“Nasty bitch,” Tabitha said. “She talked about getting pissed on. Golden shower stuff.”
“I don’t believe that,” Jimmy said. “We never talked about doing anything like that.”
“She knew who to play with and how to play with them,” Tabitha said. “I told you that. Sometimes she played rough. I saw the Geek slap her once. She kept egging him on, jacking with him. I don’t remember about what, but all of a sudden he was mad. He slapped her hard enough to drop her to one knee. Rest of the night, they acted like nothing had happened. She practically had her hand down his pants the whole time.”
Jimmy made a noise like air going out of a tire.
“I think the Geek was daring me to get mad at him,” Ernie said. “He would look at me funny. He was a big guy, had a kind of squint in one eye, like he was always winking. He’d do things that bothered me. Way he touched Tabitha. Always made it seem like there was nothing to it, just an accident as he lifted her through a window, got hold of her ass.”
Tabitha continued. “He knew what he was doing, and he knew I knew, and he knew Ernie knew. I told Ernie to just let it go. I think that guy would have killed him.”
“It made me mad,” Ernie said, “and I did tell him not to do it. It took some real nut gathering to tell him, but I did. But I won’t lie to you. I was afraid of him, and I knew Tabitha was right. He had a big clip-on knife and he’d take it out sometimes, flip it open and swing it around, grinning like some kind of idiot. Just slashing at the air. Warning us, I guess. He looked like he might have served some time.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“He had that look, way he carried himself, and all the tats.”
“Tabitha called him the Geek,” I said. “Why?”
“Reminded me of those old-time carnival geeks,” Tabitha said. “Ones you put down in a hole and tossed a chicken, rat or something down there, and they’d catch them and bite their heads off, suck the blood out of the stumps of their necks. He looked like that. He had a lot of silver in his teeth.”
A train went by and it was as if it were running right through the room. The house shook, the windows vibrated like cold teeth. The moth kept beating at the glass.
“Anything else you can tell us about Caroline, these guys?” I asked. “Anything else at all?”
“They talked about black magic and witchcraft and satanic stuff,” Ernie said. “At first I thought it was kind of cool, but then I got the idea they meant it. Not that they believed it, but that they liked the idea of rituals and sacrifice.”
Ernie paused for a moment, thinking. “Our group got whittled down to just us, Caroline and the Geek, sometimes Glug. The others didn’t want anything to do with them…It got to be like a bad dream. One night we slipped inside this Mexican restaurant, the Hot Taco, the new place, and we decided wouldn’t it be funny to go in there and fix us a big Mexican meal, eat it in the kitchen. Clean up after ourselves before we snuck out. Thought it would be funny when they went looking for something the next day and we had eaten up some of the supplies. That night it was me and Tabitha, Caroline and the Geek. That’s all. We were slicing up some jalapeno peppers. In the back with the lights on, taking a chance, and the peppers were hot and it was causing my nose to run, and I saw Caroline’s was running too, ’cause she was helping me while the Geek fried up ground meat and Tabitha did something or another.”
“I was dipping taco shells in hot grease,” Tabitha said, just so we’d know she wasn’t a slacker.
“So I see some paper towels, and I get one for myself, one for Caroline. She takes it and wipes her eyes. She says, ‘The milk of human kindness. That’s not hard, being kind. You know what’s really hard?’ And I said no. And she says, ‘Killing someone that hasn’t done anything to you, and maybe even someone you like or love a little. All the better if they love you.’ She thought killing them, not on the spur of the moment, but planning it, was best. Making it a surprise. She thought that was a sign of strength, and she wanted to be that strong. I knew right then I wanted us to get away from her for good.”
Jimmy’s face had gone ashen and he was slumping in the chair. The gun was in his lap. He was no longer holding it.
“So after that, you cooled it with her?” I said.
“We’d see her at school,” Tabitha said. “And there she was all prim and proper and shiny and acting like she was just perfect. Last time I spoke with her I tried to just be friendly, you know. No hard feelings we weren’t doing the exploring anymore, and she just smiled and touched my cheek, and all that smooth personality stuff melted away, and that face of hers, it was like, you know, like it was from someplace dark and weird. She said, ‘You’re not forgotten.’”
“What did you think that meant?” I asked.
“How would you take that?” Tabitha said. “Especially after that little speech she gave Ernie.”
“Anybody else you can think of she hung with?”
“The girl on the video,” Tabitha said. “I saw them together at school. I don’t know if they were any more than fuck buddies or not. I got the impression she was running a game on Ronnie, same way she did with your brother and everyone else.”
“Can you describe the Geek?” I asked. “Maybe more about the tattoos?”
“He had a kind of slinky way of moving,” Tabitha said. “Like maybe not all his bones were connected. He was big, but lean, and long-legged, and wore long sleeves no matter what the weather, and loose pants. Shaved his head. He had a squint, and all that silver in his teeth. Very pale skin; white as toilet paper. Usual jailhouse tattoos, done crude-like. The only one I really remember well was this blue one. Wasn’t like the others, was professionally done, looked like fingers on the back of his neck. You know, like a dead hand was reaching up out of the collar of his shirt and grabbing him by the back of the neck.”
“What about Glug?”
“He had a kind of bad eye,” Ernie said. “I don’t know it was dead or not, but it was discolored, milky blue. The other eye was brown.”
I nodded. “Anything else about Caroline you can think of?” I said. “Anything at all?”
Tabitha shrugged. “She liked to read. And she liked puzzles.”
“That’s true,” Jimmy said, almost causing me to jump. “She loved mysteries, true crime books and puzzles.”
I thought: My hobbies are urban exploring, being peed on and hinting that I might be a murderous Satanist, reading mysteries and working puzzles in my spare time.
“She liked Edgar Allan Poe,” Tabitha said. “And this obscure poet and writer Jerzy Fitzgerald. She quoted him sometimes. Another thing she did, and I suppose it’s related to the puzzle and mystery stuff she liked: She was always taking a souvenir when we went out, which is something we did too, but she wanted to leave something that showed we had been there. Some subtle clue. We’d slip into an office, and she’d turn someone’s name plate around. Put, like, you know, a paper clip in their chair. One time she put a ballpoint pen up herself.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Not the sharp end,” Tabitha said. “It was one of those fat pens, with a lid on it. She thought it was funny. I kept thinking, maybe even hoping, the cap would come off inside her. She put it back on the desk, placed the pen next to the guy’s photograph of his wife and kids. She called it a statement.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said. “You think the Geek had anything to do with her going missing?”
Tabitha shrugged. “I wasn’t surprised she disappeared, her and the Geek. I was relieved. That put them out of our hair.”
“Was the Geek on the DVDs?”
“Not on any we looked at,” Ernie said.
“Do you know where this Geek, Stitch, lived? Anything about them that you might not have told us?”
“No idea where they lived. But the Geek had a weird accent, like it was Southern and Northern both…I mean, he mixed words, phrases. Had a kind of eloquent way of speaking, mixed it with thug’s talk. Always seemed to have some kind of plan going the rest of us didn’t know about.”
“That’s an odd feeling to have,” I said.
“Might not be anything to it,” Ernie said. “But I felt that way.”
“Can you tell me any more about Ronnie?” I said.
“Not really,” Tabitha said. “We knew her through school. She seemed nice. Like we said, we think Caroline duped her too. She went home.”
