Brood XIX (7 page)

She stepped out onto the porch and turned in
a circle.

The entire front of the house, the hedges
lining the front façade, the pecan tree beside the walk, the
dogwoods at the edge of the driveway...everything was covered with
cicadas. The air was alive with swarming insects.

And then as one they took to the air and the
song ceased, replaced by a furious buzzing sound. They swirled
around her like a tornado before exploding upward and outward.

The entire swarm hung over the street for a
long minute, then funneled down the lane to the east.

After a moment's hesitation, Vanessa started
off after them.

* * *

Trey needed answers, but he didn't know
exactly where to start. The first priority was to figure out whose
body had been buried in the swamp and why someone had gone to so
much trouble to conceal its identity. He prayed that Emma was still
alive out there, somewhere, and not just waiting to be discovered
in another shallow grave. Worse was the alternative. He imagined
his niece being forced to kneel on the mildewed earthen floor of
some dank cellar beneath the copper glare of a lone exposed light
bulb, connected to the exposed joists overhead by swaying cobwebs,
one faceless shadow yanking out clumps of her hair by the roots
while another punched her repeatedly in the face to knock out her
teeth. The image was more than he could bear. When he found whoever
was responsible---and he
would
find them---he was going to take
immense pleasure from returning the favor.

He hoped that Warren had left boxes of files
or access to some computer database that he would be able to search
in hopes of finding the child with the osteosarcoma diagnosis.
Maybe Warren hadn't treated her personally. If that was the case,
then his partner, Dr. Gerald Montgomery, must have. Of course, that
assumption was predicated on the belief that the dead child had
been treated locally. Trey had to believe as much for now.
Otherwise, that child could have come from anywhere in the country,
and with four hundred new diagnoses every year, the odds of pinning
down one were poor. With any luck, Vanessa would be able to help
him access the records and it would be easy enough to find the
right child. If not, then he had no problem banging on Montgomery's
door and dragging him out of bed and down to his office.

Something was wrong.

He recognized it the moment he pulled to the
curb in front of his sister's house. The front door stood wide
open, the light from the foyer stretching across the porch and onto
the lawn. The second-story window of Warren's office was
illuminated and he knew his sister barely ever opened the door, let
alone went inside. He threw the Jeep into park, bounded out onto
the asphalt, and ran toward the front door.

"Vanessa!" he called as he passed through the
entryway and into the living room.

He glanced into the kitchen. Light on. Empty.
The living room, dining room, and main floor bathroom were vacant
as well. No one in the family room.

"Vanessa!"

He charged up the stairs into the hallway.
The light was on in Emma's old room. Same with the bathroom across
the hall. The next doorway on the right was open. Light flooded
into the hallway from a room in which he hadn't set foot since
Warren's passing.

"Vanessa?"

Still no response.

He ducked his head into her bedroom to
confirm that she hadn't passed out in bed, so overcome by grief
that she didn't realize she had left the front door open, then
returned his attention to the study. Vanessa wasn't in there
either. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, dialed his
sister's mobile, and listened to it ring as he stepped into the
room. A pall of stirred dust hung in the air. A screensaver
scrolled across the computer monitor on the desk. The mouse rested
slightly askew from the pattern of dust that had accumulated on the
mousepad around it.

Vanessa's voice answered on the fourth ring,
but it was only a recording asking him to leave a message.

Nothing else in the room appeared to have
been disturbed.

He leaned over the desk and tapped the mouse
to kill the screensaver. The screen flashed black, and then a web
page opened.

"Jesus," he whispered. How the hell had she
found out?

There was no way Vanessa could have known
that the child they exhumed had osteosarcoma. He had barely heard
the news himself maybe fifteen minutes ago. No one from the CSRS
would have called her directly. He was certain of that. So how had
she figured it out?

He paused and stood stock-still with the dust
settling on his shoulders and hair.

She couldn't have. No one could have told
her. She didn't know that the victim had cancer, so she obviously
had to have come to that conclusion from a different angle. He
tried to focus, tried to imagine his sister entering a room she had
treated as a sanctuary and opening a website on a computer that
didn't look like it had been used in years. What could have drawn
her in here? Why tonight? Why right now?

It was Warren's office.

Warren was a physician, a general
practitioner who treated adults and children alike.

It hit him like a blow to the gut.

Warren had treated the dead girl in the
bayou.

And now Vanessa was missing.

The front door had been standing ajar and
half of the lights in the house were still on. He hadn't seen any
signs of a struggle. If she had taken her car, the garage would
have been open instead.

That left only two options.

Either she had set off on foot or someone had
come for her and split in such a hurry that there hadn't even been
time to close the door. Maybe she was just taking a walk to clear
her head. It had been a rough day for her after all. But that
wasn't how his sister worked.

He looked again at the monitor.

No. The osteosarcoma link ruled out the
possible element of coincidence. Vanessa had made some sort of
breakthrough that he hadn't yet. She had known the body in the
swamp wasn't Emma's long before he did. She had been convinced that
her daughter was still alive, and if she'd somehow figured out the
true identity of the corpse or that of Emma's abductor, she would
have done whatever it took to find her daughter and bring her home
again.

Vanessa was in terrible danger. He could feel
it in the pit of his stomach.

She had told him Warren didn't keep any files
at home for legal reasons, but Trey tossed the room anyway. He
pulled the boxes out of the closet and dumped them, knocked every
book off of the bookcase, and scanned the computer for anything
resembling patient records.

He was wasting time.

His sister was out there somewhere, and
possibly in desperate need of help.

He never should have left her alone in the
first place.

Never.

Trey dialed Vanessa's cell phone again and
sprinted for his car.

He couldn't hear the muffled ringtone from
inside the purse on the corner table.

* * *

Vanessa walked on the sidewalk until it
eventually gave way to a dirt shoulder narrowed by the
proliferation of the impregnable forest. Spanish moss hung from the
branches of trees packed so tightly together she rarely saw the
hint of moonlight reflecting from the stagnant marsh beyond.
Somewhere nearby, amphibians croaked and predatory birds shrieked,
but there was no way she could hear them over the deafening song of
the cicadas. They filled every tree and every inch of airspace over
the gravel road. Buzzing around her head, between the cypresses.
Groups of them lagged behind and then raced back ahead of her and
waited in the boughs for her to catch up. She had never seen a
million of anything, yet she was certain that there had to be at
least that many cicadas. The world around her had become a living
swarm, as though the individual molecules of oxygen had been
replaced by the red-eyed bugs.

They guided her onward into the night, swept
up like a drowning body carried out to sea by the tide. No
headlights pierced the roiling darkness, not that she expected to
see any. Not this late at night, and not in this unincorporated
area. The tracts of land out here were all multi-acre lots situated
primarily on marshland, designed for complete privacy. Rutted dirt
drives forked from the road every half-mile on the right hand side.
To the left lay nothing but uninterrupted bayou that stretched
clear to Louisiana. The houses out here were a mixture of
ramshackle trailer homes set into the deep woods and sprawling
estates that were so secluded from one another as to negate the
socioeconomic differences. These were reclusive families that
valued nothing more than isolation and wouldn't soon be organizing
any neighborhood picnics. Vanessa knew several people who lived out
here, but hadn't visited enough times to recognize their patches of
wilderness in the dark.

She wondered why she was even out here. Why
in the world was she following a swarm of locusts anyway?

The answer was simple.

Hope.

Maybe she had finally relinquished the
slippery grasp she held on her sanity. The rational part of her
mind, now a distant voice calling from the bottom of a deep well,
insisted that she turn around and abandon this absurd course of
action, but her heart was persistent. It demanded that she try
anything, no matter how irrational, if there was even the slightest
chance of finding her daughter. It forced the blood into the legs
that carried her onward of their own accord, diverting it from the
brain that struggled to make sense of the senseless.

She had lost track of time. There was only
the darkness and the shrill cacophony of cicadas. She didn't know
how long she had been walking when the swarm closed in upon her so
tightly that she was forced to stop and cover her head with her
hands to shield it from the insects. After a moment, they again
ascended and buzzed off down a shadowed driveway into the forest.
The mailbox at the junction was dented and rusted along the metal
creases. It bore only five numbers. No name, just 10782.

If there was a point of no return, she had
reached it. To follow the private lane meant trespassing and
admitting that she had placed her fate in the hands of a swarm of
cicadas. To turn around was to acquiesce to the fear and live with
the ramifications of abandoning all hope.

There really was no choice at all.

She mounted the dirt drive and wended into
the morass. Standing water, gray with algae, winked at her through
the tree trunks to either side of the mounded track, which grew
subtly steeper with each step. Eventually, it opened into a broad
clearing, at the center of which was a knoll crowned by a
Spanish-style hacienda with a red ceramic-tile roof and porticos
flanking either side. That was the extent of the detail she could
glean through the mass of cicadas that covered every available
surface. They filled the ring of trees around the manicured yard
and turned the formerly white house black. All of them had settled.
Not a single insect flew through the air. They just watched. She
felt millions of blood-red eyes focused upon her.

And none of them made a sound.

The silence was so intense that every noise,
from the scuff of her feet on the dirt to the thrum of her pulse in
her ears, seemed amplified a hundredfold.

She recognized this place. It had to have
been more than five years since she had been here last, but there
was no doubt about to whom the house belonged.

And her heart broke.

There was no way that her daughter was here.
These were normal people, albeit more reserved: an educated
husband, a domestic wife, and a pampered child.

Tears rolled down her cheeks. She had allowed
herself to hope, allowed herself to believe that some greater power
had sent the cicadas to lead her to Emma. Instead, she found
herself face-to-face with the grim truth.

Emma wasn't here.

She was undoubtedly buried somewhere in the
bayou where the gators and snapping turtles had laid waste to her
flesh. Her husband was gone. She was lost and alone. There was
nothing at all left for her in this life, and the time had finally
come to end it.

Vanessa was just about to turn around and
embark upon the last long walk that would end with an overdose of
Sominex when something caught her eye. At first, she hadn't noticed
it with all of the black insects on the house.

She walked silently across the lawn.

Countless crimson eyes followed.

The majority of the houses built at the edge
of the swamp didn't have basements. The water table and the
shifting soil forced most to be built upon aboveground foundations.
This elevated crest must have provided the necessary stability to
support the garden-level basement that featured windows set nearly
flush with the ground. From the distance, she had assumed they were
hidden behind a living skin of cicadas like the rest of the
house...until she caught just the faintest hint of reflected silver
light.

As she approached, it became clear why she
had been led here. Decorative iron bars capped with florets had
been bolted over the windows. Behind the glass, a sheet of metal
had been affixed from the inside.

They hadn't been there before.

She thought about the couple who owned this
house, about their family...a mirror image of her own.

They had been friends.

Something stirred inside of her, an instinct
she hadn't felt this strongly in two years.

Suddenly, everything made sense.

The dying child.

Emma's abduction.

Warren's death.

She needed to get inside the house.

Her daughter was in the basement.

And she was still alive.

* * *

Trey gave up on reaching his sister on her
cell. It was readily apparent she wasn't going to answer. He had
settled upon a plan. Jefferson was a small town. He could cruise
the length of every street in under half an hour. If Vanessa was
out there on foot, he would find her in no time at all. Only the
diner stayed open twenty-four hours, and there was nowhere else to
go. If he didn't find her by the time he reached South Maple Street
at the edge of town, then he would call Dr. Montgomery and make him
drag his weary ass out of bed and guide him through the clinic's
records, even if he had to do so at gunpoint. But what then? Did he
propose reading through every file? It wasn't like there was some
kind of search function that would allow him to sort through the
entire population by disease. He needed to take a step back and
evaluate it from scratch, narrow the field to a manageable
number.