The Last House on Needless Street(20)

She nods because she does not have a choice.

He leads her down into the centre of the house. At the bottom of the stairs he unlocks a door made of something that looks like, but surely cannot be, granite. Dee shivers. Perhaps he will lock the door behind her and leave her in there.

A long gallery stretches ahead running the length of the house. There are no windows. The air is cool, controlled to a fraction of a degree. Display cases and framed photographs line the walls, each lit by a single low spotlight. This is his collection; the museum, he calls it. She has heard of it. It is well known, if your interests lie in that direction. The man obtains things that most people can’t. Things that no one should see. He collects the artefacts of death. Photographs, vials of blood stolen from evidence, letters in spiky Victorian copperplate, pieces of the unclaimed dead, the pieces the killer did not have time to eat before he was caught.

The room is a corridor of Dee’s nightmares. Each object is a relic of something terrible that could have been done to Lulu. Dee glances at the black-and-white image on the wall to her left. She quickly looks away again.

‘You must look,’ he says. ‘That’s the deal.’ He knows precisely what she feels. She can hear it in his voice.

Dee walks down the gallery. She looks at each display for exactly three seconds before moving on. She makes her mind white static. He walks beside her, intimately close. His skin exudes a faint odour of tin. He doesn’t seem to breathe.

When Dee reaches the end of the dim corridor, she turns to him and holds out her hand. For a moment he is motionless, and his still blue gaze crawls all over her, head to foot. She understands that he is collecting her, and the moment. Not every memento can be housed in a glass case. She thinks, It’s going to happen now. I’m going to throw up. Then he gives a little nod and puts the envelope into her hand.

The light and the air are blinding. She wants to weep with gratitude at the sight of trees. But she refuses to give him anything else.

‘Drive safe,’ he says, and goes back into his wooden palace. He has taken what he wanted and she holds no more interest. She goes to her car slowly, puts the envelope casually on the passenger seat beside her. She forces herself to drive away through the trees at a leisurely pace. He might still be watching. Dee’s foot twitches on the gas, her breath comes fast.

As she turns out of the long forested drive, onto the road, she puts her foot down. The engine screams.

She lets the black ribbon of road take her on and on, until the forest changes to meadows and horses and barns, and they in turn give way to one-storey strip malls. Gasoline hangs heavy on the air. When she has put miles and miles between her and those freezing blue eyes she pulls into a rest stop. She lays her head on the steering wheel and breathes in ragged gasps. Vast trucks roar by, shaking the little car with their passage. She is grateful to them for covering the sounds she makes.

At length her breathing steadies somewhat. Dee sits up. It is time to find out what she has bought. She suppresses a swell of nausea, opens the envelope and draws out the photograph.

There it is, the familiar image, lacking only the caption: SUSPECT’S HOUSE SEARCHED. And there he is, the suspect, shading his eyes against the sun. Dee knows this picture. She has asked Karen about it more than once.

This man had an alibi, tired Karen told Dee, and the search of his house turned up nothing. They had to move on with other lines of enquiry.

‘But the people who saw him outside the grocery store might have been wrong,’ Dee said. ‘They were used to seeing him there, expected it. You know, they might fill in the blank place on the sidewalk with a familiar sight, even if he wasn’t actually there.’ Dee understands this, better than most.

‘There’s security tape,’ Karen said.

‘For the whole time?’ Dee asked. ‘Karen, for the whole afternoon?’ Karen didn’t answer but she didn’t need to. Dee could see the no in the hunch of her shoulders. That was when Karen still gave Dee information, before the incident with the man from Oregon.

Karen would be concerned if she knew what Dee now holds in her hands. The photograph has not been cropped, as it was for publication in the newspaper. Perhaps it is the photographer’s own print.

In this picture the view opens out, showing the hidden edges of the scene. Dee’s heart pounds. She forces herself not to hurry, to look at each thing one by one; see it, know it, understand it.

There are trees in the distance behind the house. Thick, Pacific North West growth, clustering in, overrunning itself. There is a woman in a hat, back turned, walking away along the sidewalk, dragging a hairy terrier on a leash. There are small, pale, curious faces at the window of a farther house. Children.

Dee sees the most important thing last, as if her mind cannot absorb a success after so many years of trudging failure. The sign on the corner is in plain view, and can be easily read. Needless Street.

Dee understands for the first time why people faint and how it happens; like a white light going off in her brain, a flash, followed by a dark shock. She now knows where the suspect lived, maybe even still lives. She breathes shallow and fast. That would be enough, but it is not only that.

‘We were there that day,’ Dee whispers. ‘Dad took a wrong turn.’ Her mouth fills with the taste of memory and bubble-gum. She must have chewed thirty pieces on that long-ago ride. Dad was driving to the lake but he missed an exit and they ended up wandering, lost, through the endless grey suburbs that hemmed the forest. Then the rows of one-storeys thinned out and gave way to peeling Victorian houses, and the rank wild scent of the woods grew strong. These were streets that went nowhere. She recalls driving past that sign and thinking, Yes, this craphole is totally needless. The street was a dead end, she recalls. Dad wiped his brow and swore under his breath, and they turned around and retraced their steps.