The Stalker

16

He had entered the hallway, walking stiffly, purposefully, and he was reaching out for the telephone receiver when the bell shrilled at him. He came up short, pulling his hand back as if the sudden cacophonous sound had somehow imparted a physical shock. He stood there listening to his heart plunge in his chest, and the bell rang a second time, and a third, and then he put out his hand and caught up the receiver and put it to his ear. He said “Hello?” carefully, guardedly.

“Mr. Kilduff?” an unfamiliar masculine voice said. “Mr. Steven Kilduff?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, speaking.”

“My name is Fazackerly, Deputy Sheriff Ed Fazackerly. I’m with the Marin County Sheriff’s Office.”

He frowned, working his tongue over his lips. Now what? he thought. Jesus, now what? He said, “I... don’t understand.”

“You own a small fishing cabin on the Petaluma River, is that correct? In Duckblind Slough?”

“Why... yes, that’s right.”

“Well, we’re investigating the death by drowning of a young woman found about seven this morning near the dock at the rear of your cabin,” Fazackerly said. “Two foul-weather fishermen trolling the slough for catfish saw her floating face down in the water there. They summoned us immediately.”

A cold thing began to work its way slowly up along Kilduff’s back. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t—”

“We subsequently found evidence of recent occupancy of your cabin, Mr. Kilduff.”

“You mean somebody’s been living there?”

“Yes, for the past few days. You weren’t aware of this fact, I take it.”

“No. No, I wasn’t.”

“I wonder if I might speak to your wife?”

“My wife?” he asked, and the cold thing grew colder.

“Yes. Is she at home now?”

“No, she’s not here.”

“May I ask where she is?”

“I... don’t know.”

“Would you mind explaining that?”

“We ... we separated last week . . . ” Pause—one heartbeat, two—and then the automatic and immediate defensive barriers constructed by his brain collapsed, and the inescapable implications of Fazackerly’s words overwhelmed him. His knees seemed to buckle, as if the joints had somehow liquefied, and the cold thing froze his spine into humped rigidity, and a terrible tingling pain flashed upward through his groin, into his belly, into his chest, taking the breath away from him momentarily.

The telephone crackled. “Mr. Kilduff?”

The hard rubber circle of the receiver crushed his ear painfully against the side of his head. He fought air into his lungs, and they responded convulsively, expanding, contracting, and he got words out then, breaking a silence that was, in his ears, as loud as the combing of surf in a storm: “Jesus God, you don’t think Andrea is—?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kilduff,” Fazackerly said. “We found your wife’s car, a tan Volkswagen, parked in the clearing in front, and her purse was inside the cabin, on the table. Your name was on her insurance ID card as next of kin...”

He stood there, motionless, and after a long moment thick, liquid, tremulous words came out of his throat: “How... how did it happen? God, how . . . ?”

“We have no way of being certain,” Fazackerly said quietly. “It’s been storming heavily up here for the past couple of days. There’s the possibility that she was walking along the bank for some reason, and an undermined section gave way and toppled her into the slough. That water can be treacherous at this time of year, as you surely know. Was your wife a good swimmer?”

“She couldn’t swim at all,” he said numbly. “How—long has she...?”

“It appears as if she was in the water about twelve hours, Mr. Kilduff.”

“Twelve hours.”

“I’m sorry to have to break such tragic news over the telephone,” Fazackerly said. His voice was sympathetic. “But we’re understaffed here and we couldn’t send a man down personally. I hope you understand.”

“... yes...”

“We haven’t moved the—remains as yet; we’d like a positive identification first. Will you be able to come to Duckblind Slough right away?”

“Yes, within an hour . . . within an hour . . . ”

He broke the connection. He put his thumb on the button and held it down, the receiver still clasped tightly in his left hand. He was trembling now, and his face was flushed and sheened with tiny globules of sweat, and there was ice on his back and under his arms and between his legs.

Andrea was dead.

Andrea was dead!

He dropped the receiver suddenly and turned and ran into the kitchen. He stopped by the table, putting his hands flat on the Formica top. He looked wildly about him. The walls began to move—he could see them moving—pale white vertical planes reaching for him, going to crush him, and he choked off the scream that spiraled into his throat, and turned again and ran into the living room. He fumbled at the pull-catches on the sliding glass window-doors, breaking a fingernail, and then he had them open. He ran out onto the balcony and stood there with his palms braced against the slippery wet iron railing.

Andrea was dead.

He opened his mouth and sucked ravenously the cold wet air, his chest heaving as if it were a blacksmith’s bellows. The shock of it entering his lungs eased the pressure that had been forming within his skull, and he straightened up, pivoting, looking back into the apartment. He felt the rain then, and the frigidity of the morning, and he stepped forward into the warmth of the living room again, shutting the window-doors behind him. Duckblind Slough, he thought, and he went on enervated legs into the bedroom and opened the paneled door on his half of the walk-in closet and took out his heavy wool topcoat. He laid it over his arm, walking back into the living room now, walking swiftly, and he went to the front door and threw it open.

The woman standing in the hallway outside said “Oh!” in a small, startled voice, and took a step backward.

Kilduff said, “Christ!” He tried to move around her.

But the woman had recovered now, and she came forward again, blocking him. She was tall and angular, middle-aged, with short, layered reddish-brown hair. She held her hands as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with them, elbows in close to her sides, palms turned upward, fingers spread and somewhat overlapping. She wore a multicolored silk muumuu and an old gray sweater around her shoulders.

He said, “Mrs. Yarborough, for God’s sake!”

“I have to talk to you, Mr. Kilduff,” she said rapidly, as if she wanted to get those words out—and the ones which were to follow—before she forgot them. “I really do, it won’t take very long, now you know, Mr. Kilduff, that I’m not a woman to pry into the affairs of my neighbors but I really do like you and Andrea, she and I have become very close friends you know, of course when I didn’t see her these past few days I thought perhaps she was visiting her sister, I had no idea you were separated, I really didn’t, until...”

Not now, not now! Oh goddamn it, why did she have to come around now? He wanted to tell her to shut up, shut up, he wanted to tell her Andrea was dead: “Do you hear me, Andrea-is-dead!” But all he could say was her name, Mrs. Yarborough, and that was ineffective against the rushing, breathless flow of words.

“... until she called me last night to ask if you had moved away because she’d tried to call you and you weren’t home and she was naturally upset, of course I told her no you hadn’t moved away, at least not that I knew about and you would surely tell me if you had since I’m the building manager, but you can’t imagine how surprised I was to hear from the poor thing like that, oh she sounds so miserable, Mr. Kilduff, she really does, that’s the reason I came up here this morning, now you understand I’m not a woman to pry into the affairs of my neighbors but I thought perhaps if you were to drive up to that fishing cabin of yours and just talk to her, I mean well she’s been there for five days now, I feel so sorry for her, Mr. Kilduff, she sounded so helpless, after all it was the middle of the night and I didn’t sleep at all not a wink after we hung up, thinking of her out driving alone in all this rain we’ve been having, alone up at that cabin—”

“What?” he said. “What did you say?”

She opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She looked at him blankly. He reached up and took hold of her shoulders, roughly, and his eyes bored into hers, making her cringe a little at the sudden fire which burned brightly there.

“What did you say?” he repeated. His voice was flat now, without inflection, and very soft.

“I... well, I don’t know what you—”

“The middle of the night. You said Andrea called you in the middle of the night.”

“Well, it wasn’t really the middle of the night, I suppose, I go to bed early during the winter months because of—”

“What time did she call you!”

“It was... after eleven sometime,” Mrs. Yarborough said hesitantly, a little frightened now. “I ... I’m not sure what the exact time was, but it was after eleven...”

After eleven sometime. After eleven. He released her shoulders and stepped back, and his heart was hammering loudly, crazily, against his chest cavity. After eleven sometime.

It appears as if she was in the water about twelve hours, Mr. Kilduff...

Twelve hours. Found at seven this morning. Twelve hours. Time of death would have to have been around seven last night, but she had called Mrs. Yarborough after eleven. Eleven P.M. to seven A.M. Eight hours. Less than eight hours. And Fazackerly had said twelve hours, and a doctor or a coroner or a medical examiner or whoever the hell it was who examined a dead body couldn’t make a mistake of four hours, could he? No, it was impossible, impossible.

Then-?

Fazackerly had been lying.

Sweet Mother of God, Fazackerly had been lying and the only reason he could have been lying was because he wasn’t a deputy sheriff with the Marin County Sheriff’s Office, wasn’t even named Fazackerly; he was the killer, the nameless and faceless murderer of five men, setting up Number Six, the last one left. What better spot than Duckblind Slough—isolated, desolate—what more fitting spot? How he had known of the shack there wasn’t important; he had known and he had gone there and Andrea had been there, Andrea had been there for the past five days...

But he had lied about the twelve hours.

Andrea had been alive, and safe, between eleven and midnight. If she was dead, if he had killed her, why had he lied about the twelve hours? What reason would he have for lying about that?

No reason, none at all...

Abruptly, then, his legs moved, carrying him forward, past Mrs. Yarborough, almost knocking her down. He hit the stairs running.

Because maybe, just maybe, dear God, just maybe Andrea was still alive!

She lay huddled foetus-like, cold and afraid on the floor of the storage closet, lay in the Stygian blackness and listened to the vague, muted sounds of wind and rain, and to the imagined gnawings of a dozen rats in the mud beneath the shack’s rough wood flooring. The nylon fishing line which bound her hands and her ankles was mercilessly taut, and her splayed fingers were numb against the cross-grained boards of the rear wall behind her. The strip of cloth which had been tied tightly, painfully, across her mouth tasted of grease, of must, of darkly crawling microbes.

She had been in there less than an hour.

She had harbored the idea, at first, of trying to kick down the closet door—the wood was old and very dry, and the hasp was somewhat rusted—and then crawling into the other room and finding a sharp knife or breaking a glass and using one of the shards to cut the nylon line. But the closet space was cramped, allowing no room for maneuverability, for leverage; if she had been a man, with a man’s strength and stamina, with a man’s bravery, she might still have been able to do it. But she wasn’t, she was a small frightened woman, and she could only lie there, shivering in the darkness, waiting, waiting for him to come back, waiting for the nondescript, innocuous-looking man who walked with a noticeable limp.

And who had the eyes of a madman.

Andrea began to tremble again as she thought about those eyes. They were wide, penetrating, soulless; they looked through you, burned holes in you; they contained something indefinably but unmistakably terrifying. She had almost fainted the first time she’d seen them in the illumination from the Coleman pressure lantern, seen how the black, black pupils reflected the light and gave the impression of flames dancing and flickering deep within their inner recesses.

In that moment, she had fully expected him to kill her.

After performing unspeakable atrocities on her flesh.

But he hadn’t touched her, except to slap her once very hard with the palm of his left hand when he had broken in, commanding her as he did so to stop screaming. When she had complied, he had told her in a flat, toneless voice that nothing would happen to her if she was quiet and responsive—not elaborating what he meant by responsive—and that was when he had put on the Coleman lantern and she had seen his eyes. She had had to exercise a tremendous effort of will to keep from panicking at that moment, to keep from screaming again, but she had done so, sitting on the Army cot and pulling the wool blanket up to cover her body even though she was clad in heavy lemon-colored pajamas. He had only nodded, and then had dragged in one of the chairs from the half-table and sat down on it facing her, crossing his legs and holding the gun very loosely, very casually on his knee, watching her, not speaking for a long while.

Who was he, who was he? The question had echoed and re-echoed in Andrea’s mind as she sat before him, not looking at his eyes. Was he a madman, an escaped mental patient from some institution? She had tried to remember if there were any hospitals for mentally unbalanced people, any asylums, in the vicinity; but she didn’t think there were, it wasn’t likely. Was he an itinerant, a tramp? She had heard stories about hobos and drifters riding the northbound freights that rolled frequently by on the spur tracks a half-mile distant, about how they sometimes jumped off in isolated areas such as this one and went looking for food and shelter and money and . . . other things. But this man was too well-dressed, too well-groomed, too calm and systematic to be a tramp, to have been riding in a freight car. But who was he, then? Who else could he be? What did he want? What was he going to do?

He had said suddenly, “Where’s your husband, Mrs. Kilduff?”

It had surprised her. It had surprised her enough so that she hadn’t immediately been able to reply. He had asked the question again, with menace, with impatience, and she’d managed at length, “I ... don’t know where he is. Why? Why do you want to know where he is?”

“He isn’t staying here with you?”

“No”

“Then why are you here?”

She hadn’t been able to lie to him, hadn’t been able to hedge an answer. It was his eyes, those omniscient eyes. “Because I... I’ve left him.”

No visible reaction. “How long have you been here?”

“Since . . . last Saturday.”

“Does Orange know you’re here?”

“... Orange?”

“Your husband.”

“No, no... I don’t think so.”

“When was the last time you spoke to him?”

“Last Friday,” Andrea said. “Please, what do you want with Steve? Do you know him?”

“I know him,” the limping man had answered, and that had been all he’d said, lapsing into silence then, a silence which she hadn’t been capable of breaking even though her mind was seething with new questions, new fears.

He had called Steve “Orange”; she’d heard him dearly. What did that mean? Was it some kind of nickname? Did he have Steve mixed up with someone else? No, that wasn’t it; he had called her “Mrs. Kilduff” and he had come here to Duckblind Slough. He must have known Steve rather well—not many people were aware of the existence of this shack. But why had he thought Steve would be here now, in November? And how could her husband know a man like this, a man with insane eyes, a man who carried a gun? And what possible reason could this man have for wanting to locate him? To . . . dear Lord, to kill him? That would explain why he had the gun, but . . . no, that was crazy, why would anyone want Steve dead? It was a nightmare, this whole thing was a nightmare . . .

Time had passed, crawling. She had lost control momentarily, with the questions and the fears commingling in her brain, and had begun to cry. She’d sat on the cot, rocking to and fro, and the tears had fallen, cascading from her eyes. The limping man had said nothing, watching her, until there were no more tears and she was silent again. He’d seemed to be deeply immersed in thought, in some private and hideous contemplation.

Dawn had come, finally, diminishing the long shadows within the shack slowly, consuming the darkness until Andrea had been able to see through the window that the sky was once again wet gray gossamer. What was he waiting for? she had thought then. If he was going to kill her, rape her, why didn’t he have done with it? Was he trying to torture her by making her wait, wait in silence, by giving her all this time to think about what would happen to her? It was inhuman—

Abruptly, as if he had reached some decision or formulated some plan, the limping man had gotten to his feet. He had held the gun pointed at her, moving to the storage closet, opening the door, peering alternately at what lay on the shelves inside and at Andrea sitting on the cot. He had taken the nylon fishing line down finally—new line wound carefully about a small wooden stake—and had instructed her to lie on her stomach across the cot with her hands clasped behind her. She had obeyed, sobbing again, tasting the fear in her mouth and in her throat, feeling it surge in her stomach.

He had put the gun into the pocket of his overcoat and methodically bound her hands and ankles. When he had finished, he’d picked her up, not straining under her weight at all, and carried her to the closet and placed her on the floor inside, where she now lay. His breath on her face had been fetid, though now she knew that fear and imagination had only made it seem that way.

Moments later she’d heard him leave the shack.

Her fear, now, was almost evenly divided. She feared for her own welfare; there was the uncertainty of whether or not he would come back—and if he did, what he would do to her. And she feared for Steve’s welfare; she knew that he was in danger, terrible danger, that something of which she knew nothing, something of great magnitude, was terribly, terribly wrong.

But she could only lie there as she had done for the past hour, lie there cold and frightened and in the darkness and listen to the rain and wind, to the imagined gnawings of a dozen rats in the sucking mud beneath the closet floor.

Lie there and wait.

Just wait.

For—what?

Oh God, for what?