He seemed like he’d be more at home navigating a giant spider web than the world wide one, she realized. His face was scratchy with a day’s worth of stubble, but she kissed him anyway, just rolled over and kissed him. She felt his chest hair against her bare skin, and it felt good. The warmth was reassuring, the touch was sweaty and sticky and just as sweet as what they’d done a few minutes ago. She felt the compulsion for reassurance but kicked herself for feeling it at the same time. Like every nineteen-year-old should just face up to the idea their entire hometown could get wiped off the planet. Totally normal.
He was running delicate fingers over her cheekbones and tracing the lines left by the salty tears she didn’t even know she was crying when the phone started to buzz on the nightstand. She looked at him for just a moment, frozen in that pause in time where she knew she was going to have to move, to leave his embrace behind, but didn’t want to.
Then she answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Arch,” came the deep voice on the other end of the line.
“Hey,” she said, restraining a sniffle. “What’s up?”
***
Lauren had gotten done with work early, thankfully, and drove home down the blistering interstate under a sweltering sun. Her car’s AC had gone out yesterday sometime, and she hadn’t noticed it until this morning. It was another item on her “To Do” list that she really didn’t have time for, but Tennessee summer wasn’t near to done, unfortunately, even though it was almost September. Too much shit to do, too little time to cram it all in there.
She pulled into the driveway and threw the car into park with a little more aggression than she normally would have. It had been a crap day, a busy day, with a steady influx of patients. Some of them died, most of them lived, and because of her bleary-eyed state, all of them were running together in her mind at this point.
She slammed the door and started up the walk to the white house. She never parked in the garage because her mother’s car took up most of it and the rest was junk still left over from when they’d cleaned out the house after her daddy died. Hell, there were probably still baby clothes in there from when Molly was a newborn, stacked in with the transistor radios and other shit her father had collected.
She could hear the violin going upstairs through the window as her key hit the lock. Molly was practicing, practicing like she did every day. Lauren felt a spike of frustration. Molly was a good student, a good kid overall. Seeing her do her math homework this morning was strange because usually there was no need to ride her about getting schoolwork done. She was on that shit, serious about it. Way more serious than other kids. She acted more like an adult than her peers, that was for certain.
But finishing her math homework first thing in the morning? That wasn’t just a departure from the norm; it was a full on jump from the train tracks when the train wasn’t even heading toward its normal destination. It was bizarre, that’s what it was, and to have it come along with a bullshit excuse of “I fell asleep,” gave it all the more urgency to Lauren. Something was happening there.
Nothing good.
She opened the door and closed it swiftly behind her, as though there were some way she could keep a fly from following her in. She couldn’t, and she knew that, but she tried anyway. She could practically hear one of them buzzing faintly in her ear even now.
“You’re home early,” her mother remarked as she entered the kitchen. It opened up on the family room, and Let’s Make a Deal! was playing on the TV in front of Vera.
“Really?” Lauren asked as she set her purse on the counter. “Because it feels like I was gone for about a year.”
“One of those days, huh?”
“You said it,” Lauren agreed. She paused, holding onto the strap of her bag. “Have you talked to Molly about—”
“No,” her mother said, not taking her eyes off the TV. Wayne Brady was about to offer someone a deal, Lauren was sure. Clearly more important than worrying about your granddaughter. “That’s your responsibility, dear.”
“Yeah,” Lauren said under her breath. “You know, I work—”
“No doubt,” her mother said with that little slathering of false sympathy she did so well, “and so hard, too, going to college and medical school and doing your residency. All that after being a teenage mother.” She tilted her head around. “I been holding the bag here for you for sixteen years, and I believe I am done now. You’re an attending physician, what you always wanted, and now it’s time, before your daughter leaves for college, for you to do the last mile of the parenting.”
Lauren just stood there with her mouth slightly open as her mother turned back to the TV. She was somewhere between shock and outrage, but she wasn’t quite sure where she landed on the scale. “I’ve been here, okay? It’s not like I left you with her and disappeared, I was here for birthdays and Christmases, and in the evenings wherever I could—”
They false sympathy came out again. It probably sounded real to people who hadn’t lived with her mother for thirty-two years. “Oh, I know, dear, every chance you could. But you didn’t get that many chances with your school and work and residency demands. Now it’s on you.” She still didn’t even turn around, watching Wayne Brady count out hundred dollar bills.
Lauren could feel the seething set in. But what was she going to say? Medical school wasn’t easy—or cheap. College hadn’t been, either, not to get her pre-med reqs out of the way. It was time intensive, becoming a doctor, and the oddball shifts and all the demands had been leading up to this moment. She could look back and see the trade-offs now, but at the time they’d been just as natural as could be. You didn’t pour this many years into achieving a goal to get into the middle of it and seriously considering walking away. That would be a ton of sunk time and effort that had no payoff.
A waste.
She thought back now, about Molly, the sixteen years. It was time she’d enjoyed, but it had been tiring. It was the little moments that she remembered, not the daily stuff. That kiss before bedtime that had caught her in the eye, the birthday party where she’d spun her around in front of the piñata a few times before she missed and started to cry.
Lauren sighed, and it was a sigh of weariness and one of desperation. “This parenting thing ain’t easy,” she said as she headed toward the stairs.
“You said it, darling, not me,” her mother replied as someone made a deal.
***
Lerner didn’t mind cutting down on the rest period. It was pretty unnecessary for them anyway, and he always felt like it was time wasted. Sure, they skipped it regularly when they had something brewing, but when they were rudderless, it was a regular thing. They spent a lot of time rudderless, though. Home office was like that; pointed you in the general direction and then let you walk a ways. He was used to it, so it didn’t frustrate him anymore. New arrivals into the Office tended to be pretty ecstatic about getting out of the confines of the underworld, so the heavy hand of all the attention landed on them.
Lerner wondered how many newbies the office was handling right now? He guessed a lot. Would have bet on it, actually, though he hadn’t been to the home office in quite some time.
“A whole mountain is a lot of ground to cover,” Duncan said from beside him. Didn’t even have his eyes closed; Lerner could tell he was getting out of the habit of even bothering to look around with his essence anymore. This Spellman had really fucked the whole system up.
“Less than we had this morning,” Lerner said, feeling a little more chipper. Progress was progress, even on this dinky shit case. Without it to focus on, they might as well go door-to-door looking for trouble, or sit by a police scanner and wait for trouble to crackle over the radio. The damned runes made them blind in this town, since everyone with half a brain or a connection to a connection had them. Gossipy fucks. Demons really were just one giant social circle, the stupid underworld. They’d be lucky to catch a meth dealer at this point.
“Where would it hide on the
mountain?” Lerner could tell Duncan was just thinking out loud.
“Supposed to be abandoned mines up there,” Lerner said. “Coal and shit. Or some of the deeper pockets of woods, maybe. Hunting cabins. Could be anywhere, really.” Duncan nodded along; Lerner knew he knew all this. But then again, Lerner didn’t mind speaking it aloud because it was better than being told to shut up for pontificating some obscure point of human behavior.
They were heading up a back road toward the mountain. It was visible in the distance, just a low slope on the horizon. It wasn’t anything like the Rockies, that was for damned sure, or Alaska—which was the Rockies too, wasn’t it? Lerner didn’t know, all he knew was he’d been both places, and to Canada, and even seen some of the Himalayas once on a flyover. Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains were nothing so dramatic as that. They were practically foothills by comparison—but they were still mountains.
He didn’t know the exact elevation of Mount Horeb, but he knew he was a lot happier driving it than climbing the damned thing. Besides, the whole thing was covered in trees all the way up, looking like some monster with a bowed back rising out of the earth. Lerner clicked his tongue in his mouth. Where was this motherfucker hiding?
***
Lauren paused at the door, hesitating before she knocked. The sound of violin music filled the air, not a single sour note. Lauren was no expert, but she could hear that her daughter wasn’t quite like a concert violinist. She was pretty proficient, though. She listened through the door, waiting to see if Molly missed a note, and held back from knocking.
It wasn’t like she didn’t want to see Molly, but the thought of picking up the conversation where they’d left off when she’d stormed out this morning wasn’t exactly appealing. It was a lot easier to let her mother handle the duties associated with being the bad guy, while she could just swoop in and be the good guy in the limited amount of time she usually had with her daughter.
The thought that those days were over was cause for a little more joy to be robbed from her life. Stressful job, a sheriff who considered her his personal mortician, and now this? Ugh. Double ugh. Triple-quad-quintuple ugh. She knocked.
“Come in,” Molly said, as the sound of the bow running over the strings came to a stop. It wasn’t one of those scratchy, abrupt stops, either, it was a graceful stop at the end of a note, not like when the needle came off a record mid-song.
Lauren entered the room, pausing at the threshold. There was still a lot of pink in here, though she doubted it was much to do with her daughter’s taste. The room had been pink since she was a little girl, and it hadn’t ever been repainted. Who would have done it? She was too busy, Molly was too disinterested, and her mother had left that sort of stuff up to her dad before he died. As a result, the few posters her daughter had put up had a pink background. The place smelled nice, though, the result of a vanilla-scented candle burning on the dresser.
“Hey, kiddo,” Lauren said. She shifted to lean on the frame of the door with her shoulder and crossed one foot behind the other. She was still wearing her scrubs.
Molly was sitting on the desk chair. Light shone in on her across the old wood floor. “Hey,” she answered without enthusiasm, the violin still stuck under her chin, bow in hand but away from the instrument.
Lauren stood there for a minute pondering her angle of attack. She didn’t want it to be an attack, but she knew—knew for sure—that Molly was going to see it that way no matter how she put this. How could she not? “Did you finish your homework?” She asked it low and slow, lowering her head to stare at her own feet and the floor as she did it.
“The homework from this morning? Yeah,” Molly said, and Lauren looked back up. She was still holding the bow, ready to get back to her practice. “Turned it in at school, of course.”
“I meant your homework for tomorrow,” Lauren said, and she bobbed her head up to look at Molly while she said it, but only with great effort. It was so damned uncomfortable.
“No,” Molly said, and her voice seemed suddenly strangely husky. “I’ll get it after I finish my practice.”
Lauren felt another one of those sighs coming on, the one that told her she was tired and that she damned sure didn’t want to do what she was about to have to do. “I think you need to do it now.”
Molly stared at her, probably fifty/fifty on dumbstruck and annoyed. “I’m running a straight-A average. Are you sure you want to question my process?”
“Way to sound like a corporate employee,” Lauren said. “But since you brought it up, call this a management initiative from your mother to try and keep you from having to do your algebra in a rush as you run out the door.”
“I got it done fine,” Molly said, and her brow had descended, eyes turned dark with fury.
“I’m sure you did,” Lauren said, trying to figure out how to broach the other gaping subject just sitting there in the middle of the room. “But the real question is why you didn’t get it done before that—”
“I told you, I fell asleep.” Molly’s voice crackled with teenage anger. Lauren started to wonder if she’d sounded like this at sixteen, but she didn’t have to think it over very hard. She knew she had.
“I’m not gone so much that I don’t know when you’re lying.” Lauren just laid it out there, quiet, trying to avoid the path that would set her off. Doubtful that this would do it, but it was worth a try.
“You think I’m—?” Molly’s eyes flickered. They still held that resentment, but there was a flash of uncertainty. “Whatever. I got my homework done, turned in, and my grades are sound. I don’t know why you’re bitching at me.”
“I’m not ‘bitching’ at you,” Lauren said—but she was, wasn’t she? Same shit her mother would do to her, that passive aggressive thing where she’d latch on to something unrelated to what she really wanted to talk about—which was the reason she was lying about not finishing the homework. Lauren remembered sixteen like it was yesterday—hell, it practically was—and there was always a reason for her to do it, too. “Who’s the boy?”
Molly just stared at her but didn’t adjust quite quickly enough. “What boy?” she asked, a second too slow.
Lauren laughed, light, near-toneless. “God, I wonder if it was this obvious to my mom when I was lying?” Of course it was; she’d almost always figured it out.
Molly made a half-grunt, half-seething sound. “I have to practice. And then I have homework to do.” She made the dagger eyes, the ones that Lauren had made at her mother.
“I’m going to check your homework later,” Lauren said. “Leave it out for me, okay?”
The eyeroll was prodigious. “Fine.” It was definitely not fine.
“Okay, then,” Lauren said, and started to leave her daughter’s room.
“Close the door behind you!” Molly called, a little more snot in her tone than was really needed. Lauren did and stood out there, just waiting, listening as the tone of the violin picked up.
It was late afternoon, the sun was still high in the sky, and she could feel the tension wracking her. What to do? Normally she might have tried to squeeze in a run by the Caledonia River, but since she’d seen that body at Rafton Park, she had no desire to go anywhere near there. Or town, for that matter, since Tim Connor had gotten run over on a jog of his own.
No, she needed air but not danger. Those places were right here in town, along with whoever the hell was being so damned vicious as to run people down. Lauren wanted somewhere a little more isolated, a little more removed from what was going on in Midian. There was the road up on Mount Horeb that she’d run a few times. Maybe she’d try that.
***
Arch could see Erin’s Crown Victoria behind him—the sheriff’s own car, he still thought of it—easing up the curved road leading up Mount Horeb. It wasn’t like they’d planned to travel in a convoy, but once they were out of town she was a little heavy on the pedal and he was light, so it was natural she’d catch up to him eventually, he supposed. Besides, they weren’t going
all that much farther.
“Where do you think this thing is?” Alison asked from next to him. She was pretty quiet, thinking it over on the way up. “Hiding in one of the old mines by day, slouching down to Midian by night?”
“Could be,” Arch said. “It’d be tough to comb all those old mining tunnels, though. Best we check up and down the main roads first, see if there’s any sign of anything amiss. Maybe look at driveways for a sign of …” He let his voice drift off. “Well, I don’t know what we’d been looking for a sign of.”
“Mmmm,” Alison said, and he could tell she was lost in thought again. She was pretty smart, his wife, valedictorian of her class and all. Sometimes he forgot how smart she was because she didn’t always come out with the deepest thoughts. She put her mind to something, she could usually do something with it, though he wasn’t sure exactly how far she’d get with demons hiding somewhere on the mountain. “Locals,” she said.
“What?” Arch asked, holding the wheel tight around a curve, the vinyl steering wheel smooth against his fingers.
“Erin said this thing made noise. Loud noise. When it came past her.” They passed a mailbox on the right, and Alison flicked her wrist to indicate it as it shot by. “Some of the locals might have heard it, especially if it’s following a path or a road.”
“Well, shoot,” Arch said, blinking in surprise. He hadn’t come near to thinking of that.
***
Erin eased off the gas and pulled into the overlook as Arch guided the Explorer off the road in front of her. She had been expecting him to drive slow, but he was past slow and into granny territory. She bit off another complaint, let it die on her lips, and just took the Crown Vic in to park behind him and the town car already waiting for them. The overlook was on a curve, and down below the whole Caledonia River Valley was laid out, with other smaller mountains and foothills providing the rise that fenced it all in.
Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted Page 14