Flowering Judas(7)

“She just comes around and puts up hundreds of those damned flyers,” Darvelle said. “She puts them up and I take them down.”

“Even so. You said she put them up today.”

“She did.”

“So check the house and call if there’s anything wrong,” Kyle said. “I’ll be over after shift. Leave something in the refrigerator I can microwave in case I’m late.”

“Maybe she killed him,” Darvelle said. “Wouldn’t that be an absolute gas?”

“I’ll see you later,” Kyle said.

Darvelle put the phone on the end table near the lamp and got up to go down the hall to her bedroom. Her head hurt a little. She didn’t think she was going to sell the Petrovski house to these people she’d brought out there today. She didn’t think she was going to sell it to much of anybody until she convinced the Petrovskis to bring the price down by at least thirty thousand dollars. It was not the kind of market you could play games in, and the Petrovskis were playing games.

Darvelle stepped out of her shoes. She picked them up and walked down the hall to the master bedroom in her pantyhose. It wasn’t much of a master bedroom. It didn’t have a bathroom en suite. It was just the bigger bedroom of the two, and the one with the walk-in closet.

She stopped at the bathroom and looked in. Everything was what it should be. She went to the bedroom and opened the door and looked in there for a moment, too. There was nothing to see. There was no stage blood on the bedspread. There was no wadded mess of flyers on the carpet. There was no bright-red CHESTER written in lipstick on the vanity table mirror. Honest to God, Charlene Morton was some kind of lunatic.

Darvelle Haymes did not believe in being afraid of her own shadow. She didn’t believe in being afraid of anything. She was certainly not afraid of the ghost of Chester Ray Morton, wherever he might be and whatever it was he was doing.

She sat down on the side of the bed and started stripping her pantyhose off.

It was a good question—just what it was Chester had been doing, and where it was he’d been doing it.

She’d been wondering that for twelve years.

5

The flyers were lying on the counter next to the sinks in the third floor women’s bathroom in Frasier Hall, and that made Penny London very nervous.

She put her two big tote bags on the floor and picked up the flyers, one by one. There were six of them, splayed out in a fan, as if somebody had deliberately placed them for maximum recognition value. She put the flyers down again. It wasn’t as if they were anything unusual. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? they read. Then there was that same picture that was up on the billboard at the front entrance to the college. It had to be a dozen years since Chester Morton went missing. Penny still remembered him.

She pushed her mop of gray hair out of her face and bent down to the tote bags. She found the one with the shampoo in it and got it out. She didn’t like those flyers. Those flyers meant that somebody had come up to this bathroom, and the reason Penny had chosen it in the first place was because she was sure nobody ever came up here, except perhaps the cleaning staff. It was hard to find bathrooms at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College that nobody ever spent time in. There were too many students looking for places to get stoned.

Penny glanced toward the door. It would be better if she could lock it, but there was no lock on it. If there was an emergency, a hostage situation, one of those school shootings, anybody who came into the bathrooms in this place would be doomed.

She turned on the hot water in the left-hand sink full blast, then turned on the cold a third of the way. Then she bent over and put her head under the faucet. The cold water felt good on her scalp. It felt so good, Penny thought she might give in in a day or two and spend some of her money taking a motel room for a night. It would be wonderful to have a full-on shower for once. It would be even more wonderful to have a full-on bath. She’d promised herself she’d take a hotel room whenever it got to the point where she just couldn’t stand it.

She put shampoo in her hair. She rubbed the soap deep down into her scalp with the tips of her fingers. She put her head back under the faucet and let the soap rinse out. When she was done with her hair, she’d risk taking some of her clothes off and washing the rest of herself. Then she’d change into the clothes she’d brought from the car. It was only twenty-five minutes before class. She would have to hurry.

It would be terrible if somebody walked in on her.

Maybe Chester Ray Morton’s mother was still in the building somewhere. Maybe she would come back to see if her flyers had been thrown away by a janitor. Penny had met Chester Ray Morton’s mother when all that had happened, and she was of the opinion that the woman was a stark raving loon.