With painful effort, Ben leaned forward and hauled up one of the gas station sacks. He rummaged around through the first-aid stuff, swallowed four ibuprofen capsules with a gulp of water, tried to work up the nerve to start in with the rubbing alcohol and cotton balls.
He ended up slouching back, arms limp in his lap, and watching his son sleep instead.
It was an old cliché that children looked innocent in slumber. Like untroubled angels. Charley Edward Middleton looked like a middle-aged ad exec about to lose his biggest account. His face wore a pinched expression; his hands were balled into fists beside him; his jaw muscles stood out, and Ben could see him grinding his teeth even from across the room. Hell, he could practically hear them.
I did that, he thought miserably. Sweet dreams, kiddo.
It was tempting to absolve himself. After all, no parent could honestly expect to keep their children at a consistently safe distance from the world. Nobody could shield them from life’s most basic, run-of-the-mill unpredictabilities, let alone the exploding curveballs, and Ben had always been of the opinion that it would be a mistake – a disservice – even to try.
Besides, this wasn’t like a bully at school. Or like watching your parents split up. It wasn’t even like losing one of them in a car wreck (or a hang-gliding accident, for that matter). They were facing the truly bizarre and unexplainable, here. What could anyone do except hold on tight and hope to survive the ride?
Except that Ben couldn’t quite shake the guilty idea that today probably didn’t feel like some otherworldly one-off to Charley. In his mind, Ben imagined it more like the latest step in a long progression that had started with happy Christmasses in a tidy midtown bungalow and ended in a bomb shelter in the middle of a cow pasture.
How, he thought, did it come to this?
But that might have been the granddaddy of all useless questions. Worse than that, a dishonest one. It had happened, Ben knew, the same way Wasserman’s creature had found him in the first place:
One step at a time.
He certainly hadn’t started out plodding along in his own father’s irresponsible footsteps. At least Ben hadn’t thought so. He and Christine had been genuinely happy together, once – a true team. And when he’d worked up his nerve, chucked the safe day job, and started, of all things, a guitar company, nobody on planet Earth had supported him more honestly, or with purer faith, than Christine.
Ben hadn’t even considered himself especially prideful until he was already falling, the whole time insisting he was still on solid ground. By then he was drastically overextended, throwing good money after bad, dipping into retirement accounts. Even raiding Charley’s fledgling college savings, baselessly convinced that he’d be paying it all back in spades one day. All in a stubborn attempt to deny the simple, agonizing, perfectly survivable disappointment of garden-variety failure.
He hid it all from Christine, or at least he’d tried. He started drinking more, enjoying it less, and lying about that, too. Then the drinking became its own problem (or, as Christine and any accredited counselor might have put it, merely an existing problem that finally caught him in its jaws). Either way, Ben had learned that he could avoid thinking about his problems by drinking, thus creating a self-perpetuating vortex of misery that gradually sucked up his perspective, his reputation, his self-respect, and ultimately his marriage.
Because that’s what you’ll do as you get older, he imagined telling Charley one day. You’ll start kidding yourself about things. Maybe it’s a little thing, maybe it’s a big thing, but that’s how we do it. We all start building our own little monsters, and they get a little bit bigger every day. Stick with it long enough, and sooner or later, they start to wake up and chase you around.
So, look, kid, if you learn nothing else from me, just remember … stop it … as much as you can, always … Charley, goddammit, I’m trying to tell you somethi—
‘Dad,’ Charley said, shaking him. ‘Dad, wake up. We fell asleep. Oh, man.’
Ben sat up with a start, bolts of pain and panic arcing from his scalp to his toes. His head pounded. His neck had fused into an iron rod. The light coming in through the hatch from up top had changed. The shadows were longer.
‘Shit.’ He scrambled to his feet, scattering first-aid supplies, unsure which way to move. Was it only just this morning that he’d been waking Charley up, and not the other way around? ‘Are you OK? What time is it?’
‘I thought of something bad. Really bad.’
‘Are you OK? What happened?’
‘Those guys. They said the creature followed you to Ashland. They said—’
‘Don’t remind me,’ Ben told him, thinking with fresh new anguish of the reports Gordon, Jeremy, and Devon had shared. Reports that now included fatalities. As if poor Jeeter weren’t enough. ‘What time is it?’
‘Dad! It followed you to Ashland!’
‘Charley, calm down. It’s horrible, I know, but I can’t change—’
‘It followed you.’ Charley clutched Ben’s arm, his face twisted with worry. ‘You came to my house! Tony’s house, whatever. You came to get me.’
It finally dawned on him. The bottom of Ben’s stomach dropped open like a trapdoor. He thought: How?
How could they have failed to think of this?
All this time, Ben had presumed that the creature must be operating on its own mystical radar – some unearthly perception that enabled it to crawl out of the ground after 150 years and locate its target from 200 miles away.
But what if it was now literally following his scent?
Ben looked at Charley. What if, now that the creature had locked on to its target, the thing was simply tracking them like some kind of preternatural bloodhound?
‘Stay right here,’ he said, racing toward the steps leading topside. He took them two at a time, emerging into the pasture, heart pounding in his throat.
He scanned a 360-degree circle around the hatch. Nothing but a borrowed car and wide-open grazing as far as he could see. It was still daylight, but not for much longer – the sun hung over the horizon, casting a low golden hue over everything.
He turned and called back down the hatch: ‘Come on up. Grab the phone.’
In a moment, Charley appeared. He hustled up the steps, the new burner in his hand. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘You’re calling Mom,’ Ben said, heading toward the car. ‘I’m driving.’
‘What do I tell her?’
‘If she’s at the house, tell her to get the hell out. Don’t say mud monster, but tell her she’s in danger. And make her believe it.’
‘How?’
How indeed? It was not lost on Ben that Your life is in danger were exactly the words written in the note that had started all this in the first place. What had he done about it?
‘Tell her the men from this morning are coming back.’ Ben dug Deputy Curnow’s card from his pocket as he slid in behind the wheel. ‘After that, call this guy. When he answers, hand the phone to me. Put your seatbelt on.’
Charley snatched the card and clicked into the passenger seat, already dialing. ‘Please don’t be there yet,’ Ben heard him whispering. It took him a beat to realize that Charley meant the creature, not Christine. ‘Please don’t be there yet. Please don’t be there.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ben told him, firing up Jeeter’s sister’s car and throwing it into gear. Pasture grass scraped at the undercarriage as he wheeled them back around, pointing them toward the fence line in the far distance, the gravel road beyond the gate. ‘If you’re right, it’s heading toward a hospital first.’
Francesca Montecito dropped them off on the far side of the bluff, about a mile as the crow flies from Ben Middleton’s property. Anabeth had expected police at the house, and she hadn’t been wrong. They needed to be quick, but they needed to be quiet. Most important, they needed to slip in and out under the radar. With the stone. And without getting waylaid by the local law.
To that end, Francesca had
rolled on to the next phase of her assignment: driving back around the section and up Ben’s driveway with Reuben, who had yet to regain consciousness after his perfectly timed, short-lived rally at the motel. There she would set about creating the biggest distraction she could manage, for as long as she could manage it. Something told Anabeth that Francesca Montecito, bless her, was just the right person for the job.
‘Meanwhile, if things had gone to plan, you’d probably never have met me,’ Anabeth now told the others, fielding one question after another as they hiked their way in through the back timber, still decked in their paintball camouflage. ‘I joined the Arcadia dig as a volunteer three months ago. I just ran into trouble before I could finish the job.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘Boy trouble.’
‘Tell us who he is,’ Jeremy said. ‘We’ll arrange his murder.’
‘That’s sweet. Maybe I should say girl trouble.’
‘Now I’m listening,’ said Gordon.
Anabeth swatted him. ‘Animal.’
‘What happened?’ Devon panted. It was tough going through the heavily wooded hills and gullies. The young men of First Floor IT were tops in Anabeth’s book, but they were not necessarily in peak physical condition.
‘One of the other volunteers … how to put this modestly …’
‘Tried to hit it?’
‘Decided he fancied me. I never encouraged him. But he didn’t really need any.’
‘You are kinda bangin’,’ Jeremy said. ‘For a hundred sixty-five.’
‘His girlfriend didn’t think so. They were interning together over the summer.’
‘Uh oh.’
‘Which is how the Bierbaum brothers came to find a few of their artifacts hidden in my knapsack.’
Jeremy’s mouth dropped open. ‘She set you up?’
‘Poor Randy. Poor Dickie. If only they’d believed me when I told them I wasn’t a thief.’ Anabeth shook her head. ‘Randy might still be alive if they had.’
‘How’d you get out of it?’
‘I didn’t. Neither one of them had the heart to bring in the police over it, but they did bar all three of us from the project. And they set up twenty-four-hour security at the site. I couldn’t get anywhere near the dig after that. Without being able to track their progress, I was flying blind. So I came up here instead.’
Devon nodded sagely. ‘You skated to where the puck was going to be.’
Jeremy laughed at him. ‘What?’
‘It’s a hockey reference.’
‘You’re from Nebraska, stew head. What the hell do you know about hockey?’
‘Perfectly phrased, Dev,’ Anabeth said, enjoying the smug look Devon then turned on Jeremy. These two. She’d miss them. ‘I’d been here a couple of weeks when the job was posted at your company. Happy luck, if you believe in that sort of thing.’
‘Do you?’
‘Not really.’ She shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’
‘Even luckier you actually got the job,’ Devon said, flinching at Jeremy’s shoulder punch. ‘What? I’m just saying. It’s a big company.’
‘Actually, that part, not so much,’ Anabeth said. ‘The Order is connected. I faked a résumé, they pulled a couple strings, it was a done deal. But honestly, guys, it’s not that hard to figure out what an interviewer is looking for once you’ve had a few decades of practice.’
Jeremy said, ‘Do you think I could get the Order to follow me on LinkedIn?’
Gordon, however, saw the whole thing from a different angle. ‘You didn’t just happen to like all the same stuff we like, did you?’
‘Hey, I do like all that stuff. And all of you. But no,’ she admitted. ‘I overheard Jeeter and Jeremy conspiring about paintball my first day in the building. I knew I had to get in on that invite.’
Jeremy said, ‘I feel so used.’
‘Don’t pout. I didn’t say I didn’t enjoy it.’
‘Unrelated question,’ Gordon said. He pointed toward a flash of citron fabric a hundred feet ahead of them, nestled amidst a snarl of exposed tree roots in a dry cut bank. ‘What’s that up there?’
Anabeth nodded and led them on. ‘Welcome to my humble abode.’
Charley pleaded on the phone for three or four minutes before giving up and handing the phone to Ben. ‘She wants to talk to you.’
Ben knew he couldn’t honestly have expected otherwise. He truly was making this up as he went along. He backed off on the gas, took the phone, and said, ‘Hey. You’re not at the house?’
‘I’m all the way downtown,’ Christine said. ‘At police headquarters.’
‘Thank god. OK, listen.’
‘What kind of trouble are you in?’ Her voice was surprisingly calm. Ben could tell she’d been crying. But she wasn’t crying now. ‘Please tell me what I need to do to get Charley home safely. Both of you.’
‘OK, here’s step one: if the cops are listening in right now, hang up, get somewhere private, and call me back.’
‘I’m in the cafeteria. Watching the five o’clock news.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, you aren’t.’
She sighed in his ear. ‘Heather and LaDonna are with me. Ben, please. Whatever is wrong, we can fix it. I’m on your side. Just tell me what you need me to do.’
‘What’s your comfort level with calling in a bomb threat to a hospital?’
Silence.
Then: ‘I don’t know what to say to that, Ben. Except that nothing’s very funny right now.’
‘I wasn’t joking,’ Ben said. ‘But never mind, we can handle it. I just need you to meet us. Alone.’
‘Meet you where?’
He’d been thinking about this. ‘Where we got married.’
When she spoke again, there was sadness in her voice. More like pity. ‘Oh, Ben.’
‘It’s probably not as sentimental as you think. We’ll be there in ten minutes.’
‘Ben …’
‘I’ll be able to see everything from up there, so make sure it’s only your car I see coming. Otherwise we’re gone.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Just meet us. After this is over, the cops can have me if they want me. This is just how it has to be right now. Please trust me. Tall order, I realize.’
More silence.
‘Christine?’
‘Stay there when you get there,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way.’
The flash of fabric, of course, belonged to the Marmot solo mountaineering tent Anabeth had pitched back here upon her arrival, a thousand yards from Ben’s house, well out of view of everything but the birds, squirrels, rabbits, deer, coyotes, foxes, and raccoons. A couple of weeks back, she’d even seen a bobcat. It had been decades since she’d lived rough on the land for such an extended period, and the nostalgia of it had seemed like both a hurt and a balm. It had taken her back to her younger days so efficiently that at times she could almost imagine Silas by her side. And it had been a lovely autumn, too. Crisp leaves. Crisp air. Hardly any rain.
Devon said, ‘You’ve been living out here?’
‘It’s not so bad. People didn’t always have indoor plumbing, you know.’
‘But you always look so … clean.’
‘Jesus, dude,’ Jeremy said. ‘Why are you like this?’
Anabeth just laughed. ‘I’ll admit to keeping a curling iron in the locker room at work.’
‘Forget the curling iron, where do you keep your car?’
‘Farmer,’ she said. ‘Next mile over. He rents me shed space and doesn’t ask questions. Anyway, the tent is mostly just a clothes closet. After midnight I usually stay up on the porch with the cats.’
Now it was Jeremy’s turn to gape at her. ‘You’ve been sleeping on Middleton’s porch?’
‘Who said sleeping? I’m on watch, here.’
‘Wait a minute.’
Devon said, ‘You don’t sleep?’
‘Are you kidding? I’ve been outliving
mattress warranties since before you guys were born. But it turns out I don’t actually need it.’ She shrugged. ‘Thanks, Grandma.’
Gordon said, ‘How long have you been awake?’
‘Since I got here?’ Anabeth checked the date on her phone. ‘I dunno. About five weeks, I guess.’
They reached the tent. She let them stand around staring at each other while she unzipped the flap and ducked inside, returning with a small nylon duffel.
‘Here,’ she said, passing out water and Clif bars. ‘You guys look like you could use a boost.’
Jeremy looked at the protein bar, looked at the bag, looked at Anabeth. ‘You don’t happen to have a spare Shepherd Stone in there, do you?’
‘I wish I did. Now, listen. Once we get over that next rise, we’ll be close.’
As if in response, a twig snapped somewhere in the timber ahead of them. Anabeth froze, a finger to her lips. The guys stood like suits of armor in a Halloween haunted house, moving only their eyes. Everybody listened.
Nothing.
Probably a deer.
Anabeth lowered her voice. ‘I know you’ve got more questions. And I promise I’ll answer them. As soon as we find the stone. Until then, we need to switch off the chatter, put the coms on mute, total silent ops from this point on. Be the forest.’
‘Stealth mode,’ Jeremy said. ‘Got it.’
‘Shut up, then,’ Devon said.
Before Jeremy could dig back at him, another twig snapped. This time behind and above them. Followed by the crunch and rustle of dry leaves underfoot.
Gordon glanced over his shoulder and said, ‘Aw, shit.’
Up on the ridge of the cut bank, backlit by a beam of dusty sunlight slanting in low through the trees, stood a man in a police uniform. He looked down on them from higher ground, a thumb hooked in his duty belt, one hand resting on the butt of his service weapon.
Anabeth thought: So much for under the radar.
‘Look who it is,’ Deputy Tom Curnow said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
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