“Ethan, what’s wrong?”
He sighed deeply. He shook his head, eyes downcast.
“I ...” he looked up again, and she was startled by the turmoil she saw there. “I guess you heard about last night.”
Oh my god, it’s true. The thought slammed into her like a lance. Physical pain drew the air from her lungs. Sadie’s words came back to her, and her cheeks flushed with heat.
“About Lucas Hill. Sammy, Anthony, Bubba ... baby, they’re all dead. Last night, Lucas’s car lost control and flipped over down Rampart Range Road. Opie was with them earlier in the night, but Lucas kicked him out of the car. They were out egging the old witch’s place and took off afterwards, but then ... something happened. I got a call from Sergeant Raines this morning. I guess they’d tracked down Opie because he’d left his phone in the car. He told them that I got in an argument with Lucas last night in the locker room, after practice.”
Carly went slack with relief that he didn’t say he’d slept with Sadie McBay, but she simmered with anxiety at the implications of what he was saying now.
“So, what did Oliver say?”
“They want to talk to me this afternoon.”
“The sergeant? Oliver?”
Ethan nodded grimly, as if confirming his own death sentence.
“Ethan, I don’t understand what the problem is. You didn’t do anything ... did you?”
“Of course not!”
“Good riddance anyway,” Abigail chimed in. “Those guys were a bunch of jerks.”
“Abi!”
“Seriously, Carly—you can’t tell me you’re sad to see Lucas Hill leave this world, or any of those guys dumb enough to follow him on his midnight crusades. Sounds like Opie was the only one with balls enough to stand up for himself.”
“And it saved his life, apparently,” Ethan said, repeating absently: “They all died.”
Carly pulled him into another embrace and sneaked a quick peck on the cheek, her lips brushing the new bristly growth of beard that had surfaced over the summer, since he’d begun to shave. “I’m sorry, Ethan. You’ll be okay though. I know it might look bad, but I don’t see how you could possibly have been involved in any kind of car accident. I mean, you went home right after practice, didn’t you?”
“I went to the pizza parlor with Ryan and Andy Cordina. He helped break things up in the locker room, so we asked him along.” Ethan’s eyes went back and forth between Abigail and Carly. Then he focused on Carly and she wanted to reach out to him again, but was afraid she was being too clingy. She needed him, desperately wanted to talk to him about last night, just have him to herself for a while. But the look on his face screamed illness. She even thought he’d turned a slight shade of green, but it must have been the way the light was hitting his skin. “Carly, I need to talk to you.”
“Okay.” Her fear returned. His tone said it was serious. “Now?”
“Alone.” He looked apologetically down at Abigail who rolled her eyes and munched on a final bite of her donut chasing it with chocolate milk.
“Hey, Ethan!” Ryan called to him from across the cafeteria.
Ryan’s voice galvanized Ethan into action. He saw his friend and waved, taking steps away from Carly.
“Hey,” she said. “I’d like to see you tonight.”
“I know, but I can’t. Mom’s nurse is coming and I have to be there. It’s a new nurse and I don’t quite trust her yet, and it makes Mom feel better if I’m there. It makes me feel better.”
“Okay.” Carly said, biting her tongue and feeling like a total heel that she was jealous of his mother. Sweet as she was, she deserved a good son like him.
“I’ll call you tonight,” he said. “And then I’ll come get you after practice on Wednesday, okay? We’ll grab some burgers and check out a movie. I got some good stuff from Netflix at the house, and Mom would love to see you.”
“Okay, then ...” she trailed off as Ethan walked backward and then blew her a kiss, hurrying off to meet Ryan.
“Trouble in Shangri-La,” Abigail said, and Carly didn’t know if she was referring to her and Ethan, or that fact that more people were dead, tragically, despite their being incorrigible assholes. Abigail propped her chin on her stacked fists, resting atop her pile of books for first period. “Wonder how they’ll deal with this new rash of deaths.”
“Probably offer to provide counselors for all of us, like they did that year Kimberly Bauerlein jumped off the roof of the gymnasium and committed suicide.”
“Maybe they’ll let us go home early.”
Carly slid onto the bench across from Abi, gazing into the crowd where Ethan had disappeared. “Maybe.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A hand shot from the dense pine trees, skeletal fingers with bits of decomposing flesh clinging to the white of the bones. The long, taloned hand wrapped around the nearest neck it found—the white swan neck of Sadie McBay. Tighter and tighter the fingers squeezed. At first the girl tried to scream, instead only coughing, and then even a cough was squeezed off. Her perfect features were marred by the increasingly purple tinge that crept over her cheeks. Her eyes bulged. Fear and horror mingled in her dying expression. And then her eyeballs popped with a delicious champagne cork sound, right out of her bitchy little skull.
Abi chuckled out loud at her daydream, her pencil drumming her desktop, her nervous foot tapping against the metal undercarriage of the desk in front of her own.
“Abigail Holman, would you care to share with the rest of the class exactly what is so amusing?” Mr. Fernandez asked, a look of exhaustion hanging on his face. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Uhm, no.”
“‘No’ what?”
“You asked if I’d care to share with the rest of the class what I found amusing and I said, no.”
“You said, uhm, no,” Jeremy Hall said with a smirk.
“I don’t need your assistance, Mr. Hall,” Mr. Fernandez said, sighing. “Let’s just all get back on task, shall we?”
“Sorry, Mr. Fernandez,” Abi said.
Mr. Fernandez positioned his glasses above his nose and pushed them into place with his index finger. He looked at the open book on his desk. “Abigail, why don’t you continue reading where we left off?”
Abi blanked. Where did they leave off?
“Page forty-three, top left column,” Jeremy hissed in a whisper.
She flashed him a smile and quickly turned to the correct page. Her mouth formed words that her voice spoke aloud, but her brain was busy replaying the best never-to-be-seen horror movie scene ever. Die, Sadie, Die. The movie title had a nice ring to it.
The bell rang. Abi didn’t even finish the sentence before she closed her book and joined the throng of students rushing out of his class to Fernandez’s shouts for everyone to finish the chapter before tomorrow. Abi merged with the crowd, pushing and shoving their way through the corridors. One more period to go. After school, she and Carly planned to stop off at the coffee shop for a while to work on their homework together, but then she was heading straight home. She was eager to get back to the heavy reading she’d started in the spellbook yesterday before Carly came over. Not just the light, fluffy little spell she had maybe managed to cast on her dad. The next chapter involved rituals. Rituals and spellcasting that left no doubts to the imagination as to whether or not you actually made something happen. Entities were named. Specific powers imbued. Powers that would be truly helpful navigating the rest of her high school years—hell, the rest of her life—if she were to master the techniques and abilities honed by studying the craft.
Carly would shit a brick if she read some of the stuff she was studying. One thing for sure, Abi never put this much effort into anything school-related. Some textbooks she hadn’t cracked the whole school year. These books held mysteri
es not taught in school. These books held secrets to things that could really benefit her in life.
Abi slipped into her next class, narrowly avoiding a detention as her feet crossed the threshold just as the bell rang. Her assigned seat was directly behind Sadie’s. Which meant she spent an hour a day with Sadie’s spun gold tresses cascading onto her desk and books. Unless of course, Sadie did her classic, “oh my god, my hair touched the freak’s desk,” routine and swished her hair over her shoulder and away from any potential contaminant lying dormant on Abi’s belongings.
“Hmm, jeans, blouse with color-coordinated shrug, and shoes purchased during the current decade. My, my, my, what is the world coming to? If you keep this up, Abi, we might start to think you actually care.”
“Sadie, please turn around,” the teacher said, and then cleared her throat.
Sadie twisted around in her seat, facing the front of the room, tossing a handful of gold hair over her shoulder. Abi’s lips turned up in a slightly vindicated smile as she leaned back in her chair, and drifted into a daydream of gore and terror starring one Sadie McBay.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ben Jenkins came out of the autopsy room—little more than a corner of the morgue in the basement of Carson Lake’s Langstaff-Brown Medical Center—and met Chief Gavin Wagner just as he hung up his cell phone. Oliver had started a case file, locked up what little they’d identified as evidence, and was on his way over. As he ended his phone call, Gavin looked up at Ben, the old man’s eyes deep with a need for sleep and troubled by a search for understanding. The older man slipped his rough hands into the pockets of his white smock and stared at the floor near Gavin’s feet before he spoke.
“Well,” Jenkins said. “My instinct is to request further examination of the Hill kid, at least, since it seems he got the worst of whatever it was got hold of them before the accident.”
Gavin nodded.
“You’ve notified the parents?” Jenkins asked.
“All except the parents of Sammy Gunda. Left a message for them, but nothing back yet. The Hills will be in first. Both parents are on their way.”
Jenkins nodded grimly.
“You going to perform an autopsy?”
“I’m going to take some tissue samples at least. I want to examine those wounds and determine what made them. Or, at least rule out what didn’t make them.”
The men looked at each other in the gray hallway, the white lights echoing their hum off the cinder block walls and polished blue floor. The morgue had never seen so many young people in their final rest in the span of so few days. It was almost as if the air of the place tensed with their anticipation of the parents’ arrival. Bad enough to have done this the day before yesterday for three kids, but now four more.... Gavin couldn’t remember ever having been so sick inside from his job. He had a hard time swallowing, each breath felt like a heavy sigh, his guts cold lumps of gelatin in his bowels. He pinched the upper bridge of his nose and rubbed to try and alleviate the headache forming there.
God damn it, he thought. The pay isn’t worth this. I could be sitting behind a desk in a cube farm somewhere in the Springs, sipping coffee and talking about football over the water cooler.
But he knew such work would drain the life out of him. Squeeze every last drop of hope from his soul until he ended up a bitter old man. At least here, he could make a difference. Here he was somebody.
Somebody who’d be turning on a spit in front of the mayor and city council if you don’t start finding some answers.
Seven dead teenagers in four days wasn’t a big deal down the Pass in the city, but up here, in a town of roughly 1,500 people, it was a big fucking deal, and people would be shaking their pitchforks and demanding answers. Rightfully so, he added silently.
“Ideas, Chief?” Ben lowered himself into one of the blue plastic chairs that lined the hall, groaning just slightly as his joints complained in the lingering chill down here.
“Just thinking, Ben. People are going to want answers. It’s not going to be immediately obvious that this car accident and the Saturday night murders are connected in any way. Hell, I guess it’s not immediately obvious to me. Still, I’m guessing there’s going to be a stir after news hits this morning, and I just wish to God I had some answers. Damn sheriff’s department closing the Rainbow Falls investigation and calling it a bear attack doesn’t help our cause any. Bear attack? For crying out loud, Ben.”
“I told you I didn’t see any evidence to support it, but it’s plausible, Chief. Look, that elderly gal was killed in Ouray a couple months ago. Plus all of the trouble they’ve had up in Aspen these past few months. It seems the black bears are restless this year. More so than in years past. After Oliver told me the sheriff’s boys had closed the investigation, I did some searching online. Sure enough, wildlife folks up that way have put down nine bears so far. Over two hundred or so sightings in the past year.” Ben shrugged and rubbed the back of his own neck. “It’s plausible enough to those who wouldn’t know any better.”
Gavin gave the coroner a cheerless smile. “Yes, I suppose it is—for those who don’t know any better. For those who interviewed kids who saw a door get ripped off a camper not by a black bear, but by nothing at all, or, rather, some kind of green glow. Except for some frozen deer tracks a ways back in the woods, there were no prints or traces of animals anywhere around the scene.”
Ben nodded. “No, but the ground was solid. And it snowed just short of a blizzard that night.”
“After we arrived, Ben. We didn’t see any bear tracks around the back of that pickup before the snow came down.”
“Can you be sure? How soon did you get photos?”
“Damn it, Ben, I’m telling you, we didn’t see—”
The old man held up a hand. “I’m on your side, Chief. Just playing devil’s advocate. The fact that we don’t have photos of the ground around that site before the snow started coming down hurts the witnesses’ story that something else killed those kids.”
“Tell me there wouldn’t have been some traces of flesh, or fruit, or dirt, or anything left in the bear claws as residue in those wounds.”
Ben scratched his cheek, rasping the whiskers that had grown there. “There should have been something. Traces of blood from other animals. Dirt or traces of leaves and pine needles at least. But it’s not for sure, Gavin. Nothing’s ever for sure.”
Gavin’s last argument was a flimsy one, so he didn’t even bring it up because he couldn’t stand to have another of his arguments so easily dismissed by the coroner. Some bears are still going into hibernation around this time of October, and while he might have argued that any bear worth his salt would be all fed and tucked away somewhere in the mountains, it just wasn’t the case; if food was scarce, he supposed they’d continue searching for food up through mid-October ... which was right about now.
The chief folded his arms and propped up his head with one hand, staring hard at the polished floor. He and Ben were silent for a few moments, until they heard the latching of the door at the top of the stairs. Slow, deliberate footsteps echoed down to them, and anxiety built in Gavin until he saw Oliver’s massive girth come around the corner and give him a moment of relief.
Oliver nodded at them, stepping down into the cool hallway and leaning against an empty gurney. He had a box from the Donut Mill that he laid atop the medical bed.
“Breakfast?” He flipped the top open.
Gavin would have complained that the last thing he needed was a donut, but at the site of the pastries and the scent of sausage kolaches, his stomach growled and instinct caused him to grab two of the kolaches and eat one in three bites. Ben stood up and picked a glazed donut out of the box. He held it up to Oliver. “Gracias.”
“Sure thing. Any coffee around this joint, or is everything too cold for that down here?” Oliver took a bite of an apple fri
tter and looked around.
“I’ve got a coffee maker in the office. I’ll get some started.” Ben shuffled off across the hall. They could see Ben through a window that looked into the office as he readied the coffee maker.
“Did Thomas get the film off?”
“Yup. Sent him home, too. He looked exhausted.”
“You don’t look much better.”
Oliver shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
“Still, you should take the rest of the day off and let me handle this.”
“Well, if I had some hot little thing like Officer Thomas has got at home, I think I’d probably agree with you, but being that I’ve got little more than a sink full of dirty dishes and an empty frig waiting for me, I think I’d rather stay and finish out the morning.”
Gavin patted his friend on the shoulder as he leaned over to grab another donut. “I don’t need you falling down with exhaustion somewhere. Finish out the morning, but then I order you to go home and get some rest. You have my permission to let the dirty dishes slide another day.”
“Thanks, boss. That’s mighty tender of you.”
Ben came out of the office and the scent of brewing coffee followed him, dispelling some of the medicinal smell. “Be ready in a minute,” he said.
“I got ahold of the kid who left his phone in the car,” Oliver said. “Opie McGrath. He spilled the beans and told everything. They’d been out egging the old witch’s house when he got in a disagreement with Lucas Hill, and Hill forced him out of the car. He walked home and didn’t know about the accident until I talked to him. He also dropped an interesting tidbit—apparently Lucas Hill and Ethan James had a heated exchange in the locker rooms after football practice yesterday.”
“Ethan?”
“Yup.”
“Anything else?”
“Not much. Sounds like Hill was a bully. He had his gang of followers, but just as many people probably wouldn’t have minded if he was found dead in a ditch.”
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