John Saul (28 page)

He had gone perhaps a mile when he sensed something up ahead. He paused, listening, but heard nothing. Yet when he sniffed at the air, there was a trace of a scent.

A familiar scent.

Then he recognized it. The barely perceptible odor in the air was the same one he had whiffed back in the cabin, when he’d picked up his wadded clothes.

The scent of blood.

Now that same pungent sharpness was filling his nostrils again.

He began moving through the woods once more, careful to keep his tread absolutely silent. Storm, sensing his master’s sudden fear, pressed close to him, his hackles rising.

Joey moved from tree to tree, the scent growing ever stronger. Finally, leaving the shelter of a large white-barked pine, he scuttled over to a clump of underbrush, dropped the animal skin that was his only protection from the chill air, and lay down on his belly to begin crawling forward through the shrubbery, toward the source of the coppery odor that lay just beyond. He worked his way through the tangle of vegetation, moving slowly, Storm at his side. At last he paused. Through a small gap in the leaves, he could make out the figure of a man seated on the ground, his back against a tree. A shotgun lay across his lap, and his head was tipped forward on his chest as he dozed. The head jerked as the man came suddenly awake, and Joey froze.

Had the man heard him?

But no—the man was simply struggling to stay awake, the way he himself sometimes did in the classroom, especially on the mornings after those nights when the nervousness had seized him and he’d been unable to sleep.

The man stood up, and now Joey recognized him.

Tony Moleno, his uniform rumpled from his night in the woods, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. He stretched, then moved away from the tree, and as Joey’s eyes followed the deputy’s movements, he saw the source of the pungent odor that had caught his attention a few minutes before.

His eyes widened as he gazed at the body that still lay on the ground.

The body that Tony Moleno must have been guarding all night long, just as he had guarded the body of Glen Foster only two nights earlier.

Suddenly Joey was glad there had been nothing left to see when he and Alison and Logan had gone up to the campground the other day, for now, from his vantage point in the underbrush, he could stare right into Bill Sikes’s face.

Stare at his dead eyes.

Stare at the gaping wound from which his blood must have poured.

Another image flickered in his head.

An image of the stains on his clothes came suddenly into his mind, as his eyes fastened on Sikes’s face, and he imagined blood spewing from the great tear in his neck.

The two images fused in Joey’s mind as his heart pounded heavily.

Could he have done this?

Was it possible?

Barely able to suppress the cry that rose in his throat, he began wriggling away, threading feet first back the way he’d come, until at last he was free from the underbrush. Shivering, his teeth chattering not only from the cold, but from the memory of what he’d seen—and the terror at what he might have done—he wrapped himself in the bearskin, clutching it tightly around his body.

A sob threatening to cut off his breathing completely, he stumbled on down the mountain, the trail now forgotten.

All he could think of—the single imperative that filled his soul and drove him onward—was his need to flee.

But even as he fled down the mountainside, he knew that no matter how far he ran, or where he finally went, the image of Bill Sikes’s dead face—his vacant eyes staring straight at him, accusing him—would never leave him.

That image was burned in his mind forever, etched so deeply it would haunt him for the rest of his life. He would never be able to wipe it away.

Except, he realized, there
was
a way to erase that image from his consciousness, a way to escape not only from the vision of the dead man, but from the terror of the times when the nervousness came on him, making him want to flee.

There was a way, he realized, that he could escape it all.

Now he formed another image in his head.

An image of the cliff from which his mother had plunged less than two weeks ago.

But could he actually do it? Could he bring himself to stand at the top of the cliff, look down, and jump?

“I
t’s seven
A.M
., and this is Sugarloaf Sam, greeting the morning and lifting your spirits from now until ten! It’s a cold morning in the Sugarloaf Valley, and promising to get colder before it gets warmer. Good news for the skiers, bad news for the farmers, but as Honest Abe Lincoln used to say, you can please some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and none of the people some of the—all right, so that’s not what he said, but you know what I mean! You
know
what I mean! And here we go with the first cut of the day!”

Sam Gilman hit the play button on the console in front of him, and the Montovani Strings began playing “Summertime,” which struck Sam as absolutely appropriate for the unseasonably cold September morning. It was his station—all five watts of it—and if the audience didn’t like it, that was their problem, not his. He swiveled around on the chair that took up nearly all the available floor space in the one-room studio, and began checking over the list of “guest hosts” his tiny radio station would be broadcasting that day. Arne Svenson was coming in for an hour starting at ten, to talk about getting cars ready for winter. Nearly everyone in town would be tuning in for that one. Though Arne had been running Sugarloaf’s only gas station for nearly thirty years, his Swedish accent was still so thick as to make what he said nearly unintelligible, so he always brought his wife, Naomi, along to translate, and Naomi never failed to contradict everything Arne said. By the end of the hour they would appear to be on the verge of divorce, and then Arne would grab the mike. “Yust bring da damn car in!” he’d bellow. “I do it all for nuttin’!”

The rest of the day would be much the same, for Sam GiIman let pretty much anyone who had something he wanted to talk about come in and take over the mike for an hour or so. On days when no one wanted to talk, there were plenty of tapes for him to play. In a pinch, he had a few tapes that could run up to eight hours, and no one would ever be the wiser. But the kind of programming he loved best was the sort of unpredictability he got by inviting the townspeople to come in and unburden themselves. As long as what they had to say wasn’t obscene or patently offensive to any particular minority (Sam’s policy allowed for pretty much any kind of offensiveness to an
individual
), Sam liked people to speak their minds whether they agreed with him or not. Indeed, he had taken to running the disclaimer announcement stating that the opinions of the speaker did not necessarily reflect those of the station or its owner, even when he himself was on the air. When asked about that little ploy, he always replied that he often found himself in violent disagreement with his own thoughts, and was merely protecting himself from the possibility of “suing his own ass from here to Boise.” Sam Gilman’s methods of running his station hadn’t made him much of a profit, but they certainly kept the town tuned in.

Thus, when Sam swung around on his chair and saw Milt Morgenstern, his eyes red, peering through the glass panel in the tiny studio’s door, he immediately sensed that Milt had something he felt was too hot to hold for the next edition of the paper, which wouldn’t come out until tomorrow. He waved the editor and publisher in, grinning mischievously. “You know, you and I could set up a media cartel around here, if we wanted to. Between us, we could have absolute mind control over this town. If we set our minds to it, we could probably elect a moose as mayor.” Milt failed to respond to Sam’s attempt at humor, and the broadcaster’s grin faded. “Something going on, Milt?”

“We’ve got another killing,” Milt told him. “And something’s not looking right, and not smelling right.”

The last traces of Sam Gilman’s grin disappeared. “You mean it’s the same as the one up at the campground?” he asked, slipping one of his tapes into the second player and
pressing the start button just as the last chords of “Summertime” faded away.

“You got it,” the editor replied. While the tape began to play, he told Sam what had happened the night before, from the moment he’d heard Rick Martin start organizing a search party until the deputy, together with Olivia Sherbourne, had returned to El Monte Ranch with the report of Bill Sikes’s death. “The thing that really bothers me is that he didn’t want me to go up there.” Morgenstern’s eyes hardened as they met Sam Gilman’s. “I mean, he didn’t want me at the ranch, he didn’t want me to go along when they went out searching for Joey Wilkenson, and he sure didn’t want me going up to take a look at the body.”

Gilman’s lips curved into a knowing smile. “Which I assume means that you went up there anyway.”

“I couldn’t,” Morgenstern replied. “The son of a bitch wouldn’t even tell me where it was.”

“So what do you think’s going on?” Sam asked, already sensing a major story brewing, one that could keep the phone lines ringing all day and get every radio in town tuned to his station as the news began to spread. “How come Martin’s playing it so coy?”

“Have you seen the pictures of the man who was killed up there?” Morgenstern asked pointedly. When Gilman shook his head, the editor reached into the inside pocket of the heavily lined Gortex jacket he’d worn against the unseasonable cold and pulled out three photographs. “What do you think might have done that?” he asked as he handed them to Sam Gilman.

Gilman felt a touch of nausea as he studied the pictures, quickly returning them to Morgenstern. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Well, the lab in Boise doesn’t know,” Morgenstern replied. “I called them yesterday afternoon, and a guy named Hank Henry got real cute with me. So I called back, pretending to be—” He hesitated, catching himself just before blurting out the truth that he’d impersonated the county sheriff. “Let’s just say I got some information.” He paused, building the drama of the moment. “They don’t know what
killed him, Sam. They say it wasn’t human, and it wasn’t any kind of animal they can identify.”

Sam Gilman felt a thrill of excitement. “You ready to go on the air with that?” he asked.

“Why do you think I’m here?” Morgenstern replied.

Squeezing an extra stool into the tiny studio, Sam Gilman handed Milt Morgenstern a set of headphones, checked the sound level on the microphone his guest would use, then cheerfully cut into the still-playing tape in the middle of Barbra Streisand’s nasal wailing of “Memory.”

“We seem to have a major problem here in Sugarloaf,” he announced, carefully pitching his voice to its most sonorous level. “Milt Morgenstern just came in, and I’m going to let him tell you about it.” He nodded to the editor, who leaned closer to the microphone.

“Bill Sikes, the caretaker of El Monte Ranch, and a man I always called a friend, was killed last night, apparently the latest victim of whatever it was that killed a camper in Coyote Creek Campground on Monday night.”

“You say ‘whatever it was,’ Milt,” Sam Gilman smoothly interrupted. “Does that mean there’s some question about what might be up there?”

The editor’s lips curved into a tight smile as he lit the fuse to his bombshell. “I’d say there definitely is, Sam,” he replied. “All I can tell you is that we know it’s not human, and it’s not any kind of animal any of us have ever seen. In fact, from what I’ve been told by sources in Boise, it’s not any kind of animal they can even identify. All they can say is what it’s not. And it’s not a bear, or a mountain lion, or anything else we normally think of as being in our mountains. But it’s very large, and very strong, and very vicious.”

To the satisfaction of both men, the term “Sasquatch” came up in the very first phone call. Within minutes all three lines coming into the studio had lit up. By saying as little as possible, and emphasizing Rick Martin’s refusal to talk to Morgenstern, Sam Gilman and Milt Morgenstern quickly fanned the small spark of mystery supplied by the crime lab in Boise into a full-fledged panic.

* * *

MaryAnne Carpenter’s bones were starting to ache from exhaustion. Nearly overcome by weariness, she nevertheless refused to surrender.

Not until Joey comes home, she whispered silently to herself as she began preparing yet another of the many pots of coffee she and Gillie Martin had brewed throughout the night.

It had become almost a mantra, which she endlessly repeated to herself as her eyes, puffy now from lack of sleep, began to sting, and her arms and legs began to feel oddly numb.

I won’t go to bed—not until Joey comes home.

Sometime around three that morning, still in the throes of shock at the news of Bill Sikes’s death, she’d made up her mind that tomorrow—perhaps even tonight, if the search party found Joey—she would pack up the children and drive to Boise to catch the first plane back to New Jersey. Better to go back—even back to Alan—than to try to cope with the horrors of what was happening here. Finally, as dawn broke in Idaho, knowing that Alan would be waking up anyway, she’d picked up the phone and called him.

She’d listened numbly when, instead of hearing Alan’s voice, she’d heard a woman’s voice. A wrong number, she thought; I must have misdialed. But something compelled her to ask for Alan. “He’s asleep,” she was told. Then: “Who is this?” She’d stared mutely at the phone for a moment, finally hanging up without saying anything more. So he’d moved someone in, and now she no longer had a home to go back to!

The hours had worn agonizingly on, with only occasional word from Rick Martin through the extra radio Gillie had brought in from the squad car. MaryAnne had felt fatigue bearing down on her like a physical weight, slowing her step, making it harder and harder to keep moving around the kitchen, fixing the sandwiches the searchers—seven of them now—used to fuel their stores of energy.

If they can do it, I can do it, she kept telling herself.