Later(54)

“Quite the joint, isn’t it?” Liz said. She shut the door—THUD—and bammed the heel of her hand on the bank of light switches beside it. More flambeaux came on, plus the chandelier. It was a beautiful thing and cast a beautiful light, but I was in no mood to enjoy it. I was becoming more and more sure that Liz had already been here, and shot Teddy before she came to get me.

She won’t have to shoot me if she doesn’t know I saw him, I told myself, and although this made a degree of sense, I knew I couldn’t trust logic to get me through this. She was as high as a kite, practically vibrating. I thought again of Thumper’s bombs.

“You didn’t ask me,” I said.

“Ask you what?”

“If he’s here.”

“Well, is he?” She didn’t ask with any real concern in her voice, more like it was for form’s sake. What was up with that?

“No,” I said.

She didn’t seem upset like she had been when we were hunting for Therriault. “Let’s check the second floor. Maybe he’s in the master bedroom, recalling all the happy times he spent there boinking his whores. There were many after Madeline left. Probably before, too.”

“I don’t want to go up there.”

“Why not? The place isn’t haunted, Jamie.”

“It is if he’s up there.”

She considered this, then laughed. Her hand was still in the pocket of her jacket. “I suppose you have a point, but since it’s him we’re looking for, go on up. ándale, ándale.”

I gestured to the hall leading away from the right side of the great room. “Maybe he’s in the kitchen.”

“Getting himself a snack? I don’t think so. I think he’s upstairs. Go on.”

I thought about arguing some more, or point-blank refusing, but then her hand might come out of her jacket pocket and I had a pretty good idea of what would be in it. So I started up the right-hand staircase. The rail was cloudy green glass, smooth and cool. The steps were made out of green stone. There were forty-seven steps in all, I counted, and each one was probably worth the price of a Kia.

On the wall at the top of this set of stairs was a gilt-framed mirror that had to be seven feet tall. There was one just like it on the other side. I watched myself rise into the mirror with Liz behind me, looking over my shoulder.

“Your nose,” I said.

“I see it.” Both of her nostrils were bleeding now. She wiped her nose, then wiped her hand on her sweatshirt. “It’s stress. Stress makes it happen because all the capillaries in there are fragile. Once we find Marsden and he tells us where the pills are, the stress will be relieved.”

Did it bleed when you shot Teddy? I wondered. How stressful was that, Liz?

The hall at the top was actually a circular balcony, almost a catwalk, with a waist-high rail. Looking over it made my stomach feel funny. If you fell—or got pushed—you’d take a short ride straight down to the middle of the conversation pit, where the colorful rug wouldn’t do much to cushion you from the stone floor beneath.

“Left turn, Jamie.”

Which meant away from the balcony, and that was good. We went down a long hall with all the doors on the left, so whoever was in those rooms could dig the view. The only door that was open was halfway down. It was a circular library, every shelf crammed with books. My mother would have swooned with delight. There were chairs and a sofa in front of the only wall without books. That wall was a window, of course, curved glass looking out on a landscape that was now turning purple with dusk. I could see the nest of lights that must have been the town of Renfield, and I would have given almost anything to be there.

Liz didn’t ask if Marsden was in the library, either. Didn’t even give it a glance. We came to the end of the hall and she used the hand not in her jacket pocket to point at the last door. “I’m pretty sure he’s in there. Open it.”

I did, and sure enough, Donald Marsden was there, sprawled on a bed so big it looked like a triple, maybe even a quadruple, instead of a double. He was a quadruple himself, Liz had been right about that. To my child’s eyes, the bulk of him was almost hallucinatory. A good suit might have disguised at least some of his flab, but he wasn’t wearing a suit. He was wearing a pair of gigantic boxer shorts and nothing else. His immense girth, jumbo man-breasts, and flabby arms were crisscrossed with shallow cuts. His full moon of a face was bruised and one eye was swollen shut. There was a weird thing stuck in his mouth that I later learned (on one of those websites you don’t want your mom to know about) was a ball-gag. His wrists had been handcuffed to the top bedposts. Liz must have only brought two pairs of cuffs, because his ankles had been duct-taped to the bottom posts. She must have used a roll for each one.

“Behold the man of the house,” Liz said.

His good eye blinked. You would say I should have known from the cuffs and the duct tape. I should have known because some of the cuts were still oozing. But I didn’t. I was in shock and I didn’t. Not until that single blink.

“He’s alive!”

“I can fix that,” Liz said. She took the gun out of her coat pocket and shot him in the head.





61


Blood and brains spattered the wall behind him. I screamed and ran out of the room, down the stairs, out the door, past Teddy, and down the hill. I ran all the way to Renfield. All of this in one second. Then Liz wrapped her arms around me.