

  “There was one thing he did that sort of reminded me of the Caretaker,” he said. “It was quite clever. Before his first funeral, he asked me to do him two favors. One was to give you the ring, the other—I hope this doesn’t disturb you—was to bury him next to the man in the event the Caretaker killed him.”

  “I’m fine now, really, go on.”

  He burst out laughing; it certainly seemed an unusual time to do so. “Well, before he died yesterday, he made me swear that I would bury him in the man’s grave!” He paused, waiting for her reaction, which surely must have been inadequate—she didn’t know what to say. “Don’t you see, Ali, he knew I’d be feeling so guilty that I’d turn myself in when he was gone. And he was right, I was going to do that. But now how was I supposed to turn myself in without evidence? He’d disposed of the man’s body in the fire—which, by the way, actually helped his mother out financially, what with the insurance money and all—and now he’d rigged it so I couldn’t even take the police to the man’s grave.” He added wistfully, “When it suited him, Neil could be funnier than Kipp.”

  Their big orange butterfly escort landed on top of a huge yellow boulder. Alison stopped and rested her open palm near it and was delighted when it skipped into her ha
nd. “That hasn’t happened since I was a kid,” she whispered.

  “You must have gotten your innocence back.”

  “Do you think so?” she asked seriously.

  He shrugged. “I was just mumbling.”

  She raised her hand and blew gently and the butterfly flew away. The last couple of months had been the most intense time of her life, and it seemed wrong that she could have learned nothing from the experience. She leaned against the boulder and looked up at the blue sky and thought for a moment, before saying, “I don’t know about my innocence, but I know I’m not such a stuck-up bitch anymore.”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “I never saw you that way.”

  “A lot of people did.”

  “Neil wasn’t one of them.”

  “But he was the one who made me aware of it. I’ll never again brush someone off the way I did him. The next time someone cares about me, I’m going to know about it.” She took his hand from her shoulder and kissed it lightly. She was feeling sad again, but it was a sweet sadness, and she was glad for it. “You’ve lost your best friend, and I’ve lost my greatest admirer. I can’t take Neil’s place, but can you take his?”

  He stared at her for a moment, his eyes the same rich blue as the sky, then shook his head. “No,” he said, and pulled her into his arms. “But I’ll still do the best I can.”

  THE ANCIENT EVIL

  For Neil

  Prologue

  The chain letter came as it had before. First to Fran Darey—in a purple envelope with no return address. It came totally out of the blue, and like the original letter, it carried with it a threat of danger. And like before, at first no one listened.

  Until it was too late.

  Fran Darey was just returning home from a morning of hard work when she collected the mail. Summer was almost over and so was her job at the local mall. She worked at the McDonald’s, and although it would be fair to say she did not hate her job, it would also have been fair to say she was never going to work in a fast-food joint again. The job didn’t allow her to use her full physical and mental potential. Heck, she was going to college in a few weeks. She was going to get straight A’s and graduate in four years and make the world a better place. She was never going to have to worry how many more fries there were in a big scoop versus a medium scoop—a question she had been asked three times that day by smart-mouthed junior high kids.