Catacomb (9 page)

“Whoa, stop.” Dan put his hand down on Jordan’s, forcing him to go back a page. “Abby will want to see this.”

“Good catch.” After the briefest hesitation, Jordan tugged the newspaper clipping out of its little triangle clips, turning the pages back to what had originally been shown. “Nobody will miss this.”

Dan hoped he was right. Framed photos on the walls watched them as surely as the hollow-eyed masks, Civil War soldiers staring out at them with blank eyes, as if sitting so long for the photographs had turned the men to stone.

Dan lifted the book to tuck it back in its case, and a few loose pages shuffled free as he did so, fluttering to the ground. Dan swore, kneeling to pick them up. Just more photos, he realized, and a slip or two of newsprint. One scrap was folded into a tight square. He stood and handed Jordan the loose pages to fit back into the book, but curiosity got the better of him. Unfolding the square, he found another headline Abby might want to see.

Two Witnesses in Orsini Trial Dead, One Missing

The headline was the only part of the article he could read; the rest of the story was obscured by what looked like a handwritten poem.

Dan read it aloud, squinting to make out the messy handwriting.

Be not too happy nor too proud

Beware your luck, crow not too loud;

The Bone Artist steals and then he leaves:

The page had been torn across at the bottom, the rest of the poem lost to the ages.

“See what I mean about the South?” Jordan whispered, shaking his head. “What’s the matter with these people?”

“I’m taking this for Abby, too,” Dan said. “Maybe she’ll know how to interpret it.”

“I
don’t know if I’m proud or disappointed that you stole this stuff for me.” Abby swayed a little, clutching the bottle of white wine Jordan had convinced some guy to buy for them outside of a Kum & Go. She had the news clippings spread out on the tent floor before her, as well as the notes she had taken while viewing the collection of Orsini’s possessions.

“You can always mail them back if you get a sudden attack of conscience,” Jordan pointed out. He took the bottle from Abby, drinking deeply. “Now see, this is how I pictured this drop-off going. Merrymaking, you know?”

“Stealing from libraries and drinking ill-gotten booze?” Dan asked. He didn’t feel like sharing in the wine, afraid it might make him emotional and less capable of holding back his eagerness to reach Maisie Moore. They could have been in New Orleans already, but Abby and Jordan had wanted to stay in Shreveport for the day and spend one more night in the tent.

Uncle Steve had been cool with this. But Paul and Sandy were anxious for Dan to be off the road. At least Abby was pleased.

“Yes!
Yes
. We’re going to turn this trip around yet, you’ll see,” Jordan crowed, beaming at him over the shiny bottle mouth.

“Sorry for all the stops and the camping,” Abby said. “You’re saints for putting up with it. I think things will get
a bit more exciting in
N’Awlins
. Or, well, hopefully the good kind of exciting.”

“
If
we make it there,” Dan couldn’t help saying. He turned to Jordan. “Are you going to finish that before you pass out?”

Jordan hugged the bottle tightly to his chest. “Of course,” he slurred. “I paid thirty American dollars for this crappy wine. I’m getting my money’s worth!”

Thirty dollars, yes, although half of that had been the bribe that convinced the trucker to buy it for them in the first place.

“Just take it easy. You’re up first driving tomorrow.”

Groaning, Jordan recorked the bottle and stored it near their small cooler in the corner. “Damn you and your logic.”

“Good night, Jordan.” Dan rolled onto his side and then halfway down into his sleeping bag. Crickets and frogs chorused, a constant underlying chirp that sounded disconcertingly close. Dan was accustomed to hearing the same night music back home in Pittsburgh, but usually he had the benefit of a window and walls between him and the creepy crawlies.

He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until he woke up again, startled out of a light doze by the buzzing of his phone. Dan groped for his phone in the darkness, though it was hard to hear over Jordan’s snores and the sound of singing crickets.

When he found it, Dan rubbed his eyes, jolted to greater alertness by the light of the screen. His skin felt drawn and itchy, tightness around his eyes signaling that he needed at least a few more hours to feel truly rested. But he was awake now, and he flicked the lock open on his screen. He stared down at the notification. Facebook. His gut clenched. Two in the morning. Nobody would be messaging him now, he knew
that, and he knew what he would see when he opened the app. But he did it anyway.

Micah had written again, this message more direct than the last:

g et u p th

e watch e rs wi ll find

u

The watchers?

There was no time to reflect. Sudden pinpoints of light bounced along the taut wall of the tent. He shut off his phone, afraid to give off even the slightest glow. Somebody was coming. He recognized the up-and-down bounce of the flashlights moving in time with footsteps.

He clapped a hand over Jordan’s snoring mouth, listening to the grass swish under two pairs of shoes. The yellow circles of light on the tent wall grew as the people got closer. Dan strained to hear their voices, his heart hammering up into his throat.

Get up. The watchers will find you.

How could the Micah impersonator know?

“We shouldn’t be here,” one voice was saying, a soft voice, almost sweet, maybe belonging to a young woman.

“I have to see,” another voice responded. This one was low and decidedly masculine. “He might be my only shot.”

Could they mean Dan? Or maybe Jordan? Dan felt his friend try to twist out of his grasp, but Dan couldn’t let the snoring sabotage his eavesdropping.

“You can’t sneak up on folk like this. It ain’t right.”

The masculine voice let out a sigh, and Dan watched the flashlight beams halt and then finally retreat. The voices grew softer, too, muddling with the hush of the grass as the strangers turned and left. “You’re right. There’s a better way.”

So they weren’t going to be ambushed and killed in the night—that was a plus. But Dan wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know who was following them. He carefully eased out of his sleeping bag and the tent, pocketing his phone to use as a light. He had to be quick, but also quiet. The last thing he wanted was to alert them to his presence.

What if they were armed? What if they abducted him? Jordan and Abby would wake up and think he had abandoned them in the night.

My parents were brave. I can be brave, too.

He followed the flashlight beams as they bounced along the ground. The campsite was mostly empty, just a field at the edge of a dense wood, barrels for trash cans and streetlights marking the boundaries of the dirt parking lot. Dan followed, low to the ground, then dashed for the cover of one of the tall, wide trash bins.

The beams showed little, but in the parking lot they shone over the wide hood of a red muscle car, a Mustang or a Charger or one of those. Abby was the one who knew cars—maybe she could figure it out from the description. The doors closed and the car pulled out without turning on its lights. There wasn’t much in the way of moonlight, but now Dan could tell that it was definitely an old car.

His palms slipped down the side of the trash bin, slick with frightful sweat. He was being followed. Hunted. He wondered
if one of those two had been the motorcyclist, and why they had come to find them in the night only to leave without accomplishing anything.

Dan sighed and kicked at the grass, standing and making his way back to the tent.

Abby and Jordan were waiting for him outside, peering at him with groggy eyes.

“What’s going on? Why were you smushing my face while I slept?” Jordan asked, pressing a yawn into the crook of his elbow.

“We had visitors,” Dan said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “Two. I woke up to another message from Micah. He said something about watchers finding me, and then immediately I heard someone approaching the tent.”

Abby reached for Jordan’s forearm, clutching it.
“What?”

“I know,” Dan said, glancing back at the parking lot. “I don’t like it either. But I don’t know. They didn’t seem hostile. And they left right away—just went back to their car and took off.”

“Okay, that’s it, we are getting our asses to Steve’s right now,” Jordan said hoarsely. “I don’t care how many speed limits I have to break. I’m fed up with drive-through food, I’m fed up with sleeping on the ground, and I am sure as shit fed up with being
followed
.”

Jordan tossed up his hands and stomped back into the tent, gathering his sleeping bag in a frenzy.

But Abby lingered outside, nervously tugging at the edges of her shirt. “Dan . . .”

“Jordan’s right. We’ll be safer at Uncle Steve’s. I don’t like being out here in the open, and it’s a five-hour drive to New Orleans.”

She nodded, reaching out and touching his shoulder lightly. “Do you think this thing with Micah is, well,
real
? The timing just seems so strange for it to be someone pulling a prank. And if you really did have a vision at Arlington School . . .”

That unlikely and unpleasant thought had crossed his mind.

“I have no idea. I just wish I knew how to stop it.”

The moonlight grew muted, white light turning to silver and then gray as clouds settled in heavy clumps in the sky. Abby squeezed his shoulder, but in the darkness, he could barely see her as she ducked into the tent to collect her things.

He looked down at his phone again, staring as it lit up—another message indicator pulsing above the time, the weather, the date . . .

Biting down hard on his lower lip, Dan read the new message.

t urn ba

ck turn b a ck or be foun d

in t h e i r territory

“T
heir territory? What the hell does that mean?” Jordan swerved dangerously, punctuating his questions with the beat of his fist on the wheel.

Dan watched the fields and trees of northern Louisiana give steady ground to the spindlier flora of the bayou, the trees oddly thin and anemic. Long spits of water came up alongside the road, then sometimes dashed under it as the pavement transitioned seamlessly into bridges and then back again.

Still flat, though. Still disgustingly humid.

His head stuck to the window as he tried to peel it away, and the sigh he gave glazed the glass in a tepid fog. “I don’t know, Jordan. I’ve gone over it about a thousand times in my head and it’s not getting me anywhere.”

“Uncle Steve was in the Special Forces. He’ll know what to do,” Jordan said, but Dan didn’t see how that solved anything.

“Plenty of retro cars around,” Abby said from the backseat. She had decided to point out every single vintage car that drove up next to them or trailed behind. After a dozen or so of these alerts, Dan reminded her that he wasn’t at all sure what make or model they were looking for. Abby was unperturbed. “Not seeing many black motorcycles,” she said.