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  The deputy went away choking on the stench. The smell, Marsden realized, was becoming more than just a byproduct of his harem. The smell hung around: polluted the air; permeated what little clothing the women wore; and, most noticeably, virtually soaked into Marsden himself. During his sexual encounters with his captives he smelled so strongly of decaying flesh and feces it was all the women could do to keep from puking.

  Chapter 10

  Willard Swader had picked up Deena at the diner and the two drove back to his house in silence, the sky a dark blue and splashed with long gray feathery clouds, the earth white with hints of brown and green beginning to show the air heavy with moisture. And in Deena’s mind, sharply and indelibly etched, a picture—sun slanting through jagged shards of glass, and the mess in the house, pillows ripped open as stuffing was strewn onto the floor. Deena tried over and over again to relate the picture to Willard. There was a part of her that wanted to see Steve Balleza destroying her newly remodeled home, see him take a knife to the pillows and shattering the glass. Off the side of the road as she and Willard drove by, Deena could see a body in the shadows, nearly faceless, caught up in all of this as she was. Before she could say anything to Willard to stop or slow down, they had passed Mike Leopold. Deena knew she would have to confront him again. Perhaps he had been right all along; the house was a place of evil. Or at the least attracted evil to it.

  Halfway to the house, Deena, her eyes fixed straight ahead now and riveted to the road, suddenly said: “I cannot believe that Steve did that to the house.”

  “Are you and the police certain it was Steve?”

  The look that Deena gave in response to Willard caused him to swerve a bit. “Oh?” he said. That was all he could manage to say, and then drove on quietly, conscious of a long sigh coming from Deena.

  “Who else could have done it?” Deena finally asked a few moments later.

  “What about that crazy landlord of yours that lives in the basement.”

  “I bolt the door to the cellar so he cannot get in,” Deena replied.

  “From the looks of what happened tonight, a key wasn’t used,” Willard noted.

  “What are you thinking, Willard?”

  “For God’s sake, Deena—”

  “I know,” she moaned softly. Willard thought she was going to cry.

  “What about Arlene?”

  “I know,” Deena said very softly. “I know. I haven’t figured out how to talk to her yet.”

  Willard looked at her, cringing now in her seat. “Doesn’t she deserve to speak with you, face-to-face?”

  “Yes.”

  Willard drove on a bit further through the winter morning, watching a lofty mushroom of a cloud, fixed and moving in the distance as if it were etched on the sky.

  “For God’s sake, Deena. Why didn’t you call Arlene instead? Now she’s going to think you are mad at her as well.”

  Deena felt him turn and stare at her while she faded, gray line, yellow line running down the center of the road.

  “I didn’t know what to say to her,” Deena gasped. “Say, hey bummer that your husband got drunk and totally trashed my house last night. Want to get some lunch?”

  “Well, I didn’t mean—”

  “I had Steve arrested for breaking and entering, vandalism, drunk and disorderly, and whatever else the sheriff can find to add on to the charges.”

  “Still...”

  Deena sighed once more. “I know. I will call her when I get to your place.”

  “Don’t do it over the phone...”

  “I’m not, I’m going to call her and have her meet me.”

  * * * *

  In town there would have been a crowd of morbidly curious people, but fortunately the news had not spread as of yet. Deena had agreed to meet with Arlene at the diner later that same day. Tire tracks and footprints showed that many of her neighbors had been through town that morning, but they had gone on to do their own things and not stand around and gossip.

  “I’m sorry...” Arlene began to say when Deena’s raised hand stopped her.

  “You have nothing to apologize for, I do.”

  “Why are you apologizing?”

  “Because I didn’t know how to talk to you about what happened. I’m sorry,” Deena replied.

  “Nonsense.” Arlene waved her friend’s apology off. “It is I who should apologize for my husband’s actions and my lack of inaction.”

  “Okay, let’s move on.”

  Deena and Arlene hugged. It was Arlene who spoke first after the embrace. “I did some research on the fire at the house. The house that Steve...”

  “We’re moving on, Arlene,” Deena reminded her friend.

  “Yes, of course. Anyway, let me read you some of the newspaper article:

  A bewildered dog stood lonely guard over the black heap that had been a house, first barking at all those who watched on, then concluding their company was better than none, and began to follow the various firemen about, now and then whining uneasily.

  “Guess we know that the dog was there when the house burnt down.” Arlene smiled and then continued:

  “Parts of the ash-heap still smoldered, although it had been drenched with water. The water flooded the basement and soaked the garage, the two remaining and undamaged areas of the house. Little of the house remained recognizable except the door to the basement where the kitchen had been and a sagging metal bed frame. There was nothing to show how or where the fire had started, and the fire marshal wandered in an aimless, widening circle, the dog now at his heels.”

  “So it was an accident?” Deena said.

  “Don’t know, Dee,” Arlene replied. “Even the newspaper reporter who wrote that it had been ruled an accident didn’t believe it.”

  “So what does this prove? How does it help me?” Deena demanded.

  “It helps prove that some of that god awful smell in the basement is mildew and rotting wood. It helps you realize that Mike Leopold told you the truth, but it also shows you that the basement is...”

  Deena was hanging on the last word. “That the basement is what?”

  “Special, unique, weird. I mean how does it survive when nothing else of the house does?” Arlene’s question raised some hairs on the back of Deena’s neck.

  “Did Marsden live in the basement then?”

  Arlene nodded a “yes.”

  * * * *

  “You get any leads on those missing women yet, Chapel?” Sheriff Lindsay Hill asked as she passed Gary Chapel’s cubicle. Dressed in a satin jacket, high heels, and gloves, Hill was head outside, her overcoat in tow, the strap of a battered leather purse in the fingers of one hand. She paused at Chapel’s desk.

  “Nothing solid yet.”

  “C’mon, Gary, this is bullshit. We’ve got seven missing women and nothing to go on.” Her jaw slide to the side and her eyes sparked in frustration. He supposed that once she would have been described as tall, blonde, and beautiful. And probably not that long ago. But these days, with the winter raging and Sheriff Hill going through a bitter divorce, Hill was borderline gaunt, her face craggy, her hair streaked with gray, her expression hard-set and serious.

  And still, Chapel thought, the most interesting woman he’d met in a quite a long time.

  Hill, like Chapel, was not satisfied that these women had prior arrests as prostitutes, so the public did not care. It was still seven human beings missing and someone out there missed each and every one of them, even if it was only the men who used them.

  “I need more than nothing solid yet,” Sheriff Hill said in a low voice. “Let’s try it again, shall we? I have the Harrisburg Bureau of Police’s Criminal Investigation unit breathing down my neck, wanting to take these cases from us. So let’s find something quick.”

  “I’m working, Sheriff, trust me, all the trails are cold right now. But I never give up and I know I will be able to find something soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “You will be the first to know, Sheri
ff,” Chapel said.

  Her eyes darkened. “Find something out about these women. Send out uniforms to check out their hangouts, whatever it takes.”

  “I’ve got this, Sheriff.” Chapel was already shutting down his computer. “I’ll run by those places. I was gonna head out anyway,” he said, wanting, no, needing to do something, anything other than sit in this office another minute while staring at photographs of the missing women, trying to decipher the notes and backgrounds on each of them while attempting to mentally connect then to some sort of shared lead.

  “Good boy.” Sheriff Hill said as she slapped her detective on the back. The sheriff pulled her purse over her shoulder. “Let me know what you find out. Keep checking in and set up a tip line. Perhaps we can get a lead that way.”

  “What about the press?” Chapel asked.

  “If you feel you must,” Sheriff Hill responded. “But let’s try to keep it in house for now; I don’t want to create a panic.”

  “Okay, will do, Sheriff.”

  With that each law enforcement officer went on about their day; only Gary Chapel was a little more anxious to find something on the missing women, at least a tad more than the sheriff was.

  Chapter 11

  Two weeks after the incident with Steve Balleza and the cops sniffing around the house and even coming to his basement door, Frank Marsden became even more paranoid. Convinced now that he was going to be discovered along with his harem of women and that the women were plotting against him, he encouraged an informer system so he could stop any escape plans before they got started. He also had to maintain the noise, women, and smell so he was not discovered by the police. The reward for snitching would be exemption from the hole, a little better food, and slightly more freedom. Already the promise of not going into the hole had the most profound effect as those left had watched Rosemary Spiner, Tuyen Luong, and Beverly Dutwin be put in the hole and transformed into huge piles of gelatin, then shoveled back into the hole where they were devoured.

  Marsden’s paranoia about escape plans was not totally unjustified. At one time the remaining women worked out a scheme whereby Tabitha Burke was going to hit Marsden over the head with a piece of metal pipe they had dug up and the others would grab whatever was handy and stab him. But before the plan could be completed or even attempted, Maria Pinella—in a moment of extreme weakness—tipped Frank Marsden off.

  Marsden also had decided that he could keep them off balance if they didn’t know where he was, whether he was lurking in the dark, or out of the basement altogether. He bound their hands and covered their eyes in an effort to thwart future attempts at escape. When he was in the basement, or “home”, they could usually hear him walking, and when he left they could hear the basement door close and his car drive away. The way to solve that, Frank figured, was to stop them from hearing him. This revelation led to his most cruel torture yet.

  One by one he took Maria Pinella, Jennifer Raymond, and Angela Quirino over to the eye hook and cuffed them with one hand above their heads. He also cuffed their feet. Seeing that they were already blindfolded and gagged, he would just secure the gags with duct tape, wrapping it around their heads. Finally, looping an arm around their throats to hold them still, he took a screwdriver and in one quick motion would gouge in their ears, trying to puncture their eardrums.

  At first he failed, only managed to scrape and slice the ears, but not the eardrums. He twisted a longer, second attempt, screwdriver and again came away with only torment.

  Marsden had forgone doing anything to Tabitha Burke as she had been placed in the hole and was now covered in slime. She no longer mattered to Frank Marsden. In one respect, the others envied Tabitha. She no longer had to put up with Marsden’s sexual desires or torture. In another way, they all pitied her for what was happening to her. And what was surely going to happen to her once she melted away from all that ooze.

  However, his little torture experiment did not put a stop to further disruptions. Marsden’s chief antagonist went from Tabitha Burke back to Jennifer Raymond. Raymond fought him in everything he tried to do. One day, in an attempt to frighten her into submission, he unhooked her and dragged her into the darkened area under the stairs. The two were gone only a few minutes, and when they returned, Raymond was uncharacteristically quiet. Pinella, like all the only women, had managed to loosen the gag in her mouth, allowing her to speak in whispers, and was particularly inquisitive.

  “What did he do to you?”

  At long last, Jennifer Raymond whispered, “He showed me a man’s head in a pot. And he had the guy’s ribs set to roast and a bunch of his other body parts in the freezer. He told me if I didn’t start listening to him, that was going to happen to me too.”

  “Who was the guy?” Maria Pinella asked, not sure if she wanted to know the answer to her question.

  The sight didn’t chastise Raymond for long; within a day or two she was again pushing Marsden as far as she could.

  About this time Frank Marsden introduced still another new torture: electric shock.

  He had to do something to keep the women quiet and in submission. The lady renting the house would be coming back in a day or two as the place was nearly restored once more. The plan had to continue.

  I am hungry. You are neglecting your duties, Frank. Feed me!

  These words pounded in his head day and night. He had to get the plan back on track. He could not afford any more delays.

  “I’m trying, master,” he would say out loud. The women, still blindfolded and some suffering from badly cut ears, listened to see if someone else was in the basement with them. But they should discover that who or whatever Frank Marsden was talking to was either invisible or in his head.

  Marsden slipped off the plug end of an ordinary electrical extension cord, one of those that had been used around the holidays to string up outdoor lights, and stripped the insulation to leave a bare wire. Then he plugged the other end into a socket. With current then flowing through the wire, he touched the bare end to the women’s chains and laughed while they jumped and screamed in agony. For extra effect he would throw buckets of water on them first.

  * * * *

  Sleet pelted Deena as she raced up the steps to the front door of Arlene’s house, coated her hair and shoulders, melted down her neck in streams.

  Willard Swader let her in, helped her strip off the sodden jacket, and held it at arm’s length.

  “They’re in the dining room,” Willard said. “I’ll get you a towel.”

  Arlene was wearing a nice wool blanket robe, fuzzy slippers, and looking obscenely warm and comfortable as she drank some hot chocolate from a porcelain mug. Maggie Swader was seated across from her, dressed in a nice pants suit looking as if it had been taken from Hillary Clinton’s closet. She also drank a mug of hot chocolate.

  “Heavens to Betsy, what happened to you?” Arlene asked.

  “Have you even looked out the window today?” Deena grumbled.

  Willard brought a thick towel, fresh from the dryer, and Maggie poured a cup of hot chocolate for Deena. The cuffs on her jeans flapped icily around her ankles; she was starting to shiver.

  “Take your shoes off, warm your feet,” Arlene said.

  “According to most folks I’ve ever talked to, they say most colds start off in the feet,” Willard said, his faded brown eyes twinkling.

  Deena took a couple of sips of her hot chocolate, felt the shakes ease up, and the certainty that she’d never be warm again faded.

  She sank back in the chair and, fighting the sudden draining that succeeded the shakes, she haltingly, with a feeling of abashment, felt all eyes upon her.

  “We need to talk, Arlene,” Deena announced.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Arlene responded with a slight smile.

  “And that is our cue to leave,” Willard said. “Goodnight, ladies; come on, Maggie.”

  With that he pulled his wife out of the room and the two left the house.

  Then Arlen
e and Deena hugged.

  * * * *

  Dauphin County Sheriff Department Homicide Detective Gary Chapel stood on the icy road that cut across Danbriar Ridge and watched nervously as the rescue workers ascended the face of the cliff, using ropes. It was dark, the wind blowing through the trees, but the snowstorm had given it a rest; no new snow was falling from the darkened skies. At least for now. Chapel was responding to a car that this car may have something to do with his missing women.

  Exhausted, starving, his stomach in knots, the cold medicine wearing off, he, along with several uniformed deputies and members of the rescue teams from both the fire and sheriff’s departments, had responded to the scene after the call had come in. The road was blocked, flares lit and signaling orange, adding to the already eerie incandescence of beams from headlights, taillights, cigarette tips, and flashlights, all reflecting against a deathly white panorama of wintry forest.

  Far below, crumpled and half buried in snow, were the remains of what had once been a car registered to a Joey Fischer. The rescue teams, with the help of ropes and climbing gear, returned.

  “No one inside,” Douglas, a broad-shouldered fireman, said as he approached. He was shaking his head and turned to another fireman, John Cort, a man Chapel had met a couple of times. “Do you smoke?”

  Chapel shook his head.

  “No signs of anyone climbing out or anything?” Chapel asked as Douglas, thick gloves on his hands, fumbled with a cigarette offered from an unopened pack from one of the uniformed deputies.

  “Not that I could see.”

  “Well someone had to drive that car over the edge. You telling me that no one has been in the car?”

  Douglas silently agreed. And Chapel figured the rest of the crew from the sheriff’s department would be on board with Douglas’ assessment. If Fischer had been abducted or had managed to scramble out of the wreck and was now lost in the surrounding hillside, Chapel did not know.