Chapter 8
After finding the dismembered body of Matthew Peachtree, Marcia had managed to do all the necessary things with efficiency and speed. She had driven back to the general store and phoned the police, the wire services, and Jack Higgins. Then, interminably, she had answered police questions, asked questions of her own, interviewed those who had known the dead man, and fed information to the wires.
Now, driving home, she was alone with the memory of the horror, and her hands were beginning to shake.
She pulled to the side of the road, closed her eyes, and took several deep breaths. That seemed to help. She fumbled a cigarette out of her bag and, after four tries, managed to get it lighted.
She made an effort to analyze her feelings. She didn't endorse the view, loudly maintained by one of the state troopers, that Peachtree was a crazy old man who was probably better off dead, who would have died, one way or another, within the next year or so anyway. Everything Marcia had heard about the old hermit, before and after discovering his body, had convinced her that humanity had been diminished by his death: it was now minus one rugged individualist. But that didn't explain her feelings. People she had liked and admired had died before this, and their passing hadn't given her shaking fits.
She'd seen dead bodies before, too. The image of her own father, wax-like in his casket, came unbidden to her mind. He had seemed to be asleep: shortly he would rise to tell her that her dress was immodest, that she should go and wash the lipstick from her face, that she couldn't go to the Saturday night dance. The point was that the agony of her father's death had been cleverly erased. But she had never before seen a human body torn to pieces, like a rag doll by a willful child, and strewn around a room. The sight had made her realize for the first time how fragile her own, seemingly solid body was, how easily her own bones and entrails could be laid bare by a malicious force. What she really felt was fear.
She looked down at her hand. The glowing end of the cigarette was steady. She was a little disappointed with herself. Fear wasn't a very noble emotion; it was the purest form of selfishness.
She released the emergency brake and pulled out onto the road again. She scanned the roadway very carefully before she did it. The police at the scene had been anxious to outdo each other with stories of even more horrible sights they'd witnessed, and most of their stories had involved auto wrecks. She was proud of herself for not having been sick, either at the sight of Matthew Peachtree or at the stories the police had told. She felt like a veteran newspaperwoman.
She had been bombarded with random facts and speculations all day, and now she tried to sort them all out. Peachtree, through poverty or carelessness, hadn't fed his large pack of dogs. They had gone forth to forage on their own, attacking farm animals. Finally, driven mad by hunger or mistreatment, they had attacked their master. She couldn't recall who had first advanced that theory, but it had been immediately accepted as fact by the police and the wire services.
It was the only possible explanation. She hadn't examined the remains closely, but the police had assured her that Peachtree had been torn by fangs and claws. There were no wild animals in the area, or within five thousand miles of the area, capable of inflicting such damage. It had to be a pack of dogs.
A flaw underlay their logic, and Marcia saw it now: if they'd killed him out of hunger, why hadn't they eaten him?
She took a few more deep breaths as she realized that she'd been premature in congratulating herself on her strong stomach. But the wave of cold dizziness passed.
So, the dogs must have killed him in anger. Then, stricken with guilt and remorse, they'd all run away. Dogs wouldn't act like that. They wouldn't act like that under any circumstances. The theory that everyone had swallowed without question was absurd, just as absurd as those warnings that people were always giving her about Lucifer "turning on her."
If the dogs hadn't killed him, what had? The nearest zoos were in New York or Philadelphia, miles away, beyond dismal barriers of highways and housing developments; and the escape of a lion or a bear from either place wouldn't have gone unnoticed. To the best of her knowledge no circuses had passed through recently-and again, the escape of a large animal would have been publicized.
If it had been a wild animal, it might have been someone's pet. That seemed unlikely. If anyone around here had such a pet, the Banner would have done a feature about it; the police would have known of it, and one of the dozens of curiosity-seekers who had come to the scene would have suggested it as a possible culprit. The owner, unless he was a madman, would have reported that it had gotten loose.
Unless she was prepared to believe in Higgins's Jersey Devil, and she wasn't, that left only one possibility: Peachtree had been murdered by a human being.
But the fangs, the claws? Tools of some kind, or weapons-perhaps even artificial fangs and claws. That presupposed a very weird murderer. She tried to fill out the image of one of Peachtree's fellow Pineys, harboring a grudge against the old man as he hammered out his strange armaments at a lonesome forge in the deep woods, and she found that the picture strained her credulity. A local enemy would have blasted him from ambush with a shotgun.
The hippies?
She had come a long way from the beliefs of her youth, she reflected sadly: but so had the world around her. Long hair and freaky clothes no longer meant peace and love. They could mean nothing at all. Or they could mean crazed preachers of Armageddon, who took their text from the ambiguous frustrations of rock music, from the speeches of Hitler and the writings of Aleister Crowley.
She didn't have to accuse the ... the young people. But it was her duty to express her doubts as strongly as she could to the police. She didn't expect to be believed. The police would dismiss her deductions as the fantasies of a soft-hearted dog-lover while they continued to hunt down and shoot all the strays they could. But when it came time to write her story for the Banner next week, she could write it in such a way as to highlight the flaws in the official theory. Higgins might even be persuaded to write an editorial-although that was a faint hope. The paper maintained a policy of not rocking official boats.
In addition, by simply doing the job she had been assigned-going with Ron Green on his round of interviews-she might find out something. She harbored no illusions about playing detective, hoping to find a set of bloodstained metal claws or some outlandish costume that would explain Peachtree's "giant weasel." But she believed that close attention to words and nuances might reveal someone capable of such a crime.
She had made all the proper turns automatically, and she was slightly startled to find that she was home already. Lucifer-Ken must have let him out, despite yesterday's incident-danced and grinned in the headlights.
"Get down, you big ninny! Down! Where're your manners?" She had been nearly knocked off her feet by his friendly assault when she got out of the car. "Here I've been racking my brains, trying to think of a way to redeem the good name of dogs, and this is the thanks I get. I bet nobody fed you, that's your problem. Dog food?"
Lucy knew what those last words meant, and he headed for the front door in a series of furious dashes, interrupted by pauses to make sure she was following. He scrabbled up the open staircase with a noisy clatter of claws as soon as she let him in.
"Marcia? I want to talk to you."
That was Ken's voice, issuing from the living room, gaining booming reverberation in the atrium. Infused with chilly formality to start with, it ended up sounding like Hollywood's idea of the voice of God, and she had to work hard not to giggle at the effect. She had to admit that her nerves weren't as steady as she'd believed.
She trudged up the stairs, her bag heavy over her shoulder. A glance at her watch told her that it was past nine o'clock. She supposed the younger children were already in bed. Ken never wasted time in packing them off to bed when he found himself unavoidably alone with them.
He was sitting at the far end of the brightly lighted living room with a martini in his hand and a suspiciously unfocused look in his blue eyes. A stranger, even a casual acquaintance, might not have remarked the slight drift of his left eye, but Marcia knew it as a warning signal of one of his nastier drunks.
"Is something wrong, darling?"
"You bet your sweet ass there's something wrong. Go take a look in my study, and see what your daughter's been up to now."
Marcia realized that she was too tired to humor him. Resentment suddenly boiled up, resentment at the injustice of facing this scene after a harrowing day. "Spare me the theatrics. Just tell me what the matter is, all right? And spare me that 'your daughter' bullshit while you're at it. You adopted her."
Ken's face, already red, flushed darker. "I sure as hell didn't know what I was adopting. The little bitch-the little bastard, let me get my terms right-has been in there wrecking the place. Go take a look. Go take a look at the mess in there, and then tell me she's not crazy. Go and look."
Ken got to his feet. He didn't stagger, his words hadn't been slurred, and he didn't spill a drop when he refilled his glass from the pitcher, but she estimated his intake at five, at least. If she were lucky, he would pass out before long.
She realized that she had to follow his stage directions if she wanted to know what they were arguing about. He wouldn't tell her. She unslung her bag and went to his study. Lucifer followed, now maintaining a low profile.
She looked over the destruction calmly. It didn't look like the ghost's work: he had specialized in throwing things. Most of the damage consisted of objects torn from the wall, as if a tall drunk had staggered through, clutching at whatever was available for support. Roger, on stilts? But the handwriting on the work board wasn't his. It definitely wasn't Melody's, either. It looked masculine, forceful beyond the point of insanity, the work of a severely disturbed adult.
She noticed that Ken was behind her, filling the door.
"What do you suppose it means?" she asked, not turning to face him. "Mojave?"
"Maeve," he corrected. "A girl's name, an Irish name. But what fucking difference does it make what it means? It means you're crazy daughter needs to see a shrink, that's what it means."
"Oh, Ken." It was a weary groan. He seemed a far likelier suspect than Melody. Drunk out of his mind one night, he had defaced the work that symbolized the failure of his youthful ambitions. She didn't say so. Her own experiences with psychiatrists had made her wary of hurling accusations of irrationality. Besides, he was now too drunk for a serious discussion.
She stepped forward and touched the torn paper, dissatisfied with his interpretation. There was" a vicious slash between the "ma" and the "eve."
"Maybe if her mother was around once in a while to talk to her, to tell her what's right and what's wrong, she wouldn't go into my private study and tear up my stuff. I'm going to get a lock for the door, Marcia. God! In my own house, I need a lock on the door of my study."
"Where is she?"
"In bed. Said she was tired. It's hard work, you know, thinking up new ways to screw your stepfather. She has to get her rest, so she can get up bright and early to pour sugar into my gas tank. Only that kind of thing would be childish. Maybe she wants to get up real early so she can cut my throat while I'm still asleep."
"Come off it, Ken. Did you accuse her of this?"
"No, I didn't accuse her of this," he simpered, mocking her. "What's the use? Why give her the satisfaction of knowing she hit the target? What I'm going to do is, I'm going to send her to a shrink. And I'm going to see that you quit your job. What kind of effect does it have on the kids, having a neighbor feed them supper because their own mother is off somewhere fussing over a dead bum? Or maybe fussing over a live one, one of your sleazy co-workers. Huh?"
"Ken!" She tried to control the rage that was pumping like ice water from her heart to her extremities, but she couldn't. "I suppose it does them a world of good to see their father so drunk that he tears up his only attempt at being a real architect, then accuses them of doing it."
"A real architect?" Ken's head twisted, his face contorted, as if he were taking the impact of a physical blow. "You stinking hippie whore! What do you know about it? What do you know about anything? All you ought to know is that I put a roof over your head, over your bastard daughter's head, when you got tired of taking dope and gang-banging every weirdo west of the Mississippi, and it's damn well time you showed a little gratitude for it."
"You sanctimonious son of a-"
Marcia was shocked in mid-sentence by the cold martini as it splashed against her cheek and stunk her eyes.
"-son of a bitch!" she shrieked after him as he blundered away from her, staggering now. "Where do you think you're going? You'll kill yourself. Not that I care."
"Out!" he roared, and the front door slammed like a thunderclap, shaking the windows in the study behind her.
She was glad he was gone, and she refused to accept any guilt for feeling that way. At last, after all these years, his true feelings had bubbled to the surface: his dirty little fantasies about her life in the commune, his jealousy, his resentment of Melody as a living reminder of that time. She hoped he wouldn't come back tonight She hoped he would seek solace in the arms of his sleek, young mistress, whoever she was; let her see what it was to give comfort to a middle-aged man drowning in gin and self-pity.
"Lucy! Dog food, Lucy!"
She got a glass from the freezer and poured a drink from the pitcher Ken had mixed. The vermouth could not be detected.
"Doggie food, Lucifer!"
She kicked off her sneakers and padded barefoot down the stairs, sipping the drink. Ken must have let the dog out when he'd left, the thoughtless prick.
"Lucifer!" she shouted against the chirping chorus of the starless, spring night. "Dog food!"
"Shit," she muttered as she went back up the stairs. She hesitated at the bust of Leonardo, then turned and padded up to the top floor. Maybe Ken hadn't spoken to Melody about the destruction in the study, but maybe he had made some cryptic wisecrack, or unleashed a bitter sneer that needed to be explained away and smoothed over.
She scratched lightly at Melody's door, heard no response, and eased it silently open. The room was dark and quiet, a damp breeze fluttered the curtains. She went to the bed. It was disarranged, and it was empty.
She snapped on the light and surveyed the room, the neglected array of stuffed animals, the records, the books, the poster of W.C. Fields. No treasures seemed to be missing. Behind the sliding door of the closet, Melody's clothes were all in order. Her favorite jeans, her denim battle-jacket, and her suede sneakers were gone.
She refused to let herself panic. Melody had not been kidnapped. Disturbed by the noisy quarrel-stung unquestionably by Ken's vicious words-she had gone for a walk, taking Lucy with her. That was nothing to be alarmed about. It was a safe neighborhood, and any cruising carload of punks would think twice about molesting a girl with a Doberman. As a young girl, Marcia had gone for more than one lonely walk at night.
She sat on her daughter's bed and sipped her drink. No question about it, she had to make the time to have a long, frank talk with Melody. They had to keep their channels of communication open, especially now that Ken was coming apart at the seams.
She got up and checked on her younger children. They were sound asleep-both in Roger's bed. They hadn't even heard the argument. Maybe she ought to talk to a lawyer, just to find out what her options were, just to make sure Ken wouldn't try to gain custody-no, things hadn't gone that sour yet. Had they?
She went down to the living room and put a Rolling Stones record on the phonograph, turning the volume up high. The record said something to her undirected energy, her frayed nerves. Maybe she ought to start up an affair, just to show the son of a bitch. With Ron Green. She laughed aloud.
She went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. The remains of a casserole confronted her in one of Nora Curtis's arty clay dishes. It was just too preciously homemakerish for words, and she felt like heaving it, dish and all, into the garbage.
On the way back to the living room, where she planned to pour herself another drink, she paused at the open door of Ken's study. She still couldn't read all of the writing, but she was surprised that neither of them had hit on the obvious meaning of the last word-the last two words, actually. Now, observing from just the right distance, with the light hitting the paper just the right way, she saw that the last two words were May Eve.