What Lies Beneath Read online

  WHAT LIES BENEATH

  A LAURA CHAMBERS MYSTERY

  J. G. HETHERTON

  For my parents

  PROLOGUE

  SUNSET SPREAD LIKE a fresh bruise across the western sky, raised pink welts ripening toward purple. Insects chittered and wailed among the trees, lost children crying out, pleading to be found in the thickening dark. Old pines marked the border of the field, a shadowed place where the collective whine guttered and throbbed, a current through the gloom.

  But the girl could not hear them.

  Her cheap cotton dress had been white once, now worn continuously without washing until it had turned a translucent gray. The left shoulder strap had torn free two days earlier in her haste to hide herself, ripped asunder as she pressed her body down on the grimy rear floorboards of a stolen Cutlass Supreme. She’d managed to mend the strap with a safety pin, but in her present circumstances, not much could be done about the filth.

  In the distance, a light flicked on outside a weather-beaten barn.

  Her footfalls were silent across the last stretch of pine needles before crunching into raw earth. The field lay fallow, but still she stepped carefully, avoiding sharp rocks and sandspurs, barefoot in the dirt.

  * * *

  The work light cast down a yellow pool of light, and in its center lay the truck’s engine. Bob Merritt swiped a hairy forearm across his face, truncating the little beads of sweat cascading down across his brow. He tried once more to reach, forcing his meaty fingers around the curve of the fan belt before prodding left and right, feeling for the missing part.

  He’d been examining the various components underneath the hood for the past two hours. Linda had asked him to drive into town for a gallon of milk and he’d obliged her: kissing her on the cheek, plucking his keys off the coatrack, and climbing into his truck. The driver’s seat had borne his weight for more hours and miles than he cared to remember, and just this past year stuffing had begun to erupt out the seams. So it was with care that he’d settled himself down on the faux vinyl, inserted the key in the ignition, and turned it.

  Nothing had happened.

  There hadn’t been even a peep in response, and now, finally, he had it figured. The starter relay had gone missing. Somehow it had worked itself loose and dropped down into the engine compartment.

  Bob Merritt puzzled over the various possibilities. He had never seen it happen before, not once in the twenty-five years he’d been repairing trucks and farm equipment. Which bothered him. Something about the way the relay had just up and vanished made his scalp crawl, as if a spider had decided to scuttle its way across his bald spot. But no matter how many times he turned it over in his mind, Bob couldn’t quite manage to articulate the source of his unease.

  It’s nothing, he decided finally.

  A missing starter relay was one of those simple, everyday mysteries where an explanation would not be forthcoming. Where did all those socks missing from his laundry end up? When he dropped a screw in an empty room and still couldn’t find it, had it slipped into some kind of vortex? Or what about his grandfather? Little ten-year-old Bob had been alone with him when he passed, the papery skin of his fingertips clinging to Bob’s hand, their grip tightening like a vise as he slipped into the great beyond. Just before he died, the old man had fixed his gaze on an empty chair in the corner and then pulled Bob close, muttering a few sentences in his ear. All Bob had been able to make out was a single phrase, repeated over and over: They’re here.

  Who was?

  Bob had never gotten the chance to ask. The old man had gasped one more time, puckered his lips, and then gone still. Little Bob had been left alone to spend the next few minutes prying his hand free of Grandpop’s rapidly cooling grasp.

  Now what possible explanation could there be for something like that?

  Bob grimaced at the memory, rubbing the back of his neck. It was like his grandfather had always said: “There are stranger things in heaven and earth than we can imagine.”

  It has to be nothing.

  He decided to make one last go of it and pushed up onto his tiptoes, lifting his gut clear of the grille and stretching toward the back of the engine. His fingers forced their way down into the truck’s metal bowels, his hand flexed, and this time he felt something, his skin catching on a rough, serrated edge. On instinct he yanked back, quicker than he’d intended, and something sliced through the fleshy pad of his thumb.

  He tilted his head back and pressed his eyes shut, not wanting to look at it, knowing he must, forcing himself to open his eyes. A ragged strip of skin hung free; beside that he could see nothing but blood. Red bloomed out of him, coming fast now, as if the stuff had always secretly resented being trapped inside his body, as though it had been waiting patiently for an opportunity to escape.

  “Goddamn it,” he said, jammed the thumb into his mouth, and turned around.

  A girl stepped into the pool of light, and Bob Merritt spit blood all over his shirt.

  * * *

  They sat at the round kitchen table. Her husband Bob had crafted it himself in the shop out back, sanding the planks and burning an intricate compass rose into the wood surface before lacquering it smooth again. He sat at the south position, like always. Linda was opposite him, his true north—a joke he made before most dinners and one that never failed to earn him a groan followed by a smile. Emily had been stationed to the east since she was in a high chair, and the western chair was always empty.

  Almost always.

  Emily used a box of crayons to color a picture while Bob and Linda Merritt looked the other girl up and down: unkempt blond hair, dirty in color and in condition; clear, pale eyes in the center of a face smudged dark with dirt; filthy bare feet. She maintained an oddly erect posture, almost formal, with her shoulders back and her feet crossed at the ankles.

  Linda reached out and took the girl’s hand. “Tell me your name, honey.”

  The girl just shook her head. She still hadn’t uttered a word.

  “Tell me your name, and we’ll call your parents to come get you.”

  The girl gazed back at her without moving.

  Something was wrong with her, Linda realized. Maybe some kind of learning disability. She spoke slowly, sounding out the words. “What’s your name?”

  Nothing.

  “How. Old. Are. You?”

  The girl cocked her head to one side, raised eight fingers.

  The same age as Emily.

  “What’s your name?”

  The girl pinched her thumb and forefinger together and traced a squiggly line through the air, like she was calling for the check in a restaurant.

  Behind Linda, Emily scratched away on the paper.

  “Let me borrow that, sweetheart,” Linda said, and slid the paper from east to west. Depicted on the front were a house and a tree and a horse, the creature a passable likeness despite the uneven lengths of its legs. Linda flipped the paper over and placed a black crayon down next to it.

  The girl picked it up and began to write. Her scrawl trembled across the page as if formed on an Etch a Sketch, thin wisps of letters that took great effort to form.

  I AM DEAF

  Linda touched her ear, shook her head.

  The girl nodded.

  Linda held two fingers up to her eyes, touched her mouth. Do you read lips?

  The girl shrugged and took the paper back, and they waited for her next message.

  I AM LOST

  “I know, honey,” Linda said, then caught herself, realizing she’d answered out loud again. With an exaggerated nod of understanding, she asked, “Your name?”

  The girl just stared back at her.

  Linda took the paper and formed some of her own neat block letters in the corner,
turned it back again.

  NAME?

  The girl didn’t answer. Her face remained smooth and expressionless, without any hint of understanding.

  Linda turned to her husband. “Call the sheriff.”

  Outside the kitchen window, lightning danced and flickered on the horizon. Distant thunderclaps echoed like gunshots across the empty fields. Bob picked up the phone and held it to his ear for a moment before replacing it in the cradle. “Line’s dead.”

  Linda frowned.

  “Must be the storm,” he said.

  * * *

  Emily Merritt was excited to have a roommate. Her parents had been promising her a sibling for most of her life, but somehow one had never appeared. Her momma didn’t mention it much anymore, and Emily understood perfectly—some promises had to be broken. She had been alive for eight years, plenty long enough to know that things didn’t always work out the way you planned.

  The girl sat cross-legged on the floor of Emily’s bedroom in a pair of last year’s animal-print pajamas, the cuffs riding up across her forearms and calves. She pawed her way through Emily’s toy box, pulling out the plastic horses and unicorns, the stuffed animals, the blond-haired dolls, arraying them like soldiers in formation.

  “You want to play dolls?”

  The girl nodded emphatically.

  Emily reached out and ran her fingers through the hair of the nearest doll before glancing back at the girl. “Is that what we should call you? Doll?”

  The girl’s lips pulled back from her teeth to form a silent snarl, and she jerked her head back and forth, her greasy locks bouncing from side to side.

  No!

  Emily understood that just fine, no sign language necessary.

  Over the girl’s shoulder, Momma’s head poked around the edge of the doorframe. “You girls doing okay?”

  “We’re playing dolls,” Emily said. She caught the girl’s eye and pointed toward the door.

  Linda Merritt spoke in the same overpunctuated cadence, inventing her own crude sign language on the fly. “You stay here tonight. Tomorrow we’ll be able to call your parents or just drive you home.” At the appropriate moments she pointed to the ground, tapped an imaginary watch, held her pinkie and thumb up to her mouth and ear respectively, and pulled back and forth on an imaginary steering wheel.

  The girl studied her for a moment, then shrugged and nodded once again.

  “You can use the bottom bunk. Emily, take her with you to the bathroom before bed, okay?”

  “Yes, Momma,” Emily said.

  Her mother let the door half close behind her, but her last words drifted in from the hallway: “Sweet dreams.”

  Together they ordered the stuffed animals into rank and file, dressed the dolls for war, rode the horses hard. At a quarter to nine Emily Merritt stifled a yawn and led them to the bathroom—her guest brushed her teeth with her finger—then pushed the girl into bed and drew the pink covers up under her chin. The girl gazed up at Emily, her pale, colorless eyes unblinking, a laser-like stare that felt charged with meaning. Electric, as if she were trying with all her might to beam a message directly into Emily’s head.

  Emily’s toes tingled; the crown of her head started to buzz. She felt the weight of the girl’s eyes on her, but no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t discern their meaning.

  “What is it?” she whispered, reaching out and touching the girl’s cheek.

  But the girl didn’t even blink.

  The moment faded, and Emily’s certainty faded with it, eroding away until it was nothing at all. There had never been any message, no hidden meaning behind that flat and glassy stare. She blushed and turned away, embarrassed to have misread things so badly. “Good night,” she said, then scampered up the ladder and laid her head on the pillow, listening. Beneath her the girl rolled side to side, adjusted the sheets, and finally went still. Ragged inhales and exhales turned to slow, even breaths.

  Emily sighed and tried to close her eyes. It was all very strange, she thought. When her mother asked the girl questions—her name, her address, her phone number—the girl couldn’t seem to understand. But playing together, the two of them hadn’t had any trouble communicating.

  None at all.

  * * *

  It was the girl’s father who’d taught her the trick of pretending to be asleep.

  She curled up on her side, careful to avoid any focus on her breathing. The more she thought about her breaths, she knew, the less they would adhere to the smooth exhalations of actual slumber. Some of the techniques made sense only if she were being watched (a slackening of the facial muscles, the lazy drooping of her eyelids), but she couldn’t excise these parts of her performance from the whole. All were of a piece, a bit of method acting that allowed her body to achieve total relaxation despite the paper-thin mattress. She summoned her patience, fighting the urge to scratch or otherwise adjust herself, and in time she sensed her new friend on the top bunk lapse into unconsciousness.

  What kind of person could allow themselves to fall asleep all alone with a stranger? What kind of family would let a fox into their henhouse?

  The girl had been underestimated may times before. Usually at this moment she would be struggling to parse the cause as overconfidence or naïveté, but with the Merritts, she knew it was the latter. She’d seen them take in her bony knees and her dirty dress, and instantly they’d written her off as nothing more than a lost little deaf girl. They looked at her and saw only a wounded lamb.

  Mistakes like that were cause for punishment. The girl was only eight years old, but it was a lesson she had learned many times over.

  Still she did not move, and her hush worked a spell on the house, a potion made of patience and quiet in just the right measure. She waited, waited until the storm passed, until the only sounds were the persistent chirping of the crickets and the occasional creak of joists settling in the cool night air. With care, the girl rolled out from under the covers and dropped onto all fours, distributing her weight, and scuttled across the room into the hall. Outside the door to the master bedroom, she sat back on her heels and listened.

  From inside came arrhythmic snoring, the occasional rustle.

  She nodded to herself and moved on, down the stairs and through the parlor. She stopped and removed a photo album from its place on the bookshelf, stood next to the front door, and thumbed through the pages. The pictures confirmed her suspicion: the Merritts were happy in a way she would never manage.

  The door had an unusual number of locks. She stretched on her tiptoes to remove the chain at the top, then flipped open the two dead bolts. Despite not wearing a watch, she was certain it must be the appointed hour. She cupped one hand around her ear and pressed it against the door, straining to hear.

  Outside, nothing but night sounds.

  The girl reached out, caressed the antique brass doorknob, and hesitated for a moment before rapping her knuckles once on the dark-stained wood, a knock so insubstantial it almost didn’t exist.

  Then she waited.

  And soon, from the darkness, came a knock in return.

  PART ONE

  NORTH CAROLINA TO RESUME EXECUTIONS; SHOTGUN SLAYER BARROW SCHEDULED TO DIE

  By Laura Chambers

  Sept. 13, 2019

  RALEIGH, N.C. — Convicted murderer Simon Barrow has been scheduled for execution in October, according to a spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Public Safety. Barrow will be the first prisoner put to death since 2006, when executions were stayed by a federal court case that began the state’s de facto moratorium on capital punishment.

  Two previous governors have declined to take the legal action necessary to resolve the impasse and allow the state to once again administer lethal injection. According to sources in the North Carolina Department of Justice, however, a new pro–death penalty policy has been in effect since the resignation of Governor Greg Teasdale last year. Between that and a favorable ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ric
hmond, and with the Supreme Court declining to hear the case, the current administration now has a clear path to reinstituting capital punishment.

  “A thirteen-year delay in sentences handed down by juries is an unconscionable arrest of justice,” said North Carolina Senate Majority Leader Ronnie Jayne. “Victims’ families have been in limbo for more than a decade, denied the closure they so surely deserve. Simon Barrow is the poster boy for the death penalty.”

  Barrow, the so-called Shotgun Slayer, was convicted of the murder of Robert and Linda Merritt in Hillsborough, NC, after entering their home and then shooting them during the early morning hours of August 22, 1996. Because there was no evidence of breaking or entering, he is believed to have gained access via an unlocked door earlier that day and then concealed himself, a “lying in wait” scenario deemed especially heinous. Barrow refused to testify on his own behalf at trial and has never confessed to or even commented on the crime.

  “The brutality of these murders resonated through the community,” said Orange County Sheriff Michael Fuller, then an assistant district attorney and part of the team that prosecuted Barrow. “The Merritts were ordinary, hardworking people, victims in the truest sense of the word. Working this case is what turned my career into my calling.”

  Lt. David Whitley, today a part of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office Investigations Division, was the first deputy on the scene in 1996. “This is one offender who absolutely deserves the maximum punishment,” he said. “Just imagine the sort of person who would hide himself in your house, wait for you to go to sleep, and then do his worst. To this day, the Merritt home is the most affecting crime scene of my career. I’m just sorry the daughter had to see it.”

  The victims’ daughter, Emily Merritt, was the sole survivor of the attack. Eight years old at the time, she was discovered more than twenty-four hours later in a cluster of nearby woods, reportedly so devastated by her experience that police could never get a clear statement.