Locked Doors

  Unable to muster a scream, Karen glanced over her shoulder, felt a needling in her stomach. Far below she saw the adjoining oil room at the granite foundation of the lighthouse. She saw the roof of the nearby Keeper’s Quarters and the visitor parking lot. Westward beyond the marsh, she took in the waters of the Pamlico Sound and further on, the blinking red lights of radio towers on the mainland.

  “This is a black and white banded lighthouse,” the man said. “I’ve measured out the rope so you’ll hang in the middle white band facing the visitor’s center. Imagine the face of whoever finds you first. Maybe some minivan family from the Midwest, with lots of little ones.”

  He laughed.

  Karen looked at the skein of climbing rope at his feet and the bulky knot he’d tied to the railing. He held her by the waist belt of the bathrobe she’d worn since her abduction.

  She sought out reason in his eyes and found it. They were not wild or impassioned but black and serene. And if they burned, it was a smoldering like embers.

  Now only clutching her with one hand, he brushed his black hair from his eyes.

  Karen felt gravity pining for her, a waterless undertow.

  She upchucked on his windbreaker but he did not let go.

  “Karen,” he said. “Now do you believe?”

  He released the belt of her robe, watched her fall.

  She screamed for two seconds, then the rope silenced her.

  Back and forth she swung, still fifty feet above the lawn, a pendulum for the lighthouse.

  19

  AT two in the morning the Impala streaks south on Ocracoke Island, a ribbon of land less than a half mile wide. To the west the Pamlico Sound yawns out into darkness. Oceanside the Atlantic shines like black blood under the jaundiced October moon.

  In the trunk, Elizabeth Lancing sleeps and she does not dream.

  Behind the wheel the smiling driver is tired and happy, the window down, his hair whipping across his pale face. He inhales deeply, the tepid air redolent of kelp and saltwater and driftwood and the carcasses of fish on tidesmoothed sand.

  At last he sees it beyond the dunes that now hide the sea—his hometown, a faint incandescence on the black horizon.

  And he wonders, Old Andrew, since I’ve shown you the way, will you come?

  V I O L E T

  20

  THE last Wednesday of each month is unfailingly baked spaghetti night at Lighthouse Baptist Church. It is tradition, a comforting inevitability for this Christian community.

  The congregation slowly progressed from the kitchen into the fellowship hall much as it had done every Wednesday evening for the past twenty-two years. Each churchgoer carried a paper plate laden with baked spaghetti, a yeast roll, a salad of wet lettuce and shredded carrots, and a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea.

  They dined with their brothers and sisters in Christ at the circular foldaway tables, happily consuming the insipid meals, the fellowship hall resounding with myriad conversations and rampant children, while praise music flowed from speakers on the stage, an auditory warmth. Through tall windows the dying sun funneled weaker and weaker, now only a suggestion of purple in the late October sky.

  Violet King sat at a table with her parents, Ebert and Evelyn, and a friend of her parents named Charles. Charles was thirty, single, and on fire for Jesus. Violet disliked the way he looked at and spoke to her, as though he were privy to some secret she had not disclosed, as though he were something more than a shallow acquaintance.

  Charles had been monopolizing the conversation for the last five minutes, narrating his attempt to witness to a “troubled black youth.”

  But Violet wasn’t listening. She just stared at the cube of baked spaghetti on her plate.

  “…and I told him, ‘Jesus died for you, little fella.’” Charles’s bottom lip had begun to quiver, his voice gone soft and earnest with emotion. “And you know what he said to me? It’ll break your heart, Ebert. He said ‘How come God loves me?’ And I told him, I said… You with me, Violet?”

  Violet looked up into those small lonely eyes across the table.

  “Yes, I’m with you, Charles.”

  “I told him, ‘God loves little black boys just as much as He loves little white boys.’”

  A four-year-old boy ran over and stopped in front of Violet, a chocolate icing ring around his smiling little mouth.

  “You’re pretty,” he said, then ran away shouting, “I did it, guys! I did it!”

  The young woman laughed.

  “Where’s Max, Violet?” Charles asked.

  “Same place he was when you asked me a week ago,” Violet responded but she did not say it bitterly. “He’s coaching cross-country this fall. They had another meet today.”

  Is that all right with you you freaking weirdo?

  “Just don’t want to see him backsliding on us. You start skipping Wednesday nights, what’s next?”

  “My son-in-law ain’t no backslider, Charles,” Ebert said. “You know I wouldn’t tolerate that. Ain’t that right, baby?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Violet smiled at her father, a big brawny man, whitebearded and baldheaded. He’d earned that shiny red dome working his dairy farm. Their table smelled faintly of manure.

  As Violet sipped her tea she felt Charles eyeing her. She often caught him staring, especially during Sunday sermons. He was always chiding her about her “boy haircut,” said women were supposed to have long and flowing hair, encouraged Violet to let her blond locks grow out.

  Her pager buzzed against her hip and she glanced down at her lavender skirt.

  When she saw the number she stood up.

  “Mom, if Max comes, tell him I’ll be right back.”

  “Everything all right, Vi?”

  Evelyn stared up at Violet through cloudyblue eyes that picked up the gray in her hair.

  How can you sit here with this whacko? “Yes ma’am.”

  Violet walked out of the fellowship hall into the corridor of classrooms. At the end of the hallway, the double doors had been thrown open and she could see into the new sanctuary where the music director was furiously arranging chairs in the choir loft in preparation of the practice that would immediately follow the fellowship dinner. She didn’t feel up to singing tonight. She wanted to go home, crawl into bed with a pint of Cherry Garcia, and watch television, preferably a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.

  With the commotion of the feasting congregation now a whisper, Violet stepped into a dark classroom and closed the door behind her.

  The pager vibrated again.

  She rummaged her purse for the cell phone.

  21

  VIOLET turned around in the cul-de-sac and parked her Jeep Cherokee on the curb. The dashboard clock read 7:15. There was no tinge of luminosity in the sky excepting the blurry pinpoints of starlight that obscured when you looked straight at them. Turning off the engine, she stared at the chaos in the distance, filtering out the dazzle of flashing lights so she could imagine this hysterical street as it must’ve seemed that night.

  Tranquil.

  Ordinary.

  Safe.

  She absorbed her surroundings—the young pine forest across the street from the lakefront houses, the cul-de-sacs at each end, the road that dead-ended into Shortleaf Drive, the number of houses between cul-de-sacs (eleven) and that serene black lake.

  Violet did not speculate or theorize. With the investigation only in its infancy it wasn’t useful to do so. All she knew was that a family of four had been slain in that brick ranch forty yards down the street. Coupled with the other murders—the clerk knifed to death in a Rocky Mount Wal-Mart and the woman hanged from the Bodie Island Lighthouse—this had been one of the bloodiest weeks in North Carolina since the Civil War.

  As she opened the door and stepped out into the autumn evening she couldn’t help thinking, Most investigators never encounter anything like this. And then: You are not equipped to handle it.

  Her legs gave out and she leaned against t
he Jeep.

  Closing her eyes, she took a long calming breath, whispered a prayer, and started walking toward the flashing blue lights.

  The perimeter of the Worthingtons’ half-acre lot had already been roped off with crime scene tape. Violet counted three police cruisers, an ambulance, a van, and two unmarked cars parked along the curb across the street.

  A uniformed patrolman stood at the foot of the driveway, guarding the perimeter.

  “Hi, Reuben,” she said.

  “Viking? You were on-call for this one?”

  “Yep.”

  “Lucky you. That house next door is where we had the kidnapping on Monday. These are the neighbors we could never get to answer the door or the phone.”

  “You’re kidding me. You were first car?”

  “No, Bruce was. He’s over talking to Barry.”

  Violet stepped under the tape and walked down the driveway toward her sergeant, a wide massive man with the girth of an oak tree and a voice as deep as her daddy’s. He was talking to a patrolman when she walked up between them.

  “Hey, guys.”

  Her sergeant looked down at her and shook his head.

  “You sure caught it this time, Viking,” he said as though it were her fault. “I’m gonna go talk with Chip and the boys. Bruce can tell you what you got.”

  “You been in yet, Barry?” she asked.

  “No. We just got the search warrant. Bobby’s executing it right now.”

  “CSI ready to start videotaping?”

  “I think so.”

  “Would you ask them to hold off a sec? After I talk with Bruce, I’d like to do a quick walkthrough.”

  Sgt. Mullins gazed down at her for a moment. He rarely smiled. Standing under his undecipherable scowl always made her feel eight years old again. She knew exactly what he was thinking because she’d thought it too: she was incapable of handling this.

  As Sgt. Mullins lumbered off toward the white-jacketed CSI techs, Violet glanced over her shoulder at a woman who stood weeping in the street at the edge of the Worthingtons’ lawn.

  She turned back to Bruce.

  He was a year younger than Violet, just a year out of the academy on uniformed patrol. They’d attended the same high school though they hadn’t known each other then. But Violet remembered him. He looked much the same—tall, slender, slightly bugeyed, with a fearful nervous mien.

  She pulled a notepad and pencil from her purse as Bruce stared at the woman crying in the street.

  “Bruce?” His large eyes came to Violet. “You all right?” Bruce took a deep breath. “Tell me what I got.” They were standing by the Worthingtons’ minivan and Bruce leaned against the back hatch. “No, Bruce, don’t.”

  He stood back up, pointed toward the street, said, “That woman up there crying—name’s Brenda Moorefield. She lives three houses down. Earlier this afternoon—”

  “’Bout what time?”

  “Between three-thirty and four. She came over and knocked on the Worthingtons’ door. Apparently their children play together, and Mrs. Moorefield hadn’t seen the Worthington kids in two days. She had a key to the house and since their cars were in the driveway but they weren’t answering the phone or getting the mail, she decided to go in.

  “She was halfway through the foyer when she smelled them. Came right out, called nine-one-one. I arrived a little after five.

  “You’ve got one boy under the breakfast table in the kitchen. The other kid’s in his bed. I didn’t see any blood near the children. Zach and Theresa Worthington are in their bed…it’s bad. I couldn’t stay in that room very long, Vi. I’m sorry, I just—”

  “It’s okay, Bruce. Not your job. What are the kids’ names?”

  “Hank and Ben. They were eleven and seven. Ben’s the one under the table.”

  “Okay, mobile command should be here any minute. Reuben’s got the perimeter. I want you to go over and calm Mrs. Moorefield down. I’m gonna go in, see what I got before CSI starts taping. I’d like to talk with Mrs. Moorefield while they’re doing their thing, so make sure she doesn’t leave.”

  As Bruce headed back up the driveway, Violet rubbed her arms. She’d left her Barbour coat in the fellowship hall at church and a chilly breeze was blowing in off the lake, dislodging dead leaves from the enormous oaks in the front yard.

  She took a moment to gather herself, then started toward the front porch where a gaggle of noisy lawmen awaited her on the steps. They intimidated her but she could handle them.

  What troubled her more was what waited for her inside the house.

  22

  VIOLET kicked off her heels and slipped her tiny feet into the cloth bootees. Then she squeezed her hands into a pair of latex gloves and stood up.

  Standing by the Worthingtons’ front door, the officer in charge of the scribe list wrote down her name and time of entry. Since this would be a cursory walkthrough she was going in alone. A crime scene is a delicate ecosystem and the more people come and go, the more evidence they disturb.

  “I’ll be quick, guys,” she said.

  “Hey, Viking, want some Vicks?” one of the techs asked her. “From what Bruce says, they’re pretty juicy in there.”

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  Sgt. Mullins said, “I’ve called Rick and Don. They’re gonna come out first thing in the morning.”

  “Good. That’ll move things along. We can each take a room.”

  Armed only with a flashlight, a notepad, and a pencil, Vi entered the home of Zach, Theresa, Hank, and Ben Worthington and closed the door behind her. Standing in the foyer, she noted two sounds: the rush of central heating and the voices of the lawmen standing on the front porch. It felt good to be out of the cold though she knew the warm air would only magnify the smell.

  The house was dark, in the exact condition Bruce had found it.

  Vi walked into the dining room. She hadn’t breathed yet and her eyes made slow progress adjusting to the darkness. At the dining room table she stopped, letting form and detail vivify in the shadows.

  Then she took an unflinching breath.

  Sweet. Rich. Rot.

  Some putrid aberration of macaroni and cheese.

  So keen she could taste it.

  She sniffed again, letting the scent of decay engulf her. During her second month in Criminal Investigations Division she’d caught her first suicide—two summers ago on a sweltering July afternoon, a seventy-four-year-old man suffering with Alzheimer’s had put a twelve gauge under his chin. He was found a week later in a small trailer without air-conditioning. Though his smell was horrific, she discovered surprisingly that she couldn’t shun it, that she would accept, possibly embrace that awful stench out of reverence and compassion for her dead. The visceral intimacy of it inexplicably bound her first to the victim, then to the decoding of their murder.

  A bright waning moon was rising over Lake Norman, its light spilling across the linoleum floor of the Worthingtons’ kitchen.

  When Vi saw the little boy under the breakfast table something twitched inside of her. She walked into the moonlit kitchen, knelt down by the table, and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. Turning on the flashlight, she shined it in the boy’s face, then down the length of his small body. There were no visible ligature marks or bruises but his head rested awkwardly on the floor.

  Broken neck.

  The flashlight beam passed slowly down his right arm and stopped at his hand, the fingers drawn into a tight fist. She shined the beam onto his other hand. Those fingers were loose, clutching what looked like a battery.

  Vi walked to the backdoor and peered through glass panes into the moony backyard, taking in the oak, its tree house, the rope swing, the pier, the lake. Cutting off the flashlight, she walked back through the dining room into the den, her eyes now where she wanted them, accustomed to the shadows. She could’ve turned on the lights but she needed to encounter the house as he had encountered it.

  The smell sharpened in the den. She stopped and looked
down at a bowl of popcorn on the floor. A videotape case sat empty on top of the television. Movie night. She walked over, glanced at the title: Where the Red Fern Grows.

  When the telephone rang, Vi drew a sudden breath.

  The answering machine picked up after two rings: “This is Theresa.”

  “Zack, too.”

  “Hank!”

  “And Ben!”

  Familial laughter.

  A boy’s voice continued: “We aren’t here. Leave a message if you want.”

  After the beep: “Hey ya’ll. It’s Janet. Hadn’t heard from you yet about next weekend, so I’m just calling to bug ya. Really hope you can make it. Jack and Susie send their love. Talk to you soon.”

  The silence resumed.

  Stepping into the hallway, Vi glanced in the bathroom, then continued to the doorway of the older boy’s room. She saw Hank Worthington in bed under the covers. He only looked asleep and she thought, This house would feel so normal if you couldn’t smell the death.

  At the end of the hall, the door to Zach and Theresa’s bedroom stood wide open. Vi approached carefully, as though she might wake them, pulse racing, a pounding in the side of her neck.

  She did not deny or curse the fear. Squatting down, she prayed, I don’t feel You in this house. Go with me into that bedroom. She rose, felt just as alone, but walked on until she stood in the threshold of the master bedroom, eyes watering from the smell.

  Vi had no tricks for steeling herself up to see innocence eviscerated. It punched the wind out of you and then you carried on or you quit. Sgt. Mullins had told her that early on. He’d been right.

  With the tip of her pencil, she flicked the light switch.

  The room shrieked at her and she let slip a bated whimper. Her stomach fluttered as she took three steps forward and looked straight into the worst of it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Worthington stared back at her, despoiled of any scintilla of dignity.