One Summer (41 page)

“What is it?” she asked quietly.

“It’s your father. He’s apparently had a heart attack. An ambulance is on its way.”

His arm was around her, supporting her, as she partly stumbled, partly ran to the house. That was the only thing that kept her on her feet.

46

“J
eremy.”

There it was again—the voice. The soft, terrifying voice, calling him. Jeremy, huddled in his cold dark prison, shivered. He’d been in there for hours, days, he couldn’t tell. Most of the time he thought he’d been asleep. But always, always, he’d heard that voice, whispering in his mind.

“Jeremy.”

There it was again. He wanted to scream, wanted to cry, but he was too scared to do either. He was hungry and thirsty, and he had to pee, but all that was secondary to the fear that possessed him.

Something evil lurked in the dark.

“Move, Jeremy. You have to move.”

“Mom?” It was a croak, and even as he forgot himself enough to say it aloud, Jeremy cringed in anticipation of being attacked. His mom was dead. The voice he heard could not belong to her. The evil thing was tricking him again, just as it had done the first time.

“Move, Jeremy.”

But it sounded like his mom. Jeremy’s lip quivered. He wanted it to be his mom so bad. Maybe she’d come to be with him, to keep him company while he died.

He didn’t want to die. He was too scared.

“Get up, Jeremy.”

The voice was insistent, and for the first time he began to wonder if it was maybe inside his own head. His head ached and throbbed and felt as if it had swollen as big as a pumpkin. Was his mom talking to him inside his head?

He opened his eyes and tried to sit up. But he was dizzy, so dizzy and sick. His head hurt, and his stomach hurt, and his arms and legs felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds each. All around him there was nothing but blackness, cold dank blackness that smelled bad.

Was he in a grave?

At the thought he started to breathe really fast. For a minute he almost panicked. Then he managed to control himself with the thought that wherever he was, it was too big to be a grave. He hadn’t been buried alive.

At least he didn’t think so. But his head hurt when he tried to use his brain.

“Hide, Jeremy!” The voice, whatever its source, screamed inside his head. He wanted to scream back in terrified answer, but a scratching sound, a real scratching sound, shut him up. The sound scared him more than anything else so far had done.

He got up on his hands and knees and, feeling in front of him, found a wall of what felt like some sort of very smooth stone right next to where he was. It wasn’t the outer wall but an inner wall, and he’d been lying maybe two inches from it. It was gritty with dust and cold to the touch, yet he kept his hand on it for direction as he crawled as fast as he could away from the scratching sound.

A shaft of light—no, not light, but lessened darkness—allowed him to see that the stone wall was four feet tall and perhaps three feet wide—and that he could conceal himself from the revealing slice of grayness by ducking behind it.

He did, cowering, barely daring to peep around the edge to see what threatened him.

At once he recognized it as the thing he had seen lurking
in the shadows the night his mom was killed. A solid, dark presence was towering in a doorway that led from the place where he was imprisoned to the night beyond the door. A rush of fresh air, warmer than that which he breathed, fluttered the hem of the cloak that concealed the outlines of the creature itself from his view.

He could not see it, not properly, but Jeremy sensed the presence of evil. It was as tangible as a smell. He made himself very small, fighting the urge to whimper, resisting the impulse to run.

There was no place to go—except straight at the thing.

“Jeremy.”

It was the voice he’d heard in his backyard. It was different from the whisper that had awakened him and told him to move, which he now knew was a beneficent entity. This whisper made the hair rise on the back of his neck.

“Come here, boy.”

The thing moved, and he saw a glint of something silver clutched before it like a shield. Jeremy stared and realized what it was that he was seeing: a knife, long and glittering sharp.

The knife that had killed his mom, probably. The knife that the thing meant to use on him.

Jeremy felt a rush of warmth between his legs and realized that he’d wet his pants like a baby. Humiliation mingled with his terror. It was all he could do not to sob out loud.

In the doorway the thing sniffed once, twice, audibly, as if it could smell him. Then, from somewhere outside came a flash of light. Twin lights. Headlights from a car. Jeremy opened his mouth to scream.

“Be quiet,” the good voice warned him. He shut his mouth.

The thing seemed to hesitate, then as quickly as a bird taking wing, it melted away. The door shut. Jeremy found himself once again alone in the dark.

Only this time, he welcomed the dark as his friend.

47

T
he next few days passed in a blur for Rachel. She spent nearly every waking moment at her father’s hospital bedside, holding his hand and talking to him and praying for his recovery, though she knew that it was wrong to want to hold him back from the release that death was to him now. But she couldn’t help it. She could not bring herself to let him go. Not yet, not this way.

Elisabeth, who even slept on the floor beside Stan’s bed, felt as bad. She was white-faced and shrunken-looking as she watched over her husband, and she could hardly speak coherently even to the doctors. It fell to Rachel to talk to them and to try to make sense of what they were telling her. Then she had to report the situation as she understood it to Elisabeth and Becky.

Becky, torn between her daughters at home and her father at the hospital, kept watch with her mother whenever Rachel caved in to exhaustion and let Johnny drag her away for a few hours of sleep. His intention to keep a nightly vigil in her backyard was forgotten, because she no longer spent her nights at home. Rachel now went to Johnny’s apartment as naturally as she would have to Walnut Grove, because it was close to the hospital and because Johnny was there. His arms held her as she slept, he dried her tears when she cried, and he made her eat when
she didn’t feel like it. It was Johnny who took care of the small things that made such an exhaustive vigil bearable. He drove the women back and forth when they were too tired to even think coherently, much less operate a motor vehicle. He carried food and snacks up to them when he couldn’t persuade them to visit the cafeteria for a meal. He bought personal necessities such as face soap and toothbrushes and toothpaste at the hospital pharmacy for them when they awoke feeling grubby and disoriented after spending that first terrifying night with Stan. Most important of all, he provided a strong male shoulder to lean on for whichever woman was feeling lowest at any particular moment. Even Elisabeth came to rely on him during those terrible days. She said more than once that she didn’t know how they would manage without him. In the shock following Stan’s hospitalization, she had even accepted the news of Rachel’s engagement without a murmur. Not that Rachel would have chosen that time to tell her, but with the glittering ring on her finger—tag still attached—when she arrived at the hospital, the fact was hard for even Elisabeth, distraught as she was, to miss.

Life outside the hospital went on while Stan lay hooked up to what seemed like the dozens of machines that kept him (just barely) alive. Friends poured into the waiting room, but only family members were allowed to see Stan. Kay was a frequent visitor, as were Susan Henley and all of Elisabeth’s cronies from church. Even Rob sent flowers, which gesture Rachel appreciated. At such a trying time, she found that she and Elisabeth and Becky needed people. The visitors even went out of their way to be civil to Johnny, whose status as an almost family member had quickly become the talk of the town. For once, Rachel was thankful for the efficiency of the gossip network that had trumpeted their engagement. At the moment, Stan’s crisis was all she could cope with. She didn’t think she could summon the energy to explain Johnny’s almost constant presence to her friends and neighbors as well.

A substitute had replaced Rachel at school for as long as she was needed at the hospital. Michael came once from Louisville to visit Stan, but he got so frosty a reception from Elisabeth and Rachel that he didn’t stay for more than ten minutes. Becky, coming in a little later with swollen eyes, reported that he had stopped by to see the girls at Walnut Grove, and that after he had left, Loren had asked her how long divorce lasted anyway, because she was getting tired of it. The question had made Becky cry.

The hardware store was once again being managed capably by Ben, who had agreed to stay on under a hastily worked-out deal that gave him profit-sharing as well as a nice raise and included the proviso that Johnny would no longer work at the store. Johnny didn’t mind being out of a job, since he was only awaiting a resolution to Stan’s health crisis before leaving Tylerville forever with Rachel.

Chief Wheatley was one of the dozens of Stan’s friends who stopped by the hospital to see him. Unlike the others, he was permitted, because of his official status, to visit the patient’s room. He said he had no real progress on the murder investigations to report, but he brought with him disturbing news: Jeremy Watkins had apparently run away from home. At any rate, he had disappeared, and his father and grandparents were distraught. No, the chief did not really suspect foul play—little boys were not the murder victims of choice in Tylerville lately—but still it was worrisome. After Rachel and Johnny assured him that neither of them had seen Jeremy since his mother’s funeral, Chief Wheatley pursed his lips and nodded. The kid had been still adjusting to his new home situation, which was less than ideal and in the chief’s opinion gave him a reason to run away, but still they were checking out every possibility.

The only thing that bothered him, he declared, was the way Jeremy had kept insisting that, on the night of his mother’s murder, he had seen something in the dark. If the murderer had gotten wind of that, perhaps he had felt
the need to get Jeremy out of the way. That was why he was interviewing Johnny and Rachel, and everyone else who had heard Jeremy’s remark. Of course, the way Tylerville worked, it was hard to find anyone who did not know what the kid had said, so the list of potential suspects was by no means limited to the few who had heard it from Jeremy directly.

Rachel gasped in horror at the suggestion, but the chief told her that it was only one of many possibilities, and not even a very likely one, since if the boy had been killed, his body would surely have been found by now. Whoever had murdered Marybeth Edwards and Glenda Watkins had not been shy about leaving their victims on view.

No, the most likely scenario was that the boy, distraught over his mother’s death, unhappy in his new home with his father’s girlfriend on the premises, had simply run away. He had been reported missing across the country, and the chief expected to receive a call announcing that the boy had been picked up almost any time.

Rachel hoped so, but the news that Jeremy was missing made her uneasy. Glancing up at Johnny as the chief left, she could tell he felt the same way.

But there was nothing they could do to locate the boy, and Rachel was so caught up in the heartbreak of her father’s situation that she pushed the mystery of Jeremy’s whereabouts to the back of her mind. As Chief Wheatley had said, the poor little boy had very likely simply run away.

Johnny made an excuse to leave the room a few minutes after the chief left. Rachel had not seen the curt jerk of the head with which Wheatley had summoned him, so she just waved in an absent-minded way when Johnny said he’d be back in a minute.

Wheatley was no longer in the corridor when Johnny stepped out of Stan’s room. Johnny hoped that he had not stopped by the waiting room, where usually one or more of the Grants’ friends could be found—that was a gauntlet
that he avoided whenever possible. One of the white-clad nurses, pushing a squeaky-wheeled cart that held lunch for those patients who could eat, told Johnny in response to his terse query that the chief had just stepped into the elevator. Taking the stairs two at a time, Johnny caught up with Wheatley in the lobby.