Chapter 5
“‘Commendable’!” Skye repeated. She glanced at him before opening the door to get into the car.
When they were seated, she told him, “‘Brilliant,’ ‘remarkable’—so much better!”
“Glad you like me,” he told her, grinning as he revved the car to life.
She groaned again.
But Zach looked down for a minute, becoming serious and sighing. “We’ll need to stop back by police headquarters for a minute. We’ll need the keys to get into the Bolton house. And that means I’ll need to come up with an explanation—”
“Not with Lieutenant Bruns,” she assured him.
“Do you know what happened?” Zach asked, frowning.
“What happened?” Skye repeated. “Oh! You mean why does Bruns have such faith in Jackson? I think they’ve helped a few times up here.
In fact, I heard about one case that occurred about ten years ago now, I believe.
Craig Rockwell, aka ‘Rocky,’ and Devin Lyle were involved.
Agents I’ve worked with. She has a home up here, I believe, inherited from a grandmother.
I don’t know the particulars.” She made a face at him.
“Hey, I’m just as new with all this as you are. ”
“Maybe Jackson should have sent Rocky—”
“He’s working something in another city—already on that case,” Skye told him.
He laughed softly. “Well, you know more than me.”
“Maybe he thought that … Well, he calls me a ‘mystic.’ Maybe he thinks our talents are more useful working on this case, too,” she suggested.
He glanced at her quickly and almost smiled. “Well, here’s hoping!”
As Skye had expected, they were quickly able to find Lieutenant Bruns and he didn’t ask questions. He gave them the keys for the Bolton house, simply reminding them to lock up when they left and see that the crime scene tape, though ripped, remained.
“We haven’t kept officers on the house,” he told them. “There’s no one in it, and we don’t believe there’s any danger to the house.”
“No danger to the house,” Zach repeated. “But …”
“Go on,” Bruns told him.
“A child has been kidnapped. And it seems whoever is doing this is after children—and women. Young women, like Patricia, and Jane Howell is comparatively young as well, in her late twenties. But with a child, well, the kidnapper may need things.”
“So you believe they’re all still alive!” Bruns said.
“We do,” Skye told him with certainty.
“All right. I will see that officers are assigned to keep an eye on the house,” Bruns promised solemnly. “And the keys—”
“Will be personally handed back to you this evening,” Zach promised.
Then they were out of the headquarters and on their way out to the Bolton house.
“You have the little zebra?” Skye asked him.
He nodded. “Of course. But it isn’t going to hurt to have something that belongs to Jeremy Bolton, too. See if they are together and if he sees the same things that Sophie is seeing.”
“As you said. Of course.”
Zach drove onto the property and started to exit the car. He looked at Skye and said, “I’ll be right out. Stay!” He opened his car door and headed for the door, calling back, “You don’t need to go through it all again. I’ll be quick!”
“Hey! I’m not a dog. Don’t tell me to stay! I’m fine,” she assured him.
“Just wait for me!” he pleaded.
He moved like the speed of light. She’d barely gotten out of the car and made it to the front door before he was out.
He was carrying a toy superhero doll.
“It’s Jeremy’s!” he assured her.
“You don’t think an eleven-month-old baby might like a superhero, huh?” she inquired, deadpan, looking at him. “Zach, don’t go trying to protect me! We’ll never make it as partners if you do that!”
“I’m not protecting you. I understand that when bullets are flying, you’re just about a sharpshooter. I just can’t see sending you flying back into the past, when you don’t need to be there—not when it’s a painful past,” he told her.
“I … I’m all right going in places!” she argued.
“Really? So you had a vision of Salem in the 1600s just by being here, but—”
“Things like this, I sit down, I concentrate!” she told him. “But—”
“But … please let’s not argue. Sorry. We both have a lot to learn about each other. For now, I think we need to get into the woods.”
She winced. “Into the Woods—great show on Broadway!” she told him.
He groaned and started toward the back.
“We move quietly and together,” he said.
“Of course. But I’m willing to bet that they are deep, deep into the woods. So deep that the average hiker or bird-watcher would never go that far.”
“Exactly. And we’re back to the why,” he said.
“Why steal children and young women and go deep into the woods? Zach, sorry, you’re really sure that they’re still alive, right?
” Skye asked. They had passed the in-law building where Mike Bolton had lived—and died.
They entered into something that vaguely resembled a trail at the far rear of the property.
“Why?” Zach repeated as they walked. “We need the why. More so than ever.”
“You’ve gotten something from the superhero?” she asked.
“Enough to know that he’s alive—and Patricia is still with him.
He trusts her; she’s telling him he’ll see his folks soon, and everything will be all right.
Sophie is with her mother, and she’s scared when it’s dark, but in the day …
she is just confused. But I’m right on one thing—they’re in the woods.
Neither kid can figure out what they’re doing in the woods.
I keep hearing the word ‘master’ go through their minds; someone out there is telling them that they’re the master.
Or a master, and they’re supposed to look at the grass and the trees … ”
He stopped speaking, stopped moving, and frowned, and looked away as if confused.
“Well, I’m not you, I don’t see the past.” He frowned.
“Zach! I’m not a mind reader! What’s going on?” Skye demanded. She had almost plowed into his back when he had stopped. She stood, watching him. “Zach!” she pressed. “Please! What?”
“‘Beware the devil in the darkness.’”
Skye stared at him; he looked at her. “They’re being told the devil may lurk in the forest! To watch out because the devil comes in the darkness!”
“This is crazier and crazier,” Skye said. “Someone dressed up in a wicked-witch costume is preaching to kids as if they were back in 1692?”
Zach shook his head. “Infinitely crazy, yes. So …”
“Well, I guess we can appreciate the trees and the grass and the bushes that are catching at my clothing and the stones that jab up into my feet,” Skye said.
She started to walk again.
There were areas here—as there really were in so many beautiful places around the country—where it seemed that the trees, the forest, stretched on forever and ever.
She thought about driving on I-75 through the south of Georgia and into the northern realms of Florida.
Sometimes it could seem that the trees and brush were endless.
Even in a car!
But they were on foot.
And already it seemed the back of the Bolton house had disappeared!
This was Salem, Massachusetts. A smaller city surrounded by other smaller cities. The forest could not stretch on forever.
Maybe it was the denseness of it. She didn’t think that even she would be particularly happy here at night, especially if there was no moon and the stars had disappeared into the heavens.
Zach, of course, was right behind her. She wondered if she should take the little superhero doll and the stuffed zebra away from him.
He was feeling too much.
Of course, she smiled inwardly, he hadn’t wanted her to relive something awful, over and over again.
She didn’t want the children’s pain filling his heart and soul so much so that it was all he felt!
“Ah, come on!” he said lightly. “The forests are something that we human beings need to appreciate and preserve. They take the bad stuff we put in the air and more or less recycle it so that we can keep breathing,” he reminded her.
“Science 101,” she said.
He laughed. “Something like that.”
“I do like forests. I think they’re beautiful,” she said. “I just like them when … well, when I know where I am!”
“Salem, Massachusetts,” he assured her.
She groaned and kept walking.
“How do you know we’re going the right way?” she asked.
“Branches.”
“You can read branches now?”
He laughed. “You can see that people have used this trail—”
“Trail!”
“Well, kind of a trail,” he told her.
“We look for the broken branches?” she suggested. “And you, of course, know where we’re going.”
“No, not at all. I just know that someone else has been here recently. And that this almost-trail, if you will, was created by someone walking through here recently,” he told her.
“But you know how to get out of here?” Skye asked.
“East, west, north, and south,” he told her. “Head back to the west, and we’ll wind up in something like civilization again. Warbler!”
“What?” Skye asked. “Warbler—a bird?”
He nodded. “In the trees. They’re together—Patricia and Jeremy and Mrs. Howell and little Sophie.
They’re outside … with others. There are some other kids there …
and someone is talking,” Zach said. “They’re all listening.
Not happily. The kids look … uncomfortable.
Scared. There’s a little girl who apparently had some kind of a fit—and she’s been made to stare at a tree, standing right in front of it … facing it, of course.”
“But who is it that the kids are watching?” Skye asked.
He looked at her, shaking his head. “The wicked witch,” he told her.
Skye let out a sound of extreme aggravation. “A green wicked witch is running around—and we can’t find him. Or her!”
Zach gave himself a shake, clearing his head of the images he was seeing through the eyes of the children.
“This person is careful, so very careful. He or she doesn’t want their identity known by anyone. Oh, there are other children there … three of them. And this one will get you—a young man, maybe a teenager, at most about twenty or so.”
“Others have been kidnapped, too?” she asked.