by Debra Webb
He saw the turn off and took it. The road was narrow, overgrown, just what they needed for getting completely lost.
“What caused the bald spot?” It didn’t look quite like an area that had been strip-mined. Not that he really cared, but it was a distraction and they all badly needed one right now.
Jill rubbed at the bruise on her forehead. Both she and her mother were likely still sore from the accident.
“If I remember correctly, Daddy used to tell me—”
“A highland flood,” Claire cut in. “A storm passed over and dumped massive amounts of water in a concentrated area in a very short time. It acted like a highland flood, washing away all that was in its path, down to the bedrock.”
Jill looked back at her mother and smiled. “He said nothing would ever grow back there. It was a sign...”
Her words trailed off and this time her mother didn’t finish the story for her.
“What kind of sign?” Paul asked.
“A sign of displeasure from God,” she said softly. “Well, at least we know now what He was unhappy about.”
The rest of the trip was made in silence.
Paul recognized the village instantly. It looked just like the photograph Kate had taken.
Uncertain as to how the villagers would feel about the automobile, he parked the Land Rover well outside the populated boundaries. Jill walked beside him, her mother and Kate bringing up the rear as they approached the small settlement.
The dwellings were rustic, mostly made of hand-hewn logs and mud chinking. Children scurried for home as the strangers approached. They were barefoot and healthy looking. A welcoming committee waited in the center of what they likely considered town. One dwelling looked like an old fashioned general store. Another served as the meat market, with hunks of fresh kills drying in the balmy air. Paul was vaguely familiar with the process. Those who chose not to refrigerate or freeze their meat cured it. He was also familiar with this type of primitive community. There were lots of small settlements in Appalachia. Dirt poor and seriously superstitious groups who lived their own way of life and avoided civilization.
An elderly woman stepped forward, leaving the younger woman and the man waiting two steps behind.
“Kate Manning has returned,” the woman said, looking beyond Jill and Paul.
Paul was surprised that she so easily distinguished one twin from the other. He knew Jill by her eyes and her scent. But this woman was not yet close enough to see their eyes or pick up their scents.
“I’m Jill, her sister.” Jill offered her hand as they moved closer.
The woman gave it a shake. “Have you come for the boy?”
A sob broke loose from Claire Ellington. Jill blinked back her own tears. Paul could see her struggle to keep her composure.
“Yes,” she whispered. “We’re here to see the boy.”
The woman gestured to them. “Follow me.”
As they moved deeper into the village, she said, “My name is Willa Dean. I became acquainted with your sister four years ago.”
Paul sensed that she recognized something was wrong with Kate and spoke about her instead of to her.
“She came here to do a study on how health related to environment. I persuaded the people here to trust her.”
Jill, ever the attorney, asked, “What made you trust her?”
The woman paused and smiled. “She has a good heart.” She looked back at Kate. “She has troubles now.”
Jill nodded. “Yes.”
Willa Dean sighed. “Come, the boy will be happy to see his family.” She glanced at Paul. “This is your man?”
Without hesitation, Jill answered, “Yes.” Her gaze moved to his and something passed between them, a feeling that was too precious to name. He was hers... for as long as she wanted it that way.
He would not allow anyone or anything to hurt this woman.
Paul didn’t analyze the epiphany instead he followed Jill and Willa Dean to a large dwelling on the far side of the settlement. The log house sat nestled against the base of the mountainside. He glanced around and couldn’t help getting caught up in the beauty of it. A spicy evergreen scent tinged the fresh air. His gaze drifted back to Jill. She would be safe here.
If he could only convince her to stay.
Willa Dean called out to someone named Dottie. The door to the dwelling opened and a young girl leading Cody Manning by the hand emerged. His blue eyes lit up and he flew toward his mother.
Like Willa Dean, he moved right past Jill and hugged Kate’s legs.
“Mommy, mommy!” he cried.
Claire and Jill sank to their knees and hugged him in turn. He quickly wriggled free and grasped his mother’s legs once more. As if driven by pure instinct, Kate slowly dropped down to the ground and pulled the child against her chest. Though she didn’t speak, she held him close and stroked his blond head.
Paul turned to Willa Dean. “How did he come to be here with you?”
“Kate, she found out that her boy wasn’t of our Lord.”
He understood what she meant. The child was a clone. It wasn’t so inconceivable. Just unconscionable.
“At first she didn’t mind. She loved him so much. Didn’t matter how he came to be. Our children are our children however they may come to us. But then about two months ago she got sick.” Willa Dean shook her head. “Bad problems.”
Jill stood and moved closer, leaving Cody to her mother and sister. “What kind of problems?”
“Bad, bad headaches. Shaking in the limbs. Bad stuff. Very bad.”
Jill looked at Paul then. “I noticed her right leg shaking in the hospital the other day. The nurse said it might be related to the seizure.”
Paul took her hand and squeezed it. “As soon as it’s safe we’ll get her to the right kind of medical care.”
Jill nodded, trying to find comfort in his words, visibly grappling to maintain her composure.
“Kate feared she might be dying but she feared her husband more,” Willa Dean continued. “He was a demon, that one. He had some kind of big test planned for the child. Bad stuff, Kate said. Very bad stuff.”
Jill trembled. Paul put his arm around her. “How long has Cody been with you?”
“She visited me some weeks ago and shared her fears. I told her to come back any time, I would take care of the boy. Last Sunday morning she brought me the boy. I’ve not seen her since.”
Sunday... the day Karl Manning was murdered.
“She didn’t tell you anything else,” he asked, hoping for more. “She didn’t bring any papers with her or other packages?”
Willa Dean shook her head. “She didn’t even bring no clothes or toys for the boy. But we took good care of him.”
“I have to go back to Paradise to finish this business,” he told the old woman. “Can they stay here, where it’s safe, until I get back?”
She nodded. “Good people is always welcome here.”
Jill backed out of his hold. “I’m going with you.” Fury snapped in her eyes. “Don’t even think about trying to talk me out of it. If you go, I go.”
Claire struggled to her feet. “Jill, please listen to him. Don’t go back. Stay here. Please. I’m afraid for you.”
For a moment Paul was certain Jill would be swayed by her mother’s frantic plea. She looked torn.
“I can’t let him face this alone,” she argued. “Paradise is my hometown. The Ellingtons helped start this insanity... we have to help stop it.”
Claire dropped her head. “I can’t lose you.”
Jill embraced her, held her tightly. “We’re going to make it through this.” She drew back then, pushed her lips into a shaky smile. “I love you.”
Claire murmured the words right back to her daughter and pulled her close once more.
Like an out of control roller coaster plummeting toward disaster, Paul watched Jill say good-bye to her sister and then her nephew. She hugged her mother one last time then faced him. “I’m ready. We need those f
iles. Every minute we waste is another they have to beat us to them.”
If they hadn’t already. He was very much aware that Kelly Neil could have been forced to tell her killers where the flash drive was hidden before her fatal crash. Paul had known their time was short, but getting Jill and her family to safety had taken priority.
For the good it had done him.
“I guess I have no choice,” he said, conceding defeat.
Willa Dean reached out to him, placed one weathered hand on his arm. “Be careful, Paul Phillips, there is much evil where you be going.”
He gave her a nod of thanks. As he and Jill made their way back to the Land Rover, he stalled and turned back to the village. Despite the dusk, in the distance he could just make out the silhouette of Willa Dean.
How the hell had she known his name?
A stillness settled inside him.
She knew his name the same way he knew the biggest challenge of his life awaited him back in Paradise.
He turned to the woman at his side.
Awaited both of them.
Chapter 16
Paul stayed within the posted speed limits as they headed back to Paradise. The cover of darkness would be to their advantage. Still, as much as he wanted that evidence, he dreaded exposing Jill to the danger there. If someone else got to the townhouse first, they might just lie in wait. Flashes of what he’d seen in Kelly Neil’s eyes haunted him. The fear. Fear she’d seen in her sister’s dead, unseeing eyes.
Things were going to hell in a hand basket for the chief and his pals. Desperation was making them sloppy. Kelly’s death so soon after her sister’s would attract attention. Of course it could be blamed on her grief. She was distracted and driving too fast. But if they’d made any mistakes, maybe even just one, the state police might notice. A trooper’s cruiser had been among the official vehicles on the scene.
But Paul wanted more than a mere murder rap on these guys. Lots more. He wanted them, all of them, to pay for the untold evils he feared any half-assed investigation would find.
Dammit. After all this time he should be able to recognize a killer when he met one... to know evil when he saw it and be able to point it out. But it didn’t happen that way. He only saw what the victim saw... pieces... fragments of horror.
“That’s why she killed him,” Jill suddenly said.
Paul glanced at her. She looked startled, as if an epiphany of her own had only just occurred to her.
“Karl tried to force her to tell him where she’d taken Cody. Kate knew what he would do if he found Cody so she killed him. Saving her child was the motive.”
The image of the hypodermic flashed. I’ll use this...
“That would be my guess.” Paul checked his mirrors, noted the dark SUV or truck—too large for a sedan—in the distance behind them. Tension moved through him.
“The woman... Willa Dean,” Jill went on, “she meant that Cody wasn’t like other kids. Do you really think he’s a clone of the child in Lynchburg or vice versa? Is that even possible?”
That kind of cloning wasn’t supposed to be happening even now, much less more than three years ago. But Paul wasn’t naive enough to think that everyone with the capability followed the rules.
“I think it’s possible. We know Kate discovered something that terrified her enough to hide Cody and to kill her husband. She had access to MedTech files and to Karl’s personal ones. She would certainly know better than either of us.”
“That’s why Connie behaved so strangely.” Jill stared out at the darkness for a moment. “She was scared to death. She’d been helping Kate and after Karl’s murder she probably had no idea what would happen next.”
“It’s all falling into place.” One piece at a time, he mused. But it was coming.
Jill leaned back in the seat and exhaled a tired breath. “You watch things like this in the movies... read about them in books, but you never expect them to happen in your own family. There’s so much controversy... where will this leave Cody? Is he human or is he something else? It doesn’t change the way we love him, but will it change the way the world sees him?”
Her concerns were understandable. When the story broke... children like Cody, if there were more, would be caught in the crossfire.
“Something else, Willa Dean said,” Jill said more to herself than to him, “Kate started having headaches and weakness in her limbs weeks ago. Do you think her coma-like condition could be a symptom of something more serious? Some kind of brain issue like a tumor?”
He could think of a number of troubles that started out with those same symptoms, but he wasn’t about to give her more to worry about. “That’s something a neurologist will have to determine.” He glanced at the rearview mirror, noted the vehicle drawing closer. He readied to make an evasive maneuver.
“I still can’t believe the people I’ve known all my life, the chief, the mayor, they were all in on it. How many others?” She laughed, a dry sound. “My own father.”
She fell silent. No doubt considering that the man she’d loved and called daddy wasn’t her biological father. In Paul’s opinion, she was holding up well under the circumstances. While he clutched the steering wheel, his every muscle taut, ready to react as he watched from the corner of his eye as the vehicle moved up alongside them. SUV. The front passenger window was part way down. His breath stalled. Heart thudded to a near stop. Little arms thrust out, waving, and then a little girl’s face appeared above the glass. He let go the breath he’d been holding.
Paranoia had definitely set in.
“We might be able to trust the senator,” Jill offered, after a minute or so of quiet contemplation. “Mother couldn’t directly connect him to anything. He has tried to be helpful, sympathetic even.”
Paul was glad she hadn’t noticed his moments of tension as the other vehicle passed. One of them on edge was enough. “But he could be in on it. His innocence could be a carefully developed facade. He is a politician.”
“I wonder how many other people have been held hostage, like my mother, by this nightmare.”
Paul had thought about that too. He’d also considered that the far-reaching effects might prove broader than either of them could imagine. “God only knows how far they’ve taken the experimental conceptions, genetic tampering, and cloning. There could be hundreds of children involved.” He glanced at Jill. “Adults too.”
She nodded solemnly, then turned to stare out the window. He knew she was likely wondering what kind of experiments had been done on her and her sister. There may have been genetic tampering on one subject, her sister probably, while the other was monitored as the control.
The control. A chill thickened his blood. In Mengele’s gruesome experiments with the twins, he’d used one for testing and one for the control.
They said they had to have a control specimen...
Claire’s words rang in his ears. Jill was the control. And now the experimental procedures, whatever the hell they were, on Kate were failing... developing serious side effects.
“I should call Richard,” Jill announced out of the blue. “The battery on my cell phone is low so stop at the next gas station or convenience store. Maybe we can find a pay phone.”
Jealousy reared its ugly head, but Paul ruthlessly squashed it and forced a calm, even tone. “Why call Richard?”
“I think someone needs to know what’s going on just in case we don’t walk away from this able to talk ourselves.”
As much as he hated to admit it, she had a point.
A few miles further down the road he stopped at a convenience store as she had requested, though he didn’t exactly want to. He told himself that it wasn’t jealousy, that he just didn’t trust Richard. But that was a lie. He had no real reason not to trust the man. He’d always gotten concerned vibes from him. But that was before he learned the older man had a relationship with the woman Paul wanted for himself.
Waiting for Jill, he leaned against the hood of the Land Rover. He watche
d as she spoke on the pay telephone a few feet away. Like any good lawyer, she looked still and calm despite the information he knew her to be relaying. There was nothing calm about any of it.
He could watch her talk... move... just watch her, from now until eternity and never grow tired of looking at her. The wind lifted her blond hair, the silky tresses drifting in the air then falling back around her slender shoulders. She looked soft, fragile, but she had more steel and strength than any woman he had ever known. She made him want the normal life…the nuclear family. His chest tightened at the thought. Paul had never considered himself a sentimental person, not even before that day in that dark cave. But his emotions were on his sleeves now. He could no longer hold them back or pretend he cared about nothing.
He cared about this woman and somehow he had to protect her.
She hung up the telephone and started toward him, her expression grave... frightened. She was very afraid.
He was afraid.
“He’s going to contact a friend in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and get us some backup.” She peered into Paul’s eyes and said the rest, “He said we should be extremely careful.”
Paul straightened from his casual stance. “He’s right, you should—”
She held up a hand, ending his protest before he could actually launch it. “The answer is no. Where you go, I go. If we die trying to expose this nightmare... we’ll do it together.”
~*~
It was late when they got back to Paradise. Jill could feel the tension in the air as thick as the humidity and every bit as suffocating. It was as if the evil that waited knew she and Paul were coming.
The streets were quiet. There was very little traffic. She wondered as they passed house after house if those inside had any idea what was happening around them. They sat in their quiet little houses, the lights on, the television blaring, while some lab technician just a few miles away determined the genetic make-up of their future offspring. Did the conspiracy end with MedTech and LifeCycle? Or had it spread to the regular clinics, like the one in Tullahoma where Sarah Long had gone for female health care as she and Paul suspected? Hundreds, maybe even thousands of patients, completely unaware and trusting their physicians to serve them with compassion and integrity.