Lying still for a few seconds taking inventory, Alexa moved her arm at the shoulder, then the elbow, the wrist, and finished by wiggling her fingers and making a fist. It was painful, but nothing was broken except her self-respect.
She sat up slowly, wincing. Her head was sore, bruised, but not wet, so she wasn’t bleeding. Her hip felt numb and she knew that she was going to be bruised from her ankle to her shoulder.
Alexa crawled over to the flashlight, and picking it up, she swung the circle of light around to locate her handgun, illuminating as she did a shelf where ancient spiderwebs covered dust-caked jars of canned fruit and pickles so old the tin lids were painted with the white powder of oxidation.
She shifted the light and saw a single, unlaced white orthopedic shoe with a brick-colored sole, and beyond it the foot it belonged to, looking like an overstuffed sausage. The skin on the leg looked like sun-dried earth. The other shoe was still on its owner’s other foot.
Alexa steeled herself before raising the circle of light.
A female corpse sat on the concrete floor, her shoulders against the wall, legs splayed open. Her open left hand rested beside her leg as though positioned to catch a flipped coin. Her right hand gripped an unusually large aluminum meat-tenderizing hammer that was caked with dried blood, bone chips, hairs, and blackened brain tissue.
Alexa had seen all manner of dead bodies in various stages of mutilation and decomposition, but nothing more horrific than what she was sharing the small basement with.
She raised the beam, whimpered involuntarily, as tears filled her eyes.
The woman’s head had been smashed in with such force that the top of her skull was indented in the way of a rotten rubber doll’s head that some child had pushed her thumbs into and peeled open like an orange. The froglike eyes appeared to be coming out of her cheeks. The open mouth was so completely filled with blackened tongue and animated larvae that the jaw was resting against her chest.
Alexa scooted back against the furnace and, using it for support, made it to her feet.
Based on the shoes, Alexa assumed that this horror was what remained of Dorothy Fugate, since the alternative was that the nurse had gone crazy and beat Sibby to death with a meat hammer, which seemed highly unlikely. Although why Sibby would have positioned the corpse that way was a mystery best left to psychiatrists. Maybe it was some sort of humor springing from an insane brain.
Using the flashlight, Alexa located and tugged on the string to turn on the overhead bulb. Flies reacting to the sudden light filled the room like a cloud. Alexa located her gun and stuck it into her purse’s holster compartment.
Alexa was trembling. She wanted only to get out of there, into breathable air, away from the corpse. She heard a noise and realized that it was the sound of her own whimpering as she moved as quickly as she could up the narrow stairs. Peering into the keyhole, she saw that the key was no longer in the lock. Her flashlight caught a glint of the skeleton key, which had been pushed under the door.
Sibby knocks me down into hell and then is thoughtful enough to leave me the key before she flees the house?
Alexa opened the door and after she slammed it shut she leaned with her back against it and took her first deep breaths since she’d been pitched down the steps. Then she started crying, overwhelmed by the embarrassment of being taken by surprise, the pain of the fall, what she had seen. Her whole body was racked by the sobs as she fought to regain her composure.
Her crying turned into the hysterical laughter of someone who understood, at a whole new level, what a blessing life was. She wiped her eyes and headed for the front door.
37
If she had been a smoker, Alexa would have lit up and gone through an entire pack. At the gate, she looked in both directions down the still street. Sibby Danielson was gone.
Reaching into her purse, Alexa found her cell phone.
“Yeah,” Manseur answered.
“I’m at Fugate’s.”
“She know where Sibby is?”
“I couldn’t ask. She’s dead.”
“You sure it’s her?”
“Reasonably. I mean, the corpse is a bottle blonde, and I don’t have the slightest idea what Sibby looks like.”
“How did she die?”
“Somebody played patty-whack on her skull. Best I can tell from looking at her and based on the odor and the insects’ labors, she’s been dead a few days. But Sibby was here until a few minutes ago.”
“Danielson did it?”
“She didn’t type out a confession, but based on the fact that it’s pretty clear she’s been staying here in the house, and given her track record for anti-social and impulsive behavior, it’s a good bet it wasn’t the mailman.”
“Don’t do anything. I’m on my way.”
“I think I’ve done quite enough for the time being,” Alexa said after she hung up.
It appeared to Alexa that Sibby Danielson had killed her jailer and then stayed in the house. Maybe, Alexa thought, the woman hadn’t had any place to go. Most people, even insane ones, would have left the scene of their crime before now, especially considering the smell.
Alexa decided that while she was waiting for Manseur, she would take a look around and see what she could discover about Sibby. She was no longer worried about not having a search warrant to enter-the odor of decaying flesh wafting through the open front door had given her enough probable cause. Manseur could collect evidence since it was a homicide.
The pill bottles that had been with the steel box on the bed were gone, but the box was where it had been earlier. Had Sibby stopped escaping long enough to pick up the bottles because she needed to take the medication? If she’d been medicated, would she have killed Fugate?
In the drawer in Fugate’s bedside table, Alexa found a polished wooden box with delicate ivory inlay work on its lid, which she opened, to discover a stack of snapshots. She flipped up the prints by their edges so she wouldn’t disturb the existing fingerprints, or make new ones. Despite the very heavy makeup and teased blond hair, the buxom Dorothy Fugate had been attractive in her younger years. In a picture probably taken at her graduation from nursing school, she looked more like Jayne Mansfield playing a nurse than a real one. As time had passed she had become somewhat pudgy, and, though still attractive, her features had softened with age, her body rounding itself off. The hellish effigy in the basement bore no resemblance to the woman in the pictures, but Alexa had no doubt this was Sibby Danielson’s keeper.
Alexa lifted the mattress and found nothing. There was nothing of interest in the drawers but a few pieces of fairly expensive-looking gold jewelry.
Looking into Fugate’s closet, she lifted the fallen nurse uniforms and noticed that one of the wide floorboards wasn’t flush. She raised it, to find a secret compartment, within which was a lone wooden cigar box. Inside, there were more pictures. Again being careful in handling them, she flipped through them one by one.
There was a snapshot of a small boy and a young girl attempting to pull a red wagon with an adult laughing man seated in it. Another seemed to be a fairly recent shot of Dorothy and the same grown man, whose hair had turned gray. There was such a marked similarity in their features, Alexa thought he was a relative of Fugate’s.
Another picture showed a stern-faced Dorothy standing beside a short male teenager dressed in a military school’s uniform who stared blankly at the camera. The young man could be a relative or a friend’s child and he might even be the wagon-pulling child. He had a round face, which matched his body, small eyes, and his fat lips added to the smirk he wore.
The other snapshots were of Nurse Fugate with hospital staff or civilians, taken at various times over the years. There were several shots of small groups that included Dorothy, some of which also contained Dr. William LePointe. The next-to-last photo in the stack was of Dorothy in her starched uniform standing alone with LePointe at a party. It was a recent photo, and Alexa thought it might have been her or his going-away party, because there was a partially disassembled slab cake on a table in the background. Dorothy was smiling broadly, while Dr. LePointe looked like he was about to have a tooth extracted instead of his picture taken. In the background, Veronica Malouf was in profile and was obviously talking to someone out of frame.