Hemlock Bay

mean I’m gonna tell you anythin’, mister.”
    This was a kick. “Hey, my wife thinks I’m good-looking, but I’m wondering, since you said it, if you’re just trying to butter me up.”
    “No,” she said, shaking her head, “you’re good-lookin’ all right, and I heard one of the lady cops on the airplane say you’re a hunk. They were thinkin’ that a sexy guy will make me talk, so they got you.”
    “Well,” Savich said, “just maybe that’s so.” He paused a fraction of a second, then said, his voice unexpectedly hard, “Have you ever seen the Ghouls, Marilyn?”
    He thought she’d keel over in her chair. So she knew about the Ghouls. She paled to a sickly white, looked ready to bolt.
    “They’re not here, Marilyn.”
    She shook her head back and forth, back and forth, whispering, “There’s no way you could know about the Ghouls. No way at all. Ghouls are bad, real bad.”
    “Didn’t Tammy tell you that I was there in the barn, that I saw them, even shot at them?”
    “No, she didn’t tell me . . . ah, shit. I don’t know nothin’, you hear me?”
    “Okay, she didn’t tell you that I saw them and she didn’t tell you my name, which is interesting since she knows it. But she did tell you that she wanted to have at me, didn’t she?”
    Marilyn’s lips were seamed tight. She shook her head and said “Oh, yeah, and she will. She called you that creepy FBI fucker. I don’t know why she didn’t tell me that you saw the Ghouls.”
    “Maybe she doesn’t trust you.”
    “Oh, yeah, Tammy trusts me. She doesn’t have anybody else now. She’ll get you, mister, she will.”
    “Just so you know, Marilyn, I’m the one who shot her, the one who killed Tommy. I didn’t want to, but they left me no choice. They had two kids there, and they were going to kill them. Young boys, Marilyn, and they were terrified. Tommy and Tammy had kidnapped them, beaten them, and they were going to murder them, like they’ve murdered many young boys all across the country. Did you know that? Did you know your cousins were murderers?”
    Marilyn shrugged. Savich saw a rip beneath the right arm of her brown, cracked leather jacket. “They’re my kin. I could miss Tommy—seein’ as how he’s dead now—but he killed our baby, cracked its poor little head right open, so I was really mad at him for a long time. Tommy was hard, real hard. He was always doin’ things you didn’t expect, mean things, things to make you scream. You killed him. He was one of a kind, Tommy was. Tammy’s right, you’re a creepy fucker.”
    Savich didn’t respond, just nodded, waiting.
    “You shouldn’t have shot Tammy like you did, tearing her arm all up so they had to saw it off. You shouldn’t have been there in my barn in the first place. It wasn’t none of your damned business.”
    He smiled at her, sat forward, his palms flat on his desk. “Of course it’s my business. I’m a cop, Marilyn. You know, I could have killed Tammy, not just shot her arm off. If I had killed her in the barn then she wouldn’t have killed that little boy outside Chevy Chase. Either she did it or the Ghouls did it. Maybe the Ghouls did kill the boy, since there was a circle. Do the Ghouls have to have a circle, Marilyn? You don’t know? Were you with her when she took that boy? Did you help her murder him?”
    Marilyn shrugged her shoulders again. “Nope, I didn’t even know what she was going to do, not really. She left me at this grungy motel on the highway and told me to stay put or she’d bang me up real bad. She looked real happy when she got back. There was lots of blood on her nurse’s uniform; she said she’d have to find somethin’ else to wear. She thought it was neat that there was blood on the uniform, said it was a-pro-pos or somethin’ like that. Now, I’m not goin’ to say any more. I already said too much. I want to leave now.”
    “You know, Marilyn, your cousin’s very dangerous. She could turn on you, like this.” He snapped his fingers, saw her cower in the chair, saw her shudder. He said, “How would you like to be ripped apart?”
    “She wouldn’t turn on me. She’s known me all my life. I’m her cousin, her ma and mine were sisters, at least half-sisters. They wasn’t real sure since their pa was always cattin’ around.”
    “Why did Tammy pretend to be Timmy?”
    Marilyn focused her eyes on the pile of books along the side wall of the office and didn’t answer. Savich started to leave it