If she'd heard about it from some one else or had read of such an occurrence, she would have dismissed it as ludicrous. Even now, her rational mind was telling her that she'd imagined it, her worry and concern having overshadowed her reason. Could her father really be living in a septic tank under a woman's bathroom in the middle of the desert?
No.
But she'd seen him swimming through the shit. He'd grinned at her.
She knew she should get out of here, tell Mary Beth, tell the police, but despite what she'd seen, despite the fear within her, she was still not certain that her father was really down there. How could he be? No human being could live in such an environment. And it didn't make any sense. Why would he disappear from home to live under a toilet?
Ginni pushed herself off the plastic tabletop, pulling her shorts out of the crack of her buttocks. She started walking slowly down the winding cement walkway. She had to make sure. She had to see.
The inside of the bathroom was dark, the only light coming from the diffused rays of the sun through a battered translucent skylight and the open door. Her heart pounding crazily, Ginni approached the toilet. The smell was as bad as before, maybe worse, and she almost gagged.
She forced herself to look into the open septic tank.
"Dad?" she called hesitantly. The lake of filth remained undisturbed.
She cleared her throat. "Dad?"
Her father's head broke through the surface of the effluence, white and grinning.
Ginni backed up, her heart feeling as though it would burst through the walls of her chest. She realized she was screaming, and she forced herself to stop. Gathering her courage, she approached the toilet again, looked down into the opening.
Her father stared up at her, waste dripping down his exposed forehead, brownish liquid running out of his grinning mouth. "Don't come back" he hissed. His voice was cracked and wheezy.
Oinni looked around wildly. What should she do?
Should sheA middle-aged woman weng a fashionable blue business suit stepped into the bathroom. She stared at Ginni, standing over the toilet, looking down, and cleared her throat. "Excuse me," she said awkwardly. "I need to use the facilities."
Ginni whirled on her. "You can't! My father's down there! - :
The woman backed up, a look of startled incomprehension on her face.
She exited quickly, and Ginni looked back down. There was only darkness, only brown.
"Bitch!" her father's voice hissed from somewhere in the septic tank.
Frightened as much by the hatred in that voice as by the circumstances in which they were spoken, she moved hesitantly away from the opening.
An excrement-encrusted hand shot upward from the seat of the toilet.
Ginni made it back to the car and barely managed to lock the doors before fainting.
The hours after she came to were a blur. She remembered being revived by a uniformed police officer--someone had apparently seen her lying slumped over the wheel, unconscious, and had called the police. She remembered telling and retelling her story. She remembered the influx of policemen and sewage workers and, later, the television cameras.
She remembered nothing of the capture, but she remembered Mary Beth.
Mary Beth hugging her and holding her, crying with her, talking for her to the police. Mary Beth taking care of the details and formalities.
And she'd always thought she was the strong one. Ginni stared through the bars as her father paced restlessly back and forth across the cement floor of his cell. She was alone back here except for a uniformed guard. Mary Beth was in the front office, talking to the police chief.
Her father's eyes were bright, alert, and filled with a demented sort of excitement. She could feel the kine dc energy radiating from him.
He stopped pacing, turned to look at her, then rushed the bars, hitting them with his head and grinning. "Bitch!" he screamed.
"Settle down in there," the guard ordered. '
Tears welled in Ginni's eyes--tears of pity for what he had become, tears of loss for what he had once been. The man before her still had her father's form and face, but the words, the movements, the expressions were those of a different person entirely, an alien. A tear escaped, rolling dovna her right cheek, and she wiped it away with a finger. "Why... ?" She swallowed hard, trying to keep her voice steady. "Why did you do this?"
His grin became wider. "I'm a shit. I've always been a shit." He shoved his head in the toilet, swishing it around. Ginni turned away.
She closed her eyes, saw in her mind her father's hand emerging from the septic tank.
She left the detentior area crying, escorted by the guard.
Robert stared hard at the fax machine, still not sure if he should immediately inform the feds about Vigil or if he should wait. They probably knew already, probably had people whose job it was to monitor radio and television newscasts for crime reports, but no one from either the
FBI or the state police had yet contacted him. He was tempted to hold off for a few days wait to fax them the information, but no, he couldn't do that. He thought of
Mary Beth's face when she'd seen her father in the celclass="underline" a bleak barren landscape.
She deserved the best men' and resdiees that could be mustered.
Rich walked in, and Robert nodded tiredly at him, moving back behind his desk and sitting down. "How's the news biz?"
"Pretty good. How's law enforcement?"
"Takes it up the ass."
"Different trokes for different folks." : The two of them were silent for a moment. Rober leaned back in his swivel chair, which creaked with a exaggerated opening-door-in-a-haunted-house sound. "You oughta get that thing oiled." "Yeah."
Rich walked over to the fax machine. "I wish I could afford to get myself one of these things."
"It's the FBI's. If it was up to me, it wouldn't be here."
"Have they been able to find anything out?"
Robert shook his head. "Who knows? If they did, I' probably be the last person they'd tell. I'm sure they'r, running everything through their computers and what not, doing whatever it is they do."
Rich leaned against the windowsill, faced his brother. "So what is happening?"
"If I knew, I'd tell you."
"The cemetery made it into the Republic the other day. Did you see that?"
"I've been too busy to read the newspaper lately. I haven't even gotten to your article yet."
Rich grinned. "You don't have to read it. It was brilliant."
"They think they're going to be able to rebury all of the bodies based on the plot map. Nothing was moved too far."
"Thank God."
Robert cleared his throat. "Did you ever go out there to see--?"
"I didn't look."
Robert focused his attention on a topographical map of the county that hung on the left wall, not wanting to see his brother's face. "I didn't either. But now I think maybe I should've. It just doesn't seem right to me that... I wasn't there. That neither of us were there."
"Morn would've understood....... "Dad wouldn't've." i There was a knock on the door frame. "Am I interrupting anything?" Brad Woods stood in the entryway, holding by his side a manila folder stuffed with papers
Robert shook his head. "Come on . nWoods walked across the worn carpet and dropped the folder on top of Robert's desk. 3 copies of my reports. I already sent copies to the county. I ended up examining eight of the bodies in detail, the ones that appeared to have been specifically, for lack of a better word, operated upon. You were right. The marrow had been removed from several of the corpses, although most of that marrow was already dried.
But I could find no evidence of any surgical procedures, no telling marks upon bone or flesh, no trace of chemical substances that shouldn't be there, no method, no indication even whether this was done by a human or an animal."