going on, and since your mother’s bawling her brains out and your sister looks half dead, I guess it’s going to have to be you.”
His tears drying up instantly in the face of Mark’s words, Ryan gazed up at him uncertainly. “They were going to kill Laurie. And they already killed Rebecca, and some boy.”
“All right,” Mark said as calmly as if what Ryan had just said was the most reasonable thing in the world. “How were they going to do that? And just so I can keep clear on things, who are ‘they?’ ”
“Tony Fleming, and that Melanie person, and the doorman, and everybody else in that building!” Ryan’s voice took on a note of belligerence, and he glared at Mark as if he was sure he wasn’t being believed. “It’s true!”
“Hey, did you hear me arguing?” Mark asked, holding up his hands as if to fend Ryan’s words off.
“It
“Jesus,” Mark whispered, his doubts about what Ryan had told him now erased. “What’s going on over there?”
For the rest of the night, Caroline did her best to explain, telling Kevin and Mark everything that had happened since the day she’d moved into The Rockwell. They listened silently, never interrupting her, never questioning anything she said. Every now and then one of them brought Laurie more tea, or something to eat, and by the time Caroline was finished, dawn was starting to break, Ryan had fallen asleep in one of the big recliners facing the television set, and Laurie was starting to regain a little color in her face.
“I know it sounds insane, but it’s what happened. If Ryan hadn’t managed to get out, and find me—”
“How did he do that?” Mark asked.
“He found a way into the secret passages through the ceiling in his closet and heard Tony telling someone where I was. I think it must have been Sergeant Oberholzer, because he came to see me.” She looked bleakly at Kevin. “He didn’t believe a word I said, and I guess I can’t blame him. I mean, I was strapped to a bed in some kind of hospital.”
“Well, you’re not strapped to a bed now, and you’re not in a hospital. I think we’d better call him.”
Caroline paled. “Kevin, he doesn’t believe me! And if I call him—”
“Who else are you going to call?” Kevin Barnes countered. “If you won’t take Laurie to a hospital, and you won’t talk to the police, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know!” Caroline cried, her tears welling in her eyes again. “I just — oh, God, I’m just so frightened and tired and—”
“And you’re not thinking straight,” Kevin finished for her. “But if you won’t call Oberholzer, then I’m going to. He can come over here, and we won’t let him take you anywhere.”
“He’ll call Tony—” Caroline began, but Kevin shook his head. “I’ll tell him not to — I’ll tell him Tony beat you up or something.”
“Oh, God, he’ll never believe that—”
“Then I’ll tell him something else. But you have to talk to him.” As Caroline started to object yet again, he shook his head. “Either you talk to him, or you talk to a psychiatrist, Caroline.”
The last of the color drained out of Caroline’s face. “You don’t believe me!” she said, her voice rising. “You think I’m crazy!”
Kevin Barnes’s fingers closed on Caroline’s wrists, and he looked straight into her eyes. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “I’m not going to say any of it sounds sane, but it’s obvious that something’s going on over there. And at least Oberholzer knows you, and has already been in the building and talked to some of the people. So take your choice — let me call him and get him over here, or I’m going to have to call—” He hesitated, then finished: “—someone else.”
The hesitation was enough to tell Caroline that the ‘someone else’ would probably be an ambulance to take her to Bellevue. “All right,” she breathed. “Call him. But please, don’t let him call anyone else. Not anyone!”
Frank Oberholzer sat as silently through Caroline’s story as had Kevin and Mark the first time she’d told it.
He listened to everything Ryan had to say, and looked at the marks on Laurie’s arms and legs. Laurie was fully awake now, and when he asked her if she didn’t want to go to a doctor, she shook her head. “I’m just hungry,” she said. “I don’t feel sick — I just feel weak. Like Rebecca did.”
Oberholzer frowned. “Humphries said she was anemic.”
“Anemic,” Caroline spat. “Nobody’s ‘anemic’ anymore. If that were the problem, any decent doctor would have fixed it months ago! Oh, God, I should have listened to Andrea — she said there was something wrong. But I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe her!”
“And now your theory is that they’re all really old, and are keeping their bodies alive by sucking stuff out of kids?” Oberholzer asked, his skepticism clear in his voice.
Caroline shook her head. “I think they’re dead, not old. When I scratched Tony’s face, the skin ripped loose almost like it was some kind of mask, and it was like his flesh was rotting underneath. And when I—” She fell silent as she remembered what she’d done to Rodney only a few hours earlier, slashing his throat without even thinking about it. Now, in the light of morning, she realized exactly what she’d done.
Murder.
There was no other word for it.
Except how could you murder someone who was already dead?
“The doorman was the same way,” she finally breathed. “As soon as the knife went into him, it was like he just came apart — there was a terrible odor and his fingers started swelling up, and his nails started turning black, and…” She shuddered as her voice died away, but then she regained her composure and looked directly into Oberholzer’s eyes. “They’re not old, Sergeant,” she said. “They’re dead. All of them.”
For nearly a full minute, Oberholzer said nothing at all, and when he finally spoke, it wasn’t to Caroline, but to someone he’d called on a cellphone he’d pulled from his jacket pocket. “We got any reports on anything at The Rockwell from last night or this morning?” There was a silence, then: “Look, send someone over there to take a look — see if there’s any problems in the lobby. Then call me back and let me know.”
He snapped the phone shut, and the silence stretched out again until it was finally broken by the sound of Oberholzer’s cellular phone ringing. He flipped it open, listened, grunted something, then closed it again.
“I think we better go over there,” he said, his voice as uncertain as the look that had now come into his eyes.
“They found him, didn’t they?” Caroline asked.
Oberholzer shook his head. “Not so far,” he said. “Far as anyone can tell, there’s no one in The Rockwell at all.”
“I’m not sure I can do this,” Caroline said. She and Frank Oberholzer were standing on Central Park West. The morning was crisp and sunny; half a dozen nannies were pushing as many strollers along the sidewalk, a couple of joggers ran by, dodging around them without breaking stride. A few elderly men and women were already feeding the squirrels in the park on the other side of the wall.
Across the street stood The Rockwell. Silhouetted against a cloudless turquoise sky with its eastern facade washed in the brilliant morning light, it should have looked handsomer than ever.
Instead, it had taken on a look of dismal foreboding.
The decades of grime seemed to have blackened it more than she remembered, and its windows, which always before had struck Caroline as one of the building’s best features, now seemed to be staring down at her with the blankness of death. But that was only her imagination — despite the people who lived in it, The Rockwell itself was still only a building. Yet as she gazed at it, and the terrible memories of the past few days tumbled through her mind, it seemed as if the building itself had taken on a look of evil.
Evil, and death.
“It — it looks different,” she said, unconsciously slipping her hand through Frank Oberholzer’s arm. Deliberately turning her eyes away from the building, she looked up at Oberholzer. “I’m really not sure I can go
