“And this is where you think a fucking serial killer is hiding?”
“Cold feet?” she asked again, and tried for a grin. As far as coercion went, it sounded weak even to her.
Leon gritted his teeth. “You know what? Yeah, I think my feet are feeling a little frosty.”
“We’ve come this far. We can’t turn back now.”
“Speak for yourself,” he said, and started zipping up his camera bag.
“Leon.”
He started buckling straps, getting ready to move.
“Leon, look at me.” She reached out and put a hand on his arm.
He froze, and even in the fading light she could see the fine hairs on the back of his arm stand up.
He looked at her.
“Leon, do it for me,” she said. “Look, I’m not saying we go down there, okay? Let’s just watch and see what we can see. It’s probably just a cabin anyway.”
He wavered, then shrugged again. “Fine, but there is no way I’m going down that hill.”
“Thank you.” She took her hand off his arm and went back to watching the cabin. “But at least get some shots while we’re up here.”
He unzipped his bag and assembled his camera, the same 35mm with attached zoom lens he’d had with him on the ridge near Hillsborough, and started snapping pictures.
“Any good?” she asked after a while.
“Okay, I think. Usually the sunset makes for great light, but with that mist filtering through everything I’m not sure.”
“Just do your best.”
They waited another ten minutes before the headlights appeared.
* * *
Laura noticed them first as a faint glow. There hadn’t been time to find a pair of binoculars, so she had a much wider field of view than Leon, who had his eye glued to the viewfinder.
“Hey.” She nudged him in the ribs. “Over there.”
They both tried to crouch a little lower.
The headlights bounced over the edge of the bowl and down the track, cutting veins through the mist, and stopped fifty yards shy of the cabin.
“Give me that,” Laura said, and picked up the camera. She used it as a makeshift telescope trained down toward the lights. “I want to see this car.”
But it wasn’t a car.
It was a truck.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Leon couldn’t take the suspense of not knowing. Questions poured out of him rapid-fire.
“Who is it? Is it him? Is it the Kid? What does he look like?”
“It’s Frank,” she hissed.
He matched her volume and started whispering again. “Deputy Stuart?”
Through the viewfinder, she saw him open his door, then quickly reach up and turn off his dome light. He climbed out and moved around to the hood, leaving the driver’s-side door open behind him.
He had pulled an open flannel shirt over his tank top. In his hand she could see something black and boxy.
His gun.
“He’s armed,” she whispered.
As she said it, he gripped the gun in both hands, pointed it at the ground, and started jogging toward the cabin. He moved lightly from tree to tree, getting closer by the second. At the last tree he broke into a sprint, ran right at the house, and slid to a stop with his back against the planks, his chest heaving up and down.
“What do we do?” Leon asked.
“Nothing,” Laura said. She couldn’t think of a way to get down off the edge of the bowl. Leon had refused to move, and Frank had no idea she was up here. If she tromped down the side after him, he might well turn and shoot before they could even exchange a word.
She dropped her eye to the camera again.
It was almost like watching a movie. Below them, the tiny version of Frank went into a crouch and crab-walked along the base of the wall. At the window he stopped, raised his head, peered inside. It must not have been interesting because he dropped down and kept moving. In another second he disappeared around the corner.
“I can’t see him,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s behind the cabin.”
They waited. The seconds ticked past.
“Is he still back there?”
“Yes,” Laura breathed.
“It’s been too long. Maybe we should do something.”
“You’re not going down there.”
“I thought you wanted to go down there,” he muttered.
“That was before Frank was running around with a gun.”
“We could try to call him.” Leon pulled out his phone and unlocked the screen, then shook his head. “No service up here.”
Down below, Frank emerged around the far corner and worked his way around to the front. At the cabin door, he reached up and jiggled the knob.
“He’s back.”
The door swung open.
“It’s unlocked,” she whispered.
“Let me see.”
“Just hold on.”
Frank flexed his legs and came to standing, leaned over to peer into the door, then moved inside with the gun extended in front of him.
The darkness inside swallowed him up.
“He’s inside.”
They waited.
“Oh, god,” Leon said.
“He’ll be fine.”
He grabbed her by the arm.
“What?” she hissed.
“Over there,” he said, and the tremble in his voice made her pay attention. She tore her eye off the viewfinder and followed his finger to a spot a hundred feet left of the house.
Nothing there.
“What?” she hissed again.
“Something moved.”
“Where?”
“Right there.”
She panned the zoom lens left and peered through. Nothing but leaves and pine needles and logs. A perfectly ordinary forest floor.
“You’re seeing things. There’s nothing—”
Something moved.
As she watched, a section of leaves slid downward, funneling into some kind of hole. The forest floor moved like quicksand, opening like a mouth, the ground itself sinking until it disappeared.
And then it rose out of the hole.
A figure in black, hooded, slim and tall and quick. He appeared from beneath the ground like a devil and bolted toward the cabin. Something strange about his gait. It looked like he was gliding.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god.”
Laura wondered who was talking. Realized it was herself.
“What do we do?” Leon said.
Without thinking, she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted.
“Frank!”
The figure in black snapped its head around, looked right at them, and Laura felt her blood turn to ice.
“Oh Jesus, he sees us,” Leon grunted, and buried his face in the ground.
“Frank!” she yelled again.
No movement inside.
The figure turned away from them, charged forward again, faster now, flying toward the cabin.
“Frank!” she screamed.
And then the figure disappeared inside. For a second, nothing happened.
Laura clenched her fists, squeezed her eyes open and shut, tried not to panic.
Then that familiar sound, much sharper at a distance—CRACK CRACK CRACK—three gunshots fired in quick succession.
She didn’t think, didn’t even react. Fear, the same fear she’d struggled all her life to keep locked in a box deep inside her chest, suddenly didn’t seem to matter. It crumpled off of her like a tissue paper dress caught in a driving rain.
* * *
Laura burst out of the brush at full speed, over the lip—the decision somehow made even though she couldn’t remember making it—and then she was flying down the slope, arms pumping, the Browning like a five-pound dumbbell swinging back and forth with dangerous intensity, rocks and logs appearing and then passing under her like water, and then the flat bottom of the bowl rose up to meet
her and the surprising flatness, the sudden loss of gravity’s assistance, made it feel like running through molasses, and she pumped her arms harder, the lethal weight in her hand making her bicep burn, the cabin growing until she could almost reach out and touch it, and everything else, every fear and whim and care, dropped away until the only sensations left to her were the mist sliding past her skin like oil and the steady burn of cool mountain air on the inside of her lungs.
CRACK.
The sound blistered her eardrums from several directions at once and she realized it was an echo, the curvature of the bowl bouncing reports at her from several directions. The door was close now.
CRACK.
Old wood splintered a hole into the door and something reached out and bit her on the hip. She slid to a stop, raised the Browning into the A-frame stance her father had beat into her, fired twice quickly, the big .40 caliber slugs tearing apple-sized holes in the door, and then she turned sideways and threw herself down behind a pine tree.
The world went very quiet.
And then it started to buzz. She tweaked one ear, trying to fix it, but the gunshots had temporarily ruined her hearing. She became uncomfortably aware that someone could have walked out the cabin door—could be standing behind her right now—and she would never hear a thing.
She twisted at the waist, forced herself to look.
No one there.
She waited like that, tugging an earlobe every few seconds, giving them the time to heal themselves. And they did. Second by second, sound returned. After two minutes she could hear the birds chirping in the trees, undisturbed by the evening’s violence.
“He—”
The cry choked off before it had even begun. Hey? Help? Either way, she was sure it came from somewhere in front of her.
She came around the side of the tree and jogged the last twenty feet to the cabin’s front door, then looked through one of the bullet holes. It was dark inside, the light of the sun nearly gone, but she could make out the major details.
The inside appeared to be split into two small rooms, with the door opening into the hallway that ran front-to-back between them. No sign of Frank. No sign of the hooded figure.
She pushed the door open with the muzzle of the Browning, slid in between the door and the frame, then ducked into the room on the left. She walked a few feet farther in, surveying the space.
Without warning, the room’s door slammed shut behind her, followed by the rapid scrape of wood on wood.
She raised the Browning, pulled the trigger.
And it jammed.
A tired spring in the magazine, maybe, or her own sweat and dirt clogging the mechanism. Or maybe it was the years of disuse. Maybe it was a miracle it had fired at all.
Tears were streaming down her face even though she couldn’t remember starting to cry. She was only vaguely aware of them falling onto her hands as she tried to work the gun’s action, and when that failed, to pry the breech open with her fingernails. One nail ripped, then another. In a moment of pure frustration, she whipped the five-pound chunk of metal against the door, a final fuck you to whoever was out there.
To her surprise, it took out a chunk of wood.
She ran a finger across the hole and felt the damp deep inside. Rotten to the core. The room was empty save a bed frame without a mattress and hanging from one wall some rusted farm implements. She chose a short-handled pickaxe and reached for it, then winced at the pain in her side.
Blood seeped from a wound just above her left hip. She pressed on it, winced again, and tried to forget it was there. The pickaxe came away from the wall and she swung the blunt end against the door, then again, and again. Lumps of wet pine showered her face and chest, her arms shrieked in protest, but she kept up the blows, punching the metal wedge through the barrier with all the strength she could muster. The door groaned once more before giving way.
She was out.
A scream from somewhere at the end of the hall—no, it was too far away. From behind the house. A back door? She reached the end of the hall, her hands searching, finding the knob. She ripped the door open and hurtled out.
A blinding flash rose to greet her followed by a familiar roar, splinters exploded through the air, and she found herself down in the leaves.
Unable to hear.
Unable to see.
* * *
Waking up was like clawing her way out of a hole, and it felt like it took hours. No, it couldn’t have taken that long. When she opened her eyes, the smell of gunpowder still hung in the air.
She opened her eyes.
“Frank,” she said, and sat up.
All over her body, a million tiny cuts. She ran a hand down one arm and felt miniature toothpicks sticking out of her, hundreds of them. She pulled one out and blood flowed.
“Frank,” she said again, and stood.
He wasn’t difficult to find. Less than thirty feet away he leaned against a tree, a smile open across his abdomen, eyes dead, the glass doll’s eyes of something no longer animate.
“Frank.”
She walked to him, every step like torture, wetness flowing down her skin, soaking into her clothes.
Then she saw the mask, a black hood with crude eye holes cut into it. Frank was clutching it in one hand.
He was close.
She took another step.
Stopped.
At her feet lay the remains of the hooded figure. He was just beside the tree, spread-eagle in the grass, shotgun by his side. Even now one hand held to it tightly. One finger still slipped through the trigger guard.
His feet were bare.
And his face was missing. It had been totally and completely annihilated.
She walked between them, turned back, and stared down at the grass, frozen. Stood like that until the pain forced her to her knees. She took Frank’s hand and held it, squeezed it, and waited for him to squeeze back.
She waited like that for a long time, room at last inside her to be afraid, nothing left to fill it with but grief.
PART II
NEVER A TRACE OF RED
CHAPTER
21
THE DART WAS mostly fixed. She’d killed more than a few days working on it herself, using the barn as a makeshift garage, and it was running better than ever. The radio still shorted out from time to time, and the ignition was sticking again in the cold weather. The heater didn’t work for shit.
So she shivered a little and pulled her coat tight as she braked, the whistling wind dying down to a hum. The radio had gone out a few minutes prior, and it crackled back to life as she bounced off the highway and onto the dirt track the Chambers family called a driveway.
“—front continues moving in from the northwest. It’s a chilly one and temperatures are going to stay cold the next few days. Next Monday is Christmas and things may warm up before then. The real anticipation is centered on the warmer, wetter air moving in from the southwest. If nothing changes, we may see several inches of snow this weekend. Other possible—”
Laura clicked off the radio and collected the shopping bags out of the back seat. She pushed the door open with her hip and used her foot to shove it closed behind her. She glanced down at the entryway table at the stack of mail, and that’s when she saw the picture.
She recognized it right away. The picture had run in many papers, but this version was quite large. Laura was nearly certain this one had been cut out of the News & Observer from July 12, two days after the cabin, when they’d run it on the front page. It had been folded in half once to fit in the plain white envelope still underneath it. The envelope had her name and address printed in neat block letters, and the postmark was from Charlotte.
There was no return address.
She shifted the bags to one arm and snagged the picture between two fingers before pushing through into the kitchen and settling the shopping on the counter. Her mother was in the living room, reclined in her Barcalounger, her stories blaring on the television.
&n
bsp; “Mama, this came in the mail?”
Diane grunted.
“It’s been opened.”
She turned slightly in the chair. “It’s my house, isn’t it?”
Laura bit her lip, then asked, “Was there anything else in the envelope?”
“I didn’t see anything.” She shouted it over the hospital scene playing out on Days of Our Lives.
“Maybe you could turn it down a bit.”
Her mother twisted her bulk, the chair squealing in protest. “Don’t you take that tone with me, missy. And wipe that look off your face, like you just been slapped. If seeing that picture again upsets you so, tell your friend not to send clippings.”
“It’s not from my friend,” Laura said.
“Oh no? Who else would it be?”
“Not someone who likes me.”
Diane huffed. “Who could? After all that?”
Laura saw her mother with rare clarity in that moment. “You’re supposed to,” she said. “You’re my mother.”
“I love you, dear, but I don’t have to like you.”
“What should I have done? Left that girl to die?”
Diane wrung her hands, looking very much like a bit player on her soap opera. “Oh, Laura, she was already dead.”
“We don’t know that.”
“And Frank died because of your so-called help. That’s two dead instead of one. Seems to me the math is real clear.”
She turned back to the TV, and Laura let herself back out onto the porch, hands shaking.
The picture’s edge sliced into the vulnerable flesh between her forefinger and thumb and she jumped as though bitten. She peeled her eyes away from the opening cut and looked up, out over the large and empty fields. They extended away from the house in every direction. Besides a small stand of river birch shading the area between the house and barn, there wasn’t a single tree within three hundred yards of this spot. The fields extended two miles behind her until they ran into another farm of similar size, and the driveway extended almost a mile before connecting with the highway.
One grimy plastic chair lived at the end of the porch. She sat and held up her hand to the light. A red globule of blood hung from fleshy skin, perfectly round, unmoving. Certain people had a total inability to stand the sight of blood, but Laura had acquired a different aversion: the taste. For almost six months she had assiduously avoided even the aroma of blood. She’d spent six months hiding from the crackling fat of rare steaks, six months dodging anyone with a bloody nose, six months flossing regularly and gently, careful of her gums. Anything to avoid tasting it again.
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