It's impossible to tell if the voice on the other end is still there or not.
"I didn't bring the shovel," she says a bit more forcefully. "I'm sorry. I left it-"
"Well then, you better do what you can with your hands," the voice cuts in. "Your little girl has less than ten hours to live. Do you understand that?"
Sue sets down the flashlight, props it up between two big stones so it's aimed at the post, and drops the phone in her pocket. It is time to get down to business. Dropping to a squat she sinks down to her knees, feels the moisture soak straight through the fabric of her pants to her skin, and leans forward.
She's almost forgotten that she's been wearing gloves this whole time, and as soon as she takes them off she starts to realize how bad, how truly awful, this is going to be. Her fingertips and knuckle joints immediately start throbbing with the cold. Still, she digs with her bare fingers into the slimy, clayey surface, prying up great slabs and clots of stinking, half-frozen muck and tossing it aside by the handful.
And she digs.
Time disappears. The only thing she has to compare it to is the three and a half hours she spent in labor with Veda, the epidural wearing off, the pain that could not get any worse, the hours that could not stretch any longer but somehow did. Phillip was there with her the whole time, Phillip who would be gone soon enough but for the time being was next to her bedside trying to help until she ordered him to stop telling her how to breathe.
And she digs on. Fingers long since numb, scraped so raw that when she finally does find it, it is the sound of the thing rattling against her hands, rather than the feel of it, that makes her realize she's dug it up.
The unmistakable synthetically slick surface of a familiar garbage bag, dirt-smeared and tattered, sits visibly in the cone of the flashlight beam. Several garbage bags, actually, taped in layers with packaging tape. And she remembers. Just the way they left him.
Tape it good, Sue,she hears Phillip saying, across the gulf of years.He's got plenty of tape in here so just keep going.
Sue sits upward, gulping air, and jerks erect so sharply that her backbone gives a sharp zing of pain. The world beneath the bridge reels in her peripheral vision. She is enduring equal portions of nausea, horror, and pain. But the thing she's unearthed, oblong and bulky, shrouded in garbage bags and bound up in packaging tape, tips the scale further toward horror-and the smell of it is beyond description. She vomits convulsively, twice, into the pile of earth she's pulled up.
Coughing, she wipes her lips and crawls back from it, not wanting to be any closer to the thing than she absolutely must be, for any longer than is absolutely required of her.
In her pocket the phone rings. She hitsTALK.
"Are you finished digging?" he asks. "Did you find what I asked you to?"
"It's right here."
"Pick it up."
At first she can't believe she's hearing him right. "What?"
"You heard me."
"Why?"
"You're taking it back to the car."
"I can't. Do that."
He says nothing.
"I mean, I don't…why do you want me to take it to the car?" The feeling is creeping back into her fingers and byfeeling she means pain, bright neon pain as if someone is crushing each fingertip between red-hot pliers. Faintly Sue is aware that at least one of her fingernails has torn almost completely off and there is blood trickling down between the webs of her fingers, the wound stinging with a crust of salty filth from the hole she dug. "I mean, haven't I done everything else you wanted up till now? I haven't called the police and I never tried to do anything except what you said." She waits, needing this to be acknowledged even as she knows that it won't be. "Can't you just let me have Veda back?"
Still no answer. Except this time Sue knows, somehow, that he is still there, listening, waiting. She can practically smell him through the cell phone, his breath not unlike the stench rolling off the thing in the garbage bags.
"I'll give her to you in the morning," he says with soft finality. "I'll give her to you in a little basket. And in another little basket I'll give you her heart. And another for her liver. And her kidneys. And two very small baskets for her pretty bright eyes. All wrapped up in ribbons. Wouldthat be all right?"
"Stop. I'll do it. Whatever you want."
Now the slowness in his voice is the weariness of patience wearing thin. "I already told you that I'm a big believer in second chances, Susan. But I've given you enough of them already. We've got a long night ahead of us still and it's not even midnight yet. I'm starting to feel like you're taking advantage of my generosity." Now comes the other version of the voice, the one that hooks and peels back the layer of mock civility like a serrated knife, and Sue feels herself tensing against its edge. "I'm going to have to punish you, do you understand that?"
"Please just don't hurt Veda."
"I'm going to have to punish you," he repeats even more meticulously. "Now you do what I told you, pick it up and take it back to the car, or it's going to be even worse."
He hangs up, and Sue gives herself a second, literally, to try to pull herself together. Taking more time than that isn't going to do her any more good.
Hauling in a deep breath she drops down on her haunches in front of the thing wrapped up in garbage bags and forces herself to find some kind of grip on the shape within.
Something inside crackles and pulls loose with a sickening snap and a pop and she has to fight back the urge to throw up again. But she tugs once, twice, and again, and the thing comes loose from the sucking maw of the earth so abruptly that Sue falls backward. She has time to think,This isn't going to happen, and then it does, the thing in the bags falls on top of her, its unevenly distributed weight holding her down, seeming actually to almost grope for her, like it's trying to feel her up. A whiff of putrid air pours out of the bags and up into her nose.
Sue screams. She kicks and twists sideways, contorting her body to propel the thing off of her with a great uncoiling shudder. She wants to keep kicking it, shrieking at it, but already a degree of rationality has come back to her-again this is what she does, what she in factis, an individual with the learned ability to find equilibrium in the most unlikely circumstances.
Sue takes another deep breath, bends down, and starts to drag the garbage-bag-enshrouded thing upward. It is lighter now, or feels lighter, no doubt because she is prepared for it. Rounded edges and jagged shapes press up against her chest and she is still distantly, unavoidably aware of the smell but a new kind of numbness has begun to take over for which she is nothing but grateful, grateful, grateful. In small, incrementally paced baby steps she drags the thing back up from underneath the bridge where she and Phillip buried it. Three-quarters of the way up she realizes that she left the flashlight down there and that she is now moving in almost total darkness, and this does not seem to matter to her much anymore either.
By the time she reaches the Expedition, she's sweating and badly winded, gasping for air. She drops the thing on the gravel road next to the rear tires and opens the back of the vehicle. The headlights and taillights have gone out now, but her eyes have adjusted. Sue bends down to grab the thing but its weight is too much for her fatigued muscles.
No way am I going to be able to lift this higher than my waist.
You have to.
She gives herself a ten count, as ready as she'll ever be, then sucks in a deep breath and leans down, gripping the shape with both arms. Straining with her arms, back, and shoulders, she hoists it upright. Something pops in her right knee. She can feel the vessels in her face and temples swelling with pressure. For one terrible moment she loses her balance and she and the thing in the garbage bags do an absurd little two-step around the back of the Expedition, staggering like a dance-hall girl and a cowboy too drunk to stand. Then she's back on the balls of her feet again, where her balance is, and she shoves the thing into the back of the car, then slams the door shut.
Not until she opens the driv
er's side door and climbs inside does she realize there is someone sitting in the passenger seat next to her.
And for the second time in ten minutes Sue Young screams.
As she screams, she scrambles backward away from it, half-jumping and half-falling back out, but her leg gets caught on the inside of the door and Sue gets one good look at the face staring blankly back at her from the other side.
It is Marilyn.
It is Marilyn the nanny.
Marilyn's body is very still and silent. Marilyn's hands lie on her lap. Marilyn's head is wrenched around sideways to face her. Marilyn's shoulder-length blond hair hangs damply over one side of her face. Marilyn's hair is red and stiff with blood like doll's hair. From outside looking in Sue sees the scooped-out sockets of her skull gape red and raw where her eyes once were. A sheet of paper has been stuck to the front of Marilyn's blouse with dried blood, and Sue can see a single word scrawled across it:
PUNISHED.
And once more the phone begins to ring.
10:33P.M.
Sue doesn't know how many times it rings before she answers it.
"I told you you'd be punished."
"You didn't have to." Sue's voice is drab, lifeless. It hangs in her throat like a tattered flag on a windless day. "You don't have to do this."
"Don't beg. It's pathetic. And you're wasting t-"
"Who are you, you son of a bitch?"The words fly out of her mouth before she can stop them, borne along on a torrent of fury she never would've guessed she had."If you've got something you want from me why the fuck don't you come out and take it?"
"Come out and take it?" The voice lets out a chuckle, actually sounding appreciative. "Oh, I like that, Susan. I like it a lot. I see you've grown some balls since we talked last."
"Who is this?"
"You'll figure it out eventually. That's part of it too." The voice gets nasty again. "Now get back in the car. We've got some traveling to do tonight. Quite a bit, actually."
Sue looks in at the corpse in the passenger seat staring back out at her. The lifeless thing that used to take care of her daughter, the friendly, slightly chubby girl who once nursed equal passions for Heath Ledger and Heath Bar Crunch and had been Veda's guardian and daytime companion for the last year and a half. The grief that she anticipates is still too deeply submersed in shock to make itself known.
"There's a blanket in the backseat," the voice says. "If you don't want to look at her like that. I wouldn't blame you. Death is pretty darn ugly, isn't it?"
"Fuck you."
"Fuckme? You're getting downright feisty, Susan. Maybe it's time for me to wake up your daughter so you can hear her scream again. What do you think?"
"No," Sue says, "no, no. I'm sorry. I won't-I shouldn't have said that." And despite what has just happened to Marilyn, right now all she feels is relief at the notion of Veda sound asleep through all of this. It is an irresistibly alluring thought.
"Get in the car."
Sue climbs in with the phone still pressed to her ear, takes the blanket from the backseat, and with her right hand spreads it clumsily over Marilyn's lap. Now she does cry a little bit, but silently, sparingly, like a few droplets of condensation leaking out from a high-pressure valve.
"Look at the note that I left you."
"I saw it."
"Look again."
Sue makes herself look at the bloody message stuck to Marilyn's chest. The sheet of paper that it's written on is actually a map, and when she looks more closely she realizes that it's a map of eastern Massachusetts. It starts just west of Worcester and covers the state line right to the coast. The ragged edge of the map would seem to indicate that it had been torn out of a spiral-bound road atlas.
"What is this?"
"This is your route for the rest of the night," the voice says. "Are you ready to ride, Susan?"
10:38P.M.
Sue peels the map from Marilyn's chest and lays it on the dashboard. Above the wordPUNISHED she can see that a route has been highlighted in careful yellow marker, the lines ruled into an upand-down zigzag pattern across northern Massachusetts beneath the New Hampshire border.
On first glance the route defies logic. It is made up of a combination of country roads, grinding its way in a general northeastern direction from Gray Haven toward the coast. It is by no means direct-rather, it wobbles and bobs erratically through an apparently nonsensical symphony of detours, as if someone were following a bumblebee overland, back to its hive.
The only thing that lends any degree of order to the route is the string of small northern towns that it connects, none of them large enough to warrant red letters on the map. There are seven of these towns strung together by this jagged yellow NASDAQ line, starting with Gray Haven. From there the line meanders through communities named, in order from west to east: Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham, and East Newbury before ending at someplace called White's Cove, which perches on Cape Ann just west of Pigeon Cove.
Sue has never heard of any of these towns before, despite the fact that she's lived in Massachusetts most of her life. She certainly can't remember ever seeing any of them on a map. Of course there are literally hundreds of crappy little burgs scattered throughout New England that no amount of regional familiarity could possibly make her aware of, but it's somehow unsettling just the same.
Although let's face it, that might be due to the partially draped corpse of her nanny in the passenger seat, not to mention the stinking, Glad bag-draped thing stowed in the back.
"You've got your route laid out for you," the voice on the phone says. "You've got your cargo in the back and you've got nine hours of night left. If you get started now you should be back in White's Cove by seven thirtyA.M. tomorrow."
Instinctively Sue's eyes go to the fuel gauge. Thank God she filled the tank after leaving work.
"Why do you want me to do this?"
"You'll figure it out as you go."
"What happens when I get to White's Cove?"
"You'll know by the time you get there."
"And that's when I get Veda back? Alive?"
"Always keep my promises, Susan."
Sue wishes that she could believe him. Right now she wishes it more than anything. "Where will she be?"
"The address is Eleven South Ocean Avenue. But fair warning, Susan: If you come even one minute late-or if you get there using any other route but the one marked in this map-you can still have her back. The only difference is that she'll be dead. Do you understand the terms of this agreement?"
"Eleven South Ocean Avenue," Sue repeats, "White's Cove."
"Look for the statue."
"Statue?"
"And just a reminder in case you were thinking about somehow alerting the police-"
"How do I know you're telling the truth?"
"You don't."
Something happens in Sue's brain. A neurological event that she does not anticipate, a thing that begins where fear ends, a mother's outrage coupled with an ambulance driver's low-bullshit threshold. "All right." She is not yelling. She is being very quiet. "I'll do what you ask. I'll drive through these towns with this thing in back. I won't call the police or anybody else. I'll be there tomorrow morning to pick up my daughter.But you listen to me. " She pauses to take in a breath. It is a little disorienting to hear her voice sounding like this. As if some other persona has reemerged from a few years of civility, affluence, and good manners to remind her that, at one point, she understood with adolescent ruthlessness that the world ran on blood. "If you kill my little girl tonight then you better make goddamn sure that you kill me as well. Because you're taking away everything I have in the world. And I will spend every waking moment for the rest of my life tracking you down. When I do, I promise you that you will die in a way so horrible that even a sick, sadistic son of a bitch like yourself would have to spend weeks trying to come up with something more painful than what I've got planned for you." She breathes. "Now do you understandthose terms, you cocksucker, or
do I have to make it clearer?"
It is a good moment-it almost makes her feel human again-but she is greeted with nothing but a puff of cottony silence from the phone and she knows that he has hung up on her yet again. At this precise instant, however, Sue Young does not care. There are welcome times when the truth spills out of our mouths because holding it back is like suicide. This is one of those times.
She puts the Expedition in drive and, gripping the map in her right hand, starts to turn around and head east.
10:48P.M.
Ten minutes later she is flying back through Gray Haven with her foot on the accelerator, the map on her lap. It's the kind of automotive sleepwalking that people do on the most familiar roads, the roads that carry them to their jobs, to school and church, the neighborhoods of their friends and family, back and forth through the towns they'll grow old and die in. The years she spent away from here might never have elapsed-she feels as if she knows every pothole and curve from Townsend Street to the outskirts of town.
She glances down at the map, at the route and the remaining six towns that lie ahead of her. Clearly they've been combined in this order for some reason, though any attempt to find logic in a system devised by a man who kidnaps infants and plucks the eyes out of their nannies is, to say the least, ill-advised.
Still, she goes over them in her mind, one at a time, seeing the names, trying to make them add up to something.
Gray Haven.
Winslow.
Stoneview.
Ashford.
Wickham.
East Newbury.
White's Cove.
Six towns she's never heard of and one she knows inside and out.
It doesn't make any sense.
Maybe it's not supposed to make any sense.
She's near the end of Townsend when another car pulls out of a side street in front of her. Sue hits the brakes. The Expedition goes into a skid, its back end coming around and finally stopping less than five feet from the other vehicle. Sue's heart stops.
Chasing the dead Page 5