The Homing

by John Saul

  And half an hour after that, leading a caravan of fourteen cars filled with what seemed like every relative and friend the Bennetts and Marge Larkin had, he set out for Russell Owen’s farm to begin the search.

  When he got there, though, Karen Owen informed him that the search had already begun: both Russell and Kevin were already up in the hills. “Kevin left before breakfast,” she told him, handing Shannon the note she’d found on the refrigerator door. “Russell went after him as soon as we found out he was gone.”

  Mark Shannon scowled deeply. “I wish you’d called us—” he began, but Karen cut him off.

  “I called you yesterday,” she reminded him, her voice quavering. “I even came to see you, for all the good it did me.

  Abashed, Shannon turned away from Karen to study the hills behind the house. Covered with short grass that was already turning brown under the summer sun, they were crisscrossed everywhere with a tangled maze of tracks and paths. A few of them were man-made, but most of the trails had been worn into the earth by grazing cattle and foraging deer. To try to follow anyone up there would be nearly impossible. Still, a plan was already formulating in Mark Shannon’s mind.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” he told the crowd of men who had gathered around him. “I want you to spread out—you all know these hills even better than I do, so let’s break up into groups of two. Then we’ll stretch a line as far as we can without completely losing sight of each other, and we’ll start up into the hills. Anybody sees anything—anything at all—start hollering. I’ll be about a third of the way from the north end, and Manny Gomez’ll be about a third of the way from the south end. Shouldn’t take more’n a few minutes for one or the other of us to get the message.” Then an idea struck him. “How many of you guys got cell phones you can take?”

  Half a dozen hands went up, and Shannon began splitting the group into teams, spreading the men with cellular phones as evenly along the line as he could. “If anyone with a phone sees anything, call 911, and the dispatcher can patch me or Manny in on the radio. Okay?”

  No more than fifteen minutes after the caravan of cars had driven up her driveway, Karen found herself standing behind the house, tightly clutching Molly’s shoulders as she watched the cars leave again, this time moving slowly along the rough dirt track that edged the foothills, kicking a cloud of brown dust high into the air.

  Russell paused on the crest of the hill to use the bandanna he habitually carried in his hip pocket to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The sun was high in the sky now, and the cool wind coming in from the sea only a little while ago had shifted, turning hot and dry and promising that by this afternoon the temperature might rise to over one hundred degrees.

  And still no sign of either Julie or Kevin.

  Why hadn’t the boy given them some clue of what his idea had been? Couldn’t he have at least provided a hint of where he might have gone? To attempt to “follow” Kevin into these hills, with their labyrinth of tracks, Russell realized, was futile. Yet he couldn’t bear to give it up and head home.

  If he kept at it—if he climbed to the top of just one more hill—he might find them.

  Or, more likely, he would find himself gazing once more, as he was now, over a series of grassy hills, an endless vista broken only by scattered stands of scrub oak and an occasional outcropping of rocks. Turning slowly, Russell scanned the full horizon once more, just as he had from the top of every hill he’d stood upon this morning.

  Suddenly he froze as a figure appeared on a low ridge to the east where he himself had stood only twenty minutes ago. Though the figure was too far away for him to recognize, Russell was almost sure it was neither Kevin nor any of the three missing kids.

  Cupping his hands around his mouth, Russell filled his lungs with air, then bellowed a single word: “Hello!”

  The figure waved, and a moment later Russell heard faint words drifting back to him, almost lost in the building wind. “Find anything?”

  Understanding that he was no longer the only person searching for the missing teenagers, Russell started back down the hill, almost breaking into a run in his eagerness to find out how many people had joined in the hunt.

  He was nearing the bottom of the slope when he stopped short, his attention caught by something he’d barely glimpsed out of the comer of his eye.

  For just a moment he stood frozen as the fragmentary image in his mind coalesced into a dark vision that made his skin crawl with dread.

  Certain he must be wrong, praying that what he’d seen had been something else entirely—perhaps the bones of some kind of animal—he braced himself to gaze directly at the object that had set his skin crawling.

  Even as he looked at it, part of his mind screamed out that he was mistaken, that what he was seeing wasn’t what he believed it to be at all.

  A human skeleton, only partially concealed by a clump of brush.

  The bones were intact, except for the lower portion of the left leg, which wasn’t there at all. Though the bones were picked clean of flesh, Russell could see they were fresh—not totally dried yet, they glistened in the morning sunlight. His gaze moved slowly, reluctantly, over the denuded frame, and finally, as he stared directly at the skull, he winced.

  Ants were swarming over it, milling with seeming aimlessness, but as the focus of Russell’s eyes sharpened, he saw the tiny fragments of matter gripped in their mandibles, infinitesimal scraps of brain tissue that they were taking back to their nest.

  Maggots, their pale white bodies squirming grotesquely, writhed in the empty eye sockets.

  But what gripped Russell’s attention, what made him feel numb in his soul and nauseated in his belly, was the hair.

  Still flowing from the scalp that was intact on the skull was a mass of dark, wavy hair.

  Luxuriant hair, which, even though covered with dust, still bore traces of its original luster.

  Julie’s hair?

  A sound boiled up from somewhere deep inside Russell Owen, partly a groan of terrible anguish, partly a pleading cry for help.

  After a moment that seemed like an hour, Manny Gomez appeared next to Russell. Only the deputy’s strong grip on his arm finally brought Russell out of the trance in which the grisly skeleton held him. At last, he tore his eyes away from it to turn and face the other man.

  “How am I going to tell her?” he asked. “How am I going to tell Karen?”

  Manny Gomez was silent for a few seconds, his dark eyes perfectly reflecting Russell Owen’s anguish, but then his expression hardened as his features settled into the demeanor of a professional. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Russell,” he said. “We don’t know that this is Julie.”

  “Don’t we?” Russell asked, his voice hollow.

  As Manny spoke into his radio, quickly telling Mark Shannon what they’d found, Russell’s gaze returned to the remains on the ground.

  The leg.

  What had happened to the missing leg?

  A coyote, probably, roaming in the hills last night.

  Maybe he’d heard it himself, howling over the meal it had discovered before gnawing the bones loose to drag them off to its hidden den.

  He shuddered at the thought, then once more felt Manny Gomez’s hand on his arm.

  “Come on, Russell,” the deputy said, the gruffness in his voice betraying his own emotions. “You don’t know who this is. You don’t know who it is at all.” But even as he said it, Manny knew he believed, as Russell did, that these hideous remains had only two days ago been pretty, lively Julie Spellman.

  CHAPTER 24

  Ellen Filmore had been fielding telephone calls all morning. It started the moment she walked into the clinic, arriving early just in case Barry Sadler or the professor at Cal Poly called. The phone had rung even before she put down her purse, and she snatched up the instrument on Roberto’s desk, cradling the receiver against her shoulder while she hunted for something with which to take notes. It had not been the biologist from C
al Poly, but Lucy Meyers, wanting to know about rumors she’d heard of some kind of sickness being passed among the teenagers in Pleasant Valley. “I heard Karen Owen’s daughter brought something up from Los Angeles, and now they’re all getting it. Suzanne Munson says she’s not letting Shelley go out at all.” Lucy’s voice dropped slightly. “Is it true that those three kids aren’t missing at all, but that they’re locked up in the hospital in San Luis Obispo?”

  I only wish it were, Ellen Filmore thought silently. But when she spoke, she tried to reassure Lucy Meyers. “There seems to be something going around, but so far it doesn’t look too serious. Even the kids who’ve caught it aren’t really sick. They just get a little pale.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard,” Lucy replied in a tone that let Ellen know that as far as Lucy was concerned, the information she’d gotten from her friends was a lot more reliable than anything a mere doctor might offer her. “I can tell you, I’ll be keeping my kids inside for the next few days.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Ellen said, realizing too late that within twenty minutes Lucy would have called at least ten other women to report that Ellen Filmore was now advocating a quarantine. “Not that I think there’s really anything to be too concerned about,” she hastily added, deliberately lying rather than risk adding fuel to Lucy Meyers’s already panicky state.

  No sooner had she finished talking to Lucy than someone else had called, and after that, someone else. By the time Roberto Muñoz had arrived, both lines were ringing steadily, and finally Ellen began to worry that the biologist from Cal Poly would not be able to get through to her at all. She cut each caller shorter than the one before, but by mid-morning rumor was running rampant through the town. Around ten, as she was trying to decide if Jan McLaughlin fretting about Sara should be taken seriously or not, Roberto motioned frantically to her through the glass panel that separated her office from the reception area and mouthed the words “Cal Poly.” “Jan?” she broke in. “Look, a call just came in that I really have to take, so I’m going to give you to Roberto—believe me, he knows every bit as much about this as I do.”

  “But Sara’s—” Jan McLaughlin began again, determined not to be put off.

  “Tell Roberto,” Ellen said, then punched the flashing button that would connect her to the caller from Cal Poly. “Hello? This is Ellen Filmore.”

  “Harry Matson here,” a man with a deep, resonant voice replied. “I’ve been looking at some blood samples you sent to—”

  “Thank God,” Ellen interrupted. “You have no idea what’s going on here. Both the kids those samples came from are missing.” Realizing she was sounding very much like the panicking mothers she’d been trying to calm all morning, she cut herself short. “Do you have any idea what kind of bacteria we’re dealing with here?” she asked, deliberately shifting into her most professional tone.

  “From what I can see so far, we’re not dealing with a bacterium at all,” Harry Matson replied. “A bacterium generally reproduces by transverse fission, although in some varieties—”

  “—some of them transfer nucleic acid between two cells,” Ellen cut in, more impatiently than she’d intended. “I mean, I did go to medical school, Dr. Matson. But if it’s not bacteria in those samples, what is it?”

  Matson hesitated, and when he spoke again, his tone had lost some of its resonance and taken on a note of worried uncertainty. “I wish I could be sure,” he said. “So far, my best guess is that it’s a parasite.”

  “Best guess?” Ellen Filmore echoed. “For God’s sake, Dr. Matson, I got a best guess from the lab last night. What I need now is an answer.”

  “And I’d like to give you one,” Doctor Matson replied sharply. The hard edge softened somewhat as he went on, “But it’s just not that easy, since what’s in that blood is something I’ve never seen before. But I can tell you what it looks like. It looks exactly like some kind of insect larvae, but on a microscopic scale.”

  “Insect larvae,” Ellen repeated. “That’s what Barry Sadler said, too.”

  “The question is,” Matson continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “what is it doing in blood? That’s where the best guess that it’s a parasite comes in. The whole thing is fascinating, from a scientific standpoint. The larvae are starting to die, but until I can actually look at one of your patients, I can’t be certain why. What it looks like, though, is that the larvae feed on the blood, but need some other environment to metamorphose into adults. There don’t seem to be any adults at all in the samples you sent to me. If you can get some samples from some other parts of these patients’ bodies—”

  “I can’t,” Ellen broke in. She was just beginning to explain that both the patients had disappeared, when she saw Roberto frantically signaling her. “Look, I’m going to have to call you back.” Quickly writing down Harry Matson’s phone number, she jabbed at the second line just in time to hear Mark Shannon’s voice.

  “… be there in five minutes or so. Just tell her we need her to look at them.”

  “Mark?” Ellen said. “Mark, it’s Ellen. I’m here.”

  “It’s okay,” Shannon told her. “Roberto can explain. See you in a few minutes.” He hung up, and as she was about to punch the first line, which was again flashing, Roberto called out, “I’m shutting them both off.”

  Putting both lines on hold, Roberto Muñoz got up from his desk, paused to pour her a cup of coffee from the pot on the table in the waiting room, then dropped into the chair next to her desk and scanned a pad full of notes. “Most of this is just bullshit,” he told her. “You can look at it all later. Two things are important. I told Mrs. McL to bring Sara in. From what she says, it sounds like the same thing you had with the other three kids. I told her not to let Sara argue, not to let her out of her sight, and not to stop for anything. I did my best to scare the shit out of her. That okay?”

  Ellen Filmore nodded. “Perfect.” She ripped the top sheet off her own notepad and handed it to Roberto. “Call Matson back and tell him I may have some more samples for him, and ask him if there’s anything specific he wants me to look for. And line up an ambulance, just in case we have to get Sara over to San Luis Obispo in a hurry.”

  “Got it.” He paused only a split second, then went on. “The other thing is Shannon. He’s on his way over here with something he wants you to take a look at.”

  “Something,” Ellen repeated in a tone that let Roberto know he’d better tell her exactly what it was that Shannon was bringing.

  Roberto sighed. “It’s a skeleton. It’s human, and he’s pretty sure it’s fairly …” He hesitated, but saw no way to avoid the word. “…fresh,” he finished. “He wants you to take a look at it.” Dismissing the rest of his notes as being nothing that couldn’t be put off until later, Roberto stood up again. “Great day so far, huh?” he said, then headed for his own desk to begin taking care of the details, leaving Ellen Filmore to sip her coffee and gather her thoughts for a moment or two before the next onslaught.

  Her cup was still half full when she saw Mark Shannon’s squad car pull into the parking lot, immediately followed by Russell Owen’s pickup truck, and finally a small four-wheel-drive vehicle she didn’t recognize. Car doors slammed, and a moment later Mark, Russell, and two other men stepped into her office.

  Mark Shannon placed a large plastic bag on her desk. “Roberto tell you what we’ve got here?”

  Ellen nodded and stood up, forcing a thin smile. “Let’s take it into one of the examining rooms, all right? No sense putting it on display for anyone who might walk in here.”

  She led Shannon into one of the examining rooms behind her office, closing the door to shut the others out. Then she opened the bag and carefully removed the bones, laying them out on the counter that ran the length of one of the walls. Working silently, she listened as Shannon explained that the skeleton had been found intact except for the missing leg, and that the bones had still been lightly attached to each other by a few fragments of cartilage
. “But they came apart as I was bagging them up,” he finished.

  Ellen nodded, first picking up the pelvis, then turning her attention to the skull. Her own mind was putting together an identification as rapidly as had Russell Owen’s, but she struggled against the urge to jump to quick conclu-sions. “Well, there’s no question it was a girl, and a fairly young one, too.”

  “How young?” Shannon asked, already certain he knew what was coming.

  Ellen Filmore frowned. “Teenaged, I’d say. Anywhere from thirteen to fifteen.” She pointed to the intact teeth in the skull and jaw. “It shouldn’t be too hard to get a positive identification from those,” she said quietly. Now there was no longer a way to postpone putting a name to the skeleton. “I think you might want to start tracking down Julie Spellman’s dental records.”

  Flicking on his portable radio, Shannon spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece, then turned back to the doctor. “Am I right that they haven’t been out there very long?”

  “No more than a day or so, at most.” Ellen sighed. “And possibly only a few hours.”

  “Any idea how they got so clean?” Mark asked. “It doesn’t look like they’ve been gnawed on.”

  Ellen’s jaw tightened. “Call me in an hour or so, all right? And you might want to check with Roberto about our other patients’ dentists,” she said. “I’m not about to positively identify this as Julie Spellman.”

  “Got it,” Mark said. “I’ll have a listing of every missing girl in the area by the time I get back to my office.”

  A few minutes later the examining room cleared out and Ellen set to work, measuring the bones, taking samples from them to send to the lab, and trying to discover how they might have been picked so clean while suffering no apparent damage.

  A grisly thought came into her mind as she remembered what had been found a few years earlier in a Milwaukee apartment, yet as she examined the bones, they didn’t appear to have been boiled.

  Rather, the matter that would normally have been clinging to the bones appeared to have been carefully picked off, down to the last fragment.