Harmony Black (3 page)

“Now,” Jessie said, “he uses his big brain to fight for the forces of good, seeking redemption for his tragically squandered criminal youth.”

Kevin touched his hand to his chest and bowed his head. “I am but your humble slave, m’lady.”

“Ha.” Jessie slapped his shoulder and walked back toward me. “You
wish
you were.”

I blinked. “You . . . pulled an informant
out
of Witness Protection?”

“I needed a hacker.” She shrugged. “Turned out he was useful, so I kept him.”

“What about your fourth? Linder said you lost a member recently?”

Jessie’s smile deflated like a pinpricked balloon, and the room fell silent.

“The job Linder pulled us off for
this
one,” Kevin muttered, staring at his laptop screen as he sank down in his chair.

“We’ll get back to it,” Jessie told him, her voice low. “Don’t you worry about that. There will be some righteous fuckin’ payback, just as soon as we take care of business here. Little babies going missing? That’s gotta come first.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s just . . . ”

“I know.” Jessie looked my way and gave a little shake of her head. Dangerous territory. I recognized the signs and resolved to mind my footing.

“We should get started,” I said, eager for a change of subject.

“Quite right,” April said, gesturing across the table. “Kevin, set up the projector, please. If one of you ladies would dim the lights, we can begin the briefing.”

THREE

W
e sat around the table in the projector’s silent glow, watching the images Kevin’s laptop tossed up on the blank white wall. The first was a police station booking photo: the woman I’d seen in the still from the nanny cam, but instead of blood, those were real tears staining her cheeks.

“Helen Gunderson,” April said. “Twenty-six years old, single mother, lifelong resident of Talbot Cove. Woke up to find her son, Elliot, missing from his crib. She immediately reported it to the authorities, leading to her arrest once they played back the video from the nanny cam in his room. Kevin?”

He tapped a few keys and a grainy video flooded the wall. Elliot slept in his crib. A shrill, slow creak groaned from somewhere off camera, and then a shadow shuffled into the frame. It was a woman, hunched at the shoulders, bare arms spindly and her hands curled into hooks. She whispered to herself—some kind of raspy, singsong drone—but I couldn’t make out a single word.

Just like the first time I’d heard the thing speak, thirty years ago.

She reached into the crib, scooping out the sleeping infant inside, and cradled him in her arms. She turned back, finally facing the camera. It was hard to see unless you knew what to look for—unless you knew what you were looking at—but I couldn’t miss the thin trails of blood leaking from her bottom eyelids. They rolled down her cheeks and her chin, dripping onto the sleeping baby’s upturned face.

The creature masquerading as Helen Gunderson shuffled out of the room. Then that same shrill creak, and silence.

Kevin froze the video on an empty cradle.

“Ladies and gentleman,” April said grimly, “meet target designation Hostile Entity 17: the Bogeyman. Unfortunately for Ms. Gunderson, she’s been charged with faking the abduction of her son and hiding the child. Unless we can find her boy, he will be presumed dead, and his mother will be prosecuted for a murder she didn’t commit.”

“Not the first time that’s happened,” Kevin said, tapping away. Faded newspaper clippings sprouted up over the paused video. “Thirty years ago, over a two-week period, there were five infant and toddler abductions in Talbot Cove. At one incident, neighbors out for a midnight stroll saw the ‘father’ through a window, taking his child from the crib, though he told the police—truthfully, as it happens—he’d slept through the night. He was arrested, handed a life sentence, died in a prison-yard brawl. He went to his grave protesting his innocence. Four of the abductions remain officially unsolved, and the last, whence we take H. E. 17’s lovely nickname, turned violent.”

L
OCAL
S
HERIFF
M
URDERED BY
H
OME
I
NVADER
screamed the headline as Kevin magnified it on the wall. The black-and-white picture of my father was a file photo, taken in happier times.

“Now, Sheriff Harry Black was home with his wife, Elise, and his daughters, Angie and Harmony, when . . . ” Kevin’s voice trailed off. He looked my way.

“Linder didn’t tell you,” I said, answering the question on his face.

Jessie slumped back in her chair. “Fuck. Another Linder surprise. It must be a Tuesday.”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin said. “When I complained about getting pulled onto this case earlier, I mean, this has gotta be personal for you—”

I crossed my arms. “It was a long time ago.”

Jessie fixed her bright-blue eyes on me. I realized something strange, just then: in the last ten minutes, I hadn’t seen her blink once.

“Well,” she said, “seeing as the newspaper account is probably bullshit, how about you tell us what
really
went down that night?”

“
Harmony,” I remembered my mother whispering from the doorway, “get behind me. Now.”

I couldn’t stop staring at her bleeding doppelgänger, still holding an expectant hand out to me, cradling my baby sister in her other arm.

“You come, too,” it rasped again. “Come to Mama.”

I took an unsteady step to one side, backing toward the corner of the nursery, getting out of the line of fire. Something swirled in the room, a slow-building maelstrom of pressure that made my ears pop and my teeth ache.

“You,” my mother said, locking eyes with her twin.
“Put her down.”

The creature clutched Angie tightly.
“Mine.”

The unseen winds churned faster, building like a cyclone I could only feel under my skin. My blood shivered. It was the first time I’d ever touched the currents of magic, and I’d never forget the sensation, just like I’d never forget the look of absolute rage on my mother’s face.

“Put. Her.
Down!
” she roared, lunging out with both hands, pressing her open palms toward the creature. The air rippled and turned to spun glass. Translucent, scalloped spears of hardened air blossomed like ice crystals, spearing toward the creature, harpooning its stomach and shoulder.

Blood guttered from its wounds as it twisted and thrashed, breaking free, still clinging desperately to Angie with one arm. The baby was awake now and squalling, struggling. The creature raised its free hand and brought it down in a smashing fist; my mother’s spell broke, the crystallized air shattering into a rain of broken glass on the shag carpet. Then it hissed and charged, coming for my mother like a freight train, lashing out with a brutal backhand and sending her sprawling to the floor.

I ran after it. I don’t know what I thought I could do. I just knew I had to try.

My father heard the shouting. He was in the kitchen at the end of the hall, wearing his boxer shorts and clutching his service revolver. Coming to the rescue.

The creature barreled toward him. He saw its face and paused, just for a heartbeat, confused.

“Elise?” he said. “What’s wrong with—”

It lashed out with fingernails suddenly turned long, hard, and black and slashed his throat open.

I think I screamed. I don’t remember that part. I just remember being down on my knees on the cold linoleum, grabbing my father’s chest like I could hug him back to life, listening to him drown in his own blood.

The choking, gurgling sounds stopped. There was something left in his eyes, one last spark of light, and he gave me the faintest smile as his big, strong fingers squeezed my arm. Then he was gone.

Cherry- and snow-colored lights strobed outside the kitchen window. My mother took hold of my shoulders, pulled me off my father’s dead body, and turned me to look at her. She fought through her own tears, making sure I listened.

“You were in your room the whole time. You didn’t hear or see anything. Harmony, these men . . . you can’t tell them the truth. They won’t believe you. Just say you were in your room.
Promise
me.”

The house filled up with uniforms, big clunky shoes tromping everywhere, the air filled with crackles and radio static. Barry, one of my father’s deputies, took me into my room. He was a kind-faced man, still carrying some baby fat in his twenties, and he put a blanket over my shivering shoulders and brought me a mug of hot chocolate.

My mother spun them the only story they could accept. In her version, the intruder was a strung-out junkie with a straight razor. Probably somebody Dad had busted, looking for revenge or just cash for a quick fix.

“Don’t you worry,” Barry told me, crouching down beside my chair to talk face-to-face. “We’re gonna get this guy, and we’re gonna get your little sister back. Every policeman in this city is going to be searching, night and day. I’m also leaving people to watch the house, to keep you and your mom safe.”

Even then, I knew better. The word
safe
never meant anything to me after that night, ever again.

“Officer Barry?” I said, clutching the hot mug between my tiny hands as he stood to leave.

“Yeah, hon?”

I looked up at him. “It was the Bogeyman.”

He just shook his head and gave me a sad smile.

“It was just a bad man, sweetie.” He tapped the star on his chest. “This badge means it’s my job to find bad people and make them go away so they can’t hurt anybody else. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

He never did, though. That was the last kidnapping in Talbot Cove. The case went cold, then it gathered dust, then it rotted away in the dark.

“
And that was the end of it,” I told them. “Mom’s family had some money, and roots in Long Island, so we moved out of town about a year later. I’ve never been back.”

“You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Jessie told me. It wasn’t a question.

I thought about it. Nodded. “Suppose I have.”

“Distressingly,” April said, “this isn’t the creature’s
second
emergence. Kevin?”

The projector flickered. My father’s face disappeared from the wall, replaced by an older, faded, and yellowed front page from the
Great Lakes Tribune
. The headline trumpeted the triumph of Allied powers against the Nazi war machine, but Kevin slid the focus to a column buried farther down the page.

Talbot Cove Infant Stolen from Crib;

Second Abduction in a Week Stokes

Local Fears

“I went back as far as I could,” Kevin said, “but this is the last time I found anything concrete. This has been happening since at
least
the 1940s. It comes out, snatches a handful of kids, then goes dormant again. No telling what it does with them. I mean, I could think of some possibilities, but . . . ”

He trailed off, looking my way. I rested my palms on the table.

“We need to get something straight right now,” I said. “One, I’m not made of porcelain. Two, I finished mourning my sister’s death a long, long time ago. If any of you feel like you can’t say something in front of me, that means we won’t be able to work together. And that’d be a damn shame, because right this minute, while you tiptoe around the truth, there’s a missing kid out there who needs us. I’m here to help.
Let
me.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Jessie nodded slowly, her lips curling into an amused smile. “All right. Respect. Kevin, what else have you got for us?”

“Something freaky,” he said, typing away and pulling up a neatly organized spreadsheet. “While I was combing the newspaper archives, I mostly looked at police blotters, right? Well, I noticed that when the creature is active, the blotters got bigger. And, well, kinda samey.”

“What are we looking at?” Jessie said. Beside her, April leaned in, her eyes widening.

“It’s not
just
kidnapping kids,” Kevin said.

FOUR

“
This is a sampling of crime statistics from Talbot Cove before, during, and after the 1980s incident, and from last month through yesterday,” Kevin said.

I had a degree in forensic accounting, but I didn’t need it to read these numbers. They laid it all out, crystal clear.

“The crime rates
spike
,” I said.

Kevin nodded. “I know, right? This is a sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere. Not exactly a hotbed of violence and vice. But in both cases, starting about a week before the first abduction, you see a distinct rise in criminal activity.”

“
Specific
crimes,” April mused. “Domestic violence, battery, child abuse. Crimes against family. Look: burglary and theft? Doesn’t change one bit. Homicide rises a little bit, and I’d wager those are all cases of someone murdering a family member.”

“Way ahead of you, Doc. I already checked, and that’s a bingo. Near as I can tell, while our target is awake and hunting, anybody with a predisposition to take a swing at their spouse and kids finds it a lot harder to hold back. Case after case: it’s repeat offenders, even some people who were in therapy for years. This thing is influencing people’s minds across an entire city.”

“Baltimore all over again,” Jessie muttered. She looked my way and added, “Demon possessed a mall cop, right around Christmas shopping season. Shoppers started getting Ebenezer Scrooge levels of greedy, like, shanking one another over the last discount TV set.”

April picked up her pen and flipped to the next page of her notebook, jotting down a few quick words.

“This is good information,” April said, “but it doesn’t bring us closer to finding the target. We know what it does. We need to know
why
.”

“Are we agreed—” Kevin said, then paused. He shot a guilty look my way. I arched an eyebrow at him. “Are we agreed, um, that it’s most likely using the kids for a, uh, food source? I mean, since we’ve never found any bodies.”

I held his gaze. “That’s my theory.”

“Law of averages,” Jessie said. “Considering how many critters we’ve seen that just
love
a good people snack, it’s pretty likely this one does, too.”

Kevin relaxed a little. “Okay, so, what if it’s literally hibernating? Hedgehogs and bears sleep through the winter after fattening up. Heck, there’s a recorded case of a bat in captivity hibernating for almost an entire year. This is just . . . a supersize version.”

“One flaw,” April said. “If food is the drive, why children and infants? We know it’s capable of killing a full-grown adult with ease. Bigger prey means less work and more meat.”

The table fell silent as we retreated into our own heads. I stared at the spreadsheet projected onto the wall, searching for some detail I’d missed, something to offer.

“It’s not a ritual,” April said. “Not a compulsion.”

I looked her way. “How do you mean?”

“Nothing is repeated, except the abductions themselves. There’s a bigger gap between the first hibernation than the second, by almost a decade. The first time, it took six children. In the ’80s, it took five. The abductions occur over a period of two to three weeks, with seemingly random gaps between incidents. Harmony, when it spoke to you, did it seem . . . surprised? It couldn’t have known you’d walk in on it.”

I thought back, picturing it in my mind. That first approach, when I thought it was my mother, and how focused it was on Angie.

“Yes. It hesitated. That’s when it held out its hand, and tried to get me to go with it.”

“It changed its plans, spontaneously.” April frowned. “It is sentient, it is an opportunist, and it is not bound by ritual or compulsion. That’s not good.”

“Doesn’t make our job any easier,” Jessie said, “but it’s still our job. Talbot Cove’s a three-hour drive from here. Let’s pack up and roll out.”

D
own in the dimly lit garage under the building, Jessie twirled a set of keys on a plastic tag and checked license plates.

“All right, let’s see what they gave us to drive. I’m feeling lucky this time. C’mon, Dodge Charger, it’s gonna be a Dodge Charger—”

We came to a dead stop in front of a paste-white Crown Victoria, its bug-spattered license plate about ten years newer than the rest of the car. An entire quarter front panel was a slightly different color than the rest of the body, and the driver’s-side door sported a long, jagged scar in the paint, like someone had raked their keys along it.

“Every time,” Jessie said, deflated. “They do this to us
every time
.”

Kevin patted her shoulder. “Sorry, boss.”

April pushed her wheelchair past them, rolling around to the side of the car. Kevin helped her into the backseat, holding her wheels steady while she pulled herself into the car; then we collapsed the chair and stowed it in the trunk.

Jessie tossed me the keys. “You drive. My enthusiasm is suddenly diminished.”

I’d been gone for thirty years, but once we put Detroit in the rearview mirror, Michigan looked exactly the way I’d left it. We drove through wild woods just feeling the first kiss of fall, the leaves turning crimson and gold, and past sleepy, hilly towns that hadn’t changed since the ’50s. Eventually we hit the coast of Lake Michigan, the highway turning to follow its curves, and the slowly setting sun gleamed like molten gold on the water.

Twenty minutes and I’d be home again.

The digital clock on the dashboard felt like the countdown timer on a bomb. I tried to distract myself from the inevitable, but all I had was static-choked talk radio and the incessant typing sounds from the backseat as Kevin hammered away on his laptop keyboard.

“So why are you called the Circus?” I asked, aiming the question at nobody in particular.

Sitting beside me, after spending the last hour in a light slumber, Jessie’s eyes snapped open. “Hmm?”

“Linder, he said your cell designation was ‘Circus.’”

“Because he’s a jackass,” Jessie said.

“Because we fight evil clowns,” Kevin said. “Well, okay, it was just that one time, but once was enough. Eeh,
creepy
.”

“Because,” April said dryly, “our reputation for results far exceeds our reputation for following protocol. It makes for messy reports, which Mr. Linder must then explain to his superiors.”

“They love us and they know it,” Jessie said. She wriggled a little in her seat, put her head back, and closed her eyes again. “Considering the scuttlebutt about what went down in Vegas, you should fit in just fine.”

I gripped the hard plastic steering wheel a little tighter.

“That’s not how I normally operate. I do things by the book.”

In the rearview mirror I saw April shake her head, a slight smile on her lips.

“Oh, dear,” she said, “an idealist in our midst. I almost remember what that feels like. Suffice to say, Harmony, that works only when confronting a situation that’s
in
the proverbial book. Outside the margins, improvisation is key. We operate under special circumstances. Can you think on your feet?”

I nodded slowly. “I do all right.”

“Then we’ll get along just fine.”

The sun was nothing but an orange glow on the horizon when we hit the outskirts of town. A big forest-green sign at the side of the road read,
W
ELCOME TO
T
ALBOT
C
OVE: THE
T
OWN
T
HAT
W
ORKS
! P
OPULATION
2,032
.

“Yikes,” Kevin said, glancing up from his laptop. “Kind of place where everybody knows your name, huh?”

I just shrugged and said, “Small-town America.”

We cruised down Main Street, a row of mom-and-pop stores in sturdy Midwestern brick, most of them already closed up for the night. The modern world had to force its way into Talbot Cove through the cracks, one piece at a time: I smiled at the sight of a PC café rubbing shoulders with a thrift store and a TV-repair shop.

In the distance, out toward the water, the tall scaffolding and smokestacks from the old paper mill rose up over the town. The crimson glow from the setting sun turned them into silhouettes of skeletal fingers, grasping at the sky.

“Find us a base camp,” Jessie said, and I obliged. The Talbot Motor Lodge was right where I remembered it, a sleepy one-floor motel nestled on the outskirts of town and flanked by clumps of towering oak trees. A cartoon owl loomed over us from a lit plastic sign, its claws perching on a placard that offered HBO and a heated swimming pool.

The Circus might play fast and loose with the regulations, but even Jessie Temple wasn’t about to break the Bureau’s rules on travel expenses. We doubled up, renting the two rooms on the far end of the motel.

“All right,” Jessie said to April and Kevin, stretching like a cat as she clambered out of the car. “You two set up here while Harmony and I introduce ourselves to the local legal beagles.”

“Does setting up include dinner?” Kevin asked, pulling April’s wheelchair out of the trunk.

“Order some pizzas. And get receipts. I mean it.”

The police station was a squat gray concrete shoe box with three late-model Fords parked out front. They shared a lot with the Talbot Cove Library on one side and the town hall on the other, a colonial building topped by a redbrick clock tower.

“Memories coming back?” Jessie asked me.

I looked up at the clock tower, cold and still in the gathering dark, and shook my head. “Vaguely? I mean, I was six when we left town. I . . . recognize these places, I know most of the streets, but they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just places.”

Inside the police station, an elderly receptionist sat behind a rolling desk and paged through a back issue of
People
magazine. We held out our badges, letting her take her time looking them over.

“FBI, ma’am,” I said. “Special Agents Temple and Black. May we speak to the sheriff, please?”

“He’s in back,” she said. “I’ll go fetch him.”

She left us alone in the lobby, standing under stark yellow fluorescent lights. Jessie wandered, checking out the notices on the community bulletin board. She let out a low whistle.

“Uh-oh. Looks like some kids have been playing mailbox baseball out on Route 7. We got here just in time.”

“Are you
always
this flippant?” I asked her.

She looked back at me. Smile gone. Eyes frozen.

“It’s a coping mechanism,” she said, her voice flat, “for spending a career wading through the worst shit the human mind can come up with, and then some. What’s yours?”

I took a step back and shrugged, looking down at the scuffed linoleum.

“I . . . I don’t.”

“You don’t have a mechanism,” she said, “or you don’t cope?”

I was still trying to answer that when the door behind me swung open and a big voice boomed, “Harmony!”

I turned on my heel and couldn’t help but smile. Barry looked just like I remembered him the night my father died, but he’d put on two things: another forty pounds, and my father’s sheriff star.