“Uh-huh, but it’s intriguing all the same, Mort.”
“There are some things you’d be better off leaving alone.”
“What are you not telling me?”
I wanted her to keep the hell away from Victoria and Winter. I wanted that very much, so I told her what Winter had done in the hallway as I was leaving.
“In bra and panties, huh?” Kayla said when I was finished.
“A thong, actually. One of those things made out of dental floss.”
“Did she look good?”
“She looked dangerous, like a cobra. She wanted something.”
“You, probably.” Kayla rested a hand on my thigh. “Might mean she’s got good taste. And you didn’t answer the question. How’d she look? Pretty?”
“Like a spider, Kayla. Like she hadn’t had her quota of flies for the day.”
“So she hit on you. She could’ve done a lot worse, Mort.”
“She’s nineteen or twenty, for God’s sake.”
“So she’s a little precocious.”
Which rhymes with ferocious, and I could tell I wasn’t getting through. How do you explain the expression you see on someone’s face, in their eyes?
“Let it go, Kayla, please?”
“Just like that?”
“Yes. They’re not nice people.”
For a while she didn’t answer. “I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.” I lay back down, pulled the blanket over me. A moment later Kayla eased under the covers and snuggled up next to me again.
We lay like that for a while, neither of us sleeping. Outside, a coyote howled and others joined in. It sounded like mourning, a chorus of death. Kayla shivered. I felt goose bumps on my own arms.
“Why’d you leave Ithaca?” I asked.
She was silent for a while. I waited. After half a minute she said, “Someone broke into my house.”
“In Ithaca?”
“Yes. I own my own place. An old, two-story clapboard under great big maples. It’s very upstate New York, with creaky floors, hissing radiators, the whole bit. I love it. The mortgage isn’t too bad, but I rent a room anyway—to another teacher at the college, Kristen Hawes. She’s my age. Alone, the place feels too empty.
“Anyway, Kristen was gone. Is gone. To Arizona until college starts up again at the end of the month. She has parents in Phoenix.
“Jonnie was missing, and reporters started following me around, wanting interviews. If it had only been Jonnie maybe it would’ve been just one of those things, but with two of them gone, the mayor and the district attorney, well…it got totally crazy. I started staying indoors, dashing from school to my car to my house. Finally, I gave up going to the college. I was using the dance studio there to keep in shape and work on new routines for the fall semester. I thought about coming back to Reno, but not very seriously. It was such a long drive and what could I do there? I hadn’t seen my father in three years. Then, Friday before last, I got home late. I’d gone to a movie. It was dark. The sun had been down for hours. Inside the house…”
A shudder went through her.
“What?” I asked.
“Kristen has a hamster, Rocky…”
Again she stopped. A single warm tear landed on my chest.
“She loved him. Rocky. A lot,” Kayla said. “He was this bitty, innocent thing. I was taking care of him while she was gone. He was…pinned to a wall in the kitchen. With an icepick. Someone had…cut him open, disemboweled him and left him hanging there.”
A chill went through me. Kayla lay in my arms, crying silently. I held her. Other than that, there wasn’t anything I could do but wait.
“It was horrible,” she said after a while. “Just…the thought of anyone doing something like that to a helpless little creature. I took him down. He was dead. I put him in a plastic bag. Then I heard a noise upstairs, overhead in my bedroom. Like a footstep. It might’ve been boards creaking like they do sometimes, I don’t know, but suddenly I was terrified. I still had Rocky in the bag. I grabbed my purse and ran out to my car and took off.”
“But not to the police?” I said.
“No. I mean, I started to. That was my first thought, and maybe I should have. But…I don’t know, I started thinking about how this would make things even worse, there in Ithaca. My dad had become big news and now this. I pulled over in the dark beneath some trees and thought about it, finally decided I couldn’t face any more of it. I was sick and tired of being followed around. It had been on my mind that I should come back to Reno, what with my father missing and all. A few reporters had asked why I didn’t seem to care—as if they cared, the bastards. All they wanted was a story. If I’d gone to the police they would have connected me with Jonnie and that incredible mess going on in Reno. I would have been on national TV by morning. The very thought of it made me sick.”
“So you headed west and drove all the way to Reno without a break.”
“There were headlights,” she said.
“Headlights?”
“Behind me. I looked back as I drove away from my house. I saw lights come on. They stopped when I pulled over, then started up again when I did. In a streetlamp I saw a dark van. Whoever it was followed me around Ithaca for a while until I finally lost them. But the point is, I had to lose them, Mort. The way the van kept after me, it couldn’t have been an accident, two cars happening to be going the same way, through all the turns I took.”
“Probably a reporter.”
“Maybe. But I didn’t get that impression at the time, and, well, it got worse.”
“Worse?”
“I saw the van again in West Almond. That’s like eighty miles west of Ithaca.”
“Same one?”
“I’m sure of it. At least fairly
