Part 20 (1/2)
His gleeful eyes danced. ”Drive carefully, Mr. Kenzie. Lotta nuts on the road.”
Lotta f.u.c.king nuts in this house, I thought, as he gently pushed me out the door.
9.
Dr. Christopher Dawe stood in his doorway and watched me walk to my car, which was parked behind a forest-green Jaguar at the base of his driveway. I don't know what he expected to accomplish by this; maybe he was afraid if he didn't play sentinel, I'd dash back into the house, raid the bathroom for those little perfumed b.a.l.l.s of soap. I climbed in the Porsche and felt paper crackle under me as I sat behind the wheel. I reached under my b.u.t.t, pulled a piece of paper off the seat, and placed it on the pa.s.senger seat as I backed out into the street. I pulled past the house as Dr. Dawe shut the front door, drove up a block to a stop sign, and looked at the note on the seat beside me:
THEY LIE.
WESTON H HIGH S SCHOOL ASAP ASAP.
The handwriting was cramped, scratchy, and feminine. I drove another block and pulled my Eastern Ma.s.sachusetts map book from under the pa.s.senger seat, flipped through it until I found the page devoted to Weston. The high school was half a grid from where I sat, roughly eight blocks east and two north.
I drove over there through the sun-dappled streets and found Siobhan waiting under a tree by the far corner of the tennis courts that fronted the parking lot. She kept her head down as she hurried over to the car and climbed in the pa.s.senger seat.
”Take a left out of the lot,” she said, ”and drive fast, yeah?”
I did. ”Where we going?”
”Just away. This town has eyes, Mr. Kenzie.”
So we left Weston, Siobhan keeping her small head down and chewing the flesh around her fingernails. She would glance up occasionally to tell me to take a right here, a left there, and then lower her head again. When I'd start to ask her questions, she'd shake her head as if somehow we could be overheard in a convertible traveling forty miles an hour down half-empty roads. A few more quick directives from her, and we pulled into a parking lot behind Saint Regina's College. Regina's was an all-female, private Catholic college, where the middle cla.s.s and pious tucked away their daughters in hopes they'd somehow forget about s.e.x. It had the opposite effect, of course; when I'd been in college we'd made several Friday night pilgrimages out here and came home mauled and a bit dazed by the ferocity of good Catholic girls and their pent-up appet.i.tes.
Siobhan stepped out of the car as soon as I pulled into a s.p.a.ce, and I killed the engine and followed her along a path that led around to the front of the main dorm quad. We walked for a bit in silence, pa.s.sed through the still and empty campus like survivors of a neutron bomb; the gra.s.s and trees were parched and yellowing. The wide chocolate buildings and low limestone walls seemed stricken somehow, as if without voices to bounce off their facades, they grew weak, threatened to melt in the heat.
”They are evil people.”
”The Dawes?”
She nodded. ”He thinks he's a G.o.d, he does.”
”Don't most doctors?”
She smiled. ”I guess so, yeah.”
We reached a small stone bridge that overlooked a tiny pond gone silver in the heat. Siobhan chose a spot at the midway point to place her elbows. I joined her and we looked down into the water, our reflections staring back up at us from the metallic surface.
”Evil,” Siobhan said. ”He enjoys torture-mental torture. He enjoys showing people how intelligent he is and how dumb they are.”
”And with Karen?”
She leaned her small upper body over the rail of the bridge. She stared at her reflection below, as if uncertain how it got there and who it belonged to. ”Ah,” she said as if the word were an expletive and shook her head. ”He treated her like a pet. He called her his 'dim little bulb.'” She pursed her lips and exhaled heavily. ”His sweet dim little bulb.”
”Did you know Karen well?”
She shrugged. ”Since I came there thirteen years ago, sure. She was a nice person until near the end.”
”And then?”