Authors: David Jack Bell

The Girl in the Woods (35 page)

BOOK: The Girl in the Woods

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Because her head had started to hurt again, a more intense pain. It felt as though the plates of her skull were being slowly pried apart, and Diana's eyes watered from the pressure. She gritted her teeth and tried to ride it out. In a moment, a long moment of agony, the pain passed again, leaving her taking deep breaths like a woman in the throes of labor. When her vision cleared, she placed her hand on the door handle. She needed to go before the pain started again.

She pushed the door open.

* * *

The house came in sight, a small, nondescript, two-story Cape Cod, the kind that littered the landscape of Union Township. Night birds called in the trees as Diana moved closer. No lights burned in the windows, and the house's shabby condition and slightly overgrown yard made it appear abandoned. But Diana knew it had just been searched earlier that day.

She swallowed hard and forced herself to go on.

She didn't really have a plan. She just wanted to see the place first, get a feel for it and the landscape. She believed a plan would present itself once she arrived and to prepare in advance might only provide a false sense of security.

The house sat on an average-sized plot of land that had been clear-cut out of the surrounding woods many years ago. Diana stuck close to the trees, her body in the shadows as she approached the house. She moved parallel to the long, gravel driveway, and as she came even with the side of the house, the pain returned. This time it was so intense, it buckled her knees and brought her to the ground. Blackness encroached from the edge of her vision.

"No. No."

She fell to all fours...

...she saw the Donahue house again, and then she saw behind it. A garage, a storage shed, and farther along, a stand of trees. She saw an opening there, a path...

She knew it led to the clearing...

* * *

She didn't know how long she'd been out. The sky looked darker, and the moon was peeking above the tree line, a fat rising disc accompanied by a speckling of stars. Diana lay in the grass, her joints aching. She felt cold, her body jolted by shivers.

She looked around. The house—the real house and not a vision—stood there, still dark. She hugged her arms around herself. She thought of the heat blasting in her car, the ticking of the radiator in her apartment. No one had seen her, no one knew where she was. She could turn and go, start the new life she needed.

Because that had worked so well before.

These things kept following her. Better to be the one in control, take the fight to it rather than being the one always pursued.

She pushed herself to her feet and kept walking.

Behind the house, she saw the garage just as it appeared in the vision. Beyond that, the trees and the entrance to the path. Her heart pounded. She looked back at the house. It remained quiet and dark. She turned to the path, took a deep breath, and entered it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

That night, Nate Ludwig didn't have to wait as long to see Captain Berding as he had the first day. He gave his name at the front desk, this time to a different officer who seemed less efficient and more world-weary than the last, and within two minutes he was being escorted back to the captain's office where Berding waited for him. Berding looked tense. His jaw was clenched, and his body appeared ready to uncoil and leap across the desk. Ludwig understood. He had spent the afternoon in a mindless faculty senate meeting and then was detained by his department chair who wanted to talk about the composition of a search committee to hire a new Shakespeare scholar. Ludwig went through the motions of his day, but inside he wanted to scream.

"Close the door," Berding said.

Ludwig did, but before he could sit down, Berding spoke.

"I know you're disappointed in the search," he said.

"I am. Surprised, too."

"I feel the same way. I was just about to call you."

"You were?"

Berding nodded. He clenched and unclenched the fist that rested on his desk.

"Are you free right now?" Berding said.

"Right now, this is all I have in my life."

Berding stood up and grabbed his hat.

"Good. I want you to take me to that grave."

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Diana moved through the darkened woods. Her eyes slowly adjusted, but she still only saw indistinct shapes and fuzzy outlines. She kept her eyes down, watching the path, fearing that if she lost sight of it she might never find her way back out.

I should have brought a flashlight. Why did I bring everything but a flashlight?

Something told her it didn't matter. She'd find the place she was looking for whether she could see it with her eyes or not. Something would guide her there, draw her like a magnet to steel. And that's what she felt as she moved through the woods. She no longer controlled her own destiny, and she hadn't for many months, maybe even years. She looked back over a series of events and saw how they all lined up to guide her to this place, this moment. Leaving home. Institutionalizing her mother. Coming to New Cambridge. Joining and leaving the force. Meeting Dan. And then Kay Todd.

It had to be leading her to Rachel. There could be no other answer.

The night had grown silent around her. The wind was still, the branches above and around her frozen in place. Her foot landed on a small branch, and its crack in the darkness sounded like a cannon burst. Diana's heart rate remained steady, her breathing calm. She had accepted this as her fate, as the place she needed to be, and her acceptance brought her a measure of peace. Here at last something would be decided. One way or another, she'd know something. Either these visions meant something and led to something greater, or it was a giant cosmic joke, one that she could laugh about all the way to the second floor room she'd soon be sharing with her mother.

But Diana doubted it was a joke.

Ahead, she saw a break in the trees. She hesitated.

It suddenly seemed familiar to Diana, as though she had been to this place and seen it before. The images flooded back.
The clearing in the woods...the tall trees...the moonlit night...the dark, rich earth and the secrets it held...
She had been here in her visions.

She rushed forward to the edge of the clearing, pausing at the trees and rocks that lined its edge, creating a natural barrier from the rest of the woods.

"This is it," she said. "This is it."

She fell to her knees, crying.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Roger had stayed in the house since the police had left. He was tired and hungry, but he didn't eat. He didn't feel like doing anything. His body felt empty, used up and worn out.

He missed the girl. Even though he'd had to kill her, and even though he knew she really didn't like him and probably never would, he missed her. Without her there, without her presence, the house felt terribly empty and sad. It reminded him of the days after his mother died, days when he and his dad stumbled from room to room, not speaking, avoiding each other's eyes. They didn't know what to do to keep the place going. They ate soup from cans and cried in front of the television.

That's how Roger felt now, except worse.

Back then, he at least had his dad. And eventually he had a wife. Now, he had nothing to look forward to. He wouldn't be able to take another wife, and the police might very well come back. He had covered up everything for now. He had cleaned the blood and brains and bits of skull from the bedroom. He had managed to slap on two coats of paint to hide the evidence. But he didn't think it would last. They'd find the cop's truck and they'd find his prints on it and they'd come back. Most definitely, they'd come back.

He sat in the house, in the dark, like a scared little kid.

But after a while, the clearing started talking to him.

He felt the stirring of his member. His mouth went dry.

Someone was there, it told him. Someone was in the clearing.

CHAPTER FORTY

Ludwig told Berding to stop his car on Connors Bend Road near its intersection with County Road 600. He couldn't be certain about the location since it was now dark and every acre of the landscape out there looked like every other acre. But he felt reasonably certain. He thought he recognized the contour of the fields, the distance to the trees.

"Here?" Berding said.

"I think so."

"You think or you know?"

"This is it," Ludwig said, trying to sound brave and certain. How else could he convince a cop of anything?

"So we just get out and walk?"

"There's no road through the woods."

They both stepped out of the car. Ludwig had brought a heavier coat, and he zipped it up. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

"Just stay close to me," Berding said. "We're trespassing, and if we get caught, it's not going to look good for either one of us. I'm technically out of my jurisdiction."

"Worse for you than me, I'd imagine. I'll let you do the talking."

Berding nodded. "If there's any shooting, stay behind me. Okay?"

"You don't have to tell me twice about that."

"Okay. Let's go."

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Diana raised her head and looked around. Tears blurred her vision. She wiped them away with the palms of her hands.

When she could see again, she looked around the clearing. She saw two areas of disturbed earth close to her. One of them looked freshly dug.

Graves.

"Rachel."

Diana went to the closest one, the freshest one, and sank her hands into the rich earth. She started digging. The ground gave way easily, just as it had in her visions. She moved great handfuls with ease.

"Rachel. I'm sorry. My sweet, baby sister, I'm so sorry. I'm coming for you. I'm coming. I didn't give up on you. I didn't give up."

Diana worked through the top layer of soil. She touched something that wasn't dirt or rock or root. Something fabric. She dug with more urgency, taking great scoopfuls of soil in the crooks of her arms and shoveling it aside as fast as it would go. Dirt covered her to her shoulders and began to adhere to her sweating face. But she kept going.

Soon, a portion of the body was revealed. Diana kept digging, exposing more. She saw the legs, the torso. The hands of a young woman.

"No, no."

Diana moved to the far end of the grave and worked to expose the face. She first saw the neck and the bloody gash, the apparent cause of the woman's death. She worked more and the face came clear, like a slow-to-develop Polaroid.

It wasn't Rachel, but the face of another young woman. The dark and the dirt made it difficult to see. Diana studied the features, the long brown hair, the nearly perfect nose. She'd seen the face before.

Then it clicked.

Jacqueline Foley, the missing Fields' student.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Roger stormed down the path in the dark. It felt as though an invisible rope had been tied around his waist, and something in the clearing was tugging it, supplying an increasing amount of tension that dragged him in that direction. He couldn't have stopped if he wanted to, and he didn't want to. He wanted to see who was there.

When he first reached the clearing, he didn't see anything or anybody, and he thought maybe he'd been wrong. But the clearing had never been wrong.

Something scuttled in the dirt. Roger looked down, thinking it was an animal.

It was a girl, a girl digging up the graves.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The man stood at the edge of the clearing. He was huge and hulking, but his face looked confused, and he resembled an overgrown child.

"What are you doing?" he said.

Diana was still on the ground, kneeling over the Foley girl's grave.

BOOK: The Girl in the Woods

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