The thing turned and advanced on George, a blood-chilling growl of fury issuing from deep in its monstrous chest. It grabbed George, slapping one meaty paw onto each ear and shaking his head violently from side to side. George heard a terrifying SNAP and knew it was the sound of his own neck breaking. He felt one instant of the most incredible pain he had ever experienced, and then a tingling numbness filled his extremities.
He began to drift, to lose consciousness, and was amazed to discover the fear was gone. He could see blood splattering the floor, lots of it, and although he knew it was his own blood, he found he didn’t care. George’s last conscious thought was that the creature’s putrid breath wasn’t quite as disgusting as he had thought it would be.
Then he was gone.
4
MIKE MCMAHON AND SHARON Dupont buckled themselves into the cruiser and Sharon prepared to drive out of the Paskagankee Police station parking lot. “So,” Mike said, “What was that all about?”
“What was what all about?”
“That guy we just tossed into a holding cell, the one you called by his first name even though you never looked at his driver’s license; he taunted you about your father. You two know each other.” Mike phrased it as a statement, not a question.
Officer Dupont was silent for a moment, making a show of checking both directions for oncoming traffic before pulling out of the lot and turning north on the tiny town’s Main Street. The rear tires spun on the slick pavement before gaining traction, then the cruiser accelerated slowly along the mostly empty thoroughfare. Finally she answered. “Yes, I know Earl Manning. He was a couple of years ahead of me in high school. After he graduated—a minor miracle in and of itself—he became a regular at the Ridge Runner where my dad used to spend most of his time.”
“The Ridge Runner is a bar, I assume.”
“That’s right. Out on Ridge Road. Original, huh?” The young officer flipped her hair behind her ear in what Mike McMahon was already beginning to recognize as a subconscious reaction to stress.
“Is this something you’d rather not discuss?”
Another hesitation, shorter this time. “No, it’s okay. It’s just that I’m not used to talking about myself, that’s all. Besides, this is a small town, in case it had escaped your notice. Eventually you would hear all about my dad anyway. And about me, too, I suppose.”
Mike watched two cars slide partway through a four-way stop a couple of hundred yards ahead. The storm was worsening as temperatures continued their downward spiral. The driving conditions were iffy now and weren’t going to improve any time soon. He hoped people would have enough sense to stay off the roads, this being a Saturday, but doubted that would be the case. “So your dad is pretty well-known around here?”
Officer Dupont coughed out a laugh, short and bitter. “You could say that. He held down a bar stool pretty much twenty-four hours a day at the Ridge Runner for most of the last ten years, starting the day after we buried my mother.”
Mike looked down at the cruiser’s bench seat and then across at Sharon Dupont. She stared straight through the windshield, concentrating on navigating the slick streets. If she noticed him looking at her, she didn’t give any indication of it. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
“No reason why you should.”
“How old were you at the time?”
“Twelve.”
“So you went through your teen years with no mother and a father too busy drinking Budweiser to raise his daughter properly?”
“Yeah, that pretty much covers it,” she said. “My dad was always an enthusiastic drinker, but after mom died, alcohol took over his life. I think he single-handedly kept one shift working overtime at the Anheuser-Busch plant down the road in New Hampshire.”
The big Crown Victoria police cruiser slid to a stop in front of the Unitarian Church on the corner of Main and Elm Streets. Officer Dupont angled into the parking lot and turned the car around so they could monitor traffic on the two cross streets and stay off the increasingly dangerous roads for a while. She cranked up the car’s interior heat to combat the chill permeating the vehicle.
Mike turned in his seat to look at the pretty, young officer. “Sounds like the sort of situation you’d be anxious to escape.”
“Oh, I couldn’t wait to get out all right, and eventually I left Paskagankee to attend the FBI Academy, but of course you know all of that from my personnel file.”
“True enough,” Mike answered. “But your file doesn’t explain why you suddenly came back to this tiny, little place in the middle of nowhere. Nothing against Paskagankee, but it seems to me you wouldn’t be too quick to return, especially since you were doing well at the academy. I saw your performance scores, and you were kicking ass down there. What happened?”
“My dad was diagnosed with liver cancer a couple of years ago, and for a while he did okay. About six months ago, though, he started going downhill fast. I have no brothers or sisters, and with my mother gone . . .” She lapsed into silence and stared out the windshield at the empty streets, now rapidly glazing over with a thin coating of ice. Something like defiant regret hardened her features.
“You came back to care for your father.”
Sharon nodded. She fiddled with the turn signal and looked everywhere but at Mike. “I made a promise to my mom before she died that I would look after my dad. She knew he would have trouble coping after she was gone. I came back for my mom, not for him.”
Mike said nothing, and she continued. “Then my dad died a few weeks ago, after I got hired by Chief Court, your predecessor, and I haven’t gotten around to leaving town for good yet. I don’t know why. Inertia, I suppose. So now you know the sorry, little life story of Sharon Dupont, some of it, anyway. Would I be out of line asking my boss what you’re doing here? Why you gave up a real career in a thriving city where you could actually make a difference to come here and take over a little Hicksville police force?”
Mike laughed. “Subtlety doesn’t work for you, does it, Officer Dupont?”
“My friends call me Shari.”
“Okay, Shari then. Yeah, it probably would be out of line, but I guess it would only be fair to dish a little dirt on myself since I have the scoop now on you.”
The cruiser’s radio crackled with an incoming call. Mike shook his head in mock remorse. “Looks like my little sob story will have to wait. It seems we have work to do.”
5
IDA MAE HARPER HAD lived in Paskagankee her entire life. Eighty-six years and counting, all spent in the little town a few miles south of the Canadian border, and Ida Mae was still going strong. She had gotten married at age 16 to a young man by the name of Wallace Harper, eight years her senior, a laborer at the leather mill located hard by the Penobscot River. The couple spent nearly fifty years together before Wallace’s sudden death more than two decades ago turned Ida Mae into a widow.
A stroke, they had told her after Wallace buckled and fell to the floor one Sunday afternoon over boiled dinner. Ida Mae thought to herself that they could call it a stroke if they wanted to, but she knew what had really killed Wallace—too many decades of sixty hour work weeks at the mill. Regularly scheduled double shifts, the occasional triple shift, week after week of working without a day off, you name it, and Wallace did it because he wanted to provide the best life he could for his Ida Mae.
The couple had never been able to conceive children, so Wallace’s death meant Ida Mae was all alone for the first time in her life. She had moved from her parents’ home straight to Wallace’s tiny but comfortable house when they married, and in that little house she still lived. Their inability to conceive had been a blow to Ida Mae and Wallace, but they had come to terms with the heartbreak after years of trying and had been happy for the most part ever since.
After Wallace’s death, Ida Mae bought a golden retriever puppy, Butch, for company, needing a living, breathing subject upon which to lavish all her love and attention. When the first
retriever passed away, Ida Mae bought another, naming him Butch II. Now, Ida Mae was on the phone to the Paskagankee Police Department, sobbing and requesting assistance immediately.
“What’s the nature of the difficulty, ma’am?” the dispatcher asked.
“It’s Butch, something’s happened to my poor Butch,” she wailed into the telephone receiver.
“Who is Butch, ma’am, and what has happened to him?”
“Just send an officer, please, and tell him to hurry,” she said, tears running down her face. She provided her address to the bewildered dispatcher and hung up.
Now the cruiser moved slowly up the long dirt driveway, sliding and lurching from one pothole to another, nearly bottoming out in spots but making steady progress, finally easing to a stop in front of the house. Ida Mae opened the front door and shivered violently as a gust of cold air blew freezing rain into her home, soaking her housecoat and plastering her silver hair to her head.
Two police officers exited the cruiser, simultaneously pulling the collars of their jackets up against the wind and rain and running clumsily on the icy ground for the shelter of Ida Mae’s small porch. She opened the door further to allow them to enter the house, then quickly slammed it shut, moving to the thermostat and cranking up the heat, despite the fact the temperature inside the house already hovered around seventy-five degrees.
She turned to see the two officers, a man and a woman, holding their wet hats in their hands and dripping water on to the hardwood floor of the foyer. “Oh,” she exclaimed. “Where are my manners? Please, come in. Have a seat on the couch, officers.”
“We’re fine, ma’am,” the male policeman said. “What seems to be the problem? The only information we were given is that something has happened to someone named Butch. Is that your husband?”
“Oh, goodness, no,” she said. “My husband was named Wallace, and he’s been gone since probably before this little thing was born,” she said, nodding at Officer Dupont, who smiled back at her. “No, Butch is my dog. It’s actually Butch II, but I just call him Butch. It’s easier for me, you know, and he doesn’t know the difference.”
“I understand,” said the man, who seemed to be in charge. It only made sense, thought Ida Mae; the young man looks to be at least ten years older than the young lady. “So, can you tell me what has happened to Butch?” he asked.
“Oh, dear,” sniffled Ida Mae. “I put Butch out to get some air and, you know, to do his doggie business, earlier this afternoon, and when he hadn’t returned within a couple of hours, I went to the back door to call him and, well . . .” The elderly woman burst into tears, leading the two officers through the kitchen to the back door. She opened it and gestured bleakly toward the yard.
The two police officers crowded into the doorway, hips and elbows touching. They cringed simultaneously at the sight that greeted them. In the elderly woman’s back yard, just visible in the waning grey light of the late afternoon, were the gruesome remains of a golden retriever dog. The animal had literally been ripped apart; its body parts strewn around a circle roughly ten feet in diameter. A portion of a foreleg had come to rest midway up the wooden steps leading to the door, and blood was everywhere. The dog’s head was nowhere to be seen.
The petite, young female officer placed her hand on Ida Mae’s elbow and guided her back into the small living room to the couch. She sat her down and held her hand, doing her best to console her. The other officer, the man who seemed to be in charge, closed the door and stood uncomfortably as Ida Mae wrapped an afghan tightly around her shoulders. The little house seemed to have gotten much, much colder.
6
THE AUDITORIUM ON THE University of Maine campus was big, old, drafty and, at the moment, nearly empty. Professor Kenneth Dye looked out at the smattering of college students seated in a more or less random pattern throughout the room and wondered if even one single person was paying the slightest bit of attention to his lecture. Judging by the bleary looks on most of their faces, he guessed not.
It was 8:30 on a stormy, icy morning, which meant it was roughly four hours too early for most of these kids to be awake. The few that did seem chipper and bright-eyed, large Styrofoam cups of coffee fueling their engines, seemed much more interested in text-messaging, game-playing, and whatever the hell else kids could do on their cell phones these days than in paying much attention to Professor Kenneth A. Dye.
The professor paused in his lecture, looking up from his notes, not even really needing them. He had been giving the same stock presentation for more years than he cared to remember. The only reason he was still teaching at this institution of higher education located in the middle of nowhere was that he needed a reliable source of income so he could afford the purchase price on his next bottle of Tennessee Sippin’ Whiskey. In fact, now that he really thought about it, Professor Dye decided he probably looked more bleary-eyed than most of the kids slumped in their seats in the unnecessarily large auditorium.
Lecturing in the monotone he had perfected over the past two decades about material he had been teaching for nearly that long, Ken Dye reflected on the incident that had become the turning point in not just his career but his life.
At one time, he had been an up-and-comer, an aggressive young teacher and researcher rocking the academic world with controversial theories based on extensive research in his chosen field of Native American studies. Dye didn’t just peruse historical accounts of life in North America prior to the European invasion of the 1600’s and 1700’s, he traveled extensively in the field, interviewing Native American tribal elders all over the United States and even going so far as to live with a number of different tribes in different regions of the country for several illuminating years.
After completing his research and reaching some controversial conclusions regarding the mysticism inherent in virtually all Native American cultures, Kenneth Dye made the fateful decision which would change his life forever and not for the better. He wrote a book detailing his findings and almost overnight was reduced to a laughingstock, both in his beloved academic community as well as the real world outside the ivied walls of academia.
Dye came to consider publication of the textbook the biggest mistake of his life. Publish or perish indeed, he thought wryly. More like publish, then perish. Following the book’s release, other professors gradually stopped coming by his office to discuss campus politics, invitations to academic affairs dried up, and colleagues began crossing to the other side of the quad when he approached so they wouldn’t have to be seen with him. Ken Dye became a pariah; the guy no one wanted to get too close to, lest his disease of insignificance rub off on them as well.
He had never married—who had time for romance when there was so much research to be done?—and after the release of his book, the professor became such a celebrated kook that the only women interested in dating him were either a little unhinged themselves or curious to discover whether he was really as loony as he was portrayed in the media.
Eventually, Professor Dye retreated into his solitary prison of semi-academia, lecturing bored kids who needed an easy elective with which to pad their schedules without expending too much effort. Administrators at the University of Maine at Orono were only too happy to let him keep his job—in the beginning—because he brought a measure of welcome attention to the out-of-the-way school.
After becoming the subject of near-universal academic scorn, though, the administration felt it even more prudent to retain the man, if only to keep an eye on him. Out on his own in the world he could potentially do real damage to the school’s academic reputation. Better to keep him under wraps.
Outside, the storm pounded the centuries-old building with high winds. Rain pelted the campus, freezing solidly on every surface within minutes. Professor Dye tried to convince himself that the low turnout for today’s lecture was due in large part to the treacherous weather—college students will take advantage of any excuse to ditch a class—but he knew from long experience that even if the
conditions were seventy degrees and sunny, there wouldn’t be many more bodies in the lecture hall than were here right now.
Dye shot a glance at the portable alarm clock he had placed on the podium. It was important to track how many more minutes he had to suffer through before he could get home and dive back into his bottle of Jack. Eight-fifty-five. Ten more minutes and the day’s first class would be in the books. Only three more tedious, boring, mind-numbing lectures to go. He wished he had poured some whiskey into his water bottle before leaving for work this morning. A powerful thirst was starting to build, and it was barely past breakfast.
7
“SO, WHAT IN GOD’S name happened to that poor animal yesterday?” Officer Sharon Dupont trained her deep blue eyes on Mike, her forehead crinkled, her pretty mouth drawn into a frown. McMahon wondered if she had any idea how alluring she was and decided she probably didn’t. Mike’s theory was that most women seemed to think they were more attractive than they actually were, but every once in a while he ran into a real stunner made even more desirable by the fact she was completely unaware of her effect on men. He was starting to believe Sharon Dupont fell into that category.
He sipped his coffee in the passenger seat of the white and blue Paskagankee Police Ford Explorer and considered how to answer her question. They had switched to the four-wheel drive SUV for patrolling the streets today based on the severity of the weather and the fact that it was not forecasted to improve for at least three days. Local schools had already canceled classes for tomorrow and citizens were being urged to stay off the roads, but Mike knew plenty of people would ignore that advice and venture out anyway.
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