by John Hart
An escape from this shame.
“Do it.”
The girl shrugged and laid a finger on the dying woman’s face. For an instant the air hummed, then Marion’s eyes opened, and she spoke as if she’d been awake for hours. “The baby’s coming, John. I feel the baby.…”
John staggered for the bed, but the girl lifted her hand and Marion fell away again—the soul of her, the only part that mattered.
“Bring her back!”
“There is the final price—”
She spoke in broken English, but John understood. “Anything.”
The girl rattled off in her own tongue, and Isaac spoke haltingly. “She wants a daughter.”
“A daughter. Yes. Whatever she wants.”
“For that she needs a man.”
“What…”
But her intention was obvious. She cupped a palm between Isaac’s legs, and when she spoke again, it was with the same satisfied smile.
“She says I will give her daughters, and they will be strong and fine.”
“Isaac. Jesus…”
“She says you will give me to her now, or else the woman dies.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
It took Jack ten minutes to convince Captain Lee to leave him alone, and that was only because Clyde helped. “Just back off, all right! He doesn’t know anything!” Hunt was yelling at the end, but Lee didn’t buy it. Behind him, others gathered and watched and hated. They thought Jack knew, that maybe he was involved. “I said back the hell off. I mean it. He called this in. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
That made sense to Jack, but the anger overrode it, that sense of loss and betrayal.
“That’s Willard Cline in the bag,” Lee said. “Do you know how long I’ve served with him? How much he means to me, to all of us?”
“I don’t know anything,” Jack said. “I’d tell you if I did.”
“Bullshit. You and the Merrimon kid go back forever. You think I’m stupid? You think I don’t remember? And you!” He stabbed a finger at Hunt. “Don’t pretend for a second that you’re impartial.”
“No one’s pretending anything.” Hunt showed his palms. “But you need to calm down. This is bigger than the sheriff. You know that.”
“All I know is that I want your son.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Jack said.
“Do you know where he lives?” Jack looked away from the question. “You help me with this, Clyde, or I swear to God I’ll burn you down.”
“You said it yourself. I have no jurisdiction here. FBI. State police. You should be making calls.”
He wouldn’t do it yet, not with daylight fading and the sheriff in a bag at his feet. Jack thought it was smart, though, the way Clyde reminded him that others would be watching.
Captain Lee leaned into Hunt as if some thin bond still connected them. “What if it was one of yours?” he said. “Your friend? Your boss?”
“I would do the job,” Hunt said. “I would take the long view.”
The stare between them held, but no one was convinced the captain would take the long view. Maybe in a day, Jack thought. Maybe tomorrow. When Lee turned away, Hunt watched him for a few seconds, then gathered Cree and Jack close. “Do you know where he is?”
“We were at his cabin earlier,” Jack said. “He wasn’t there.”
“You need to find him and warn him. Keep him away until state police arrive or these people settle down.”
“What? You mean now? In the dark?”
“I’ve seen what happens when cops die,” Hunt said. “Revenge. The mob mentality. Here.” He took a flashlight from an open case on the back of a four-wheeler. “Go to the cabin. They won’t find it tonight, not in the dark. Find Johnny. Get him out of Hush Arbor. Does your phone have a charge?” Jack nodded. “Good. Keep it close. Jack, look at me. You have twenty minutes before it gets truly dark. You know where the cabin is. Johnny has to come home sometime. You need to be there when he does.” Jack nodded, but was doubtful. Hunt turned to Cree. “You’re not part of this. I can call someone to take you home.”
“I’ll stay with Jack.”
“Okay, your choice.” Hunt draped an arm over Jack’s shoulders and squeezed tight. “Just stand here,” he said. “Make for the trees when the shouting starts.”
“Shouting?”
Jack asked it numbly, but Hunt was already walking. He circled the knot of county police, then knelt by the body and unzipped the bag a second time.
After that, the shouting came fast.
* * *
They went to the cabin, but Jack knew from fifty yards out that Johnny wasn’t there. Ten seconds inside and a minute calling Johnny’s name made the silence even starker. “Is there some other place he might be?”
Jack knew the tree in which Johnny often slept. It was on a hilltop to the north, a hard walk in full daylight. “Are you afraid?” he asked.
“We just found a pile of dead bodies. The cops are sure to be looking for us, if not now, then later.”
“But other than that? You know…”
He meant the silence and the unusual stillness. She hugged herself, and felt the terrors of those early years. “When I was a child here, the days were special, like they could go on forever, just sunshine and all these trees, people working together for the common good. Planting. Fishing. People hummed when they worked. People laughed. That changed when the shadows got long. People moved a little faster. They watched out under the trees. I was inside by sunset and never allowed out after. It felt like something terrible, the way people talked about it, like something solid or alive. Few risked the darkness.”
“Do you know why not?”
Cree considered the question. Truth was, only the old women moved freely at night, and then only two together or maybe three. “All I know is that people got edgy with the sun going down. They got their work done, then locked the doors tight.”
“Jesus.”
“Are we going inside?”
“Yes, God yes.”
Jack fumbled around inside. He found matches, lit candles. Cree stepped in behind him, studying the fireplace, the bed, the books rowed on a shelf. “This is where he lives?”
“Sort of.” Jack opened one cabinet, then another. “Let’s have a fire and some food. Then we can decide what to do. I’ll get wood.”
He went outside, and Cree sat on the edge of Johnny’s bed. This was his place, a Merrimon place. Drawing the knife, Cree tilted it against the light, then touched the edge and watched a line appear on the pad of her thumb. A drop of blood rose, and she felt a strange stirring in her chest. Tilting her head, she listened to the sounds outside. The lawyer was stacking wood in his arms. Wind moved the trees, and when a nighthawk made its sharp, electric call, she pictured its looping flight, the long wings with a white blaze beyond the bend.
How did she know that?
She’d left the swamp as a child, and cared nothing for birds. But she knew the nighthawk laid its eggs on bare ground, that they came in summer to breed and left for the winter in great flocks. Cree spread her palms where Johnny slept, and felt pressure in her skull, like something was trying to get inside. She wanted to burn this place, to wipe it so clean, only the earth would remember.
Why?
Her head ached. She was sweating. Pressing her palms against her temples, Cree rocked where she sat and knew the moment something broke.
She was Aina.
She was Cree.
“Stop it,” she said, but there was no clearing outside, no city lights beyond the wood. Her face was broader and scarred. Her heart was filled with anger.
“Ms. Freemantle…”
Too many memories.
Too much hate.
“Go away,” she said.
“Ms. Freemantle?”
“Leave me alone. Please.”
Cree was on her feet with no memory of standing. Jack was in the doorway, and wood clattered as he dropped it.
“Sit. Come on. Sit down.”
Cree didn’t argue. She was faint. Her head was splitting. “Take this chair. Here.” Cree sat and put her face in her hands. “Just breathe. You’re fine.” His hand was warm on her back, but her thoughts were not fine.
She wanted to hurt Johnny Merrimon.
She wanted to make him scream.
* * *
The sky was moonless when they left. Footing was treacherous with a single flashlight, so Cree stayed close at the lawyer’s back. He was solicitous, concerned.
“Watch your step. Careful, now.”
Moving onto high ground, she struggled with the contradictions inside. All she’d ever wanted was a purpose in life, some calling beyond the safety of a bolted door. But all of that was gone now. She watched her feet, and struggled with the pressures in her mind. Right foot, left foot. She blinked and saw a river of blood.
“We’ll find Johnny,” the lawyer said. “We’ll find Johnny and we’ll figure this out.”
He was battling his own fears, but Cree knew from long experience that those demons were not so easily slain. They found dark corners and chose words that made you weak. Such was the demon in Cree’s mind. It said Aina was stronger; it said Aina lived.
“Are you okay back there?”
“Yes,” Cree lied, but she didn’t trust herself or know herself. When they found the right hill, they clambered up until an oak tree spread above them. Its limbs were enormous, the trunk as thick as any she’d ever imagined, thicker even than the hanging tree. Touching it, she had a single thought.
This tree was old when Aina was alive.
It was another thread that spun out in the night.
“Johnny!”
The lawyer’s light shone into the branches, and she saw something high above. “Is that him?”
“There should be a hammock.…”
It looked right to Cree, the bend of it and the length. The lawyer called out again, but nothing moved where Cree thought she saw the hammock. “I’ll go,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She ignored the eagerness that took her into the lower branches. She didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t want to kill him.
“Be careful, please.”
Already, the lawyer seemed far below, his light shining upward as Cree moved up into the smaller branches. When the trunk forked, she followed the larger spine, and where it forked a final time, she found the hammock and the man in it. Darkness hid the details of his face, but she knew the cheek, the slope of his jaw. He was moaning in his sleep, his eyes rolled white.
“He’s here.”
“Is he all right?”
Cree didn’t answer. He was helpless a hundred feet up.…
“Ms. Freemantle?”
The lawyer called up, and it helped. “Hey.” She tried to wake him, but the word came softer than she’d planned. “Johnny,” she said; but the name was wrong. John, she heard, and the sound of it was a wind in her head. She went away for a moment, and when she returned, the knife was in her hand and against his throat.
Do it!
It was not a voice, but an echo. She touched the blade to his skin and felt want so profound, it was need. She saw him on horseback and at the river. Were his eyes to open, she would know the exact shade—a brown so deep, it was black.
Do it for us.…
She tilted the knife and saw its edge, the killing edge. In that moment, she was ready to open his throat, there beneath a rising moon. It was that close—the same eagerness—then she looked into his rolled-white eyes and understood the horrible truth. It wasn’t a dream at all, the echo in her head.
It was a touch.
It was a taking.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Helicopters came into the skies of Hush Arbor twenty minutes after the sun did. Hunt heard them before he saw them, a murmur as they neared, then the rattle and clatter as they thundered overhead. Rising from his car, Hunt scrubbed sleep from his eyes to watch them circle and bank. One was owned by the sheriff’s department, and had the distinct markings he knew so well. The other was unfamiliar. State police, maybe. Maybe a loaner.
Squinting at his phone, he looked for Jack’s number, then punched it in as the helicopters banked a final time above the old village before working off in separate directions, one moving due north, the other bending north and west. Hunt held his breath as the number cycled and the phone struggled to find a signal.
“Damn it.”
Hunt shoved the phone in his pocket. He’d been up most of the night, trying to contact Jack or Johnny, trying to calm his wife. She didn’t know everything, but law enforcement was a small community, and she’d been catching the whispers that something bad had happened in the swamp. Hunt had said: Trust me, sweetheart, please. But how long could he expect that to hold? An hour more? He doubted it. Not with the sheriff dead. Not with Johnny in the mix. It was the troublesome side of the boy’s notoriety. People knew his name. The fascination remained.
Hunt considered the phone again. The nearest dependable signal was four miles away, one of them on dirt roads, the last three on old pavement. Ten minutes away. Maybe twelve.
“Where are you, son?”
As questions went, it was pretty desperate. The sheriff’s department had flooded in overnight. On duty, off duty. Hunt had counted a dozen retired deputies before it grew too dark to count much of anything. They’d established a main command center in the old church, and kept a presence, too, at the cave. All night people had moved between the two. Flashlights. Floodlights.
Everything but the torches …
Ignoring his hunger, Hunt circled the clearing, trying to pick up information, anything. Most were steady enough, but it was clear that no one trusted him. People he’d known for twenty years, some even longer. He’d get a nod or maybe not. No one answered his questions. Have you found anything yet? Where are you looking? What about cause of death? All that mattered were the simple facts of the sheriff’s death and Johnny’s potential involvement.
They had history.
He was dead on Johnny’s land.
Beyond that, it came down to the years. Willard Cline had been the sheriff of Raven County for four decades. People knew him and loved him. People owed him. Normally, that was a good thing. Not today. Today, a pair of deputies stopped Hunt as he stepped onto the trail that would lead him to the cave. “Uh-uh. Sorry, Detective.”
They didn’t look sorry at all. Hunt gauged the tension in their shoulders, the way both men rode the balls of their feet and watched to see if he might push back. “Are the state police coming?” he asked.
“We’re not to talk to you or to let you pass. Orders.”
“What about FBI? Scientists? Any outsiders at all?”
“Just you.”
Hunt gave it a four-count, then turned back the way he’d come. At the car, he saw a truckload of rough, slouch-hatted men rumble into the clearing and stop beside the church. They spilled out onto the damp grass, worn-looking outdoorsmen, men with rifles rubbed shiny from years of hard use. Hunt knew one of them from a disabled-veterans fund-raiser he’d put together years ago. He was big and heavy, but good on his feet, good in a fight.
“Timmy Beach.” Hunt culled the big man from the group and led him to a quiet place beside the church steps. “What are you boys doing out here?”
“Tracking.”
“Sheriff’s department brought you in?”
“It’s not like they could do it on their own.”
“You’re no friend of law enforcement. I’d wager none of you are.”
“You’d win that bet. We’re doing this for Jimmy Ray Hill.”
“What about Jimmy Ray?”
“He’s the survivor. They didn’t tell you that?”
“Jesus.” Hunt turned away, trying to process. He knew Jimmy Ray. Not well, but well enough. “Listen, Johnny didn’t do this—”
“Let me stop you right there, Clyde. Okay. You see that fella there, the big one with the Winchester? That’s Jimmy Ray’s brother.
The young one beside him—the skinny one with all the hair—he put baby number two in Jimmy Ray’s daughter. Course, the only reason I’m telling you any of this is because my brother still goes on about how that money you raised cleaned up his doctor bills and bought those new prosthetics. Changed his life, he says. I think he might have killed himself otherwise. You can consider this conversation your payback.”
“You can’t go in there armed. Even the sheriff’s department knows better.”
“We’re considering it a don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of situation.”
Hunt ran a hand through his hair. He saw the danger so clearly. “Your friend’s alive, Timmy. All this eagerness I’m seeing, the anger … you need to dial it down before somebody gets hurt.”
“Jimmy Ray lost most of one leg and half of the other. His back is broken.”
“My son did not do that.”
“Were I in your shoes, I might share the same conviction, but we all know Jimmy Ray and the sheriff came out here looking for your boy. That was their intent and sole purpose. My guess is they found him.”
“Timmy—”
“I’m sorry, Clyde. One way or another, I intend to see this through.”
Timmy walked off after that. He said a few words to the other men, then stomped up the stairs and into the church.
Things were going sideways.
Hunt felt it.
Sliding into the car, he fired the big engine and drove four miles to find reception. He’d already been there twice, a sandy verge with views of the distant city. He called Johnny and Jack first, but was shunted straight to voice mail. Speaking quickly but clearly, he explained what was happening, and left the same basic message.
If you’re in the swamp, leave.
If you’re already out, stay away.
After that, Hunt did something he’d never done.
He called reporters.
He called lots of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Johnny moved from one awareness to the next as if being drawn through a hole in a wall. Aina was grinning in the firelight, then she was above him, but the scars were gone. She had the same dark eyes but different lips. The sky beyond her was a morning sky.