Pleased by that admission, Potter smiled. “Googled you to see what’s what. Internet’s full of lies, but it says you’re thirty-nine, been a dick—in the best sense of the word—since you were twenty-one. Way I understand, first thing you did once you got yourself a PI license was investigate the livin’ hell out of your parents and expose the operation they were runnin’ where they were bilkin’ old people out of their life savins.”
Wyatt said, “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’”
Potter shook his head. “Speakin’ for my own self, give me a righteous child, and if maybe I deserve thanks, I’m sure I’ll get some. I won’t ask what you’re here to investigate, but if it’s me, then you go straight at it like a dog with a bone.”
“It’s not you. But if it was, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Potter laughed. “I half wish it was me. Seems like you’d be interestin’ to hang around with.”
The ranch house was large, about seven thousand square feet, but it pretty much explained itself. The pantry, the refrigerator, and the bathrooms had been stocked for the O’Hara family’s visit the previous week. Nothing more was needed. The tour took ten minutes.
Potter said, “Our Mr. O’Hara intends to upgrade things, all the mechanical systems, remodel with nicer finishes, though only after visitin’ a few times and gettin’ a sense of what’s needed. You ask me, she’s a pretty sweet house as she is.”
As Wyatt accompanied the property manager to his truck, he said, “Since you’ve been tending to this place, have you had any unusual experiences?”
Pausing with his hand on the driver’s door, Potter said, “A word like ‘unusual’ covers a lot of territory.”
After a hesitation, Wyatt changed it up: “What if, instead of ‘unusual,’ I said strange?”
The property manager was not a man who broadcast his thoughts with unguarded expressions. He met Wyatt’s eyes for a long moment before he said, “Never did see any Bigfoot runnin’ across a meadow nor no flyin’ saucer comin’ down out of the moon. But once in a while . . .” He turned his head to survey the lake, the land, the stables. When he went on, his voice had a solemn edge. “Maybe ’cause there’s bad history to the place—tragedies, you know—maybe when I remember them, it juices my imagination. But once in a while . . .”
When Potter fell quiet, Wyatt pressed him. “‘Once in a while’？”
With a shrug, the caretaker seemed to dismiss whatever he had intended to say, and he spoke now in a lighter tone of voice. “Oh, once in a while, when I’m workin’ here alone, I get the feelin’ I’m bein’ watched. It’s so convincin’ that it puts the fine hairs up on my neck. But what place this big and this deserted wouldn’t give a man that feelin’ from time to time?”
Intuition told Wyatt that Potter had held something back—and that pressing him further would not result in his divulging it.
They shook hands, and the property manager drove away.
When the Ford pickup was out of sight, Wyatt Rider let his gaze travel wherever it might: across the quiet stables, to the dwindling blacktop lane, from one cluster of willows to another . . . The shadows stretched eastward, as if yearning for communion with the oncoming night, and the dying day spilled redness across the land, and the water rippled with firelight in the lake where a woman had once died.
16
Ophelia Poole retrieved the Tac Light from the floor of the center aisle, where Optime had left it, returned to the pew, and switched off the beam to preserve the batteries. The darkness fell unrelieved, not the slightest chink of light at any of the bricked-up windows. Of course, the day had faded to a scarlet twilight, so there wasn’t a lot of light left to penetrate the building.
She had much to think about: options to consider, if there were any; a plan of action to be devised.
From overhead came a soft noise that she could not place. After a silence, the noise came again, faint and furtive. She supposed there must be mice or even rats. Neither concerned her.
Blind, she could see nothing but her captor in her mind’s eye, his visage horrifying because it appeared so ordinary. His mind, a cesspool of ignorance and hatred, seethed with homicidal fantasies, and in his extreme narcissism, he convinced himself that his lust for power must be a noble mission of penance. His inner evil was a potent venom, so caustic that it should have left at least a trace of corruption in his face, but he was a serpent who could pass for a sincere servant.