“I really want a long-term plan for Luther,” Dalton said. “Something to make sure we overcome his dyslexia and get him through college and beyond. It’s what his mother would have wanted. Can we sit and talk about that?”
“Certainly, we can set up a time Tuesday or Thursday afternoon and—”
“There’s no way I can leave the bank during the day. All hell broke loose when I was gone to drop into the school before, and we’re preparing for a corporate audit. How about one evening after school?”
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “I prefer—”
“It would be a big favor to me,” he said. “I’ll toss in dinner at Chapman’s in Waltersboro. Open air and aboveboard. When we are done, we’ll have a road map for Luther’s success.”
Dalton cocked his head a bit with a wide-eyed look of anticipation. His eyes were a deeper green than she had noticed before. An after-school, off-campus meeting was very irregular, forbidden in New York. But there were no rules about it in Shaw County.
He’s a bank manager, she thought. It would be in public and they would be talking education…
“Sounds good, Mr. Gowan.”
“How about six thirty day after tomorrow? I can be clear of the audit prep by then.”
“I’ll meet you at Chapman’s.”
Dalton pulled his hand from her cart and smiled. “Gotta get this ice cream home before it melts. See you then.”
Laura moved down the aisle and into the checkout line. This little nondate was about Luther, but she still felt a bit off about it. She hadn’t been somewhere even semisocial with a man since she’d started dating her late husband, Doug, years ago.
She stopped herself right there. This wasn’t a date, it was a parent conference with food. She addressed the second thoughts in her brain like a cop at a crime scene. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Her turn came at the checkout.
“Did you find everything you need?” the cashier asked.
“I’m pretty sure I did,” she said.
An hour later, the manager of the Piggly Wiggly called a bag boy back to mop up a mess at the end of aisle ten. An abandoned cart sat in a white, sticky puddle. A carton of ice cream had melted all over the cans of soup beneath it.
Chapter Sixteen
Laura kicked herself that evening as she replayed in her head the events at the Petty place. She paced her tiny living room, stepping over the same box of towels each trip.
What had she seriously thought she would get accomplished? If her plan had worked perfectly, she would have handed Tammy, or worse, Aileen, some workbooks and walked away. Did she think that donation would elicit an invitation to search the place? There had to be a better plan.
Back in New York, this kind of investigative work was the bread and butter of her deceased husband’s pseudojournalism. He’d have had some ideas about how to find out what went on in that old farmhouse.
Her train of thought derailed. She paused and leaned back against the wall. How strange. She’d just thought about Doug for the second time in a long time, perhaps months. After the Galaxy Farm incident, he’d barely crossed her mind. Guilt poured in like water from an opened spigot. They had dated for two years, were married for three. She’d loved him like no one ever before. How could all that be forgotten faster than some cancelled television sitcom?
He had tried to kill her that last night at Galaxy Farm. But she could rationalize that that hadn’t been him really, it was more a possessed version of Doug. But it didn’t matter. Even the Doug that moved with her to Tennessee wasn’t the Doug that moved with her to New York. His tabloid job and the lifestyle it required had made him a distant, unsupportive spouse. Ever since her miscarriage…
She stood and shook the thoughts from her head. Bigger fish to fry here.
There were surveillance toys Doug used to use, probably all of marginal legality. Definitely all buried in the ash of Galaxy Farm. But all still available, thanks to the Internet and credit cards.
She fired up her laptop and began the search. The results were unreal. Video cameras the size of stamps. Infrared. Night vision. Telescopes to count the stars on the flag at the Moon’s Tranquility Base. Personal surveillance drones that looked like toy helicopters. Whole sections of products she needed a private investigator’s license to even look at. It was a wonder anyone had any privacy at all anymore.
A camera would be overkill. She couldn’t surreptitiously position it anywhere and get a reasonable view of something. But audio would be something else.
She found just what she needed, Zooper Snooper, a battery-powered bug the size of a soda-bottle cap, with a self-adhesive back. It transmitted over half a mile to a wireless receiver plugged into a smartphone. Next time, when she delivered the workbooks, she’d drop off a little something extra. She could eavesdrop from the security of her car, parked well away from number 214. Perfect.
She pounded the keys. Quantity, one. She hammered out her Moultrie mailing address. She tied the transaction to her online payment account. The next page asked if she wanted overnight delivery. She looked for the box that said “Hell yes!” but had to settle for the simple affirmative.
Tomorrow afternoon, the plan would go into motion.
That next afternoon, the van was home at 214. Laura pulled in behind it. Second thoughts flickered through her mind. She suppressed them. Yesterday’s good idea was still a good idea today. It had to be.
Her heart pounded hard as she knocked on the door. She tried to keep her face composed, normal. Like someone who wasn’t planting an illegal microphone. She prayed Tammy would answer the door.
The door swung open. Janice. Crap. The woman’s broad face went dark as soon as she saw Laura.
“Hi! I’m back to drop these books off for Tammy and the kids.”
Janice stood there like some squat Aztec statue. A bead of sweat rolled down Laura’s spine. This was not going to work.
“I’ll get her,” Janice said. She closed the door most of the way and disappeared.
Damn it. The sentinel hadn’t invited her in. Tammy would walk up and Laura would hand her the books. The opportunity would be lost.
The door swung open. Tammy looked mortified.
“Please come in! I’m sorry.” She looked over her shoulder to confirm they were alone. “Janice has some serious trust issues.”
Laura followed her in. Her eyes flitted about the room in search of a hiding place for the mic. Hidden but open. Remember the range. A flat uniform surface for the—
“Laura?” Tammy said.
God! She hadn’t even been listening.
“Sorry! Got sidetracked. I brought you these workbooks left over from last year. They’re a grade level ahead, but I saw what Bo and Caroline were working on and thought it would be appropriate or at worst a challenge.”
She handed the books to Tammy. Her free hand went instantly to her pocket to double-check on the bug. Still there. Cold, metallic, ready.
Tammy flipped through one book and made approving, little noises. From the corner of her eye, Laura scouted an end table at the edge of the parlor. The parlor, kitchen and hallway would all be well in range. She brushed a stray hair from her face. Her palms were wet.
“I have the state certification forms ready, if you want to take them back and save me the trip,” Tammy said.
“Sure!”
Tammy headed for the classroom. “Follow me in and you can see the children.”
Crap again. Laura needed time. Just a moment…
“Uh, don’t let me disturb them,” Laura said. “I’ll just wait here.”
Tammy flashed a thumbs-up over her shoulder. She entered the classroom and left the door open.
Laura scrambled for the mic in her pocket. It slipped from between her fingers twice. She palmed it and pulled it out. She tried to pull away the plastic backing on the adhesive. There was no pull tab. She picked at it with her fingernails, jabbed it when she couldn’t find an edge. She shot a look at the open classr
oom door. From within came the sound of a drawer opening and papers being shuffled
She dug a nail at the back of the mic. The adhesive peeled off, not the backing. Her heart sank.
“There it is,” Tammy said from the other room.
Laura stuck the edge of the adhesive backing between her teeth. It tasted like rancid meat. She yanked the sticky rubbery disc free and slapped it on the mic. She bent and tucked it under the table edge with a squeeze. She spit the backing out of her mouth.
“So, on this form…” Tammy said as she reentered the hallway.
Laura straightened up. The backing fluttered past her waist. She flipped her hair back.
“…I don’t need to attach their report cards from last year?” Tammy finished.
Laura panic-processed the question. “No, no. All on file from last year, I’m sure.”
The backing landed between her feet.
Tammy handed her the forms. They stared at each other. Laura stalled and then surrendered. The backing wasn’t going to get retrieved. The rest was up to fate.
Tammy walked her to the door and they said a cordial goodbye. Laura returned to her car and pulled her smartphone from under the passenger seat. She opened the Zooper Snooper application. The Mic button lit up green. Tammy’s voice came through the tinny smartphone speaker.
“All right, enough distractions, let’s see those spelling words.”
Laura sighed and leaned back against the headrest. She tucked her phone away in her purse. Close. Too close. But everything worked out. Tonight, she’d have more answers about what went on inside those walls.
From an upper window, Aileen watched Laura’s Honda leave the driveway. As the dust settled in her wake, she headed downstairs and straight out the back door. Janice was in the backyard, ax in hand, ready to splinter some firewood. Aileen marched up and stood nose to nose with the bigger woman.
“What kind of stupid performance was that with that woman?”
Janice looked away. “I don’t trust her. I told you I caught her around the house yesterday.”
Aileen struck her openhanded on the shoulder. “And if you act angry and suspicious, she’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.”
Janice backed up a half step.
“Our solitude here is valuable. I will not let you piss it away because you aren’t thinking. Is that clear?”
Janice nodded. Aileen growled in frustration and headed back to the house.
Janice muscled a stout log onto the chopping block. She shot a vengeful look at Aileen’s back. She raised the ax and brought it down with a grunt.
The log shattered into pieces.
Chapter Seventeen
That night, Laura sat in the passenger seat of her car. She’d pulled off the road near the property line of the Petty place and tucked the car behind the sagging remains of a neighbor’s barn. Her hands shook as she plugged her smartphone into the power outlet. It hummed to life and she started the Zooper Snooper program.
She’d read the online guide and figured out how to record anything she heard, as well as several notes about how such recordings were rarely admissible in court. She didn’t care about court. Once she found out what was going wrong with the kids in that house, she’d be the judge and jury. She’d rescue those kids and let the consequences sort themselves out.
The Mic button on the application didn’t light up. She pressed Reinitialize. Nothing.
She cursed the unit’s advertised half-mile range. Apparently it was less, perhaps much less, somewhere between where she was now and the driveway outside the house.
Her jaw dropped as she entertained a worse thought. What if that telltale backing had pointed the way to the bug? Superfund sites had more visitors than 214 Pear Tree Lane. There would be no doubt who planted it.
She pushed that outcome aside. It had to be a range problem, had to be. There was only one way to check. She had to get closer. She left her car and, with the cell phone as a sad little flashlight, tromped through the stubble of a spent field of corn. She entered the woods in the direction of the farmhouse.
As she picked her way through the moon-washed trees, she wondered what she thought she was going to see. She also wondered if she’d poke her eye out with a branch, break an ankle in a hole or rip her skin open on some wild blackberry thorns. If she’d known she’d have to resort to Plan B, she’d have worn a different outfit.
A hundred yards from the house, the night went still. The chirp of crickets only sounded behind her, not ahead. The intermittent rustle of field mice in the leaf litter stopped. An oppressive humidity enveloped her, thicker with each step she took forward. On the hilltop beyond the house, a coyote howled a plaintive lament. Its brethren answered in a distant, discordant chorus.
Clouds scurried across the sky. As they obscured and revealed the moon, the yard around the farmhouse alternated between dark and ghostly white. Dim candlelight lit the windows with a power too low to banish the shadows from the porch outside. The van was parked in the back between the house and the shed, so Laura assumed that the gang was all here.
She shielded the phone with her hands and checked the Zooper Snooper app. The Mic button flickered on and off. Had she damaged it when she fumbled placing it under the table?
By this hour, the children should be in bed. She guessed that their room would be the darkened one in the corner that adjoined the classroom. With no power, they sure weren’t up watching Nick at Nite. The shades were open. Her Triple S rang hard enough to wake the comatose. She needed to take a look inside there.
She moved as close as she dared in the woods and crouched in the lee of an oak. Clouds enveloped the moon and she ran across the driveway. Halfway across, the clouds retreated. Moonlight bathed the yard. She dropped to one knee.
A sweet, smoky scent, like burning sorghum wood, drifted by. A voice, low and unintelligible, came from the backyard, amplified by the night’s unnatural silence. Laura crept around trees at the edge of the wood until she could get a better view of the backyard.
Bracketed between the van and the shed, on the garden’s edge, a woman stood wearing a long, hooded red cape. The raised hood hung far forward and her face within was all shadow. She held a rough clay bowl in her hand. Tendrils of smoke snaked upward from the glowing embers within.
A child stood in front of her, back to Laura. Her first thought was of Caroline. The child wore a long, shapeless white gown and had a white scarf tied around her head. Laura checked her assessment. It might not be a girl; at this distance, in this light, it was impossible to tell. It could just as well be Bo, with their similar height and build. What was beyond question was the pale luminosity of the child’s skin, amplified by the moonlight’s fluorescent glow. The child was nearly translucent.
The hooded woman spoke phrases in some foreign tongue. She passed the smoldering bowl around the child’s neck with her right hand, passed it to her left and brought it back around to the front. She lifted it up over her head, bowed and held the bowl under the child’s chin. The child took the bowl in its hands.
The rising streams of smoke swirled and intertwined like a braided rope. Then they split into two and penetrated the child’s nostrils. The child’s head jerked back and forth several times, then lolled backwards, mouth open, eyes staring blankly at the cloud-strewn sky.
Laura’s child-defense mechanism, sharpened by years of teaching, kicked in. Whatever this screwed up ritual was, there was no way it was good. A defenseless child demanded rescue. She shoved her phone in her pocket and took a step out of the woods.
The caped woman pulled back her hood and revealed no human head, but a skull, glowing in the moon’s pale beams. The jaw flexed open in time with more strange, guttural phrases.
“Oh my God…” Laura jerked to a stop. A cold chill ran up her spine and her stomach went tight.
She stepped backwards into the shadows. A fallen branch caught her ankle. She fell back into the leaf litter with a crash.
; The skull spun in her direction. Blackened sockets probed the darkness. The caped figure moved between Laura and the child. The child did not move, as if frozen by the smoke it continued to inhale.
Laura panicked. She scrambled to her feet and ran from the house, crashing through the woods, hands extended to ward off the branches she could barely see.
The skull barked a muffled curse behind her. Footsteps pounded gravel. Blood thrummed in Laura’s ears. Her breaths grew short and sharp, and she barreled through the woods.
A door slammed at the house. A choppy voice came from her pocket, distorted by the tiny speaker in her phone and a layer of denim.
“…in the woods! Someone saw…”
A second voice sounded, farther from the intermittent eavesdropper, “… did the child…?”
The answer was unintelligible. The next response was not.
“Find them!”
A shattered branch speared Laura’s arm. She whirled and her shirt shredded as the branch tore her skin. She gripped the wound and kept running. Warm blood seeped between her fingers. Every vine and stick on the forest floor seemed to reach for her, intent on snagging her and delivering her to the skull woman.
Behind her at the farmhouse, the van roared to life. Headlights pierced the darkness. Gravel spanked the wheel wells like birdshot and the van rocketed down the driveway.
They’d beat her to her car, cut her off from escape. In her panicked retreat, she wasn’t even sure now where her car was. All she knew was she had to get away from that house and whatever the hell one of those women had turned into.
She paused at the base of a tree. With the van off in the distance, fear of getting lost suddenly outweighed fear of capture. She needed a reference point before she got so far into the woods that she was hopelessly disoriented.
The house was behind her, somewhere, sort of. Candlelit windows were no lighthouse beacon. The worst would be to inadvertently circle back around and end up where she started. In the daytime, she could use the sun, but…
Dark Vengeance Page 6