Chapter 3
He opened his eyes. It had begun to snow again and for a moment this morning seemed no different than any other morning of all the previous days and weeks of snow and silence and loneliness. He looked at the flakes of snow and suddenly he was aware of the aching in his legs. He remembered. Irene, Janie, Emma, Ellen. He lit a cigarette and looked around the room, trying to remember everything that had happened.
They were locked in the cellar. He had got rid of the car-he remembered driving the blue Ford toward Trenton and parking it near Sellers' Park, north of Trenton.
He smiled. Unwittingly they had given him exactly the information he needed-in the first few minutes after they came in the house. They'd said they were driving toward Trenton. By driving the car still further toward Trenton and parking at the bottom of a hill, it would look as if they had been unable to drive up the hill because of the icy road. It would look as if they had parked at the side of the road.
There had been cars parked everywhere along the side of the road and the police would have no reason to think they had turned off 882 south of Miller's Hill. The beauty of the plan was the police would have no reason at all to search the woods around Jess Parker's farm.
If they searched anywhere, they would search Sellers' Park near the hill where he'd parked the car. The park was sizable and would keep the police busy for several days if they suspected the girls had been murdered. They would search for bodies but they would find no bodies and no single clue.
If he was lucky, Jarrell might ask him to help in the search. During the search for the Renslow girl, Jarrell had asked him to help. If Jarrell asked him to help in this search, maybe he could take something to plant in the park further to mislead the police-something like a pair of panties or their car-keys.
He could carry them in his pocket and drop them somewhere when he was sure no one was watching. He could let someone else find them and then, with the planted clues, the police would be even less-likely to suspect the woods around Jess Parker's farm.
He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray beside the cot. Strange-these last weeks he'd gotten in the habit of sleeping on the cot instead of on his bed in the bedroom.
The cigarettes....
Looking down at his fingers as he crushed the cigarette in the ashtray, he saw the lip stick painted butts in the ashtray and realized that even a factor that small could ruin his entire plan. All he needed was to have someone visit him-Jess Parker, or Bob Jarrell-someone to see the cigarettes with the lipstick and start thinking. It would be hard to explain.
He went about the room and collected all the ashtrays, carrying them outside and dumping them in the garbage can beside the house. When he returned and replaced the ashtrays, he noticed Emma's panties almost hidden under a chair. Before, when he had been about to rape her, he had thrown them aside, but he hadn't thrown them that far. When he left the house on his way to get rid of their car he must have brushed a foot against them and accidentally kicked them further under the chair.
He picked up the panties and was about to take them outside to put in the garbage can when he noticed the two pocketbooks. He carried the panties outside, opening a bag of garbage he had carried out the day before and stuffing them inside, carefully closing the bag again. The garbage man would come tomorrow and, sometime tomorrow, the cigarettes with the lipstick and the panties would be in a pile of refuse miles away from the house.
When he went back in the house he carried the two pocketbooks into the kitchen and placed them on the table. After he scrambled some eggs and ate them, after he made a fresh pot of coffee and poured a cup, waiting for it to cool, he opened one of the pocketbooks.
He found a wallet and, unsnapping it, saw the identification card with the name Jane Joyce. Janie. The small one with the brown hair and the brown eyes.
There were four one-dollar bills. He un-snapped the photograph compartment and saw a photograph of an elderly man and woman-probably her parents. A photograph of another girl-probably a girlfriend. Six pictures of young handsome men not photographs. Studying them more closely, he decided they had been cut from a movie magazine.
They all had a Hollywood look, a calculated poise, a polished handsomeness, but none of them was familiar. Maybe they'd all starred in the teenage flicks. I was a Teenage Werewolf ... The Teenage Monster From Outer Space. Hollywood had made a thousand such movies aimed directly at teenagers. He had never seen any of the type, but the handsome young men in the clippings were probably Janie's idols.
In the change section of the wallet was sixty-three cents-two quarters, a dime, three pennies. In the bottom of the pocketbook a handkerchief, lipstick, a comb, a compact. Replacing all the contents of Janie's pocketbook, he spilled the other onto the table. Emma's. The contents were much the same as Janie's except there were a driver's license, a social security card, a charge-account identification card. He counted the money-two hundred fifty dollars and twenty cents.
He decided to rape one of them.
Now....
In the storage room, before he opened the hidden door, he paused and stood with the Luger in his hand, listening. He could hear no sound except the sound of his own breathing.
When he opened the hidden door and stepped into the passageway, he began to hear faint noises. When he reached the cellar and pressed an ear to the door he could hear them. One shouted, "Help! Help!" in rhythm with an insistent sharp banging. He tried to identify the sound and decided one of them was banging a shoe against the door.
He smiled.
They didn't know all the details about the cellar. There was no way anyone would ever hear their shouts for help, the cellar was a perfect prison.
He had always thought of it as a cellar because it was underground, although it was unlike most cellars since it was not beneath the house. He had been eight years old when his father built it. At the time he had not understood exactly why his father built it and then hid the entrance, but he did understand some of the reasons.
His father had worked for old Sam Parker, Jess Parker's father. His father had worked on the farm and old Sam Parker had given him the land to build the house. Sam Parker had given him a deed so the land would always be his, but, when Stanley was eight years old, his father had wanted to add another room. His father had said it would be his room-Stanley's-and the thought of having his own bedroom had pleased him.
At eight he could not remember his mother-she had died when he was much younger. His only memories were of living with his father in the three room house. He had always slept in the same bed with his father, but eventually his father had complained that he snored and kept him awake.
He remembered his father studying the deed and the map and he remembered his father measuring their land. There was a steep hill close behind the house, so close that, when a storage room had been added, it had been necessary to excavate part of the hill. The back wall of the storage room was almost entirely hidden in the hill.
His father had intended to add the second bedroom at the side of the house, but, studying the map, he found there was not enough space to add a decently sized room. Their land was just barely large enough to contain the house itself.
The storage room extended two feet onto Sam Parker's property.
He remembered the hot summer day they drove to Sam Parker's farm. He remembered watching the chickens while his father and Sam Parker talked, he remembered hearing their angry voices. He never did learn how the argument began but he remembered very clearly the ride back to their house, his father stiff behind the steering wheel, his arms and hands as rigid as steel, his jaw working fiercely as if he were mad enough to bite nails.
"That cheap sonofabitch!" his father said. "Won't give us ten feet. That cheap sonofabitch! Him with more land than he can..."
"Does that mean I can't have my own room, Dad?"
His father had looked at him. "You're going to have your own room, Stan. By Jesus, you're going to have your own room!"
They had begun that summer to tear down the back wall of the storage room. The boards on the side that faced in toward it were painted and smooth, but on the side that lay pressed against the earth of the hill the boards were rotted and filled with worms. He had helped to carry bucketsful of earth to the stream on the other side of the hill, dumping the earth into the stream. It had taken them a year, working a few hours at a time, to dig a large enough cave into the hill.
The passageway to the cellar had been necessary since the storage room was only five feet tall at the back wall. Directly above the passageway the hill was not steep enough to allow a room of normal height, but at the end of the passageway they had been able to build a room seven feet tall and ten by ten. His father had made the walls of cinder blocks and the ceiling of heavy creosoted lumber. For the floor he had bought bags of pre-mixed concrete for which it was necessary only to add water.
At the end of the second year of construction, his father had installed the door to the cellar-building the door from two-by-fours edge to edge and covered on each side with a layer of plywood. His father had installed the doorknob, but installed it backward with the key slot facing the inside of the room, the releasing mechanism facing the passageway. His father had installed the hidden door in the storage room-there was no lock or doorknob for it, simply pieces of planking nailed together and hinged to swing into the storage room.
It had taken them two years to build and he was ten when he finally had his own room. He slept there and spent many hours reading in the absolute silence there. He did his school homework there, and his father said the room had paid off because now he could sleep better without Stan waking him up a dozen times during the night with his snoring.
They had both taken great pleasure in the secret room although it had filled two years with hard work. It had pleased them to play the "joke" on old Sam Parker, to add another room onto the house without his knowledge and on his property.
His father had warned him never to tell anyone about the room and it was only in later years that he understood the real reason. His father had worked on Sam Parker's farm for several years, until Jess Parker was old enough to work in the fields and then his father had worked as a carpenter in the new housing developments scattered around Trenton.
At the time, he had not thought it strange when his father brought a few cinder blocks home every night in the trunk of his car. And, at the time, he had not thought it strange when his father borrowed a pickup truck and, around midnight, they had gone to a housing development thick with the skeletons of new houses, where his father had given the night watchman a bottle and some money and then loaded the truck with heavy lumber and cans of creosote.
In later years, remembering the incidents, the truth was obvious. His father had stolen the cinder blocks and the lumber and the creosote. They could tell no one about the secret cellar, not only because it extended onto Parker property but also because the materials had been stolen.
When Stanley was twelve, old Sam Parker died, and when Stanley was fifteen, his own father died. He had lived with his Aunt Geraldine in Trenton until he was twenty-two and then he had returned to look at the small house. There were broken windows, all the paint had faded or peeled, the floors were covered with a layer of dirt and dust, a tree had fallen from the steep hill behind the house and smashed in a section of the room, but he had decided to make all the necessary repairs and live there. It was his property, the papers said so. It would be cheaper than paying rent to Aunt Geraldine, easier than living with her constant nagging.
He reached for the doorknob, felt his heart beat faster and tried to decide which one to rape first.