Garden of Darkness (4 page)

I viewed the footage of the two men sliding the body bag into the white van. The faces of the cops, raw and stark. I reversed and watched the section again.

How could the recorded emotion seem so much more intense than the live scene? It amazed me.

Recording an event changed it. I’m not sure how, but it allowed a person to see things they’d missed before. Almost as if the real event wasn’t the real event, and the video was reality.

Some people might argue that the viewing allowed you to sort things out, that it gave you time to focus. I’m not so sure about that. I often find myself toying with the idea that the recording actually brings about a change.

I let it play all the way out.

This time I reached the sad woman with the short black hair. She had a beautiful, angular face and large, soulful eyes. As I watched, she put an unconscious hand to her stomach, and something flitted across her face as her thoughts seemed to turn inward.

Maternal fear.

The grass blew—but not exactly the way it had blown when I was filming. The timing was slightly off; the shadows were deeper. Bits of conversation I hadn’t been aware of at the time could be heard.

“Never seen anything like it.”

“Didn’t look human.”

“What could possibly do that?”

“A wild animal.”

I caught a glimpse of something in the shadows of the yellow woods behind the pregnant woman.

A small figure with long hair.

I blinked and it was gone. I rewound and replayed, but didn’t see anything the second time through.

I tried again.

There.

Stop.

Rewind.

Pause.

A shadowy figure in the woods, appearing in only a few frames. Too vague to make out.

Artifacts often showed up in strange places, especially if tape had been used before. Even new tape wasn’t foolproof when it came to picking up odd shapes that weren’t really there. Freaky, but it happens.

Strange how it looked so much like a person.

Like a little girl . . .

Chapter Four

It was weird how the presence of people created energy. They didn’t even have to be moving around. Most were just standing in line waiting for the museum doors to open, but Graham Stroud could feel them out there, creating a tingle in his brain.

Collective unconscious? Was that it?

“One minute until doors open!”

That cry was carried from the front of the museum and passed from person to person until it reached Graham in the dark depths of the lower level, where he and the others stood guard at the as-yet-to-be unveiled exhibit.

“Last chance,” Amy said. “We could peek. See it before everybody else does.”

The guards were dressed alike, in black slacks and blue polo shirts with the museum logo printed discreetly above the left breast. The room had been given a fresh coat of paint, but it hadn’t been enough to cover up the damp smell of basement. A kind of wet rock combined with mildew. And the lighting didn’t help. Round, recessed ceiling lights brushed a faint orange glow across surfaces and failed to illuminate corners and indentations.

“Are you afraid?” Amy shot him an I-dare-you smile.

He knew her from school. The class clown. Smart, but always stirring up trouble. He was surprised they’d hired her. The other guard—a kid named Bradley—shifted nervously, but didn’t say anything.

Lighting for the room had been a big issue. It was finally decided that low light would keep the exhibit from rotting and disintegrating, and also add to the atmosphere.

Are you afraid?

His dad and grandfather had asked him how he could take this job with all that had happened.

He was drawn to fear. Wasn’t everybody? Was that attraction something left over from the time humans didn’t live in houses or towns? If something scared you, you had to examine it, make sure it was worthy of the fear so it could then be labeled as either harmless or a threat.

Beyond the psychological, Graham just felt a need to get out of the house and make some money. Typical teenager. And maybe that’s all it was. Maybe he was blowing things at home out of proportion. He basically had two choices: museum guard or fast food guy. Wasn’t too hard to figure out why he’d chosen museum guard.

He thought too much. Sometimes he wished his brain would just shut off.

Amy bent down and fingered a velvet corner of the fabric covering a case that stood seven feet high. In the poor light, parts of her face seemed to be missing, and Graham had to try to fill in the blank spots with memory of the way she’d looked moments ago.

He couldn’t do it.

An air horn honked. Amy let out a shriek, dropped the corner of the cloth she’d been clutching, and straightened as if on springs. Bradley giggled. Then the building exploded as the ground-level doors opened.

They looked above their heads—hundreds of footfalls thundered over them, creating one continuous roar as people rushed forward in hopes of getting a good spot.

The room filled.

The mayor and his bunch broke a path through the crowd. A TV station crew followed with a camera. After a short but boring speech about the museum and tourism and the revitalization of Tuonela, along with something about embracing history, Mayor McBride stepped forward and with a flourish whipped the velvet fabric away to reveal a glass box containing an upright mummy dressed in an antique black suit.

The Pale Immortal.

That brought about a gasp, followed by a long silence.

Someone finally let out a murmur that broke the spell. Conversation gradually increased until the room hummed.

Graham thought he’d been prepared. How bad could it be? He’d seen mummies before. On TV, and at other museums. Hell, he’d even sat beside this guy. But it had been dark, and at the time he’d thought he was
alive.

Just a piece of leather in a suit.

But as he looked at the corpse, he wondered if people like his dad and Rachel Burton had been right: The Pale Immortal was nothing to take lightly or put on display.

Patrons filed through.

Some were nervous. Some giggled. A couple of little kids cried, and their mothers whisked them away. Who would bring a little kid to see a shriveled-up dead guy? That was evil.

People kept coming.

So far so good. Nobody was breaking any rules. Nobody was trying to step over the rope or sneak in food. Then he spotted a girl with bright red hair dressed in thrift shop clothes, pulling a camera from an army green messenger bag.

“Miss?”
Miss
?

Should he call her
miss
? She wasn’t old enough for
ma’am
. “You can’t take pictures in here.” They’d allowed one news crew inside. That was it.

She removed the lens cap. “I don’t have a flash.”

“That’s not the point.”

She was holding a small video camera. The green light was on.
Damn
. Now what was he supposed to do? “No videotaping.”

“Oh? I thought we just weren’t supposed to use a flash.”

She was playing dumb while she let the camera run, cradling it unobtrusively at her side, the lens pointed in the direction of the display case.

He stepped between the camera and the mummy. “No cameras.”

He was only a few feet from her. He’d guess she was twenty-one or twenty-two. Not from Tuonela. Definitely not from Tuonela. She even smelled different. Sweet, like a mandarin orange.

Her gaze shifted from his face to his name tag, back to his face. “Stroud?”

He could see her connecting the dots, figuring out who he was.

Times like these he thought maybe he shouldn’t have changed his name to Stroud. Maybe he should have kept his mother’s name. Or maybe something completely new. He’d be going off to college in the fall, and it would be nice to ditch the freak label. Leave it in Tuonela, where it belonged.

Yep, he was bitter. Young and bitter. His girlfriend couldn’t hang out with him because of his history. He didn’t really blame her parents. If he had kids, he wouldn’t let them hang out with him either. But without Isobel’s stable influence, and with his dad doing the stuff he was doing, Graham was pissed off most of the time.

“I know the camera’s running,” he said.

Her cheeks turned bright red and she laughed.

Maybe now that she knew who he was, she’d pay attention to him.

Now
that
was funny.

She shut it off. “Sorry.” Her smile was lopsided and sheepish. She replaced the lens cap and stuck the camera in her bag.

“We’re making a documentary,” she told him. “Part of a senior project at the University of Minnesota.”

Looking for a freak show. They weren’t the first or the last.

“Are you related to Evan Stroud?”

“He’s my dad.” No sense in lying. She’d find out anyway.

“We’d love to interview him for the project.” She pulled out a business card. “We’d love to interview both of you.”

Interview his dad? “That won’t happen.” He tried to hand the card back, but she wouldn’t take it.

He’d expected things to get better once he found his dad, but in a lot of ways they were worse.

“We’ll be in town for two weeks and are staying at the Tuonela Inn. My cell phone number is on the card.”

When he saw she wasn’t going to take the card back, he pocketed it. It would have been rude to throw it away in front of her. “You’re a senior at the U of M?”

“Not me.”

She twisted around and looked over her shoulder for someone, then back. “I’m not a student. Well, I was, but I dropped out.” She shrugged as if to say,
You know how it is with college.
“I’m working for some students. They’re back there somewhere in that mob. They’re going to be really pissed that I didn’t get any footage of this. It’s the main reason we came. They’ll probably fire me and dump me without a dime.”

She was playing him. He wasn’t an idiot.

“It’s not like we’re selling it to
Geraldo.
Nobody will see it other than the professors. It’s for school.”

The room was packed; people were growing impatient. Someone bumped the girl from behind.

“You’d better get moving,” he told her.

“Kristin!”

Near the entry to the mummy room a girl waved both arms in the air. “Did you get it?” she shouted over the crowd.

Kristin turned back to Graham and rolled her eyes. “An interview with your dad would really save my ass.” She adjusted the strap on her messenger bag. “Call me.” She moved past him and the mob surged forward.

Graham didn’t want her to get in trouble and lose her job. Maybe he’d let her interview him, but he wasn’t letting anybody near his dad.

Chapter Five

Rachel covered the skinned body with a sheet. Without removing her blood-splattered disposable gown, she left the basement autopsy suite and stepped into the hallway, where Mayor McBride and Alastair Stroud waited.

She’d invited them inside for the exam. The mayor had passed. The police chief had given up after two minutes. Her assistant had lasted ten before dashing from the room.

The carcass hadn’t bothered her. Not even the smell, which was strange given her condition and the way her stomach heaved when she caught a whiff of strong perfumes.

Both men glanced at her belly, then back up, discomfort on their faces.

Except for a couple of friends, nobody in town had questioned her about the pregnancy. And nobody—
nobody
—knew the identity of the father.

The mayor pocketed his cell phone. “Well?”

He was an outsider and a relative newcomer, if you used the Tuonela time line. He’d lived there about ten years. A young businessman with a lot of plans for change, and he didn’t want those plans screwed up.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Rachel thought about her moving truck parked outside. How far would she be by now? Halfway across Minnesota? Selfish of her, maybe. But she wasn’t thinking of just herself anymore.

Alastair Stroud patted his shirt pocket and produced a small notebook and pen. “Was it a wild animal?”

“It was, wasn’t it?” the mayor asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But it could have been, right?”

“The skin was removed quickly and efficiently, with what looked like great precision. I don’t know how something like that could have been achieved. I’m not sure the most skilled surgeon in the world could have done something like that. And if it could be done, it would take hours. It would be tedious and sloppy. Skin will sometimes slip off after a body has been dead for a few days. I often remove the entire skin glove in order to get good prints, but this . . .” She shook her head.

“The husband said she was gone for only a short time before he found her.” Alastair clicked his pen. “What could do that?”

“Coyotes,” McBride said from the comfort of a stylish suit. “Had to be coyotes. I grew up on a farm. I know what a pack of them can do in just a matter of minutes.”

“I couldn’t find any evidence of bite marks. Coyotes would have eaten at least part of the body.”

“Maybe the husband scared them off,” Stroud suggested. “Maybe it wasn’t coyotes, but wild dogs. Or even tame dogs. Tame dogs don’t kill for food, they kill for fun.”

True.

“Chief Stroud and I have been talking, and we’re hoping you’ll stick around until we can find a replacement,” the mayor said.

Finding a replacement wouldn’t be easy, since she played the unusual dual role of both coroner and medical examiner.

“It would bring some reassurance to residents and visitors,” the mayor continued. “We don’t want to alarm people, not when we’re just getting the whole tourist thing off the ground. Your departure, on the heels of this ghastly death, will look odd.”

“But I was leaving before it ever occurred.”

“Most people won’t know that. Most people will look at it and think you ran. That maybe you were scared. And we know there’s nothing to be scared of. I’m going to put together a team. We’ll scour the area and find the coyotes or dogs and round them up.”