The Unclaimed Victim Page 9

  After they cleared the plates, Mary Alice led Ethel to the sprawling fields that surrounded the barn and a homely farmhouse, dragging a leather harness with a big metal blade behind them.

  “What the hell is that?” Ethel asked when they stopped at the far end of an empty stretch of dirt and dried stalks.

  “Shh! Remember your vow, Hattie!” Mary Alice stepped between Ethel and the barn, putting her back to the other workers so none would see her talking. “This is a plow. We use it to till the fields. We need to turn the soil over for planting.”

  “Oh, stuff my vow. I didn’t sign up to be a pack mule or to be locked in a cell all night while the brothers raid the henhouse.”

  “What?” Mary Alice gaped at her.

  “One of the brothers was buggering someone last night in the room above mine,” Ethel whispered back. “What the hell is going on here? You got Brother Wenger with his knife. You got your reverend and his whispering devil. Which one of ’em sleeps in the room upstairs?”

  After a long blank stare, Mary Alice muttered almost to herself, “But there’s no one that sleeps on the fourth floor. It’s storage.”

  “Well, somebody was up there, and I’m not sticking around to find out who. This is ridiculous! I quit!”

  “You can’t just quit,” she hissed back. “It doesn’t work that way. Do you know what they’ll do if you . . .”

  “If I what? If I leave?”

  “If they find out I’ve deceived them?” Mary Alice’s face went pale. Her eyes flooded as they searched the field for eavesdroppers.

  “What will they do?”

  Mary Alice just shook her head.

  “Beat you? Whip you? Make you pull a plow with your bare hands? What?” Ethel joked, but a nagging feeling bored its way into her gut. She didn’t want to see Mary Alice hurt. Not when the poor thing had only wanted to help her.

  “They will test my humility, and if they aren’t satisfied, I will be . . . I’ll be shunned.”

  “Shunned?” Ethel mocked the word. “Like all those spinsters will refuse to sit with you at dinner? So what? People been shunnin’ the likes of me my whole life.”

  “No.” Mary Alice’s eyes pleaded with her. “They will cast me out, and I will have nothing. No home. No food . . .”

  Ethel stared at her for a beat. This fool wouldn’t last a night in the Run. Or anywhere else. They’d turn her out. They’d . . . It was unthinkable. Like it or not, she was stuck with Mary Alice. “Goddammit!”

  Mary Alice’s eyes bulged at Ethel’s outburst. She shook her head, but it was too late. The three sisters that had been clearing brush at the next field stood up with loud gasps.

  “Hattie? Was that you?”

  Ethel sat next to Mary Alice on a bench in a rattling horse trailer the entire trip back to the city. It was the sort of thing they used to cart livestock to the slaughterhouses. She let her head fall back against the clattering metal wall. Tops of naked trees and banks of frigid clouds rolled past the airholes. A blood red barn passed by the cattle wagon. Ethel watched it through the tiny holes, debating whether she should make a run for it.

  When they got back to the Harmony Mission, the trailer pulled back into the loading dock, and the ladies poured out. Wenger climbed down from behind the wheel of the truck and sauntered past them all, stopping to give Ethel an appraisal. “You feeling alright, Sister Hattie? I hope the ride back was kinder to you.” He put a hand on her shoulder and gave it a far too familiar squeeze. It was as though they were old lovers, and Ethel couldn’t help but grimace as she surrendered a polite nod.

  “Thank you for your concern, Brother Wenger,” Mary Alice said with a bow of her head and then ushered Ethel out of the loading dock and up the stairs. They were both covered head to toe in dirt and sweat.

  As Mary Alice pulled her down the narrow hall to the dormitory washroom, Ethel whispered, “What’s his story anyway?”

  “Shh!” she whispered back and pushed her through the door. They were alone. “We only have a few minutes. Brother Milton will question you, and if you don’t answer well . . .” She just shook her head.

  Ethel couldn’t believe she was bound to this simpering fool. “Don’t you have a family you could go to, if, you know, if you get ‘shunned’?”

  Mary Alice shook her head violently. “You don’t understand. If you’re shunned by the faith, you’re shunned by everyone. It doesn’t matter anyway. They washed their hands of me when I left.”

  “Why? Aren’t they proud of your . . . whatever it is you do here?”

  “Not everyone believes in Brother Milton’s mission. They fear he has strayed from the fold. He heeds none of the Brethren and answers only to God. But there’s no time. You must listen. You grew up in Mount Airy. Your parents never joined a church or received Jesus into their hearts. You felt a calling and found an excuse to come see me.”

  “Okay. But what does that matter. I can’t speak, right?”

  “No. You can’t.”

  “Right. So wh—”

  Mary Alice screwed up her face as a group of three ladies came through the door.

  “Bless you, Sisters,” the interlopers murmured. Then they pulled off their dirty dresses and set about washing their hands and feet in a trough set along the far wall.

  Mary Alice and Ethel followed suit and scrubbed away the mud ground into their hands and faces in total silence. Ethel scanned the arms and legs and backs and bellies of the women out of the corner of her eye, looking for signs one of them had fought off the man she’d heard the night before. She counted a few scattered bruises and scrapes but no bite marks. Their breasts looked unmolested. Mary Alice nudged her shoulder and shot her a pointed look. Ethel dropped her eyes for a moment.

  Bending to soap her feet, Ethel caught a glimpse of Mary Alice’s back. It was covered in long, thin scars and several fresh welts. Ethel gaped at them a moment and went back to scrubbing her toes, wondering what sort of flogger or whip had left the marks. There were at least twenty of them. Each one a frozen scream. A cold feeling crept down her spine.

  Finally, the other women wrapped themselves in the clean rags hanging from nails on the far wall and left the room. Mary Alice shut off the water.

  “Your vow of silence has helped you hear God’s voice,” she continued in a rush. “His voice is everywhere, and you’ve been listening. But you’ve heard the devil speak to you as well. Lucifer urges you to break your vow and reject God’s will. This battle has been raging inside of you, and today Lucifer won. You must beg for God’s grace to overcome your weakness. Understand?”

  “So the devil made me do it?” Ethel couldn’t help but smirk.

  “You don’t believe in the devil?” Mary Alice raised her eyebrows.

  Ethel shrugged.

  “Make no mistake, Ambrosia. I’ve seen the devil. He is quite real.” The look in the young woman’s eye gave Ethel pause. Mary Alice turned and grabbed a towel of her own. Her welts shrieked across her back in raised purples and thin silver.

  Ethel looked down at the various marks the world had left on her own body. Cigarette burns, two stab wounds, long slash marks on her forearms, the stretch marks on her belly, and the long scar that ran through them. If there is a devil, she mused, he’s a drunk looking for a girl.

  Glancing up at her friend’s tortured back, Ethel wondered what sort of devil Mary Alice had seen.

  SEEK NAME OF 5TH HEADLESS CORPSE

  Police Hunt Maniac Killer

  Seeking to establish the identity of the fifth victim of supposed decapitation murder in Greater Cleveland in less than a year, police last night took fingerprints of a 40-year-old man in the county morgue and searched missing person files of the last six months for his description.

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 23, 1936, p. 3

  CHAPTER 13

  April 7, 1999

  The Elvis clock on the kitchen wall shimmied out the seconds as a phone rang 150 miles away. A voice Kris didn’t recognize answered the call.


  “Auglaize County Sheriff’s Office.”

  She nearly hung up, but the urge to hear a friendly voice kept her on the line. Between everything that had happened—the sheriff’s office, losing her job, and the unnerving chat with Lowjack—she could barely stand the feel of her own skin. Did somebody die? “Yeah, hi. Can I speak with Deputy Weber please?”

  “He’s gone home for the day. Can I leave him a message for you?”

  The dancing clock read 11:08 p.m. Ben would be asleep by now. She should’ve called him earlier to tell him about David Hohman and his strange website. “Can you tell him to give Kris Wiley a call?”

  “As in Al Wiley’s girl?”

  Breathe. “Yep.”

  “Shoot. I was so sorry to hear ab—”

  Kris cut him off. “I appreciate it. Please just let him know I called.”

  She hung up and debated trying Ben’s place, even though it was late. A stiff wind rattled the plastic siding outside her thin walls. Pete hadn’t come home and probably wouldn’t. An unnerving silence settled over the tiny house as the breeze died.

  The basement door was still shut. She scanned every room, opened the closet doors, and turned on all the lights. Outside, a drunk stumbled past her door, mumbling to himself. It was a relief to just hear another person, if only for a moment.

  She picked up the phone again, then set it back down. I’m being ridiculous.

  Ben would be worried sick if she called. Kris was the closest thing to a daughter he had. He didn’t have kids of his own to fuss over. He was the odd sort that never got married. It was probably why he and her father were such good friends. She used to joke that they were married to each other. Her father had dated a few women over the years, but he always said there was only one lady for him. And she was dead.

  Mom. It was a thought she rarely allowed herself. Pressing her head against the cupboards behind her, she could see the crunched metal of her car. When she was small, she’d been too scared to ask about the accident, scared her father might yell or cry or fly apart and blow away. As she got bigger, the questions just seemed cruel, like twisting a knife in the poor man’s side. He wasn’t really much of a talker anyway, and now she might never have the chance again.

  “Oh, God. Dad.” Kris squeezed the tears from her eyes.

  A knocking sound snapped her head off the cupboard. Her eyes darted around the empty kitchen, and she hoped Pete might pop up to explain the noise. She held her breath and listened. Another thump came from down in the basement like a can of paint hitting concrete.

  She grabbed a kitchen knife and took a tentative step toward the basement door with her eyes on her exits. The floorboards creaked under her feet. She pulled open the door and flipped on the light. The bare bulb dangling from the center of the room below cast a yellow glow through a curtain of dust and spiderwebs.

  “Hello?” she called out in a weak voice that made her cringe. “Anybody there?”

  Nothing moved.

  She crouched there for a solid minute, scanning the wreckage the landlord had stashed. The place was a fire hazard. Boxes and trunks piled up next to the furnace. Wood doors stacked against the walls. A rusted stove nearly blocked the foot of the stairs. After she was satisfied that the boogeyman wasn’t lurking down there, she turned off the light and closed the door. There was no way to bolt it shut, so Kris grabbed a kitchen knife and locked her own bedroom door instead.

  Her tired bones collapsed onto her bed in a heap. But the prickly feeling that someone else was there listening kept her muscles tensed to run. Her ears strained to hear another thump, another creak in the floorboards . . . another person breathing.

  She finally passed out with the lights on around 3:00 a.m. In her dreams, she fell into the black waters of a river over and over, fighting to breathe as the current carried her farther and farther from shore.

  The sun broke through her swollen eyelids around noon. Stretching out her arms, she knocked her hand into the dried wood of the knife handle. Kris pulled the crude weapon out from under her pillow and examined the dull blade before tossing it onto the bed and shaking her head at herself. A little bump in the night had scared her half to death. What a nutcase.

  Her blank computer screen seemed to agree with her. She hadn’t had the guts to log back in to the chat room in the dark. She still didn’t have any answers about David Hohman or her father. Disgusted with herself, she flipped the machine on and went back to torsokillers.com, determined not to let Lowjack push her around.

  A ridiculous cartoon of a construction worker popped up on the screen. Site under construction? Someone had taken the chat room down. She typed it again but got the same roadblock. Damn it!

  She snatched David Hohman’s card off her desk and read the address. Ten minutes later, she was in her car. It was horribly irresponsible, she realized, chasing after some lunatic stranger that may or may not know her father and that may or may not have had something to do with his disappearance. The spring sun shining overhead gave her courage as she weighed her options. She didn’t have to go inside. She’d just drive past and try to get a look at him. She didn’t even have to get out of the car.

  A minivan full of kids sat idle at a green light. Kris laid on the horn. “Wake up!” she shouted at the soccer mom and buzzed past her on the right.

  At the next light, she picked up the business card and checked the address again. According to the map in the back of her phone book, Franklin Boulevard sat north of Tremont in Ohio City. Out her passenger window, the downtown Cleveland skyline sprawled out on the other side of the Cuyahoga River. The towering statues of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge watched her as she turned down Lorain Avenue toward West 25th.

  As she approached the address, doubt crept into her head. She should have been calling Ben or going to class or figuring out how to pay the next tuition bill. Forget paying for school, she didn’t even know how she was going to pay rent. It was due in two weeks and she’d just gotten herself fired. A scolding voice inside told her this entire infatuation with David Hohman was just a distraction to keep cold reality from creeping in. It sounded a lot like her father.

  She stepped on the gas.

  Ben hadn’t called her back that morning, and a part of her was glad. She didn’t want to know if they’d found more evidence . . . more pieces of the body. It can’t be him. But the thought had grown less convincing.

  Her Jeep rolled to a stop outside 2905 Franklin Boulevard. There was no office building or seedy strip mall at that address. Instead, she found herself outside an imposing redbrick Victorian mansion with a matching extension. The sign out front read, Cuyahoga County Archives. She double-checked the business card, figuring there had been some sort of mistake.

  The smell of old books and the hush of a library greeted Kris at the door. A tweedy receptionist behind a table in the foyer flashed an expectant smile. “Good morning!”

  “Yeah, hi.” Kris approached the desk sheepishly. “This might be a weird question, but is there a David Hohman here?”

  “A who?” the woman asked, her smile folding into a frown.

  “David Hohman? He’s some sort of private investigator?” Kris held up the business card as proof.

  The woman took the card, studied it, and gave it back to her. “I’m sorry, but there’s no one here with that name. This is the county archives.”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s pretty strange, right? I mean, why would someone put this address on their business card?” Her eyes circled the foyer that opened up into large, dusty rooms on either side. It was an old mansion, she realized. They’d taken an enormous house and stuffed it with old records and cast-off furniture.

  The fallen look on Kris’s face must’ve pulled a heartstring. The librarian stood up. “Let me go ask our director, Terri. She might know this man.”

  The bird of a woman flitted away down the hall to a hidden room in the back, leaving Kris alone in the grand entrance of the repurposed Victorian. A frayed topographic map of Cleveland hung
from the far wall of what must’ve once been the drawing room. A collection of black-and-white photographs of mansions flanked the adjoining wall under a yellowed paper sign that read, Millionaire’s Row. Nearly all the old houses had been torn down.

  On the other side of the foyer, a beat-up wooden desk sat in what used to be a dining room, now piled high with file boxes and ancient bound books. Edging closer, Kris studied the spine of one. It read, Criminal Docket 9 Cuyahoga County. In another stack of documents, a file box read, Coroner Case Files—Torso Murders. She started at the words and took another step toward it, but the woman was on her way back down the center hallway.

  “Terri says there was a David that spent a lot of time here a few years back. He was a bit of an oddball. I guess he had a thing for old coroner reports. She’d sometimes find him asleep in the stacks. But she hasn’t seen him in quite a while. I wish there was something more we could do.” The receptionist clasped her hands and returned to her seat behind the makeshift desk.

  Kris nodded and stole another glance at the box marked Torso Murders. “You have quite a collection here.”

  “Well, we do what we can.”

  “Can anyone just come in here and go through the archives?”

  “Of course. That’s why we’re here. All these records are public. Most people who come in are interested in property records or family history. Can I help you find something?”

  “I’m curious about that box over there. The one about the Torso Murders. Is that public?”

  “Yes, it’s one of our more requested records. But we do ask that you wear gloves. So many people have gone through them, they’ve taken quite a beating over the years.”

  “Really? Why? I mean . . . something called the Torso Murders sounds pretty terrible to me.”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the most famous unsolved crime in Cleveland’s history. Amateur detectives are always trying to crack the case. They’ve written books about it, you know.”