What did he do, whack her?
Looked back at the doctor’s notes a few days after the abrasion appeared:
Aug 1, 1977
Pt woke screaming approx. 12:35 a.m., suffering @ night terrors. Nurses rpt. diff time calming her. Admin. 150 mg @ Thorazine. No further incident.
Bad night, indeed. The woman was terrified. It was also around the same time she began talking about Sam I am.
What the hell was the guy doing to her?
Apparently, he’d had the presence of mind to dispose of the records documenting his final visit the night Jean Kingsley died, but not enough to cover all his tracks.
I dialed Glenview and asked for Aurora Penfield.
“What is it?” she said, her voice edgy and tight.
“I need to see you.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No,” she said again, this time with more annoyance.
“But I need more information.”
In a hasty whisper, “You’re going to have to get it without me. I gave you what I could. Now leave me out of it!”
“Too late for that. I need to talk to—”
She hung up.
I stared at my phone for a long moment. The woman was scared; it seemed obvious.
I began gathering up the notes. A sheet slid from the loose pile to the floor. As I leaned over to pick it up, I saw an envelope halfway under the door.
I looked through the peephole. Nobody there. Opened the door, glanced both ways. Picked up the letter, flipped it over: standard business size, white, plain, nothing written on it.
I tore it open, pulled out the sheet of paper, unfolded it.
And nearly lost my breath.
Scrawled across the page in large letters, barely legible handwriting:
the snoop spies the snoop dies
My mouth went dry, my body numb. I placed the note on the nightstand and stared at it for a long time. A sick joke? Nothing remotely funny about this. Someone trying to rattle me? Then I remembered CJ’s warning: You might be headed for some trouble.
Next question: who wanted me out of town? Pretty much everyone, so far. But to go to this length? It had to be someone desperate enough. I considered the people I’d spoken to so far: CJ Norris, Dennis Kingsley, Jerry Lindsay, and Doctor Faraday. Norris was fine. Kingsley was standoffish in the beginning but warmed up once the conversation started. The guy seemed genuine; I liked him—Doctor Faraday, not so much, and Lindsay, not at all. I still couldn’t decide if he was hiding something or just your standard macho shithead—either way, I didn’t trust the old bastard. And if he had sent me this warning, I had to wonder why he’d want to keep me from digging, and even more, what exactly he didn’t want me to find out.
I walked over to the window and pulled the curtains closer together.
Thought about calling someone—but who? That would draw even more attention to me, something I could hardly afford right now. Nope, wasn’t going to do that.
I wiped my sweaty palms on my pant legs, went to the desk, found some motel stationary and a pen.
Wrote miscreant fifty times.
Noticed my handwriting looked uncharacteristically shaky.
Decided to lie down for just a few minutes…
Chapter Seventeen
Things weren’t all bad all the time. I had glimpses of what happiness might have felt like. I called them “almost moments.” Times in my life when I almost got what I needed, almost made a connection, almost figured things out.
Autumn in Black Lake, a time of year I loved, the sweltering summer heat making its downward slide from miserable to mild, the leaves showing the latest in fall color, the winter months riding just above the horizon. School had just started, and I was busy at work on my first project for the year: constructing a family tree using photographs that went as far back as I could find. Warren brought a boxful over for me to pick through. He placed them on the counter, then silently migrated into the living room to watch the football game on TV.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table and sorting through photos, surrounded by the delicious smell of pumpkin pie. It was my mother’s only indulgence to the holidays. Warren loved her pies, and what Warren wanted, he usually got.
Maybe it was a combination of the photos, of us all being together, the smell of fresh pies baking in the oven. Maybe it was because my mother appeared to be relaxed and in a decent mood for a change. I don’t know—maybe it was all of those things. Whatever the reason, for a brief moment we almost felt like a real family. And that almost feeling was wonderful.
Sorting through photos, I came across one that made me curious. Mother was standing right behind me, and I held it up so she could see it. “Is this you?”
She leaned in for a better look, then smiled and nodded. “With my father.”
“My grandfather?” I asked, now more interested. I’d never had the chance to know him; he’d died before I was born. I raised the photo for a better look, barely recognizing the girl in the picture as the woman I knew. Young, happy, and beautiful, it was such a sharp contrast. I wondered where along the way she’d left that girl, whether she ever missed her, if she’d even noticed—and what might have turned her so angry at life.
She took the photo from my hand and gazed at it. With the slightest hint of a smile and with an unaccustomed softness to her voice, she said, “I’d almost forgotten about that day...”
“Where were you?”
She lowered herself into the chair next to me, still lost in the photo. I edged in closer and looked on with her. “At the state fair. We went for my birthday. I’d just turned sixteen...”
She placed the photo flat on the table, began gently running her fingers over it.
Then the smile turned sad, and tears filled her eyes. She sniffled, wiped them away quickly, as if to erase any trace of sorrow. It was a side of her I’d seldom seen, and suddenly I felt sorry for her. Unsure what to say, I instinctively put my hand on her arm.
She yanked it away, her sudden refusal making me flinch.
“The pies are baking,” she said, then stood and rushed back toward the stove. “You’re making a mess with those photos. Get them out of my kitchen.”
And so I did, not knowing why that picture had allowed us to connect, and at the same time, not knowing why it had ended so quickly.
But I never forgot how good it felt.
Chapter Eighteen
5:36 a.m.
My moment of rest had turned into hours; I woke up with my clothes still on, still thinking about the nasty-gram on the nightstand. There was no going back to sleep after that. Message received. I wasn’t welcome here. But here I was, and I needed to stay focused.
I thought about Penfield. She’d said Jean’s death wasn’t a suicide, and while the files may have pointed to Michael Samuels as a possible suspect in some kind of abuse, I saw nothing that proved murder. I needed to talk to her, find out why she was so convinced. I glanced at the clock again. She’d be coming off her shift in about an hour.
A driving rain battered the windshield, and suddenly, negotiating the interstate felt more like a challenge than a chore.
I took the off-ramp to Glenview, then about five minutes later, pulled into the lot. Somehow, the rain made the monster-of-a-building look even more ugly.