The Bad Box Read online

  The tapping ceased and the shadow vanished from behind the curtain, but he remained petrified for a long minute. At last he snatched up a long chef’s knife from the counter, ran to the door, and yanked the curtain aside.

  Nothing was there. He unlocked the door and jerked it open. Nothing there. He stepped out onto the stoop and peered into the shadows of the small back yard. Nothing moving, but then the corner of his eye caught something dark ducking behind the corner of his neighbor’s house.

  When at last he turned to go back in, he saw a sheet of paper attached to the door by a nail driven into the oak. He tore off the page and squinted.

  Someone had scrawled in big childish letters: A DEAD WHORE AND A DEAD QUEER LIVE HERE.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The noisy fan in Sarah’s room drowned out other sounds, even the sound of the police talking to Howard downstairs at 4:30 in the morning, and she was so exhausted that she slept peacefully until almost 11:00. She showered, and when she came downstairs she found Howard in the kitchen making sandwiches with leftovers from the picnic. He looked tired.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

  “Like a baby. You?”

  “Like a very old baby,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind leftovers for lunch. I have a class from 2:00 till 3:20, and then we’ll hit the road. Just pack what you’ll need for a couple three days.”

  “I guess I’ll do some housecleaning while you teach.”

  “No,” he said rather sharply. “I don’t want you here by yourself any more, not till all this blows over.”

  This didn’t sound like Howard’s usual blithe attitude. “Did something happen while I was asleep?” she asked. “Another phone call?”

  “No, nothing happened. I just think we need to be more careful, that’s all. Oh, and there’s a very rare parking place right out front at the moment. I want you to move your car there.”

  “Why?”

  “It will be bait, my dear. We’re going to leave your car parked in front of the house so every psycho in town believes you’re still here. Meanwhile the police will be down the street watching in case anyone tries to break in. It was my idea, and Detective Okpara thinks it’s a brilliant plan.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “I called him this morning to tell him where we’re going, and he thinks that’s a brilliant plan too.”

  “Well then, he knows more than I do. Where are we going?”

  Howard smiled. “Mum’s the word. You know, loose lips sink ships and all that.”

  “Yeah right, like I’m gonna run out and make an announcement on the news.”

  “Just trust me, Sare. And move your car before someone grabs the spot.”

  As she was walking to her car she noticed the unmarked car with two plainclothes cops inside it parked a few houses away. She waved, but they pretended they didn’t see her.

  When they got to the university Howard gave her some money, a grocery list, and the keys to his car so she could pick up food while he taught. Charcoal was on the list, so presumably there was an outdoor grill wherever they were going. Maybe he was borrowing a friend’s vacation cabin in a woods somewhere, and she doubted she would feel any safer stuck out in some woods in the middle of nowhere. She wouldn’t even have her car. What was she supposed to do while Howard was away teaching, sit out in some damn cabin all by herself?

  She didn’t like Howard’s secrecy and had a hunch she wouldn’t like his plan, and the only reason she was going along with it was to protect him: if she insisted on staying here and renting her own place, then he would be all alone in his house, and his house was probably the least safe place in town right now.

  When she picked up Howard he took over the wheel and headed southeast out of town.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going now?” she asked.

  “Yes. We’re going to stay with my friend Benjamin Easton. He lives on a farm near Lancaster, all alone in a huge old house.”

  “No we’re not,” she said. “I absolutely refuse to deal with a stranger right now.”

  “Benjamin Easton is certainly no stranger, my dear. I’ve known him for ages, and he’s a lovely man. He told me he’ll be delighted to put us up until the police get everything sorted out. It will be fun.”

  “So this is why you were being so secretive,” she said. “You knew I wouldn’t agree to stay with some damn stranger.”

  “Guilty as charged. Forgive me, Sare, but you agreed to trust me, and you need to trust me now. I intend to keep you safe whether you want me to or not.”

  Sarah stared angrily at the blur of trees and houses and wished that she were driving back to childhood, to Iowa, to Johnny and her parents. She wondered why Johnny’s ghost hadn’t come to her like a comforting cloud of sunshine to help her through this mess. Probably because his ghost was a figment of her mind, like Darnell’s Angel, just a wish-fulfilling escape from ugly reality.

  Howard was talking about Ben Easton. Sarah scarcely listened, but she gathered that Ben was a psychologist—”a brilliant man, my dear”—who taught at the Lancaster Branch of Ohio University. She pictured one of those empty-headed gay hunks that Howard favored, the kind with thick golden hair and no brains underneath it.

  At least if the house was as huge as Howard claimed, she would be able to hide in one of the rooms while he pursued his lust. Tomorrow when he drove in to teach she would ride in with him no matter what he said, and then she would get her car and get her own place, and that would be the end of that.

  About half an hour out of town, Howard turned off the highway onto a narrow road. The land was gently hilly out here with the sweet smell of fresh hay. He drove a mile or two past a few farms, cattle staring at their car and two horses capering in a pasture, and turned into a long gravel driveway.

  The sun was low enough behind them to cast shadows pointing like dark accusing fingers at the house. It looked deeply uninviting, sitting a good fifty yards off the road and half-hidden behind tall trees. It wasn’t so huge as Howard had claimed, just a forlorn-looking farmhouse with white siding and on the other side of the driveway a weathered barn and some outbuildings.

  The enormous front yard needed mowing and was dotted with white-headed dandelions and other weeds. Here and there were some fruit trees that needed pruning, and scattered among them were a few neglected flower beds. Obviously whoever had lived here before had tried to make something nice of the yard, but just as obviously Howard’s brilliant friend was letting the place go to hell. A shame, she thought.

  Howard parked beneath a tall elm with two dead branches hanging from it like ghostly hands preparing to snatch the car. They got their suitcases from the trunk, Howard’s huge one and her tiny one, climbed onto the front porch and knocked. Surely Ben must have seen them heading down his driveway, but he seemed to be in no hurry to greet them.

  At last the door opened, and a tall lanky man nodded at them with a faint smile that didn’t look particularly happy. He didn’t look like a psychologist or like anyone who should whet Howard’s appetite. Older than Sarah had expected, forty at least, with a lean square-jawed face and sandy brown hair combed straight back and graying at the temples, he wore old blue jeans and a plain gray outdoors shirt that had seen some wear. And cowboy boots, for Christ’s sake, scruffy-looking brown cowboy boots with squared toes.

  Just some phony academic wanting to look like Clint Eastwood in one of those spaghetti westerns, Sarah thought. The Good, the Bad, and the Bogus.

  “Benjamin, you look lovely, lovely!” Howard exclaimed. “And this is my dear friend Sarah, a most delightful young lady!”

  She extended her hand and Ben shook it with no enthusiasm. His cold gray eyes met hers for only an instant, and in that instant she saw quite clearly that he didn’t want her to be here, didn’t want either of them here.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said in a voice that didn’t seem to mean it, and Sarah smelled alcohol on his breath. “Come in.” He reached for Sarah’s small
suitcase, but she rather rudely jerked it away.

  He hadn’t done much to clean up the place for them: books and magazines cluttered the living room sofa and the coffee table. Ben led them into a dining room, its table littered with more books, and opened a door to a stairway.

  “I’ll show you your rooms,” he said as he started up the creaking stairs.

  “Benjamin, it’s been so long,” Howard was saying. “How have you been? What on earth have you been doing?”

  “Just a little private practice,” Ben answered quietly. “I just keep a few patients, kick out the ones I don’t like. That’s most of them.”

  “Are you teaching?”

  “I have the summer off.”

  “How I envy you.”

  He led them along an L-shaped hallway to a small bedroom with a brass bed, an oak washstand, and an old oak dresser with a large mirror. There were two windows, both open with screens, and in one of them a fan was blowing in fresh air.

  “This okay for you?” he asked Sarah.

  The room looked quaint, not the deliberate quaintness of Howard’s house, more like the unintentional old-fashioned plainness of the house where Sarah had grown up. She placed her suitcase on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed and said, “It’s very nice.”

  “Go ahead and get settled in,” Ben said. “I’ll show Howard his room.”

  “I know this is an imposition—” she began, but he had already stepped out of the room.

  Howard chattered as the two men moved down the hallway. Sarah closed the door, sat on the bed, shut her eyes, and tried to imagine she was in her own apartment somewhere far away.

  Long after the men had gone downstairs, she went to the bathroom. Ben had placed clean towels and washcloths on the wicker hamper. She washed her face, trying to scrub away her sour mood with the sweat. Since he was putting her up, she should make at least some effort to look friendly, but it took a lot of scrubbing before she felt able. She put on a bra, which she rarely bothered with, and then a blouse with a higher neckline and went downstairs.

  The men were in the kitchen. Ben was husking the corn she had bought, and Howard was brushing marinade on the chicken. He was no longer chattering, and there was a gloomy silence that she didn’t know how to break.

  “There’s beer and whiskey,” Ben said at last. “And I see you brought some wine.”

  “Beer sounds good.”

  She got one from the refrigerator and stood there feeling awkward until Howard said, “Those coals should be getting hot.” He picked up the tray of chicken, and she opened the screen door for him and followed him out back to a picnic table with a grill smoking beside it.

  “Your brilliant friend doesn’t want us here,” she said quietly.

  “Of course he does,” Howard said. “I think he’s just a little depressed.”

  “That makes two of us,” she said.

  Howard didn’t answer. He put the chicken on the grill and stood with his back to her, poking it with his long fork. Sarah sat at the table, sipped her beer, slapped mosquitoes, and felt ashamed of herself. Howard was going out of his way to help her, and all she wanted to do was strangle him.

  Eventually Ben came out. He ambled more than walked, a lanky, all-the-time-in-the-world gait that Sarah found somehow irritating. She couldn’t tell if he was being insolent or was just annoyingly comfortable in his own skin.

  “Corn’s ready whenever the chicken is,” he said in a quiet Western drawl, as if he were saying something about cattle rustlers in them there canyons. “We better eat inside, mosquitoes will be out soon.”

  They ate at the kitchen table. Howard’s grilled chicken was good, and so was the rice Ben had fixed with tomatoes and hot peppers, but they mostly chewed in silence despite Howard’s sporadic efforts to get a conversation started.

  After dinner they moved into the front living room. Ben seated himself across from her in a rocking chair, his long legs seeming to stretch halfway across the room. To avoid looking at him, she stared at one of the many paintings that covered the walls, a dark landscape of jagged desert mountains, distant and aloof like Ben, and she wondered if he had painted it. Even Howard seemed to have run out of things to say.

  “Tell me about Darnell,” Ben said at last.

  He watched her with no expression while Sarah told him what she knew. His gray eyes were like mirrored sunglasses: maybe they were paying attention, maybe they weren’t, and it was none of your business anyway. She disliked him more and more, his coldness, his imposing tallness, his whiskey-abetted ease. He said nothing when she finished, and she wondered if he had even been listening.

  “Do you believe this dreadful young man has done away with himself?” Howard asked.

  He was slurring his words. Both men had been refilling their glasses pretty often from the bourbon bottle on the coffee table, but Howard looked trashed while Ben still looked sober and cheerless.

  “I doubt it,” Ben said. “Darnell said Angel is becoming dominant. If he was telling the truth, then Angel wouldn’t let him kill her. If he was lying about that, then he probably wasn’t telling the truth about suicide.”

  “What do you make of this poppycock about growing breasts?” Howard asked. “Do you think he’s been taking hormones?”

  “Maybe not,” Ben said. “When I was a grad student I studied a criminal with multiple personalities. Some of his personalities were female, and I talked the psychiatrist in charge of the case into doing blood work when the patient was in a female phase and again when he wasn’t. Turned out when the patient was in a female phase, his estrogen level shot way up. Besides, it’s no great trick for a man to grow breasts. There’s a small epidemic right now of men doing just that, especially guys who make birth-control pills. There are plenty of estrogen-like chemicals in every polluted river, partly because women who take the pills pee just like the rest of us. There’s one chemical called diethylstilbestrol that’ll send a guy to Victoria’s Secret in a hurry.”

  “Can Angel take over completely?” Sarah asked. “I mean sort of shove Darnell out permanently?”

  “Yes,” Ben said. “She’s probably had the upper hand for a long time. Think of it this way: the mental models we fabricate as children are with us the rest of our lives. Imagine what strange models a child cobbles together when the world he perceives is monstrous. Young Darnell locked in a box a few feet from his dead sister—he identifies with her because she’s his sister and because they share the same punishment. She’s close to him, just a few feet away, but she’s also separate. She’s a girl, with all the otherness that entails. She’s a year older, giving her the superiority of age that kids are so sensitive to. But more than that, she’s dead. Death gives her the ultimate otherness, a kind of supernatural superiority. Darnell can’t see her, but he imagines she can see him, like a ghost peering into his box.

  “That’s probably been his relationship with Angel until recently. They’re close, but separated by a wall. She’s superior to him. She knows more than he does. After all, he has locked up his pain inside of her, and that’s a box he doesn’t care to open. After he returns from an Angel-phase, he has no memory of what she did, at least until recently, if we can believe what he said over the phone. On the other hand, Angel always knows what Darnell is doing and thinking. It’s a mental construct created in childhood, still defining his reality today. The two apartments side by side, just like the two adjacent boxes. He needed that other apartment next to his, the other box as a means of escape.”

  “Does that mean he’s renting two places now?” Howard asked, slurring his words quite badly.

  “I doubt it. Till now he has used Angel to bury his pain and anger. She acts out the anger by killing people, and Darnell remains innocent. But now the crimes have been exposed, so there’s not much purpose to the innocent, ignorant side. That’s why Darnell says she’s pushing him out—he has become extraneous. I think they’ll fit comfortably into one apartment now. The little family’s getting smaller.”


  “What do you make of this stuff about Angel’s friend?” Sarah asked.

  “Darnell doesn’t want to accept blame for his crimes,” Ben said. “Until recently they were all Angel’s doing, but now he knows she’s really just a part of himself so he needs to invent a new character to take the blame. Some dark devilish ‘friend’ who stands behind Angel and makes her do all this. Notice he told you it was this ‘friend’—not innocent Darnell—who brought Angel to life. He’s Darnell’s deus ex machina, god from the machine, or in this case a devil from the machine, creaking down from the theater ceiling on a pulley to rescue Darnell’s drama of innocence.”

  It made a kind of sense, Sarah thought, but she wasn’t convinced. It didn’t fit with the feeling she had gotten from Darnell’s voice and words, and he had made a point of saying that this “friend” wasn’t Satan.

  “You said Darnell was preoccupied with religion,” Ben continued, the whiskey not slowing him down. “Religion is a common excuse with psychotic killers, God’s voice in the head telling them to kill, and that’s probably all this ‘friend’ amounts to. Other religious trappings are pretty obvious too, the candles he placed around the casket and the timing of his crimes.”

  “What timing?” Sarah asked.

  “You said the men followed Angel home on Fridays and left on Sunday nights. Jesus was buried in the cave on Good Friday, and on Easter Sunday the rock was rolled away and Christ emerged from his tomb.”

  Snazzy, she thought, but a more likely explanation was that Darnell worked during the weeks and couldn’t go out and play till the weekends. Of course a theory like that wouldn’t get you published in Headshrinker Quarterly.

  “There are often ritualistic aspects to these cases,” Ben continued. “Religion’s an excuse to these killers, and they may think of the killings as sacred religious rites. On the other hand . . .”

  He stopped talking and stared at something behind her head.

  “On the other hand what?” Sarah asked. She was getting tired, and Howard was dozing beside her on the sofa.