Читать книгу Dead Girl - Craig Nybo - Страница 14

Chapter 8

When I rolled up on DeeDee’s pull out, her front room light shone in tallow yellow through the large bay window on the front of her house. An old rocking chair looked like bones sitting on the porch backlit by the amber pallor. Through the window, DeeDee’s silhouette darkened a smear in the lace curtains that hung inside the pane. I got out of my car and walked the gravel path to the porch. By the time I mounted the top step, DeeDee had opened the front door.

Her face blanched, her hair hanging in whips, she wasn’t the same woman I had visited that morning. I ignored her unkempt appearance and smiled. “It’s been quite a day, DeeDee; I’ve met the good sheriff of Ridgewater. I’ve tried the cuisine. I’ve even become acquainted with your cerebral, next-door neighbor. And I have to say, although I’m intrigued with the compelling cross-section of characters living within the confines of your city limits, if I can’t get my hands on something truly grounded, I’m afraid I will have to cut my stay here short.”

DeeDee looked me over with a bedraggled stare. She turned away toward the garage to the east of the house. I glanced at the block and iron bar building, then back at her. “DeeDee?”

She broke out of her reverie. “Don’t worry, you’ll get what you have come for. And if you play your part in it all, you might be instrumental in saving lives along the way.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

An unexpected smile bloomed on DeeDee’s face, perhaps bringing out some of the former beauty Stan had seen in her so many years ago. “What time is it?” she asked.

I checked my watch. “Eleven-forty-seven, why?”

“That’s grand. We have just enough time for tea and another of my biscuits.”

Another of her biscuits? Wonderful. I swallowed the phantom gulp of the petrified rock of a biscuit I had choked down earlier that day. I turned down her offer, telling her that if we didn’t get to what it was she wanted me to see, her eleven-fifty-seven deadline would pass. The ruse worked; she gave me a verbal rain check on tea and biscuits and led me down the porch steps.

We walked across the back lawn, well kept, trimmed tight and edged. We made our way past a spindly apple tree that was just putting out its green produce for the upcoming fall harvest and closed on the back door of the garage, a block fortress, built in a utilitarian fashion.

I reached for the doorknob.

DeeDee stopped me by placing a liver-spotted hand on my wrist. Her expression drooped as if made from melting wax. Lemon-colored light from a halogen bulb above us lay on her hair and shoulders, cutting her features from the night. For a moment as she looked up at me I felt spooked, as if something deep and sinister had momentarily taken her over. She blinked and most of the malevolence left her pallor. She became DeeDee again. I wondered if she might have schizophrenic tendencies.

“I must warn you, what I am about to show you is quite dangerous.”

My lips put on a familiar smirk I reserved for people who warned me of danger.

“Do not take it lightly,” she said, a reprimanding tone in her voice. I dropped the smile and tried not to roll my eyes. “Have you read the journal?”

“Some of it,” I said. Although Stan’s entries interested me in a voyeuristic way, I hadn’t found anything that was story-worthy.

“Then you know that the evil in this garage has taken several lives.”

“I haven’t gotten that far,” I said.

“I know you are a cynical man. But I beg you to take my warning at face value. As we enter the garage, you must remain near me. Please don’t touch anything.”

I nodded.

DeeDee drew a key from the front pocket in her skirt and unlocked the deadbolt. She flung the door wide, reached into the darkness and flipped on a double bank of halogen tubes, suspended from the ceiling. My jaw dropped at what sat inside the block cell. A fully restored, cherry-as-they-come 1961 Impala SS, the very car I had seen in DeeDee’s cigar box photo collection, sat directly in the center of the garage. I’d seen bubble tops at car shows where they were always a hot ticket. But this one had something special. Whoever had restored her had paid obsessive attention to every detail. She crouched on a quartet of polished, no-mileage whitewalls. Her grill, with the Chevy emblem seated like a wicked grin right in the center, seemed to say, I’ll kick your ass. I understood why old school car enthusiasts called them bubble tops. Her cab was mostly constructed from glass. I wondered what was under the hood. Based on the car’s exterior, a perfectly cleaned 409 cubic centimeter engine most likely.

There was one peculiar thing about the car; someone had bound her like an S&M plaything with thick rawhide belts. The straps crisscrossed over her roof, over her hood, and over her trunk. The leather restraints, at least a quarter-inch thick, were fixed to chains that ran to weighty eyehooks bored into the concrete floor.

I looked at DeeDee, puzzled. I took a step toward the car.

“Don’t touch her; she’s a bitch,” DeeDee said.

I grabbed one of the chains and gave it a pull. It didn’t budge. Someone had cinched it down with a come-a-long. “What’s with the straps and chains?” I asked. “You’ve got her caged up like an animal.”

“More like a monster.”

I looked over the rest of the garage. A respectable set of tools, everything from body working dollies to Bondo, from welders and pneumatic hammers to ratchets and punch drivers hung in a series of locked cages. I suspected that the same man who had restored the Impala had also stored his tools, clean, organized, and meticulously racked.

A black and white photograph hung on the wall. Another shot of the four men--Stan, Joss Fielding, Ben Stitching, and Deloy Tillman, the all-stars from Stan’s journal. They stood in front of the then new Impala. The men wore white t-s, their hair slicked back into ducktails. They shared a vacant demeanor as if something had depressed their egos and shifted down their collective, fraternal energy. “When was this taken?” I asked.

“Just after the accident.”

“What accident?” I walked over to the Impala. I reached out to feel the irresistibly smooth surface of the black hood. Just before I touched the steel, DeeDee shouted: “DO NOT TOUCH HER!”

I pulled my hand away. I must have appeared stunned.

DeeDee used a series of de-escalating breaths to settle down.

I backed away from the car.

“It’s dangerous, particularly this close to the anniversary.”

“What anniversary?” I asked.

“The anniversary of Sarah Chase’s death.”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Had I driven all the way from Salt Lake City, jeopardizing my job, to hear a damn campfire story from a loony old bat? “Look, DeeDee, I know you think this is all somehow, how do I put it, real. But as interesting as your story might be, I’m a busy man and I’m afraid--”

“Sarah Chase is a blood-sucking whore and she took the lives of Stan and his three best friends.”

Then it happened; my eyes rolled. I couldn’t help it. “Let me put it another way, DeeDee. I’m leaving, tonight. I appreciate your assertiveness. I’m not easily strung along; but it’s time for me to get back to my life and for you to get back to yours.”

“It’s because of Sarah Chase and that damn car that I’m all alone now, Mr. Hunshuler.”

“It’s Mr. Vang, Block Vang, reporter for a legitimate paper, The Wasatch Times.”

“You need to tell her story,” DeeDee pleaded. “By telling her story, you can bring her out were we can face her.”

“DeeDee,” I tried to sound sympathetic. If I had a penny for every small-town ghost yarn I had heard, I could start a charity for the gullible. “I don’t care about this car.” I pointed at the photograph on the wall. “Other than offering my condolences, I don’t care about Stan and his three greaser buddies. And I certainly don’t care about Sarah Chase.” I put my hands on my hips. “Let me give you the straight dope…” I raised a finger to bring home my coup de grace. It was going to be something pointed, full of wit. But just as I opened my mouth, the Impala roared to life.

I leapt, startled by the engine’s grind. I wheeled around and gawked at the car. She crouched like a puma, her girth rocking with the force of the motor. The accelerator let off and the engine settled down to a steady idle. I walked closer and stared in through the passenger’s side window. I expected to see someone lying low, a smile on his face as he pulled the prank of the day on me; but nobody was inside the car. I moved as close as I dared--my heart skipping its way into high gear. As I neared the window for a better look, the dome light snapped on. I staggered back to DeeDee’s side.

She looked up at me, wearing an expression of absolution. “She’s evil. She has to be stopped.”

“When is the anniversary?” I asked.

“In three days, 11:57 PM. She gets more powerful every night as we approach that ungodly hour.”

“Why call me here? What can I do?”

“I called you because Stan and his friends, the ones who have protected us for so many years, are dead. There is nobody else. Maybe if you tell her story, someone will come, someone who can help.”

“But why me?”

DeeDee cocked her head to the side. “I have read your work. You are not just a writer; you are a doer. You have defeated evil before. I’m counting on you to do it again, here in Ridgewater before more people die.”

I reached under my Ivy cap and scratched my head. Sure, I’d seen some unexplainable things. I’d even found myself in the middle of them at times. But I hadn’t seen anything like what lay before me in that garage. I decided at that moment that Ernie Sanidoro would have to wait a little longer before I returned to my office. I had a story to write, and it was panning out to be a doozy.

The sound of car tires crunching over the pea-stone outside broke me from my thoughts. I glanced out of the open door and spotted Torre’s rice burner in front of the house.

DeeDee clamped a hand on my elbow, catching me off guard. She turned me around and looked up at me with moist eyes. “Those damn kids think it’s a game, but Sarah is hungry. I can’t bare to think of what she might do down at that bridge.”

Torre busted out of DeeDee’s house in a trot, holding a case of beer in one hand and a microwaved burrito in the other. I left DeeDee and intercepted him at his rice-burner just as he settled in behind the wheel. I opened passenger’s side door and smiled at him.

“What do you want?” he asked with a smirk.

“You headed down to the Milvian Bridge?”

“What’s it to you? How do you know about the Milvian anyways?”

DeeDee walked up behind me. “Torre, don’t go to the bridge, it’s dangerous,” She said.

“You’re my Nanna, you’re not my mom,” Torre said.

I slanted my head toward the case of beer in the back seat. “How old are you, son?”

“Eighteen, and I’m not your son.”

“A little young to be packing a case of beer, don’t you think?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Your nanna here seems to think that the Milvian is dangerous this time of year.”

Torre leered. “Has she been telling you her ghost stories? About scary Sarah Chase and how she died on the Milvian Bridge?”

“Something like that.”

“Well there’s nothing to it. My friends and I are just having a little get together down there, that’s all, and I’d appreciate you’re getting out of my business.”

I eyed the beer in the back seat. “I’m not going to keep you from your little soirée … but … it sure would be a shame if Officer Biels found out that you were taking a case of beer to an underage party.” I smiled.

Torre simpered and balled up his hands. I half expected steam to come from under his collar. I dug in a little harder. “Unless, of course, you take me along.”

Torre pounded the wheel with one fist and looked away from me. “Okay, fine.”

I got in the car. Going to a teenage party wasn’t my idea of a good time. I would be the old guy, the room-killing chaperone.

DeeDee’s expression told me that my riding along with her grandson wasn’t what she had in mind. No doubt, she wanted him home, safe, away from the Milvian Bridge. But she needed to realize that if I was to get to the bottom of her story, I needed to tour the scene of the crime. And I couldn’t think of a better tour guide than her grandson.

Torre dropped his Civic into gear and goosed the accelerator. We rocketed away, patching gravel up behind us.

The Ridgewater scenery smeared by at two dimes over the speed limit. I hoped Biels wasn’t patrolling; I hadn’t exactly made good first or second impressions with him and being caught with alcohol and a minor in the same car, racing at reckless speed toward a teenage bash wouldn’t bode well for me.

We drove for a good ten minutes before either of us said anything. It was Torre who broke the silence. “So what does nanna want with an asshole like you?”

I smiled. “I’m a reporter. She’s having me look into the Sarah Chase story.”

“They went insane together, you know,” Torre said, “Stan and DeeDee. Hard to say who started it, Stan or his weirdo old friends.”

“Did you know any of Stan’s friends?”

“I called them my uncles: Ben and DeLoy. They were a pack of crackers, the bunch of them, always working on that car, never driving it. How can you work on the same car for so many decades? She’s cherry, you’ve seen her. But they were in that shop almost every day, year after year.”

“Did Stan ever let you work on the car?”

“Not on a hot bet. I’ve only seen it because I snuck in a couple of years ago to get a perspective on all the hoopla. They got that thing chained up like Hannibal Lecter. Stan caught me in there snooping and beat the tar out of me.”

“Was Stan a violent man?”

“That was the only time I ever saw him get his hackles up. Mostly he was tired and depressed.”

“What about Sarah Chase; you know anything about her?”

Torre glanced across at me, a wicked smile curling his lips. “You want to know about Sarah Chase? I mean what really happened back in ‘62?”

I nodded.

“Well, tonight you’re going to find out.” Torre punched the gas. I clamped down hard on the ceiling handle as he pushed it to a steady 90 miles per hour. I felt off kilter as we jetted down the winding road. I hung on and prayed to the Utah Division of Transportation that we would make it to the Milvian Bridge alive.