Every Dead Thing

“I don’t know.” It was becoming a familiar refrain. “There may be a connection between Catherine Demeter’s disappearance and Mr. Barton’s death but we won’t know unless the police find something or the girl turns up.”

“Well, I can’t authorize that kind of spending at the present time,” began Ms. Christie. “You’ll have to wait until after-”

I interrupted her. Frankly, I was getting tired of Ms. Christie. I was used to people not liking me, but most at least had the decency to get to know me first, however briefly.

“I’m not asking you to authorize it, and after my meeting with Mrs. Barton, I don’t think you have anything to do with it. But as a common courtesy I thought I’d offer my sympathies and tell her how far I’ve got.”

“And how far have you got, Mr. Parker?” she hissed. She was standing now, her knuckles white against the desk. In her eyes something vicious and poisonous raised its head and flashed its fangs.

“I think the girl may have left the city. I think she went home, or back to what used to be home, but I don’t know why. If she’s there I’ll find her, make sure she’s okay, and contact Mrs. Barton.”

“And if she isn’t?” I let the question hang without a reply. There was no answer, for if Catherine Demeter wasn’t in Haven, then she might as well have dropped off the face of the earth until she did something that made her traceable, like using a credit card or making a telephone call to her worried friend.

I felt tired and frayed at the edges. The case seemed to be fragmenting, the pieces spinning away from me and glittering in the distance. There were too many elements involved to be merely coincidental, and yet I was too experienced to try to force them all together into a picture that might be untrue to reality, an imposition of order upon the chaos of murder and killing. Still, it seemed to me that Catherine Demeter was one of those pieces and that she had to be found so that her place in the order of things could be determined.

“I’m leaving this afternoon. I’ll call if I find anything.” Ms. Christie’s eyes had lost their shine and the bitter thing that lived within her had curled back on itself to sleep for a while. I was not even sure that she heard me. I left her like that, her knuckles still resting on the desk, her eyes vacant, seemingly staring somewhere within herself, her face slick and pale as if troubled by what she saw.

As it turned out, I was delayed by further problems with my car and it was 4 P.M. before I drove the Mustang back to my apartment to pack my bag.

A welcome breeze blew as I walked up the steps, fumbling for my keys. It sent candy wrappers cartwheeling across the street and set soft drink cans tolling like bells. A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover.

I walked the four flights of stairs to my door, entered the apartment, and turned on a lamp. I prepared a pot of coffee and packed as it percolated. About thirty minutes later I was finishing my coffee, my overnight bag at my feet, when the cell phone rang.

“Hello, Mr. Parker,” said a man’s voice. The voice was neutral, almost artificial, and I could hear small clicks between the words as if they had been reassembled from a completely different conversation.

“Who is this?”

“Oh, we’ve never met, but we had some mutual acquaintances. Your wife and daughter. You might say I was with them in their final moments.” The voice alternated between sets of words: now high, then low, first male, then female. At one point, there seemed to be three voices speaking simultaneously, then they became a single male voice once again.

The apartment seemed to drop in temperature and then fall away from me. There was only the phone, the tiny perforations of the mouthpiece, and the silence at the other end of the line.

“I’ve had freak calls before,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “You’re just another lonely man looking for a house to haunt.”

“I cut their faces off. I broke your wife’s nose by slamming her against the wall by the kitchen door. Don’t doubt me. I am the one you’ve been looking for.” The last words were all spoken by a child’s voice, high-pitched and joyous.

I felt a stabbing pain behind my eyes and my blood sounded loudly in my ears like waves crashing against a headland bleak and gray. There was no saliva in my mouth, just a dry dusty sensation. When I swallowed the feeling was that of dirt traveling down my throat. It was painful and I struggled to find my voice.

“Mr. Parker, are you okay?” The words were calm, solicitous, almost tender, but spoken by what sounded like four different voices.

“I’ll find you.”

He laughed. The synthesized nature of the sound was more obvious now. It seemed to break up into tiny units, just as a TV screen does when you get too close and the picture becomes merely a series of small dots.