by John Saul
She found the light switches, then turned on all the lamps in the showroom to show off their ornate shades to best advantage, and in less than fifteen minutes, everything was ready. She’d adjusted the positions of at least three dozen of the porcelain figurines that were Carol’s specialties, even moving one of them—a little boy sitting self-consciously on a toilet, his pants around his ankles and a surprised look on his face—into the restroom, certain that whoever was the first to use the tiny chamber that day would buy the item. Just as she was about to take a tour of the showroom, she heard the back door open.
“Hello?”
A second later Carol Langstrom appeared in the doorway. Though dressed perfectly, Ashley could clearly see the lines around her eyes and mouth, and the pallor that her makeup didn’t begin to cover.
“Carol? What on earth are you doing here?”
Carol smiled wanly, her sad eyes betraying the depth of her grief. “I can’t stay home alone—not by myself. At least not yet. All I do is think about Ellis and what I could have done to keep him from going out that night.” She bit her lower lip, and Ashley could see her struggling to control her tears. “I need to stay busy—I need to work. But not by myself.” The look in her eyes threatened to break Ashley’s heart. “You’ll stay with me today?”
Ashley reached out and gently touched her friend’s arm. “Of course.” As Carol retreated to the office in back, Ashley followed.
Carol glanced around the office as if searching for something, though Ashley was fairly certain she was doing nothing more than trying to distract her mind from thoughts of her son. Finally, her eyes came to rest on the unopened box on her desk. She gazed at it uncertainly, then turned to Carol. “What’s this?”
Ashley shrugged. “It was on the back step.”
Carol moved closer, then drew back. “Phew! It certainly smells strange.” Reaching out with her hand while still trying to keep her nose as far from the box as possible, Carol opened two of the flaps.
The stench that Ashley had been only barely aware of a few moments earlier now poured forth as a sickening odor, and Ashley struggled not to gag. “My God, what is it? It smells like a dead animal!”
Carol peered inside. For just a moment she thought it must be someone’s idea of some kind of strange art. There was what looked like some kind of wire construction and—
Oh, God!
Carol recoiled a step. “Call the sheriff,” she said, her voice catching.
“The sheriff?” Ashley echoed. Holding her breath against the noxious odor, she edged close enough to look over the edge of the box.
What looked like scraps of some kind of raw meat were hanging from whatever the wire had been formed into. She felt her breakfast rise in her gorge, and quickly closed the flaps of the box, putting a phone book on top to hold them down.
Only as the worst of the stench faded from her nostrils did Ashley finally pick up the phone and dial the number Carol Langstrom recited.
“
THAT WAS ON my doorstep,” Carol Langstrom said, pointing at the box that neither she nor Ashley Sparks had been able to bring themselves to touch during the few minutes it took for Rusty Ruston to get to the shop.
“Where did it come from?” Ruston asked.
Carol shrugged helplessly.
Ruston moved closer to the box. “No label at all? No note?”
“Nothing on the outside,” Carol said. “I don’t know about the inside.”
Ruston opened the flaps of the box, recoiling from the stench just as the two women had earlier. As Carol and Ashley automatically stepped back, he first looked into the box, then produced a pair of thin latex gloves from one of his pockets, put them on, and reached inside. Very gingerly he lifted the contents out of the box.
“Here,” Carol breathed, opening the morning newspaper and spreading it over a tabletop. “Don’t set it back on my desk. Set it here.”
Ruston placed the object on the table, then stepped back, and suddenly both women had a clear view of what it was that had been left on Carol’s back step during the night.
It was the bent and rusted frame of a lamp shade, whatever original covering it may have had long since stripped—or rotted—away.
Where perfectly sewn panels of silk or linen had once been stretched, there now hung ragged scraps of raw skin, held together by crudely tied pieces of string.
The skin had not been tanned; pieces of decaying flesh and rancid yellow globules of fat still clung to it, and the holes through which the string was unevenly laced looked as if they must have been made by an ice pick.
As Ashley struggled once again to control the nausea rising in her belly, a maggot dropped from the grotesque construction onto the newspaper. “My God,” she said. Choking on the words, she turned away.
Carol Langstrom, though, stayed where she was, staring numbly at the object. “Why?” she finally asked, her voice hollow. “Why would someone leave something like that on my step?”
Ruston ignored the question for the moment, carefully studying the hideous thing. He moved slowly around it, examining it from every angle.
And then Carol saw it.
A bluish mark near the top of one of the strips of skin.
A mark that looked familiar.
A terrible foreboding building inside her, Carol forced herself to look closer.
No!
Oh no, God no, please no.
But even as she silently screamed the prayer, she knew it would not be answered.
She knew what the mark was.
It was a symbol.
An old Viking symbol, called Thor’s Hammer.
Ellis had had it tattooed on his shoulder.
And now she was staring at that tattoo.
A shriek rose in her throat and exploded from her mouth before she could stop it.
Ruston, jerked out of his reverie, moved instantly to her side, asking what was wrong, but there was no way she could speak.
All she could do was point at the mark.
At the tattoo.
At the skin from Ellis’s missing arm.
“Ellis,” she finally managed. “It’s Ellis’s tattoo.”
Then she felt Ashley’s hands on her shoulders, and as her knees weakened, she let herself be helped to a chair, too stunned even to think.
“Jesus,” Ruston whispered. He studied the mark a moment longer, then carefully lifted the object back into the box, where Carol at least wouldn’t have to see it. “You going to be okay?” he asked. Carol nodded, her face pale, her eyes fixed on some invisible place in the far distance. Ruston was fairly certain she wasn’t going to faint, at least not right now. He took a deep breath, turning to Ashley Sparks. “I need you to show me exactly where you found this, Mrs. Sparks.”
“It was right here, sitting on the step,” Ashley said a moment later as she and Ruston gazed down at the steps behind the back door.
Ruston scanned the step, then the small parking area.
Then he spotted the Dumpster next to the building. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. Why don’t you go see to Carol while I look around a little bit?”
Ashley turned and went inside, while Ruston walked over to the Dumpster and lifted its lid.
It looked like Carol’s shop shared the Dumpster with a couple of neighboring shops, one of which was the bakery, which Ruston knew regularly disposed of bags of bread and bagels too old to sell.
Too old to sell, but not to scavenge.
The Dumpster had not yet been emptied this morning, but there were no bags of baked goods—only garbage utterly unfit to eat—and Ruston knew of only one person who was known to go through the Dumpster.
Someone who, if memory served, also used to run a trapline up in the woods.
Which meant he would know how to skin an animal.
Or an arm.
Now Ruston’s gut was truly churning.
GERALD HOFSTETTER REFILLED his coffee cup in the newspaper’s front office, then looked out the big window and watch
ed Billy Stevens in his cherry picker hang a Fourth of July banner from the tall pavilion roof. Rich Patrick was unloading a van full of folding tables into the pavilion where the Chamber of Commerce would be selling hot dogs, hamburgers, corn on the cob, and everything else anyone might be willing to eat tomorrow at the big picnic. Rich’s wife, Marge, and her whole Red Hat club were blowing up balloons and hanging quilts to be raffled off.
Al Stevens was setting up the fireworks scaffolding over by the footbridge. Hofstetter shook his head. Al Stevens and his incendiary devices were a disaster waiting to happen, given that Al’s reluctance to stay sober consistently was combined with his seeming inability to work for more than five minutes at a time. Still, Al had been doing the fireworks display for almost thirty years, and so far, so good.
At least no one had died yet.
Gerald heard the phone ring on his secretary’s desk behind him and felt a brief flare of hope that it was Ruston with the coroner’s report, but a moment later that hope died as it turned out it was just his secretary’s boyfriend calling for the fourth time that morning.
But then, as his attention reverted once more to the scene beyond the window, he saw something that made that brief flare of hope burst into full flame: Ray Richmond was crossing the street—actually, he was almost loping—and as he disappeared through the front door of the sheriff’s office, everything about his pace, his posture, and his attitude told Hofstetter that Richmond was in full mayoral mode.
This wasn’t just the grocer dropping in for a quick cup of coffee.
Gerald smelled news.
He left his coffee cup on his desk and grabbed a fresh pad from the bookcase.
Rusty Ruston was just dropping the privacy blinds on his office window when he saw Gerald come through the door, and he shook his head in resignation. “One guess who just walked in,” he said to Ray.
“Hofstetter, of course,” Ray replied. “I swear to God, that man never stops looking out his window.” He shrugged. “Might as well let him in—he can’t put out a newspaper until Friday, and by that time everybody will know everything anyway.”
Rusty opened his door and waved Hofstetter in. Abandoning the blinds, he handed both men copies of the coroner’s report, then settled into the chair behind his desk as they scanned it.
“Well,” Gerald Hofstetter said, leaning back in his chair as he folded the report and slipped it into his notebook. “So much for Ray’s nice little theory that an animal attacked Ellis Langstrom.” His eyes fixed on the sheriff. “Any idea who did it?”
Ruston nodded as Ray Richmond, too, finished the report, tossing his copy back on the sheriff’s desk as if it had suddenly become poisonous. “I do, indeed,” he said. “And by the way, Gerald, I don’t remember saying you could keep that.”
“It’s a public document, isn’t it?” Hofstetter countered.
Ruston decided it wasn’t worth a fight, especially given that in the end Hofstetter would get the report anyway. “I’m thinking Riley Logan is the man we’re looking for.”
“Riley Logan,” Hofstetter repeated as Ray Richmond sat silently in his chair, his face ashen as he thought of what the report he’d just read could do to the town’s economy. “What makes you think it was Logan?”
Ruston tipped his head toward the cardboard box he’d brought from Carol Langstrom’s shop and placed in the corner of his office farthest from his desk. “You might want to take a look at that,” he said, rising and moving to the box. “Someone left this for Carol Langstrom last night.” He opened the box, wincing at the odor that rose from it, and stepped back so the mayor and the newsman could peer at the object inside.
“Mother of God,” Ray breathed.
As both men backed away, Rusty donned another pair of latex gloves and carefully lifted the grotesque lamp shade out of the box, turning it so that they could see the blue mark. “Ellis Langstrom’s tattoo.” Though he spoke the words softly, Ray Richmond looked as if he’d been struck, and even Gerald Hofstetter’s face paled.
As Hofstetter started scribbling in his notebook, Ruston put the grotesque object back into the box and folded down the flaps. “I’m taking Derek Anders with me, and we’re going to go get Logan and bring him in.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ray said, still shaken.
“You still haven’t told us why you think Logan did it,” Hofstetter said without looking up from his pad.
“We know he was locked up in Central State for a lot of years, we know he used to run a trapline, which means he could have done that”—he tipped his head toward the box again—“and I can’t think of any other person who might have done it.” Now he fixed his eyes on Ray Richmond. “Maybe he didn’t do it,” he added. “But we’ve got enough to bring him in and question him, and there’s no way we’re going to keep a lid on this. The best we can do is have him locked up, at least through the Fourth. Then we’ll see.”
Richmond and Hofstetter exchanged a long look, and finally the mayor nodded. “Do what you have to do,” he sighed. “And be careful, okay? Don’t you be letting Derek Anders ‘accidentally’ shoot anyone. Understand?”
Ruston nodded. “Derek’s on his way over. We know where Logan’s shack is, and it shouldn’t take long.”
As Richmond and Hofstetter got to their feet and started out of his office, Ruston unlocked his gun safe and took out a shotgun.
Just in case.
ERIC GAZED DOLEFULLY down through the shallow lake water at the wreck of the Pinecrest skiff. Sometime during the night, it had filled with water and sunk to the bottom, where schools of minnows had claimed it. Now, with Kent Newell standing beside him on the dock, the minnows seemed almost to be mocking them while he tried to figure out some way to haul the ruined hull back to the surface. Kent, though, appeared to be thinking about something else altogether.
“What do you think is the big deal Tad wants to tell us?” Kent asked, confirming Eric’s suspicion.
Eric shrugged, then turned to look up the lawn and saw Tad himself emerging from the mouth of the path that led through the woods to his house, a large bandage covering what looked like at least half his head. “Here he comes,” Eric said, nudging Kent. “And it looks like they must have sewed up half his scalp.”
“You okay?” Kent called out.
Tad shrugged. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” He reached up to touch the bandage, wincing at the pressure. “Okay, so it’s not quite as bad as it looks,” he temporized as he joined his friends on the dock. “Still hurts, anyway.”
Kent cocked his head quizzically. “Well? What’s the big deal you called about?”
Tad took a deep breath, glanced up toward the house as if looking for someone who might be listening, and dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “You aren’t gonna believe what my mom found on the back porch of Mrs. Langstrom’s antiques shop this morning.”
An image rose in Kent’s mind of a square brown cardboard box, dirty and stained. Despite the heat of the morning, a chill ran through his body. But the box wasn’t on the back porch of an antiques shop.
It was in his hands.
It was in his hands, and he was carrying it.
Tad’s voice began to fade, and the images in his head became more vivid.
He was walking through the woods, and though it was night and he could barely see at all, he was following some kind of invisible path, moving quickly through the trees, never stumbling, never uncertain which way to turn.
Then, in the way things happen in a dream, he was suddenly in town, and setting the box down.
Setting it down on a porch!
With Tad’s voice droning softly and indistinctly far away, Kent slipped deeper into the strange scene unfolding in his mind. Now he knew what was in the box—knew it without even having to unfold the flaps at the top and peer inside.
Knew it because he’d made the object himself.
Now he could feel the stickiness of blood on his hands as he stretched the skin of Ellis Langstrom’s upper arm over
the bent and rusty lamp shade frame. His fingers twitched as he watched himself pierce the skin with some kind of thick needle, then pull through the twine that would bind the bloody tissue to the wire.
Suddenly, Eric Brewster’s voice jerked him out of his reverie, and he saw Eric staring at Tad Sparks, his face almost as ashen as Tad’s after Adam Mosler’s boat had rammed them.
“How did they know it was the skin from Ellis’s arm?” Eric whispered, and Kent felt his skin crawl once more.
What was happening? Was it possible that what he’d just been remembering wasn’t a dream at all?
Was it possible it had actually happened?
His knees suddenly weak, Kent sank down on the dock.
How would he know everything Tad was saying? How could he?
“He had a tattoo on his shoulder,” Tad whispered. “It was stretched out on the lamp shade.”
“Oh, God,” Kent said, something almost like a sob choking his throat. He caught his breath, then looked up at Eric and Tad. “I dreamed it. I dreamed I made that thing, and I was carrying it through the woods, and…” His voice trailed off at the memory of depositing the box on the back porch of the shop. Now he could see all the details—everything in the tiny parking lot. He fixed his eyes on Tad Sparks. “I remember setting it on the back step of her shop. Right by the Dumpster.”
“Jesus,” Tad breathed as he and Eric also dropped down onto the dock on either side of Kent.
Kent looked at each of them, searching their faces for something, anything, that would tell him they had shared the dream, too. “Didn’t either of you have it? The same dream, like we all had last time, and the time before?”
Tad shook his head. “I couldn’t go to sleep, so finally Mom gave me a pill. And I had a headache, too,” he added, once again touching the bandage covering the stitches in the back of his head. “I don’t remember dreaming anything.”
Kent turned to Eric, but Eric only shook his head. “I don’t remember dreaming anything last night, either,” he said.
Now Kent stared down at his hands, half expecting them to still be covered with blood. “It was so real,” he whispered. “And the weird thing is, I didn’t even remember it until you started talking about it. But as soon as you said your mom found something on the porch, I knew what it was. I could see it! It was like it was real.”