GRAVEWORM Page 20

  You fought it.

  You evaded it.

  Maybe Death would win in the end (of course it would) but you did not make the chase easy on that bastard. You made him work for every inch of it.

  He looked over at the phone, wishing it would ring and wishing it would remain silent for an eternity. The kids had been calling, of course—Katherine and Peggy from Oregon, Elena from California, and Ronny from Mexico City. He could only tell them the same thing again and again. We just don’t know. Your mother went out and just didn’t come back. I’ll keep you posted. How empty that sounded. How weak. By the weekend, they’d start flying in and he did not look forward to it. They would remind him too much of Marge and, honestly, he was afraid to look them in the eyes.

  You did nothing wrong, old man. Nothing at all. You have nothing to feel guilty about.

  Yet he did and that guilt was deep and cutting.

  He went out onto the porch and sat in his camp chair, easing himself down so his back did not protest too much. Sitting there, it amazed him how quickly youth faded, how bitter was its passing. If there was a God above then Bud hoped in His infinite wisdom he would grant him his remaining years as a younger man. Forty would be about right. Your brain worked when you were forty and so did your body; you were mellowed by time like a fine bottle of merlot but you hadn’t lost too much zip. The grapes of life had not yet begun to sour and still tasted sweet.

  Listen to yourself, you old fool. Going on about being young again and thinking God’s going to grant you wishes of all crazy stupid things.

  So he sat.

  He thought.

  He remembered.

  Feeling the sun on his arms, he figured he would spend whatever days were left to him wishing that when Marge had left he had paid more attention to what it was she had said. For, truth be told, he could not be sure… but he was almost certain that he heard her voice call out as it did most weekdays. See ya later, Bud. Be home late like usual. But was that it or was his old brain just telling him that because that’s what she said just about every day as he puttered about in the garage?

  Margaret.

  Oh Jesus… Marge.

  Seeing her face in his mind, hearing her voice chiding him about this and that, he smiled and remembered once, some years back, just before he’d retired off the force, when on a whim, filled with a love for his wife he had not felt in twenty years, he’d stopped and bought her roses. When he came in the door with them, her face went wet with tears, and her voice bright with forgotten youth. “Oh, Bud,” she had said. “Oh you dear, wonderful man.” The memory of that day and the look on her face had kept him going for many weeks.

  But now, the smile fading from his lips, his weary eyes graying with sadness, the memory only brought to him a feeling of suffocation for things he had known and would never know again. He knew he had tears on his cheeks and he had not cried openly since he was a child but he could not stop for all he could see was his wife’s face and the more he concentrated on her image the more it began to blur until it was no more, like maybe it had never been. Oh good God, Marge, where the hell have you gone and what could have happened to you?

  And it was at that moment that he knew, despite his years, that he could not sit and do nothing. He could not suffer himself that slow, agonizing death. No, that would not do at all. He had to find Margaret. He owed himself that much and her that much for only he could make it right.

  With that firmly in mind, he started thinking about Tara Coombes.

  53

  Waiting for the night because it was now her natural element, Tara lay naked on her bed shivering in shallow sleep, her face and breasts and thighs hot with a sickly-smelling fever sweat. She dreamed she saw Lisa skipping down the sidewalk as she had always skipped as a little girl, except she was no little girl but seventeen. Tara tried to catch up to her, but the faster she ran the faster Lisa skipped away into the filmy yellow sunshine. Then Lisa was skipping through the gates of a cemetery, down a path, threading through the stones and wet grass like some jubilant, mischievous specter that had arisen for a day of play amongst the tombs and markers. She darted in and out of the shadows of trees, seeming to glide over a carpet of pine needles and heavy loam. She would appear behind a stone cross or a weathered headstone, then disappear again. Tara gave chase, her feet unnaturally heavy and lumbering. Then, just ahead, Lisa went down like she was submerging in a lake, sinking away, and Tara saw the open grave that had claimed her. Lisa was trying to dig deeper into it and Tara herself dove in there and took hold of her sister and it was at that moment that Lisa dissolved into a swarm of bloated, crawling graveyard rats.

  54

  Steve Crews did not go to work that day for several reasons. One of them was the ugly welt on his cheek and another was the awful hangover that was running rampant in his belly and in his head. But those were minor, insignificant reasons. The big one was Tara Coombes because he was haunted by her and not in a good way. He and his new friend Frank Duvall—Frank, of all people—had decided they needed to stage some sort of intervention with her, but as to how to go about that they just did not know. Steve had crashed on Frank’s couch and had woken about nine to the smell of coffee. It should have been very uncomfortable, but it was not. They drank coffee and chatted.

  “I’m going to need your help with her,” Steve finally said.

  “You got it. Trust me, the way things are going, I don’t have any jobs anyway.”

  “No work?”

  Frank shook his head. “She’s pretty dry of late.”

  Steve thought about it. “We’re doing a big expansion down at the office, putting a new wing on. Why don’t you handle it?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Hell, Frank. You’re a contractor, you need the work. We need somebody to handle it, see it gets done. I think you’re that man. We haven’t taken any bids yet, but I know my partners would be more than happy not to have to go through that process. It’s yours if you want it.”

  Frank kept looking at him like he was expecting a joke in the offing, but seeing none, his eyes softened and he gripped Steve’s arm firmly—too firmly, guy didn’t know his own strength—and the bond between them was solid.

  “You just saved my bacon, Steve.”

  “Now maybe together we can save Tara’s.”

  After Steve got home and took a shower, he called Rich Corby at the office and told him he had their contractor and Rich sounded enormously relieved that they wouldn’t have to be taking time out of their busy days to hem and haw over bids. When that was done he went over to Tara’s just on the crazy off-chance that he had exaggerated the entire thing and misread the signals he was getting from her and maybe blown it all up in his mind into something it was not. He stood on her porch knocking for twenty minutes off and on. There was no answer. The doors were locked. Tara’s Stratus was in the garage. Nothing looked out of the ordinary save that the mailbox was bulging with letters and flyers. It looked as if Tara hadn’t bothered checking it in days.

  That didn’t necessarily mean anything… did it?

  Next he went over to the Teamsters Hall just off Elm and found Jan Gerlich at her desk, chatting on the phone. When she saw him come in, she did not smile or roll her eyes as she usually did to indicate that whomever she was talking to was going on and on. Steve grabbed a chair and waited about five minutes.

  “Whew,” Jan finally said. Still, no good humor had touched her usually smiling face. “And what can I do for you, Steve?”

  “I’m looking for Tara.”

  Again, that pinched look. “She’s not here today, Steve. In fact, she said she wouldn’t be in the rest of the week.”

  Hmm. “Did she say why?”

  Jan shook her head. “No.”

  And was it him or did Jan seem just ever so slightly uncomfortable talking about Tara? She was like some soldier, fresh from the front, her eyes mirroring some secret atrocity that she could not bring herself to put into words.

  “Liste
n, Jan,” he said. “Something’s going on with Tara and I don’t know what it is, but it’s scaring the shit out of me. If you know something, anything, please tell me what it is before I go out of my freaking mind here.”

  “Then it’s not just me?”

  Steve felt a spike of dread in his chest. Vindication of his formless fears, yes, but it hardly put him at ease. Something was really happening, but what?

  Jan sighed, picked up her coffee mug, realized it was empty, and set it back down. “I don’t know what’s going on, Steve. But she called in yesterday morning. I thought maybe it was my imagination or maybe I hoped it was, but there was something in her voice.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “I… I’m not sure.” Jan shook her head. “She sounded… I don’t know… weird. I mean, Tara is always intense, but this wasn’t that… it was almost hollow… empty, you know? Like a prerecorded message when a computer calls you or one of those dolls where you pull the string and they talk. I don’t know, it makes no sense.”

  But to Steve it made all the sense in the world. He had gotten much the same feeling from Tara himself. Like she was just going through the motions, saying what she thought he wanted to hear but with no feeling behind any of it. As if the real Tara was light years away and the one he saw was just a dummy reciting a script. Though, now and again, that veneer would crack and something else would peer through and whatever it was, it scared the shit out of him.

  Monsters, Steve. Fucking monsters. When the lights go out, that’s when the monsters come.

  “Something’s going on, Jan. Something bad, only I don’t know what.”

  Jan was concerned too, so he told her about his visit with Tara. Maybe he was betraying Tara by doing it, but he didn’t really think he was because Jan was her friend and she deserved to know how bad things were getting. Besides, the way he was seeing it, the more people who cared about Tara who stood behind him the better.

  “I don’t like any of it,” Jan admitted, tapping her lacquered nails nervously on the desk blotter. “Like I said, she’s always intense, but not like this. Do you think… I even hate to say it… that she might be, you know, having a nervous breakdown?”

  But Steve could only shrug. “I just don’t know, Jan. But I’m worried. Hell, I’m scared to death.”

  “I called her this morning.”

  Steve sat forward. “Did she answer?”

  “Yes. She sounded very weird and I asked her if she was feeling okay and she said she was feeling under the weather. So I asked her if there was anything I could do for her, anything I could help her with.”

  “And what did she say?”

  Jan chewed her lip. “She said nobody could help her. Then she hung up.”

  Well, that was all he got from Jan and it did little to calm him and even less to make him understand just what in the hell was going on. He was more worried than ever after he left the Teamsters Hall. This was big and ugly and he honestly did not know if he was up to it, but he had to be. He had that feeling when he spoke with Tara that something inside her was calling out to him, begging for help, and that feeling was growing stronger by the moment.

  It wasn’t until three that he got over to the Starlight Lounge where Tara put in four hours a night hustling drinks. The Starlight didn’t open until five, but some of the employees came in at three. Steve knew they used the back entry, so he parked in the alley and waited.

  About five after, Bobby Drew pulled up in his Cadillac convertible and adjusted his toupee in the rearview mirror, pulling off a Pall Mall that was longer than a pencil.

  “Steve,” he said, puffing smoke and exuding cologne. “How’s the boy?”

  “Okay. Has Tara been in lately?’

  Bobby pulled off his cigarette. “Tara? No, not last night.”

  “Did she call?”

  “Hell, I think so. Lucky it was slow. She not coming in again?”

  “I don’t know, Bobby.”

  Bobby just stared at him, then he smiled. “Oh, one of those things, hey, Steve? Lover’s spat. Shit, it’ll work itself out. They always do.”

  “I hope so. Who would have taken the call?”

  “From Tara? Probably Linda.”

  They went through the bright red backdoor and into a supply room stacked with cases of beer and liquor. Steve followed Bobby into the barroom. The smell of old booze hung in the air like a yellow memory. The juke was already thumping with old rock and roll.

  “Hey, Linda!”

  “What?”

  “C’mere!”

  “What?”

  “I said c’mere!” Bobby shook his head and Steve waited for the toupee take wing. “Jesus, these broads.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming! Keep your shirt on!” Linda appeared from the back carrying a case of potato chips. “Oh, hey, Steve. How’s Tara doing? Still under the weather?”

  Is that what she told you? She’s under the weather. That’s good, I like that.

  As Bobby went on his way, Linda set her case on the bar, jotted a few things on a sheet of paper and Steve stood there, his mouth filled suddenly with dry cotton, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. There were words in his brain, but they would not come. And even if they did, they would scratch dryly in his throat like a stick dragged through desert dust and his lips would never be able to give them form.

  Linda was looking at him, seeing the darkness clinging to his face and knowing, as all women knew, trauma and terror and anxiety when she saw it. “Steve? Are you all right?”

  “What did Tara say when she called?”

  Linda sighed, gave a noncommittal shrug of her shoulders… then dispensed with the pretense and let herself go tense to her roots. “There is something going on with her, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Steve said. He sketched out a few things for her and asked her to keep it all to herself.

  “I thought so.” Linda leaned against the bar as if her body was suddenly too heavy to support itself. “She called and said she wouldn’t be in, that she’d be gone all week. Said that she was under the weather. At first I didn’t even know who the hell I was talking to. It didn’t sound like Tara. It sounded… I don’t know, like a different person, someone much older, you know?”

  Oh, Steve knew, all right. “What did she say exactly?”

  “She said she was sick, you know, under the weather.”

  “Nothing more than that?”

  Linda shook her head. “I asked her, but all she said was… I don’t know… something kind of strange like if she got better, she’d call.”

  If she got better, she’d call.

  If.

  If…

  There. Did he need much more reason to be afraid? Tara was unhinged and the evidence was abundant. But if that were so, then what exactly unhinged her? There had to be a catalyst. Something. Standing there, Linda’s words echoing through his head with a dull rhythm, he was gripped by the oddest sensation of fear and unreality. It seized him and would not let him go. On the surface things seemed to be quite normal—she was under the weather—but he, like Tara, was no longer a surface dweller. To know her and understand what had happened, he had to crawl on his belly through her murky labyrinth now, get his nose in the dirt and soil on his tongue.

  I’ve come down with something and I feel like shit.

  That’s exactly what she had said to him. There was truth in that statement, yes, but only a hint of it. He’d known it at the time, that blankness living in her eyes, shrouding what was really going on inside her skull.

  “Hey, Linda!” Bobby called out. “I need you over here! Did you order two cases of pizzas? There’s a guy here with two cases of fucking pizzas!”

  Linda shook her head. “I gotta go, Steve. You let me know how things turn out. She’s probably just in a mood or something.” Linda uttered a quick laugh at that but it was dead before it left her lips. “Let me know if I can do anything.”

  “Linda!”

  “I’m coming! Jesus
Christ!”

  Then Steve was alone, feeling things he did not want to feel and knowing absolutely nothing. He felt weak in the belly and dizzy in the head and he stumbled out into the alley, gulping in fresh September air, a perfectly awful taste in his mouth.

  55

  Bud Stapleton wasn’t sure when he started getting a bad feeling about Tara Coombes, only that it was there and maybe it had been from the first. Like catching a whiff of rotting meat, once it was in his head he could not get it out of there… something was wrong, something had gone bad in that girl or around her and he knew this without actually having any evidence to the same.

  His mind kept going back to the day Margaret had disappeared.

  He’d been in the garage working on that old rocking chair Marge had picked up at a flea market. He was on his second coat of varnish, following the grain of the wood with sure, easy strokes. That’s when Marge had called out to him. He could even hear her voice: “See ya later, Bud. Be home late like usual.” There was no doubt of it in his mind now. If she had been going anywhere but over to the Coombes’ house she would have told him.

  So either something happened on her way there (which was highly unlikely being that they were only six houses apart) or… or something had happened to her at the Coombes’ house. But Tara said she had not come over, that Lisa was down in Milwaukee. Bud could hear Tara now as easily as he could hear his wife: “No, she’s not here, Bud. I mean, I can go look around, but no one was here when I got home last night. Lisa’s down in Milwaukee with her Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire for a week, so I just figured Margaret didn’t come over. No reason for her to.” That’s what Tara had said on the phone that night. But Margaret must have gone over there. Something was screwy with this whole business. Something was wrong about it.