Which, come to think of it, he found kinda strange now: There should have been people scurrying in and out like a nest of ants. Edith Matthews was dead. So where were all the mourners, all the neighbors, all the good churchgoing folk who should be here with their pies and platters, their hams and fried chickens and deviled eggs and angel food cakes?
There was something damned strange about the Matthews house being locked and silent on this of all days. Hell, even if everybody in Addington knew about the aberrant lifestyle of Edith and her nieces, people still should have come. If for no other reason, they’d come so they could congratulate themselves afterward on how Christian and understanding they all were. No, this really wasn’t making sense now that he thought on it.
He tried the door again, harder this time, but that didn’t do a thing to change the fact that it was locked. And there were curtains pulled at all the windows. He checked, stalking back and forth along the porch where he’d once sat and shared a lemonade with Clarice, but every window was carefully covered.
Had they been covered the other day when he was here? He couldn’t remember. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.
He tried peering into the side windows, but they were covered too. Every one of them.
He went around back to the little laundry porch and mounted the stairs there. The back door was locked and the small glass pane in that window covered. Damn it, anyway.
The right and logical and proper thing to do now, of course, would be for him to leave. Or if he really felt he had to look inside the house, send for an officer and eventually a proper search warrant.
Right. That was the correct thing to do. No doubt about it.
Longarm left the back porch and looked around inside a tool and storage shed in the back yard. After a few moments he found what he wanted.
He took the scrap of rusted wire and straightened it, then bent a short hook at a right angle on one end. With that for a key he returned to the back door of the Matthews house and began burgling the place.
Chapter 43
Oh, shit. Longarm swallowed. Hard. Sweet Jesus!
The short hall between the kitchen and dining room ran thick with blood. Tacky, copper-smelling, none too old blood. He couldn’t see the source, but he could sure as hell see the blood.
There wasn’t any way to avoid it, none that he knew of, so he walked through it, conscious of the sticky-slippery texture underfoot, into the entry hall. He could see then where all the blood was coming from. Barbara. The short, plump, cheerful little waitress he remembered from that visit to Edith Matthews’s ice cream parlor. Clarice’s cousin Barbara.
She lay on the dining-room floor like a cast-off doll that had lost its stuffing. She seemed awfully small and … empty … lying there with an enormous, gaping hole where her throat should have been.
She was dressed in her work uniform. Perhaps she’d just come back from … except no, her aunt was killed that morning. More likely she’d been dressed ready to go to work when she heard that news and then never got around to changing clothes since. Or there could be a hundred other perfectly reasonable explanations. Longarm likely would never know the truth of it.
The truth he did know about was that the girl’s throat had been horribly slashed, the cut so deep it very nearly severed her head from her body. He looked at her and shuddered.
In the parlor there was another body. A mature woman with a faint resemblance to Edith. The other aunt Clarice had told him about? Possible. Or a neighbor. Friend. One of Edith’s lovers. Somebody in town would know.
Damn it.
Longarm drew his Colt and held it at the ready while he moved ghost-quiet through the rest of the downstairs. There were no other bodies. Only two. Only. Jeez. Murder was bad enough. Murdering women was worse. Two women dead in this house. And no sign of Clarice.
He should have found Clarice. Barbara was here. And the woman he thought was the other aunt. So where the hell was Clarice?
Longarm held his revolver in his left hand for a moment while he slowly and carefully wiped his right palm—damp with dread—on a trouser leg; then he resumed his grip on the gun. And began slowly, carefully mounting the steps toward the bedroom where he and Clarice had romped. So very few days past. He remembered the way.
Chapter 44
He heard the squeaking of bedsprings first. And then after that the low, soft sobbing of a woman in tears. They were in Clarice’s bedroom.
The door, he found, was primly shut. Everyone else in the house was supposed to be dead, but Buddy Matthews had tidily closed the bedroom door before he began raping his niece.
Longarm twisted the knob, pulling the door slightly to him so as to release the latch with as little noise as possible. The brass tongue slipped free from the mortise without a sound, and Longarm breathed easier.
He could hear Clarice’s weeping clearly now. And the steady, rhythmic creak of the springs along with the moist, meaty sound of flesh slapping flesh as two sweaty bellies collided over and over and over again.
Longarm made sure the Colt was comfortable in his hand and then pushed, ever so gently, on the door. A groan of metal rubbing on metal sounded as the hinges objected. It sounded almighty loud in Longarm’s ears. But then from inside the room, to someone distracted as Matthews no doubt was by now …
He pushed the door open another few inches and slipped inside. To find Buddy Matthews, trousers around his ankles and his boots still on but his ass bare and pale, shiny in the yellow lamplight inside Clarice’s half-darkened room. The man was lodged deep between Clarice’s legs, covering her slim body with his own. The two had stopped their movement at the intrusion.
Both looked at him with the wild, wide-eyed stares of deer caught unexpectedly in the beam of a bull’s-eye lantern. Both seemed frozen in place, locked into position with Clarice spread open to the lust of her own uncle. Except they hadn’t become frozen quite quickly enough.
Matthews must have had excellent hearing and perfect reflexes too, for with so little warning he had grabbed a slim, long-barreled revolver—Longarm recognized the gun as a crude Colt replica from the old cap-and-ball days, probably one of the weapons so hastily manufactured for the Confederacy by Dance Brothers or Griswold and Greer or some similar, even less well-known makeshift factory—and was holding it tight to Clarice’s temple. The girl looked at Longarm, and her tears flowed anew.
Her uncle held the cocked revolver tight to Clarice’s head with one hand and with the other quite casually reached over onto the nightstand beside her bed. He picked up a blood-crusted folding razor—no wonder the wounds in the flesh of the dead women downstairs had been so awful—and smiled at Longarm as he flipped the blade out of the handle and laid the edge ever so lightly across Clarice’s throat.
“Move and she dies, Deputy.”
“Do you know me?” Longarm asked.
“By reputation. I know who you are. I seen you at night sometimes lately. Know what else? I seen you screw with Clarey here. I got awful horny watching you do it with her. Those other bitches, they never liked being with boys. Not even when they were little. But Clarey, she likes a prick. Don’t you, honey?”
When the girl did not answer, Matthews’s voice hardened, and he repeated the question in a menacing hiss. “I said you like a prick. Don’t you?”
“Yes, I … yes I do.”
“You like it when I screw you, don’t you?”
“Yes, I like it.”
“You like me screwing you better than you like him. Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“A lot.”
“Yes, I like it a lot.” Her voice was small, and the tears coursed freely down her cheeks to soak into the pillow behind her head.
Matthews’s razor fluttered rapidly up and down with the wild cadence of the heartbeat in Clarice’s throat.