Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

  Then the smile faded, drained slowly off her lips and out of her eyes.

  "It's dark there, where I am."

  "Don't go back there, Katydid. Stay here with me in the light." There had to be a way to control the Dissociative Identity Disorder. Drugs or therapy or something. Some way to fasten the fragile Katydid to the real world, a way to keep out—

  "Shannuck does bad things now." The child's tiny voice was so soft even the gentle breeze almost carried her words away. "I've seen. I've watched him. He has to stop hurting people … little kids."

  Then she gave Bailey a look of such utter sadness and loss, it broke Bailey's heart.

  "He's not my protector anymore." A single tear appeared and slid down the child's cheek. "I have to flip the switches. Turn off … everything."

  It took Bailey a moment to realize what—

  "No!"

  She started toward the little girl but a strong hand grabbed her arm and T.J. whispered in her ear, "You got to let her go."

  Bailey tried to wrest her arm away, struggled to free it, but the old man's grip was iron.

  The little girl stood perfectly still, her eyes locked on Bailey's.

  "Sweetheart, don't! Oh, please don't …"

  The child lifted her hand to her face, curled her finger over her nose and put her thumb into her mouth.

  "Katydid, no!"

  She only sucked her thumb for a moment, then folded up and collapsed into the dirt.

  T.J. let go of her arm and Bailey rushed to the child lying in a fetal position on the ground. She was as limp as a rag doll when Bailey gently eased her onto her back. Her eyes were not staring in sightless catatonia, though. They were closed. Bailey felt the little girl's neck searching for a pulse. There was none.

  Katydid had flipped a final switch and stopped her heart. She was dead.

  In the distance, Bailey heard the wailing cry of a massive symphony of sirens painted on a low rumble of thunder. It began to rain in earnest then, a heavy, punishing rain that pelted the bushes, soaked the dirt and drenched Bailey as she tenderly lifted the lifeless child into her arms and cradled her there, rocking slowly back and forth.

  Chapter Fifty

  Dobbs's face had just the suggestion of a smile, the not-smile he used to hide by ducking his head when him and T.J. was ten years old and his mama was going on about how he hadn't ought to be out there makin' friends with "a colored," when all the time T.J. was sittin' right on the other side of the mulberry bush, waiting for the woman to stop jawin' so him and Dobbs could go fishin'.

  The big man was watching Bailey cut up the last of Brice's steak for him because his arm was still in a cast after the surgery required to mend the "greenstick fracture" of the ulna he'd suffered when Melody/Shannuck snapped it.

  Bailey and Brice were seated with Dobbs around a table on the wide back porch of the Watford House, dawdling over the dinner T.J.'d whipped up with his near magical ability to transform a piece of meat into ambrosia with an outdoor grill. He had left the grill turned up high while they ate to burn off the grease and now he turned it off and closed the lid. Soon's it cooled, he'd scrub the grates with a wadded-up piece of aluminum foil.

  Taking off his apron, a manly garment — black and gold, with a Pittsburgh Steelers’ logo on the front — T.J. sat back down at the table where Bailey was talking about Senior FBI Agent Haruto Nakamura.

  "… think his friends call him Harri?" she asked.

  "That would imply he has friends," Brice said.

  "He might have been an emotionless robot around you," Bailey said, "but no way was he a Sphinx when he stepped into that ballroom — maybe a tarantula crawled over his shoe! I bet he turned as white as a gym sock."

  "Or looked like he'd just swallowed one."

  In truth, all the law enforcement officers who'd responded to Brice's officer down distress call that Saturday evening more than a month ago had been shocked beyond any description by what they found in the grand ballroom of The Cedars.

  Just getting Brice and Dobbs out of there and into ambulances had been a harrowing experience not a member of the Kavanaugh County Sheriff's Department would ever forget. T.J. hadn't seen it, but he'd heard that Fletch refused to wait for a hazmat suit, just went barreling in, picked Brice up, threw him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry and beat feet out of that house like somebody'd yelled "run, Forest, run!" Of course, they couldn't even load the sheriff into an ambulance until he'd been "decontaminated," stripped down to his skivvies to make sure he didn't have a black widow spider in the cuff of his pants.

  Even with the combined efforts of the rescue squad and the fire department, it took almost two hours to get Dobbs down from the ship's rigging. They did wait for hazmat suits.

  Wasn't much of an exaggeration to claim that the ambulances bearing Brice, Bailey, T.J. and Dobbs had barely made it to the hospital before the first of the phalanx of news media descended on the horror like crows tearing at roadkill. Within hours, it was an international story beamed all over the world.

  Behemoth white news vans, wearing satellite dishes like some rapper's ball cap, backed up traffic on the narrow mountain roads. Fox News, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, BBC, even Al Jazeera sat bumper-to-bumper for hours to earn the privilege of filming stuff their viewers'd take one look at and be so horrified they'd switch channels to roller derby.

  Then an alphabet soup of state and federal agencies grappled with what to do with the contamination … the infestation.

  The NIH (National Institutes of Health), ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry), the CDC, the EPA, even the Department of Agriculture — and those was just the ones T.J. knew what their initials stood for — they all wanted a piece of the action. Until they seen what the action was. Every mother's child of 'em had been briefed on what to expect, all thought they was prepared for what they'd see, but there wasn't no way to prepare a person for a thing like that. More than a couple of the first responders balked and refused to go into the room — even wearing hazmat suits.

  T.J. didn't know what they'd done — or who had done it — to get rid of the plague. He could have asked, but what difference did it make? Didn't matter who done what, not a living soul in Shadow Rock, West Virginia would ever willingly set foot in that place again.

  The footage they'd shown on national news was so horrifying, in fact, that when the Shadow Rock Town Council proposed burning the still-quarantined building to the ground, the Historical Society Nazis actually agreed to consider the proposal.

  The various agencies cataloged eighteen different varieties of spiders among the thousands in the house along with an untold and uncounted potpourri of miscellaneous bugs that'd been provided to feed them. Many — not all, but a good-sized number — of them spiders was poisonous. Black, brown and red widow spiders, hobo spiders, yellow sac spiders, wolf spiders, funnel web spiders, brown recluse, even deadly Brazilian wandering spiders. How the fragile little teacher had come by such exotic creatures had still not been determined.

  Seemed proof to T.J., as if he needed it, that if you had enough money, you could buy anything off eBay.

  The doctors suspected Brice had been bitten on the cheek by one of the widow spiders — black, brown or red — and possibly by a wandering spider on the ankle. But it was an allergic reaction to the venom that had come very close to killin' him. He'd been unable to breathe without a ventilator — his diaphragm paralyzed — for three days.

  The right side of his face was still puffy, with a healing wound that'd likely leave a good-sized scar. All evidence of the tarantula bite on T.J.'s arm was gone now, but he'd had outpatient surgery earlier in the week where — judging from the necrosis of the skin — a brown recluse had bitten him on the left leg. He had a bandage the size of a baby's diaper where they'd removed the last of the ulcer and skin lesions there that refused to heal. He was sure multiple skin grafts awaited him.

  Fang marks on Bailey's neck indicated she'd been bitten by a wolf spider there, a huge one — horr
ifying, but no more poisonous than a bee sting — in addition to the tarantula bite on her arm. She and T.J. had been pumped full of antivenom and hospitalized for a couple of days, with symptoms that ranged from severe abdominal pain and rigid muscles to vomiting and — in Bailey's case — shock. Dobbs had been kept overnight for observation as well, but suffered no ill effects from hanging upside down. He had suffered no spider bites, either, but whatever she'd hit him on the head with had created a goose egg the size of … well, a goose egg. He was so hard-headed wasn't no concussion, though.

  Brice had got the worst of it — at least physically. But it was Bailey who'd taken the biggest hit mentally. Flashing in and out of the mind of a murderous spider! T.J. had been terrified she'd suffered massive psychological damage. That she'd be haunted by debilitating, permanent post traumatic stress disorder. That all that mind-numbing horror would chew up her soul.

  Truth was, Bailey could barely remember any of it! And what she could remember was fuzzy and indistinct. Melody'd spiked the sugar cubes with an as yet still unknown concoction of psychotropic drugs, hoping to render both Bailey and T.J. groggy and disoriented. The drug-soup did just that to Bailey, with the added side effect of removing her inhibitions, leaving her defenseless against mind connections. But when the potion was flushed completely out of Bailey's system, it carried the images it had enabled along with it. Bailey could distinctly recall touching Melody's locket, connecting with Katydid. Her next clear memory was running through the backyard maze. Everything in between was mush.

  In actual fact, all four of them was lucky to be alive. Which was more than could be said for the three kidnapped children, whose funerals were held one after the other in three different churches with uncounted thousands of people attending. The devastated community was still staggering from the blows. The parents would never recover. Lucas Ferrigliano had been voluntarily committed to some fancy psychiatric facility in Pittsburgh and would face all kinda criminal charges — as an adult — when he was released.

  It had taken the combined confirmation of all four of them to convince Agent Nakamura that the diminutive first-grade teacher had done the things they had seen her do.

  "I believe you because I don't have any choice," he had told Brice when he'd returned to Shadow Rock to interview the sheriff, who was still in the hospital a week after Melody McCallum's death. "It has to be true. The physical evidence bears it out."

  Evidence that included a review of the surveillance camera videos at the mall, where Brice pointed out what he had missed, what he'd put together in his head a split second before Melody'd turned on him — the ponytail of the woman in the baseball cap exiting the mall carrying an apparently empty gym bag was unmistakable, clearly Melody's distinctive caramel-colored brown. And Christi Strickland had, indeed, been a student in Melody's second-grade class at Madison Elementary School. There was a mountain of other forensic evidence, of course, traces of fiber and hair in Melody's car and in the gym bag, but given that the children's bodies had been found at The Cedars, none of it mattered.

  "The history of unexplained murders during Caitlyn's hospitalization … the testimony of four reliable eyewitnesses … and …" Then Nakamura had shaken his head. "I'm sorry … I just can't …" He'd stopped, finished in a whisper. "She became a spider?"

  Of course, Nakamura was only given the sanitized version of events, one that left out any mention of the portrait Bailey had painted, or how she had gotten involved in chasing down Melody McCallum's true identity in the first place. A reasonable lie sufficed — that Bailey was a friend of Brice's and she had suspected Melody from the beginning.

  "I don't know … call it woman's intuition," she'd said, and shrugged.

  That was a more plausible and certainly more palatable explanation than reality — that Bailey had painted a picture of a little girl trapped in a wrecked camper while her parents' bodies decomposed nearby, and then fell into and out of a spider's mind, watching him murder three adults — a pervert, an orderly and Melody's husband — and kidnap three children.

  The autopsy of Melody McCallum's body revealed no apparent cause of death. Her heart had simply stopped beating.

  "I'm really looking forward to explaining my reports to my superiors — even with a mountain of physical evidence and eyewitness testimony," Nakamura had said, weary astonishment still written on his face. "That woman willed herself to die."

  T.J. could tell Bailey was struggling to assimilate it all. To reconcile her pity for the pathetic little girl and her loathing terror of the spider. That would take time.

  As Brice and Dobbs talked about — what else? — Pittsburgh Steelers football, he caught Bailey looking at him. He gestured with his chin toward the kitchen, she nodded and the two of them began gathering up plates and hauling them into the house.

  Once inside, she set the dirty dishes on the countertop, reached down and picked up Sparky, who'd been busy as a one-armed paper hanger ever since they'd all got home from the hospital. First, he'd lick T.J.'s whole face, then he'd lick Bailey's. Then back to T.J. He'd been hanging tight to Bailey today, though, could sense in his Sparky way that she was troubled.

  She cuddled the ball of fluff close.

  "We didn't do any good, T.J.," she said, keeping her voice low. "I painted that portrait … and Riley Campbell still died. So did Christi Strickland and Marley Ewing. In fact, the portrait almost got the four of us killed."

  T.J. turned on the hot water tap and began to fill one side of the double sink.

  "And you think you'd be better off to treat your gift like Mama done hers. Ignore it. Destroy the paintings. Don't get involved."

  "And you don't think that would be better?"

  "Depends. Maybe you'd ought to ask Macy Cosgrove." Bailey stopped petting Sparky, her face expressionless. "Or all the little kids in this town who's outside playing in the sunshine right this minute, riding they bicycles — or more likely in a dark room somewhere sitting glassy-eyed in front of some stupid video game — little kids who ain't dead bodies wrapped up in cellophane hanging upside down in Melody McCallum's ballroom!"

  He hammered the next words like nails into a plank.

  "You think Shannuck woulda stopped at three? If we hadn't caught Melody McCallum, who would have? The sheriff's department and the FBI — they was both clueless. Who'd ever have suspected that sweetheart first-grade teacher?"

  He looked around the countertop, spotted a sponge and held it under the running water.

  "Maybe somebody would have …" — Bailey was scrambling — "I don't know, stumbled over the bodies somehow and …"

  "Even if a plumber come to fix a leak had accidentally wandered into that ballroom, Melody'd still have got off. 'Cause ain't no way a little bitty thing like her coulda done what she done. No jury on the planet'd convict her, especially since she coulda passed a room full of polygraph tests."

  Picking up the top plate off the pile of dirty dishes, T.J. wiped it with the wet sponge and set it in the other side of the double sink.

  "When Melody's car got run off the road and Shannuck saved her — and replaced her as the dominant personality — first thing he done was kill the men in that pickup truck. And he woulda gone on killin'. 'Cause that's what spiders do. Maybe for years!"

  Horror stole Bailey's voice so she could only whisper. "Years?"

  "How many kids you think Shannuck woulda murdered — and got away with it? — if you'd walked out into your back yard and set that painting on fire?"

  She folded inward emotionally, sank down into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, all the air gone out of her. Sparky hopped out of her arms to the floor and stood up on his hind legs with his paws on the cabinet. He wasn't quite tall enough, though. His little pink tongue fell an inch short of the crumbs on the countertop beside the dirty dishes.

  "Last time, there was Macy — alive. But this time—"

  "—was different from last time." T.J. turned off the tap, set the plates in the sink full of hot water and bega
n to wipe his hands on a towel. "And next time will be different from this time. Ever time this thing happens to you, you gonna have to decide what to do about it, case by case."

  "I don't want to decide. I want—"

  "Bailey girl, listen to yourself. I want. I don't want. How's that workin' out for you?" T.J. made a humph sound in his throat. "I'm having deja vu all over again here 'cause I done had this conversation."

  "With Dobbs?"

  "With Brice. When you 'nounced all confident that you wasn't never again gonna paint a portrait like the one of Macy Cosgrove."

  Bailey got that awful haunted look in her eyes.

  "You think there'll be more of them, don't you?"

  "I told Brice then and I'm tellin' you now — we ain't the ones get to decide that."

  "Then who does?"

  Fear passed between them as real as a gust of wind. T.J. reached out and patted Bailey's shoulder, but his own hand was unsteady.

  "Sugar … I ain't got no idea."

  THE END

  The series continues…

  Bailey’s newest painting: A strangled girl. As she, T.J. and Dobbs team up again to find the girl and prevent a murder they stumble into something larger and darker than they could have imagined. Can they find the girl and stop the murder or are they putting their own lives on the line?

  GET GOLD PROMISE

  A Special Request

  Thank you for reading Red Web.

  If you enjoyed this book. would you please consider writing a review of it on your favourite bookseller’s website so other readers might enjoy it too. Just a couple of sentences. That would mean a lot to me.

  Thank you!

  Ninie Hammon

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