Darkness (41 page)

He froze, his whole body breaking out in a sweat.

He listened, but the sound didn’t come again, and finally he twisted the key in the crypt’s lock and hurried back to Duval, who was waiting by the car.

“What took you so long?” the deputy demanded.

Fred Childress glanced back toward the graveyard. “I heard something.”

Duval’s eyes narrowed. “You sure?”

Childress nodded silently. Now it was Judd Duval who gazed out into the cemetery. “I don’t—”

He cut off his own words.

He’d barely missed it; indeed, he still wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. Just the faintest flicker of movement in the shadows. “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’m gonna have a look around.”

“He heard me,” Kelly whispered, but immediately fell silent as Michael held a finger to his lips and motioned to her to follow him.

Moving quickly, he started back toward the front gate of the cemetery, slipping as silently as a cat through the deep shadows cast by the mausoleums. A few moments later he paused, and as Kelly crouched beside him, slid his head around the corner of the tomb behind which they were concealed. He saw nothing at first, but then a shadowy form stepped out onto the path fifty yards away, crossed, and disappeared again. Michael straightened up, glancing quickly around, then squatted down next to Kelly.

“We’re only twenty feet from the gate. He’s looking in the wrong place, so we can get out. Just follow me.”

He peered around the corner once more, saw nothing, and made his move. Staying low, he darted toward the gates, then dropped down behind the wall.

“Maybe we better go home,” Kelly whispered as she crouched beside him once more. But Michael shook his head.

“I want to know who it is. Come on.”

He started off again, staying close to the shelter of the low wall that surrounded the graveyard until he came to the unpaved road that led around to the back. Across the dirt track was a thick stand of pines, and Michael darted into it, stopping only as the deep shadows of the trees closed around him.

“What are we going to do?” Kelly asked.

“Wait,” Michael told her.

Judd Duval silently crisscrossed the cemetery, his eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of life. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a movement, but even before he could start toward it, the lithe form of a cat leaped off the roof of one of the stone buildings and disappeared into the darkness. Chuckling hollowly at his own nervousness, he went back to the car where Fred Childress was waiting.

“Nothin’,” he said as he slid into the car next to the mortician.

“There was something,” Childress insisted, starting the engine. “It wasn’t just the sound. I could feel someone watching me.”

Duval’s lips curled into a mocking sneer. “Are all grave diggers scared of ghosts, or is it just you?”

Childress’s prim lips tightened. He put the car in gear, but left the headlights off until they reached the main road. He paused once more, searching in both directions for any sign of another car.

Nothing.

At last he turned the headlights on and pulled out onto the pavement, pressing the accelerator. The Cadillac’s powerful engine surged, and the car shot away into the darkness.

With every yard he put between himself and the cemetery, Childress felt his sense of relief grow.

Perhaps, after all, he’d heard nothing.

“Did you see who it was?” Kelly asked as the car disappeared down the road and the two of them stepped out of the shelter of the pines.

Michael nodded, his mind racing. The driver had been Fred Childress. But there was someone else in the
car with him, someone he hadn’t been able to see. “It was Mr. Childress,” he said. “He owns the funeral home. I couldn’t see the other one.”

“What would they be doing out here in the middle of the night?”

“And how come they didn’t turn on their lights?”

They crossed the dirt road again, and a minute later were back in the cemetery, making their way quickly along the paths that wound through the tombs, coming finally to the vault in which Jenny’s coffin had been placed that afternoon. Michael stepped close to it and tried to pull the door of the crypt open, but it held fast.

Looking down, he frowned, and stepped back.

Crouching low, he studied the close-cropped grass in front of the mausoleum. Though it was barely visible in the dim moonlight, he thought he could see the faint outline of something that had pressed down upon the grass only moments ago.

A coffin.

“Look,” he whispered to Kelly. “See? Look how the grass is pressed down here.”

Kelly dropped down next to Michael, her eyes scanning the area in front of the sepulcher. “Here?” she breathed.

Michael’s eyes followed her hand. “There was something sitting there not very long ago. Watch.” Using the palm of his own hand, he pressed down on the lawn, and when he lifted his hand away, its print remained clearly visible for a moment before the grass began to straighten up again, until, like the larger impression in front of the crypt, it was barely visible. Indeed, even as they watched, both of the faint impressions disappeared in the weak light of the moon.

Kelly looked up at him. “They took her, didn’t they?”

Michael nodded.

“What are we going to do?” Kelly asked as they both stood up, shivering despite the heat of the night.

The words came into Michael’s mind unbidden, as if they’d been there forever, waiting for the right moment
to rise up into his consciousness. “Kill them,” he replied, his voice empty. “We’re going to kill them all.”

Abstractly, as if observing himself from afar, Michael wondered why he felt nothing as he uttered the words.

And then he remembered.

He felt nothing because he had no soul.

Long ago, right after he had been born, it had been stolen from him.

Now it was time to get it back.

Barbara Sheffield stared out the window at the silver crescent of the moon. Sleep would not come. She had lain awake for what seemed like hours, feeling the exhaustion of the day in every bone of her body, but her mind refused to let her rest.

Kelly’s words echoed in her mind.
If I ever find out who my real mother is, I wish it could turn out to be you
.

Then Amelie Coulton’s:
She ain’t dead any more’n my own little baby is!

But it was impossible. It
had
to be impossible! She couldn’t try to replace Jenny with Kelly Anderson!

Yet the thought refused to be put aside. Barbara slipped out of bed. She went to Jenny’s room first, standing in the doorway, her vision blurring with tears as she looked once more at all of Jenny’s things.

Her stuffed animals, propped up on her bed the way Jenny always arranged them, were sitting against the wall so that they seemed to be staring at Barbara with their big sad eyes.

The closet door stood open, and Barbara could see the row of dresses hanging inside, and the shoes, set in neat pairs, beneath them.

Pictures covered the walls, the colorful scribblings that had always made Jenny so proud and which now made Barbara’s heart melt, knowing there would be no more.

A sob catching in her throat, Barbara turned out the light and went to the kitchen, where she put on a kettle of water to make herself a cup of coffee.

When she went to the living room and pulled the family picture album out of the bottom drawer of her mother’s antique sideboard, she told herself that she wanted nothing more than to look at some of the pictures of Jenny, to replace the haunting image of Jenny in her casket with one of her daughter when she’d been happy and full of life.

But a few minutes later, after she’d made her coffee and settled herself at the kitchen table, she found she couldn’t look at the pictures of Jenny—the wounds were still too fresh, the pain too sharp.

She paged slowly through the album and found herself stopping each time she came to a picture of Tisha.

She found herself studying the pictures of her niece carefully, comparing the images in the album to the one in her mind of Kelly Anderson.

Their resemblance was unquestionable.

The lips were the same, full and generously curved.

The same high cheekbones and arched brows.

And yet there were differences, too.

Tisha was much pudgier than Kelly, but then, her mother had always been heavier than Barbara.

And Tisha was short, like her father.

Still …

No! She was imagining it all, denying her grief by making up fantasies!

She turned the pages carefully back to the beginning of the album. But before she closed its cover, her eyes fell on the first picture she’d put into the book.

It was an eight-by-ten enlargement of a picture that had been taken at the Fourth of July picnic sixteen years earlier, which she’d captioned “Last Days of Freedom—Of course I can barely walk!” She smiled at the image of herself in the last days of her pregnancy with Sharon, sitting on the picnic table, Craig beside her.

They’d looked so young then, all of them.

She began looking at the people in the picture. Some of them had changed so much that she hardly recognized them.

There was Arlette Delong, wearing the same beehive hairdo then that she still wore today. Except in the picture, Arlette’s elaborate coiffure didn’t have the look of desperation about it that it had taken on lately. Back then Arlette had been a pretty young woman—now, sixteen years later, her figure had thickened, and her middle-aged features had hardened from the long hours in her café. But her hair had remained the same—teased and back-combed, then sprayed solid. The only thing missing in the picture was the pencil that Arlette was now in the habit of implanting in the platinum mass.

There, too, were Billy-Joe and Myrtle Hawkins, Myrtle almost as pregnant with Buddy as Barbara had been with Sharon. Billy-Joe’s handsome features had all but dissolved since then, his nose now puffy from the long years of drinking, his once-flat stomach having long ago given way to a beer belly.

Barbara frowned, her eyes coming to rest on Warren Phillips, who was standing with a group of other men under a pine tree to the left of the picnic table at which Barbara herself was sitting.