“So, you were on the other side of the needle. How did that feel, Stephen?”
He didn’t answer her, and though his eyes remained fixed on hers, they looked far away as if he stared right through her.
“Green injected me, and I felt that rush of cold fill my veins. It was in that moment I experienced fear. It had been a decade since I felt that way. The last time was twenty years ago in the cellar when you found me. When she locked me down there and probably would have left me to die.”
“Maybe that would have been for the best,” Liv murmured.
Stephen grew silent for several minutes, and Liv hoped he’d leave. Instead, he continued.
“I told him, ‘if you think a dose of barbiturates will have me over here blubbering like a woman, you’re sadly mistaken.’ Strickland laughed, and that’s when I noticed the man in the corner. He wasn’t a doctor at all, but a patient. His eyes were fluttering, and he was scribbling on a pad of paper. Dr. Palmer stood, ripped the top sheet from the notebook and scurried to Dr. Strickland, sliding the paper into his hands.”
Kaiser’s breath had grown fast and ragged.
“He knew, Liv - what I’d done, what we’d done. Strickland started to ask questions. He asked me about Gaylord, about my mother. I wanted to rip off the binds and hop a train like we did as kids. I never wanted to look on that patient with the sunken eyes and the scribbling hands ever again. ‘Tell me about the witch, Stephen. The Norse witch,’ Strickland asked.”
Liv wanted to cover her ears with her hands, but she couldn’t. Even if Stephen had not bound her, her arms were like lead weights resting beside her.
“’What is he?’ I demanded, nodding toward the patient, who again scribbled on the paper. Strickland did not respond. He looked down at the page. ‘Tell me about the trunk, Dr. Kaiser,’ he asked me. I looked at the patient in the shadow. He had tilted his head as if he were waiting, listening for the next revelation, and that’s when something in me exploded. I started rocking back and forth. I slammed the front of the chair down, and the front leg splintered and sent me to my knees. I wanted to scream. I wanted to kill the man in the corner, but then I heard it again. The voice of chamber. Shhh… it seemed to whisper. And I grew silent, my heart slowed, and the blood stopped pulsing in my head. It was helping me, Liv.”
Stephen sighed and leaned forward into the side of the bed, clutching Liv’s wrist in his clammy hands.
“The next morning, Strickland knocked on my door. 'Welcome to the Umbra Brotherhood, Dr. Kaiser. Burn these after reading them.’ He handed me a letter of introduction and a code of silence. I was in.”
Liv held her breath as the story ended.
She waited for Stephen to go on and struggled with the delirious notion that he might crawl into bed beside her and fall asleep. Or worse he might stand in the room all night revealing the torture he’d inflicted on his patients in the last two decades. And she would listen and carry it, because she had helped to create the monster that was Stephen Kaiser.
He leaned down and Liv gasped as he planted a cold moist kiss on her forehead. Then he turned and left. She listened to the door close and the lock slide into place.
Chapter 25
Jesse
Jesse pushed in the door to Quarry’s Pub. The heat and the smell of spiced rum swirled up around him. He shrugged out of his coat, hung it on the rack by the door, and ambled over to the bar, where an older man sat sipping from a clear glass of golden liquid.
The man glanced at him as he sat down.
“Help ya?” the bartender asked. He was a short man, mostly bald, with a tuft of dark hair that rimmed his lower scalp. He planted his hands on the bar, and Jesse saw scabby knuckles. The man was a fighter, or he regularly threw drunks out of the bar, maybe both.
“I’ll take an old-fashioned,” Jesse told him, laying one of his newly acquired bills on the counter.
The man took it, made his drink, and dropped his change in front of him.
“Don’t reckon I know ya,” the man next to Jesse said. His voice was raspy and on the edge of slurring.
“Jesse Kaminski,” Jesse told him honestly, offering his hand.
The man shook it.
“Bart Wynkoop,” the man told him.
Jesse spotted a gold band on his ring finger. The man had the pouchy face of a regular drinker. Sacks of fleshy skin ballooned beneath his small, dark eyes.
“You new in town?” Bart asked.
Jesse sipped his drink and shook his head.
“I sell cars, and I’m planning on moving my family north. I heard about a gem of a house in these parts. My wife loves big, old antique places. Some friend of a friend told her something like that might be for sale around here. Figured I’d check it out on my way through town. They said it was a real big house tucked back in the woods, a Victorian style house,” Jesse explained.
The man scratched his chin.
“Don’t know nothin’ about a Victorian. Half the houses in these parts are shacks, and the other half are these new ranch doo-hickies popping up every which way.”
The bartender walked back toward them, cleaning a glass.
“Sounds like the old Kaiser place. But I ain’t ever heard it went up for sale.”
“The Kaiser place?” Jesse asked.
“Oh, yeah,” the man beside him crooned before downing his glass. “Hit me with another, Punchie.”
The bartender set the glass down and grabbed a bottle of scotch.
“Punchie?” Jesse asked.
“It’s not what you think,” the bartender told him dryly. “I played Punch in Punch and Judy a thousand years ago in the school play, and the nickname stuck like a fat woman’s girdle.”
“It fits in more ways than one,” Bart murmured from the side of his mouth, winking at Jesse.
“Do people live in the Kaiser place?” Jesse asked.
“Nah,” Punchie shook his head. “Not for twenty years, probably.”
“The ma took off, and the son skedaddled not long after,” Bart announced. “Boy, was she a tart, that Kaiser woman. Had quite a following in these parts, and from what I heard, not all those men were just admirers.”
Punchie rolled his eyes.
“Bart, you think half the women in this town are floozies.”
“I’d lean toward sixty percent,” Bart corrected, leaning forward and giving Punchie a jeering smile.
This last drink had broken down the man’s inhibitions. One more and he’d be singing like a rooster at dawn.
“I didn’t know the Kaiser family,” Punchie told Jesse. “Her boy went to some fancy private school. The mother was a socialite, but she sure didn’t socialize with the townsfolk. I heard she threw big parties and people came from Chicago, New York.” He shrugged. “But those are rumors.”
“Rumors, my ass,” Bart jeered. “Lawrence Rector was my best friend for forty years, and Adele Kaiser invited him to every one of those parties. He barely had a pot to piss in, but he was real smooth-like.” Bart offered Jesse another exaggerated wink. “Looked like Clark Gable, too. The women got wet if he smiled at ‘em. I can tell you, she did more than throw him a few bucks here and there. She bedded him whenever she didn’t have a big fish on the line.”
“She wasn’t married?” Jesse asked, imagining the wedding picture of the pretty dark-haired woman.
“Her husband hung himself in the cellar,” Punchie said, shaking his head. “A terrible thing for the son, I’m sure.”