Hallowed Read online

  Apprehensively, I made my way upstairs to the door at the end of the hallway.

  I’m not sure how I had pictured a teenage girl’s room would look. If I had to venture a guess, I’d assume posters of unicorns or celebrities would be adorning the walls. There would be perfume bottles, make-up and hair-styling products on their dressers. But I’m a guy, right, so I figure I’d get three out of four.

  Claudia’s room was more like a crime analyst’s lab.

  First, the walls of the room had been painted jet black, the yellow carpet-- due to the fact that every bulb in the room had been replaced with a black light bulb--glowed the color of a swamp on an alien planet. The total affect was one of disorientation. I located Claudia only by the light of the computer screen. She had one hand on the mouse and the other in a bag of popcorn.

  Beside her computer was a small library of true crime books authored by men with names like Keppel, Douglas, and Greysmith with subjects I’d vaguely heard of in movies and TV shows. Berkowitz. Bundy. Dahmer.

  The bookshelf was covered with other memorabilia. A skull-shaped candle that bled red wax. Unique bookmarks, one shaped like a guillotine, another with a little noose dangling from the end. The centerpiece was three cartoonish figurines; the first was Frankenstein’s monster covering his eyes; the second, the Wolfman covering his ears; and finally, the third, Dracula covering—oddly enough--his crotch.

  “Hey, did you read the paper this morning?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Take a look at the front page first. It’s on my bed.”

  Along with the newspaper, there were computer printouts of maps covering her bed and a large black binder opened to a page that showed a black and white crime scene photo of a corpse flanked by two uniformed officers. This photo, which looked as if it had been copied from a book, had been trimmed down and slipped into a clear plastic sleeve. Flipping through the next few pages, I realized that this book was a collection of news articles and photos of homicides. Lying beside this binder was an oversized hardbound book, also filled with crime scene photos.

  As I gazed down at the disturbing pictures of human destruction, I heard a familiar song coming from Claudia’s computer. I figured she was logged onto a radio station or maybe had a CD in her drive. I couldn’t place the melody. When I opened my mouth to ask what she was listening to, the music stopped.

  I realized with confusion that I had been unconsciously humming the tune.

  Shaking it off, I turned back to the bed and glanced down at the Haven Herald. The headline read: “Coroner Says Abner Girl Strangled.”

  “Claudia, what’s going on? What is all this?”

  She finally turned away from the computer. “Oh, don’t mind the rest of that stuff. It’s the newspaper I wanted you to see.” She stood and stretched. “You want some coffee. I could use some. C’mon, you can read this in the kitchen.”

  Once downstairs, I settled down at the table and scanned the article in the morning newspaper.

  “Tell me when you’re finished.” Claudia dumped a couple of scoops of coffee into the coffeemaker, filled it with water, and switched it on.

  She joined me at the table and watched me read for about thirty seconds. The only new information was the part about an autopsy revealing that the neck of the victim had showed evidence of strangulation, but I wanted to read through to the end.

  “You finished?”

  I waved her off. I’ve never been the quickest of readers.

  “Strangled,” she interrupted. “I guess that rules out your suicide theory.”

  Sighing, I slapped the paper to the table. “I never said I thought it was suicide,” I growled. “I was just playing devil’s advocate, okay?”

  “No, that’s cool, Paul. I like the rhythm of bouncing ideas.” She leapt to her feet, went to the freezer and pulled out a microwavable pizza. “You want anything to eat?” she asked, as she ripped the plastic wrapping from the frozen wheel of tomato, cheese, and bread and tossed it into a microwave in desperate need of a moist sponge.

  I returned to the article and was only a paragraph from finishing before she said, “There’s been a series of disappearances.”

  I abandoned the newspaper for good and settled back in my chair. “And I guess you’re going to tell me that this Abner girl is somehow connected.”

  “There’s a pattern. Girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen all within a seventy-five mile radius. Between Austin and San Antonio.”

  “How many?”

  “Five,” Claudia revealed, joining me at the table, wetting her lips hungrily.

  Suddenly, my curiosity was peaked. “How come I never heard about this?”

  “They don’t want to start a panic, y’know.”

  “And all these girls were found dead?”

  “No, only one was found dead.” I waited oh-so-patiently for the punch line. “So far.”

  “Okay, but these girls who disappeared… are they connected?”

  “I think so.” She got this look on her face as if daring me to challenge her. “I just haven’t discovered how.” The microwave finished nuking the pizza and gave a single loud Ding.

  Accompanying that sound, I almost expected to witness the sight of a coo-coo birdie peeking out through a tiny door in the center of Claudia’s broad forehead.

  I looked down at the newspaper and tried to find the passage in the article that might have led her down this bizarre road.

  “Listen. I need a ride. To Abner.”

  I snorted derisively.

  “What?” she countered with innocence.

  “I’m finishing the display.”

  “You’re precious display will be here when we get back and you can finish it twice as fast if I’m helping.”

  “So now you’re bargaining? I thought you’d already agreed to help me?”

  Claudia rose and retrieved the pizza from the microwave. She grabbed a pizza cutter from a drawer and plunged it twice with unexpected violence through the white skin of the pizza, raising twin channels of tomato sauce to the surface.

  “I agreed to help you with the planning, not the execution.”

  She slid half of the pizza onto another plate and set it down in front of me.

  “I told you, I just ate.”

  “C’mon, Paul. It’ll be fun.” She gave me a look that almost swung me around to her side, but I came to my senses and thought of an indirect way out of it.

  “No way Mom will ever let me drive all the way to Abner. That’s like an hour away.”

  She took a huge bite of the pizza, talking between chews, a smile emerging. “Let me handle that.” Somehow, the spectacle drew a fine line between repulsive and adorable.

  I chose to stare down at the pizza before me and wondered nervously what the hell we were going to talk about for an hour. No, scratch that. Two hours.

  “Why exactly do we have to go to Abner again?”

  “I’ve never been there. So, I have to see the town and I have to see the crime scene. Trust me, it’ll help the investigation.”

  Investigation, I asked myself. Was she putting me on?

  Then I glanced at her eyes and realized that this was the most animated that I’d seen her since she got back. The thought of taking that away from her seemed a little cruel.

  Suddenly, despite the fact that I wasn’t hungry, I found myself eating the food she had laid before me.

  “This is bullshit!” she proclaimed.

  Here I was figuring that our mothers would have given us either a yes or no answer. What I failed to appreciate was the fact that when our mothers conspire together in the same room, two minds became a single twisted super-mind, one that can warp reality and create scenarios hitherto unforeseen.

  What they had decided was that it was too late for us to go somewhere we had never been before with the knowledge that we would have to drive home at night, but that we could go tomorrow with them, as a group.

  “Tell them the truth, you said,” she
complained. “That was a brilliant idea.”

  “I don’t lie to my mother, Claudia.”

  Claudia shot me a condescending look and sighed heavily. We were finishing up the last of the yard display. When I say “we,” what I mean is that I was stapling a string of lights up along the border of the roof and Claudia was pacing around my ladder. (Of course, the significance of her walking beneath the ladder was not lost to me. Claudia took a sort of dark pleasure from deliberately tempting fate.)

  “That crime scene will be wiped completely clean by then.”

  “Claudia, if you actually found something where a trained forensics team has already been, you should apply to the FBI as soon as possible.”

  She stopped under the ladder and gave it a shake. I seized it with both hands and glared down at her. She shot an evil smile up at me and whispered, “I’ve got a wild idea. Why don’t we just go anyway? We can just tell them that we’re going to a movie or something.”

  She had unwittingly stumbled upon an alibi that I had been using for months now.

  I glanced inside the kitchen window that was just outside and looked down at Claudia with a stern look. She glanced up at the window and shook her head. We could hear distant laughter coming from the somewhere deeper in the house. They weren’t in the kitchen.

  I leapt down to the ground and faced her. “Here’s the deal. I’ve been telling them that I’ve been going to the movies every Saturday lately, so I wouldn’t have to tell them what I was really doing.”

  Claudia got this surprised look on her face. “What have you been doing?” she asked with interest.

  “I’ve been going to vigil mass.”

  She gave me this blank look, then burst out laughing. She actually had to take a few steps away from me to get back some semblance of control.

  I moved the ladder further down the side of the house, grabbed another set of lights and started up the ladder.

  “Okay, first: what happened to ‘I don’t lie to my mother,’ and second: are you telling me that the worst you could come up with to do with a good lie is to go to church? You really are priceless, Graves!”

  “Well, I really don’t care what you think.”

  “What? Are you trying to pick up girls there?”

  Ignoring her, I continued with my work. The pile of orange and purple lights on the ground had become tangled and I tried shaking it loose from atop the ladder. “I figured you wouldn’t understand,” I murmured under my breath.

  Indifferently, Claudia picked up the string of lights and began untangling them.

  “Personally, I think the Christian religion and especially the Catholic Church is very closed-minded. I find their belief-system very restrictive.”

  “Restrictive in what way?”

  “Communication with the dead, for one.”

  I stopped attaching the lights and glanced down at her. “Okay, back up and try and pretend I’m not one of the DFW elite.”

  “It’s called Spiritualism and it’s a bona fide religion, okay, so don’t even think about ridiculing it.”

  “I’m just trying to understand. Do these people believe in a God?”

  “Yes, of course. They also believe that you can get in contact with the spirits of those that have died, and since the dead are on a higher plane of existence than you and me, they know things we don’t and can help us.”

  It definitely sounded like she’d done her research, though I was sure her enthusiasm was blinding her to a few inherent dangers. “Aren’t they the ones that worship nature?”

  “No, you’re thinking of Paganism. Spiritualists share a lot in common with orthodox Christians. A moral based value system, for one, and a belief in a Judeo-Christian God, for another. We just are more open to outside spiritual influences.”

  This conversation was starting to creep me out, and suddenly, out of nowhere I got the compulsion to ask her to come with me to mass, even though it might require driving her to Abner as a bribe and lying to my parents. Somehow despite all that, it seemed like the right thing to suggest. “How long have you been into this?”

  “Since last summer. Gordie, one of those DFW elite,” she added with a dark glare in my direction, “talked to a nineteenth century sailor, who told him that there was a bad storm coming. A few weeks later”—she slapped her hands together—“Katrina.”

  “Were you there in the room when he did?”

  “No,” Claudia said with a dark scowl at me, then loud enough for Mrs. Wicke and Mom to hear through the open screen door on the front porch (had they been anywhere in the vicinity) she barked, “Mom never lets me go anywhere!”

  I’d had just about enough of the spoiled brat routine. “I don’t know anything about séances. All I know is that I’m not wasting my gas going to Abner to look at an empty ditch,” I said, as I dropped from the ladder into the grass as close to Claudia as I could without it actually landing on her. She hopped back a step and gave me an indignant look. “I’ve got better things to do with my time.”

  “Oh like what?” Claudia got in my face. “I guess you’re such the Mr. Popular around Haven that you’d go to church on a Saturday night.”

  In spite of the control I thought I had over my emotions, I could still feel my blood starting to boil. It was on the tip of my tongue to respond with something smart and cutting, but instead I kept silent. I turned away from her and started collecting my tools.

  “I go to church because I’m looking for answers,” I caught her eyes and held them for a second. “Same as you. The difference is I don’t belittle you.”

  When I looked up next, Claudia was stomping off down our driveway.

  Chapter 7 (Sunday, October 4th)

  When I went into the kitchen to get breakfast on Sunday morning, I heard Dad speaking in hushed tones on the phone. He had pulled the cord around the corner and into the living room, where he sat in his recliner.

  Silenced were the typical sounds of cursing and country music from the AM station out of Austin that normally filled the garage. Instead, he had the radio tuned to a morning talk radio show. Some lady was talking about the “sanctity of human life.” I didn’t think twice about the subject. Sounded like your typical morning talk show fodder to me.

  Then I saw the newspaper on the kitchen table.

  It was open to an article about the disappearance of another girl in San Marcos, who had been gone for over two weeks now. The article was an interview with her parents who talked about her high grade point average, her active participation in the community and church. Not a typical candidate to “up and run away.”

  This sort of thing had suddenly become news because the remains of the girl found in the ravine had been identified as belonging to eighteen year old, Grace Fischer, who had disappeared from Renton over three months ago.

  Little detail was given on Grace, though it clicked right away that I knew her family, as I read her biographical information. In fact, her cousin Martin was second chair cornet in our band. I was second chair trumpet, so we were associated through our respective inability to reach that topmost position reserved for overachievers like Brent Jacobs and Nathan Graham, who between the two of them must have been on every team or club available to a teen at Haven High. I remembered Grace because she would sometimes come with Martin’s aunt and uncle to the varsity games and sit next to us in the bleachers.

  As I was finishing up the article, Dad hung up the phone. I looked up at him framed in the doorway, and for a moment, his reddened eyes almost gave me the impression that he’d been crying, if I didn’t know him any better. Stress just caused him to blink less.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, my wavering voice sounding as if it had emerged from the mouth of a five-year-old child.

  “That was Vernon Fischer. I just wanted to find out how Grace’s mother was doing since the news.” Mr. Fischer was Grace’s uncle and ran a dry-cleaning business just outside of town on Farmroad 321.

  “She okay?”

  “Vernon says tha
t she still believes that there’s been some kind of mistake. That’s a typical reaction.” Dad turned his back to me to refill his cup at the coffeemaker. “The funeral’s on Tuesday,” he grunted.

  I stared down at the shivering hand holding the newspage. I willed it to stop.

  “Dad, what do you think about this other girl, the one that disappeared?”

  “People disappear and reappear all the time, especially headstrong teenagers.”

  “Claudia thinks this girl Grace is the first of a series.”

  Dad stopped sipping his coffee and cocked a brow at me. “Paul, you’re going to start hearing a lot of things in the newspaper, on TV, and from your friends at school. Everyone is going to have an opinion. But until they have the facts to back them up, that’s all they are. Opinions.” Dad took a seat at the table. “As for Claudia, well, she’s always been on the melodramatic side.” He fixed me with a look and fished through the bulk of newsprint until he’d found what he was looking for, the sports section.

  “Paul, you might want to watch what you say around school. This is the sort of thing that when emotion takes over, folks stop listening to reason.”

  I nodded. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask, “What if this thing does turn out to be true and we have some degenerate strangling teenage girls?” But just before I was about to utter the words, it occurred to me that it was the same sort of panicky speculation that he had just railed against. So I let it go.

  It was already after noon when I gathered up the main section of the newspaper and walked it over to Claudia’s house. Mrs. Wicke answered the door. Her eyes looked sleep-deprived.

  “I just wanted to drop the Herald by in case you guys haven’t already seen it.”

  “We have a copy.” She gave me a look and sighed. “She’s still sleeping.”

  “Did she have another late night?”

  “No, she went to bed around eight last night.” Mrs. Wicke gave me a look of concern. “Paul, I don’t think you should encourage this… this whole runaway teenager thing. In a couple of weeks, when this Nayar girl comes back home on her own, this’ll all blow over and everything will return to normal.”