Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle (102 page)

“Uh-oh,” Massino interrupted.

Nick looked up. Massino was staring over Nick's shoulder at something behind him. He twisted around and saw a young girl standing in the center of the row about thirty feet away.

“Is that the kid?” Nick asked.

“Yeah.”

“She can't see her father like this—cover him up.” He raised his voice and called out to the little girl. “Hey, go back—go back to the house.”

The little girl didn't move.

She was young, no more than three or four, with a very slight build that made her look even younger. She wore a broad, floppy sun hat that covered most of her face and dark sunglasses with thick frames that were too old and too big for her face. She had thick auburn hair pulled behind her in a ponytail that stood out like fire against her creamy skin. She was dressed in a sleeveless cotton sundress the color of the Carolina sky and, strangely, a pair of thick socks but no shoes.

Nick scrambled to his feet and hurried toward her. “Did you hear what I said? You shouldn't be here—go find your mother.” He did his best to block her view of the grisly scene behind him, but she didn't seem to be trying to look. She wasn't looking at Nick either; she seemed to be staring just off to the side. The little girl stood with her arms bent at the elbows, rotating both hands in constant circles as though she were trying to limber up her wrists.

Nick knelt down in front of her. “Excuse me—I'm talking to you.”

Still she refused to make eye contact, and her little hands kept circling.

“Hey! Little girl!” Nick reached out and gently touched her right arm with his fingers; the instant he did she let out a piercing shriek that made him jerk back. The little girl turned on her heels and ran back toward the house, making intermittent shrieks as she went.

Nick turned to the detective. “What was that all about? I barely touched her.”

“Better go find the mom,” Massino said. “We don't want her getting the wrong idea.”

Nick let out a groan and reluctantly started down the row after her.
The wrong idea
, he thought.
What's the kid's problem, anyway? And what's with the mom? She lets her daughter go wandering around a crime scene? That's just what you want—to let your little girl find her dad's dead body. If the kid wasn't damaged before, she would be after that.

Nick came to the end of the row and stepped out onto the grass. Halfway to the farmhouse he saw the mother kneeling in front of the little girl.
Terrific
, he thought. He could just imagine the story the girl was probably telling her mother—about the bad man with the scary eyes who squeezed her arm until blood shot out of her fingertips. Nick had never been good with children. It wasn't that he didn't like them; they just didn't seem to like him. Maybe it was the glasses—he should have remembered to take them off. The glasses never helped. He made the mistake of bending over a baby crib once and the kid went ballistic, as if Nick were the baby mobile from hell. It took the mom an hour to calm the kid down again—he was probably in therapy now. And moms are so defensive; they're like mother bears protecting their cubs. You can't reason with them—they're too busy ripping open your bowels with their claws.
How am I going to explain this?
he wondered.

“Lady, I barely touched your daughter.”

“Then why is she screaming her head off?”

“How would I know? Maybe she's weird.” Great—that'll go over big.

The woman stood up as Nick approached and he braced himself for a verbal barrage—but she said nothing.

Her face seemed strangely familiar . . .

She stepped in close to him and looked up into his enormous eyes. She rested her hands on his chest, stretched up on her tiptoes, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Hello, Nick. It's been a long time.”

4

I
can't believe it,” Nick said. “Kathryn Guilford—I haven't seen you in years.”

Guilford
,” she said. “Funny—it's been
Severenson
for so long that it sounds like somebody else's name.”

Nick sat at the kitchen table and watched her fill the kettle from the sink. “I'm . . . sorry about your husband,” he said.

“I wish I could have done something—God knows I tried.” She stared out the kitchen window until the kettle began to overflow. “Do you still prefer tea to coffee?”

“Either one is fine,” Nick said. “I've become less discriminating over the years—I'll take caffeine in any form these days. The kids are all into energy drinks now—Red Bull, Rockstar, things like that. They guzzle the stuff all morning, then show up for my afternoon class in a coma.”

“It couldn't be the teacher,” she said. “You always kept me awake.”

Kathryn Guilford
, Nick thought. The woman hadn't changed a bit—at least not in Nick's memory. She still had the same thick auburn hair with just a few coarse strands of gray mixed in now. She had the same waspish figure and she moved with the same graceful rhythm. Whenever she stepped to the side her hips swung like a pendulum slowing to a stop—it surprised him that he still remembered that. Her face looked a little leaner now, but despite all the years her fair skin was only just beginning to show the weathering effects of the sun. The freckles across her nose and cheeks were more prominent than he remembered them. He always liked those freckles—he remembered that too.

Kathryn leaned down and set a steaming cup in front of him.

“The last time I saw you was in Holcum County,” he said.

She nodded. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

He remembered very well. It was several summers ago, when Nick was doing research at one of NC State's extension research stations in Holcum County. A young Kathryn Guilford came walking up to his door one day and wanted to hire him. An old friend of hers had died—suicide, the county coroner said, but Kathryn didn't buy it. She offered Nick twenty thousand dollars to give her a second opinion—but she wanted to make sure her money didn't go to waste, so she insisted on working with Nick every step of the way. There was one small problem: Kathryn was entomophobic—she had a deathly fear of insects, and in Nick's line of work you tended to run into a few. But she hung in there every step of the way and she earned Nick's respect. He remembered that, because not many people did.

“How could I forget?” he said. “You fell off my porch and landed flat on your back in the driveway. I heard the crash and came out and I stood there looking down at you. I remember thinking, ‘Not a graceful woman.'”

She managed a smile. “You were always looking down at me.”

“That's not true,” he said. “You turned out to be a credit to your species.”

“
Your species
—are you still doing that?”

Nick just shrugged.

There was a small bay window beside the kitchen table. The little girl sat cross-legged on a flowered seat cushion with a stack of books in her lap. With her left hand she turned the pages at an impressive pace. With her right hand she continued to make the same strange circular motion that she had made in the field.

“She looks just like you,” Nick said to Kathryn. “She could be your clone.”

“I'll take that as a compliment. The truth is, she has a lot of Michael in her. It worries me sometimes.”

Nick leaned toward the little girl. “You're a very fast reader.”

The little girl didn't respond.

Kathryn clapped her hands twice and the girl looked up at her. “Callie, this is Nick. Say, ‘Hi, Nick.'”

Callie turned toward Nick but didn't quite meet his eyes. “Hi, Nick.”

“Hi. How old are you?”

But she was already lost in her reading again.

“Callie has autism,” Kathryn said.

Nick cocked his head at the little girl. “
Autism.
I know it's a brain development disorder, but not much else.”

“I didn't know much about it either, but I'm learning fast. Callie was just diagnosed recently. Her father had ADD—we just thought Callie had the same problem. But one of her teachers had an autistic nephew and she recognized the symptoms. We took her to a pediatric neurologist at Duke, and sure enough. It's officially known as ‘autism spectrum disorder'—that means there's a whole spectrum of possible behaviors, so autism looks different with every child. They have a saying: ‘If you've seen one kid with autism, you've seen one kid with autism.' Some kids have obvious disabilities; others seem pretty normal. They're still trying to figure out what Callie is capable of. She can talk, but she mostly just repeats what she hears. She lives in her own little world. I have to clap just to get her attention—sometimes she doesn't even respond to her own name.”

“She seems to like to read,” Nick said.

“She mostly likes to turn the pages. Autistic kids can often learn to read, but they have difficulty conceptualizing what they're reading. They don't use the same logic we do; they can't think abstractly. They don't understand metaphors, and they can't use slang. It's very strange—like talking to someone from another planet sometimes.”

“She came up behind me in the field,” Nick said. “I told her to go back to the house. I didn't want her to see . . . you know.”

“I'm sorry about that,” Kathryn said. “She runs off sometimes—I guess she got that from her father too. It's like her legs have a mind of their own and she just takes off. I do my best to keep an eye on her, but there's a lot to do around here.”

“She didn't like it when I touched her. I was only trying to—”

“Don't take it personally, Nick. Autistic kids are often hypersensitive—it's like all their senses are dialed up a couple of notches. Callie's sensitive to touch, especially if she's not expecting it. She wears a sleeveless dress year-round, even in the winter. You know why? She can't stand anything touching her arms. She's sensitive to light too—that's why she wears the silly hat and glasses.”

“She doesn't seem to make eye contact.”

“Don't let her fool you—she sees everything. She just looks at you out of the corner of her eye because direct eye contact feels too intense to her.”

“It sounds to me like you've learned a lot.”

“I just wish I'd caught it earlier. It breaks my heart to think how many times I disciplined her for not listening or not paying attention. I didn't understand that her brain just doesn't work the same way as other kids'. But Callie's my first, and they say firstborns are slower to be diagnosed because parents have no other children to compare them to.” She paused. “Maybe I could have paid more attention to her if I hadn't had my hands full with Michael all the time.”

Nick let a moment go by before he asked, “What can you tell me about your husband?”

Kathryn pulled out a chair and slowly sat down. “I met him not long after you left. Michael was passing through town; he stopped at my bank to ask about a farm loan and I did the interview. He was handsome, and confident, and he had all these lofty ideals. He said he had a tomato farm here in Sampson County and he had all these dreams and plans for it. He told me all about organic farming—about toxin-free foods and how it was a debt we owed to future generations. And I believed it, because I believed in him. He was so passionate, so energetic, so convincing. I didn't realize until later that he was manic-depressive—
bipolar
I think they call it now. I happened to meet him during one of his manic cycles. There was nothing he couldn't do, or so it seemed. He just swept me off my feet.” She winced. “That makes me sound so pathetic, but that's what it boiled down to. Anyway, we had one of those whirlwind romances and we got married just a few weeks later. I gave up my job at the bank. I moved up here with him and we went to work on this farm. That's when I began to see his other side.”

“What happened?”

“He started to crash. He'd hit one of his depressive cycles and he'd get moody, angry, irresponsible—he'd let the farm fall apart and he'd leave the whole thing to me. I've got five acres here, Nick—that may not sound like a lot, but it's way too much to take care of all by yourself. Michael was just no good to anyone during his depressions. He knew it too—and he'd try anything to dig his way out.”

“Including drugs?”

“Yes. That's when he started using, and that's when things really started going downhill. An organic farm doesn't generate a lot of cash—we were lucky if we cleared twenty-five, thirty thousand a year. You don't do this kind of thing for the money—you do it because you're philosophically committed to it. When Michael started using drugs, our savings disappeared overnight. We were about to lose the farm and I didn't even know it because Michael kept the books. Losing the money was bad enough, but the drugs—I just won't put up with that, especially with Callie around. You know how I feel about that.”

Nick remembered.

“Then Michael would get clean for a while, and when he did it was like he was a different person—like the person I married. He was always so sorry, and he'd make all these promises about what he was going to do and how he was going to turn things around for us here—but it never happened. The good Michael would just slowly fade away, and the bad Michael would gradually take his place—and the cycle would start all over again. A year ago he moved out—just cleaned out our checking account and left without a word. I tried to find him. I tried to do what I could to help him, but he took all our money and left me with a farm to run and a daughter to raise by myself. What could I do? I felt so guilty. I felt so helpless. I felt . . .”