Chapter Ten

TEN

The next afternoon, I found myself in the passenger seat of Katherine’s rental car, a sensible sedan that Katherine was currently pushing to the limits of its acceleration capacity. I had told her to slow down three times already and it was doing just as much good as it had when she was sixteen and learning to drive.

Katherine had her phone in her hand, GPS pulled up. She was not looking at the road. “There’s another bar just a mile away,” she said. “It’s called Happy’s. Do you know it? Did Dad ever mention it?”

Katherine had recovered faster than I’d expected after the police had left the day before; perhaps the breathing had helped after all. She burst through the door a few moments after I shooed Angelica away from the basement door (sometimes, if you ran at Angelica and her friends, they scattered like terrified pigeons). Katherine stomped down the hallway with red eyes, a wet face, and a renewed sense of purpose.

“Fuck the police,” she said, sounding remarkably like a song that Hal and I had once told her that she was not, under any circumstances, to blast from the car stereo anymore while she drove around the neighborhood. “If they aren’t going to take this seriously, we will.” Katherine reasoned that all alcoholics needed alcohol, which meant that she planned to visit every bar in town, on the off chance that somebody had seen Hal. She also planned, much to my dismay, for me to accompany her.

“Shit, we missed it,” Katherine said, hurling the car into a U-turn at what felt like eighty miles an hour with barely a cursory glance at oncoming traffic.

My forearm slammed into the armrest. “Katherine, slow down,” I said for the fourth and definitely not final time.

The car shuddered as it swerved through the road, finally slamming to a halt in Happy’s parking lot. My seat belt jerked against my shoulder as I flew forward, braced for impact. Dust settled around us. Katherine was out of the car before I even had a chance to catch my breath.

Sleep the night before had been virtually nonexistent. Angelica returning so soon after Father Cyrus’ blessing had me rattled, and I had spent the remainder of the evening looking over my shoulder, petrified that Angelica or one of her friends would be in Katherine’s view. What if Katherine followed one of them into the basement? That would be a catastrophe. I spent the night awake with worries spinning through my head, pointless yet insistent. Then of course there was the moaning, louder tonight. It hadn’t developed into screaming just yet, but the mentions of my name were more frequent. Margaret, come down here. Margaret, we need you. Margaret, come find us. Margaret, come see what he did to us. I didn’t wake up so much as give up in the morning, my puffy eyes opening hopelessly to the sunrise as I accepted that sleep was not on the docket. And of course, there was a waterfall of blood on the wall behind me. Of course.

On top of all that, Fredricka was getting increasingly squirrelly. As if the stacks of plates and cups in the kitchen weren’t enough, I had descended the stairs this morning to find that she had taken all the cushions off the couches and arranged them neatly on the floor. It also looked like she’d moved all the couches three or so inches to the left, judging by the grooves in the carpet. Not sure what that was about. It was challenging to move the furniture back and replace the cushions quietly before Katherine came downstairs in the morning, but if she had heard me, she didn’t give any indication. One benefit to sleepless nights—completion of morning chores before breakfast.

Still, the whole of it didn’t exactly make me a particularly peppy travel companion. By the time I made it into the bar after Katherine, she was already holding Hal’s photo in the face of a confused-looking bartender.

“Have you seen this man?” she demanded. “He’s my dad. He’s missing. He’s an alcoholic.”

“Former alcoholic,” I said, finally making my way to her side.

“Current alcoholic,” Katherine corrected. “Have you seen him?”

“Lady, I don’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning, let alone every person who drinks in this bar.” The bartender had an armful of liquor bottles he was restocking, and didn’t seem keen on pausing in his task.

“Can you just look at the picture?” Katherine’s voice was shrill.

“Please?” I asked. “It would mean a lot to us.” The bartender caught my eye, and I tried my best to communicate my apologies for Katherine’s behavior while moving as little of my face as possible.

The bartender walked over to us, glanced at the photo. He sighed. “Like I said, I don’t really remember. But I don’t think he’d’ve come here. Happy’s usually has a?.?.?. younger crowd. You know what I mean?”

I looked around at the grimy decor, beer pong table, and lack of chairs, and I knew what he meant.

“Are you sure?” Katherine asked, pushing the picture even closer, unwilling to accept no for an answer even if no was, in fact, the correct answer.

“He’s sure,” I said, pulling her arm away and turning her towards the door. “Your father wouldn’t be caught dead here.” Hal didn’t like to drink in bars at all, much preferring the comfort of his own home, but Katherine, thus far, had ignored this little fact.

Back in the car, Katherine crossed Happy’s off her list, cursing. We were early in our search—four bars down, countless to go—but she was already frustrated. Perhaps she imagined that Hal had frequented every bar in this town, or that other patrons were so familiar with his face that they shouted his name when he entered, a regular Norm from Cheers.

“Next up is a place called?.?.?. the Salty Nurse,” Katherine read. “It’s about a mile away.” She turned the key in the ignition and, I swear, managed to lurch the car into motion before the engine even started all the way. Certainly before I had my seat belt on.

I wanted nothing more than to be back home, cup of tea in hand.

I was not particularly interested in seeing the inside of whatever excuse the Salty Nurse had for a bathroom once we arrived, but we had been out for a couple hours now and there was no holding it anymore, as well as no convincing Katherine to make unnecessary pit stops in favor of restrooms that didn’t boast condom machines and broken soap dispensers. The bathroom in the Salty Nurse was particularly seedy—unmentionable stains, toilet paper everywhere, and a broken lock on the lone stall door—but it would have to do. I wiped down the browning toilet seat with tissue before I sat down and leaned my hand forward to act as a barrier between myself and the bobbing stall door. The inside of the stall was peppered with graffiti—scribbled-out phone numbers, people’s names surrounded by either hearts or expletives, and tracings of genitalia. Just to my left, a limerick had been carved into the wall.

There once was a man named Vale

Who the wee ones thought was so frail

But he had them all snowed

And he took ’em below

And one by one made them all wail.

Well, that was interesting.

The Vale family had once been well-known in this town, but these days the name seemed limited to the occasional mention in a few old newspaper articles I’d read back when I thought research would help anything. I’d never really heard the townsfolk go around with the name on their tongues, and certainly not with any sort of foreboding connotation. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who knew of Master Vale’s horrors, and that was only because I had firsthand evidence. Was I mistaken about Master Vale’s reputation? Was he some sort of local boogeyman, the one that teenagers whispered about at sleepovers and that parents threatened their children with if they didn’t eat their vegetables? Be careful or Master Vale will come and take you away.

I doubted it. Based on the articles I read, nobody seemed to have ever drawn a connection between Master Vale and the missing children. Likely, I was the only person to connect the dots, and I had been given generous assistance from the batch of pranksters taking up residence in my home.

Somehow, I had a feeling this limerick had been composed for me. It felt self-centered, but I knew. I knew the way I knew that, outside the bathroom door, Katherine was making enemies with a bartender and growing increasingly unpleasant. As far as I was aware, this was the first time any pranksters had tried anything outside the house. Not that I had given them a lot of opportunities—I did my best to leave only when absolutely necessary—but I might have noticed Fredricka moving food at the grocery store or blood running down the side of the bank. I couldn’t help but wonder what this meant. Nothing good, likely. But then, as Fredricka sometimes said, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.

Katherine pounded on the bathroom door. “Are you almost done in there?” Time to go, apparently.

We passed by the bar on the way out. The bartender was busy counting money at the till. I stopped in front of him, letting Katherine walk ahead.

“This is a weird question,” I said, voice low, “but you wouldn’t happen to know anything about the limerick written on the wall of the women’s restroom, would you?”

He looked up at me, brow furrowed. “What?”

“Mom, let’s go.” Katherine was out the door.

Back in the car, Katherine crossed the Salty Nurse off her list and careened out of the parking lot. The next bar was eight or so miles away and Katherine intended to get there in under five minutes.

An urge to return home tugged at my mind like a child on a mother’s sleeve, light but insistent. I wanted to be in my studio painting, the sunlight making the walls shine a brilliant yellow. I wanted to sit in the kitchen sipping tea while Fredricka puttered about. I wanted to rock on the front porch and gossip with Edie. Most things about the house weren’t particularly terrible, after all. The blood and the birds weren’t so bad. The pranksters weren’t so bad. Following the rules wasn’t so bad. However, speeding around in this car was bad. Bothering bartenders in these grimy bars was bad. Being outside the house was bad. Nothing inside my home was bad. Everything was rule-bound and predictable and survivable.

Katherine hit a speed bump without slowing and I heard the axles shudder.

“How many bars do we have left?” I asked, bracing myself against the dashboard.

“A lot,” Katherine replied.

The next bar was called Boomer’s, and the bartender was female, so Katherine was a little nicer and took a little more time asking questions. While she chatted, I walked around, surveying the decor. The bar boasted several framed prints of nature that had been painted over with various monsters. A quaint image of a lake with the Loch Ness Monster erupting from the water, fangs gleaming. A bucolic scene of a tree-lined valley with an alien spaceship beaming up a cow. A peaceful forest being torn apart by a dinosaur, a bloodied villager in its teeth. Idyllic scenes rendered disastrous.

“Wow, I’m really sorry about your dad,” the bartender said. She leaned towards Katherine, exposing her cleavage. “That must be awful.”

“He’s a motherfucker,” Katherine said.

“Language,” I called from across the room, preoccupied by a painting of Godzilla frolicking across a field of tulips. I quite liked this one.

The bartender studied Hal’s picture. “I don’t think I’ve seen him, though. He doesn’t look familiar.”

“Join the club,” Katherine grumbled. “Apparently, he’s a goddamn ghost.”

“Maybe you could give me your number?” The bartender blinked her doe eyes at Katherine. “And if I see him, I could give you a call?”

The next picture—a hill of lush grass, the same color green as our backyard. Lying across the grass, the red bodies of several children in various states of dismemberment. One of the children—a girl, pale skin and flowered blue dress blotched with red—had something horrible that had happened to her skull.

Katherine shoved the photo into her back pocket. “Don’t bother,” she said. “He’s probably been drinking somewhere else.” She turned, uninterested in the bartender’s frowning face watching her leave. “Let’s go,” she called to me.

“That bartender seemed to have eyes for you,” I said to Katherine once we were back in the car.

“Not interested.” Katherine was staring at her notebook, her expression pained. “The next bar is ten miles away. It’s called”—she sighed—“the Wet Hole. Jesus, who names these places?”

The urge to return home tugged harder. I had never been one to venture far from home, even before we’d moved. Sure, I might have been more sociable in my early twenties, before I met Hal, but soon into that relationship, I learned that sociability was not sustainable. So I adapted. I went grocery shopping, ran errands as necessary, went to my job when I had one. That was it. It wasn’t so much a rule—not like staying out of the basement was a rule—but it made things easier, much easier. These days, especially with Hal gone, there’s no real need to stay at home anymore, but I go on following the rule anyway.

Sleep now, my darling. Don’t you cry.?.?.?.

When the song first drifted into my consciousness, tickling my brain long enough to catch my attention, I thought it was only in my head. Like Fredricka’s voice yesterday a loud thought in my own ear.

Mommy’s gonna stay with you all through the night.?.?.?.

Then I realized the song was playing on the radio. And Katherine was singing along to it.

“Ne’er shall you worry. Ne’er shall you mourn,”Katherine sang softly. “You won’t see your poor ol’ pop no more.?.?.?.”

I stared at Katherine, my mouth agape. I had a feeling this song had something to do with me as well, just like the limerick in the bathroom stall.

“What?” Katherine asked once she noticed my eyes on her.

“Where the hell did you hear this song?” I heard the sharpness of my voice but had little control over my reaction.

“Jesus, I don’t know.” She was immediately on the defensive, looking at me out of the corner of her eye like I was punishing her for something commonplace, like breathing. “I think you used to sing it to me when I was a child?”

“I never sang this song to you,” I said.

“Okay, fine. Christ.” Katherine stopped singing and faced forward, both hands on the wheel. Her eyes kept darting towards me as she assessed the situation, formed conclusions. In the silence, the song kept playing.

He ain’t in the barn. No, he’s long gone.?.?.?.

But you’ll see his sad face again ’fore long.?.?.?.

I rubbed my temples. “Can you drop me back off at the house?” I asked. “I’m not feeling well.”