by Madelyn Alt
Noah sat down next to her and patted her clasped hands. “We’ll think of something, Lib. You don’t have to worry about this now. Actually, you don’t have to worry about it at all. Frank and I, we’ll take care of everything. Won’t we, Frank?”
Turning away to give them their privacy, I filled the water vessel and measured out the coffee. Nothing gourmet here. Just plain old preground coffee that they probably bought cheap at the local grocery store. It didn’t matter—it would do the trick. Anything to jolt reality and inject a little bit of normalcy into the situation.
With the coffee on and the water heating through, I began to drift along the fringes of the office in an attempt to find something to distract myself with from the awkwardness of finding myself a part of the strange proceedings. The big desk in the corner had a number of photographs on it, so I wandered over.
One of them caught my eye: a smiling, happy couple sitting on a park bench. It was Joel as he’d not come across in my only meeting with him—relaxed, in love, on top of his world with his woman by his side. Nowhere in this picture did I see evidence of the anger and tension I’d seen in him the other night. It was almost like looking at two different people. I touched the frame, and shivered.
“I’d forgotten he had that picture here.” Startled, I yanked my hand back as Libby appeared at my shoulder. With an eerie sense of calm, the kind that often descends right after a sudden death, she reached out and picked up the picture. “It was one of our first candids as a married couple . . . one of his favorites of us. Joel always said it made him look ten years younger.”
There had been an obvious age difference between the two of them. Remarkable, really. Ten to fifteen years seemed most likely. Was it something he had felt acutely, the older he had gotten? In the photo he looked like he hadn’t a care in the world but the young woman beside him. So different from the man I’d encountered. What a difference a few years made. Was it the stresses and challenges of business ownership that had settled the weight of the world in his aura? Call me nosy, call me a student of human nature, but a part of me couldn’t help wondering what it was that had wrought so much change in him.
Frank was staring out the window at the proceedings, his spine stiff and his shoulders hunched, his hands clasped behind his back. “They’re putting him in the ambulance now,” he said quietly.
Setting the framed picture down, Libby went to stand beside her stalwart brother-in-law, her arms tightly hugging herself as she gazed out the double-paned window. Noah remained in his seat, watching his brother and sister-in-law, before putting his head in his hands and dragging his palms down his face, then gathering his hands together in front of his chin.
I didn’t belong here with them. I felt that so keenly, and yet there I was anyway.
Desperate for some distraction, I checked on the coffee, but it was only midway through the pot. I set out a couple of cups and located the ubiquitous artificial creamer and sugar packets, but that took only a second. I needed something, anything, to occupy my attention. The office was fairly Spartan. Most of what could be found along the walls pertained to some new chemical field additive for weed control, or a new and improved kind of fertilizer that wouldn’t burn the plants when topically applied. Snoozeville, big time. A pile of books on top of a credenza-style filing cabinet proved to be nothing more than a selection of farming catalogs. A large, utilitarian bulletin board was filled with a plain calendar, bits and pieces of papers, clippings, and various ephemera found in any office. The ephemera was, as expected, just a jumble of things that meant something to Joel but little to me. Business cards, carbon copies of packing slips, pages torn out from hunting magazines, a clipping for Rogaine—hmm, wonder if that was why he had worn a cowboy hat—tucked back behind an advertisement for a fairly effective-looking handgun.
Behind me, a great, hiccupping sob emerged from Libby, and she turned from the window and ran down the hall. The slam of a door followed, but it didn’t mask the weeping that issued forth from within. Frank and Noah looked at each other, then Noah clapped his older brother on the shoulder and went off to do his brotherly duty.
My shields had held for Libby; but it was Frank that proved their undoing. Bewilderment, sorrow, pain threaded in, bit by bit. I tried to push them back out, but once in, they grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go.
“Why?” Frank murmured, as though he had forgotten I was there. “Why was he up there? Jesus.”
The coffeepot stopped burbling a moment too late for Libby, but maybe it could do Frank some good. I poured him a big, steaming mug and carried it over to him. Unfortunately as I passed the desk, my hip bumped a stack of papers on the corner. They swept to the floor, taking with them the picture frame Libby had set down beside them. It fell to the tile floor with a clatter that made me cringe.
I stood among the wreckage of strewn papers and bit my lip. Frank turned around. “I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling terrible. “I must have bumped it as I walked past.” I set the coffee down on the desk and immediately knelt to assess the damage.
Frank bent to pick up the papers, which had caught invisible air currents and floated in all directions. I gathered the nearest ones together, then, cringing, I reached for the photo frame. My heart sank. The glass was broken. A jagged, lightning bolt line separated the two lovers in the photo down the middle. A second line reached from the center and spider-webbed over Libby’s face. “I’m so sorry!” I repeated. “The glass is broken.”
Frank knelt down and took the photo from me. “No harm done. It’s just the glass, see? The photo itself is fine. Don’t you worry about it.”
Between the two of us we got the rest of the mess picked up. I was about to get to my feet when I spotted one last thing lurking half under the desk. I slid it out. It was a cheap desk agenda, notebook-style, held open with a rubberband to display the month of June. A couple of pages had wrinkled in the fall. I smoothed them out, running my palm over the paper. Absentmindedly I noticed there weren’t a lot of entries on it. A couple of doctor’s appointments marked there in a heavy black scrawl—one on the fifteenth, just past, 2 P.M.; and another coming up on the twenty-ninth. Joel would be missing that one. The poor guy must have had some sort of recurring medical issue he had been taking care of. “Someone will need to cancel his appointment with Dr. Dorffman,” I murmured, half to myself.
“What’s that?”
I held up the agenda. “This fell, too. Sorry for being such a klutz.”
Frank took the agenda and dropped it on the big desk beneath the lamp, then held out his hand and helped me to my feet.
Just in time, too, as Libby and Noah emerged from the bathroom. Libby’s cheeks were damp, her eyes red. Poor thing. I hurried to pour cups of coffee for her and Noah. Libby had opened the door and stood there, looking out at the scene.
“What was that?” she asked suddenly. “Over there by the pig barns. Did you two see that?”
Noah frowned and leaned closer to the glass. “What did you see?”
“A shadow of some sort . . . and then it moved. Like a person. Didn’t you see it?”
“Where?”
“Over there”—she pointed—“by the pig barns.”
Frank turned away from the window. “I didn’t see anything,” he grunted dismissively. “Probably just one of the emergency workers.”
I looked out the window, too, once the rest of them had moved away at last, and immediately a chill ran up my spine. Because I, too, thought I had seen something tucked away in that corner between the largest of the hog barns and one of the lesser silos. Something vaguely man-shaped that was there one minute and gone the next.
Shades of Quasimodo.
Shades of something.
I shivered. I just hoped it wasn’t the shade of Mr. Joel Turner himself. Was that too much to ask?
Chapter 8
It was with great relief that I was finally able to extricate myself from the grief-stricken tension in the office with the excuse that I needed to get
back to my car. Leaving the three Turners alone to comfort one another, I darted here and there across the feed mill complex to avoid the emergency crew milling about the scene. I was heading toward the road and my car, knowing that Liss would have been far too polite to ditch me no matter how long I’d been absent, when a dark something caught my eye.
Despite the beginnings of a headache starting at the base of my skull, I found my feet veering off on a completely different path toward the far end of the pig barn.
The smell of the hogs, as I drew near the long, narrow building, was even more atrocious. New building or no new building, it didn’t take long for the stench of pigs to permeate the concrete, the steel, the insulation, the beams. Everything.
The smell was one thing, but the sounds were downright ghastly. I couldn’t say that I’d been this close to a hog holding barn in over twenty years, but the sound that the animals made was something that a person could never quite forget. It was a cross between a scream and a guttural squeal, made somehow worse by the knowledge that they were in a holding barn on their way to slaughter. I wondered, sometimes, whether they could sense it, their impending demise. Did they know?
The shadow was too tall for a hog that had gotten loose, far too stealthy. There it was again, darting into the cove created by two grain silos.
I fished in my pants pocket for my key ring and the handy little LED flashlight I kept clipped to it. Damn. I’d left the keys in the car with Liss, and there was nothing there but dryer lint left along the pocket seams.
As surreptitious as a person could be when in the middle of what amounted to a big paved lot without a single bit of cover in sight other than the fact that they were one of twenty people moving around the area, I made a zigzagging beeline for the pig barn, flattening my back against its newly painted surface once there. I know I probably looked ridiculous, had anyone been paying attention—but sometimes a girl had to sacrifice dignity and an aversion for trouble when there was a higher purpose involved. Namely, to figure out whether Spook the Shadow was a real, live person, or the manifestation of something else entirely. Although given a choice between the two, I’m not sure which was the better alternative at that particular point in time.
I inched my way down the barn in my best Fred “Twinkletoes” Flintstone style—back and hands flat to the wall, tippytoes tootling along—until I was within a few feet of the end. I’d sharpened my ears to the noises around me, but I had heard nothing out of the ordinary considering everything else that was going on. Just the grunting and squeals of the pigs, commentary slung back and forth by police and medical personnel, a whisper of a breeze every now and again, the crunching of footsteps across the pavement where gravel had scattered, and the occasional squelch of police radios.
Nothing to make the fine hairs on my arms stand on end. So why were they?
The Shadow knows.
I was creeping myself out. Heh. I really needed to stop doing that.
There was nothing to fear. There were people—big, strong men, in fact—all around me. All I had to do was step around the edge of the barn, stay within sight, and see what it was that was creeping along the fringes, watching the processing of the accident scene. I could, I suppose, call for Tom . . . but was there really any reason to when it was most likely nothing? He already thought I was halfway to the loony bin for my involvement with the N.I.G.H.T.S. in general and Liss in particular . . . not to mention for my current predilection for all things esoteric and mysterious. No reason to confirm his worst fears without just cause.
I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and leapt out to confront . . .
Nothing.
The cove was actually just an alley created by two grain silos, and this particular alley led around and about the maze of other alleys created by still more silos. The security lights and spotlights had eliminated some shadows and created others. Maybe the shadow I had seen was nothing more than a bat or a bird that crossed into one of the beams of bright light.
Or maybe there had been something there. Something that knew I’d been watching and had eluded me in the thrill of the chase.
I wandered a little farther down the “alley,” but I didn’t see anything else that might have caused the moving shadow. My vote was on a bird—specifically, one of the enormous buzzards that I had seen circling above, silhouetted against the glow of moon and clouds. Though I had to admit, the thought of that kind of creeped me out, too.
Confused by the events of the evening, I headed back toward my car and hoped I could find some way to make amends to Liss for leaving her alone for so long.
I found her standing ever so elegantly beside one of the police cruisers that had arrived after us, and speaking earnestly with a state police officer who appeared to be around fifty years young, a bit gray at the edges, but still in sporting good shape.
“Here she comes now,” she said before I’d even had a chance to announce my return. “Maggie, my dear, I’d like you to meet Trooper Gary McKenzie of the Indiana State Police. Trooper McKenzie popped by to lend a hand to the officers already on the scene here. I was just telling him about your Tom, and what a wonderful job he does for Stony Mill. That’s Tom over there with poor Mr. Turner, isn’t it?”
I held out my hand, and Gary took it, well, like a trooper. “A pleasure. Yes, that’s Tom. He’s the department’s Go-To Guy for anything out of the ordinary here in town, so I guess an accident on this scale qualifies.”
“I’d heard about the Special Task Force that Chief Boggs had created between the police and sheriff’s departments,” Trooper Gary commented in an almost offhand manner. “Stony Mill sure has had its share of bad luck this year.”
Luck. Yeah, that was one way of looking at it.
“Well,” he said, eyeing Liss the way a hungry man might eye a really juicy Porterhouse, “I guess I should be heading over to see what kind of help I can give to the emergency crew. I’ll, uh . . .” He cast an embarrassed glance my way, but I busied myself pretending to look for my car keys. He angled himself toward Liss and said, “I’ll be in touch.”
I waited until he was gone before I raised my brow at her. “ ‘I’ll be in touch’?”
She almost looked embarrassed. “It’s completely innocent, I assure you. Trooper McKenzie happens to be in charge of a chapter of Tots on Wheels—you know, the annual drive for toys. I told him I’d be happy to host a gathering bin at the store.”
Uh-huh. Except it was obvious the trooper had had more than charity drives in mind. Maybe it was the witch in her.
I surveyed the emergency crews working ahead of us. “Do you think we should try that three-point turn after all? At this rate, we could be here all night.”
“I’m game if you are.”
She handed me the keys and we headed back to my aging Bug. I was about to get in the car when I heard it: the tiniest little wail.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Liss.
She had stopped, too, her head cocked, listening. “Yes, I did.”
I wasn’t sure what it was, but it sounded pitiful, and it was calling to me. I knew it, just as surely as I knew that whatever it was needed help. I had to find it.
I found my answer in the shallow drainage ditch across the road, where a steel culvert created an open passage for water beneath the driveway into the feed mill complex. I had been standing by the edge of the road, about ready to give up and dismiss it all as imagination or the wind (not that there was any) whistling through the conveyers, when I heard it again. Closer, this time. Tentative.
Lost.
The sound tore at my heart. I bent down to look in the culvert, getting ready to shine the flashlight inside . . .
And then something black and small leapt up my body by increments and set its claws into my chest.
“Gaaaaaaaah!”
Coherent thought and vocal abilities eluded me. My arms pinwheeled at my side as I double-stepped backward. Unfortunately, I stepped in a hole and lost my balance, ending up immediately on my
back, staring at the glow of the feed mill’s security lights and the colorful flash of police lights on the misty undersides of the clouds. My brain was now officially knocking against my skull. Whatever had leapt at me remained attached to my shirtfront. Oddly enough, it was nearly but not quite weightless, and . . . it rumbled. I was afraid to look, half certain it was going to be of the rodent persuasion. Did rats rumble?
Liss came running to my rescue. “Are you all right, my dear—oh! Well, if that isn’t the cutest little thing!” she said, two thoughts in one breath.
The source of the nonweight, the rumbling, and the claws was all in one compact, fuzzy package: the tiniest little kitten with the biggest pair of saucer eyes I’d ever seen. It was black as pitch, but not quite sleek; there was too much in the way of mud and other intangibles in its fur for that. But the oddest thing about it was that one of its eyes was green, and the other blue, and they glittered in the lights.
Its claws were still making a pincushion of my shirtfront, poking into my tender skin like eighteen tiny little razor tips, but not in malice. As I watched, it closed its eyes, and . . .
“It’s purring!” Liss said, chuckling, as she bent down to touch a fingertip to the kitten’s head.
“It just scared the bejeebers out of me. Maybe it’s purring in self-satisfaction.”
“It did come out of nowhere, I’ll give you that. Here.”
She reached down to scoop the kitten off my chest, then held out her hand. I took it and got to my feet, dusting off the dirt and grass bits that were undoubtedly clinging to me. “Thanks.”
The kitten watched my every movement and let out the tiniest mew when our gazes met.
“She likes you,” Liss said, scratching the kitten under the chin.