Turn to Stone (15 page)

23

The wall of the barn loomed in front of Stride.

Nearly every barn in Shawano County boasted a painted barn quilt, and Gandy’s barn was no different. He saw it in the light of his flashlight, a square of vibrant colors depicting lightning bolts laced together like a razor-edged throwing star. It was vivid against the decaying red of the wall itself.

The barn’s foundation was built of fieldstones and mortar, dug into a shallow bank of land, making two levels. He found a wooden door in the stone, but when he leaned his shoulder into it, the door held firm. A chain rattled inside. He climbed up the slope to an old row of windows, but the glass was painted over and the frames nailed shut with plywood. He kept climbing to the top of the slope, where a large shed jutted from the wall on the barn’s upper level. The shed door was padlocked, but he reared back and kicked, and the rotting wood splintered and readily gave way.

He went inside. Spider webs clung in sticky ropes to his hair. Rusted tools dangled from hooks. Hack saws. Scythes. Drills. Dank water puddled in the dirt. He smelled gasoline. The shared wall with the barn was moldy and soft, a mess of half-broken beams. He pried at the old wood, tearing it away, opening up a hole. Dodging nails, he squeezed through the wall into the interior.

A wave of cold assaulted him. Ridiculous cold. Crazy cold. The barn was a forest of ice. He felt as if he’d climbed into a cloud of liquid nitrogen, freezing the very air that opened up his lungs. His whole body convulsed. His fingers bent like claws. He had visions of being found here in the morning, a statue covered in frost.

Then, like a fit, the sensation passed. The super-cold lifted as if it had never been there, and all he felt was the ordinary damp chill of the shut-up space.

The barn was black. He turned his flashlight around him, illuminating spongy mountains of hay. Long beams bent diagonally across the floor, propping up the barn walls. He smelled mold and dung. Something scuttled across his boot—a white rat, old and fat, which stopped long enough to glare at him with its crimson eyes. He heard the drip drip drip of snowmelt oozing through the ceiling and landing in the sodden straw. Shining his light upward, he saw silver rain.

And in the midst of it all, animals.

Dead animals that looked alive. Dozens of them. Everywhere.

A hawk dangled from a wire, its huge wings spread, its hooked beak open. A scared hedgehog peeked out from the hay beneath it. A wolf, with hackles raised, clutched a bloody bone in its teeth. A raccoon watched him with hunched back. A moose, seven feet tall, antlers like broken saw teeth, stood its ground, ready to charge. Stride navigated the still-life zoo, avoiding deer, squirrels, trumpeter swans, and porcupines. Their eyes all followed him.

He walked silently. The concrete floor was buried in hay. When the wind blew, the animals moved. It unnerved him.

He stopped and listened.

Deep in the barn, someone laughed.

It was a laugh that couldn’t be described as male or female. There was no humor in it, only menace. The laughter bubbled up, poisonous as sulphur gas, starting soft and growing louder. It seemed to come from under the earth—under his feet.

He was on the upper level of the barn. Someone was below him.

Stride sidestepped a vast hillock of spiny straw that crested nearly at the ceiling, and when he did, he saw a column of light streaming in dusty rays from a square hole in the floor. A thick wooden beam rose from the center of the hole and made a cross high above him. He withdrew his gun from his pocket. When he approached the opening, he looked down at a twelve-foot drop into bales of hay.

A black bear guarded the hole like a sentry. It was reared back on its hind legs, shaggy fur covered in dust and gossamer, canines bared. The dead animal’s glass eyes focused on Stride as if to warn him:
Don’t go down there
.

In the belly of the barn, he saw larger-than-life shadows thrown across the floor. Metal clanged on metal, like ghost chains. One of the distorted shadows painted on the hay formed the shape of an upraised arm, ending not in fingers but in the elongated hook of a blade. With another sickening gurgle of laughter, the knife streaked downward, eliciting a scream.

A scream of agony. Despair. Disbelief. A shriek that begged for mercy and got none.

“Gandy!” he shouted. “
Stop!
”

Stride threw himself into the hole. His knees were bent. His jacket flew like a cape. Gravity sucked him to the floor, where the uneven bales stabbed him like needles and kicked him sideways. The impact rippled through his body. He rolled and rose to his knees with his gun at the end of his outstretched arms.

Two people were in front of him, under a hanging light that swung like the hypnotic tick of a pendulum. Neal Gandy. Kelli Andrews. It wasn’t the scene he expected.

Gandy lay on the floor, hog-tied, his wrists over his head, encased in duct tape and chained to a beam. The same was true of his ankles. His face was purple with bruises. His jean shirt lay open and unbuttoned, exposing his flat chest, which hammered with panicked breaths. His mouth was wide open. He couldn’t stop screaming. Blood dripped from two inch-deep incisions cutting open the skin of his torso and forming a letter.

T.

Kelli had already begun to carve.

She was on her knees. Her hair fell in front of her eyes. The sleeves of her sweatshirt were pushed up past her elbows. Her face and arms, like Gandy’s, were a rainbow of bruises. They’d fought viciously on the dirty floor of the barn, but Kelli had won. He was her prisoner now. Like Jet.

“Kelli,” Stride said. “You’re safe. You don’t need to do this.”

Her eyes were empty, no more than two marbles devoid of life. The laughter, crazed and inhuman, was hers. It kept on behind her lips, the mad cackling of someone whose brain had been washed away by fear. In its place was a sheer, violent survival instinct, a thirst for revenge that couldn’t be slaked.

“Kelli, put down the knife.”

It was a six-inch fillet knife with a black handle, its blade wet, dripping beads of Neal Gandy’s blood back onto the man’s skin. Its honed edge gleamed in the light. Her fingers tightened around the weapon. She gave no signs of stopping. She lowered the knife until the very point of the blade made an indentation in Gandy’s chest, at the point where his heart was beating wildly inside. Gandy wailed.

“Stop her, shoot her, do something!”

“
Kelli
.”

She pushed with barely a breath of effort, and blood leaked around the blade. Her hand trembled, and she looked at Stride and whispered the next letter: “E.”

“No. Stop, Kelli. You’re stronger than this. You’re better than this.”

“Shoot her!” Gandy howled.

“E,” she repeated. The blade stayed where it was. She didn’t move, but with a simple flick of her hand, she could bury it deep, severing skin, tissue, and muscle. Opening up his heart.

Stride re-holstered his gun. He held his arms wide, his hands and fingers outstretched.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Gandy screamed. “Kill this crazy bitch!”

“Kelli,” Stride said softly. “Listen to my voice. No one can hurt you. No one can touch you.”

He got slowly to his feet. A wave of arctic cold washed over him again. He took a step toward her. She watched him come, drained of emotion, hovering on the brink between surrender and murder. When he took one more step, she hiked the knife in the air as if to drive it down, and he froze where he was.

Gandy squirmed against his bonds, but he had nowhere to go.

“Trust me, Kelli,” he said, but she didn’t. She was beyond trust.

Stride didn’t know how to reach her. He didn’t know what to say. She may as well have been on a precipice with an endless drop on all sides. Her angels battled her demons, but her demons were strong.

“Don’t lose faith in yourself,” he said.

Kelli blinked. In the time he’d stared at her, he didn’t think she’d blinked once. The knife wavered. “Percy lost faith,” she said.

“Percy was
wrong
.”

Kelli stared at the man below her. She blinked again, as if coming back to life. The ice in her eyes melted and grew hot as flame. She was angry now. Angry at Neal Gandy. Angry at herself. She still had the knife poised in the air. She wanted to strike back at something. Anything.

“No.” He repeated it calmly. “No. No. No.”

Stride saw movement in the mass of straw. It was another white rat. Albino white, red eyes, calm and determined. Inching closer. Smelling blood. Kelli’s head pivoted. She saw it, too. They stared at each other with no more than three feet separating them. It was as if the rat were Jet Black. Greg Hamlin. Neal Gandy.
Der Teufel
. All of them sucking energy from violence and feeding on death.

She pointed the knife at the rat.

“If you come any closer,” Kelli said, “I’m going to cut you in half.”

The rat backed away. It scampered into the blackness of the barn. Kelli’s anger fled just as quickly. Grief flooded in to take its place. She heaved a huge breath, and every ounce of strength vanished from her body like air fleeing a balloon. The blade spilled harmlessly from Kelli’s fingers. She crumpled to her side, curling into a ball. Her mouth fell open in despair, and silent tears poured from her eyes.

Stride walked over to her, picked up the knife and threw it aside, and then bent down and held her and let her cry.

24

“What’s next?” Kelli asked him.

She sat on the uncomfortable steel frame of the bed inside the county jail with her hands between her knees. Stride stood on the other side of the bars. Weik had given him five minutes with her, and Stride was sure the sheriff was timing him. A day had passed, from night to night.

“Next you hire a lawyer,” he said. “I can give you names. There’s a criminal attorney in Duluth who’s very good. Archie Gale. Talk to him.”

Kelli looked around the small cell with a curious wonder, as if taking the measurements of her new home. “I always thought I’d end up here. I had the feeling it was just a matter of time.”

“Not necessarily for long,” Stride said.

She touched one of the bruises on her face, which were the only remnants of the fight. She’d been allowed a shower and a change of clothes, so she looked like herself again. Young. Pretty. Strong. A punk vibe. Stride thought of her as someone who didn’t follow the rules, and he could relate to that. Up to a point.

There were some lines you didn’t cross, because once you did, there was no going back.

“Is Neal Gandy talking?” she asked.

He shrugged. “From what I hear, Gandy’s still accusing you of murdering Greg Hamlin. He says you kidnapped him, not the other way around.”

Kelli looked concerned. “Will anyone believe him?”

“Unlikely. I think if he considers the prospect of Sophie testifying against him, he’ll change his story and take a plea. It was his truck, his barn. Plus, he made a big mistake. Remember he told you about phoning in an anonymous tip to get Percy over to Tom Bruin’s camper? One of the cops told me they were able to pinpoint the call. It came from a payphone at the Pick ‘n Save market in town. Ten minutes later, Gandy checked out with groceries at the same store and used his perks card. He probably did it by habit, never gave it a thought.”

Her head cocked. “It doesn’t really prove anything, though, does it?”

“No, but circumstantial evidence counts. Juries don’t like coincidences. Besides, the police know what to look for. They’ll find more evidence tying Gandy to Hamlin and the crime scene. The bottom line is that the odds of you ever being convicted or even charged in that murder are essentially zero.”

Kelli smiled. “That makes me feel a little better.”

“The news isn’t all good,” he said. “Your biggest problem is the one you’ve had all along.”

“Jet,” she said.

He nodded.

Kelli got up from the bed and came to the door of the cell. Stride’s fingers were wrapped around the bars. She put her own hands over his. “Whatever happens, thank you. You went out on a limb for me. I had no right to ask that. I had no right to ask you to believe in me when I’d done something terrible.”

He looked for answers in her eyes, but there were none.

“You realize I have to tell them,” he said.

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Of course. Actually, I plan to go public about it anyway. It’s time. I don’t want this secret shadowing my life forever. Magazines have asked for interviews for years. Publishers have offered book deals. I think I’m ready to be open about what I went through. And what I did, too. Let the chips fall where they may. If I spend years in jail, so be it.”

There would be no years. They both knew it.

“Archie’s a good lawyer,” he said. “You’ll be a sympathetic figure. It’s the kind of case that a county prosecutor typically wants to make go away with as little fuss as possible. The public won’t want to see you in prison, no matter what you did. The jury would be unpredictable, if it came to a trial. The evidence is problematic, too. No body. Most of the witnesses are dead. They might accept a confession and offer a temporary insanity deal. Let you do psychiatric counseling instead of jail time.”

“Do you really think so?” she asked.

“I think most people would believe that someone who went through what you did would be unable to distinguish right from wrong,” Stride replied. He felt her warm hands holding his own, and he added: “Is that what happened?”

She removed her hands and folded her arms across her chest. They were still close, with only inches separating them. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not a big believer in mystical explanations,” Stride said.

Kelli shrugged. “You saw what happened in the barn.”

“Did I?”

“What are you saying? Do you think I was faking it?”

“I have no idea. I wasn’t the one lying on the ground, knowing what was about to happen to me. I wasn’t the one in the Novitiate. It seems to me you had every reason to hate Jet Black. You had every reason to hate Neal Gandy, too.” He leaned into the bars. “However, there’s a difference between temporary insanity and deliberate revenge. If you knew
exactly
what you were doing, that’s not the same thing, is it?”

“Did I look I knew what I was doing?”

“No.”

Kelli turned her back on him. For a moment, she said nothing. Then she wheeled around. “So why the questions? Why the doubt?”

“It’s the little things that bother me,” Stride said.

“Like what?”

“Like your escape from the Novitiate,” he told her. “Sorry, God doesn’t drop mortar from the ceiling to break manacles. Neither does the Devil.”

She hesitated. “I told you, there was a storm. A lightning strike. You don’t have to believe there was any religious significance to it. Then again, like you said, you weren’t the one who was there.”

Stride shoved his hands in his pockets. “No, there was no storm, Kelli. It makes for a dramatic story, but you shouldn’t use facts that someone can check. I looked up the weather records at the library. There were no storms in the area that week.”

She stared at him. He wondered if it had never occurred to her that he would do any research on her story. That he wouldn’t simply assume she was telling the truth.

“Well, I remember a storm,” she insisted. “Maybe the records are wrong. Or who knows, maybe I hallucinated it. My mind was scrambled. Can you blame me? I was in a ruined building. It’s crumbling away to nothing. Maybe mortar fell from the ceiling, and I was just lucky it landed where it did. I could have dreamed the storm.”

“That’s one possibility,” he acknowledged.

“And the other?”

“You had help.”

Her dark eyes flared with anger. “Help? I prayed to God all week to help me. He did nothing. No one came.”

“I’m not belittling what was done to you. Not in any way. My heart goes out to you. I just don’t believe a
miracle
freed you. A human being did that. I think someone else found you in the Novitiate before Percy did.”

“What, do you think Mike Black rescued me? Because he didn’t.”

“Mike? No. I considered him, but he was just a boy.”

“Then who?”

“I think Mike told his mother what he’d seen. He had a terrible secret, and he couldn’t keep it inside, so he told Ginnie. I think she came to get you. She was the one who set you free.”

Kelli was silent. She opened her mouth to protest, but then she closed it again.

“Ginnie was very eloquent about what Mike saw Jet do,” Stride went on. “I believed her until she started talking about the last day and how Jet died. Then she stumbled. Then she seemed to be making up a story. The details sounded off. You see, I think Mike told her what he saw
before
Jet died, not after. I think Ginnie Black came and found you at the Novitiate and helped you escape. And then I think two women who had suffered so much at the hands of Jet Black decided there was finally a way to put an end to him once and for all. What did you call it?
To pay him back in full
.”

Kelli sat down on the bed. The metal springs squeaked. “Wow.”

“Of course, it’s easier to sell a tortured woman going insane and being possessed by
Der Teufel
than it is two abused women coming up with a cold, calculated plan for vengeance and murder. You figured you could talk your way out of whatever you did, as long as it was just you in the ruins. As it turned out, though, you didn’t need to say a thing. Percy took the fall for you. He and Tom made it all go away.”

“Do you really believe any of this?” she asked. “Do you really think that’s what happened?”

Stride didn’t reply right away. He’d been asking himself the same question all day. “I believe you’re a very persuasive woman, Kelli. And I don’t put much faith in the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“The Devil made you do it,” he said.

Kelli couldn’t help herself. He watched a tiny smirk play across her face, coming and going literally in the blink of an eye. A secret grin. An inside joke. It was enough to make him think that he really was in the presence of a talented actress. A woman who had conned not just one—but two—seasoned policemen in her young life. Himself included. An actress. Victim. Murderer. Not insane at all.

Who could say?

“So are you going to tell all this to Sheriff Weik?” she asked. “You know you’ll never prove a thing. Ginnie will deny it. Mike won’t say a word against his mother.”

Stride shrugged. “It’s not my case. It’s not my town. You’re right, suspicions aren’t evidence. Besides, I don’t think I’m in any position to judge you or Ginnie Black. I’ve seen what men like Jet can do, and women who come to the police often get no help. Abusers wind up right back on the street. Victims wind up dead.”

“You’re right about that,” Kelli said fiercely.

Stride zipped up his leather jacket. He nodded at the woman in the cell. “Me, I’m finally heading home. Good luck, Kelli. Remember, the hard part isn’t what you do. It’s living with what you’ve done.”

She stood up and ran back to the cell door before he left. She reached through the bars and took hold of his arm. Her face was curious. “Can I ask you something?”

“Okay.”

“If you didn’t believe me, why did you help me? You could have just walked away.”

He’d heard the same question before. People close to him had wondered about it for years. Why he did what he did. Cindy. Maggie. Serena. He’d struggled to explain it to himself, but there was only one explanation that made sense.

“Because you needed help,” Stride said.

His uncle stood in the driveway as Stride packed the Expedition for the road. “It’s late,” Richard told him. “You won’t be back in Duluth until the middle of the night. Why not stay and leave in the morning?”

Stride shook his head. “No, I have to go. I’m overdue.”

“Stubborn,” Richard said. “Like your mother.”

“And like her brother,” he replied.

His uncle enjoyed a quiet laugh. As Stride slammed the tailgate, Richard stepped through the snow and put his arms around his nephew. No handshake this time. Stride hugged him back. When they separated, he was surprised to see in the glow of the porch lights that his uncle’s eyes were glistening with tears. It surprised him even more to realize that he was holding in tears of his own.

“When will I see you?” Richard asked.

Stride opened the driver’s door, ready to head home. “If anything goes to trial, I’ll need to be back here.”

“We’re about the only family each of us has, Jon. Seems to me we can do better than that.”

Stride thought about his mother in the cemetery. About his father in the lake. About Cindy. People who had gone before him and left him alone. “I think you’re right about that,” he admitted.

“Come for Thanksgiving.”

“Maybe I will.” And he realized that he would.

“Bring that dark-haired beauty with you, too,” Richard said. “I’m an old man. It does my heart good to see a woman like Serena.”

“Well, I wouldn’t count on that,” Stride replied.

Richard put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Listen to me. I’m not sure you can ever put right the mistakes of the past. Most of us never get the chance. Fact is, most of us don’t try. If it ever comes your way, Jon, you leap at it, okay?”

Stride said nothing, but there was nothing he needed to say. He smiled.

He backed out of the driveway. Richard waved as he headed toward the Wolf River and the streets of Shawano. In another five minutes, he was back on Highway 29, finishing the trip he’d begun days earlier. He was barely conscious of the miles disappearing under his tires and the hours passing. There was no traffic, only the threat of deer, but he could live with that. It was late, he was tired, he was ready to be home. He didn’t make a stop on the way. His truck was running on fumes by the time he drove across the Superior Bridge into the city of Duluth.

Home.

It was two in the morning. The streets were empty, and snow was falling again, as if to welcome him back. He headed down the narrow strip of land that jutted between Lake Superior and the harbor. The Point. He’d lived here with Cindy. He’d lived here with Serena. The cottage would be empty and cold when he arrived, but he wanted nothing more than to listen to the waves of the lake over the dune and sleep the sleep of the dead. There was no vigil to keep.

He arrived at his house. The dark windows beckoned him inside. The lake roared and howled. He climbed out of his truck, and Shawano already seemed to be far away from where he was.

Sleep was what he wanted, but there would be no sleep. Not tonight. He realized that immediately.

There were footsteps across his snowy lawn.

He knew he wasn’t alone.