Chapter Forty-Two
Forty-Two
She’s forced to make a quick stop at home to gather her bag and call her mother, check that she’s okay to keep the children. Elsie has gone to Margot’s to cajole her out of her mood. They started this together, and they should end it together, too.
But they don’t have much time. They need to get to Sharon’s as soon as they can if they are to stop Peter.
It makes so much sense now. This is why the police were never able to match the prints they found to anyone in their system—because the killer is little more than a kid.
Beverley quickly pulls her bag onto her shoulder. She takes a knife from the block in the kitchen and wraps it in a scarf, tucks it inside. They don’t know how Sharon is going to react when they tell her that her son is a killer. They don’t know how Peter will react if they confront him.
As Beverley reaches for the door handle, the bell rings.
She freezes.
She is not expecting anyone. Her mother is at home—she just spoke to her. She’s meeting Elsie and Margot across town. Beverley pulls the door open.
“Ah.” Christopher Appleton is standing on her doorstep. He looks sheepish, his shoulders hunched. Behind him, the sky curls with wisps of white-gray clouds.
At first, she is baffled. He is the last person she would expect to see on her doorstep.
Then she sees it—a hard shell, a small black eye. In his arms is Meatball the tortoise.
“He was in my front yard,” the man explains shyly. “It’s a miracle no one ran him over when he crossed the road.”
“I’m so sorry!” Beverley reaches across and takes the tortoise from him. Her cheeks ache with the false smile. Her palms are growing slick. She needs to get out the door.
“Hey, he’s just a tortoise.” Mr. Appleton shrugs with half a smile.
There’s a silence as Beverley waits for him to leave, her body charged with impatience. But there is something else making its grim way in, too.
Shame.
How could she really have believed this man—this old man—in front of her to be capable of murder? And not just murder, but grisly, ritualistic killings that are now so clearly the work of someone young and strong and troubled.
She eyes Mr. Appleton’s knitted vest, his shirtsleeves swamping frail arms, the uniform of the retired. She is ashamed of herself. But she needs to leave. Now.
“Well, if that’s—”
“I picked up your paper, too.” He holds it out to her.
She pauses. Then, through gritted teeth: “Why don’t you come and help me put him back in the garden quickly?” It will take only a minute. She lifts the tortoise like a football. Meatball responds by abruptly wrenching his neck into his shell.
There’s something hanging in the air around Christopher Appleton. She knows its taste all too well.
Loneliness.
She sometimes senses it in her mother, too.
Just a minute, then out. That’s it.
“Have you always lived alone?” she asks as she leads him through the house, thinking of the unkempt garden, the nights in front of the television, the twitching curtains.
He tells her that his wife died almost ten years ago, and that since then he’s never really done well at looking after himself. “Holes in my socks, breakfast cereal for dinner, that sort of thing.” He seems embarrassed to be saying it.
But Beverley is the one who should be embarrassed. She has been the subject of scrutiny herself, the fuel for rumors, the punch line to tasteless jokes.
With a wince, she remembers fleeing from him at the grocery store—seeing the cereal boxes in his cart and making the most elaborate of leaps. This is just a man who is trying to live after loss, a widower who can’t work his oven—someone alone. She knows what that’s like.
“I’d happily cook you a casserole for the freezer.” It’s a paltry offering, but it’s something.
She senses him stopping behind her, so she turns. He stands there, blinking, visibly moved. “You don’t have to do that,” he stammers.
“Actually, you’d be doing me a favor.” She forces a bright tone, wanting to hurry things along. “I’m a hopeless cook.”
“Well, I’d love that.” He smiles a genuine smile. “Shall I put this on the counter?” He raises the newspaper in the air.
She nods, then flinches when she sees the McKenzie girl on the front page. Kate. Stories about the potential killer run almost every day now. Will Peter Farrer be splashed across the front pages tomorrow?
“Well, if that’s everything…” She has to get out, to tell Sharon what her son really is. It’s the decent thing to do for a mother before she reports her son to the police. Even if it means doing it without Elsie and Margot, she has to leave now.
She places Meatball on the floor, picks up her bag again.
Then Mr. Appleton says something she does not quite hear.
She asks him to repeat it.
“Like something from a Hitchcock film,” he says again, tapping the newspaper headline—stabbed in the shower.
“What?” Beverley asks impatiently as Meatball plods away.
“Like Janet Leigh,” he explains. “Marion Crane. Just horrible.”
“You watch a lot of movies?” she asks through gritted teeth, eyeballing the door.
“I’m nutty about cinema,” he says shyly. “I worked at Warner Brothers as a young guy. Props.”
Suddenly her memory serves up something from its recesses: a dark room plastered with movie posters, piles of pack film stacked on the side. Something settles in her mind, heavy like snow.
She’d had the smallest space for doubt to inch its way into—maybe it wasn’t Peter; maybe it was just some mistake, like how she had the wrong man with Hank. But she knows it to be truth now.
“In the film Psycho”—Christopher seems to have taken her silence as misunderstanding—“Marion Crane is killed while taking a shower.”
He thinks that she doesn’t get it, that it needs explaining. But things are rattling toward her now. Things are suddenly very, very clear.
“Would you wait here, please?” Beverley rushes to the back of the kitchen and opens the pantry door. From behind the tins of soup and packages of spaghetti on a shelf, she pulls out the scrapbook and carries it to the kitchen table. She places it flat, then quickly opens it to the required page.
“This,” she says, tapping on an article. “Does this sound like any movie you’ve seen?”
He leans over and inspects the newspaper article. She knows she is close to unearthing something profound. She can feel it. Her blood knows it.
He looks up at her from the picture of Sarah Gunn, from Beverley’s scrawled notes beside it, and he frowns. “Hanging from a hook…” he says quietly, as if he cannot quite believe what he is saying. “Well, it’s how they find Charley’s body in On the Waterfront, I suppose.”
On the Waterfront. She knows that movie. Marlon Brando. She snuck in to see it in the theater, remembers the pictures of Eva Marie Saint in all the magazines.
She reaches down and hurriedly turns more pages, her fingers jittery.
“This one.” She reaches a picture of Emily Roswell. “She was found at the bottom of a lake.”
Mr. Appleton inspects the photograph. His shoulders drop.
“Is it from a movie?” she urges. “Is there a movie in which a young woman is found at the bottom of a lake?”
“I—I’m not—”
“Think. Please.”
She is applying too much pressure—she knows it. He’s just some guy who used to work in the movies.
“I’m sorry.”
“A lake. A body in a lake,” she prompts.
He shakes his head again. “I’m sorry. Not that I can think of.”
Then she remembers. It comes at her like a brick through a window.
“Her hands were tattooed.” She can taste the words, the horror of the detail. “Her knuckles.”
“What sort of tattoos?”
“Love and hate.”
“The Night of the Hunter.” There’s barely a pause before he answers. “Harry Powell, the killer, a religious fanatic—he had love and hate tattooed across his knuckles.”
She cannot believe it. This is the link. This is what they need. This is the killer’s inspiration, Peter’s inspiration.
She tells Christopher about the two other murders.
The first, he is able to assign after a while.
Cheryl Herrera—strangled, then staked through the eye with an arrow.
It leads him to a Sharon Tate film. The star’s big-screen debut.
Eye of the Devil, not even released yet.
The art from its advertisements includes a skull with an arrow through the eye.
The tagline: This Is the Climax in Mind-Chilling Terror. People were excited about it.
Then there was Diane Howard Murray, strangled to death, positioned, postmortem, with her legs dressed in suspender stockings.
Christopher’s eyes land uncomfortably on the floor.
It’s an image no one would want to have to imagine.
He thinks for a while, shaking his head, scanning the small newspaper article repeatedly.
The picture of Diane gazes out at Christopher and Beverley—just a young woman, a life full of potential, so demeaned after death.
“There is a film,” he says eventually. “Mario Bava. Blood and Black Lace. It’s Italian.
The killer…” He shakes his head, as if the truth of what he is about to say is too strange even to be considered.
“The killer stalks models. There’s a scene in a park where he strangles a beautiful woman and then drags her through the trees.
She’s wearing black suspenders. It’s very stylized, very visual. ”
“That son of a bitch.”
“Are you saying this killer,” Mr. Appleton quavers, “is some sort of Mario Bava fan? The Tate picture hasn’t even hit theaters yet. This person must know their movies.”
Beverley nods. Sharon mentioned film school. The camera. The posters. “There is a pattern. This is the pattern.” She feels as if she wants to shake him, to squeeze him. The police can’t contest this. “The killer is taking inspiration from what he sees on-screen.”
Then it hits her. The letter—the one left in the grocery store parking lot, on the windshield of the truck. Why can’t you guys see the big picture? The big picture. How could she have missed it? The clues were there all along.
Now she has it. She has what she needs. Peter Farrer will be arrested.
But for that to happen, she needs to ruin a life. She needs to tell a mother that her son is a killer.