by Nora Roberts
after work, end of the week or not. If a woman wasn't safe walking down the road, how could they know they were safe inside their own homes?
A few of the regulars remained. Less Gladhill hulked over the bar, nursing a brew and the indigestion he'd gotten from meatloaf at Martha's. A fight with his wife had sent him out looking for dinner and consolation elsewhere. Besides, everyone knew that Big Barb Gladhill could take care of herself and ten men besides.
Cam studied the familiar faces as he walked to the bar. He noted not only who was there but who was missing.
“Slow night,” he said to Clyde.
The barman scowled. “You come in to point that out, or you want a drink?”
“Give me a Rolling Rock.”
Skunk Haggerty was there, in his usual corner, nursing his usual shot of Johnnie Walker while he waited for Reva Williamson to finish her shift at Martha's. The Dopper boy, home from college for the holiday weekend, drank Budweiser and hoped he'd get lucky with Sarah Hewitt.
Nobody played the jukebox, and the clatter of pool balls came clearly from the back room.
Cam drank his beer while Less stood beside him and belched.
“Friggin onions. Give me another beer, Clyde, goddamn it.”
“Walking home?” Cam said easily.
“I can hold my beer.”
“Another DUI'll go rough on you.”
“Then I'll sonofabitchin′ walk.” Feeling sorry for himself, he slurped up beer. God knew he got enough nagging from his old lady. Was it any wonder he went out looking for other female companionship when he was married to a damn warhorse? “It's a fucking shame when a man can't enjoy a beer without being hounded.”
“Hard day?” Cam sipped, but his eyes had fixed on the bandage wrapped around Less's right hand. “Hurt yourself?”
Grumbling, Less turned the hand from side to side. He'd been expecting the question and had already worked out an answer. “Burned the shit out of my hand on a fucking manifold.”
Cam hated knowing he would check in the morning to corroborate Less's story. “That's tough.”
Less guzzled down beer, burped, then sighed. “I guess I'm pissed ′cause we were supposed to have a poker game tonight. Roody's old lady won't let him out of her sight after sundown. Skunk's got his balls in an uproar over that skinny-assed Reva. Sam Poffenburger's sleeping in his ex-wife's living room until she calms down, and George Howard is patrolling his yard with his dogs, for Christ's sake. This business has screwed everything up.”
“Can't deny that.”
“That woman up to the hospital, she tell you anything you can use?”
“If I start discussing a witness, I'll get fired.” He drank again. “Best I can tell you is that I've been hitting a lot of walls.” He was studying Less like a cop, and they both knew it. “Thing is, when you keep hitting a wall, eventually you knock it down. You want to tell me where you were Tuesday night, between ten-thirty and eleven?”
“What the hell is this?”
“My job.” Cam held up his mug. “Sometimes it's easier to do it over a beer than down at the office.”
“Shit.”
“It's routine, Less. You're not the first one I've talked to, and you won't be the last.”
“I don't much like it.” He snagged a bowl of peanuts off the bar and began cracking them with his good hand. He wanted to show he was pissed but not scared.
“Neither do I, so why don't you tell me so we can both get back to enjoying our beer?”
“If you got to know, I was over to Charlie Griffith's, working in his garage on his Cavalier.” He glanced over his shoulder at Skunk. “I ain't supposed to do side jobs, and if it gets out, I could get canned.”
“Nobody said it had to get out. I'll have to check with Charlie, though.”
“Go right the fuck ahead. Now if you don't mind, Sheriff, I'd like to drink in peace.”
Cam took his half-full mug and wandered toward the back room. Cops lost friends—he knew it too well. It was better to lose them this way than by a bullet.
Sarah was shooting pool with Davey Reeder, a lanky, bucktoothed carpenter with good hands and a weak brain. Over the years Davey had joined Cam and Blair and some of the others on their jaunts into the woods. He was older by a couple of years and hadn't graduated until he was twenty. He'd knocked up one of the Lawrence girls and been married and divorced by the time he was twenty-two.
Cam was aware that Davey was one of Sarah's regular customers. He wasn't sure which of them he felt more sorry for.
“Hey, Davey.”
“Hey.” He smiled his beaver smile and kissed the three ball into the side pocket. “Want to play for beers?”
“Last time we did that, you got drunk and I got poor.”
Davey whooped in the girlish way he had, then speared the four and five into opposing pockets. “I could spot you.”
I'll pass.
Sarah smiled and ran her hand deliberately, seductively, up and down her cue. “Got another game in mind?”
“Shit on Sunday.” Davey missed his next shot. “You're up, Sarah.”
“It's gloomy in here without the juke.” Cam pulled some bills from his pocket. “Why don't you get some change, Davey, pick us out some tunes? Get another beer for yourself while you're at it.”
“Sure.” He sauntered out.
“Well…” Sarah leaned, long and slow, over the table, sighted in, and shot. “It's nice to know you'd spend five bucks to be alone with me.” She tossed her hair back, tilted her head, then ran her tongue along her top lip. “Wanna play?”
“Straight questions, Sarah. And I want straight answers.”
“Ooh, that official talk makes me hot.”
“Cut it out.” He grabbed her arm and jerked her upright. “What the hell did you mean the other day about me not knowing this town?”
She walked her fingers up the front of his shirt. “You were away a long time, baby. Things change.”
“You're bullshitting me, Sarah. It didn't have anything to do with me being away.”
When she shrugged and started to turn, he pulled her back.
Her eyes lit. “Go ahead. I like it rough. Remember?”
“You threw out that bone about Parker. What do you know about why he left?”
She slid her leg intimately between his. “What should I know?”
“Give me an answer, Sarah. Things are happening here that shouldn't be.”
“Your stepfather gets himself beat to death. Your girlfriend runs a woman down. What's it to me?”
“Answers, damn it. Stick with Parker. Why did he leave?”
“Because he got sick of the town, I guess. How should I know?”
“You do know, and you were mad enough to almost tell me. Did he used to visit you upstairs?” He caught her hair and held her still. “Did he come up the back stairs for twenty a pop?”
“What if he did?” She shoved Cam away. “What's it to you who I fuck?”
“Did he talk to you—after he'd rolled his fat body off yours, did he tell you things?”
“Maybe.” She pulled out a cigarette. When she struck a match, her hands were shaking. “Men tell women like me all kinds of things—like they'd tell a doctor or a priest.” She laughed and blew out smoke. “Something you want to … tell me?”
“After almost sixty years in this town, more than twenty-five as sheriff, he packs up and leaves. Why?”
“Because the bitch he was married to wanted to move to Fort Lauderdale.”
“He isn't in Fort Lauderdale. He isn't anywhere that I can find.”
“Parker's old news.” She picked up Cam's beer and drank deeply. “Don't you have enough to worry about? You still got a murder on your hands, don't you? Or are you letting that slide?”
“What do you know?” he asked softly. “Who told you things he shouldn't have told you upstairs in that bed?”
“I know all kinds of things.” She set the beer down again. “I know who has trouble at the bank, who
cheats the IRS, and whose wife won't do it more than once a week.” She pulled on the cigarette, exhaled. “And I know that you're pissing a lot of people off by asking questions when everybody thinks you should be looking for psychopaths under rocks in the woods. There's nothing I can tell you, Cam.”
“Nothing you will tell me.”
“I might have, once.” She picked up the cue and gave him a playful poke. “I might have done a lot for you once. Could've made things easy for you. But a woman like me looks out for herself, and I figure you're on your way out. A murder, an attack, slaughtered cattle, all since you've been back.” Her eyes were sly with secrets. “Maybe somebody ought to ask you some questions.”
He leaned close. “Figure this. If you know something you shouldn't, I'm your best chance.”
“I'm my best chance,” she corrected. “I always have been.” She turned her back on him and leaned over the table again. She spared him one last glance. “I heard your mama was packing up, too. I wonder why?” Sarah shot the cue ball into the pack and scattered balls.
* * *
By the light of her bedside lamp, Clare leafed through her father's books. It wasn't the first time. Over the last few nights, she had read them again and again, trying to understand the connection they had with the father she had known and adored. Trying to understand at all.
She'd found six of them, in the boxes upstairs. Six that dealt with what Jean-Paul had called the left-hand path. A half-dozen books, most of them dog-eared, that touted, even celebrated, the freedoms of Satanism.
What frightened her most was that they were not the screaming ravings of uneducated lunatics. They were slickly, somehow persuasively written and published by reputable houses. As an artist she viewed freedom of expression the same way she did breathing: No soul could exist without it. And yet each time she opened a volume her skin felt soiled. Each time she read, she suffered. Yet she continued to read, as her father must have, in secret, in shame, and in sorrow.
He had been searching, she thought. Jack Kimball had been an open-minded man thirsty for knowledge, always ready to question the status quo. Perhaps he had developed an interest in the workings of Satanic cults in the same way he had honed his interest in politics, in art, in horticulture.
She sat smoking, then easing her raw throat with tepid tap water, wishing she could convince her heart as easily as she convinced her head.
He'd been a man who enjoyed being fascinated and challenged, being shown a different route. A rebel, she thought with a small smile, determined to break the strict mold in which his parents had struggled to enclose him. Raised by devout Catholics, he had often referred to his parents as Saint-Mom-and-Dad, as if they had been one holy entity.
Often he'd told Blair and her stories about rising at dawn to make it to mass before school every day during Lent— and dozing through the sermon until his mother would jab him with an elbow. He'd had a never-ending supply of Catholic-school anecdotes, some hilarious, others a little scary. He'd told them how hurt and disappointed his parents had been when he refused to enter the priesthood. He had laughed when he related the way his mother had lit candle after candle, asking the Virgin to intercede so that her son would recognize his calling. But when he laughed, the bitterness had always come through.
And she had overheard other stories—ones not for her ears. About how his parents had come to detest each other, how they had lived under the same roof, shared the same bed, year after year, without love, often using him as a kind of seesaw on which they weighed their bitter unhappiness. But there was no divorce in the eyes of the church, and those were the only eyes through which his parents could see.
“Better to live in misery than in sin,” he'd recalled in disgust. “Christ, what hypocrites they were.”
By the time he married, Jack Kimball had turned completely away from the church.
Only to turn back, Clare thought now, almost as fanatically as his parents, some ten years later. And a few years after, he had picked up a bottle along with his rosary.
Why?
Was the answer somewhere in the books she had scattered over her bed?
She didn't want to believe that. Didn't think she could face it. The father she had known had been solid, ambitious, delightful. How could a man who fretted over a sick rosebush have connected himself with a sect that advocated the sacrificing of animals, the shedding of innocent blood?
It was inconceivable.
And yet, there was the dream, the dream that had haunted her since childhood. She had only to close her eyes to see her father, glassy-eyed and naked, dancing around a fire pit with blood dripping from his fingers.
It was symbolic, she told herself and hastily began to pile up books. Dr. Janowski had said—over and over— that she had never accepted her father's death. The dream was simply a reminder of the horror, the grief, the terror of losing him.
But when she had switched off the light and lay sleepless in the dark, she knew that the dream had come to her long before her father died.
Chapter 18
BY TEN, EMMITSBORO WAS PACKED. Sidewalks teemed with people, children racing away from harried parents, teenagers hoping to be seen by other teenagers, concessionaires hawking lemonade, hot dogs, and balloons.
The older, or the wiser, of the crowd had their lawn chairs set up beside the curb, coolers of soft drinks close by. Since the road was closed off from Dog Run to Mousetown, people hiked in from their cars.
Those fortunate enough to live along Main Street—or to know someone who did—sat on their freshly painted porches, under the shade of awnings. They sipped cold drinks from cans, nibbled chips, and talked gleefully about their neighbors or about parades gone by.
In backyards picnics were already set—wooden tables covered with colorful paper cloths that fluttered in the light breeze. Grills had been scrubbed down, and beer and watermelon were chilling.
Emmitsboro High had a new young band director. The old-timers looked forward to criticizing. It was a small, human pleasure.
There was plenty of gossip. Talk about Biff Stokey's murder had been relegated to second place by the attack on the woman from Pennsylvania. Farmers considered the butchering of Dopper's cattle the number one topic of the day.
But with a communal sigh of relief, most of the townspeople had resolved to put tensions aside and settled in to celebrate.
The Hagerstown television station had sent a crew. Men sucked in their guts, and women patted their hair as the camera panned the crowd.
There were twelve who stood among the crowd, hiding behind the colorful banners and laughter to celebrate their own secret rite. Their eyes might meet; the sign would be given. Discontent might simmer among them, but for today the town was theirs, even though the town didn't know it.
The black armbands each wore were not an homage to the dead but a symbol of their alliance with the Dark Lord. Their Memorial Day celebration would begin here, among the gleaming brass and twirling batons, and end on another night, very soon, in the secret circle deep in the woods.
Someone would die, and the secret that had been held among the chosen few would continue to crouch in the darkness.
In the grandstand Min Atherton preened. She enjoyed sitting up there, looking down on friends and enemies. She'd bought a brand-new cotton dress for the occasion and thought the big purple irises spread across her breasts and hips gave her a girlish look. She was a bit sorry she'd belted it so tight—particularly after indulging in two plates of fried dough—but her mother had always told her beauty must suffer.
Her hair had been newly washed and set and sprayed so liberally it wouldn't have moved in a tornado, much less the light spring breeze. It sat like a lacquer helmet atop her wide face.
Nearby, her husband glad-handed with members of the town council. Min was pleased that he looked so grave and handsome in his buff-colored suit. He'd argued a bit about the red tie she'd chosen, but she convinced him it would look just right on TV. As always he had deferred to he
r.
Min considered herself the perfect politician's wife. The woman behind the man. And she enjoyed the power a woman could wield in secret. She fed him information she gleaned in the beauty parlor, in the market, over the backyard fence, and during bake sales.