Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (22 page)

More thunder, like a rattle of timpani—and then a rolling crack, like a whiplash.

Jake lifted his head, looked at Steve with fleeting alarm, then put his head back down.

“It's okay, buddy. As long as we're inside, we're okay.”

The monsoon was here at last, the rain coming down hard. Looked like he'd have to stay in this morning.

The rain hammered on the tin roof as Steve made breakfast, the noise going from a downpour to the sound of marbles hitting hard. Hail.

Steve took his eggs and toast to the breakfast nook where he could look out at the forest, watched as the tiny white pebbles of compressed ice bounced all over, like ping- pong balls in a lottery air mix machine.

Thought he saw something by the tool shed. He immediately thought of the break-ins. There hadn't been any since the first two nights and no more strange phone calls either.

The tool shed was up the hill a ways, off to the right. Partially obscured by the trees, the bottom half of the door screened from view by the propane tank near the house. But he'd definitely seen something move. He glanced up beyond the tool shed to the excavation site, the crime scene tape shivering in the pelting hail. He didn't see anybody up there. He shifted his gaze back to the shed, but the hail had turned to a hard, misty rain. Even harder to see now.

Probably, it was just a raccoon or some other forest animal.

He found his eyes drawn to the bronze on the fireplace mantel, the cowboy roping the devil. The devil's tail lashed like an angry cat's, seeming to transcend the metal it was made from. The bronze was called “The Devil's Hour,” but Steve thought it should be called “The Cowboy's Hour.” The cowboy was in the driver's seat. The devil clearly losing.

But then he thought about it some more and realized that maybe it was the devil's hour after all. The cowboy had him roped, true. But why rope the devil in the first place? What would the cowboy do with him now?

To Steve's mind, roping the devil was just asking for trouble.

________

By mid-morning, the rain let up. Steve stared out the window in the direction of Camp Aratauk, felt the urge to hike up there.

He didn't know why it drew him. There would be nothing left, certainly not of Jenny Carmichael or her bunk mates. It was just curiosity, but it tugged at him. Strange, but he felt a nostalgia for the place, even though he'd never seen it before his walk up there a few days ago.

He looked at the mess before him—he had so much of his grandfather's stuff to wade through—but he shrugged on his hooded jacket anyway, put on his hiking boots.

A telltale jingle: Jake appeared in the doorway of the bedroom.

“Sorry. Not this time.”

Jake's ears went to half mast, and his golden acorn eyes turned sad.

After closing the porch door, Steve pulled the picnic bench in front of it.

He headed up the incline alongside the stream bed, mostly watching his feet so he could avoid the muddy patches. He didn't spare a glance for the shed off to the right—why should he? And for a while he didn't hear it, because of his own mushy footsteps, the water dripping from the trees, and the sound of the wind, high up in the pines. But finally it broke through to his consciousness: He heard a child crying.

He stopped. Closed his eyes and listened, straining to hear. For a moment, there was nothing, just the water dripping off the heavy boughs:
drip drip drip
. Then it came again. Faint, almost not there. There was a quality to it he couldn't quite pinpoint. It wasn't sad crying. It wasn't grief. It was—

Frustration? That was the best description he could give of it.

He glanced around, but saw nothing unusual. A mist had rolled in, clouding the trees.

“You're coming home with me!”

It was a child's voice—a girl's voice, barely there. It could have been inside his head. It matched his mood—exasperation. Suddenly, he felt thwarted, angry. Had no idea why.

He knew it was Jenny Carmichael. He'd known it the moment he heard the crying, which first had seemed to echo through the dark, dripping woods and then seemed to come up from the recesses of his own mind.

He turned around, straining his eyes against the whiteness. Just trees and mist and the shed, looming up nearby.

Close. He'd thought it was a lot farther to the right.

Have to clean that out next
, he thought. He could hear the water dripping from the eaves of the shed. Smelled the sharp scent of pine.

“
Stop
it!”

Querulous, angry. Coming from the direction of the shed. He wiped away the water beading on his eyelashes, squinted at the small structure.

Something funny about it. He realized what it was immediately. The door wasn't pulled to.

It smacked him, hard, right in the chest—fear. He stayed rooted to the spot, staring at the door. There was an explanation. He had been in there the other day, looking for the trowel. Probably forgot to pull it to.

Would he do that? It seemed to him he'd been very careful about using the new padlock, the shiny new padlock, which was now hooked over the hasp.

He had to think about that.

The strange noises, though … those had an explanation. It was simply the weather. The mountain was socked in, and sounds carried. There were probably pockets of sound that made it over and around the mountain—he'd heard it before. Cars starting in Summerhaven, a little over a mile away; it was a natural phenomenon.

He breathed out his relief.

But was it his imagination or did the door move? The side that opened inward seemed farther away, angled back. Less than an inch maybe.

Jenny was real, the voice in his head told him. Jenny was real. What makes you think this isn't?

He stepped toward the door.

It creaked open.

He could think it was the wind, but the wind had stopped. The boughs above his head, heavily-laden with moisture, were still except for the
plink, plink, plink
of raindrops.

He looked back at the shed. Now there was a black oblong in the small wooden building—the door was all the way open.

He opened his mouth to speak. Tried, but at first his vocal cords couldn't gain purchase. When he was able to speak, his voice was rusty. “Jenny?”

No sound from within.

He swallowed. “Jenny, is that you?”

Nothing.

He stepped toward the shed, his heart and pulse racing.

You're mine now
.

The words sounded distinctly inside his mind. The little girl's voice, the girl he met by the stream bed.

You're
my
puppy now. You're coming home with
me
.

Jenny had a puppy? As he pondered this, he realized that he was now standing right in front of the door. He didn't know how that could have happened. He'd been three or four yards back, and now, here he was. As if in a dream, he stepped up onto the cement apron.

A calmness overcame him. He felt as if he had been wrapped in cotton and placed someplace quiet and muffled, safe from harm. He observed with clinical clarity the empty padlock latch, dark green. He registered the smell of sawdust, mixed with potting soil and wet leaves.

You're coming home with
me.

The same words, a faint echo.

Something made him turn around.

He saw her standing probably thirty feet away, over by the excavation where her bones had been interred until two nights ago. Standing there in her uniform, her serious eyes holding his.

He's coming home with me
.

Steve blinked, trying to clear his vision. In that blink, she was gone.

Completely gone. He no longer felt her presence. He turned back to the shed and walked inside. It looked the same as it had two days ago: the new potting soil, a rake, a shovel, gardening implements, including the trowel with the broken handle. The wooden table still stood by the left wall, its top worn smooth with age. The hooks hanging above it, hooks for tools.

Hanging from one of them was a small, red dog collar, frayed almost to rope.

He didn't remember seeing that before.

You're
my
puppy now
!

He reached over and lifted it off the hook. Someone had punched in a couple of extra holes into the collar, the buckle tongue poking through the last one, making it incredibly small. Small enough for a puppy.

He carried the collar back out onto the front stoop. In the light, he could see that it was not only frayed into strings in places, but filthy with grease and animal hair. Mostly black hairs, forming a fuzzy matt on the inside. There were no tags.

He looked back in the direction of Jenny's grave, but she was gone. He knew it without looking for her. It felt as if air had gone out of his balloon. Steve was all alone.

He closed the door to the shed and pushed the hasp home, made sure the padlock clicked home. Then he started back to the house, the little dog collar looped over his arm.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Laura didn't get any more hangups. In retrospect, she thought that the first call was electronically generated. Thousands of calls were made per minute by call centers, and if no one picked up, the call was automatically terminated. The second time the phone rang, in the middle of the night, was probably somebody realizing they had the wrong number.

She was spooked, though, because of Grady.

The day would be another hot one; it looked like all the storm had done last night was pull bark, leaves, and branches off the trees and touch off another fire, this one in the Rincons. So now the orange helicopters were flying over her house with their giant buckets of water.

The first thing Laura did when she got in to work was make her daily calls to other jurisdictions in the state, looking for The Missing Girl, Lily. She made seven calls; none of them panned out. She crossed the latest batch of police departments and sheriff's offices off her list and stared at her notes. So many ways to go. Jaime had told her he would start interviewing the people who worked at Camp Aratauk. Laura wanted to follow up with Robert Heywood.

She called G&H Kiddieland and Shows. Trudy Goodrich came on the phone, sounding harried. “What is it?” she asked.

Laura said, “Was Robert Heywood friendly with anybody in the carnival?”

There was silence on the other end. Finally: “Tom Purvis. Tom was one of our drivers, and he also ran the shooting gallery.”

“Do you know where Tom is now?”

“He died several years ago, got himself into drugs; I think he had a meth lab. He died in the explosion. I'm pretty sure that's what happened.”

Laura felt a let-down. “He was Heywood's only friend?”

“You have to remember, this was ten years ago. Wait a minute. He used to stay with Tom at Clinton's place.”

“Clinton?”

“Clinton Purvis, Tom's dad. He's a clown.”

“A clown.”

“A really good clown, too. Ran the most popular show we had—the Weiner Dog Races. Did the state fairs, but he was also a sign painter. He did all our signs.”

“Is he still around? Do you think Heywood would still be in touch with him?”

“I don't know. I can tell you where he lives, though. He's out near Florence on Route 79. He's the caretaker for a … I'd guess you'd call it a ranch. Piece of property this company bought back in the eighties before the boom went bust; I guess they're still trying to figure out what to do with it. Clinton lives on a trailer on the property and makes sure nobody vandalizes anything, although there's not much to vandalize. Just his old trailer and a big metal barn where you'd keep farm equipment.”

Jaime came by a short while later. He'd gotten statements from the janitor and one of the groundskeepers at Camp Aratauk.

“Nothing ground-shaking,” Laura observed.