Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
I whip around and start moving fast down the trail. It’s fear that’s got me scurrying through the dark like a terrified animal, but not fear for myself. It’s fear for Xan. I refuse to pull his putrefying corpse out of the ground. I will not wrap my fingers around his bones and yank them from some shallow grave.
He is not going to die in these hills.
I’m picking up speed, practically running now. Dodging mud puddles. Jumping over downed branches. My feet skid on some loose rock and I go flying face-first in the unknown. I manage to hang on to my flashlight, but I get up out of the dirt with a bloody nose and rocks embedded in my palms.
I hardly even feel it.
Two or three times on the way down the mountain, I have the unmistakable feeling that I’m being watched. One of those times, when I glance over my shoulder, I could swear I catch sight of a black shape.
Red glowing eyes.
Curled horns and dripping fangs.
But there’s nothing to do but keep moving. Fast. And faster. Slipping. Sliding. Skidding. Closer and closer to Lucifer’s Creek.
When I see the lights of the shop windows, I break into a dead run as another bloodcurdling howl shreds the thick stillness of the summer night. I burst out of the woods, sprint across the strip of grass at the edge of town, and fly down a deserted Mud Street toward home.
It only takes me a minute to reach our house, and I tear up the front steps right past Jonah the Deputy. “Dovie?” he shouts after me. “Thought you was upstairs. Where you been?”
I jerk open the screen door with a bang and run into the kitchen. Nana is sitting at the table listening to the radio. “Where’s Daddy?” I say, and I slam the flashlight down on the kitchen counter. “I need him. Now.”
“He ain’t here, sugar pie. Ain’t been here all night,” she tells me.
“Shit!” I growl in frustration.
“Dovie?” Jonah the Deputy is standing in the kitchen doorway eyeing me like I’m a rogue bear on a rampage. “Where’s the fire?”
I whirl around to face him. “Where’s Sheriff?” I demand.
“Takin’ a break,” Jonah reports. “Down at Donny Blue’s. Said he’d be back in an hour.” He blinks at me. “You got blood on your face.”
Jonah’s worse than useless, and I can’t wait an hour.
I shove him out of the way and bang back out the screen door. “Somebody’s been callin’ for you!” Nana shouts after me. “Phone’s rung a dozen times tonight, but she won’t talk to me.” I don’t have time to stop and chat now, though. I hit the front porch and skitter down the steps, then I’m flying down the stone path to the street and turning toward the downhill end of town, in the opposite direction of the church and Daddy’s stained glass shop.
I hurry past the tiny one-room library that Ira built us last year and Sutton’s Grocery, where my mama and daddy bumped shoulders and fell in love, and the collection of little trailers where none of my classmates speak to me.
My side aches and my legs are cramping, but I push myself faster when I get close enough to the far end of town to hear the fiddle music pouring out the open windows of Donny Blue’s.
I pound up the steps to the little bar and shove open the heavy door. Everyone inside turns to look at me.
The band stops playing and the dancers stop dancing and the building goes quiet. It isn’t Ira’s group on stage tonight. His bluegrass bunch plays Saturdays. This is Thursday, and I don’t recognize these guys.
“Dove? Somethin’ wrong?” I scan the crowd until I find the sheriff. He’s stood up from his spot at a corner table, and I watch him down the last of his beer before he starts moving my direction. “Time to go up the mountain?”
I shake my head. “I already found Hannah Nelby for you.”
A shocked murmur spreads through the pub, and Sheriff grabs me by the arm to haul me out of the building. “Pick it back up, boys,” he shouts over his shoulder as we step outside, and the country swing band starts to play again. But nobody’s dancing now.
He pulls me around the side of the building to the little gravel parking lot. “What’s goin’ on?” he demands once we’re away from all the listening ears. “What do you mean you already found her?”
“We sneaked out this evening when I started feeling the bone song,” I explain. “Went up the mountain to find her on our own.”
“Goddammit, Dove. That ain’t the agreement.” He yanks off his hat to run a hand through his greasy hair. “That ain’t how this is supposed to work.”
“You’re the one that needs my help to do your job,” I remind him. “I don’t need yours.”
“Shit!” Sheriff turns and kicks a concrete parking stop hard enough to probably break a toe. “Who the hell is we ? You and the Wilder boy?”
I nod. “And somebody else. Xander Alden.”
“Dammit.” He smashes his hat back on his head. “I told that kid to go home and let us handle it.”
“Well, he didn’t.” I give him my best glare. “Because you aren’t. You don’t even have any suspects.”
“You don’t know what we got, Dovie. You think I’m tellin’ everything we know? We got thousands of acres to search and a mountain of witness reports to comb through. Some of ’em are credible, and some of ’em ain’t. But none of ’em amount to nothin’. They’re talkin’ about people just vanishin’ outta thin air and—”
“And you don’t have a fucking clue.”
“Is that why you three ran off into the hills alone tonight to play detective?” Sheriff demands. “?’Cause you don’t think I been doin’ my job?”
I’m so angry now I could spit. “We weren’t playing anything. I found Hannah Nelby. Without your help. And you said yourself that’s a damn sight better than you’d be able to do without mine.”
“So you come runnin’ down here to get me and take me back up to where them bones are layin’?”
“And to tell you that Xan’s missing,” I say.
“What do you mean missing ?”
“He vanished.” I grit my teeth to keep from crying, more from frustration than anything else. “Something took him.” I stop to correct myself. “Someone took him.”
“Aw, Jesus fucking Christ.” Sheriff looks like he wants to kill me. “Where’s the Wilder kid at?”
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“You’re tellin’ me I got two missing kids up in those hills right now?” Sheriff marches back toward the front of the bar and grabs the door to yank it open. The music gets louder and the crowd goes quiet again, watching and listening.
“Where’re you goin’?” I shout.
“I’m goin’ to pay my tab, then I’m gonna radio Jonah to meet me at the sheriff’s office and we’re gonna go up and see about Hannah Nelby. At least she’s only been dead a couple of days. Maybe we can get a definite cause of death for this one.” He sighs and rubs at the bridge of his nose like he has a headache. “At first light, we’ll get a team up there, see if we can find the boys.” He glares at me. “You go on home. And you stay there. Hear?”
He’s about to disappear inside the bar when some kind of alarm gets triggered in my brain. I chase after him and grab him by the arm before he can get the door closed behind him. He outweighs me by a good two hundred pounds, but I haul his ass back outside. “What do you mean this one ?”
“Huh?”
“You said maybe we could get a cause of death for this one ,” I shout, and he nods.
“A lot of times we can’t. There ain’t enough of ’em left to tell. Like with Riley Alden.” He shrugs. “We got no clue what killed that kid.”
That’s not true.
“I heard he was gutted,” I say.
Split up the middle.
All of his insides spilled out on the ground.
Sheriff gives me a funny look. “We ain’t even got the report back yet from the medical examiner. That’ll take weeks. But I don’t expect it’ll say for sure one way or the other, even when we do. Too much decomp and tissue damage.” He shakes his head. “Only way somebody could say for sure right now is if they’re the one that gutted him.”
He shakes me off his arm and heads back inside the pub to settle his tab, and I have to grab the porch railing to keep from going down hard. Everything is swirling into blackness. The ground shifts and tilts under my feet like I’m walking through a fun house at the county fair.
I remember Lo sneaking into my bedroom to wake me up a few nights ago, covered with dirt and scratches. His skin torn and bleeding. That was the night he told me about the knife. The night Turley drowned.
But, before all that, when I told him Hannah Nelby had vanished, he told me she was already dead.
My knees give out and I collapse to the sidewalk. I sit there on the ground. I’m shaking too hard to get up.
What if that’s why he’s so plagued by the imaginary spirits of the murdered hikers? Because he’s the one that’s been killing them?
I remember that bloody shovel I saw up at the cabin.
A wail rises up in my throat and I have to clamp both hands over my mouth to keep it trapped inside. I gag. My skin still smells like rotting flesh.
Please not Lo. Don’t let it be Lo.
It can’t be Lo.
He’s gentle and tender and soft.
He says my name and makes it magic.
A terrible thought comes to me then. The only thought that makes sense.
What if he doesn’t even know he’s doing it?
I push myself up to my hands and knees and somehow get back on my feet again so I can stumble on home.
When I make it back to our little blue house, I start up the stone path toward the front porch. At least Jonah is gone. He must’ve gotten that call from the sheriff already. I trust them to go up and take care of Hannah.
But I don’t trust them to find Xan.
I wouldn’t even trust those two to find a missing dog.
I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know who to go to for help. Lo is who I go to. Always. He’s the one I want when things are too hard. Or too scary. He’s the one who makes things right.
This isn’t like Daddy having that angel pin, or him being seen in the woods. That might’ve looked bad, but it could be explained away.
This is something of Lo’s ending up in the dirt with a body.
This is Lo telling me something with his own mouth that only a murderer could know.
I’m climbing the steps to the porch when something moves off to the side of my vision. A blur of movement. Indistinct and out of focus. I spin around fast, hoping it’ll be Xan and praying it won’t be Lo. I’m not ready to face him yet. I have to think all this through.
But it’s not either one of them. A beautiful dark-haired woman in a white sundress stands in the yard, next to Mama’s crepe myrtles. She has features that look exactly like mine.
And she’s holding a white rose in her hand.