Chapter 21
Dena drove away from the Biotron plant with a feeling of relief. There was something about an empty office building that gave her the creeps. Ghosts seemed to lurk in the shadowy corners and behind the empty desks. Ghosts of the people who spent so much of their lives there.
She pulled to a stop in front of her own little house and sat for a moment looking at it. The house looked lonely. Dena exhaled sharply through her teeth and told herself to stop personalizing buildings. She had enough to occupy her mind without cluttering it up with silly fantasies.
She got out of the car, walked up the short path to the front door, and let herself in. Although she had been away only three days, the house seemed to Dena to have a musty, uncared-for feel to it. A fine layer of dust covered the polished hardwood surfaces. A spider had begun a web at the edge of the mantel. She let it be.
Moving with a practiced efficiency, she packed a large suitcase with clothes and enough personal articles to sustain her for a couple of weeks. She tried to think of it as going on a vacation trip, but she could not rid herself of the unsettling thought that she would never return to this little house.
As she went through the door, Dena could not resist turning for a last look. The place held no really powerful memories for her. She had lived there for two years in relative comfort but without any sense of fulfillment. There had been a few good times, but there had been loneliness, too.
She closed the door decisively behind her, locked it, and walked briskly back to the car. How silly, she told herself. I’ll probably be back there in a few days dusting off the furniture and wondering what all the fuss was about. She keyed Corey’s engine to life and pulled away down the quiet, elm-shaded street.
The clock in the dashboard told her that only twenty minutes had passed since she left Corey at Biotron. He would not yet have had time to learn anything from Dr. Kitzmiller. She was not eager to sit outside the gate and wait for any length of time. Not under the cold eyes of the security guard.
For a moment she considered going back to the little house to wait there but rejected the notion almost immediately. Then it occurred to her she was only a mile or so away from Carol Denker’s house. She could kill a few minutes by stopping in to see how Carol was feeling.
Dena had already turned up the short street that led to the Denkers’ place when she remembered the circumstances under which she had last seen Carol. The brief flulike symptoms that kept her home from work, the headache when she came back. Maybe going out to see Carol now was a bad idea.
Dena was disgusted with herself. She was falling victim to the paranoia that had people locking their doors against neighbors and refusing to answer their telephones for fear they could catch something over the wire. Carol was her friend. Besides, if anything were wrong, she could simply turn around and drive back to meet Corey.
Like most of the houses in the small town of Wheeler, the one where the Denkers lived was more than sixty years old. It was a boxy two-story frame building with a wide front porch and a brick fireplace chimney running up one wall. It was too big for the family of Carol, her husband, and two small children. However, the rent was half of what they would have to pay in Milwaukee, where Ken was working for his doctorate at the university. So Ken commuted back and forth from Wheeler while Carol worked at Biotron.
The street was quiet under its heavy green canopy of shade trees. Nothing unusual about that. All the streets in Wheeler were quiet, all the time. Dena was a little surprised to see Ken’s pickup in the driveway. He would normally be at school now. In the garage she could see the Ford that Carol drove. Something wrong?
Stop being silly.
She parked in the street and started toward the big house. A tricycle was overturned in the walk at the foot of the porch steps. It must belong to one of the Denker children. The boy. He was five, wasn’t he? And the girl was what? Two? Close enough. Now, what were their names? Oh, what did it matter? Dena was not there to have a conversation with the children.
She had not really been social friends of the Denkers; her contact with Carol was almost entirely at the office. Their friendship was based on their mutual profession and shoptalk. Dena had been invited out there for dinner a couple of times. She had reciprocated, but that was it. She knew Ken as a quiet, pleasant man who looked something like a scholarly Robert Redford, but she had never talked with him about anything serious. The kids were always clean and well behaved. Thinking about it as she approached their house, Dena was surprised at how little she really knew these people.
Actually, Dena would not have minded seeing more of Carol’s kids. She liked children and once in a while regretted not having any of her own.
She climbed to the porch and rang the bell, then waited nervously for someone to come.
Silence.
The window shades were pulled down behind the lacy living-room curtains, so she could not see inside. That was another odd thing. Shades were not drawn at that time of day. Dena felt a tiny prickle of apprehension.
To satisfy herself that she had really tried, Dena gave the bell key another jab. When there was still no response, she turned with relief and started off the porch.
A scream.
Dena froze, her foot on the top step. Unmistakably, it had been a scream. Thin, high-pitched, and terrified. And it came from inside the Denkers’ house.
Again.
A child’s scream of eye-popping terror.
Get out of here, Dena’s good sense told her. You don’t know what might be happening in there. Anyway, it’s none of your business. It might be just one of the kids getting spanked.
And yet she did not move to leave.
“Help me! Helllp!”
That was not a kid getting spanked. That was a kid in deadly fear.
Now she could not go. A human being needed help. Dena looked quickly at the neighboring house, separated from the Denkers’ by a wide yard. Nothing doing there. She turned toward the house across the street. Quiet and lifeless. From the urgency in the little voice calling for help, Dena feared she might be too late if she ran to one of the houses to try to get somebody.
She turned and walked slowly back across the porch. Her movements were stiff and wooden, as in a dream. But this was no dream, the sick dread in the pit of her stomach reminded her. She walked across the thick welcome mat to the heavy front door. She tried the old ornate doorknob. It was cold against the flesh of her palm.
The knob turned.
The door opened.
The hallway was dim, even with the light that came in through the open door and the fan-shaped window above it. Dena left the door open and moved cautiously into the living room. The furniture was contemporary in light wood and fabrics, contrasting with the house, which was dark wood and gloomy wallpaper.
There was light in the living room, but the angle of illumination was wrong, throwing shadows crazily where no shadows should be. Dena looked around and saw why. A floor lamp had been knocked over, the shade tilted so its light shined upward from the floor.
A fight? An intruder? What am I doing here?
“Help me!”
The cry came from upstairs, muffled but unmistakable. Dena started for the stairway.
As she stepped through the archway from the living room, she stopped, sucking in her breath. At the bottom of the stairs Ken Denker sat on the floor with his back against the wall. His fine blond hair was tangled. His glasses hung drunkenly from one ear. From his stomach protruded the black wooden handle of a butcher knife.
Dena put a hand to her mouth to keep from crying out. Her stomach contracted. From upstairs came the scream again and a thumping sound. The children must be locked in up there, she thought, and started up the stairs.