Nocturnes

“Maybe you’ll find the girl.”

“Or maybe we’ll be accused of starting a panic over nothing, of overreacting to what’s probably just a sick practical joke. Next thing, I’ve got the media down here showing images of the Grady house, and then the freaks will start to arrive. Maybe the whole shitstorm will give one of them an idea, and then we really will be looking for an endangered child. Like I said, we’re going to work at getting the photograph out to local and state law enforcement, then school boards. We find that little girl, then we can just take her parents quietly to one side and tell them what we know, which is squat.”

In one way, I knew Grass was right. The whole affair had to be handled delicately, and there was no point in frightening a little girl and her family over what might be nothing. But I realized that Grass was approaching the issue from one perspective, and Matheson was approaching it from another: Grass believed that the child probably wasn’t in any danger, because there was no evidence to suggest otherwise, but, heightened (or, perhaps, tormented) by his own loss, Matheson’s instincts told him that the child was at risk. I was stuck in the middle, wanting to believe Grass, but half persuaded by Matheson’s concerns.

“Were there any prints on the envelope?”

“None, apart from Matheson’s, and we don’t suspect him of putting an envelope in his own mailbox and then bringing it to us.”

I agreed that it didn’t sound likely, mainly in an effort to diffuse what felt like growing tension between us. Small-town cops don’t like people questioning their decisions. Even big-city cops don’t like it very much, but they tend to be less protective of their patch.

“Have you been out to the Grady house recently?” I asked Grass.

“We check it pretty regularly. The place is locked down tight. I was back there after Frank Matheson found the photograph. There was nothing out of the ordinary.”

“When you say ‘we’…?”

“We have four officers in total, myself included: three male, one female. They’re good people.”

“So sometimes one of them will go by there and open up the house?”

“Well, occasionally. Mostly, I do it myself. Easier that way. I don’t have to worry about the keys getting lost, or someone getting spooked.”

“Spooked?”

“You know what happened in that house. It’s not a place to visit unless you have to. It’s got a bad feel about it, and always will have. It stinks too. Something in the paints and pastes that Grady used. It just seems to get worse and worse. After twenty years, I’m used to it. It doesn’t get to me so much. Someone else, someone new…”

He trailed off.

We sat like that, in silence, until I stood and thanked him for his time.

“Like I said, it was my pleasure, but I don’t know what more you can do for Mr. Matheson.”

“I’m not sure either,” I said. “I think I’ll just nose around. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. I’d appreciate it if you could see your way clear to doing the same.”

I gave him a card. He placed it carefully in his wallet, then gave me a card of his own in return from a little dispenser on his desk.

“You going to take a look at the Grady house while you’re up here?” he asked.

“I think I will, since I’ve come all this way.”

“You want me to go out there with you?”

“I believe I’ll be okay.”

He nodded to himself, like a man who feels secure in the conclusion that he has just reached.

“I guess this is the point in the conversation where you tell me that you don’t scare easy,” he said.

“Being scared isn’t the problem,” I replied. “It’s not ru

The Grady house was much as I remembered it from the news reports of the time: a little more overgrown with ivy, perhaps, its windows now boarded up and a pair of padlocked steel doors preventing access through either the front or back of the house, but these were relatively cosmetic changes. The Grady house was ugly when it was built, even foreboding in its way, although I felt certain that this impression was mostly a consequence of my knowledge of its past. I circled the house, checking the windows and the doors to see if they had been tampered with in any way, then returned to the mailbox and gave it a cursory check. It was empty, apart from some dead insects and a faded flyer offering free soda and fries with every pizza delivery.

I walked back up to the house and took a set of keys from my pocket. Frank Matheson had given them to me when I agreed to take on the job. I unlocked the outer steel door and pulled it open. The door behind it had a fan of stained glass dominating its upper third, and opened easily to the touch. Inside, the hallway was covered with a coating of dust, and cobwebs draped the chandelier in the center of the ceiling. There were no bulbs in its sockets. To my right, I caught my reflection in the mirror on a battered coatrack, the sole furnishing in the hallway. Footsteps had disturbed the dust relatively recently. I guessed that Grass or Matheson had left them when they came to check on the house.

To my left was what would once have been a receiving room. It contained no furniture, but an ornamental marble fireplace against the far wall had been left untouched. There was another mirror here, although its reflection was slightly off. I approached it and saw that it was angled toward the covered window. A length of shiny new chain led from the back of the mirror to an old nail driven into the plaster. Maybe the original chain had broken, and someone had seen fit to rehang the mirror. It seemed like an odd thing to do.

A pair of sliding doors led into what was probably once the dining room, again empty of furnishings apart from a fireplace matching the one in the receiving room, and another mirror, this time angled to the floor and once again with a new chain. There were mirrors too, I discovered, on the back of the kitchen doorway facing into the hallway; in the kitchen itself; on the first and second landings of the upper floors; and in every bedroom. There were mirrors on the walls of the upper floors, in the bathroom, and even in the attic when I checked it using a rickety stepladder. Most were old, but some looked like more recent additions, untainted by the decay of the nitrates.

I went back downstairs and checked the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. The sink in the kitchen was stained and reeked of stagnant water and rotting matter in the pipes. By contrast, the sink in the bathroom was comparatively clean. Nobody would be drinking from it in a hurry, but compared to the kitchen sink it was a model of good hygiene. Someone had wiped it down in recent months, or had at least allowed the faucets to run. Maybe someone had used it to wash up after checking the house, because my own hands were already black with dust and filth.

The only door in the entire house that appeared to be locked was the door leading down into the basement where John Grady had made his last stand before shooting himself. I tried all of my keys on the lock, with no result, then made a mental note to ask Frank Matheson about it when next we spoke. A full-length mirror hung on the basement door. I checked my reflection in it. I was going kind of gray, I thought. Old age was going to be a gentle slide for me.

As I turned, I felt my head swim a little. I had been conscious of a vague chemical scent in the air when I entered the house, but now it seemed to have suddenly grown stronger. This would be a bad place to stay for any length of time, I thought. With the windows boarded up and the doors sealed, there was no fresh air to dispel whatever miasma hung about the house. After only fifteen minutes, I was already experiencing the begi

I was about to leave when a noise from the front of the house alerted me. There was a man on the step, his hand on his gun. It took a moment for my eyes to distinguish his brown uniform against the afternoon sun. He was in his forties, and ru