by Dean Koontz
Sometime in the eleventh century, the rulers of the Anasazi Indians had sought to perpetuate their power by turning one group against another, identifying social outcasts for execution and cannibalizing them. The reign of terror became so great for so long that families built cliff dwellings as high as six hundred feet above the canyon floors, defensible habitations accessed at considerable peril.
What had changed in a thousand years? Contemporary terror could be administered with greater efficiency than existed back then, the targets chosen by the application of metadata analysis. The weapons with which power-mad elites could enforce their rule were far more effective than the knives and clubs of old. And a millennium after the Anasazi, no one could escape merely by building a home in the side of a cliff.
Jane mixed a second drink.
Later, on the edge of sleep, she slipped the wedding band on her finger. If she dared not wear it in public, she could still wear it in private. And if she could not have Nick any longer in this world of treachery and cataclysm, there had better be a life hereafter. There had better be.
13
* * *
On Monday, Sheriff Luther Tillman would take a two-hour nonstop flight from Minneapolis to Louisville, Kentucky, and drive a rental car to Iron Furnace, where something of consequence seemed to have happened to Cora Gundersun that might have led to her fiery act of madness, although he could not imagine what that might have been.
Now, after Sunday lunch, he sat at the computer in his home office, trying to learn more about the conference to which Cora had been invited, all expenses paid. Hazel Syvertsen had remembered the sponsor as being the Seedling Foundation, but it turned out to be the Seedling Fund, a charitable organization with a significant endowment, founded and financed by a wealthy entrepreneur, Mr. T. Quinn Eubanks of Traverse City, Michigan.
Googling Eubanks resulted in a slew of links—and the discovery that he had committed suicide the previous October, two months after the conference at the Iron Furnace Lake Resort. He had left his home on Grand Traverse Bay, driven out to Old Mission Peninsula, parked near a cherry orchard—the largest concentration of such trees in North America—where he stood on a campstool he’d brought with him, tied a short rope to a sturdy limb, fashioned a noose, tightened it around his neck, and kicked the stool out from under himself.
His wife and business associates appeared to have been shocked and mystified by the suicide. He had not been ill, never suffered a day of depression, and had every reason to live. A fellow board member of the Seedling Fund, the billionaire David James Michael, had delivered a moving eulogy during the memorial service, at which he announced that he would contribute ten million dollars to the fund in T. Quinn’s honor.
Through the Seedling Fund, Eubanks had been the primary sponsor of the conference on techniques for teaching special-needs children. According to the fund’s website, he had also been at the five-star resort in Iron Furnace for the entire four days.
Sensitized to curious patterns by years of police work, Luther thought it significant that two attendees should subsequently kill themselves in the space of five months. He wondered if there might have been a third suicide or a death by violence, or a suspicious accidental death, among others who had been at the event.
The website didn’t offer a list of those who had been invited and provided only a cursory explanation of the purpose of the conference. Curious. A charitable foundation with a mission usually promoted its goals and activities at every opportunity, as a matter of pride and in furtherance of its objectives. Indeed, the fund’s other projects were described at much greater length.
Hazel Syvertsen had remembered that those invited to Iron Furnace Lake Resort had been recipients of Teacher of the Year awards from their cities or states, not necessarily in the same year but at some point in the past. Nationwide, over a couple of decades, many hundreds of teachers would have received that honor. But when Luther searched for any connection between the phrase “Teacher of the Year” and “Iron Furnace Lake,” he found none.
His first thought was that Hazel misremembered. But two hours later, having used every search string he could think of, he had been unable to turn up even a single name of a conference attendee other than T. Quinn Eubanks. He couldn’t even find Cora’s name. It was almost as if the event never occurred. Or as if it had been held…but then something happened during those four days to unsettle and embarrass the people at the Seedling Fund to such an extent that they wished to minimize references to the entire affair.
Having found the name of the primary officer of the fund—Lisa Toska—and her phone number, his first inclination was to call her in the morning, before he caught his early-afternoon flight to Louisville.
But that night, after dinner, he stepped outside to stand on the back porch steps, coatless in the cold air, gazing at the sky, “listening to the stars,” as Rebecca fancied it. Sometimes, as now, when he stood here troubled by something about a case, he was not sure what was nagging at his subconscious. In time, the stars must have spoken to him, because he realized that he should not call Lisa Toska, lest word of his having done so reached Booth Hendrickson.
The Department of Justice attorney had given him a statement—platitudes and cornpone—to read before news cameras, as if the incident at the Veblen Hotel were an elementary-school play and Luther a child who needed to study his few lines before making his parents proud by performing his walk-on part, as if the public’s fears about yet another mass murder could be massaged away by the right messaging, by meaningless reassurances in simple language.
But none of the clichés applied this time. This horror had not been perpetrated by a lone-wolf gunman of any flavor, nor was it workplace violence, nor a payback for social injustice that everyone must be encouraged to understand if not approve.
To soothe the public, Hendrickson and other political fixers would have to be more creative than usual. By the time they were done with Cora, they would have reinvented her as a live-alone freak outsider, a cunning sociopath capable of passing herself off as a caring schoolteacher, who in secret collected Hitler memorabilia, mutilated herself with needles and knives, drank her own urine as a health cure-all, and probably molested the special-needs children who had been entrusted to her. Just another nut. Nothing to see here. Everyone move along.
That’s why they torched her house: to erase evidence of the real Cora’s private life, to make of her a blank canvas on which they would be able to paint whatever they wished.
The truth of Cora’s descent into madness and fire was being covered up; therefore, it must be an ugly truth but also a wrecking ball, huge and terrible, a wrecking ball that, if ever made public, would bring down Booth Hendrickson and those who employed him.
Now Luther fully understood why he could not call Lisa Toska at the Seedling Fund, knew he must go to Iron Furnace as a private citizen and with discretion, and so he ceased merely to stare at the stars in contemplation. He began instead seeking constellations, to comfort himself that the vastness above remained ordered as it had always been, regardless of the disorder here below.
Perhaps worry and weariness befuddled him, for he could not find Cassiopeia or Pegasus, or Leo Minor, or Lynx, or Hercules, as if the universe as it had been through the previous night changed with the latest sunset, groups of stars no longer suggestive of shapes and symbols. The coldness of these strange new heavens brought to the night a deeper chill, and although he told himself his failure to discern the ancient designs was, yes, a consequence of worry and weariness, he went shivering into the house, where things would be as they had been, a consoling domesticity.
14
* * *
On the road at seven Sunday morning, eating takeout egg sandwiches from a diner, leaving Albuquerque with no respect for speed limits, Jane chose Antoine Domino—the immortal Fats—for company. Fats rocking his piano. Her father would sneer. To Amarillo and, without music, on to Oklahoma City, 556 miles in eight hours.
She pu
shed three hours more, one through a storm, plump white raindrops like threads of pearls, lightning in sheets of flame through a sky invisible, trees swooning in the wind. Somehow, the appropriate music was Rachmaninoff playing the “Corelli Variations.”
She stopped Sunday night at 6:05 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, with the intention of rising before dawn, staying to the speed limit in the more densely populated—more policed—territory ahead, to reach Bowling Green, Kentucky, in twelve hours. That would put her within two hours of Iron Furnace on Tuesday.
Another dinner of takeout eaten in a motel room.
After a shower, she sat in bed with a vodka-spiked Coke.
In the low lamplight, every article of furniture and every cheap art print on the walls seemed identical to those in the room where she’d stayed in Albuquerque, identical as well to the contents of all the many rooms in which she had endured other nights alone, under names that were not hers. The farther she traveled, the more she seemed to go nowhere, as if the roads and changing landscapes were illusions, the violent encounters merely episodes of some virtual-reality drama in which she had become trapped.
She turned out the lamp and sat in the dark, propped up with pillows. An accomplished pianist, she had forsaken a career as a performer, but music at times played in her mind as clearly as if from a radio. Now she heard Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” and she sang softly, “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” But it wasn’t the darkness that summoned that song from memory. It came to mind because both the lyrics and melody spoke of the world as she now knew it—of alienation, oppression, loneliness, and apocalypse.
She slept and later woke in a condition she allowed herself only in sleep. She didn’t know if she had dreamed of finding her mother or of finding Nick dead of an apparent suicide. Perhaps she found both, as she’d found them often before. All she remembered was a dream of blood and anguish. In sleep, she allowed herself to weep, her face wet with tears. But tears while awake were a weakness, an invitation to the wicked who fed on them, so she turned on her side and drew her legs up in the fetal position and returned to sleep, where she was safe when she sought the relief that tears provided.
15
* * *
As a lawman, Luther Tillman had an aversion to the kind of speculation that led to emotionalism and sensationalism, that took an ordinary case with a few oddities and ballooned it into a sordid melodrama involving conspiracies by wirepulling villains larger than life. Under the current circumstances, however, maybe a straw wasn’t necessary to break the camel’s back of that aversion. Perhaps a feather was enough to do the job, the feather being his inability to identify long-familiar constellations in the night sky, but whatever the cause, something tipped Luther Tillman over the edge after Sunday dinner.
Because he wouldn’t have time on Monday to purchase disposable cellphones, he committed an act of evidence tampering of which he wouldn’t have been capable a day earlier. He drove to headquarters, entered the evidence room alone, and took two disposable cells from a sack of twelve unactivated phones confiscated in the bust of a methamphetamine operation that had not yet gone to trial. As an item of evidence, ten phones served as well as twelve, didn’t they? There would be a discrepancy in the evidence records, but sometimes that happened quite innocently.
Home again, he made the necessary call to activate both phones, and he gave one to Rebecca. “While I’m in Kentucky, keep it charged and on. If I need to call you, I don’t want to use either your iPhone or mine, and I don’t want to call the house landline.”
Scowling, Rebecca said, “Are you maybe letting this thing with Cora push your spook-me button a little too hard?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
16
* * *
Clouds banked the moon. The lake pooled black from shore to shore, and silence lay on the waters, even the insects of the early darkness now quiet in the wake of midnight.
In daylight, no escape could succeed. Harley had tried several times.
At night the dark forest resisted navigation, and a flashlight drew them—whoever they were, whatever they were—as a porch light summoned flurries of moths. The woodland confounded like a maze, an intertwined raveling of white oaks and sugar maples and black walnuts and dogwoods, but it was not a maze to them, the imposters. They navigated the wilderness as though they had planted every tree themselves according to some master plan that they had memorized.
Harley Higgins, who had hours earlier celebrated his fourteenth birthday, crept along the shore, avoiding the sand that would take clear footprints.
He crossed onto the grounds of Iron Furnace Lake Resort and made his way to the small marina. During the day, the resort rented motorized Duffy boats, rowboats, and pontoon bicycles that tourists could pedal along the scenic shore. At two o’clock in the morning, no staff attended the place, and it stood at a safe distance from the hotel.
A Duffy offered the fastest way across the lake. They were equipped with electric motors, so there would be no noise to bring the imposters down on him. But for one of those, he needed keys, which were in the locked marina office.
The rowboats were tied in their slips, a pair of oars shipped in each. He sat on the dock and hooked his feet over the gunwale of a boat and pulled it against the pilings and dropped down into it with a stealth that pleased him, although then the vessel bumped against the pilings, a hollow thump that might have drawn attention if anyone had been nearby to hear it.
On his knees at the transom, he used an oar to push off from the slip head, and the boat glided into open water, raising no sound other than the burble and slish of the lake parting around it.
Harley sat mid-vessel on the rowing thwart, facing the bow, and used the oar as if poling a gondola, pushing against the lake bed, propelling the boat slowly away from the docks and turning it north with the intention of transiting the lake to the farther shore.
When the water grew too deep to pole the boat, he had to face the stern, risk socketing the oars in the oarlocks, and row in the conventional manner. The locks were well lubricated, but they still creaked softly as they swiveled, and he let the boat glide as far as it would on each stroke, to avoid making too much noise near shore.
He was not afraid of the lake. Nothing dangerous lived in it. But even if there had been sharks and alligators, he would have swum its width to escape, if there had been no boat.
For a few weeks, he had been on his best behavior, as if he had at last resigned himself to his new life. He ceased arguing with the adults, stopped trying to organize a rebellion among the children. He even pretended to enjoy his birthday, the ice cream and cake, as if the giftless celebration wasn’t a mere charade.
He stopped complaining of being imprisoned. They didn’t call it prison, of course. They called it school, although no one attempted to teach him anything and had no expectation that he would learn. There were no classes, no textbooks, no lessons. He and the other seven kids were allowed TV and video games and anything they wanted to amuse themselves and pass the time. They were not, however, permitted to interact with anyone who was not a citizen of the town.
The imposters pretended that what they did to him and the other kids was normal, the way things had been done for generations. They even seemed to believe what they said, though it was all a humongous load of bullshit. The imprisonment had begun ten months earlier, in May of the previous year, just two months after Harley’s thirteenth birthday. Did they think he couldn’t remember what his life had been like then, that he’d been free to ride his bike into town, that he had been bused eleven miles to a real school at the county seat?
The soft landscape lighting of the resort receded slowly to the south. When he looked left, east, the lights of town, such as they were at this hour, glimmered faintly four miles away. The west shore lay at a greater distance, and though there were many homes along its arc, they were dark now.
Most of the north flank of the lake, toward which he rowed, remained
in its natural state. He intended to beach the boat there and find his way along the tree line to a meadow that would provide an easy path to Lakeview Road. Lakeview would lead to the county highway. Perhaps there he could flag down an eighteen-wheeler and convince the driver to take him to the county sheriff’s office or even to the state police.
Truckers were good folks. They worked hard, and you could trust them. That’s what Harley’s uncle, Virgil Higgins, had always said before he ceased to be Uncle Virgil anymore, having been replaced by an imposter. Now no one should believe any damn thing the man said.
Harley didn’t know if he could persuade the police that the people in Iron Furnace had changed, that they weren’t who they had once been. But he felt confident that he could raise in them enough suspicion to wonder why all the kids in town under the age of sixteen—eight of them—had been pulled from public schools on the same day, thereafter to attend a private school. When the cops investigated and saw the setup that the imposters called a school, they would know at once that it was in fact a prison.
Perhaps a third of the way toward the farther shore, Harley began to row harder and faster, unconcerned about the noise he made, even if sound might carry well across water.
In time, though fit and athletic, he began to tire. His arms grew heavy, as if they were stone grafted to him, and the vertebrae in his neck seemed to be made not from bone, but from woven bundles of nerves grown hot and sensitive with his effort.
The lake lay wider at night than it appeared to be in daylight. Even in this moonless pitch, he couldn’t have become disoriented, because the resort lights marked the south shore, and due east remained fixed by the lights of town. He told himself not to worry, just to keep rowing, but he rowed and worried until abruptly the bow draft ran aground.