Hallowed Read online

  “Would you like to sit?” Tatum asked, rising from her chair and waving Claudia toward it. Only after Tatum took a seat on top of the made bed, did she take the chair. I remained standing.

  Her attention fully on Claudia, Tatum leaned forward and almost seemed ready to offer her hands in greeting, but stopped just short of it. When I had gotten past the scars, I noticed that she was holding something in her right hand. I could just make out what looked like a small leather cord dangled loosely from between two tightly clenched fingers.

  “I heard about your mother and I’m so very sorry.” Tatum lowered her head and blinked so rapidly I thought she would cry.

  Claudia just stared at her with a blank expression.

  “I found out too late to warn you,” Tatum admitted, staring down at the leather cord in her hands. “When I knew for sure, I remember collapsing in the church aisle and the next thing I know, I’m in a hospital room. Father Graves told me what had happened, but I think he knew as well as I did. He’s got a strong feeling for it. I sensed that the first time we met.”

  “Knew what?” I asked.

  Tatum turned and peered at me with surprise, almost as if recognizing for the first time that I had entered the room with Claudia.

  “That she had been murdered,” the woman responded as if it were common knowledge.

  I moved closer. “She was in a car accident.”

  Tatum turned and looked at me with an expression of confusion. “That was no accident, Paul.” She turned and looked at Claudia. “Oh my God, you really don’t know, do you?” Her hand reached out and touched Claudia’s hand experimentally then retreated. “I’m so sorry that I have to be the one to tell you, but your mother’s death was no simple accident. She was murdered.”

  “How did you come to this conclusion? From where did you derive your facts?” Claudia challenged.

  “I’ve been sitting here the last two days with nothing to do but think and meditate,” Tatum replied, seemingly oblivious to the posed question, yet staring solely at Claudia. “Whoever killed your mother is also responsible for the other four murders.”

  “I don’t understand. Why her? It doesn’t fit the profile.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but evil is a creature of opportunity.”

  There was that phrase again--the third time since this thing had begun.

  “The killer knows your family. He knows your father is investigating the killings. He knows about you and Claudia.” Here she looked up at me. “Yes, your uncle told me about the letter.”

  “The killer knows that we’ve also been doing our own investigation every day at lunch,” Claudia stated.

  In that moment, a sick feeling came over me. In my heart I knew. Until that moment, the impact of what had happened less than an hour before hadn’t registered with me. I had traded pleasantries with him. Only nights before I had touched him in the October Country and left a mark on his neck, but like the mark on Cain himself, I couldn’t touch him in this world. I knew but I couldn’t prove anything.

  Nathan Graham would continue to walk free.

  Claudia looked at me then, almost as if reading my guilt-ridden mind, and I turned my eyes elsewhere. “So, I led him straight to Mom. It was me,” Claudia admitted in the hushed tone of a conspirator.

  “No, this didn’t begin with you,” she told her. “It was your father who involved himself along with Paul’s father and uncle.” Tracy Tatum reached out and took Claudia firmly by the shoulders. In doing so, the object that she had been holding dangled from her hand behind Claudia’s back. I saw now that it was a small leather bag no bigger than the palm that had been holding it.

  Claudia shook her head. “That happened thirty-five years ago, before I was born. That has nothing to do with the Samhain murders.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that limited in scope,” Tatum replied almost apologetically. “The murders committed here in this world in the last few months may have begun in the heart and mind of a single man, but there is more to it than that.”

  “I don’t understand,” Claudia admitted. “If one man committed the murders, of course he would be the one responsible. Do you think there’s more than one person involved?”

  “No,” Tatum stated with clarity. “There’s only one killer, but the Evil he tapped into already existed, simply waiting for the opportunity for someone like him to listen.”

  Evil is a creature of opportunity.

  “It existed in 1969 when I was five and kidnapped by a man named Dr. Wenton Joyner just as it exists in the person of your Samhain killer. It existed in 1983 when me and your father went back there and tried in vain to destroy it entirely.”

  “Wait, he went back?” I cried. “Dad went back to that house?”

  Tracy Tatum turned back to me, fixing me with eyes filled with judgment. “No, not your father.” She looked over at Claudia with compassion. “Ronnie Wicke and I went alone. No one else would come.”

  I was utterly bewildered. How could this be? “My father would never…”

  “He did once,” Tracy Tatum snapped.

  Claudia lifted her eyes to me, and I found myself looking away in shame.

  I started toward the door, retrieving my cell phone to check for missed messages. “C’mon, Claudia. We have to get back.”

  She turned to Tatum and asked, “What was he like? My father?”

  Although the corners of the woman’s mouth moved only slightly, her eyes shined radiantly. “I felt safe when I was with him.” She reached out and squeezed Claudia’s shoulder. “Your father was a good man, Claudia.”

  Claudia’s eyes glistened, but she held the tears back through sheer will. “Why are you doing this?”

  “These visions, they give me no choice,” she chuckled helplessly. “I’ve been trying to outrun this since I was five, and I finally decided that I’m done with that. I’d rather die fighting then go on living my life in fear.”

  Then she said something that I will never forget, something that put everything else in perspective: “And all that aside, I owe both your fathers a debt. They gave me the gift of life, one that should have been cut short at the age of five.” She suddenly smiled and gave a chuckle. “In that way, you’re both my siblings.”

  Tears were in her eyes. She started to turn away. Claudia stood, went to her and held her face against her chest. Tatum sobbed quietly a few moments until finally pushing her away. “You have to go now. You’re too vulnerable here.”

  “I’m going to ask my father to get some extra security here.” I grabbed Claudia by the arm and started to lead her to the door.

  She stopped short and gasped. Tatum and I followed her eye line to the crucifix hanging on the wall above the doorway. “God, I remember now.” She grasped me by the hands, her eyes wide with astonishment. “It was the same one in those crime scene photos I saw that night at the camp. One of those big wooden gothic numbers, like the ones you used to see in those old Hammer Dracula pictures.” I gave her a look of utter confusion. “The day we went to Eerie’s, the Halloween store, he was there looking at a crucifix. I remember now because he caught me watching him and turned his back to me and only a few minutes later I saw him leaving the store without making a purchase, but I remember the crucifix.”

  “Who?” It was a rhetorical question, because I already knew what she would say.

  “Nathan Graham.”

  Tracy Tatum looked from Claudia to me. “You know him?”

  I looked over at Claudia, who was staring off into space with a confused expression. “He goes to our school,” I told Tatum. “He’s in band with me.” Yeah, we go way back, I thought with dread.

  On the way to the SUV, I called Dad and told him what we knew—not exactly evidence to build a case on, but Dad said that it would be enough for Sheriff Brannigan. Less than thirty minutes later they had a search warrant from the judge and started searching the Graham house.

  Claudia didn’t say a word for almost five minutes. We were about ten miles down the
highway before she turned to me and with a hard expression on her tear-stained face she asked, “How long have you known?”

  When I didn’t answer right away, she swore under her breath. “Pull over! Now!”

  From her tone, I knew there was little choice in the matter.

  “No wonder you didn’t seem surprised. You knew?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “There was this convoluted dream, where I couldn’t see his face… and I talked to him at the wake.”

  Claudia sat sullenly silent. I could feel the heat of her anger slowly rising. It was like sitting next to a boiler. When I offered nothing more, she punched me on the arm as hard as she could. It was the sweetest pain I could ever remember feeling, because I knew that she had just forgiven me… in her own bizarre way.

  “Hey! Maybe I didn’t tell you everything, but you keep things from me too.”

  “When?”

  “Graham whispered something to you earlier,” I flatly stated. “I saw him.”

  Claudia blinked and glanced away for a moment. “Yeah, well, it didn’t make sense to me.”

  “Oh, and my dreams do? Just tell me!”

  “He said, ‘It must end where it began,’” she stated flatly, then looked up at me and in a louder voice, “Your turn! Prid, Pro, and Quo it up!”

  I sighed heavily. “Fine! I had this dream that I scratched his neck,” I said, hoping it would end there, but she just kept watching me and waiting for more. “At the wake, I believe that he deliberately showed me a scratch on his neck.”

  Claudia’s eyes widened in awe. She gave an involuntary shudder. “Wow,” she simply said.

  “All circumstantial. The only thing it proves is that I’m dreaming about some guy from my school,” I continued defensively.

  “Since when did that matter? We’ve been trading theories for almost a month now and suddenly you need proof before you tell me something?”

  “A month ago you weren’t in the hospital for poisoning and your mother wasn’t…”

  The anger on Claudia’s face faded and was replaced with something much more vulnerable.

  I could have kicked myself for drudging that up. In my own awkward way, I attempted to redirect the conversation. “You just gave us the first real proof we might have to connect him to the murders. At the very least, it bought my Dad a search warrant.”

  She slumped forward, staring down at her hands. “Just a few days sooner.”

  “Don’t,” I warned. “Tatum and I could make the same argument. Why didn’t we put two and two together in time? All these dreams, these visions, what good did it do us?” Hesitantly, I reached out and took her hand. When she let me, I knew I was out of the doghouse, for now.

  “Why you? Why Tracy? What’s the connection?”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about that myself.”

  After all this time and speculation, there was no way we could have gone home, but when we went to the Graham house, the street out front had been cordoned off and emergency vehicles and uniformed men and women were all over their property. When Deputy Nick spotted me, he called Dad on his radio, and I was personally ordered back home by my father in front of most of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department.

  It wasn’t until later that we would learn all the details of what they had found: Several key pieces of evidence in the top drawer of a computer desk in Nathan’s room connecting him to each of the victims, including a business card from the beauty school Grace Fischer had attended in Austin (with Grace’s cell number written in her own handwriting on the back); a deck of tarot cards, missing one significant card, that would turn out to belong to Sadie Nayar; a menu from a Student Council luncheon held at Kalim Al-Sahim’s school in Pflugerville in September; and the most damning, a receipt from Eerie’s on the day after Claudia had seen him—which told me he had the ego to return to the same store even after he had been spotted by someone who knew him.

  Neither Nathan, nor his father Cyril was to be found anywhere. There were no messages on their answering machine, and all the previous calls in the memory of the caller ID box had been erased. Also there was evidence that Nathan had a computer (ie. a mouse and blank discs), but there was no computer in the house.

  By three PM an all-points bulletin had been issued for Nathan and Cyril Graham and the white F-150 truck registered to Mr. Graham.

  We brought the SUV back to her Mom’s house, because I thought it would be morbid if we were to park it at the same place where the owner’s wake was being held. Though she didn’t see my point at first, she finally gave in simply to avoid an argument.

  When I pulled it into the garage, Claudia started into the house.

  “Where are you going?” I yelled after her.

  “I just need to pick up a few things while I’m here,” she yelled back as she disappeared into the house.

  Swearing under my breath, I raced after her. “Hey, Dad said one of the deputies was supposed to do all that.”

  “I’m tired of wearing the same set of clothes every day,” she complained as she started into the living room. “Besides, I don’t want some strange uniformed guy going through my underwear drawer.”

  I grabbed her by the arm. “Seriously, Claudia, I don’t think…”

  She touched my arm and looked meaningfully into my eyes. “If I don’t get what I need right now, I don’t know when I’ll have the courage again.”

  I couldn’t argue with emotion. Finally, I let her go.

  Claudia stopped in the center of the living room again like she had the last time we’d been there. She looked around and murmured, “That’s weird.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing, I guess.” Ignoring my look of confusion, she pulled last year’s Haven High yearbook off the living room bookshelf and carried it into the kitchen. “I figure Nathan must have known all the victims through school. Grace Fischer he probably knew about through her cousin Martin, who he played with in the band, and I bet you a kick in the butt that he was a customer at her beauty school in Austin. They give trainee discounts at those schools, y’know.” We found out later that this was indeed how Graham had first made contact with Grace.

  “He knew Bridgette through band too,” I offered.

  On the kitchen table, Claudia spread the yearbook open to the sports section and spun it around to face me. “And look at this, Graham was on the track team. We have a meet in San Macros every year and that would put him in contact with Sadie Nayar, the second victim.”

  I snatched the yearbook out of her hand and flipped back a few pages to the club section and pointed out at a group picture. “Look, he’s on the debate team as well as the student council and honor society.”

  We looked at each other and remarked at the same time: “Third victim.”

  Upstairs, we pulled out all the suitcases in her closet, and began packing up her room. She took the Psychic Eye Ouija board down from the top shelf in the closet and put it next to the suitcases on the bed.

  I had found a couple of empty plastic containers downstairs in the pantry and went over to her bookshelf library of true crime books. After packing the first few, I held one, turning it slowly over in my hand. “I can’t believe we did it,” I muttered in awe. “We may have actually helped the Broward County Sheriff’s department stop a string of serial murders.”

  Claudia stepped to my side, a bittersweet smile on her face. “They haven’t caught him yet.”

  I looked up at her from my crouching position and must have given her such a dumb-founded look that she had to chuckle. “But we definitely played a part, didn’t we?” She lowered herself down to my level and with a playful smirk on her face asked, “How do you feel about solving your first homicide case, Mr. Graves?”

  “Well to be fair, I might as well give just a little credit to this kook of a profiler that I keep on retainer,” I answered in my best baritone voice. “But since we nearly killed
each other during the course of the investigation, this might be the last case we work on together.”

  She drew closer. “That seems like such a shame, Mr. Graves. I think the results speak for themselves. Sounds like you made a good team.”

  Our lips touched for only an instant before she turned away from me.

  She frowned up at the bookshelf over my shoulder. Finally, she rose and ran a finger down the spines of the books on the second shelf. “Did you move these?”

  “No, I just started packing…”

  “They’re out of place,” she flatly stated. She then glanced over the figurines on the top shelf. I heard a short intake of breath.

  I looked up and saw that the third figurine--the Dracula one with the hands over his crotch--was missing a head.

  My cell phone rang, startling us both.

  “Where are you?” It was Dad. He sounded out of breath.

  “Claudia is picking up some things over at her house.”

  The subject of conversation stood wide-eyed in the center of her room, slowly turning a full circle, her rapier-sharp eyes noting the placement of every object.

  Dad cursed under his breath. “Listen, very carefully, Paul,” he said evenly and deliberately. “I want you to take Claudia and get-out-of-the-house. Right now.”

  “Why?”

  “No questions, Paul. Just do it,” he snapped forcefully.

  “We’re on our way right now,” I told him, grabbing Claudia roughly by the arm and pulling her toward the doorway.

  She snatched her arm away angrily and stepped out into the hallway. “What’s going on? What did they find?”

  Following Claudia into the hall, I pressed the cell phone closer to my ear and asked, “What did they find, Dad?”

  He sighed heavily. “We found a body in the Graham’s bathroom.”

  “The bathroom,” I exclaimed. “Who is it? Do you know?”

  “Looks like it’s the father.”

  A second later, I heard a terrified scream, a sound I would never have associated with the girl I knew. I turned and realized that Claudia was no longer beside me.