The Laura Cardinal Novels (99 page)

Feeling a slight let-down, she walked out, wondering if this was such a good idea.

“How are things going with Micaela?” she asked Nina as they walked to the front door.

“She's doing well,” Nina Brashear said. “I hope she's been helpful.”

“She has been.” Or at least she tried to be.

“Well, I'll leave you here,” Nina Brashear said. Clearly distracted.

Suddenly Dr. Brashear appeared in the arched doorway of the kitchen. “Nina, where's Micaela?”

“She's out.”

“Just once I'd like her to have dinner with us.” He glanced at Laura, dismissed her with a look. “When are we eating?”

“Joanie said about an hour.”

“Where is she? I don't see her anywhere.”

“She had to pick up some things for dinner.”

“Oh.” Dr. Brashear pulled his tie off and balled it up. “Where's Lourdes? The study is a mess.”

Laura felt superfluous. She didn't like the fact that Dr. Brashear didn't acknowledge her. He had that arrogant tone that she couldn't stand in men.

As she drove out, Micaela drove in, the headlights of her sporty little car bouncing off the royal palms. She turned to look at Laura, her face pale in Laura's lights. Her lips pressed tightly together in consternation, as if she were thinking:
you again?

Laura had nothing to ask her so she didn't bother to roll her window down. They drove past each other and into the night.

Laura's unease grew when she got back to the Bosque Escondido Ranch and checked her messages. No messages, just a hang-up. Whoever it was had stayed on the line for a full five seconds before hanging up. She'd timed it.

It was just silence. Nothing more and nothing less. No way to tell if there was any animosity there. But that didn't stop her from thinking of Grady.

Laura had an unlisted number. She'd also installed motion detector lights, iron bars on the doors and windows, and deadbolts on every door of the house. Most people out here didn't bother to lock their doors; Laura always did.

From the Brashear house, she'd driven a circuitous route to the freeway, aware of the headlights in her rearview. She'd looked for a Hummer, but didn't see one. Laura had done enough to be sure that no one had followed her out here, but she couldn't be sure that Grady didn't have other resources. Any private investigator would have access to her address and phone number. By law, they were not allowed to give that information out, but that meant nothing.

Laura had only been asleep for what seemed like seconds when the phone rang. Loud. She blinked at the clock. It was two forty-five, the time of night when you got only bad news.

She reached for the phone, but it stopped ringing. By the time she got the receiver to her ear, all she heard was a dial tone.

Wide awake now, her heart speeding up.

She hit Star 69, but all it showed was an unknown caller.

She went to the window. The wind tore through the small courtyard, the trees tossing. Lightning wired itself to the ground in a hail of airborne grit and the acrid odor of the wildfire south of town. The Diamondback fire was now one-hundred-percent contained, but she could still smell it.

No rain. No long-awaited monsoon. Just the wind, the heat lightning, and the thunder. Laura closed her eyes and her eyelids felt dry and brittle. She needed to sleep. If it was Grady, he was probably just playing games.

But she brought her SIG-Sauer to bed with her anyway.

Steve awoke before dawn. He felt much better. The aches were still there, but he could move pretty well. Jake lay on the floor beside the twin bed. Outside, Steve heard the faraway grumble of thunder.

He got up, careful not to step on the dog, and walked across the wood floor to the window. He parted the drapes and stared out into the forest. Even though it was still dark, he knew it wouldn't be a clear day. The air seemed opaque, weighed down with moisture. Dark, gloomy.

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.

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.