Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children (10 page)

It always felt weird to see an older man cry, and I didn’t know how to comfort someone like that.
Be pragmatic.
My chest grew tight, the air stuffy. “Can you prove it?”

“No. If I could, I’d do something more than sit here.”

Standing, I studied Brandy, amazed at how small and fragile life was when you looked beyond yourself and your own selfish gluttony. I grasped at what Jim had said earlier, about walking these halls, knowing what it was, a reminder that nothing kept you safe. Sometimes it came down to luck. Sometimes things shattered and all you could do was pick up the pieces and mourn what would never be whole again.

“Do you think you could get proof somehow?”

Jim pushed himself out of the chair and straightened his shirt. “I wish I could help you, John. I’ve done all I can do when it comes to Pat. The rest is up to him. I need some caffeine.” He tapped my arm with a meaty palm. “Good seeing you. Find your friend and get some rest. Brandy’s not going anywhere.”

I followed him out the door. Jim went left, toward the cafeteria. I looked right, remembering and feeling guilty that Mike’s mom had been dying in here for the past year.

And I’ve never once visited her.

I headed for the nurse’s station to get her room number, hoping I’d find Mike there. I wondered if the strange woman was with him. It bothered me, Angela bringing Brandy in.

She’s got answers. I have to get them out of her.

My heart raced. I hoped she’d seen who, or what it was that attacked the mayor’s daughter. She may have known who butchered the girls in the woods too, which made sense in why she’d ran toward the Wright Mill the day I woke on the forest floor.

I was so certain she was the key. It clouded my mind to everything else.

Chapter 14

Tuesday, Oct. 12
th

I opened the back door and took my boots off next to the washer and dryer in the back room. Cat sat on the sofa, a phonebook next to her, the cordless pressed to her ear. She tugged at a loose thread on her pajamas. I wiped my eyes and collapsed next to her. She covered the mouthpiece. I looked at the Yellow Pages.

“You’ve called a psychologist. Do you expect to reach someone this early?”

She looked at the front door. It hurt, seeing her look away. I itched my ear and the garbage bag by the front door caught my eye. “Why did you bring that up here?”

Cat whispered into the phone.

I jerked it out of her hand and ended the call. “You couldn’t wait.”

“I’ve been up all night.” She leaned back into the couch, and crossed her legs. “You have serious problems, John. I want you to go in and talk to someone. I’ll go with you. And we have to take that evidence to the real police.”

The real police. Thanks.

“I will talk to someone, but I have to wait.” My sweaty hands sat in my lap and I couldn’t move them as I tried to sort my thoughts. “I know it seems like I’m crazy, and I know I’m wrestling with what happened to Mark, but I have to set aside my own problems if I’m going to help those girls find rest.”

And hopefully that will redeem me.

“It’s all in your head, John.”

“Where’d the girls’ clothes come from then? Do you want to call Rusty? Ask him about it. He won’t give you the whole truth, but you’ll
know
when you ask him that he’s lying to cover it up.”

“We both know he’s not going to know what I’m talking about.” She ran her hand under her nose and her lips grew redder, trembling. “You need to take today off. Call Pat and tell him. We’ll go up to New Wave and—”

“I’m not crazy. Not like you think. I just feel like I’m torn in all these different directions.” I touched the bandage over my heart. The wound felt like it had started to bleed again. “I will talk to someone once this is over. I promise.”

She touched my hand, squeezed it. “It’s never going to be over. You have to talk to someone now. I don’t know where you found the clothes, but I know that another man like you had promised me he’d do something important and he never did.”

“Well, thanks for comparing me to one of your exes.” I stood, walked into the kitchen. “Why don’t you go out to the woods with me?”

“For what?”

“I’ll show you where they buried the girls.”

“And what will that solve?”

“It’ll show you that it
happened
.” I looked across the island that separated the kitchen from the living room, trying to keep a hold of the anger and disappointment I felt toward her. “I’m not crazy. I thought maybe it was headed that way with some of the shit I’ve been seeing, but Uncle Red has seen at least one thing that shouldn’t be, too.”

“What did Mike have to say? What was so important that you had to run out again in the middle of the night?”

“I never found him.”

“Did you try his house?”

“No. I came back here. He called from the hospital.”

“What did he want, John?”

“Brandy Miller was attacked, and he wanted me to know.”

“Why? Wasn’t Pat there to take care of it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any answers for you, but I’m trying.”

“You have me worried sick, John. Please, call in and—”

“Will you lay down with me? I can barely stand and I’m tired of arguing.”

And you not believing me.

Cat closed the phone book and walked into the bedroom.

I looked at my watch. Seven after seven. I had fifty-three minutes to get to work. Rubbing my eyes, I pulled my cell from my pocket and dialed Pat.

On the third ring, Pat answered, said, “Take today off.”

I nodded. “I was about to ask for it. I’ve been up all night.”

“Herb said you were at the hospital. Something happened to his kid.”

“Yeah. She doesn’t look so good. Jim was there.”

“Why? What’d he say?”

“He likes to walk around Our Lady at night.”

“And?”

I sighed. “And that’s it. I think he called Herb to tell him.”

“Who found her?”

“Brandy?”

“Yeah, who else would I be talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you lying to me?”

I ran my knuckles over the wall. My hands ached.

“So, who found her? What’d they say?”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Don’t hang up.”

“Why did Mr. Miller tell me that Wylie found the girls?”

“What?”

“The girls. He said Wylie found them and me.”

“
I
found you. I don’t know why Herb would lie, but I don’t like it.”

“See, that makes me think that Herb wanted me to be suspicious of you. Why would he want that? How’d you find me? What were you doing out there so early in the morning?”

The line grew silent for a moment. I felt the air around me thicken, saw the girl with the door in her chest, her hand coming up, touching the key hanging over my heart. Her eyes were blue, like Cat’s. An ocean so deep it could crush you.

Pat’s voice filled my ear. “I go for walks when I’m stressed, and the trails are nice and quiet. If you must know, my wife is a slut, and if I didn’t take some walks to clear my head, be alone, I’d probably kill her. I got lucky stumbling across you. Nothing more, just luck. Lucky for you, too. If someone else had found you all, it might have played out a lot different. They might have thought
you
killed the girls. It wouldn’t have been so easy to deal with if the state boys had you behind bars. I did what I could, what I thought was best.”

“It shouldn’t have been easy to deal with.”

“It wasn’t! I did it for your family.” Pat’s voice broke on the word
family
. “I always liked them.”

“Sure.” I looked out the window over the sink and saw Pat’s car in the cemetery behind my house. “Are you in All Saints right now?”

“No.”

I stared at the new Dodge Charger gleaming in the sun in the cemetery, a quarter mile up the hill. Too far away to see through the tinted windows. No one moved beneath the trees or around the headstones. I slid the patio door back and started walking up the hill, the ground damp, saturating my socks. “You at home?”

“Yes. We’re getting sidetracked here.”

“Is your wife with you?”

“She’s tied up at the moment.” Pat chuckled.

A breeze kicked at the weeds peppering the hillside. “What are we missing?”

“Don’t believe what Herb has to say. He told you a lie and that’s not good. Wylie’s your friend. I take it you asked him about the girls.”

“I did. He didn’t know what I was talking about.” I climbed over the rail fence, stepping on the lowest graying timber, careful of my balance. The car sat there. Waiting. Forty feet away. I approached the passenger side, expecting Pat to roll down the window, stick a gun out and pull the trigger. I stopped, heart hammering. My cowardice annoyed me, but I couldn’t take another step.

In my ear, Pat said, “I don’t think you or your brother did it. I know I’ve been slack with a lot of things, got problems of my own, but after we both get some rest today I’ll help you look into this whole mess.”

“Why the change of heart?” Sunshine gleamed off gravestones wet with dew, reflected off the windshield of the cruiser and I remembered my patrol car, what I’d left on the passenger seat. I touched the onyx key on my chest.

The silver bowl.

“Maybe I’ve been looking at everything too narrow, my whole life. Maybe it’s time I changed some things.”

What are you getting at?

The passenger window cracked and fell inside. Smoke poured out of the car in thick black waves. “Shit!”

“John?”

I ran forward as flames flickered through the black. I dropped the phone as the heat hit me. Stepping back I tried to peer inside. The windshield cracked and the siren went off. I plugged my ears and scanned the graveyard. Someone moved into the woods at the edge of the property, a flash of white between birch and black walnuts.

I grabbed my phone and recoiled from the heat trapped in its casing. The siren bleated a long tone that died suddenly. My phone crackled in my hand.

I backed away from the inferno, wind slapping flames, covering the grass in ash. I jumped the fence, running for home, Cat on the patio, Ethan in her arms. I thought about what Pat had said, “She’s all tied up.” And ran faster.

Please God, don’t let Tiffany be inside that burning heap.

Chapter 15

Wylie set his chainsaw on the fallen tree and ran a blue handkerchief over his forehead. Sunlight stung his tired eyes. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and wiggled it, watching the sawdust fall free. Used to be he loved the work, anymore, with Tiff on his mind all the time, he dreaded coming out into the woods by himself. With her on his mind he could chop his leg off and bleed to death before anyone found him. But he couldn’t afford to hire a helper and most of the kids around Division wouldn’t be able to handle the strain.

He grabbed his gallon of water and drank half of it in four long chugs. The leaves stirred in the wind and, out past the end of the tree, the mountain fell away, a two-thousand foot tumble to the valley floor, the Loyal Sock twisting like a vein through the heart of the forest.

Brush broke behind him.

Wylie turned, the muscles in his back tense from running the chainsaw for the past few hours. A redheaded girl in a plaid shirt tucked her Levi’s into the top of her work boots. World’s End State Park lay a mile west, and none of the hiking trails ran this far.

“Are you lost, lady?” It seemed like a stupid question when she looked ready to dig in and help out, but he had no idea what else to ask.

She pulled her hair back in a pony tail and smiled, twenty feet away. Wylie straddled the fallen tree. “You shouldn’t be out here. What if you’d been at the end of this when I dropped it?”

“Then you’d feel bad.” She walked over, rolling up her sleeves. “Because I’d be dead. Right?”

“Can I help you?”

“Heard you working and thought I’d offer a hand.”

He studied her for a moment. Her body, even in work clothes, made his crotch tingle. His face grew hot, half guilt after all this time claiming he loved Tiff, half out of embarrassment because his dick dug at his pants like a meat hook. She laughed. Wylie pulled the front of his shirt down. “You’re not from here.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately. Nice quiet town full of secrets. Nobody likes outsiders, do they?” She straddled the log, and dug at the bark.

Full of secrets?

“I’m Wylie.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“You’re Johnathan and Michael’s friend.”

Wylie swallowed, snatched his jug of water and pulled the cap off. “Who are you? Friend of Mike’s? You come back from L.A. with him?”

“He was never in Los Angeles.”

“I thought—”

“Secrets, like I said. Where he was makes Los Angeles look like heaven.”

“Your name?”

“Angela.”

Wylie tried to see what she was going for here, why she’d approached him. He sipped his water and wiped his lips with his forearm, squinting against the sun glaring over her shoulder, a little angry with himself for the inexperience he had with women. “And you think I can help you with something that John and Mike didn’t?”

Or wouldn’t.

“I don’t want you to help me.”

He shrugged and shook his head. “I’m not following.”

“I want you to help them.”

Birds chirped and an albino deer broke out of the brush and ran uphill, antlers clacking against branches. It stopped on the ridge line and looked back at him, a raven on its shoulders, pecking, black on white producing speckles of red.

Wylie’s eyes grew heavy and his head sagged. He tried to look up at Angela but couldn’t move his neck. Her voice came from faraway, as if through one of the drainage pipes he and his buddies had played in as children. He remembered Mike’s sister, Natalie, long forgotten. Heat flooded his whole body.

“They cannot face the coming darkness without you. This is only the beginning. I know you love your friends, even more than you love the woman.”

The woman…He struggled to remember her name.

God, what’s happening to me?

The sun’s heat touched his skin; a soft breeze brought rippling gooseflesh that climbed his arms, caressed his shoulders, slid down his spine. The edges of his vision darkened. Angela touched his leg and he jumped, fell off the log, his jaw locked shut.

“If you’re to help them you must realize that you can only do it with a pure heart.”

Pure…

Pain enveloped him. Liquid fire trapped between his clothes and skin, burning. It spread deeper, through his muscle, every fiber contracting until it felt as if it’d break.

“You want to help them?”

Yes! Stop!

“You must know what your future holds to renew your focus once this sad, sad music ends.” She knelt next to him. He watched her through slits as his teeth ground against each other. “Sleep, like Adam slept. Wake to your Eve.”

* * *

Mike woke and pulled his pistol from the end table. Sirens blared in the distance, sharp and angry. He set his feet on the cold floor and jumped off the sofa, head jerking left and right, his dream of the one who is and shouldn’t be clawing at the edges of reality.

At the large window overlooking his front lawn, he pressed his forehead to the glass and closed his eyes for a moment as a shiver broke through him. When he looked down the hill, he saw the fire truck pulling into All Saints, a couple of state police cars, and the mayor. They moved like angry bees around the smoking husk of the sheriff’s black Charger.

Angela, dressed in a slim black skirt and white button up dress shirt, touched his shoulder. “What happened?”

Mike squeezed the gun, ashamed of himself for letting her stay after what she’d shown him in the hospital, how her finger had drawn images in a pool of black.

But she’s like the other one, the old one, she knows what she’s talking about. Even if she has brought death with her.

“I don’t know. Looks like someone stole and torched the sheriff’s car.” He looked at the pistol, enjoyed its weight. “Do you cook?”

“We’re here to help each other. I can do whatever you need.”

If I do whatever you want.

She smiled and ran her finger over the glass. “Do you want to go down there?”

“No.”

“I see our friend.”

Mike looked out the window again as the sun hit the trees and cast dancing shadows over the men bustling about, some of them hooking up a large house to douse the remnant of fire. John walked across his back yard, his gaze on the ground. “He’s not your friend. And neither am I.”

“But we need each other.”

“And you’ve never said why.”

“You’ll see. Don’t test me. I’m sick of being tested.” The venom in her voice rose to a crescendo and she took his left hand and stirred a loss he’d stuffed away. It tore through thin gauze, confusion. He saw his mother leading his sister out into the woods behind the manor, sister looking back, meeting his glare. Father pulling him away, taking him to the store to hide something…

Natalie.

He screamed and head butted Angela but fell right through her, stumbled, and caught himself on the bookcase against the wall. “What happened to her? You know! Tell me!” Mike lifted the pistol, knowing that it’d do no good, but instincts took over.

“I will show you when you help me with your friend.” Angela wiggled her fingers at him as she walked toward the door. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

He stood in front of the window, his nerves popping, but eager to get John to help him so that the demon would reveal the truth about his sister. John had his hands on his hips, among the chaos in the cemetery, the firemen putting their hose away, the mayor shaking his head. John stared at Pat, whose face stood out like a bright rose.

You need to know the truth.

* * *

Between the sun pounding down and the steam rising from Pat’s car, the exhaustion I had kept at bay overpowered me. The last day and a half I hadn’t slept but in sprints. I rubbed my hands on my jeans and blinked sweat out of my eyes.

Pat clenched his hands and looked ready to hit Herb, leaning toward him. I looked up at the manor, black, tall, a monstrosity against the skyline. Too many bad memories, half-remembered.

I was glad that Tiffany hadn’t been in the car. But it didn’t make any sense why anyone would steal it and torch it. I felt bad for holding back with the state police, for lying to Pat and Herb too, saying the car burned before I’d ever came up, that I’d seen someone, a flash of white disappear into the tree line. I wasn’t even sure why I lied, part of me hoping it wasn’t just to spite them for what they’d done to the girls. And that bothered me too, not seeing them. Almost like they’d given up hope, the way it felt. My shoulders sagged. I looked down the hill, at my house. Cat was inside, probably on the phone talking to a damn psychiatrist, lining up a meeting. I shook my head. Her disbelief hurt.

The firemen rolled their hose up and climbed back in their red truck. Wind blew ash across their faces. Pat stared at the Charger. Two state police finished filling out some paperwork and drove away. Herb cleared his throat. “You want me to take you to the station so you can get the other car?”

“Where is Wylie working today?” Pat sat his hand on his gun. He squinted against the sun, his face scrunched up with enough emotion to choke a monster. I wished I’d brought the pistol. I didn’t think the sheriff would hesitate to use his. Pat spat on the stained ground. “He’s fucking my wife. He did this.”

Herb cranked his head, and the thick piece of flesh hanging from his neck jiggled. “What’s that?”

“You heard me.” The scowl Pat wore deepened. “You know where your friend is at?”

“Wylie wouldn’t steal your car. And I don’t believe he’d have a relationship with your wife.” I frowned, remembering Wylie lying to me about always working and never having time for a relationship, as we stood in front of the post office yesterday morning.

I know what you lied about now. Why the hell would you do that?

Pat stared at the Charger for a moment and turned away from us. Herb said, “Where are you going?”

Pat walked to the road. I looked at Herb. “I better find Wylie.”

Herb nodded. “Did you know Wylie was sleeping with Tiffany?” He wrung his hands together. “Not that it matters. I hope Wylie kills that sonofabitch.”

“Why’s that?”

“None of your business, John.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“I’m not the only one feeling some strain, am I? Do you see the dead girls from the woods?”

“You want Pat’s job?”

“Depends. Why did you bury them in the woods without identifying them and letting their families know? No bullshit about sparing my family’s name.”

“Don’t judge me. I had my reasons.”

“I don’t want to be deputy. Sheriff either. You’re all crooked. Even Rusty, who I thought was a friend.”

“Well,” Herb ran a hand through his hair, “believe what you want. Things are always easy when you’re not in someone else’s shoes.”

“You can step in mine.”

“No thanks. You’ve stepped in a pile of shit so deep you’re not going to be able to pull yourself out.” Herb turned and walked to his Cadillac.

I called to his back, “After I find Wylie and let him know Pat’s hunting him, I’m going to find out what happened. It could have been Brandy in the woods, butchered.”

Herb stopped at the driver’s door and leaned his arms on the roof. “I know. That’s why I’m done with it. This town can tear itself apart. My job is to take care of my family.”

“You’re still mayor. The town’s your family, too. But I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Miller. Whatever you know, you should have told the state police.”

“Pat would kill me. Like he’s going to kill Rusty.”

I stepped toward the car, legs heavy, head light. “Why would he kill Rusty?”

“Because Rusty likes you, and he has a conscience. He’s going to talk.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Herb opened the car door and disappeared behind smoked glass. As he backed out to the road, movement up the hill caught my eye. Mike stood on his porch, a dark figure, as if chiseled from granite, the house itself.

In a way he is. He’s always been unshakeable.

I wanted to speak to him but there wasn’t time and not much he could do to help anyway because he’d be just as lost as I was.

I turned back to my house and took another step on the long road choking the past.