Dumping Grounds (Joshua Stokes Mysteries Book 1) (24 page)

Upon hearing Emma’s screams, both Davis and Calvert rushed into the house with guns drawn. It took them a moment to find the entrance to the embalming room and by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, Emma had stopped screaming.

Joshua heard their footsteps behind him and attempted to get to his feet, but his attempt to get up brought a sharp pain to his ribcage and he yelled out.

Davis holstered his gun, grabbed Joshua under both arm and dragged him through the doorway and back into the room where Emma lay, unconscious, on the table.

Calvert stepped through the doorway and shined a flashlight, which he kept on a strap on his belt, into the room. After the initial shock of what he saw, he fumbled around on the wall for a light switch. Light flooded the room, lighting up even the farthest corner.

“Sheriff, you’re gonna want to take a look at this shit,” he said, his face an ashen gray color.

Davis helped Joshua to his feet and then both stepped toward the door. Calvert stepped to the side to let them pass into the room.

Davis whistled. “I’ll be dammed Sheriff, I think it’s some sort a trophy room,” he said, gazing around.

Davis was an avid reader of anything pertaining to law enforcement; he also liked to read True Crime and Detective magazines.

What Joshua saw turned his empty stomach inside out. It was all he could do not to throw up, and if he had had anything to throw up, he probably would have.

“Good Lord!” Calvert mumbled, “Sheriff, some of these must have been in here for a long time. Those over there,” he said pointing to Joshua’s left, “have several inches of dust on em.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Joshua commanded. “Metcalf and the coroner will need to get in here to process this room,” he said as his eyes tried to take in the entire bizarre room.

Women’s heads sat atop shelves that lined the walls of the room. All of the newer heads had the same haircut and color; they all looked very similar in appearance, which was different from the older heads.

The most freakish of the heads though, for Joshua, was the goat heads. They were on the shelves, placed between the older heads (those with the most dust and driest skin) and the newer heads. Joshua knew they had to be the heads from James Fortner’s goats. They had never found them, just the bodies of the goats remained.

There were also a few other small animal skulls on the shelves. Joshua figured these were the boy’s first kills, before they graduated to killing human beings. However, the boys could not have put the oldest heads there, unless they dug them up out of the cemeteries, although, that was definitely a possibility.

What really made Joshua sick to his stomach, were the lips of the women. Someone had used thick black thread to lace the women’s lips closed. The stitches crisscrossed the lips drawing them into a pursed pose, as if they were about to kiss. The memory of his dream or vision of the woman’s apparition who came up on his porch from the river entered his mind.

Joshua’s eyes were drawn to the newest additions on the shelves. “These last five here, probably belong to our latest victims,” he mused aloud.

Looking around the room, he saw a set of double doors on one wall. On another, he saw a single door that was slightly ajar. Joshua reached for his gun, but it was not in his holster. He looked down to where he had fallen and there it lay partially under the bottom shelf on the wall nearest the door.

“Calvert, take that flashlight you got there and see where that door leads,” Joshua said motioning toward the door.

“You want me to go with him?” Davis asked.

“No, I need you to run to your patrol car and radio for an ambulance for the girl. Tell them to send Metcalf’s investigation team; we’re gonna need em.”

Joshua picked up his revolver and then went back into the other room to check on Emma. He was sickened when he saw her in the overhead light.

She was still unconscious, but that was a good thing. He did not know how she was even still alive; they had already begun sewing her lips together!

Joshua picked up the dress that was lying on the floor and draped it over her. Then he bent down to get a closer look at her mouth. A large needle with thick black thread hung off the side of the table and swung idly from her lips.

Looking around, he saw a pair of snips lying on a small table near the sink. Joshua took the snips and pulling the knotted end of the thread out slightly from her lip, he cut it. He then eased the thread on through her lips until it was completely out. He hoped it did not leave too bad a physical scar, but he knew there would definitely be mental scars after what she had been through the last few days.

Just as Joshua finished getting the thread out of Emma’s lips, Calvert came back into the room from the room of heads.

“You’re not gonna believe this, Sheriff, but that door goes to a tunnel that comes out down to the river!”

“That don’t surprise me none at all. I figured they had several escape routes from this place. Besides, I believe this was an old cotton plantation and many of them had tunnels that lead to the river.”

“Yes, Sir, you’re right about that.”

“I know I’m right. What did you see when you got to the river?”

“It comes out near an old dock that was back up in a slew. I could see the main river from there though and could tell that it is used a lot. If they had a boat down there, which I’m sure they did, it and them was long gone by the time I got there.”

“Go back through there and check where those double doors lead to,” Joshua ordered, and watched as Calvert disappeared through the doorway. Within two minutes, he was back. He reported that beyond the double doors was another large room.

“It’s creepy as hell, Sheriff.That room is divided into several other rooms at the far end of it. The biggest room has coffins and such as that for selecting for a funeral, I reckon. There is an office and the main door leads outside to the west side of the house. There’s a sign out there that has “The Rising Sun Funeral Home” painted on it.”

“So that was the name of it. I really wasn’t sure what it was called back in the day.

As soon as the ambulance gets here and takes the girl, we can start searching for them boys that done all of this.”

“Either which way they left that room, led outside, so they gone for sure.” said Calvert.

“But not for good,” Joshua said, “because if it’s the last thing I do, I’m gonna catch those boys and string em up by their balls!”

A moaning noise drew Joshua’s attention back to Emma, who was regaining consciousness.

Emma’s brain felt like a mesh of cobwebs and there were hundreds of spiders in there, weaving away, making more and more webs.

She could actually feel her brainwaves pulsing each time their tiny little feet took a step.

Emma could hear voices speaking, but as hard as she tried, she could not focus her mind on them.

The people she heard sounded as if they were all around her. She could not move her arms or her legs and her body felt plastered to whatever was against her back.

Emma struggled, trying to get up. She knew she needed to move, but could not do so.

When she finally opened her eyes, she saw the outline of someone standing over her.

“Emma, are you awake?” Emma heard the man’s voice but could not focus on his face. He was a gray mass in front of her.

When she tried to speak, her tongue felt thick and dry, but she managed to mumble something that, even to her ears, sounded warbled and quavering.

What Emma intended to tell him, was about the spiders in her head. She remembered screaming when she first felt them and could not reach them with her hands to knock them away.

She wanted so badly for him to make the spiders stop weaving.

“Emma, can you hear me? It’s me, Sheriff Stokes. An ambulance is on its way to take you to the hospital.” Joshua was not sure if she understood him or not. He did not know the extent of what was going on with her, but he was sure they had drugged her in some form or another.

That was how they could sew her mouth shut and her awake.

Joshua heard a commotion behind him and when he turned, he saw Deputy Davis coming down the stairs ahead of two men with a gurney.

“Sheriff, I hope you didn’t mind that I waited on them to show them where to come. The dispatcher called the substation in Citronelle and got them to send someone that was closer.” Davis reported. Joshua simply shook his head no, he did not mind.

When the ambulance attendants reached the bottom of the stairs, they both stopped and stared. They looked plumb dumbfounded and Joshua was about to tell them to snap to it, when he saw someone else coming down the stairs with a medical bag. Well, maybe they did send someone that knows what to do, thought Joshua.

The last man down the stairs was a paramedic and he immediately began asking questions about Emma.

“All I know for sure,” Joshua told him “is that she has been drugged with something and they attempted to sew her mouth closed.” the medic went to Emma’s side.

Joshua watched as the paramedic started an IV on Emma and began administering a saline solution.

He told Joshua that it should flush out her system and he hoped it would weaken the effects of the drugs. Now that Emma was in capable hands, Joshua turned to the matter of catching the lunatics that had done this to her.

The ambulance attendants loaded Emma onto the gurney and took her up and out of the house; out of harms way, she was headed to the hospital. Joshua was no longer concerned for Emma’s safety; he was ready to hunt.

He called in every available man, even the Sheriff’s Flotilla because they were familiar with the river waters.

Joshua was under no delusions that catching Earl and Vernon was going to be easy. They had a pack mentality and were nothing short of being animals; wolves are what came to mind. They were just as conniving as wolves too. As long as they were together, they would be hard to stop.

He knew the boys traveled the river often and probably knew every backwater slue from there to the Gulf of Mexico, but Joshua was a Wolver from way back. He had hunted down men that were just as crafty as those two were and he intended to get them before they could do harm to another person.

He sent orders for his deputies to station themselves at every road and railway intersection along the river, even the narrowest of pig-trails was to be covered. He wanted them to thoroughly search upriver and downriver from the Rising Sun. He told them to shoot first and ask questions later. He knew the brothers had a good hour start on them and they could have possibly left the river, but he hoped not.

They probably did not have the forethought to plan that far in advance. Most likely, the boys never thought they would be discovered, much less driven from their home, but they had. Now, there was no turning back, they had to surface eventually.

Deputy’s Davis and Calvert had already begun a search of the area behind the old plantation house. Joshua figured there might be more than one entrance to the tunnel that came into the basement of the house. He even sent a deputy to the courthouse to see if they could locate the original plans for the house.

He hoped the architects design would show a plat of the land and the rivers relationship to the house.

Knowing the relationship of the river to the house would make likely tunnels easier to find.

Joshua knew it was a long shot. Those days, many plantations were built on the spot by slave labor. The owners would simply draw the design he wanted on a piece of paper, then oversee and instruct the slaves to build it. Usually, only rich, educated planters hired architects.

Since the home was ornate, with carved intricate fretwork around the porches and balconies Joshua figured the original owner was rich; he hoped so.

He wanted badly to be on the river hunting Vernon and Earl, but felt compelled to stay put. He’d issued orders and sent all of his deputies out to try to intercept them along the river. The coroner had not yet made it to the house, but John Metcalf was in the basement busily doing his job.

Joshua left Metcalf and walked to his pickup to get a pack of cigarettes. He had lit a cigarette and was sitting in his truck smoking when he remembered seeing a large barn a couple of hundred feet to the west of the main house. He was sure the deputies had already searched the barn, but he had a notion if there were tunnels leading from the house to the river, then there was probably a tunnel from the house to the barn.

Joshua searched through his truck and found a flashlight behind the seat. He was surprised the batteries were not dead. He could not remember the last time he had used it. He eased back into the house and down into the basement. John Metcalf was in the “trophy” room noting each severed head and its placement on the shelves. Joshua nudged Metcalf then put his finger to his lips in a “don’t say anything” gesture. He took the notebook from Metcalf, found a clean sheet and wrote what he wanted to tell him on the notepad. Metcalf nodded that he understood.

“Well, John, I reckon you’ll have it to yourself awhile. I’m headed to Earlville to see if they’ve captured those boys yet.” he winked.

“Alright, Sheriff; I’ll finish up here in a bit and then be on my way. Catch you on the flipside.” Metcalf said, and then turned back toward the shelves, but not before unsnapping his holstered revolver. If Joshua’s idea was correct, those boys may be just out of sight, waiting on an opportunity to get back inside the house.