She stood like a statue, praying he’d think she’d taken off down the driveway. If he searched for her in that direction, she might get the chance to slip back inside his house. Then she could find a phone and call the cops. But all he did was stand with his face lifted, like some animal sniffing the breeze. With her teeth chattering like dice, she watched until all at once, like a robot coming to life, he moved. He clicked something on his gun then turned in a deliberate circle, scanning the woods in front of him, looking like a terrorist in his black outfit and bugged-out eyes. As he turned toward her, she made herself small, willed herself to melt into the tree trunk. She waited, watching as his gaze grew closer, then her heart stopped.
“Peekaboo, Avis,” he called, laughing. “I see you! You’d better come out now before somebody mistakes you for a bear!”
Grinning, he aimed his rifle straight at her. Without another thought, Avis bolted. Fighting her way through the thick branches, she tore through the trees, plunging headlong into the deeper forest. Still she heard him coming up behind her, giggling as if they were playing a game of tag.
“You can’t beat me in the woods, Avis,” he called, his voice terrifyingly close. “Nobody can.”
She scrambled up a small rise, then along a ridge, her feet skidding on the slick pine needles. A damp, cold mist rose from the ground, chilling her sweat-soaked clothes. She had no idea of how to get to the road, so she just kept running. He followed her relentlessly, his footsteps crackling through the underbrush behind her.
She struggled up another, steeper ridge, her breath coming harder. Her legs burned like fire and she wanted nothing more than to stop and breathe. Heaving herself up the final ten yards, she collapsed against a smooth-barked tree that towered into the night. Wiping the sweat from her eyes, she stared down the ridge below. Coach Keener had not slowed his pace. Already he was halfway up the steep slope. In less than a minute he would be here, pointing his gun in her face.
“Think!” she told herself, looking at the trees that surrounded her. “Think like Nancy Drew, Kinsey Milhone! Figure out where to go!”
She seemed to be standing on the spine of a ridge. If she went left, she would run straight into Coach Keener. If she went forward, she would simply continue along the ridge to who-knew-where. To the right, a sliver of a trail disappeared into even thicker woods. Though it looked like a path from one of her own nightmares, it offered dense foliage that could hide her and a downhill course where she might gain some the hill. She took one more look at Coach Keener, then plunged down the hill.
Immediately she sensed something different. Though the air had been oddly cold ever since Coach Keener had snatched the cap from her head, now it felt frosty. Her breath became visible, and she shook from the chill as well as from her own fear. Farther down the trail she began to smell a weird odor—gamey, like an unwashed dog. She’d never smelled anything quite like it before, but she kept on going. When the trail bottomed out, she risked a glance over her shoulder. She gasped. She thought Coach Keener was far behind her, but he’d already crested the ridge. She could see the moonlight flickering in his goggled eyes. Turning, she ran, dodging branches, jumping fallen limbs, desperate to get away. As she splashed through a shallow creek, she slipped on some mossy rocks and fell hard, sprawling on the opposite bank. When the muzziness cleared from her eyes, she saw it. A low, small opening that poked up from the earth like the knuckle of her finger; darker than dark, she figured it must be a cave, or the den of some wild animal. Kayla had told her that deep in the woods you could still hear mountain lions scream. She gulped, trying to decide what to do, then she remembered Coach Keener’s eyes and the way his hands had touched her. She headed toward the little cave. If a mountain lion ate her, so be it. Better to be a feast for a mountain lion than to wind up like poor Bethany Daws.
42
The moment she’d hung up from Kayla Daws, Mary Crow had called 911 and told the dispatcher there was a domestic disturbance at Deke Keener’s house. Though it was a lie that could conceivably cost her a career, compared to a child’s life, her career was small potatoes. After she hung up from emergency dispatch, she unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk. Though she had not worn her old Glock 9mm since she left Atlanta, she kept it clean, oiled, and ready to go. She loaded it, buckled on the shoulder holster, and threw on a navy blazer she’d been intending to take to the dry cleaners. Though she still only half-believed Kayla Daws’ wild story about her friend trying to trap Keener, the tape alone was reason enough to go. The music playing in the background was the same that Deke played all the time; the man on the tape had clearly identified himself as Coach Keener. If Deke was the Pisgah County child molester, maybe she could stop him before another victim “disappeared.”
She pulled into his driveway. He lived at the top of King’s Mountain, a thickly forested peak honeycombed by logging roads left over from the nineteenth century. She’d passed no police cruisers on the way, nor did any sit with lights flashing at Deke’s front door. His house, though, was lit like a beacon in the darkness, clinging to a mountain, seemingly supported by nothing but air. One entire side appeared constructed of glass while the other three sides were guarded by tall pines that stood like sentries around a fortress. How typical of Deke, she thought. A castle for the king.
She got out of her car. The temperature up here was cooler by fifteen degrees, and the damp breeze carried the same woodsy, cedar smell as Little Jump Off. With her breath visible on the air, she hurried to the front door and rang the bell. She heard a deep, Westminster-like chime, but it failed to bring anyone to the door. She tried the bell once more, then began to knock.
“Deke?” she called. “Deke, this is Mary Crow. I need to talk to you!”
Still she got no response. She knew he was here; his Lexus sat parked in an open garage not ten feet away. Cautiously she tried the doorknob. To her surprise, it turned easily in her hand. The tingling in the pit of her stomach grew worse. Deke Keener had obsessed about form and detail ever since the tenth grade. She doubted that he had grown into a man who would leave his front door unlocked, even up here on the top of his own mountain. She pushed the balky door open and walked into a soaring stone foyer that led into the main room of the house. Music played from a stereo—Vivaldi, she thought.
“Deke?” she called as she stepped inside.
Again she heard nothing beyond the music as she walked further into the house. The inside had been designed as strikingly as the exterior, with slate floors, chestnut paneling, and a massive stone fireplace that commanded the single great room. Two leather sofas faced each other in front of the fireplace, and a reading chair sat in front of a wall-sized bookcase that housed the same collection of Keener Kat photos that hung in Sutton’s Hardware.
Feeling exactly like the intruder she was, she crept carefully through the rest of the first floor—a sleek space-age kitchen that would make most professional chefs drool and a bachelor-pad sort of bathroom with onyx marble walls. The house boasted a number of state-of-the-art features, but she found nobody around to enjoy them.
She returned to the living room and started to head up the stairs when the white drapes from the patio billowed suddenly into the room. She stepped over, thinking maybe Deke was sitting out there, but instead she found two overturned Coke cans and a Carolina Panthers cap, all clustered beneath a huge telescope that pointed toward the stars.
“Deke?” she called, walking out onto the flagstone structure that extruded into the darkness like the prow of a ship. “Anybody home?”
No one answered. As the lights of Hartsville twinkled below, she walked over to the soda cans. Nothing special about them beyond sloppy housekeeping. She stooped down to examine the Panthers cap more closely, then she gasped. Someone had duct-taped a tape recorder to the inside of the crown, carefully affixing its microphone to one of the air holes on the left side of the cap.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, her heart plummeting. “Kayla wasn’t kidding!”
&nbs
p; She raced back inside, pulling her pistol as she hauled up the stairs. Maybe Deke had taken the child up here. The second story of the house had several bedrooms that opened off a long hall. Quickly she checked each one. The first was a guest room, the other was painted pink, and held an array of stuffed animals piled on a frilly-looking canopy bed. She remembered Deke mentioning a daughter, though she’d never known the child to visit, even for a day. The third bedroom commanded the other half of the second story. Huge, with a bank of windows that looked down upon the patio and the darkness beyond, this room echoed the same modern, angular look of downstairs. A plasma television faced an oversized bed that stood on a platform. At the foot of the bed lay a pile of clothes—Deke’s adult-sized Keener Kat shirt, a pair of black shorts, and sneakers. She looked around for a child-sized version of the same outfit, but found nothing.
“Okay.” Mary tried to bite back her rising panic and regard the bedroom as she would a crime scene. What happened here? she asked herself. What does this tell you, so far?
The little girl—what was her name? Anna? Angie?—had come home with him. He’d served them both soda, then they’d gone outside to look at the telescope. Then the girl’s cap had either fallen off or been removed from her head. Then what?
Then Deke had changed clothes in a hurry, she decided. But why? And what did he put on? And what had made him so frantic?
Frowning, she walked over to a door that opened off the bedroom, entering a huge closet where at least twenty expensive suits hung with matching pairs of shoes beneath them. The precision with which Deke kept his closet would have made any drill sergeant proud, but what caught her attention was a small armoire along the back wall. Like all the rest of his furniture, it was sleek and modern, except instead of holding shirts and sweaters, it held a collection of rifles. As she stepped closer, she realized that like the clothes at the foot of his bed, Deke had left his gun case in disarray. The door stood ajar, the key still in the lock, and the cradle that should have held the fifth of five rifles was empty. Suddenly it all fell into place. “The little girl managed to get away,” Mary whispered. “And Deke’s gone to find her.”
As if to corroborate her theory, three gunshots rang out from the distant woods, fired at a casual rate, as if someone might have all the time in the world to take aim at his target.
She ran downstairs, through the living room and back out into the night beyond. At first she heard only the rush of her own blood, then she heard a faraway scream, as if some outrage were being visited upon someone in another dimension.
She slipped into the dark, fragrant pines, easily finding a track of trampled weeds and shorn-off branches. Thank God for Jonathan, she thought. She’d spent so much time in the woods with him that she could track most anybody who wasn’t trying to conceal their trail, and tonight neither Deke nor his prey seemed the least bit interested in doing that.
“You just think you’ve got it made, don’t you, Deke?” she whispered, her anger flaring again.
She ran on, the Glock heavy in her hand. The trees grew thicker as the terrain steepened, and she had to pull herself up a long, seemingly endless ridge. Wispy clouds scudded across the moon and an unseasonably cold breeze brought the gamey, oily smell of bear.
Oh, Lord, she thought, wiping the sweat from her forehead. Please not a bear. At best they were unpredictable, at worst, lethal. She didn’t need a bear added to the evening’s agenda.
Feeling as if her lungs might burst, she reached the top of the ridge. The trees thinned out, and she saw that she was standing on the rim of what she knew as a sink—a great, tree-filled bowl made by underground water seeping through limestone. If you made the effort to trek down to the bottom of a sink, you usually found either a creek or a cave. As she paused to catch her breath, she remembered something Jonathan once told her: “Foxes take the high ground, possums take the sink.”
At the time, she’d thought he was just spouting more of his cryptic Cherokee wood lore, but now she understood his meaning. No experienced woodsman would seek cover in a such a low place. But a terrified child with an armed man chasing her? She would think it perfect—all downhill, filled with woodsy cover. It would be the first place a scared little possum would go.
She paused to catch her breath, then she started down. The sloping terrain was easier on her lungs, but harder on her knees. Once she slipped on some pine needles, but caught herself by grabbing onto a low-hanging grapevine. As she made her way down, she tried to keep one ear on the gusting breeze. It did not disappoint her. Once more she heard a plaintive cry, floating up from the bottom of the sink.
“You son of a bitch!” she muttered. Knowing Deke, he would have the newest rifle with the sharpest scope while the little girl would probably have nothing but the clothes on her back. She picked up her pace, hurtling downward, trying hard not to trip over a root and blow out an ankle.
Finally the steep hillside leveled off as thorny, waist-high weeds replaced the thick trees. As she surveyed the wide, open area around her, instinctively she dropped to the ground. She was betting that Deke would have night vision goggles, possibly a military rifle scope.
She crept along the ground, quiet, heading toward the distant gurgle of a stream. With every inch she expected Deke to pop up from the tall grass around her, but she crawled on, unmolested. Gradually the weeds began to thin out. Ahead she could see a dark, linear indentation in the earth and the soft glitter of moonlight on water. The sink bottomed out here; this is where the little girl would have come. She stopped behind some laurel and used another trick Jonathan had taught her—owl eyes. Trying to remain still, she softened the focus of her eyes and gazed at everything and nothing, at the same time. Though the nighttime world was arrayed before her in various shades of gray, what she sought was movement—either Deke’s or the child’s. Once she spotted either of them, she would know what to do.
She watched and waited, like a rabbit frozen in a field of clover, its stalker near. The breeze again brought the smell of bear, but this time no noise rode upon it. Finally, just as she was beginning to think perhaps the child had opted to follow the creek, she saw a pale gray ghost of a thing emerge from the dark little knob on the other side of the water. Too small to be Deke, it moved too hesitantly to be anything other than a terrified little girl, way out of her element, deep in the nighttime woods.
Mary rose to her knees. Somehow she needed to let the child know not to be afraid of her, but she didn’t want to risk calling out. She scanned all around, looking for Deke, but she saw no sign of him. Quickly she got to her feet and gave a soft whistle. The little figure spun around and looked directly at her. Mary started to beckon the girl forward, then realized that she might just be luring her right into Deke’s gun sights. With one hand held up as a gesture of friendship, she waded quietly across the stream. As she neared the girl, she saw that though she had lost her cap, she still wore the rest of her Keener Kats uniform. She stood a few yards in front of the tiny cave, her eyes huge and terrified.
“Hello,” Mary whispered. “Are you Kayla’s friend?”
The little girl nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Avis Martin.” The child sounded near tears. “Who are you?”
“I’m Mary Crow, Avis. I’ve come to take you home.”
“Take her home?”
Mary’s heart froze as a familiar male voice rang out behind her.
“Why would you want to do a thing like that, Mary? From the way I’m looking at things, our party’s just about to begin!”
43
“Drop your pistol, Mary.” Deke’s voice was sharp as a splinter. “I’ve got a Browning hand cannon aimed right at the girl. I’d blow her head off before you could fire one shot.”
Mary looked at Avis, hoping she could get her to drop to the ground, but the child just gaped at Keener, her eyes fixed in horror. No good, Mary thought. She’s too scared to move, much less dodge any bullets.
“Okay, Deke.” Extending
her right arm, Mary tossed the Glock toward him, slowly easing in front of the child. “I wasn’t gunning for you, anyway.”
“Oh, really?” He laughed. “I guess tonight of all nights you just decided to drop by?”
“I came up here as your attorney,” she said. Deke looked like some crazed white hunter gripping an elephant gun, night vision goggles dangling around his neck. “And I’d still like to advise you on where you stand.”
“I think I’m standing at just the right place, as far as this rifle’s concerned.”
“Deke, I have a tape that clearly reveals you molesting Bethany Daws. I’m guessing that you killed her, too. Probably to keep her quiet.”
“Sorry, Mary, but you’re wrong. I was home in bed the night that little bitch caught it.”
“Deke, come on. Tell the truth. I can’t turn you in, anyway. I’m your attorney.”
“I am telling the truth, Mary. It wasn’t me.”
“Deke—”
“He is telling the truth, Ms. Crow.” Mary gasped as a high, female voice came out of the darkness. “He did mess with Bethany. But I’m the one who killed her.”
Mary turned. In the shadows of the little knuckle of the cave, pointing a rifle just as impressive as Deke’s, stood Sylvia Goins. The sweet, fat hardware clerk had killed Bethany Daws? “Sylvia?” asked Mary. “What are you talking about?”
Legacy of Masks Page 33