The Ghost Tree

by Christina Henry

  Then she saw them—the girls. But she didn’t really see them. It was like she was watching a replay of someone else’s memory. There were two girls in the woods, walking together and wearing backpacks. Lauren didn’t recognize them—they looked a little older than her, and they were probably not from Smiths Hollow. One of the girls had very short blond hair cut like a boy’s, and the other had her brown hair tied up in braids that draped over her chest. Something about the girls—maybe the heaviness of their packs—made Lauren think that they were runaways.

  The girls didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, just ambling along to a place where people wouldn’t ask them questions, wouldn’t wonder where they were going and what they were doing. They both shared the same expression—a kind of half-worried, half-happy wrinkle in their brows, like they were glad to be doing things on their own terms but not sure yet what those terms would be, or if they would be successful.

  Then Lauren was aware of another presence, something that didn’t see the girls as girls or even humans. It saw them as meat, beautiful bloody red delicious meat.

  No! Lauren cried out. Run away!

  But the girls didn’t hear her, because Lauren wasn’t really there and because they weren’t worried about a monster eating them up. They were worried about someone finding them and making them go home, home where they had been so unhappy and sometimes afraid, and they weren’t going to be afraid anymore.

  Lauren knew all of this, knew what the girls were thinking and what the thing was thinking and she knew what would happen next and she didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know any more. Why couldn’t she just imagine that the girls had gone on happy together, that they made a new home for themselves somewhere? Why did she have to see what happened next?

  It didn’t matter if she closed her eyes because the scene was under her eyelids, imprinted on the inside of her brain. It didn’t matter if she covered her ears with her hands because she heard the braid girl scream as her friend was torn in half by claws that were from no animal Lauren had ever seen.

  But there was something funny about those claws, too, Lauren thought, part of her sunk in the horror of it all but another part dispassionately noting that there was something out of place. Just for a second she thought she’d seen a human hand underneath the claws.

  A person? A person was doing this?

  How could a person tear up two girls and then eat bits of them and then deliberately drag the remains to a place where they would be found?

  Lauren watched—it felt like she was watching even though it was only a scene pressing on the inside of her brain—as the thing gathered up what was left in a canvas sack. The sack left a trail behind as blood drained from what was left of the girls, the half-happy girls who’d walked in the woods.

  The vision—if that was what it was—stopped as abruptly as it had started. Lauren sat up and peered around, half expecting that there would be a monster there, a monster with sharp claws and bloody teeth. But there was nothing and no one—not even, Lauren realized, the remnants of the migraine that had left her feeling so crippled just a short while earlier.

  The side of her face felt gritty, and she swiped at it with her hand. It came away covered in dirt. She must have ground her face into the soil, trying to escape the things she saw.

  The images were fading quickly now, so fast that it was almost like it hadn’t happened at all. All that was left was a hollowed-out feeling and an intense exhaustion that made her want to stay right where she was and take a nap.

  “Well, no wonder,” she said to herself, forcing her feet and legs to move and stand. She’d gotten sick and had the mother of all headaches and then had what amounted to a waking nightmare where pretty girls got slaughtered by monsters. Of course she wanted to sleep.

  Despite the strange thing she’d just seen—imagined?—the woods still seemed to be the same refuge they’d always been for her. The rustling of the leaves and the chirping of birds washed away the last vestiges of the nightmare. That was what she decided it was, after all. Just a nightmare brought on by the headache and nothing to worry about at all.

  She found her bike leaning against the ghost tree exactly where she’d left it and grabbed the handlebars, pulling it away from the shade of the tree’s branches. It was then that she noticed something on the seat.

  The seat was dark blue, so it was hard to tell exactly what it was. She leaned her face closer, then reared back in horror.

  There was a handprint on the seat, a handprint that almost looked human, with very long fingers that tapered into sharp points.

  But that wasn’t what had Lauren dropping her bike and backing away. It was because the print had been stamped in blood, and the blood was still fresh.

  6

  Alejandro Lopez—he preferred to be called Alex rather than Alejandro, because the Americanized name made white folks feel like he was one of them—stood in Mrs. Schneider’s violated backyard, a place he’d never thought he’d be permitted to enter. Not that he’d particularly wanted to—you didn’t usually rush over to barbecue with a neighbor who considered you subhuman. Despite the horrible thing he was looking at, he couldn’t shake the sense of having successfully breached enemy territory.

  Alex’s partner, John Miller (was there any more stolidly American name than John Miller? Alex wondered) wandered back to Alex’s side, having lost his lunchtime meatball sub in the far corner of Mrs. Schneider’s well-tended yard.

  “What in God’s name?” Miller said, shaking his head.

  This was the same thing he’d said right before he’d puked, and Alex still didn’t have an answer. Luckily, Miller didn’t seem to expect one.

  One of the other four officers, Luke Pantaleo, was interviewing Mrs. Schneider in her kitchen. Sofia was there, too, with Luke’s partner, Aaron Hendricks. Alex could see his wife through the storm door, calmly explaining what had happened.

  He might have been impressed by her cool except that Sofia was always remarkably cool under fire. Later, after the crisis passed, she would rage or cry or break down.

  Alex had called the chief of police, Van Christie, as soon as he entered the yard and saw what they were dealing with. He’d held off the EMTs—no point in having them contaminate the crime scene—and directed Luke and Aaron to interview Sofia and Mrs. Schneider (his wife had been sitting next to the weeping old woman on the porch steps, her arm wrapped around Mrs. Schneider’s thin shaking shoulders), and then gotten on his police radio to call Van.

  Now Miller and Alex stood over the mutilated remains of at least two girls. Alex only thought there were two because there were two heads, but the quantity of blood and viscera strewn around made it seem like there might be more.

  He sighed deeply, not just because it was terrible but because he’d thought he’d gotten away from this when they left the city. Alex felt he’d seen enough stab wounds and crack overdoses and bullet-riddled bodies to last a lifetime. They’d moved to this picturesque little town with its charming main street and friendly neighbors where Alex thought the worst thing he’d have to deal with was teenagers getting drunk and causing a ruckus out at Make-Out Field. Now there was this, and this was reminding him of something he’d rather forget.

  Don’t think about it, he told himself, but still there was a flash of memory—empty eyes staring up at him from inside a dumpster, black flies circling.

  Just like now. Alex thought the flies must be calling their friends in the next county, because it seemed the cloud of swirling, dipping, buzzing insects doubled in size every few seconds.

  He wondered who the girls were, and who would have to tell their parents what happened.

  But what did happen?

  “Is this like the diMucci case?” he asked Miller.

  Miller gave him a blank look. “Lauren? What happened to Lauren?”

  “Not the daughter,” Alex said, giving Miller a lo
ok. Why would he assume Alex was talking about Lauren? “The father. He was killed last year, right?”

  Alex was talking like he hadn’t seen the report, hadn’t studied the crime scene photos dozens of times already. When he’d joined the force—such as it was, being composed of four patrolmen and one detective who retired shortly thereafter and one largely ceremonial chief of police—he’d been surprised that such a serious crime hadn’t been more thoroughly investigated. But whenever he asked about it the other officers got a strange kind of glazed look in their eyes, like they couldn’t quite remember what Alex was talking about—just like Miller was doing now.

  “Right,” Miller said, and his expression told Alex that he was reaching far back into the vault of memory. “Lauren’s dad. Yeah, that was a weird one.”

  That’s an understatement, Alex thought, but he didn’t say anything else about the diMucci murder. And anyway, even the photos of Joe diMucci weren’t as awful as what was in front of them.

  The two heads had been placed next to one another, cheek-to-cheek in a horrible parody of a dancing couple, one girl facing toward the woods and the other facing Mrs. Schneider’s house. Alex saw that the skin of each neck was shredded and ragged, like the heads had been torn off rather than cut with a sharp object. One of the girls—the short-haired one—still had a few trailing pieces of vertebra peeking out from underneath. The other girl was missing one of her ears.

  All around the heads were organs, most of which were unidentifiable because of similar shredding. How could anyone except maybe a doctor tell if that lump of grayish-red jelly in the grass was a liver or a heart? The only thing that was really clear was that the bits and pieces had quite obviously been arranged—the heads in the center, the organs radiating outward like planets circling a sun.

  “It can’t have happened here,” Alex said.

  “What can’t have happened here?” Miller said.

  This time Alex turned toward his partner with an exaggerated double take. “Are you drunk, Miller?”

  Miller flushed. “No.”

  “What could I possibly be talking about then?” Alex said, pointing at the heads and the organs and the rapidly increasing swarm of flies.

  “I thought you were still talking about Lauren’s dad,” Miller said.

  Why did everyone always refer to him as Lauren’s dad? Alex wondered. No one ever mentioned Joe’s other child, David, or called him “Karen’s husband.” It was always “Joe” (maybe followed by “the mechanic”) or “Lauren’s dad,” as if Joe diMucci’s primary context had been in relation to his daughter.

  Alex decided to ignore the last thing Miller said and continue his initial thought. “If these girls were killed here, in the old—”

  He stopped himself before he said “the Old Bigot,” which was the nickname that both he and Sofia used in the house to refer to their less-than-charming neighbor.

  “In Mrs. Schneider’s yard, there would have been a lot of noise,” he continued, but Miller hadn’t appeared to notice anything. Miller’s gears didn’t shift too fast and he seemed to still be stuck in the last one. “Not only would Mrs. Schneider have heard it, but the other neighbors, too.”

  “Okay,” Miller said.

  The trouble with having Miller as a partner was that he never took rhetorical bait. Alex’s old partner in Chicago, Tyrone Robinson, would already have finished Alex’s sentences. He would probably be five steps ahead of Alex, in fact, because Tyrone had a lightning-fast brain that was wasted on a patrolman. Alex expected that as soon as he was eligible Tyrone would be a detective.

  “And Mrs. Schneider’s yard isn’t easy to get into from the street,” Alex said. “Besides, someone would notice if a guy dragged two girls back here from the driveway.”

  “Maybe,” Miller said, shrugging. “Around here most of the housewives are watching their soaps this time of the day. They probably wouldn’t notice if someone was getting murdered right out in the street.”

  If Sofia heard him talking about her watching soaps she’d probably shout until Miller’s ears were scorched, Alex thought, but again decided it was best to try to keep Miller on one path and not acknowledge side comments. Besides, Alex knew that Mrs. Schneider herself spent most of her day hanging out the front window watching her neighbors for proof of their criminal intent. If anything untoward had happened on her watch she would have dialed 911 immediately.

  “Anyway,” Alex said. “That means whoever did this came through the woods. Probably killed the girls in the woods, too.”

  “How do you figure that?” Miller asked.

  Alex refrained from explaining what he’d just basically explained—that, in essence, the woods were the only place nearby without prying eyes. The only other option that he could think of was that whoever had done this had killed the girls in his house, then taken the remains through the woods.

  “Why plant them here?” Alex said.

  “What?” Miller asked.

  “Why leave the girls here?” Alex asked. He wondered if the carnage was getting to Miller. His partner seemed more out of it than usual.

  He started acting like this when you mentioned diMucci. He’s like a record needle that got stuck.

  Alex wondered if Miller knew something about diMucci’s murder, something that he was trying to keep Alex from finding out. He was about to follow this line of thought when Van Christie opened the gate and entered the yard.

  The chief of police was forty-six, a former Marine, and one of the quietest people Alex had ever met—quiet in the lack-of-noise sense, Alex had told Sofia once, not quiet as in not talkative. The chief made practically no sound when he walked, never slammed a door, never raised his voice. Even his car engine was quiet, and this confounded Alex since the chief’s car was the same Chevrolet Caprice Classic as the patrol cars.

  Christie stopped at Alex’s side and surveyed the backyard. “Jesus.”

  “That’s what I said, Chief,” Miller said.

  “That’s what anyone would say, Miller,” Christie said. “I think we’re going to need the camera from my vehicle. It’s in the trunk.”

  Miller recognized an order when he heard one and hurried off. All the officers had keys for every fleet car, including the chief’s.

  “What do we know?” Christie asked, turning his thoughtful blue gaze on Alex.

  “Not a whole lot,” Alex admitted. He told Christie that the other two officers were interviewing Sofia and Mrs. Schneider. “Although it seems like they’re taking a while.”

  “Probably don’t want to come out and see this again,” Christie said. “Or Mrs. Schneider’s raising a fuss. I can’t see Sofia giving them a hard time. Who’s watching the kids?”

  Alex realized this thought hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “Want to go check with Sofia?” Christie asked, correctly reading Alex’s consternation. “You probably want to get her home as soon as possible, anyway. Tell Pantaleo to stay with Mrs. Schneider, keep her in the house. Hendricks and Miller can return to the station and handle whatever calls come in. You can help me with the photos and blood.”

  Alex jogged up the porch stairs. Even through the storm door he could hear Mrs. Schneider’s shrill voice. He pushed open the door and found Pantaleo and Hendricks standing in front of Mrs. Schneider, looking helpless. All three of them turned toward him. Pantaleo and Hendricks looked unmistakably relieved.

  “Where’s Sof?” he asked.

  “She went home about ten minutes ago,” Pantaleo said. “Through the front door.”

  Alex didn’t blame her for not returning to the yard. He didn’t even blame her for not saying good-bye. He wouldn’t have wanted to see what was left of those two girls again if he didn’t have to.

  “Chief is here. He says Hendricks and Miller should go back to the station. Pantaleo, you should stay here and support Mrs. Schneider.”

 
Hendricks didn’t bust out smiling in front of his partner, but it was a near thing, Alex could tell. Pantaleo looked like someone who’d been condemned to walk the plank.

  “If Chief Christie is here, I demand to speak with him,” Mrs. Schneider said. “I want to know what this town is coming to when such things can not only occur but be inflicted on innocent bystanders.”

  Alex thought fast. The chief would not appreciate getting roped in by one of Mrs. Schneider’s rants.

  “We just have to take some photographs and samples of the crime scene, Mrs. Schneider. The sooner we do that, the sooner your yard can be cleared. I’m sure the chief would be happy to speak to you once that’s taken care of,” Alex said, and gave her his best service-with-a-sober-smile face, one that expressed friendliness while simultaneously acknowledging the gravity of the situation.

  Sofia had once asked him if he practiced it in front of a mirror, and he had to admit that he did. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, to school your face to a certain expression when you were dealing with stressed-out people, and cops almost always dealt with stressed-out people.

  As Alex returned outside he wondered what Sofia had told Val and Camila and Daniel. Probably nothing. He hoped nothing. But one of them was bound to notice three police cars parked across the street.

  Miller had delivered not only the camera but the little case that contained evidence-collection equipment. Christie was pulling on latex gloves when Alex joined him. He heard the storm door slam shut behind him and caught a glimpse of Hendricks making a fast exit. A minute later he heard the engine of one of the patrol cars fire up and pull away. Alex put on his own gloves and then pointed to the camera.

  Christie nodded. “I’d better take the samples. Although you probably have more experience at this sort of thing than I do.”

  “Nah,” Alex said, taking the camera out of its case. It was a standard thirty-five-millimeter Pentax. Alex wondered if he’d be dropping the crime scene film off at McDowell’s Camera for development. The station didn’t have a darkroom. “In Chicago there was a team that came in and took photos and collected evidence. Patrolmen just stood around and kept bystanders away from the scene.”