by Nora Roberts
“Anything?”
“No.” Cam rubbed his gritty eyes, then swung his rubbery legs off the cycle. He'd been riding most of the day, down back roads, over old logging trails, covering ground that had already been covered and covered again.
“I'm making sandwiches,” Alice said. “You come in and have one before you go again. I mean it, Cam. You need fuel just like that machine of yours.”
Cam sat down on the cycle again as Alice hurried back in. “How's your mother?” Cam asked Blair.
“Worried sick. She and Jerry are driving around.” He looked helplessly at the sculpture that towered behind them. “Like everyone. Christ, Cam, it's been almost a week.”
He knew exactly how long it had been, to the hour. “We're doing a house-to-house, search and interviews. Now that Mick's on his feet again, it'll go easier.”
“You don't really believe someone's holding her in town.”
“I believe anything.” He looked across the street, to the Buttses′ house. That one he would search personally.
“She could already be—”
“No.” Cam's head whipped around. His eyes, shadowed and weary, sharpened. “No, she's not. We start here, and we spread out, and we go over every inch of these hills.” Cam looked down at the ground. “I didn't take care ofher.”
When Blair didn't respond, Cam understood his friend thought the same thing.
Blair stood where he was, struggling to be calm as Cam lighted a cigarette. His research had gone well. Too well. He knew much too much about what could be happening to his sister. What might have happened already. He couldn't afford to break down now. “I'd like to go out on the next search. I know you've got experienced men, but I know the woods around here.”
“We can use everyone. Have to use everyone,” Cam corrected. “I just don't know who I can trust.” He looked up at the sun. It was straight up noon. “Do you know what today is?” He turned his head again and looked at Blair. “It's the summer solstice. I didn't realize it until I heard it on the radio.”
“I know.”
“They'll meet tonight,” he murmured. “Somewhere.”
“Would they take a risk like that, with the search and the press?”
“Yeah. Because they want to. Maybe they need to.” He swung onto the bike again. “There's somebody I've got to see.”
“I'll go with you.”
“It's better that I go alone. It's a long shot.” He kicked the engine. “I'll let you know.”
“It's outrageous. Absolutely outrageous.”
“I'm sorry, Miz Atherton.” Bud had his cap in his hands, running the brim through his fingers. “It's procedure, is all.”
“It's insulting, that's what it is. Why, the very idea of your coming into my home and searching all over it, as if I were a common criminal.” She planted herself in the doorway, floral bosom trembling. “Do you think I've got Clare Kimball tied up in the basement?”
“No, ma'am. No ma'am. And I sure do apologize for the inconvenience. It's just that we're looking through every house in town.” He gave a little sigh of relief as the mayor came down the hall.
“What's all this?”
“An outrage. Why, James, you won't believe what this boy wants to do.”
“We're conducting a house-to-house search, Mr. Atherton, sir.” He flushed. “I got the proper warrants.”
“Warrants!” Min plumped up like a broody hen. “Did you hear that, James? Warrants. The very idea.”
“Now, Min.” He put a soothing hand on her shoulder. “This has to do with Clare Kimball's disappearance, doesn't it, Deputy Hewitt?”
“Yes, sir, Mayor.” Bud always preened a bit when Atherton called him Deputy Hewitt. “It's nothing personal, and I'll be in and out in just a few minutes. Just have to take a look around and ask you some questions.”
“You step a foot inside this house, I'll take a broom to your behind, Bud Hewitt.”
“Min.” Atherton gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “The man's only doing his job. If we don't cooperate with the law, who will? You come right on in, Deputy, go through from attic to cellar. No one in town wants to get to the bottom of what happened to Clare more than my wife and myself.”
He gestured Bud inside, and the deputy took a strategic step so that the mayor was between him and Min. “I appreciate it, Mr. Atherton.”
“Our civic duty.” His eyes and voice were grave. “Can you tell me how things are going?”
“We ain't found a trace. I'll tell you, Mr. Atherton, the sheriff's worried sick. Don't think he's slept more'n an hour at a stretch since it started.”
“It must be a dreadful strain on him.”
“I don't know what he'll do if we don't find her. They were talking marriage, you know. Why, he'd even called up an architect about building Clare a studio over to his house.”
“Is that so?” Min's gossip glands went into overdrive. “Could be the girl got cold feet and ran off.”
“Min—”
“After all, James, she already failed at one marriage. It wouldn't be the first time a woman just up and took off when the pressure built up.”
“No …” Atherton stroked his bottom lip gravely. “No, I suppose you're right.” He waved the thought away, hoping it had taken root. “We're holding up Deputy Hewitt. Start anywhere you like. We have nothing to hide.”
Annie wasn't in her trailer. Nor could Cam find her in any of her usual haunts around town. The best he could do was have a neighbor promise to see that she stayed put when she got back.
He was running in circles, he thought as he headed back to town. Chasing his tail just like they wanted him to. He knew more than they realized. He knew that the passbook with Kimball's and Biff's names had been a plant. What he didn't know was whether Bob Meese had found it or had merely been following orders.
He knew that rituals were held on a regular basis. At least monthly, from what Mona had finally told him. But he didn't know where.
He knew there were thirteen men involved, from Clare's sketch and Mona's corroboration. But he didn't know who.
So when you added it all up, he thought as he pulled up in front of Ernie's house, you still got zero.
The worst was that he couldn't afford to share what he did know with anyone, not even Bud or Mick. Even in a town as small as Emmitsboro, thirteen men could hide easily.
He hoped Ernie would answer the door. He was in the mood to choke some answers out of the boy. But it was Joleen Butts who answered.
“Mrs. Butts.”
“Sheriff?” Her eyes darted behind him. “Is something wrong?”
“We're conducting a house-to-house search.”
“Oh, yes. I heard.” She twisted her beads. “I guess you can get started. Excuse the mess. I haven't had a chance to pick up.”
“Don't worry about it. Your husband's been a big help with the search party.”
“Will's always the first to volunteer, the last to leave. I guess you'll want to begin upstairs.” She started to lead him up, then stopped. “Sheriff, I know you've got a lot on your mind, and I don't want to sound like an overanxious mother, but Ernie … he didn't come home last night. The therapist says it's a very common behavior pattern, given the way Ernie feels right now about himself and his father and me. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid something might have happened to him. Like Clare.” She rested her hand on the banister. “What should I do?”
Cam was on his way back out of town when he passed Bud's cruiser. He signaled, then stood, straddling his bike as Bud backed up and leaned out the window.
“Where's Mick?”
“Supervising the search on the other side of Gossard Creek.” Bud wiped his sweaty forehead with a bandanna. “I had radio contact about twenty minutes ago.”
“Did you finish the house-to-house?”
“Yeah. I'm sorry, Cam.”
Cam looked out, over a field of corn. There was a haze of heat hovering like fog. Above, the sky was the color of drywall. “You know that kid,
Ernie Butts?”
Sure.
“The truck he drives?” “Red Toyota pickup. Why?” Cam looked back at Bud, steadily. He had to trust someone. “I want you to cruise around, keep your eye out for him.”
“Did he do something?”
“I don't know. If you spot him, don't stop him. See what he's up to, but don't stop him. Just contact me. Just me, Bud.”
“Sure, Sheriff.”
“I've got another stop to make.” He checked the sky again. It was the longest day of the year, but even that didn't last forever.
As Cam parked in front of Annie's trailer, Clare tried to claw her way out of the sticky mists the drug coated over her mind. She recited poetry in her head, old Beatles lyrics, nursery rhymes. It was so hot, so airless in the room. Like a coffin. But you were cold in a coffin, she reminded herself. And she'd already soaked through the sheets that day.
She wasn't certain how much longer she could take lying in the dark. How much time had passed? A day, a week, a month?
Why didn't someone come?
They would be looking. Cam, her friends, her family. They wouldn't forget her. She'd seen no one but Doc Crampton since the night she'd been brought there. And even then she wasn't certain how many times he had sat beside the bed and popped a drug in her veins.
She was afraid, not only for her life but for her sanity. She knew now that she was too weak to fight them, whatever they did to her. But she was desperately afraid she would go mad first.
Alone. In the dark.
In her more lucid moments, she plotted ways to escape, then expose them all and clear her father. But then the hours would pass in that terrible, dark silence, and her plans would turn into incoherent prayers for someone, anyone, to come and help her.
In the end, it was Atherton who came. When she looked up and saw him, she knew she wouldn't spend another night lying in the dark. It was the shortest night of the year, for everyone.
“It's time,” he said gently. “We have preparations to make.”
It was his last hope. Cam stood in front of the empty trailer. His last hope centered on the chance that Crazy Annie knew something. And if she knew, she would remember.
It was a crap shoot, and he wouldn't even have the chance to roll and come up seven if she didn't get home.
It came down to this, him and a sixty-year-old woman with an eight-year-old's mind. They weren't getting a hell of a lot of outside help. He hadn't been able to prove conspiracy or ritual slayings. All he had proven was that Carly Jamison had been held in a shed, murdered, buried, and exhumed to be placed in a shallow grave in a hay field. The fact that a dead man had had an accomplice didn't prove cult killings—not as far as the State boys or Feds were concerned. They'd helped in the search for Clare, adding men and helicopters. But even with them, he'd turned up nothing.
Time was running out. He knew it. The lower the sun dipped in the sky, the colder he became, until he wondered if by nightfall his bones would be brittle as ice.
He couldn't lose her. And he was afraid because the thought of it was so abhorrent that he had rushed and fumbled in his search for her and made one tiny miscalculation that could cost Clare her life.
Three steps behind, he thought, and falling through.
He hadn't forgotten how to pray, but he'd taken little time for it since his first decade, when there had been CCD classes and mass on Sunday, monthly confessions with strings of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to cleanse his youthful soul of sin.
He prayed now, simply and desperately as the first streaks of red stained the western horizon.
“ ‘Beyond the sunset, O blissful morning,’” Annie sang happily as she toiled over the hill. “‘When with our Savior heav'n is begun. Earth's toiling ended, O glorious dawning; Beyond the sunset when day is done.’”
She dragged her bag behind her and looked up, startled, when Cam raced the last yards toward her. “Annie, I've been waiting for you.”
“I've just been walking. Gosh Almighty, it's a hot one. Hottest day I remember.” Sweat had stained her checkered dress from neck to hem. “I found two nickels and a quarter and a little green bottle. Do you want to see?”
“Not right now. There's something I want to show you. Can we sit down?”
“We can go inside. I can give you some cookies.”
He smiled, straining for patience. “I'm not really hungry right now. Can we just sit down on the steps there, so I can show you?”
“I don't mind. I've been walking a long way. My dogs are tired.” She giggled at the expression, then her face lit up. “You brought your motorcycle. Can I have a ride?”
“Tell you what, if you can help me, I'll take you out real soon, all day if you want.”
“Really?” She petted the handlebars. “You promise?”
“Cross my heart. Come on, Annie, sit down.” He took the sketches from the saddlebag. “I have some pictures to show you.”
She settled her solid rump on the yellow stairs. “I like pictures.”
“I want you to look at them, look at them very carefully.” He sat beside her. “Will you do that?”
“I sure will.”
“And I want you to tell me, after you've looked at them, if you recognize the place. Okay?”
“Okeedoke.” She was grinning widely when she looked down. But the grin faded instantly. “I don't like these pictures.”
“They're important.”
“I don't want to look at them. I have better pictures inside. I can show you.”
He ignored his rapidly beating pulse and the urge to grab her by her poor wrinkled neck and shake. She knew. He recognized both knowledge and fear in her eyes. “Annie, I need you to look at them. And I need you to tell me the truth. You've seen this place?”
She pressed her lips tightly together and shook her head.
“Yes, you have. You've been there. You know where it is.”
“It's a bad place. I don't go there.”
He didn't touch her, afraid that no matter how he tried to keep his hand easy, his fingers would dig right through her flesh. “Why is it a bad place?”
“It just is. I don't want to talk about it. I want to go in now.”
“Annie. Annie, look at me now. Come on. Look at me.” He forced himself to smile when she complied. “I'm your friend, aren't I?”
“You're my friend. You give me rides and buy me ice cream. It's hot now.” She smiled hopefully. “Ice cream'd be good.”
“Friends take care of each other. And they trust each other. I have to know about this place. I need you to tell me.”
She was in an agony of indecision. Things were always simple for her. Whether to get up or go to bed. Whether to walk west or east. Eat now or later. But this made her head ache and her stomach roll. “You won't tell?” she whispered.
“No. Trust me.”
“There are monsters there.” Her voice continued to whisper through her wrinkled lips. An aged child telling secrets. “At night, they go there and do things. Bad things.”
“Who?”
“The monsters in the black dresses. They have animal heads. They do things to women without clothes on. And they kill dogs and goats.”
“That's where you found the bracelet. The one you gave to Clare.”
She nodded. “I didn't think I should tell. You're not supposed to believe in monsters. They're just on the TV. If you talk about monsters, people think you're crazy, and they lock you up.”
“I don't think you're crazy. And no one's ever going to lock you up.” He touched her then, stroking her hair. “I need you to tell me where the place is.”