by Vicki Lane
Elizabeth looked up from the computer, where she was wrestling with the end-of-month billing. Rosemary, her face pale and drawn, stood fidgeting in the doorway of the little office.
“How is Jared doing with all this, sweetie?” And how are you doing, my dearest baby?
“He’s trying to line up a legal team for his dad. I don’t think he can accept what happened. He keeps saying that his father couldn’t have…Oh, Mum, I saw the skull. Maythorn’s teeth had been knocked out…and the bones around the eyes all shattered. How could someone do that to a child?”
How could someone do that to a child? She and Phillip had talked late into the night, asking that same question. Eventually the subject had turned to Calven.
“Miss Birdie says he’s having trouble settling down. ‘That pore little young un keeps thinkin’ his no-good mama’s gonna come back fer him. Won’t hear nary a word agin her even though she’s treated him like a sorry cur’ is how Birdie put it.”
Phillip’s eyes were distant. “I worked a few child abuse cases and that’s one of the saddest things—seeing the kids defend their worthless mothers and fathers—fathers who abuse them, mothers who’d sell their kids for a bag of crack. But the kids fight to believe that their parents love them, particularly their mothers. They’ll beg to stay with her even when she’s mistreating them.”
Phillip left for Weaverville to pick up his mail, and mother and daughter ate lunch in almost complete silence. We should at least be relieved that it’s all over, Elizabeth thought, watching Rosemary pick at the carrot sticks beside her half-eaten sandwich. But she’s still so…bemused, almost like that strange, fey state she was in yesterday. Of course, seeing what was left of her friend, imagining what she’d suffered…
Rosemary pushed her chair back. “Sorry, Mum, I’m just not very hungry. If you don’t mind, I’m going to change and go on to Asheville early. Laurel wants me to come by where she’s working on that mural. I’ll hang out with her for a while. Maybe poke around some bookstores. Phillip’s coming back, isn’t he? I hate to leave you here alone….”
Elizabeth smiled at her. “Hey, I’ll be fine, sweetie. All the bad guys are where they belong. But, yes, he is coming back.”
And at some point I’m going to have to stop blushing about it.
Elizabeth drove Rosemary down to her car and watched the little vehicle depart. She was filled with an irrational feeling of unease. It was Moon, not Jared. Rosie’s perfectly safe with Jared, you fool.
She crossed the little branch and began a leisurely inspection of the beds of perennial herbs and flowers, now nestled under thick blankets of mulch in preparation for the coming winter. She was leaning down to break off a few branches of variegated sage when she heard the now familiar sound of Phillip’s car.
He spotted her across the field and waved. Pulling up beside the drying shed, he flung open the car door, sprang out, and started jogging toward her. Agreeably surprised at his impatience to see her again, she hurried to meet him.
“I missed you, too, Phillip.” Smiling, she took his hand. “You took a long time picking up your mail.”
He leaned forward to kiss her briefly. There was no returning grin.
“I had a call from Mac—Sheriff Blaine—so I went into Ransom on the way back.” Phillip’s expression was solemn. “Mac said that he’d had Doc Adams come take a look at the skull—at the teeth—before the remains went off to the ME.”
“Doc Adams? The dentist? My dentist?”
“The one in Ransom, yeah. Anyway, Mac said he figured since Doc Adams is the only dentist on this side of the county, it was likely he’d had the Mullins family as patients. Mac gave the doc a call first thing this morning and asked him about it. Sure enough, the doc remembered the whole family—said he still had their dental records. He came right in, with a quick stop by his office to get Maythorn’s file.
“Mac said it didn’t take thirty seconds—Doc Adams took a look at the teeth in the skull and said that he’d bet his license to practice that those remains weren’t Maythorn.”
MAYTHORN SPEAKS
Halloween 1986
I WATCHED AS the booger untied her from the chair and laid her on the floor. He had made her put on my clothes before he started—not the fancy ones she always liked but just my old jeans and my Cherokee Pride sweatshirt I’d left on the floor in my room. Now they were all soaked with blood, and where she had wet herself when she finally understood it wasn’t a game anymore.
I knew that she was dead now, and that the booger couldn’t hurt her anymore. There at the end, those last things the booger had done, she hadn’t made any noise. And before that, the duck tape he put across her mouth, like he had done to me, kept her from screaming. All she could do was make low, awful, gurgling sounds.
There was a hole there in the basement floor and a shovel where the furnace men had been working. The booger looked at the shovel and then picked it up and whacked the dead girl in the face. Her body was all cut up and limp, but it jumped when he hit it, and even though I knew she was dead, I started to vomit. The booger heard me and came right over. He ripped off the duck tape fast. I don’t want you choking on your own puke, he said. Oh, no. I have plans for you, little Indian.
When I’d finished and there was nothing left to come up but thin yellow stuff, I tried to call out for Moon to come save me. But he was asleep upstairs and I couldn’t make more than a sad little sound. The booger just laughed and slapped the tape back over my mouth. You want Moon? Just wait here; I’ll go get him for you.
He looked at me close and ran his knife along my leg. The cloth of my Indian pants fell apart like there was a zipper there, and the booger smiled his booger smile as he watched the blood come out and spread. Why, you’re going to be a real redskin, Mary Thorn Blackfox. Just what you always wanted. But first I’ll go get Moon for you.
He left me alone and went quiet and careful up the basement stairs. I started working against the ropes at my wrists. I folded my hand as small as I could, and soon I pulled it free. My heart was beating fast and the tape on my mouth made it hard to breathe.
Both hands were loose now, and I was scratching at the knot that held my ankles when I heard bumping on the floor over my head. The basement door opened and the booger started down the stairs, left foot, right foot, feeling for each step. He had Moon across his shoulder, like he was some fireman saving him from a burning building. At first I thought that the booger had killed Moon, too, and I felt sorry. Moon had never been mean to me except when he was drunk.
But when the booger laid him on the floor, there by what was left of the blond girl, I could hear that Moon was saying something. He never opened his eyes though, not even when the booger marked him all over with the dead girl’s blood and wrapped his hands around the handle of the bloody shovel. The booger was so busy that he didn’t notice when I pulled off the last of the ropes and ran for the stairs. Then he yelled out and started after me.
I slammed the door and turned the lock. In a second the booger was there and he rattled the knob and beat on the door and yelled terrible things as I took off out the kitchen door into the night.
I ran up the dark trail as fast as I could, feeling my way among the trees and rocks I knew so well. When I got to the top I stopped to listen.
Everything was quiet, but back down below, I could see the strong beam of a big flashlight searching all over, looking in the pool house and then in the garden shed, where my masks were hidden. I knew that when the booger didn’t find me there, he would come after me.
My mouth was sour from the vomit and my leg burned like fire where his knife blade had run. The pieces of my Indian pants flapped around my leg and caught on the bushes as I ran toward the Goodweathers’ house.
Their porch light was on but I could see that the truck was gone. Then I remembered about trick-or-treating and knew that Rosie’s house would be empty. But that’s where the booger’ll expect me to go, I thought, and kept climbing, up the hill to the Cave of t
he Two Sisters.
45.
BONE AND STONE
Saturday, October 29
Elizabeth stared at Phillip. “Not Maythorn? How could Doc Adams be sure of that? The teeth were all battered in.”
As they walked back to his car, Phillip explained. “Not all of them. The canines were untouched. According to Mac, Doc Adams showed him on Maythorn’s chart where she’d been in his office on the twenty-third, just a week before she disappeared. There was a note on the chart to the effect that Maythorn’s upper left canine was loose. And, as Doc Adams saw immediately, both canines in that skull were fully mature teeth—there wouldn’t have been time for the loose tooth to come out and be replaced. And what’s more, he pointed out that the teeth showed signs of untreated decay. Maythorn’s records indicated healthy teeth and no decay. Doc said these were the kind of teeth he sees in low-income kids—the ones who drink a lot of Mountain Dew and eat a lot of sugary junk food.”
Phillip pulled a small duffel bag from the back seat of his car and transferred it to the jeep. Elizabeth watched him, her mind busy with the ramifications of this new revelation.
“Then if it wasn’t Maythorn—”
“Who was it? Blaine’s asking that same question. Moon swears it was Maythorn he buried, but he’s not the most rational of witnesses. Mac’s checking through the records of runaways and missing—”
“Missing…” They climbed into the jeep, and as Elizabeth reached for the ignition, a name flashed into her head. “Wait a minute. Tamra! The other little girl.”
“Phillip, it was in Rosie’s notebook. Rosie wrote about a Tamra who lived near here and played with her and Maythorn some of the time. And Tamra was blond….”The prettiest little yaller-haired girl called Tamra, Miss Birdie had said. The words were coming more slowly now as she sorted through her memories. “Miss Birdie told me about her…Tamra was Bib Maitland’s daughter.”
“Oh, yeah, the one he was supposedly looking for when he got drunk and assaulted an officer. But I thought her mother took her away?”
“Let me think.” Elizabeth tugged on her braid and twisted it impatiently. “Okay, Birdie said that first Tamra’s mother ran off and then…then she must have come back because the child left a note saying she was going to be with her mother. And Bib came home and found the note—”
“Or said he did.” Phillip was reaching for his cell phone. “We need to see if Mac’s thought about Tamra…and Bib.”
Phillip watched as Elizabeth skimmed through the notebooks she had brought downstairs from Rosemary’s room. She was paging intently through the second one, the remaining dozen on the sofa cushion beside her.
“Rosie mentions Tamra several times in here. She didn’t like her much—jealous, I guess. I haven’t read all through these…I’m just looking for any mention of Tamra and…and of Moon…maybe there’ll be some hint of how he reacted to the girls…or what Rosie thought about him.” She looked up at him, her blue eyes troubled. “It’s just so unbelievable to think of Moon…” And she was lost again in the pages of the slim book in her lap.
Phillip watched her for a few more moments, then, realizing that this search could takes hours, picked up the worn paperback copy of Glory Road that Elizabeth had found for him. This Heinlein fella’s a hoot. I think I remember reading some of his science fiction when I was a kid.
He read on, falling deeper and deeper into the story of Star, the Empress of Twenty Universes, and Oscar, the Hero she had recruited to find the Egg of the Phoenix—the repository of the memories of all her predecessors.
Maybe we should hire a Hero to look for Sam’s stuff. Or for the little Mullins girl.
The clock in the office had just struck three when Elizabeth slammed shut the notebook she had been reading. “Phillip, we need to go find Rosie and Maythorn’s cave.”
She had been adamant—no, she didn’t want to wait till tomorrow so Rosie could show them the way; she felt almost positive she knew where it was. She was on her feet and pulling on her hiking boots and jacket, in such a fever of excitement that he simply laid aside his book and got ready too.
As they climbed the hill behind the house, she explained. “In her spy notebooks, Rosie keeps mentioning a place she calls the Cave of the Two Sisters. Evidently, she and Maythorn used it as a kind of secret clubhouse. She talks about how it was hard to find the way in, that you had to get down and crawl. She says it’s a perfect hiding place.”
Elizabeth’s face was flushed with excitement and she was setting a rapid pace, slanting across the semi-wooded hill. Ahead, a clump of buckeyes marked the beginning of the woods that extended to the top of Pinnacle Mountain.
“Okay, but why is this so important?” He paused to catch his breath. Though they were only slightly above the house’s roofline, already there was the feeling of looking down on things from a great height.
Her eyes glittered. “It’s important—or it may be important—because I think this is the same cave that Miss Birdie told me about a couple of years ago—a cave that Cletus found when his dog followed a rabbit into it. She told me he had to crawl under a big ledge of rock to get in, and that’s exactly how Rosie describes it.” She pointed up the hill. “See where it looks like two huge boulders are leaning against each other? I bet you anything that’s where the cave is—it fits the description.”
“Elizabeth, sweetheart, I still don’t see what the point—”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t told you the important part.” She was quivering with eagerness to be climbing again. “I think the cave may be where Maythorn is. Cletus told Miss Birdie there were bones in there.”
He had followed as Elizabeth went straight to the tall leaning stones, as if walking a familiar path. She had explored around their base, prodding at various rocks with her hiking stick until she found the opening under the ledge.
Crawling under the ledge had been the hard part. Though Elizabeth had assured him that the cool weather meant that any snakes would be, if not actually dormant, at least sluggish; still, it had been an unpleasant, claustrophobic thirty seconds, writhing on their bellies through dry leaves and sandy soil to pass under the rocky ledge.
“It’s not really a cave, more of a rock lean-to.” Elizabeth was on her hands and knees, investigating the farther recesses of the little hidden room.
Phillip looked down at the sandy floor—a scattering of dry leaves, a small pile of fist-sized stones, a few lengths of rotting branches. With an inward sigh, he dropped to his knees to help Elizabeth in her search.
She was working her way methodically around the perimeter. Looking up, she saw that he was doing the same. “No bones, huh?”
“Not over here.” His answer was more brusque than he had intended and he added, “But it was certainly worth a look. Interesting place.”
“Oh, Phillip, I’m sorry I dragged you up here. It was just…It was just that I had this sudden vision of Maythorn…coming here to hide, and then maybe something happened and she couldn’t get out. But I guess that if Cletus saw bones, they were probably animal bones, and other animals have taken them away by now.”
Phillip was only half listening. There, before him, wedged in a crevice, lay a round, flat stone with a dime-sized hole in its center. A bleached sliver of bone was jammed through the opening.
46.
THE EGG OF THE PHOENIX
Sunday, October 30
For the third time in a half hour, Elizabeth went to look at the kitchen clock. She glanced at Phillip, comfortably ensconced on the sofa, a second cup of coffee in one hand, Glory Road in the other, serenely oblivious to her unease.
Only ten after eight—too early to be calling. Laurel, whose bartending job kept her up till the very wee hours on Saturday nights, generally slept quite late on Sunday mornings, and presumably, so would Rosemary. If Rosemary had stayed with Laurel. On the other hand…
When she and Phillip had returned yesterday from their search of the so-called cave, the blinking light on the answering machine ha
d announced a message.
“Mum,” Rosemary’s quiet voice had said, “I’ll be staying in Asheville tonight. See you tomorrow, probably after lunch.”
Stop fretting. Either she’s with Laurel or she’s with Jared. She’s a big girl, Elizabeth.
“Worried about your daughter?” Phillip was looking at her over the pages of his book.
“No…well, a little. I wish I knew if she was at Laurel’s or…”
With a sigh she dropped onto the sofa beside him. “Really, I just wanted to tell her about the bone we found and ask her if she ever went to the cave after Maythorn disappeared.”
He put the book down. “She’ll be back after lunch and we’ll ask her then. We’ll show her the stone with the hole and see if it means anything to her. And then I’ll take the bone to Mac. It looks like a human finger bone to me, but I could be wrong. Mac’ll send it off to the ME, and if it is human, they’ll do DNA testing. It’ll all take a while, but eventually they ought to be able to establish if the bone is Maythorn’s.”
Phillip read on, thoroughly enjoying the swash-buckling fantasy. Now Oscar the Hero was trading rhymes and swordplay with Cyrano de Bergerac, guardian of the Egg of the Phoenix. Now he was crawling through endless tunnels in search of the egg. Pretty corny, but fun to read. I remember Sam telling me about this book. He kind of identified with the hero—Oscar was a “military advisor” in Southeast Asia, which turned into the Vietnam War.
The egg that holds the knowledge. In search of the egg. Where would you look for an egg? Phillip blinked, put the book down, and went into the kitchen, where Elizabeth was filling a jug with water to take down to the chickens.
“I wonder…” He saw her amused look as his hand moved toward his head, and he stopped himself from making the habitual gesture. “This is probably pretty wild, but I was thinking…”