Eerie - Crouch Blake - Страница 30

“One more favor?”

“This what I get for being so accommodating?”

“Can we keep this request just between us?”

A long pause, and then: “You know every search gets logged automatically. Nothing I can do—”

“I understand that.”

“Oh. You don’t want me mentioning this in passing to the big man. That what you getting at?”

“Or anybody else.”

“I won’t bring it up—”

“Thank—”

“—unless someone brings it up to me. Then you on your own.”

“All I ask. You’re the best, Frances.”

Grant snapped a photo of the spreadsheet and e-mailed it to Frances from Sophie’s account.

He suddenly realized he was starving.

Bit a giant wedge out of one of the triangles.

“This is perfection,” he said. “You okay, Paige?”

She looked up.

“I’m fine.”

Sophie’s phone vibrated—a text from Dobbs.

4th man just arrived … how’s grant?

Grant said, “Paige. Paige, look at me.”

Paige raised her head.

“Your phone,” Grant said. “Where is it?”

His sister’s eyes looked distant and unfocused, even as she reached into the pocket of her kimono and held it up.

He said, “Sophie showed up, and I completely spaced it. We need to watch the video. The one you took of Steve.”

Paige’s eyes slammed back into the present.

“What video?” Sophie asked.

Paige said, “Whenever I take a man into my room, I always black out, and he’s always gone when I wake up. With this last guy, Steve, I set up my phone and recorded us.”

“Can I see it?” Grant said.

Paige shook her head. “I want to watch it first. Alone.”

Chapter 28

Paige took her phone into the kitchen.

She was gone awhile.

Grant and Sophie stayed behind in the dining room.

While they waited, Grant tapped out a response to Dobbs’s text:

grant’s ok, send pic of new guy

Grant showed Sophie Dobbs’s last text, said, “The fourth man has to be Steve. What do you make of it? Four men, none of whom—far as we know—have any personal connection beyond Paige. They go into her room. They disappear. Then they meet up. Why?”

“I wish you could’ve heard them talking. It was so strange.”

“How so?”

“Like there was this whole other conversation happening below the surface, but they were only verbally expressing a fraction of it. I know it doesn’t make sense.”

“What does anymore?”

As Grant reached for his water glass, he heard Paige gasp in the kitchen.

“Paige?” he called out. “Everything okay?”

The door to the kitchen swung open.

Paige stood in the threshold. Even in the firelight, Grant could see that her face had lost all color, the tremors in her hands so violent they extended up into her shoulders.

He rose out of his seat and went to her.

Paige pushed her phone into his chest.

“What happened?” he asked.

She shook her head, eyes welling.

He took her by the arm and helped her into the chair.

Grant set the phone on the table and looked at Sophie, a knot tightening deep in his gut.

He turned the phone lengthwise, revived the touchscreen.

The video was cued.

Eleven minutes, forty-one seconds.

• • •

For a second, Paige’s face fills the lens.

She pulls back, walks out of frame.

The view is level.

It shows a bedroom from a wide angle, three or four feet up off the floor.

Left-hand side of the frame: floor to ceiling drapes hide a window.

Right-hand side: double doors, presently closed, open into a closet.

The bed is centered almost perfectly in the shot.

Four posts reach for the ceiling.

The headboard is hidden behind a rampart of pillows.

Paige and Steve Vincent walk into frame, Paige holding his hand and guiding him toward the bed.

At least a dozen candles populate each bedside table, but still the light is poor and the picture grainy.

Paige unties the cloth belt and lets her kimono slide down her shoulders into a pool of silk around her feet.

Grant said, “How am I supposed to watch this?”

Sophie said, “Suck it up, you big baby.”

“That’s my sister.”

Grant looked at his sister.

Paige was staring hard into the table like it was a visual sanctuary.

In that moment, he felt the strangest mix of anger and compassion toward her.

A conflicting yet simultaneous desire to hold her, to love her, to hurt her.

Vincent begins to moan.

Grant glanced down at the phone.

Took his eyes a moment to piece together what he saw.

The man is on his back, spread-eagle, with Paige between his legs, her head bobbing up and down.

Grant shut his eyes, and Paige must have caught a waft of the heat coming off him, because she said, “What did you think happened up in that room?”

“One thing to know. Another to see.”

“Disapproval noted.”

He forced himself to look back at the screen.

Vincent on top now. Missionary. Riding hard.

Sophie said, “Oh my God.”

Grant’s eyes cut to the closet doors, but he couldn’t see that anything had changed.

“What? I don’t see it.”

She touched the screen.

At first, Grant didn’t think it was real.

A trick of light and shadow perhaps.

A byproduct of the grainy picture.

The shadow keeps lengthening, a long, thin arm stretching out from the darkness under Paige’s bed.

Vincent humps away unawares.

Faster and faster.

Getting loud.

He yells as he comes, an unmistakable component of rage in his voice that drowns out Paige.

And then …

One minute, the man is on top of her, pounding away.

The next, Paige lies alone and motionless on the sheets as the last vestige of Vincent—his foot—slides under the bed.

For thirty seconds, the room is still.

Grant looked at Sophie, and then Paige.

“Did that just happen?”

“Yes,” Sophie said.

“How is that—”

“I don’t know.”

He looked at Paige. She finally met his eyes. He said, “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“This isn’t lightbulbs exploding or some unidentified illness. Something just dragged that man under your bed.”

“I saw it.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know!”

“It’s in your room. Under your bed.”

“Grant.” Sophie nudged him and pointed at the screen.

A hand reaches out.

Then a head emerges.

Vincent wriggles out from under the bed and struggles slowly onto his feet.

For what seems ages, he stands motionless on the floor beside the bed, naked save for his dress socks, arms hanging straight down his sides, fingers twitching. The picture quality is too poor to see his eyes with any clarity, but they resemble gaping black holes on a blank white face that has been purged of any expression.

Slowly, and with great care, he begins to pick up his clothes which lie scattered across the floor.

He sits down on the end of the bed.

Pulls on his boxer shorts. His pants.

Then he’s standing directly in front of the phone, pot belly taking up most of the frame.

Vincent leaves the room.

There is Paige, still motionless on the bed, and nothing else.

Finally, she sits up and looks around, bewildered.

Paige climbs down off the bed and walks over to the camera.

The picture swings up toward the ceiling.

The video ends.

“You okay, Paige?” he asked.

She gave a short, unconvincing nod, said, “A shame nobody from the church even bothered to call us back.”