“Oh, I’m cursing her, believe me.” Carly fumed.
“No,” Abi said and leaned forward. “I mean a true curse, Carly, one that will teach that slut a lesson once and for all.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Abi, and right now I don’t care. Let me see your laptop.”
Abi handed it to her. Carly forwarded the e-mail from Abi’s account to hers, and then she logged into her own e-mail account. She opened the message with the damning picture attached and sent it to Ethan with a furiously typed message: How could you do this to us?
She clicked Send before she could type any more. Part of her was holding back the full fury that she felt toward Ethan right now, hoping deep inside of her that this wasn’t true, that it was a fraud or a hoax. And now that she’d sent the picture off, she instantly regretted it and wished that she could bring it back. Her head was aswirl with confusion and misery. She felt more tears coming on.
“I need to go home, Abi.”
“Okay. Do you want me to walk with you?”
“Yes.”
They gathered their things quickly and left the coffee shop. When they were outside and on the way down Park Avenue that would take them over Washington Hill, Abi said, “Look, Carly, real spellcrafting is no joke. We’ve suffered too long with Sadie McBay.” Abi grabbed her friend’s elbow and turned her so they faced one another. “Both of us have suffered too long with her. I have the power to do something about this, Carly, without anyone having any idea who or what really did it.”
They stood on the edge of the road, muddy from the melting snow, in the shadow of the trees on Washington Hill. A blustery wind came down the slope, bitter cold numbing their cheeks.
“Do what you want, Abi,” Carly said. “Right now, I just want her dead.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The sun dipped below the mountain ridge to the west of Carson Lake. Clouds that spanned the horizon glowed pink and lavender as skies darkened with the onset of twilight. The temperature dropped dramatically as soon as the sun disappeared below the tree line, and the wet muddy roads began to ice over again, crunching under the wheels of Gavin’s pickup as he drove to the top of Washington Hill and parked with the intent to speak to Vanessa Maeveen.
Since the front walk of the house remained perpetually in the shadow of its foliage tunnel, snow remained along the walkway. He could see a few sets of footprints leading into the yard. Gavin paid close attention to the scene around him, the thorny brambles that made up the walls of the walkway, some broken vines and branches. It did seem that there were fresh disturbances, but he guessed it could just as well have been her doing something as innocent as getting her mail. If she had any neighbors within view he would have asked them if anyone had seen her in recent weeks, or if anyone had seen Lucas Hill’s Mustang up here last night. As it was, she was completely isolated from the rest of the neighborhoods in this area, which made everything pretty damned inconvenient for somebody looking for information about the woman, as he’d figured out years ago. He didn’t try to fool himself that he was here as much to pry into the whereabouts of Davis Crowley as he was to double-check the story told to Oliver by the kid, Opie McGrath.
Gavin took careful steps through the walkway, realizing that he was being as quiet as possible. A reflex, he guessed, evoked by the dilapidation and pervasive ominousness of the house and its grounds. As he came into the yard, the interwoven branches of trees above filtered the waning light of day, leaving him at the base of her stairs on the verge of night. The house loomed above him, its Victorian angles and brooding composure invoking uneasiness. As he stepped onto the stairs, something growled from the darkness under the porch. A dog? It sounded almost unnatural.
Gavin mounted the porch before turning around. His hand clasped the grip of his pistol.
From beneath the porch poked a misshapen head. It looked vaguely like a Rottweiler. Half of its face was black and covered with fur, but the other half seemed stretched and pale with hairless skin. The eye on the dark side of the face was blue, but on the pinkish, fleshy side it was green and larger than the other. Likewise, its jowls looked like someone used a jigsaw to cut two dog’s heads in half and then cruelly melded them together. If not for the small ears that protruded from the top of the head on both sides, he almost could have mistaken one half of the beast’s skull for human.
As the creature snarled it emerged from the shadows, one side of its lip raised higher than the other, revealing a long fang. When it barked, Gavin jumped and gripped his pistol again, switching off the safety. Its right shoulder was deformed. It had an Igor-like hunch where a bulbous joint appeared, and the lower half of its other front leg looked like the twisted forearm of a man with gnarled fingers curled to resemble a paw.
It barked. The sound of it was deep and full of menace.
Gavin was about to reach out a fist to knock when a woman’s voice came from behind him.
“Silence!”
The beast flinched at the command.
“Verschwinden!”
Instantly it cowered back beneath the porch.
Gavin breathed again. He turned to face the source of the woman’s voice. The front door stood open, but a screen door between them made it more difficult to discern her features. All he could see were slender cream-colored pant legs, curved hips, and a hint of a sweatered torso. The woman’s face was bathed completely in shadow; he perceived only a vague outline of her head and shoulders in the entryway.
“Miss Maeveen?”
“Chief Wagner.” Her voice carried just the vaguest hint of her age. He tried to recall how old she had been last time they spoke. In her fifties perhaps.
“That’s some dog you’ve got there. Something wrong with it?”
“Just a mutt that insisted on raiding my trash week after week. I decided to keep it and feed him dog food to keep him out of my garbage. As a guard dog, he’s done well enough.”
“I can see how he would.”
“How can I help you, Chief?”
“May I come in?”
“Now isn’t a good time, I’m afraid.”
Gavin paused, tried to look beyond her into the house, but it was thick with darkness.
“I see. Well, Miss Maeveen, I’m here to ask if you’ve had any problems with vandals recently.”
“None so far. Though I’m sure as Halloween draws near we’ll have something exciting happen. My reputation seems to make it necessary.”
“You didn’t hear anything last night?”
“No.”
Gavin pointed at the front walls of the house. Even shadowed as they were in the creeping night, he could see stains and particles of eggshells left behind by four of the rotten missiles the boys had managed to hurl. They made brackish outlines on the raw wood where paint had chipped away from the siding.
“Some kids last night claimed to have egged your house. Looks like they landed a few. If you could turn on the porch light you can see them plain as day.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Chief Gavin. But I didn’t hear a thing last night.”
“Not even your dog barking?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary, Chief. The dog always barks.”
“Maybe someone else inside might have heard something.”
“There is no one else inside, Chief, and hasn’t been for a long time.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, you said ‘we’ a second ago—‘we’ll have something exciting happen’—I thought you meant someone else living here with you.”
“I meant the dog.”
“Does the dog have a name?”
“Shithead.”
“Sorry?”
“Shithead is the dog’s name, Chief.”
Gavin blinked at the form of the woman, less visible now, as nightfall was nearly complete.
He briefly laughed. At the strangeness of the dog, the exchange, the weirdness of standing here in the dark talking to her, no lights on in the house beyond.
“Is there anything else, Chief?”
He resisted an urge to ask again if he could come inside, sensing her reluctance to do anything but close the door. Without a warrant or some compelling evidence tying her to the deaths of those teenagers, he had no real right to insist.
“Have you seen Davis Crowley, Vanessa?”
She seemed caught off guard by his use of her first name. That’s what he intended. To strip away the formality of this, to get at the heart of what he really wanted to know. The guilt of that ate at him—the fact that he cared more about finding the man he felt was responsible for his wife’s spiral into death, than finding the killer of those teens last night ... if any such killer existed. He shouldn’t have asked, and she had every right to tell him the investigation was complete, move on Chief.
“Chief Wagner, I haven’t seen Davis Crowley since the night after you came to the house. The night your wife died.”
“He hasn’t tried to contact you? Phone? Letter? E-mail?”
“Gavin,” she said, using his tactic. Her voice softened and he sensed as they spoke in the darkness that she softened toward him for a moment. “Everything I told you about Davis was the truth, and as truth, none of that has changed. When I learned of the treatments he’d been giving to Elizabeth, I was furious with him. For that reason, and others. But for that reason especially, because of her condition. It was irresponsible of him. Reckless. And yet, he had his own agenda. He was a twisted, selfish man. He was a bastard. And believe me, if I ever saw him again, Chief Wagner, you’d be the first to know.”
Hearing Beth’s full name spoken by Vanessa Maeveen took him by surprise. It was also like a kick in the ribs. It hurt. He felt the rise of an old familiar anger that had no outlet for release. To know who had killed a loved one and to know they slipped through your fingers was far worse than not knowing anything more than they had been killed. And because he was a cop, and because she had been his wife, the mother of their daughter, he felt double the weight of crushing failure.
As sincere as Vanessa Maeveen sounded, Gavin couldn’t read her body language, and he couldn’t gauge the truthfulness of what she said by the tone of her voice. Ridiculously, they now stood in the full darkness of night, and she made no move to turn on the lights. The snow in the yard glowed a light blue, reflecting what little moonlight filtered through the trees. Her shape was ghostly behind the screen door.
“Was there anything else, Chief?”
Gavin focused on her shape, trying to discern her features, but she seemed faceless in the sable gloom.
“Those kids who egged your house last night, they turned up dead.”
Silence from the doorway. Gavin’s cheeks, bitten till now by the chill, burned with heat as blood rushed to his face. He was embarrassed to have made the insinuation, and yet, the nature of their deaths left questions unanswered.
“I see.”
“Are you sure you didn’t hear anything at all last night?”
“Chief, I am cold, my bones are stiff, and I am ready to retire to the warmth of my room. I am still just as grief-stricken as ever about the situation with Davis and your wife, more than you know. As far as the kids are concerned, I don’t know what more I can offer. I did not hear anything out of the ordinary last night. In fact, I wouldn’t even have known I’d been vandalized if not for your observation.” An apparently disembodied hand floated pale through the shadows, in a vague motion to the egg-marred house exterior. “I don’t come out this way anymore, and haven’t in years—the lights here in the hall and the porch have been burned out for quite some time. I’m sorry to leave you standing in the dark. Next time, perhaps, you can pull in through the private drive and come in the back way.”
Gavin nodded, touched the rim of his hat and tilted his head in farewell. “Well, thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
She didn’t say anything until he turned away and walked down the stairs, which creaked beneath his weight. He made it a point to glance just briefly under the porch, where he could see the red reflections of the awful canine’s eyes as it watched him go.
“Have a good evening, Chief Wagner.”
The door closed. He thought that, for a door that never got used, it sure was quiet on its hinges.
A growl emanated from the yard. He had to try not to hurry in the event that she was watching him go. No sign of fear. Just even steps down the walk to the road. He passed her mailbox and thought it was unlikely she’d come out the back door and walk all the way around the house to check the mail. But then, one never knew what you decided to do when you were old.
She’s not that old, he thought. If she’d been mid-fifties when they’d conducted the original investigation, she couldn’t have been any older than sixty by now. But then, age was relative. The older you get, the less old age seems excessive. She was hiding her face from me. Or just being deliberately inhospitable. Maybe both.
He thought he might try to come up with another excuse to visit by the back door in the light of day. Right now, he was ready to go home. Fatigue settled over him. Dinner with Carly, followed by a beer, his favorite chair, and TV sounded just fine. Shut off his thoughts for a while, and maybe his subconscious mind could work something out by morning.
He climbed into his truck and started the engine. As he shifted into Drive, he heard the strangled barking of Miss Maeveen’s mutt. He flipped on the headlights and steered the truck toward home, gazing in the rearview mirror at the glowing window atop the drum tower of the woman’s house. Black trees obscured it as he rolled down the far side of the hill.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The creature snorted dust from its mucousy snout as it roamed through the foliage, dense and overgrown. Confused, it rested, squatting on muscular haunches, lifting its head to the sky, testing the direction of the wind against its deformed face.
The snow was cold to its flesh, causing its toes to sting with the frigidness of the ground. Shifting from one foot to the other, it sniffed the bushes and plants. The green had left the vegetation, leaving behind brittle stalks and leaves. Withered, molded flowers sagged limply where they had died a few months earlier. Something human trod here recently. The creature sniffed the ground, panting, trying to zero in on the path of the scent.
The moon shone, partially obscured by thick clouds. The creature gazed at the brightness of it hanging there, a sliver of illumination that peeked through the overcast skies. It threw its head back and howled into the wind. Various dogs throughout the area replied in kind, a kinship among dwellers in the night.
It didn’t usually get this far from the house before the human reined it in. It could still look back and see the human’s light glowing orange through the heavy red curtains so far above the trees and snow-covered walkway. It crept beneath a snow-capped pine and huddled over dry needles, leaving behind foul excrement that reeked from the offal off which it fed. The creature shuffled pine needles over the stench of the mound. To leave it in the open would alert the human that it had ventured from beneath the stairs and had the freedom to roam. Every night it grew in strength, searching out and discovering what it desired to learn without the bondage of the human in the towering house.
The creature could hear the human’s footsteps inside, on the hard wood stairs, descending to the first floor, possibly to toss meat beneath the porch.
But it wasn’t hungry.
On this night, all it wanted was freedom ... and something more. Something that was still a vague craving it could not yet understand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Carly was curled into a warm little ball at the end of the couch. Dad had started a fire and settled into his chair with a beer. The room smelled faintly of wood smoke. Th
ey had small talk about the day, and Carly only alluded to her train-wreck discovery of the damning picture after school. She tried to change the subject but Dad zeroed in on the sore spot like a good cop. Like a good parent.
“Anything you want to talk about?” Dad asked her. He watched her, searching her face for some sign of what she wasn’t saying. Probably hoping she wasn’t pregnant or something.
“No Dad, I guess ... it’s just ... I’ve got to handle it myself.”
“Okay, then. You know I’ll help you if I can.”
“I know. Thanks, Dad.”
“Got your heart set on anything in particular to watch?”
“No. Anything’s fine.”
“Did your science project with Abi come out okay?”
The image of Mr. Holman in the dark haunted her and she banished it quickly lest Dad somehow pick up on what happened and go shoot Mr. Holman full of holes. “Yeah, it was really good.” She leveled her voice successfully, keeping the tremor out of it. “We got it all done and presented it today in fifth period. Mr. Prater is senile and slept through half of it, but I think we’ll get an A.”
“Awesome.” Her dad surfed the channels between History Channel and Spike TV. Sleuth was running a James Bond marathon, so he settled on Dr. No.
The phone rang. Carly snatched the receiver off the table between them. Dad looked at her with an eyebrow raised. The caller ID display read ‘Martha James’ on its glowing face.
Ethan.
She stared at the phone for a moment. Uncertain, heart pounding in her throat. Tears threatened to surface and she hadn’t even said a damn thing yet.
Oh, this is going to go bad. Damn it, why did I have to send that picture to him?
“Carly?”
“It’s okay. I’ll take it.” She ran off and thumped upstairs to her room, closing the door behind her before it rang a fourth time. She pressed the Call button. The phone beeped and the light went green. She pressed the receiver to her ear.
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