Chapter 12
She was lost in blackness, snared in the threads of an anxiety dream, where there were hands around her neck and she couldn’t breathe, and as panic engulfed her she jolted suddenly back to consciousness, letting out a small startled noise, enough to make the people in the row in front glance back.
She sat up straighter, needing a moment to collect herself as the dregs of her dream faded, leaving only a headache and dry mouth behind, but before she was even fully awake, she realized the people in front weren’t looking at her.
They were looking at Grandma, who was the only person up on her feet.
“Grandma?” Anna said quietly. “Sit down, Grandma.”
“What am I doing here?” Her voice was loud, worried, and when Mom tried to pull her back down, she shook her off, turning to Anna.
“Are we in church?” It wasn’t a whisper, but loud, and this time more than just the row in front turned around. “Is it Sunday?”
“Yes, Grandma.” Anna got to her feet, trying to shake off her sleepiness. This was all she needed. The whole church staring at her. Jeannie and Miles and all the rest. She felt queasy. Her dream might have vanished but the headache remained.
“Is it me? Did I bring us here?” Grandma grabbed at Anna’s hand.
“Is Grandma okay?” Caroline’s voice was full of worry.
“Do you remember, Anna?” Grandma’s cold hands were like claws on her arms. “Do you remember?”
“Of course I do. We came in the car.” Anna looked over at her mom. “I’ll take her outside.” Ignoring the shuffling of feet and whispering of the congregation, she steered Grandma to the aisle.
The elderly man she’d seen in the diner, the doctor who’d spoken to Sheriff Adams, now smartly dressed in a linen suit, got up and opened the doors for her before following them out. He carefully took Grandma’s other arm and helped Anna lead her to a bench, despite using a walking cane himself.
“I’m John Burdett,” he said. “Local doctor. You work at Jeannie’s, right?”
Anna nodded. She was glad of the help with Grandma but didn’t want to sit and make small talk with a stranger.
“I knew your grandmother a long time ago.” He took hold of Grandma’s hand, rubbing it in his own as he sat beside her. “It’s good to have you home, Evelyn. Although I thought you’d have called on me by now. But then you always did play hard to get.”
“Johnny?” Grandma frowned, looking at him. She was still confused, Anna could see.
“That’s right.” He smiled. “It’s me, Evelyn. Just a heck of a lot older than when you last saw me. You had a fainting fit. But you’re okay now.”
Anna stepped back, not knowing how to comfort Grandma herself anyway—there was too much bitterness between them, too much silent blame—and turned away, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in her small purse.
“I’m going to have a smoke, that okay?” The bench faced in the other direction, away from the parking lot and the flower beds beside it, and the doctor only half turned when she spoke, focused as he was on Grandma. “Leave you two to get reacquainted?”
“That’s fine. Evelyn’s safe with me. She’s always been safe with me.”
Anna said nothing to that but simply walked away, because since when was a woman always safe with a man? Only a man would have the arrogance to say that. For a woman it was often so hard to know if men were wanting to protect you or hurt you, or when one could tip into the other.
She’d just leaned against the wall in a patch of shade and lit her cigarette, smoking hard despite her sleep-dry mouth, when she heard a roll of tape ripping.
She peered around the corner to see a skinny man, about her age, clothes hanging off him, taping a poster to the wall.
He froze, a trembling rabbit in the headlights, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
“So it’s you putting them up.” Anna looked once again at the smiling faces of Lila and Bonnie and the ominous question at the bottom.
Who will be next? “Sheriff Adams was pissed. Says the case is closed. Cigarette?” She held out the pack and after a tiny hesitation he grabbed one with shaking fingers and let her light it.
He’ll be dead soon. The thought had come out of nowhere the moment she’d seen him, but close up the whites of his brown eyes were yellowed and his pale skin—so pale he could have been dead already—was scabby with blemishes and sores.
The inside of his arms were track-marked and scabbed from shooting up. He probably would be dead soon.
“Thanks.” His body twitched nervously, every sinew and bone dancing. “Got to be clean. Think straight for this. Still struggling. There’ll be another one. I know it.”
Despite the doctor only being a shout away, Anna took a step back as she exhaled a long stream of smoke. This guy was too close. A man was a man, however weak he looked. She didn’t want to be within easy reach.
“How come you think the killer’s still out there?” she asked.
He sucked so hard half the cigarette nearly burned down in the one inhale. “Because he did this to me. After Lila. When they knew it wasn’t me. The summer workers were gone then.”
“Who did what to you?” He might have been making sense to himself, but Anna was struggling to understand.
“You have to be careful.” He kept the cigarette in his mouth as he put the Scotch tape in a small backpack and slung it over his shoulder before pulling an electric scooter away from where it rested against the wall.
“If it could happen to Lila, could happen to anyone. He’ll be looking for the next one now.
It’s nearly time. Promise you’ll be careful. ”
“I will,” she muttered. She didn’t need a man telling her to be careful. She’d learned the hard way. A cloud drifted across the sun, and she stepped closer, still needing an answer to her question. “But who did what to you?”
“The clown.” He looked back at her sorrowfully as he stood on the scooter deck and then kicked off from the pavement. “The clown did it.”
Watching him disappear down the quiet Sunday street, Anna took another glance at the dead girls before the last of the cigarette smoke burned her throat.
The clown did it. So the poster guy was crazy.
A paranoid junkie obsessing over dead girls.
She smoked to the edge of the filter, then ground it out against the bricks and tossed it close to the wall.
There was a collection of similar butts already there, an almost neat pile of twenty or so.
Maybe Pastor Keene was a secret American Spirit smoker too.