Rock Spider (A New Hampshire Mystery Book 2)

by Mira Gibson

  ROCK SPIDER

  Mira Gibson

  ALSO BY MIRA GIBSON:

  The New Hampshire Mysteries

  DADDY SODA

  ROCK SPIDER

  TAR HEART

  The Kensington Killers

  COLD DARK FEAR (Prequel to The Kensington Killers Series)

  LUNATIC

  CRANK

  MANIAC

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  More Books by Mira Gibson

  Author Biography

  Teaser Chapter from Tar Heart (A New Hampshire Mystery)

  Prologue

  Warped asphalt, marred with shallow potholes and buckled with frost heaves—the scars of harsh winters and brief sweltering summers—unfolded under a shock of headlights like a story she could recite. It didn’t matter that a ghostly shroud of fog had crept in from the lake, clouding the road, or that the windshield was blurred with condensation. Gertrude knew every bump, its relationship to each bend, dip, and swell. Poor suspension on her old Audi had her anticipating the jolts and jerks. Her body was programmed to tense, to lean into the wheel, her chin to its clammy plastic, her hands in a white-knuckle grip.

  A sharp bend hugging the south side of the lake prompted her to downshift—fast flick of the wrist, precise stomp on the clutch, forcing it to the sweet spot just shy of the carpet so the gears wouldn’t grind. Then her hand was back on the wheel.

  She wondered where summer went in the dead of night, why it chose to cripple the day then vanish as soon as the sun set, leaving the long dark hours chilly and dank, not typical of New Hampshire. Strange weather patterns were playing nightly practical jokes.

  In the passenger seat sat Doris—cardigan wrapped tight but not buttoned, chipped polish over demurely rounded nails, eyes like a sun-startled raccoon. She used the hem of her sleeve to wipe away the condensation for Gertrude, but her effort only smeared the glass badly, leaving streaks too distracting to properly see through.

  “Let's roll the windows down,” she suggested, monotone, still rattled from their long, strange evening.

  Doris was testing the vent, holding her hand above it and working the dial, as if it wasn’t already blasting. Giving that up, she cranked her window down then turned and strained to reach into the backseat, while Gertrude figuring that Doris speaking to her at all was progress, rolled her own window down by a good six inches.

  As a result, damp air gusted through the car and kicked up a nest of junk at Doris’ feet. She stomped on it, making an honest effort to brace down candy wrappers and old magazines, fluttering receipts and case files too hopeless to update, a graveyard of Gertrude's career and her sister’s teenaged deposits—every time they got home: Could you take your trash? A million excuses: Next time? I’m tired. I have to get the grocery bag. I have to pee. It’s not all mine.

  “Did it help?” She spoke up over the torrent, examining the windshield by sweeping her fingers over the glass and creating another smear Gertrude would have to squint to see through.

  Doris’ button-nose breath caused a feather of condensation to creep its way into her sightlines.

  “We’ll be home in five minutes,” she said, implying there was no need to improve things.

  “Are we going to talk about it when we get home?”

  She was perched at the edge of her seat, forearm draped across the dash, as she rocked and bounced with the grain of the road like she was riding a wild animal.

  A quick glimpse at Doris and she spied the absence of a seatbelt. Rather it flapped against the car door, buckle rattling metal against plastic.

  “Put your seatbelt on.”

  “Why? We’re at the bridge.”

  The glow of twin wrought-iron streetlamps at the far end of the bridge cast just enough light to make Doris correct. They’d reached the end of Messer Street, having navigated its jarring twists and hairpin turns which gave way to the smooth but rickety wooden bridge that would arch into Opechee Street, its fresh pavement, wind-kissed Maples, and the distinct scent of cut-grass mingling with the marshy breath of the lake where they lived.

  Gertrude didn’t nag her about her seatbelt as she hit the gas, accelerating across, popping the clutch and upshifting in rapid succession, old childhood fears the bridge would give way and kill them, rumbling in the back of her mind as loudly as the wooden slats under her Audi’s tires.

  POW.

  Gertrude startled the second she heard it. The sound of the gunshot cut through her foggy thoughts—the fragments and images of their bizarrely rehearsed and even more bizarrely executed confrontation with their parents—that had been distracting her the entire drive home.

  Doris didn’t have to confirm it had been a firearm. They’d lived in Laconia their whole lives, born and raised there, and the sound was unmistakable, though they usually heard the pops and bangs echoing in the afternoon and early evening, never at two in the morning, never a solitary shot, and never coming from the woods where hidden homes, the mysterious characters inside—agoraphobic and tucked away until death, neighbors they didn’t know existed until medics rolled them out in body bags—lay dormant.

  Agitated by the disturbance and even more so by Doris’ incessant guessing—Hunters? No, not at this time of year. Maybe a car backfiring? Didn’t sound like it. The Millers or Winona’s dad, or that strange Chinese family that moved in last winter?—all verbal blows both given and received during their volatile screaming match with Mom and Dad, now gone from her sister’s skittering mind. Gertrude realized she'd hit the gas, nerves roiling around inside her, and the curve through Opechee would be a trick to control.

  “Put your seat belt on now!” Not liking the fatal rawness of her tone, she repeated herself anyway, as the tires shrieked against the grain of the bend and the fog thickened. The road was disappearing—It's a story and you know every word, rely on it, no need to see. But Gertrude was wrestling down a sickening knot in her gut, a hot rush of bad tingles, her loosening bowels, an old reaction to weapons firing as though her body didn’t know what age she was, didn’t know she wasn’t a child, didn’t know the gun hadn’t gone off in the next room, didn’t know her sister was alive even though Doris was screaming at her from the passenger’s seat to slow down.

  Her voice, shrill and desperate, cut through the noise of Gertrude’s time warp, “Look out!”

  Billows of fog slipped over the windshield then a figure appeared, shadowy and unreal, the night telling a lie too complicated for her to make sense of. Were her eyes tricking her brain? White-hot panic disconnected her mind from her hands, and from her foot. Two seconds after she slammed on the brakes, cutting the wheel hard, vehicle careening sideways, she understood her reflexes had been fast but unfocused.

&nbs
p; The next thing she knew glass was shattering against her cheek—excruciating ringing in her ear, the Audi on its side, flying and scraping over asphalt. She was crushed—Doris: limbs loose, stretching, tucking, straining, the worst cry Gertrude had ever heard coming out of her like death clawing its way up her throat. And then she didn't feel Doris crushing her and then she did, and then she didn't, slamming and disappearing, over and over. When she finally understood the vehicle was rolling, the crashing splash that followed had her once again bogged in woolly confusion.

  Wet ice enveloped her. There was no air. Her skull was throbbing. Black water stung her eyes. She gasped then choked, coughing the lake water out of her mouth, as she frantically felt for her seatbelt, feeling, feeling, following the nylon strap down to where it met with a hard square of plastic. From the corner of her eye, Doris’ chestnut brown hair waved at her. Her hand was lolling freely, loose and relaxed through the murk. Doris' body had a terrible ease to it, no fight, no tension as though her sister was no longer there.

  Stiffly, muscling in slow motion, hands quavering in the cold, fingers numbing, breath held and lungs burning, Gertrude pressed the seatbelt release, yanking the nylon and when it gave, she drifted to the backseat, away from Doris. Strategies wouldn’t formulate, her thoughts as devouring and jagged as the freezing depths of the lake. She pushed off hard, swimming downward, hands tangling in Doris’ cardigan, searching for something real to grasp, her arms, her waist, anything to push her through the window and free them.

  She thought she saw the nasty gleam of eyes studying her beyond the windshield, swamp creatures lurking, but those were only white starbursts of pain flaring behind her eyes, complicating her effort.

  Releasing Doris’ sweater, she saw with her hands. Hard cloth? It was the ceiling. Plastic? It was the door, yes a handle, higher a lip, the windowsill. She kicked through the car window.

  The nose of the Audi was at the bottom of the lake. Looking up she gleaned ripples in the distance. The surface. She kicked downward, hauling herself deeper, and grasped Doris’ arm through the open window.

  Trusting that she had her sister well enough was a prayer at best, but her lungs were aching and her head was throbbing. Drowning was all too real.

  She started kicking. Her legs felt like twigs ready to snap. Her hands were too numb to tell if she was still gripping Doris, but the weight of her sister told her she had her. Half fighting, half surrendering to natural buoyancy, as lazy and gradual as it was, she rose to the surface and broke through with an exhilarated gasp, but got a mouth full of water, splashed up by her flailing arm. She coughed it out and got her bearings. Stillness all around her—shimmering pinprick stars in timeless constellations, the lake as still as meditation, Balsam Firs and White Pines stately at the water’s edge, the bloom of lights from the bridge in the distance, serenely oblivious to their dire straits. They were too far beyond civilization to be rescued.

  Keeping her arm hooked firmly around her sister’s chest and their heads above water—Gertrude paddling, Doris’ limp and drifting, gurgles and splashes and monsters below—she came to the muddy shore.

  Check for breathing, give mouth-to-mouth, pump her chest five times, check for breathing, give mouth-to-mouth, pump her chest five times. But though Gertrude believed she was doing this, she’d already collapsed unconscious beside her sister.

  Chapter One

  Gertrude couldn’t place how long she’d been sitting there. Even more daunting was trying to fathom how many days—Weeks? Had it been months?—she’d been cooped up in this room where white tile floors, white walls, and a white hospital bed were holding her prisoner. She pressed the remote and her bed jutted upright, rigid in its mechanical ascent. The ward smelled like rubbing alcohol and death, if death was a musty, semi-organic, brain-stinging odor, the undercurrent of which seemed oddly familiar.

  The staff’s kindness was nightmarish. Their waning smiles beneath dead eyes reminded her of the old swing-set behind her parents house, frayed ropes that could snap, bolts too eroded to hold. Better not trust it, she’d warned Doris, exercising teenaged wisdom to keep her four-year old sister from bottoming out in the grass.

  Orderlies provided her meals—white bread with luncheon meat and wilted lettuce inside, an apple too dimpled and waxy to eat, sweaty jello cups, milk and water and juice. They were always served on a plastic tray and placed beside a little white paper cup just like the ones her dentist used to hand her after fluoride treatments, rinse your mouth and spit. Then he’d blot her lip with her own bib, the same gesture the orderlies used.

  The little cups at the hospital didn't contain water, but rather pills that rattled around inside.

  For your headaches, they'd explained, for her anxiety, the tinnitus that would burst deep inside her ear when she felt too cold. Several times she’d asked her nurse to raise the temperature in her room. It was freezing, the AC set too high, it chilled the surgical staples that arched in a haphazard semi-circle around her left ear, industrial stitches meant to hold her skull together, the side of her head that had cracked hard against glass when her Audi slammed on its side before tumbling into the lake. She argued that if it were warmer in here, then the staples wouldn’t be cold and her headaches wouldn't be as bad. She wouldn’t need the pills, see? The staples caused the headaches, which caused the anxiety, which caused the sleeplessness.

  When that argument had failed, she explained how the pills bathed her in a vacant, zombie-like reticence, which prevented her from recovering, from excelling at retraining her cognition. Her physical therapy was suffering. Her explanation had been perfectly reasonable, but in response the morning nurse, Jefferson, had only feigned a smile that wavered badly. I hear you, her taut smile had said, but the nurse had been otherwise occupied, angrily stripping the bed sheets, grimacing at their smell, eyeing the bathroom then shuffling over, the bundled sheets under her arm.

  She'd turned on the shower faucet, ran the sink, tested the temperature, admonishing Gertrude with each action. The sheets wouldn’t smell if only she’d shower, had been what her pinched mouth told her.

  The evening nurse, Salisbury, was no better, except rather than dismiss Gertrude and make passive-aggressive overtures, she’d given Gertrude her undivided attention, leaning in close, eyes twitching, as she examined her like an insect skeptical of a rotting piece of fruit.

  As Gertrude listened to the melodic laughter of children too far beyond her window to spy, and as she studied the heat-heavy landscape outside, the Maples, their leaves green and lustrous, peat moss blanketing their trunks, and the blue sky, its popcorn clouds that looked solid enough to touch, she absentmindedly grazed her fingertips over the staples that arched around her ear like a train track, the flesh beneath still bubbling up and tender, the hair stubbly along the jagged track. The evidence of how long she'd been here, she thought. A month’s growth maybe, was that how long she’d been here? A month?

  Traumatic brain injury...

  She knew that was what was wrong with her. The Medical Director, Dr. Hagstaff had been reminding her of the diagnosis every afternoon after her daily neuropsychological evaluations, and eventually the information had stuck.

  She understood.

  Her memory was jumbled up because of the accident. Her brain now organized events out of order. It fused memories together that had occurred years apart. Many life events she'd probably cherished were now gone—birthdays and vacations, her first kiss, her graduation day. Things she felt certain had happened to her had in fact happened to Doris and vice versa, and realizing this was jarring. She thought nightmares were real and was convinced real things she’d survived had only been nightmares.

  She felt eyes on her, but didn’t tear her gaze from the scenery outside to glance over her shoulder at the door, its narrow window where she sensed someone watching her. She’d been fidgeting with the frayed hem of her sleeves, poking her fingers through the loose chunky stitches, playing with the yarn, studying the gradient fade from purple to ros
y brown when her gaze wasn't resting on the trees outside.

  He was making her antsy. People always did. This wasn't a symptom stemming from the accident. She’d always been this way, deeply anxious unless she was completely alone for miles and miles.

  There came a faint knock at the door so she touched eyes with Dr. Hagstaff through the window then settled her gaze on his tuft of wispy brown hair, as he entered. He pushed his horned rim glasses up his nose and the angle magnified his dry blinking eyes. His skin was ruddy, though his face was boyish otherwise—down sloping nose and a taut, curling mouth. The mess of papers which were somehow always in his arms plus his worn out corduroy pants and rumpled button-down shirt gave him the appearance of a professor who’d just lost tenure by way of scandal.

  A sharp, nasality in his tone undermined his sincerity, as he asked, “How’s it going today?”

  He’d probably had a promising future after medical school, but social awkwardness must have narrowed his options. At least that was the story Gertrude had come up with. He was certainly old enough to have been rejected from a number of opportunities before winding up here, failing his way into the Lakes Region Brain Injury Rehabilitation Center.

  When she met his question with a blank stare, he said, “Are the headaches easing up?”

  “These windshields don’t open,” she complained in a far away voice that scared her. She must have slipped beyond her body again, detached from her mouth and tongue.

  Placing his hand on the windowsill, Dr. Hagstaff winced a smirk. “Windshields?” Then, encouragingly, he began mouthing the word as if prompting a toddler. “Wiiiinnndddoo-”

  “Window,” she said gloomily, embarrassment a hot flare in her chest. “That’s what I said. My head is cold.”

  “It’s very hot out, mid-nineties.”

  “I want real air.”

  Shifting her gaze out the window, she saw the children she’d heard. They were waddling like a row of ducklings behind a woman wearing a floppy brimmed hat, long matronly skirt, and clogs. Gertrude wracked her brain for the name of the Montessori school nearby, but found only dark pockets in the hollows of her memory. They couldn’t be in school, she realized, wasn’t it July? Must be day care.