The Frank Peretti Collection

by Frank E. Peretti

  Maggie opened her eyes again and glared at Tracy as if she’d said something stupid. “Don’t you know what happened to Cliff?”

  Tracy lifted her hands. “Maggie, no, we don’t know what happened to him. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. That’s why we’re here.”

  Maggie sat up on the bed. “He got eaten! Eaten alive! Everybody knows that!”

  “Now we don’t know that for sure,” Tracy said, as if Maggie had said nothing unusual.

  Maggie looked toward a boarded-up window as if something lurked outside. “And now it’s gonna happen to me!”

  This must have something to do with the superstitions Tracy was talking about, Steve thought. And Tracy wasn’t kidding. The terror in this woman was so real it chilled his blood as well.

  Levi consoled her, “It don’t have to happen, Maggie! You can get free of that sin right now!”

  And here was Levi’s religious quirk, another thing Tracy had warned him about.

  “Levi.” Tracy glared at the man to silence him. Then she turned back to the woman. “Maggie, do you know—”

  “It was a beautiful thing!” she repeated defensively. “I don’t know what I did that was so wrong! Cliff loved me and I loved him and—” she looked at Steve. “—I just wanted to be happy. I didn’t wanna hurt anybody. I just wanted somebody to love me, that’s all.”

  Tracy nodded with understanding. “I hear you, Maggie. I hear you.”

  Maggie softened as she saw the kindness in Tracy’s eyes. “You know how it is.”

  “Sure I do.” Tracy took Maggie’s hand again. “Harold’s been pretty rough on you, I know.”

  “I’ve tried to be good to Harold.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “But he’s a mean man, Tracy.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “And Cliff made me feel good. He treated me like I was somebody, like a lady.” Now Maggie looked at Steve. She was trying to make him understand. “Cliff was a good man, and he treated me right.”

  Trying to be helpful, Steve answered, “I’m sure he did,” and then felt uncomfortable for saying it. Cliff should have been treating Evelyn right, he thought.

  “I met him at Charlie’s,” Maggie volunteered. “He said he wanted to take pictures of the mining towns, and so I started going with him, showing him around. I liked him right away. And he kept coming back to take more pictures. Sometimes he didn’t even take pictures; he just wanted to be with me.”

  Steve didn’t know if he could listen to much more of this. Cliff and this woman. It was unthinkable. It was all he could do to hide his shock and disgust as he thought of Evelyn and the boys and what this would do to them.

  But confession did seem good for Maggie’s soul. She was calming down with each new piece of information she shared. Tracy knew it and was determined to draw out more.

  “Maggie, where were you the night Cliff was killed?”

  “At home, having a big fight with Harold.”

  “And that’s the same night he kicked you out?”

  “Uh-huh. He found out about Cliff. He was mad.”

  “So about what time did he kick you out?”

  “I don’t know. About ten.” Well, that let Harold off the hook, Tracy thought. Unless he had had some of his cronies kill Benson, which would be difficult to prove.

  “And that’s the last you saw him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you ever meet Evelyn Benson, Cliff’s wife?”

  “No.”

  “So you were never threatened by her, you know what I mean?”

  Maggie shook her head. “I never saw Cliff’s wife.”

  “Did Cliff ever give any indication that his wife knew about you, or was upset about it, or might want to get even if she did find out?”

  Maggie shook her head. “Tracy, Cliff’s wife didn’t kill him. I know.”

  Tracy hesitated, braced herself, and asked, “What about Harold? Did Harold say he would kill Cliff?”

  Maggie shook her head.

  “Did he say he would kill you?”

  Her eyes became vacant, and she shook her head in despair. “He didn’t have to. It’s just going to happen, that’s all. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “No, it’s not going to happen,” said Tracy. “We’re going to get you out of here, right now.”

  “It won’t help!”

  “How do you know?”

  “It won’t help,” Levi agreed. “The problem’s in Maggie’s heart, so it goes with her. It don’t matter where you move her.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt to try, now can it?”

  Levi shook his head in frustration. “Tracy . . .”

  “Deputy Ellis,” she corrected him.

  “Deputy Ellis. That’d just be running, and you can’t run from this.”

  “Maggie has to get out of this town before she gets hurt,” Tracy said in a tone that made it an order. “Maggie, would you like to come with me? I’ll get you a room somewhere safe, somewhere nobody will know about.”

  Maggie looked at Tracy. Maggie’s expression was disbelieving.

  Levi insisted, “It’s in her heart, Deputy Ellis. Her sins are gonna follow her no matter where she goes!”

  Tracy put her finger an inch from Levi’s nose and snapped, “Shut up!”

  “I’m trying to—”

  “You’re only filling her head with crap, Levi! Now if I’m going to help Maggie at all, it’ll have to be in the real world; you got that? We’re not dealing with fantasies here.”

  “You don’t think sin is real?”

  She seemed about to slap him, but reined herself in with great effort and tried to sound calm but firm. “Levi, under the present circumstances, if anybody gets her killed it’s going to be you and your stories. So please, just be quiet, all right?”

  Tracy took a moment just to breathe before addressing Maggie again. “Maggie, I’ll get you out of the valley for a few days, take you someplace where nobody can find you.”

  Maggie had no answer.

  “I’ll come back in a few minutes. If you want to get out of here and come with me, then be ready. Levi, you help her, you understand?” He was about to protest. She nailed him with a voice that jolted Steve. “You’ve got another man’s wife in your house, Levi, right in your bedroom! I will use that, so help me! Now help Maggie get her things together and have her ready by the time I get back. Is that clear?”

  Levi looked at Maggie and spoke softly, “We better do like she says, Maggie.”

  Tracy rose, and following her cue, Steve went with her down the back stairs and outside.

  Steve was disturbed, brooding, and bewildered all at once. “I had no idea—”

  “Don’t look,” Tracy interrupted, “but there’s a man under that lean-to over there, and I think he’s watching us.”

  Steve didn’t look as he asked, “Watching us? You mean spying?”

  Tracy headed for her car, acting casual, her conversational tone covering the gravity of what she was saying. “There are people looking for Maggie, trying to keep tabs on her. Guess they’ll be keeping an eye on you too—and me.”

  Steve managed a corner-of-the-eye glance. Across a vacant lot and under a rickety lean-to, a thin little man in blue mechanic’s coveralls appeared to be working on an old Willy pickup.

  “That’s Carl Ingfeldt,” said Tracy. “He doesn’t live there, and that isn’t his truck. I don’t think he works for Harold Bly, but Harold’s the kind of man he’d want to do favors for. It won’t be good that we were seen together at Cobb’s.”

  Tracy finally caught the little man looking their way and waved, shouting a friendly greeting, “Hey, Carl!”

  Carl waved back, but not happily, and then walked away, leaving the Willy sitting there with the hood open.

  Tracy sighed. “Well. They know what we’re up to.”

  Steve paused by the patrol car.

  “Who is this Harold Bly, anyway?” Steve asked.

  Tracy snickered der
isively. “He’s the local godfather. He owns the mining company and most of the town, and there are some pretty strong superstitions about him and his family. People are afraid of him, and I think he uses that to his advantage.” Then she added, “And he’s not much of a husband, you may have gathered.”

  “So you think maybe Harold—”

  “Steve,” Tracy cautioned, “we’ll have to talk about this later. Right now, you need to get out of town. I guess you can see, there could be more to your brother’s death than a bear attack, which means I have quite a bit of work ahead of me. Now listen to me, I mean this, my job’s going to be hard enough. I don’t need any more skirmishes like we had in Charlie’s.”

  “But you know what you’re saying, that someone actually did that to Cliff.”

  “Steve, I’m not saying anything one way or the other. All I can do is try to find out what really happened and why, and—” She considered it a moment. “—no matter how it all turns out, I know it’s going to be ugly through and through, and I’m not going to like it.”

  “Well I certainly don’t like it. The whole situation is overwhelming.” An understatement deserving a trophy, Steve thought.

  Tracy nodded regretfully. “Just take it one step at a time. Go ahead and—I don’t know, talk to Marcus again. By all means, talk to Evelyn. Maybe you’ll find out something that’ll change the whole picture. I really hope you do.”

  “But if this is the work of—of people . . .” He was trying to sort it out. “Maggie said Cliff was eaten!” Then he shrugged. “She was really out of it, though. I guess she means the bear. Levi obviously told her about it.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Tracy said. She opened the door of her patrol car, then looked over the roof at him. “Steve.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe it was a bear.”

  Steve realized there was no comfort to be found in any possibility. No answer would ever be the right one. No answer would ever bring back his brother. “Maybe,” he said, and opened the door.

  “Stay out of trouble,” she said, and got in her car.

  They drove away in opposite directions.

  EVELYN STILL wasn’t all there, Steve thought. She’d seemed so well, so like herself the other day, but today she seemed vague and sketchy in her thinking and conversation.

  She might have a long road back, Steve thought.

  “I have dreams,” she said, lying on her back and staring vacantly at the ceiling.

  They’d gotten around to That Night after talking about anything and everything else. He told her he’d been to Hyde River, but he withheld more than he shared. As far as Evelyn knew, the trip to Hyde River had been unfruitful but had raised some “other possibilities” Steve was going to look into. Evelyn asked no questions, so Steve let it go. He did not tell her what he’d learned about Cliff and Maggie. He didn’t know if he ever could.

  Now, as Evelyn tried to recall something, anything, she began drifting between reality and . . . he didn’t know what.

  “I have dreams that keep coming back.”

  Steve stayed close, listening but expecting little.

  “I keep seeing a big black thing coming out of the dark. And I hear it, I feel it thrashing around, and I feel blood splashing all over me.” She shivered.

  Steve asked softly, “What about people? Are there any people in your dreams?”

  She continued to stare vacantly and slowly shook her head. “No. No people. Only a big black thing.”

  “What about your knife? Do you fight back? Do you use your knife?”

  “Yes. I stab at it. I just keep stabbing and stabbing.”

  “Where is Cliff? Is he in your dreams?”

  Tears came to her eyes as she whispered, “No. He’s gone. He’s gone, and all I see is a shadow where he used to be.”

  THE TRAVELER MOTEL on Route 16 catered to vacationers traveling south, away from Clark County and Hyde Valley. Tracy knew that few people from Hyde River would ever come this way or notice this place unless they were on vacation, so Tracy had brought Maggie here, not in her patrol car but in her own Ford Ranger. Maggie had registered under a false name.

  Now they were in Maggie’s room, Number 12. Tracy stood by the door in jeans and a light blue workshirt, the incognito civilian. Maggie sat on the bed. “So what now?” she asked, timid and bewildered.

  “Just sit tight for a few days. Take some walks down by the lake, see a movie. You need to breathe free for a while, and I need to find out what’s going on without having to worry about you.”

  Maggie bent just a little and looked out the window at the sky. “He might see me.”

  “Maggie, come on. This far away?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you.”

  They said good-bye, and Tracy drove away.

  EARLY THAT EVENING, Steve sat in a lawn chair by the little kidney-shaped pool at the Tamarack Motel, thinking, making notes, trying to clarify where things stood, and not getting very far. All he could think about was Cliff, the kid brother he would never see again; all he could see before his mind’s eye were the memories, some of them so hilarious now:

  The hot-air blimp Cliff tried to make out of laundry bags when he was fourteen. It flew for maybe one minute before it landed on Mr. Sorenson’s barn and set it on fire.

  Cliff spending all his summer earnings on a gutless Chevy with drag slicks and stuck valves; boy, it looked great, but it couldn’t even climb a hill, much less race anybody. Cliff thought it would impress the girls, but it never got out of the driveway.

  That stupid dock Cliff built out of inner tubes and old pallets. It was his revolutionary design: portable, quickly assembled, quickly torn down, easy to maintain. He was going to get it patented and become a millionaire. You couldn’t walk on it—it flipped over the first time they tried.

  But that was Cliff, always running off half-cocked after some crazy idea and always getting a lecture from his big brother when he got back. They were a pair: the imp and the intellectual, the clown and the straight man, the kid who stayed a kid and the older brother who never got to be one.

  Cliff was nine and Steve was fourteen when their folks split up and their dad moved out of state. As a result, Steve quickly found himself in the role of the father, skipping his teenage years entirely to look out for his mother and his carefree brother. Cliff almost forced it on him. Whenever he was in trouble, Cliff came to Steve, and Steve was always there for him.

  But now those days of childhood were long past, Cliff was gone, killed in an unbelievably gruesome way, and Steve was left alone in the confusing, devastating present. He began to shake with emotion and turned away from the motel building so that no one would see the tears streaming down his face.

  After several minutes, he sat back in the chair, wiped his eyes and nose with a handkerchief, and wondered if perhaps Tracy Ellis was right. Maybe he was too close to the situation to be investigating Cliff’s death. With such a load of grief and outrage, it was nearly impossible to be objective and clear-headed, and he’d demonstrated that to himself and to Tracy Ellis despite his best efforts.

  But what else could he do? With Cliff’s death unexplained and unresolved, and now, with foul play being considered, he had to be here; he could do nothing less. He couldn’t rest until he had the answers.

  With a deep breath and a determination to press ahead despite his feelings, he referred to some notes he’d scribbled on the writing pad in his lap. He had discovered long ago that writing things down helped him organize his thoughts, helped him see what was important, and helped him find solutions. He had written down three topics:

  The killing. The greatest riddle, of course. Tracking down and shooting a rogue bear would have been simple. Now he knew less and had more questions than when he’d started, and worst of all, he might be expected to trust others to solve the whole thing while all he did was sit at home fretting about it. That just couldn’t happen, not as long as�
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  Steve jumped a little. Oh. The motel owner’s big tabby cat, that’s what it was, letting out a long, low growl—the strange sound that people who didn’t know cats were always surprised that they made—from the bushes nearby. Steve settled back into his chair, having demonstrated to himself a secondary burden: his shattered nerves.

  Next topic:

  The affair. This topic could be broken down into two categories: (1) How the affair could suggest a human perpetrator in Cliff’s death, unthinkable though that may be, and (2) How in the world Cliff could be so foolish as to get tangled up with that semi-deranged woman in the first place; how he could be so intoxicated that he gave no thought to what his escapade would do to Evelyn and the boys—and to Maggie Bly’s husband. From all appearances, which Cliff should have seen, Hyde River was definitely a bad choice of towns for starting an affair, and Harold Bly’s wife was definitely the wrong woman.

  Cliff, you sure did it this time. If only I’d known . . .

  He was getting upset again, so he went on to the next topic:

  The myths and superstitions of Hyde River. Now here was something he knew nothing about, but apparently he’d come close to getting clobbered because of it. If there had been foul play, this would be a factor—

  Crunch. Crunch. A faint sound.

  Crunch.

  Steve looked in the direction of the sound—and froze in horror at the sight. Under another lawn chair nearby, the big tabby crouched, his face close to the concrete. He was chomping, chewing, licking a large mouse. The lower half of the mouse sat on its haunches, lifeless, rocking to and fro with the cat’s jaws. The upper half was gone, snipped off. The lower half ended in a red stump . . .

  THE BARTENDER at Harvey’s Restaurant and Lounge asked Steve if he’d been jogging. Steve only asked for a table in the corner and a stiff drink. He had no recollection of his long run down the road from the motel, and he wasn’t entirely sure where he was.

  He was sweating and breathing hard. He couldn’t think.

  The drink arrived and he gulped it down, the liquor burning his throat. He was still shaking. He couldn’t stop.

  IT WAS DARK enough to get away with spreading a little terror without being seen, so this night six huge men, all wearing black hoods to hide their faces, got together to make a few things abundantly clear to young Kyle Figgin. Kyle was bound hand and foot, kicking, squirming, trying in vain to free himself from their iron grip as they carried him like pallbearers, three on a side, his body flat out and face down. They rushed along, letting Kyle’s head and face take the lead through the tall grass and prickly underbrush until they got to the edge of the river. Kyle was screaming, but his screams were only pitiful squawks through the gag they’d crammed into his mouth.