HEX (20 page)

“What is it with that dog?” Jocelyn asked. “He's wound up like a spring. It's getting on my nerves.”

“Oh gosh, don't tell me Gramma's back,” Matt joked. Tyler was afraid to look up from his laptop.

That night he lay wide awake, staring up at the ceiling. He couldn't shake the images of that killer look in Jaydon's eyes; the exposed, torn nipple; Fletcher catapulting through the room. It was the first time he had seen the witch stand up for herself and not just passively occupy space in a corner. And how bad was the situation now? What would be the consequence of the events
he
was partly responsible for?

There are forces at work here beyond your control.

That's a whole nother level of fucked-upness.

It took a long time before he fell asleep, totally exhausted. And when he finally did, he dreamt of owls, big owls with silky wings and golden eyes that hunted in the night.

*   *   *

THE NEXT MORNING,
Friday, Fletcher came into the kitchen whining and wagging his tail. Tyler gaped at him as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Jocelyn had the day off, so he had thought she might be able to keep an eye on him. But when Fletcher actually took a few nibbles of his food, Tyler allowed himself a glimmer of hope … a hope that maybe things weren't so bad after all.

At two o'clock that afternoon Jocelyn went out for groceries. She had been about to lock the dog up in his kennel, she later related—when all of them, in a state of growing despair, were trying to reconstruct the day's events, while Tyler kept his mouth shut, numbed. But Fletcher did something he had never done before: He growled at Jocelyn. So she scolded him, and finally he let himself be taken to his kennel, head hanging guiltily between his front legs. Then Jocelyn went to town and thought no more about the dog, at least not until Tyler came home from school at four-thirty and noticed that the door to Fletcher's run was ajar and the kennel was empty.

Even though it was getting dark, Steve and Tyler went out to the woods behind their house armed with flashlights and Matt biked through the neighborhood and along Deep Hollow Road, whistling and calling.

“Fletcher may have a mind of his own, but he never goes far, and he knows the woods like his own backyard,” Steve said confidently. “If he's there, we'll find him.”

“And what if we don't?” Tyler asked. The gathering darkness hid the fear that showed on his pale face and trembling lips, and the new, overpowering sense of guilt that gripped his heart. Steve didn't answer, because it simply didn't seem like a realistic option. Of course they'd find Fletcher. But they didn't, and that's when Steve, too, began to worry. Later that evening they searched again, assisted by Pete VanderMeer, but in the dark it was a wasted effort.

At half past nine, as Jocelyn whimpered yet again that she could have
sworn
she had shot the bolt and was pondering the dreadful possibility that Fletcher had ended up under a car, and when Tyler's condition mounted to what could best be described as early hysteria, HEX sent out a text alert for people to be on the lookout for a black-and-white border collie, owned by the Grant family of 188 Deep Hollow Road. Fletcher was officially declared missing.

 

THIRTEEN

THAT NIGHT FLETCHER
didn't come home, even though they left the back door ajar and stayed up until four in the morning. At first light Pete and Mary VanderMeer came to the back door. Mary had made muffins—a kind gesture, although the children were still asleep and only Steve had an appetite. Jocelyn, still in her bathrobe, asked if they'd like a cup of coffee, but she was unable to pour without spilling. After becoming fully awake, she began weeping quietly and couldn't seem to stop.

“Don't worry, Jocelyn,” Mary said, standing up to get a towel from the kitchen. “We'll find him. I'm sure he'll be wagging his tail when he walks in the door as if nothing happened. You know how dogs are. They always find their way home.”

“But Fletcher never runs away!” Jocelyn cried.

Once is enough,
Steve thought, but he said nothing. He had accepted the reality that Fletcher was more likely dead than lost.
It's cats that always come home. Cats are drifters, gangsters. If a dog runs away from home, it turns into one of those dramatic episodes that almost never has a happy ending. The faithful old pooch who wouldn't hurt a fly but chases a rabbit into the woods and ends up in a trap and dies. The beloved hound who never runs off but climbs out of his basket one day and gets run over on a busy road. It's gruesome, the way a dog meets his fate. It almost seems predestined.

At ten past eight, Robert Grim came to the door. He looked remarkably alert for such an early hour. “We've studied the images from the camera on Deep Hollow Road, from the minute Jocelyn left for groceries until your son got home from school. We're sure your dog didn't escape from the street side, because we would have seen it. The cameras behind your property haven't registered anything, either. But they're focused on the trail, not your backyard.”

“But that means he's almost sure to be in the woods, right?” Jocelyn asked hopefully.

“That would be my guess,” Grim said. “But here's something reassuring: I've driven Route 293 twice, from the golf course all the way to the south side of Popolopen Lake, and there was nothing on the shoulder. The app's full of sympathy from people who are keeping an eye out, and if he's in town, we'll see it on camera. That dog is sure to be back soon.”

That's not what you think,
Steve said to himself.

He took Pete and Grim out to the backyard. “Here, take a look at this.” He pulled out the bolt from Fletcher's kennel and stuck his fingers through the wire mesh. “Jocelyn says she's sure she shot the bolt. I believe her. You don't put your dog in his kennel without bolting it; that just doesn't make any sense. And look at this.” He pushed the gate against the lock and let go. It bounced back and stayed ajar. He did it again, and again the gate sprang open. “You
have
to slide the bolt shut, otherwise it just won't close.”

Pete looked at it and nodded. “So you think the kennel was opened from the outside.”

“Absolutely.”

“But by whom?”

Grim jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “You didn't make a lot of friends in town at the Council meeting Wednesday night. Don't get me wrong: your idealism was moving; your performance … a bit reckless.”

“You don't think—” Steve began, but he cut his sentence short. A gust of wind blew past the eaves and he shivered for no good reason.

“I don't know,” Grim said. “Say somebody wanted to take revenge and came up with a plan to poison your dog. They must have come and left through the woods rather than taking the trails, or the security cams would have caught them.”

“That seems unlikely,” Pete said.

“Yeah, but not impossible,” Steve muttered. “Do you really think they'd pull it off?”

“Coming up with a scheme like that? Definitely,” Grim said without a trace of doubt. “But the strategy is too complex. If you want to waste a dog, you slip into the yard and feed the mutt a bowl of poisoned Purina. Making off with a live dog would draw too much attention. Especially here.”

Why don't you say what you're afraid of?
Steve thought.
What we're all afraid of, but nobody dares to say out loud: that no matter how insane it sounds,
she
had something to do with it. It doesn't fit the pattern, but you're thinking it anyway, or you wouldn't be here. We're talking about a dog, for Christ's sake.

Steve realized that Grim must have read his mind, because the security chief pulled his head down into the fur-edged hood of his coat. He said nothing for a moment, then seemed to reach a decision. “Maybe we ought to go for a little walk in the woods. It's still early and there aren't any hikers out yet. If he's fallen into one of the mineral ditches or gotten himself stuck in the barbed wire, he may very well be alive.”

“Good,” Pete said, as if he had been waiting for a command like this one. “I'll go put on my boots. The trails are bound to be soggy.”

*   *   *

THEY CLIMBED AT
a brisk pace along Philosopher's Creek, which left the nature reserve from the side of their property before dipping under Deep Hollow Road, where it fed into the sewer. As the streambed began to narrow they took the trail to the left and up the hill. They decided to start on the ridge and comb out from there to the south and west: the part of Mount Misery that belonged to Black Spring. Without having to mention it, they all knew, with a certainty that was both instinctive and unconscious, that Fletcher still had to be in Black Spring.

The trail was indeed soggy, and Steve, who was already sorry he was wearing sneakers, soon felt his socks become drenched. When he had gone inside to put them on the kids were up. Tyler was pale and withdrawn and said nothing. Jocelyn and Matt had their preliminaries that afternoon, but Jocelyn said she'd call them off if they hadn't had any news yet. She wanted to be there in case Fletcher came home.

They reached the two leveled rocky outcrops that formed the top of the mountain. Passing the highest one on the left, they climbed the stony hewn path to the southern vantage point. When they got there, Pete threw back his head and stretched his back.

“You okay?” Steve asked.

“Yeah, just catching my breath.” He sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette.

There was history on the hilltop. For the Munsee, who had built their settlements on the lower slopes, it had been a holy site where they buried their dead. In the seventeenth century, Dutch trappers had built a lookout post on the main summit, but all traces of it were gone. From here, the terrain took a steep dip into the valley, where the tongue of the continental glacier had reached during the Ice Age, and where the Hudson had carved its path at a later time. Steve stared at the cultivated land, the river, the fields, and the buildings of Fort Montgomery and Highland Falls, the Bear Mountain Bridge, and, in the distance, Peekskill. The vast grayness and silence had something medieval about it, something malignant. It gave off an unmistakable charge that seemed to come from all sides but was concentrated behind the ridge to the south, where Black Spring was. It reeked of a past of cruelty and human disease, a past ruled by fear. Here terrified settlers had engaged in heinous atrocities; here they had hanged witches. Having fled to the New World, but with the scars of the Old World still etched in their skin, they had burned casks of pitch and herbs in the streets to drive away the tainted pestilential air while carrying their dead in sinister processions to be burned on pyres, all the while spreading the disease by excising their infected buboes. And here their descendants were driven one by one into the Hudson on a winter morning, never to be found.

In that context, and with that charge in the air, anything was possible. Someone might have taken Fletcher away and poisoned him or bashed his brains in with a rock.
Does it make any difference,
Steve thought,
that three hundred fifty years have passed and we now have what we like to call civilization?

“Come on, buddy,” Grim said, placing a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “We won't find your dog this way.”

Steve nodded and turned aside. He felt tears stinging his eyes, and for the first time he realized how deeply Fletcher's disappearance was affecting him. There was still the possibility that they would find him alive and well, although Steve had little faith in it. But damn it, he loved that dog.

They descended into the shelter of the woods. A bit lower down, where the terrain leveled off, Pete came to a halt. On the trail in front of him was a circle of ivory-greenish toadstools, so perfectly round it seemed unnatural.

“A fairy ring,” said Pete. “My mother used to say that if you counted more than thirteen toadstools in a ring it meant that witches had danced there, and you had to walk past with your eyes closed to ward off doom. Later I stopped believing in witches, so I did it as a balancing exercise.”

He winked, but almost imperceptibly. Steve squatted down and stuck out his hand, but Pete stopped him. “Watch out—they're poisonous. They're death caps.”

Steve pulled his hand back and muttered, “It seems so …
intentional
.”

“Oh yes, that's why they call 'em fairy rings. Fungi grow like weeds, and rings like this can pop up overnight. It used to scare the crap out of people, but in fact it's a perfectly natural process. The fungus grows underground in all directions, and when the nutrients are exhausted the fruits grow upward. Nature is a mystery, but like so many mysteries, there's almost always a logical explanation.”

Steve was slightly amused to see that all three of them were reluctant to be the first to go past the ring. Finally, Robert Grim took the initiative, followed by Pete. Neither of them shut his eyes. Steve wondered if they might have done so if they had been alone.

On impulse, and embarrassed by that stupid fit of superstition that had briefly undermined his determination, Steve kicked one of the death caps and broke the ring. The others hadn't seen him do it, and he hurried to catch up with them.

They didn't stay on the trail, but scoured the area across the wooded bedrock outcrops and unnamed streams. The slopes were covered with densely packed ferns and empty acorn caps, pried open by some animal. Every now and then they whistled or called, but after a while they stopped. If Fletcher was nearby, he wouldn't be able to miss their noisy rummaging through the undergrowth.

It was Steve who suddenly broached the subject. “When was the last time she caused trouble on her own?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound neutral. “Apart from '67, I mean.”