Skeleton Key(24)

The car in the next bay was a little BMW and, by some trick of the moonlight that was streaming in through the open bay and the barn’s few small windows, it looked as if there were a person there, sitting bolt upright in the front passenger seat. Bennis stared and stared at the shape, willing it to go away. It was spooky in a way she didn’t like to think about. Her cigarette felt hot and hostile in her hand. It kept burning down to the skin on her fingers. Bennis took a long drag and rocked from foot to foot. The barn floor had been paved over with cement. Her feet weren’t being hurt by the small rocks of the drive anymore. It was still cold.

The best thing to do about fear is to face it. Bennis had made that rule for herself years ago, when she had first escaped from her father’s house. If you are afraid to face your fear, you simply fold. Bennis wasn’t sure what folding would mean in this case. She wasn’t even sure if it would matter. She dragged on the last of her cigarette—she always forgot how much faster they smoked down outside than in—and ground it out against the cement.

It was going to turn out to be a jacket left lying across the back of the seat, or a large tote bag stuffed with junk that someone had forgotten to take inside. Bennis wrapped her arms around her body and walked up to the side of the car. This close, she could see even less than she had from the open bay, because it was darker. She put her face to the glass of the passenger side window and got nothing at all. A shape. A hulk. A ragged piece of darkness. Nothing.

“Ass,” Bennis said, meaning herself. She was an ass sometimes, too. She blew things out of all proportion. Gregor always said that she cared more for her imagination than she did for practical reality. She made her living on her imagination. Gregor also said other things, though—such as that she always tried to find the most expensive price for anything she wanted to buy—that weren’t strictly true. They had been together for so long now, in one way or the other, that they exaggerated the things that seemed to them unique in the other person. It was a way of marking territory and soothing the nervousness that came with any serious human connection. A relationship could always fail. A love affair could always fall apart. A friendship could always disintegrate.

“I am killing time here,” Bennis said, as loudly as she could, just to hear the sound of her own voice. If she had brought Gregor with her, she could go back into the house and get him to help her with this. Of course, if she had brought Gregor with her, she wouldn’t have come out here to begin with. She would probably have had a better bedroom, too. She didn’t believe her bedroom had been Kayla’s idea. Margaret Anson struck her as the kind of woman who always gave the best she had to men, and then resented them for it.

Bennis got her arms unwrapped from around her body and her hand on the car door’s handle. She held her breath and counted to ten and jerked the car door open. When she heard something start to slide out, she thought she had been right about a tote bag. It made the kind of sound cloth bags make when they are full of clothes. Then she felt something brush against her legs and looked down.

Eyes, Bennis thought a second later. Those are eyes I see, staring straight up at me. This must be some kind of ventriloquist’s dummy.

But Bennis knew enough about ventriloquist’s dummies to know they didn’t have eyes like that, eyes that stared straight up, eyes with whites that were threaded through with tiny red veins. This was a body she had lying against her legs. It was a body that had been dead for at least some time. It was stiffish and awkward, as if it were just beginning to freeze with rigor.

Bennis backed away from the car, moving very slowly. She backed away until she hit the Mercedes in the open bay. By then the body was off her legs and wholly on the barn’s cement floor. It lay on its back with its legs splayed and its clothing spattered with blood. Hit on the back of the head, Bennis thought. And then she started to half-run, half-walk to the house.

Outside, the full moon was floating in a sea of black, free of even the trace of clouds. The house looked backlit and deserted, so dark it might as well have been haunted. How long would the body have had to be out there, in the cold like that, before it got into the condition it was in? How long had it been tonight since someone had bludgeoned Kayla Anson to death?

The first thing Bennis Hannaford wanted to do was to call Gregor Demarkian and tell him what had happened. The next thing she wanted to do was to pack her things and move right out of this house.

Somewhere in there—maybe when this latest coughing fit was over—she would have to find the time to call the state police.