by Nora Roberts
religiously and rarely got to put into use. “I'll get right on it.”
Cam took the photograph out of the car and walked toward the house, where his mother still waited. She looked old, he thought, even older than when she had opened the door for him two hours before.
He held out the picture. “Is this the girl in the photograph you found in the shed?”
Jane licked her lips and forced herself to look. It was a pretty face, young and pretty. She had to turn away from it. “Yes.”
“Try to think back to around Eastertime. Did you ever see this girl around?”
“I never saw her.” Jane looked over his head, toward the fields. “Is she dead?”
“I'm afraid she might be.”
“You think Biff killed her.”
“He had a part in whatever happened to her. She was in that shed. Tied up, held there.”
She thought she'd cried herself out, but the tears began again, pouring from her burning eyes. “I didn't know. I swear on my life I didn't know.”
“Who was around here during that time? Who came out and spent time with Biff?”
“Cam, that was weeks and weeks ago. I don't know. How would I remember? I was down with the flu before Easter. Remember, you brought me flowers.”
“I remember.”
“Biff came and went. There might have been a poker game, or that might have been after Easter.” She pushed a hand over her limp hair. “I never paid any mind to that kind of thing. He didn't want me to. What difference does it make now? He's in hell. He sold his soul and sent himself to hell.”
“All right.” He was beating a dead horse and knew it. “If you remember anything, you call me. I don't want you to talk to anyone about this.”
“Who would I talk to?” she said dully. “They'll all find out anyway. That's the way things work.”
He let out a sigh. “Do you want to come and stay with me until … for a while?”
Surprise registered first. Then shame. “No, I'll be fine here, but it's kind of you.”
“Damn it, you're my mother. It's not kind. I love you.”
She could barely see him for the tears blurring her eyes. But he looked as she remembered him as a boy. Tall and straight and defiant. Angry, she thought. It seemed that he'd been angry with her since the day his daddy had died.
“I'll stay just the same. It's my home for a little while longer.” She started to walk into the house, then stopped. It took the rest of the courage she had left just to turn and face her son again. “When you were five, you got ahold of my good red nail polish. You wrote I love you Mom′ in big, block letters on the bathroom tile. I guess nothing before or since ever meant so much to me.” She looked at him helplessly, hopelessly. “I wish I'd told you that before.”
She went inside, alone, and closed the door quietly behind her.
Clare was waiting for him when he got home. She met him at the door, took one look, and put her arms around him.
“We don't have to talk about it.” She tightened her grip when he laid his cheek against her hair. “I picked up some pizza. If you'd rather be alone, I'll head home. You can just warm it up when you get around to it.”
He lowered his mouth to hers. “Stay.”
“All right. Angie and Jean-Paul left about an hour ago. They had to get back to the gallery and said to tell you good-bye.”
“Blair?”
“He's decided to hang around for a couple of days.” She eased back to study him. “Rafferty, you look like hell. Why don't you go up, have a soak in that magic tub of yours? I'll heat up the pizza and fix you a beer.”
“Slim.” He closed her hand into a fist and brought it to his lips. “You're going to have to marry me.”
“I'm what?”
He didn't really mind the shock in her eyes. “I like the idea of you meeting me at the door and heating up pizza.”
She smiled even as she eased away. “Boy, do one good deed, and the guy expects a lifetime.”
“Right now I'd settle for company in the tub.”
Her smile became more relaxed. “So I can wash your back, I suppose.”
“You wash mine, I'll wash yours.”
“Deal.” She hoisted herself up and wrapped her legs around his waist. “What do you say we heat up the pizza later?”
“I say good thinking.”
They went upstairs as the sun began to lower.
Others waited, restless, for sundown.
Chapter 22
AT NINE'THIRXY, Rocco's was hopping. Joleen Butts had given up on the idea of closing early when the Hobbs family walked in, all seven of them. The youngest howled around the bottle in his mouth while the other four kids made beelines for the arcade games, their quarters ready. Joleen took the order for three large pizzas, loaded, then went back to sprinkling diced mushrooms on top of shredded mozzarella to the tune of the beeps and buzzes of Super Donkey Kong.
Now all four booths were packed with bodies and pizza in varying degrees of annihilation. Balled-up paper napkins littered the tabletop. Their part-time delivery boy had just taken four extra cheese with pepperoni over to the fire hall. She noted that the youngest of the Hobbs troop was on the loose and was pressing gooey fingers on the glass of the display case as he peered at the soft drinks and candy bars.
So much for a ten o'clock closing, she thought.
In another couple of weeks, after school was out for the summer, they would keep the parlor open until midnight. Kids liked to hang out there, munching on pizza in the wooden booths, popping quarters in Dragon Master. Except her kid, she thought, and slid the pizza into the oven.
He'd rather sit home alone and listen to his music.
She smiled at her husband as he carried two cardboard boxes to the cash register. “Busy night,” he murmured and winked at her.
Most were, she thought and began to build a submarine. They had made a success out of this place, just as they had dreamed they would. Since she and Will had been teenagers themselves, they had worked toward this. A place of their own, in a nice, small town where their children would be safe and happy. Their child, she corrected. Two miscarriages after Ernie had drawn the curtain on the notion of a big family.
But they had everything else.
She worried sometimes, but Will was probably right. Ernie was just going through a stage. Seventeen-year-olds weren't supposed to like their parents or want to spend time with them. When she was seventeen, her major goal in life had been to get out of the house. It was a lucky thing that Will had been out there waiting, just as eager.
She knew they were the exceptions. Teenage marriages were almost always a mistake. But at thirty-six, with eighteen years of marriage under her belt, Joleen felt smug and secure and safe.
Not that she wasn't glad that Ernie didn't seem to be serious about any particular girl. Maybe she and Will had been ready at a tender age to take the big leap, but Ernie wasn't. In some ways, he was still just a child. In others …
Joleen pushed back her long brown braid. In others she didn't understand him at all. He seemed older than his father and tougher than nails. He needed to find his balance before he could be serious about a girl, or anything else.
She liked Sally Simmons, though. The fresh face, the polite manners, the neat clothes. Sally could be a good influence on Ernie, bring him out of himself a little bit. That was all he needed.
He was a good boy really. She wrapped the sub and rang it up, with a six-pack of Mountain Dew, for Deputy Morgan. “Working tonight?”
“Nope.” Mick Morgan grinned at her. “Just hungry. Nobody makes a sub like you, Miz Butts.”
“I doubled the onions.”
“That's the way.” She was a pleasure to look at, he thought, with her face all flushed from the ovens, and the white bib apron over her jeans and shirt. She didn't look old enough to have a grown boy, but Mick figured she'd got herself knocked up at a young age and made a go of it. “How's your boy?” he asked as he pocketed his change.
“fine.”
“Graduating next week?”
She nodded. “It's hard to believe.”
“Take it easy.”
“You, too.”
Graduating, she thought, and took a deep breath of air laced with the scents of spices and sauce and sharp cheeses. Her little boy. How often she wished she could go back five years, ten, and find the moment when she had made the wrong turn.
But that wasn't right, she assured herself. Ernie was his own person, and that was how it was supposed to be. She watched, with some envy, as little Teresa Hobbs hugged her father's knees and giggled. Maybe Ernie wasn't outwardly affectionate or full of jokes and good humor, but he kept out of trouble. His grades were steady if not spectacular. He never came home drunk or stoned—as she had certainly done before marriage focused her. He was just, well, deep, she supposed. Always thinking. She wished she knew what he was thinking.
He was waiting. Ernie knew he was early, but he'd been too psyched to sit at home. His adrenaline was pumping so hard and fast he thought he might explode. But he didn't know he was scared because the fear was so deep, so cold in his bones.
The moon was full. It silvered the trees and sprinkled the fields. He could just make out the Dopper farmhouse in the distance. Close by, cattle lowed.
He was reminded of the last time he had come here. He'd climbed the fence then, the rope and knives he carried in a laundry bag. There hadn't been so much moonlight then, and the breeze had carried a chill.
He hadn't had any trouble cornering the two calves or tying their legs, just the way he'd seen in the movies he watched in ninth grade when he was stuck in agriculture class. He'd hated every minute of ag, but he'd remembered the movies of brandings and birthings and butcherings.
Still, he hadn't known, he really hadn't known, there would be so much blood. Or the sounds they would make. Or that their eyes would roll.
He'd been sick at first and left the carcasses to run into the woods until his grinding stomach was empty. But he'd done it. He'd gone back and finished. He'd proven he was worthy.
Killing wasn't as easy to do as it was to read about. Having blood in a little vial in the drawer was different, much different, than having it splash warm from a vein onto your hands.
It would be easier next time.
He rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. It had to be easier next time.
He heard the rustle of leaves and turned to look, unaware that there was fear in his eyes—the same kind of rolling fear he'd seen in the calves′ eyes. His hand closed over the key in the ignition. For a moment, just one moment, his mind screamed at him to turn it, to throw the truck into reverse and drive away fast. Run away, while there was still time.
But they came out of the woods. Like spirits or dreams. Or devils.
There were four of them, robed and masked. Ernie's throat clicked on a swallow as one of them reached out and opened the door of the truck.
“I came,” he said.
“You were sent,” he was answered. “There will be no going back.”
Ernie shook his head. “I want to learn. I want to belong.”
“Drink this.”
He was offered a cup. Unsteadily, he climbed out of the truck to take it, to raise it to his lips, to drink with his eyes on the eyes behind the mask of Baphomet. Come.
One of the men got into the truck and drove it up a logging trail until it was hidden from the road. They turned, Ernie in the center, and went back into the woods.
They didn't speak again. He could only think they looked magnificent, powerful, walking in the shadowed light, layers of dead leaves rustling beneath the hems of the robes. Like music, he thought and smiled. As the hallucinogen cruised through his system, he felt he was floating. They were all floating, around the trees, even through them. Air parted like water. Water like air.
The moonlight was crimson, and through its haze he saw brilliant colors, magical shapes. The crunching of leaves underfoot was a drumbeat in his blood. And he was marching toward destiny.
Baphomet turned to him, and his face was huge, bigger than the moon's and brighter. Ernie smiled and thought that his own features changed. Into a wolf's, a young wolf's, hungry and handsome and shrewd.
He didn't know how long they walked. He didn't care. He would have walked with them into the pit of Hell. Flames couldn't touch him. He was one of them. He felt it, the power, the glory, swelling inside of him.
When they came to the circle, the others were waiting. Baphomet turned to him. “Do you believe in the might of the Dark Lord?”
“Yes.” Ernie's eyes were glassy with the drug and harmless. Not hungry, not handsome, not shrewd, his face was slack and vulnerable. “I've worshiped Him. I've sacrificed for Him. I've waited for Him.”
“Tonight, you will meet Him. Take off your clothes.”
Obediently, Ernie pulled off his Nikes, his Levi's. He stripped off his Black Sabbath T-shirt until he wore only the pentagram. A robe was slipped over him.
“You will not have a mask. Later, when you are one of the few, you will choose your own.”
The voice came to Ernie's ears, low and stately, like a funeral march or a record played on the wrong speed. “I've studied,” he said. “I understand.”
“You have more to learn.”
Baphomet stepped into the circle. The others closed around it. When Ernie took his place, he saw the woman. She was beautiful, draped in a red robe, her hair loose and glossy. She was smiling at him. Even as he hardened beneath his own robe, he recognized her.
Sarah Hewitt had participated in the ceremonies before. For two hundred dollars, all she had to do was lie naked on a slab of wood and wait until a few nut cases went through their ridiculous routine. There was a lot of chanting and calling up the devil. The devil, for Christ's sake. It was all an excuse to ball her. For two hundred, she didn't care if they wanted to wear masks and shake their naked butts at each other. 'Course, sacrificing goats was pretty sick, but boys would be boys. In any case, tonight looked like a special treat. She'd recognized Ernie and figured he might add something to the night's entertainment.
The kid was stoned, she thought, and would probably pop off before they got to the good part. But she could bring him around again. She was good at it.
And she had been relieved to be told to come tonight. She'd made a mistake talking to Cam. Sarah was well aware that people paid for mistakes.
The bell was rung, the candles were lit, and the flame was set in the pit. Sarah slid a hand down the center of her robe and let it slither from her shoulders. She held the pose a moment, knowing eyes were on her. In the spotlight of the moon, she walked over to spread herself on the slab.
The high priest raised his arms. “In the name of Satan, king and ruler, I command the Dark Forces to bestow their infernal power upon me. Open wide the gates of Hell and grant me all I ask. We rejoice in the life of the flesh. We seek and demand its pleasures. Hear the names!”
Ernie shuddered as the names were called. He knew them, had studied them. Had prayed to them. But for the first time, he wasn't alone. And his blood was hot, melting the lingering fear in his bones, as he repeated them with the coven.
The cup was passed. Ernie wet his dry mouth with the tainted wine. The flames from the pit seemed to tower, alive, snapping greedily. His flesh burned.
He watched the high priest. The image of the sculpture Clare had created imposed itself over the reality. She knew, he thought, and yearned for her. She knew.
The sword was taken up to call out the four Princes of Hell.
The power was like a shaft of ice speared into him. The heat and cold vacillated like a sexual dance. He shook with it as he joined in the chant.
“We bring a new brother to You tonight, Master. We offer You his heart, his soul, his loins. Youth is blessed. Youth is strong. His blood will mix with ours in Your glory.”