The Door to December
Page 8

Abruptly, with a gasp, she scrambled out of the shadow-shrouded corner and across the floor. She went under the unused bed. Safe. Or maybe not. Nowhere was safe. She stopped and curled into the fetal position, murmuring, hopelessly trying to hide from the thing beyond the door.
'The door,' she said. 'The door ... the door to December...'
With her arms crossed on her breast, her fingertips pressing hard into her own bony shoulders, she began to weep quietly.
'Help me, help me,' she said, but she spoke in a whisper that did not carry to the hall, where nurses might have heard it.
If someone had responded to her cry, Melanie might have clung to him in terror, unable to cast off the cloak of autism that protected her from a world too cruel to bear. Nevertheless, even that much contact with another human being, when she wanted it, would have been a small first step toward recovery. But with the best of intentions, they had left her alone, to rest, and her plea for solace and for a reassuring voice went unanswered.
She shuddered. 'Help me. It's coming open. It's ... open.'
The last word faded into a low moan of pure black despair. Her anguish was terrible, bleak.
Eventually her breathing grew less agitated, less ragged, and finally normal. The weeping subsided.
She lay in silence, perfectly still, as if in a deep sleep. But in the darkness under the bed, her eyes were still open wide, staring in shock and terror.
10
When she got home, shortly before dawn, Laura made a pot of strong coffee. She carried a mug into the guest bedroom and sipped at the steaming brew while she dusted the furniture, put sheets on the bed, and prepared for Melanie's homecoming.
Her four-year-old calico cat, Pepper, kept getting in the way, rubbing against her legs, insisting upon being petted and scratched behind the ears. The cat seemed to sense that it was soon to be deposed from its favored position in the household.
For four years, Pepper had been something of a surrogate child. In a way, the house also had been a surrogate child, an outlet for the child-rearing energies that Laura could not direct toward her own little girl.
Six years ago, after Dylan had run off, cleaning out their bank accounts and leaving her with no ready cash, Laura had been forced to scramble, scrape, and scheme to keep the house. It wasn't a mansion, but a spacious four-bedroom, Spanish two-story in Sherman Oaks, on the 'right' side of Ventura Boulevard, on a curving street where some homes had swimming pools and even more had hot tubs, where children were frequently sent to private schools, and where the family dogs were not mongrels but full-bred German shepherds, spaniels, golden retrievers, Airedales, dalmatians, and poodles registered with the American Kennel Club. It stood on a large lot, half hidden by coral trees, benjaminas, bushy red and purple hibiscus, red azaleas, and a fence shrouded in bougainvillea, with thick borders of impatiens in every hue along the serpentine, mission-tile walk that led to the front door.
Laura was proud of her home. Three years ago, when she had finally stopped paying private investigators to search for Dylan and Melanie, she had begun to put her spare money into small renovation projects: darkly stained oak base molding, crown molding, and door frames; new, rich dark-blue tile in the master bathroom, with white Sherle Wagner shell sinks and gold fixtures. She'd torn out Dylan's Oriental garden in the back lawn because it was a reminder of him, and had replaced it with twenty different species of roses.
In a sense, the house took the place of the daughter who had been stolen from her: she worried and fussed about it, pampered it, guided it toward maturity. Her concern for keeping the house in good repair was akin to a mother's concern for the health of her child.
Now she could stop sublimating all those maternal urges. Her daughter was finally coming home.
Pepper meowed.
Snatching the cat off the floor and holding it with its legs dangling, face-to-face, Laura said, 'There'll still be plenty of love for one pitiful cat. Don't worry about that, you old mouse-chaser.'
The phone rang.
She put the cat down, crossed the hall to the master bedroom, and plucked the handset off the cradle. 'Hello?'
No answer. The caller hesitated a moment, then hung up.
She stared at the phone, uneasy. Maybe it had been a wrong number. But in the dead hour before dawn, on this extraordinary night, a ringing phone and an uncommunicative caller had sinister implications.
She double-checked the locks on the doors. That seemed to be an inadequate response, but she could think of nothing more to do.
Still uneasy, she tried to shrug off the call, and at last she went into the empty room that had once been the nursery. Two years ago, she had disposed of Melanie's baby furniture when she had finally admitted to herself that her missing daughter would have by that time outgrown everything. Laura had not refurnished, ostensibly because when Melanie returned, the girl would be old enough to have a say in the choice of decor. Actually, Laura had left the room empty because—though she couldn't face her own fears—deep in her heart she'd felt that Melanie would never be coming back, that the child had vanished forever.
She had saved a few of her daughter's toys, however. Now she took the box of old playthings out of the closet and rummaged through it. Three-year-olds and nine-year-olds didn't have much in common, but Laura found two items that might still be appealing to Melanie: a big Raggedy Ann doll, slightly soiled, and a smaller teddy bear with floppy ears.
She took the bear and the doll into the guest bedroom and set them on the pillows, with their backs against the headboard. Melanie would see them the moment she came into the room.
Pepper jumped onto the bed, approached the doll and the bear with curiosity and trepidation. She sniffed the doll, nuzzled the bear, then curled up beside them, apparently having decided that they were friendly.
The first beams of daylight were streaming through the French windows. By the manner in which the early light fluctuated from gray to gold to gray again, Laura could tell, without looking at the sky, that the rain had stopped and that the clouds were breaking up.
Although she'd had only three hours of sleep the previous night, and though her daughter wouldn't be leaving the hospital for six or eight hours, Laura didn't feel like returning to bed. She was awake, energetic. From the stoop outside the front door, she retrieved the plastic-wrapped morning newspaper. In the kitchen, she squeezed two large oranges to make a glass of fresh juice, put a pan of water on the stove to boil, took a box of raisin oatmeal from a cupboard, and popped two slices of bread in the toaster. She was actually humming a tune—Elton John's 'Daniel'—when she sat at the table.
Her daughter was coming home.
The front-page stories in the paper—the turmoil in the Middle East, the fighting in Central America, the scheming of politicians, the muggings and robberies and senseless killings—did not discourage or concern her as they usually did. The murders of Dylan, Hoffritz, and the unknown man were not reported: That story had broken too late to make the early edition. If she had seen that slaughter recounted in the Times, maybe she wouldn't have felt so lighthearted. But she saw not a word about those murders, and Melanie would be released from the hospital this afternoon, and all things considered, she had known worse mornings.
Her daughter was coming home.
When she finished her breakfast, she pushed aside the newspaper and sat looking out the window at the damp rose garden. The sodden blooms seemed impossibly bright in the slanting sun, as unnaturally colorful as flowers in a vivid dream.
She lost track of time, might have been sitting there two minutes or ten, when she was snapped out of her reverie by a thump and clatter somewhere in the house. She sat straight up, rigid, tense, scared, her mind filled with images of blood-spattered walls and cold dead forms in opaque plastic bags.
Then Pepper broke the ominous spell by dashing out of the dining room, into the kitchen, claws clicking on the tile. She scampered into a corner, stood there, the hair raised along her back, ears flattened, staring at the doorway through which she had come. Then with a sudden self-consciousness that was comical, the cat pretended nonchalance, curled up in a furry puddle on the floor, yawned, and turned sleepy eyes on Laura, as if to say, 'Who, me? Lose my feline dignity? Even for a moment? Never! Scared? Ridiculous!'
'What'd you do, puss? Knock something over, spook yourself?'
The calico yawned again.
'It better not have been anything breakable,' Laura said, 'or I might finally get those cat-skin earmuffs I've been wanting.'
She went through the house, looking for the damage that Pepper had done, and she found it in the guest bedroom. The teddy bear and the Raggedy Ann doll were lying on the floor. Fortunately, the cat had not clawed the stuffing out of them. The alarm clock had been knocked off the nightstand. Laura picked it up and saw that it was still ticking; the glass face wasn't cracked, either. She put the clock back where it belonged, returned the doll and the bear to the bed.
Strange. Pepper had gotten over the reckless-kitten stage three years ago. She was now slightly plump, content, and thoroughly self-satisfied. This rambunctiousness was out of character, yet another indication that she knew her place in the McCaffrey household was no longer second to Laura.
In the kitchen, the cat was still in the corner.
Laura put food in the calico's dish. 'Lucky for you nothing broke. You wouldn't like being made into earmuffs.'
Pepper rose to a crouch, and her ears perked up. Tapping the dish with the empty can of 9 Lives, Laura said, 'Chowtime, you ferocious mouse-mauler.'
Pepper didn't move.
'You'll eat it when you want it,' Laura said, taking the empty can to the sink to rinse it before tossing it in the garbage.
Abruptly, Pepper exploded from the corner, streaked across the kitchen, through the doorway, into the living room, gone.
'Crazy cat,' Laura said, frowning at the untouched 9 Lives. Usually, Pepper was pushing in at the yellow dish, trying to eat even as Laura was scraping the food from the can.
PART TWO
ENEMIES WITHOUT FACES
WEDNESDAY
1:00 P.M.—7:45 P.M.
11
At one o'clock, when Laura drove her blue Honda to Valley Medical, a uniformed policeman at the entrance to the main parking lot barred the way. He directed her to the staff lot, which had been opened to the public 'until we straighten out the mess here.' Eighty to a hundred feet behind him was a cluster of LAPD cruisers and other official vehicles, some with emergency beacons rotating and flashing.
As she followed the patrolman's directions and headed toward the staff lot, Laura glanced to the right, through the fence, and saw Lieutenant Haldane. He was the tallest and biggest man among those at the scene. She suddenly realized that the commotion might have a connection with Melanie and with the murders in Studio City the previous night.
By the time she slotted the Honda between two cars with MD plates and ran back the hospital driveway to the fence that encircled the public parking lot, Laura had half convinced herself that Melanie was hurt or missing or dead. The patrolman at the gate would not let her through, not even when she told him who she was, so she shouted to Dan Haldane.
He hurried across the macadam, favoring his left leg. Not much, only slightly. She might not have noticed if her senses hadn't been sharply honed by fear. He took her by the arm and led her away from the gate, along the fence, to a spot where they could talk privately.
As they walked, she said, 'What's happened to Melanie?'
'Nothing.'
'Tell me the truth!'
'That is the truth. She's in her room. Safe. Just the way you left her.'
They stopped, and she stood with her back to the fence, staring past Haldane toward the pulsing emergency beacons. She saw a morgue wagon with the patrol cars.
No. It wasn't fair. To find Melanie after all these years and then to lose her again so soon—it was unthinkable.
A tightness in her chest. A throbbing in her temples.
She said, 'Who's dead?'
'I've been calling your house—'
'I want—'
'—trying to get hold of you—'
'—to know—'
'—for the past hour and a half.'
'-who's dead!' she demanded.
'Listen, it's not Melanie. Okay?' His voice was unusually soft and gentle and reassuring for a man his size. She always expected a roar, but he purred. 'Melanie's fine. Really.'
Laura studied his face, his eyes. She believed that he was telling her the truth. Melanie was all right. But Laura was still scared.
Haldane said, 'I didn't get home until seven this morning, fell into bed. Eleven o'clock, my phone rings, and they want me at Valley Medical. They think maybe there's some link between this homicide and Melanie because—'
'Because what?'
'Well, after all, she's a patient here. So I've been trying to get hold of you—'
'I was out shopping, buying new clothes for her,' Laura said. 'What happened? Who's dead? Are you going to tell me, for God's sake?'
'A guy in his car. That Volvo over there. Dead in the front seat of his Volvo.'
'According to his ID, his name's Ned Rink.'
She leaned back against the chain-link fence, her pulse rate gradually slowing from the frantic beat it had attained.
'You ever heard of him?' Haldane asked. 'Ned Rink?'
'No.'
'I wondered if maybe he was an associate of your husband's. Like Hoffritz.'
'Not that I'm aware. The name's not familiar. Why would you think he knew Dylan? Because of the way he died? Is that it? Was he beaten to death like the others?'
'No. But it was odd.'
'Tell me.'
He hesitated, and from the look in his blue eyes she could see that it was another particularly brutal homicide.
'Tell me,' she said again.
'His throat was crushed, as if someone gave him one hell of a whack with a lead pipe, caught him right across the Adam's apple. More than one whack. Lots of damage. Literally pulverized the guy's windpipe, crushed the Adam's apple, the vocal cords. Broke his neck. Cracked his spine.'
'Okay,' she said, dry-mouthed. 'I get the picture.'
'Sorry. Anyway, it's not like the bodies in Studio City, but it's unusual. You can see why we might figure they're connected. In both cases, the murders involved an unusual degree of violence. This one wasn't as bad as those, not nearly, but nevertheless ...'
She pushed away from the fence. 'I want to see Melanie.'
Suddenly she had to see Melanie. It was a strong physical need. She had to touch the girl, hold her, be reassured that her child was all right.