Hallowed Read online

  “Check with your father,” Mom replied tersely, starting away.

  Of course, Dad was in the garage when I got home.

  Standing in front of the open hood of the Ford, he seemed to be having a staring contest with the Ford this morning. I couldn’t tell who was winning.

  “Mom told me to ask you if I can I go to the library to study.”

  “Fine.”

  That seemed to go well, so I figured I’d push my luck. “Can we invite Uncle Hank over for dinner this week?”

  Dad turned to look at me. “What? Why?”

  “Because I want to.”

  Dad drew an oily rag from his pocket and used it to apparently spread even more oil on his hands than was there previously. “Paul, your uncle’s got church business and all that.” Then under his breath, “Counting up all that money.”

  “Can I at least invite him?”

  He waved the rag at me in dismissal and disappeared under the hood. “Under the circumstances, this week is not a good time.”

  “For him or you?”

  Dad shot me a look from beneath the hood. “Paul, the department has asked me to take a look at what they have so far on an informal basis.”

  I rushed up to the hood, waiting patiently for more. Claudia was going to flip.

  He sighed and straightened up, giving his back a stretch. “They figure a fresh pair of eyes might see something they haven’t.”

  Around three o’clock, I found Claudia at the library computer, surfing the net for as many details on the two victims as was out there. When I greeted Claudia with my father’s news, she spun around in her chair, her dark eyes as big as saucers. “You’re shitting me!”

  I shook my head. “A friend of his called him late last night. Woke him from a dead sleep. That’s when they noticed I was gone.”

  “Did he tell you anymore? Is he going down there to work with them?”

  “His condition for helping them was that all the material be brought out to him at home.”

  Claudia nodded. “They wanted him to go to them, but he refused.”

  “Yeah, he told me he wants to avoid publicity.”

  Claudia looked me in the eye. “He’s protecting you and your mom.”

  She was right. Until that moment, I had never considered the interest an investigation like this might attract from the media, from sicko celebrity hunters.

  We sat in the silence of the library, our respective wheels turning, generating questions and posing hypothetical answers to them.

  “Did your Mom punish you?”

  “Well, what do you think? Can’t say, I didn’t see it coming. I just figured that it’d be for the séance, not for hanging out with you,” she said with a scoff. “Actually, you provided a perfect cover for me.”

  Claudia turned back to the computer and I signed in to the terminal next to her. “I should probably warn you, my mother doesn’t buy the cemetery story. She thinks I lied about the movie so I could be with you.”

  I stopped typing and stared at Claudia in wonder. “Huh?”

  “Yeah, she’s a little pissed at you, I think.” There was a teasing smirk on her face, though there was no doubt in me that she was completely serious.

  “What? Your mother thinks that you and I..?”

  Claudia gave me a searching look. “Is that so hard to believe?” When I didn’t respond right away, she went on. “Honestly, what would you think if your daughter started spending all her free time with a guy?” She turned and gave me her characteristic poker-face.

  I spent the next few moments squirming in my seat. Finally, I sighed and snapped back, “You told her the truth, though.”

  “I tried.”

  “And she doesn’t believe you?”

  Claudia laughed at me. There’s nothing like the amused laugh of a teenage girl to sober one to hidden realities. “You’re kidding me! After all the lies I’ve told her. I’ve used up all my credit with her.”

  Angry but keeping it under control for the moment, I responded, “Didn’t you even try to defend me?”

  “What and tell her about the séance?”

  “Oh, so you’re covering for your friends from Dallas, just not me?”

  Claudia rolled her eyes. “What should I have told her? That I’ve been schooling you in the intricacies of serial killers? That we’re investigating a chain of murders that only has one victim?”

  “Actually two.”

  “Well, now it’s two. It wasn’t last week.”

  “Didn’t you tell her about the cemetery?”

  “I did. She thinks I’m hiding something.”

  “Hello! You are!”

  The librarian gave me “the shush,” followed by “the look.”

  “Look, I don’t like being accused of doing something I didn’t do.” I couldn’t seem to adjust to this new position I had been placed in. It felt foreign to me. “Is she really mad or are you just exaggerating a little?”

  “Look, she’s delusional. Just blow it off. I do.”

  I sat there frowning at the computer screen in front of me.

  “Stop pouting, Paul. We’ve got work to do.” She handed over several printed pages of information on the two victims, Grace Fischer and Sadie Nayar, gathered from various sources. “Like much of the stuff on the internet, some is rumor, speculation, or just outright crap. Some are unverified facts. But here’s what I know for sure,” she began. “Grace Fischer was eighteen. Tall with short dark brown hair. Sadie Nayar was sixteen. Short in height with long blonde hair. Grace was from Renton and found in Abner. How far is Renton from Abner?”

  I pulled up a mapping website and gauged that Renton was roughly twenty-five miles from Abner.

  “Sadie was from San Marcos and her body was found in Pine Marsh.”

  I typed in the towns. “Thirty-six miles.”

  Claudia glanced over at the maps I had pulled up on screen.

  “All these towns are within thirty or forty miles of each other.”

  “So we have a commonality of distance. What about the girls? Do you see any common denominator?”

  “Teenagers,” I offered with a shrug. “They seem pretty different.”

  “In appearance. We know nothing about their private lives.”

  I studied the printouts that Claudia gave me. “Oh, that’s weird.”

  “What?”

  “Twelve letters in each girl’s name.”

  Claudia snatched the printouts out of my hand before I could get all the words out.

  “Five in the first. Seven in the second,” she finished for me. “Probably a coincidence but it’s just the sort of thing the Feds would have spotted.” She gave me a smirk and slugged me on the arm a little harder than she really needed to. “Now, if the letters in their middle names matched as well that would be more than chance.”

  “Nothing on the web?”

  “No, y’see that’s my whole point. People don’t know each other’s middle names. If they do, that only means those individuals somehow hold a special place in their lives. Intimate knowledge implies intimate relationships, right?” Claudia had already begun adding another paragraph to the document she was working on. “If this pans out, the killer had a more than casual relationship with the victims beforehand. We have to know where the girls used to hang out. If there is a commonality, we may be able to determine how the killer met the victims. First, we have to find out what these girl’s middle names are. What are the odds your dad would just give us this info?” When she got no response, she glanced over at me.

  My mind was elsewhere. I was busy recalling the moment in the cemetery on Thursday. She had asked: “What would make you say such a bizarre thing, Paul Andrew Graves?” What was it that I had said? Now I couldn’t recall. Strange.

  “Paul?”

  Suddenly I saw the house in my head. On the heels of that image, I could hear that tune again out of the blue.

  “The house that you and your friends went to for the séance; could you find it again
if you had to?”

  Faced with such an unexpected question, Claudia stared at me in confusion, her mind sat in neutral. “What?” Then almost as if she wasn’t sure she said it the first time, she repeated, “What?”

  “The house?”

  “What does this have to do with the investigation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I turned back to the computer, realizing that I’d misspoken. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to hear what I had decided to tell her. But she was awaiting a response nonetheless.

  I turned back to her and moved in conspiratorially. She gave me a distrustful look. “Do I seem unbalanced to you?”

  “What are you talking about, you freak?”

  “Psychosis. That’s when you hear voices and stuff, right? Like Berkowitz thinking that a Labrador retriever is talking to him because he’s a high demon, or like Herbert Mullin believing that he has to kill to prevent an earthquake from destroying California.”

  Claudia gave me a confused smirk. “Does this have to do with your constant humming?”

  “Yes,” I sighed, relieved to get at least that bit out.

  “Do you think you’re going crazy?”

  I struggled with the question a moment before answering: “Maybe.”

  “If you think you’re going crazy, you’re not.” Claudia slapped my knee and turned back to her document. “You want to get a song out of your head, do what I do. Hum it out loud.”

  I hummed as much of it as I could remember out loud for her.

  “Sounds familiar, but odds are if it’s a song you like, I’ve never heard it before.” I narrowed my eyes at her and she showed me her teeth. “So, why do you think this song has anything to do with the house we had the séance in?”

  I shrugged. The well of awkward sharing had dried up.

  “If you want, I can ask the DFW guys if they know any history on the place.”

  I sighed. “Do you realize that it takes more syllables and time to say D-F-double U than it does to actually say what those letters stand for?”

  She, of course, ignored me, handing me a freshly-printed document. “Give this to your father.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a list of questions we need for our investigation.”

  I looked down at a few of the questions. “‘Were the bodies posed?’ ‘Was there sexual penetration?’ I’m not going to ask my father these questions! Do you know the lecture I’d get?”

  “Well, you’ve got to be just a little sneaky about it,” Claudia growled. She snatched the page back from me and began packing up her stuff. “I can see you might lack the finesse for this kind of job. I guess I’ll have to do it myself. When do you think you dad will know something?”

  “I believe they’re supposed to bring him down some information tomorrow.”

  “Then I’ll be over tomorrow night for dinner.”

  “I thought you were punished?”

  “Yeah well, I’ll handle that part.”

  Dad wasn’t home when I got in. Mom told me that they had convinced him that “man-hours” would be better utilized if he were to come into the station. The way they explained it to him was that time would be wasted if they had to spend time gathering information, photocopying it, and sending a man down with it, not to mention the potential of paperwork getting misplaced and as a result, leaking certain information to the press.

  Dad made the decision to go down to the station after all.

  I could tell by the way Mom was banging around in the kitchen that she did not agree with his decision in the least. For the time being, I decided the best tact would be to avoid her.

  After a half hour of looking over some of the books Claudia had given me on serial killers, a general indifference began to settle over me at the graphic descriptions of dismembered bodies and horrific murders. The names were meaningless to me. At some point they had become like fictional characters in books. It made my soul heavy to think that these individuals--many with full profitable lives--had been reduced to faceless victims of celebrated monsters. When human lives began to become simple marks on a scorecard, something was horribly wrong.

  I tossed the books into a stack on my floor and went downstairs to be with another human being. Mom told me that Dad called to tell her that he would be home late, and I suggested going into town for burgers and a movie rental.

  “You’re still punished,” she informed me.

  “C’mon, no one would have to know.”

  “You’d know. That’s enough. Part of raising a good son like you, Paul, is following through with promises. That includes punishment.”

  We had all the ingredients for a pizza, so we ended up making one. As she pressed out the dough on the flour-covered counter, she asked if Claudia had been at the library. I told her that she had.

  “You two have been seeing a lot of each other lately.”

  Knowing how sensitive Mom was about the two murders, I gave her a calculated answer: “She’s been tutoring me.”

  “Claudia?” She gave me a look of incredulity. “Seeing as how she started in the middle of a semester, how can she have already caught up enough?”

  “She’s sharper than everyone gives her credit for,” I said a little more defensively than I’d meant.

  Mom sensed the mine field and wisely decided to step back. “Well, I’m just happy to see that you two are getting along. You used to fight like cats and dogs when you were little.”

  I pretended that I didn’t remember just to hear her interpretation of a couple of episodes.

  Mom recalled one of those incidents on the Fourth of July at Sea Rim State Park when I was nine. If I remember correctly, it was Claudia’s idea to go collect seashells. At one point I held a fiddler crab shell up to my ear. Claudia informed me that a classmate had lost his hearing from a crab that had crawled into his eardrum while trying a similar seemingly innocent maneuver.

  It was five years before I held another shell up to my ear.

  Later on that same day, we both got a “timeout’ for straying so far from the rest of the group and had to spend the rest of the afternoon under a shade tree making faces at each other. She told me that I should stop crossing my eyes at her. Why, I asked.

  “There are little hooks on the back-sides of our eyeballs. And one of these days if the hooks catch, your eyes could lock like that forever.”

  To this day, I have never crossed my eyes again.

  I could remember a few occasions that I had attempted bodily injury to Claudia. More often than not, I would just end up locking her out of my room in frustration.

  “Even back then, she thought the world of you, y’know,” Mom commented with a certain tone of resignation.

  “Yeah, well now I’m lucky if I can just get respectful tolerance.”

  She laughed. “Teenage girls are enigmas, Paul. Don’t think you have got them all figured out. At her age, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next until I did it.”

  We ended up watching the classic 1940 Howard Hawks comedy “His Girl Friday” with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. I’d never seen the movie all the way through and thought it was pretty good for a movie that didn’t have one explosion. Mom recalled hearing that because the dialogue was so quick that audiences back in the day thought that director Hawks had actually speeded up the film.

  As much as I enjoyed it, I kept thinking about Claudia. Wondering if she would have liked the movie. Wondering if she had made any progress on the case.

  After the film was over, I was about to go upstairs when that mysterious melody entered my head again. “By the way, do you happen to know what song this is?” I hummed what I could remember.

  Mom’s face lit up. “Oh, that’s ‘Crimson and Clover.’ It was really popular back when your father and I were going to high school.” Her eyes lost focus for a moment and she smiled. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Does it have a positive or a negative connotation?”

  “Well,
for me, positive, but that’s pretty subjective.” She wrinkled her brow. “Now that I think of it, the song always seemed a little dangerous to me. It wasn’t… I don’t know… innocent.” Then she gave an uncharacteristic chuckle and started clearing the coffee table of cups and plates.

  “Is it connected to any event culturally? Y’know, Woodstock or something?”

  “I don’t think so, though it was big in ’69. What are you doing research on oldies or something?” She gave me an exaggerated expression of seriousness as she started into the kitchen.

  “Actually, I’ve been humming it and I couldn’t figure where I might have heard it. Do you guys have that album or something?”

  “No, not that I know of. Maybe your father had the radio in the garage tuned to an oldies station or something.”

  Of course, that must have been it. That made more sense than hearing it for the first time in a dream.

  “It’s nice to hear that you’re listening to the classics. They don’t make them like they did back when your father and I were growing up.”

  By the time I told her goodnight, I think Mom had forgiven Dad’s stubbornness at going down to the station and that I had played a part in that.

  I went upstairs to look up the song on the internet. Now that I knew what to look for, I found references to it everywhere. I could even download the actual recording. I pressed the earphones connected to my computer to my ear and listened to the familiar song. Though I’d heard it before, probably on oldies stations chosen by my parents, from the backseat of my parent’s car, it felt like I was hearing it for the first time. The experience was a little surreal, reminding me a little of the first time I’d ever seen a live baseball game in a real park after watching it on TV for so many years.

  I went to another website, found the lyrics, written by Tommy James and Peter Lucia of Tommy James and the Shondells, and read the words of the song as I listened:

  “Now I don't hardly know her

  But I think I could love her

  Crimson and clover

  Well if she come walkin' over

  Now I been waitin' to show her

  Crimson and clover

  Over and over”