The Gathering, page 7
“Doc only works out of the surgery a couple of days a week,” Nicholls told her. “Other than that, he sees patients at his house, up near Deep Hollow Lake.”
“Right. The lake formed in a deep hollow by any chance?”
He managed a small smile. “Folks here do like to call a spade a spade.”
A larger, more modern, single-story building drew into view on their right.
“Deadhart School,” Nicholls said. “Elementary on one side. The other part is the high school.”
“That work out?”
“Has so far.”
Barbara could see a few younger children outside the school, playing tag. Too young to understand that dark clouds were gathering. Too young to realize that life was finite. Necessarily so. At eight you wanted to live forever. At eighty you were glad that everything had its time.
After the school, the dregs of the town fell away. Buildings became sparser. A sign on their right pointed up a side road: “Garrett’s Tours—explore the beauty of Denali National Park with trusted, knowledgeable guides. Hiking, snowmobiles, wilderness camps, Colony tours.”
“Stephen’s parents live up there and run their tour company,” Nicholls said.
“What about Jacob and his father?”
“They live on the other side of town.”
Said in a terser, more dismissive tone. The other side. A curl of distaste.
They were almost out of buildings when the cross drew into view. At least seven foot tall, planted firmly in the ground at the side of the road. Behind it, a short dirt track led to a modest-looking wooden building. A sign hung from the cross.
Church of the Holy Cross.
“Nice,” Barbara murmured. “Literal, right?”
“Colleen wanted to make sure people didn’t miss the place.”
“I can see that.” Barbara peered closer. Her stomach lurched.
“Could you stop the truck a second?”
Reluctantly, Nicholls pulled to a halt. Barbara hopped out and walked over to the cross. From a distance it looked like it was constructed from two large, solid pieces of wood. Up close, Barbara could see that it was actually made up of numerous small bundles of wood bound together. Used stakes. Their sharp ends stained russet with dried blood.
A small sign at the bottom of the cross read:
This cross has been constructed with the tools of God and the weapons of His holy war. We will persevere.
“They’re old,” Nicholls said as he joined her. “Not illegal.”
Barbara rolled her eyes. “A lot of things aren’t illegal. Doesn’t make them right.”
Nicholls stared at her. “Come with me. I want you to see something.”
Barbara followed him down the dirt track, past the church. A large clearing had been created here between the straggly birch trees. At the entrance, a rough wooden board hung between two posts: Deadhart Cemetery. Barbara could see a haphazard array of headstones and other markers poking up through the snow. Spirit Houses, crosses. At the far end of the clearing, a group of four men tended a roaring fire.
Barbara frowned. “What are they doing?”
“Warming the earth,” Nicholls said. “For Marcus’s grave.”
“His body still needs to be sent to Anchorage for autopsy.”
“This time of year, it can take days, even weeks, to dig deep enough. The earth is as hard as granite. Everyone in the town will help. They’ll take it in shifts, using pickaxes and drills. If they don’t, Marcus’s parents will have to wait till the spring thaw to bury him. Their only child. Murdered, and still not laid to rest.”
“I’m sorry.”
Nicholls nodded, face grim. “So, maybe you don’t get to be the judge of what’s right around here.”
He turned and strode back toward the truck. One of the men threw another log on to the fire. The flames leaped and crackled. Barbara sighed—well done keeping your only ally on your side—and walked slowly after him.
They drove off again in silence.
* * *
—
“Cabin” was something of a generous description for the heap of rotted wood that lurched lopsidedly among the dark spruces.
Nicholls shook his head. “Never understood why kids like to hang around places like this.”
“You don’t have kids yourself?”
“Nope. You?”
“No, but I remember being one.”
As a teenager, Barbara and her best friend had made dens in the forest near the river. Constructed of fallen branches and twigs, covered in moss and dead leaves. They were basic and flimsy. But they were theirs. Being a kid was tough. Being a teen was even tougher. You’re told you’re almost an adult but with none of the power that adults have. You’re still helpless, still trapped in between. Teens needed escape. Places like this. A barely held together structure of rotten, falling-down wood. But it belonged to them.
“It’s just us here, Babs. They can’t touch us.”
She pushed open the creaky door, which was barely hanging on by two loose hinges.
The cabin was dark inside, lit by a few shards of wintry light slipping in through the many gaps in the wood and a larger hole in the roof. There was no real furniture apart from a few upturned crates. Melted candles were dotted around the place, along with crushed beer cans and the stubs of cigarettes and joints. Just what she would expect. About the only thing missing were a few discarded condoms.
“We searched it thoroughly before,” Nicholls said, defensively.
“I’m sure you did, sir,” Barbara replied. “I’m not really looking for anything you’ve missed.”
Not entirely true. Barbara hoped there might be something Nicholls had missed or at least not registered. Fresh eyes often found fresh evidence.
She reached into her pocket and took out her flashlight. She flicked it on and scanned the floor. Easy to spot where Marcus had died. Despite most of the blood having been removed, there was still a large dark stain. She moved around the cabin, shining the flashlight around the corners and over the walls. On the right-hand side of the ramshackle building, she spied a rusty nail sticking out of the splintered wood. She walked over and looked more closely. Something gray and wispy was caught on it. A thread. This was where the coat had been hung.
“You see this?” She turned to Nicholls.
He walked over and squinted at the thread. “Just about,” he said.
Barbara extracted a plastic bag from her backpack and slipped the thread inside. Not that she had the boy’s coat to compare it to, but still, you had to be like a magpie in this job. Pick up the things that caught your eye and hopefully use them to feather your nest of evidence.
She looked back around the room, trying to picture what could have happened here. The boys had met up as usual. Text messages confirmed it. They had hung out, smoked a little weed, drunk a little beer. Nothing out of the ordinary. At some point they had left, Marcus had come back for his phone—or maybe to rendezvous with someone else—and that was when he had been killed.
“What are you thinking?” Nicholls asked.
She wasn’t sure. Something about this scenario just wasn’t sitting right somehow, and she wasn’t sure why.
“Let’s run through it again,” she said. “The boys came up here at what time?”
“Around seven, seven thirty.”
“How long would you say it takes to walk here from town?”
“Around half an hour, forty minutes maybe.”
“The timestamp on the video was 9:18 p.m. Stephen and Jacob said they last saw Marcus around 9 p.m., when they were halfway home, and he realized he’d left his phone in the cabin and went back for it. Yes?”
“Ye-es.” Said more cautiously as Nicholls saw where she was going with this.
“What time did Stephen’s parents say he got home?”
“Around 10 p.m.”
“Why did it take so long? Must have only been a twenty-minute walk.”
“Maybe the boys waited for Marcus.”
“You told me that they didn’t wait. Boys don’t stick together like girls.”
Nicholls shook his head and touched his mustache again. Barbara noticed he did that when he was feeling uncomfortable. He should have caught this himself. Or maybe he did and just didn’t want to think about it too much.
“It might mean nothing,” he said eventually.
“And it might mean everything.”
Barbara looked around the cabin again, letting it soak in, breathing in the smell: stale beer and weed, the cloying aroma of spruce. Beneath it all, the faint irony tang of blood. Death had come here, she thought. And it had been hungry. Ravenous. And there was something else too. Anger. Fear. Hatred.
Her head whipped around. A noise from outside. A flurry of birds taking flight.
“You hear that?”
“What?”
Barbara crossed the cabin quickly, yanking open the door and almost pulling it off its hinges. She was just in time to see a slight, blonde girl turn and disappear between the trees. Barbara hurried down the cabin’s steps, slowing as she reached the edge of the woods. Easy to get lost in woods like these, if you didn’t know the area. She walked a little way into the trees’ embrace, conscious of keeping the cabin in sight behind her. She stared around. The girl was probably long gone…
And then she saw her. Standing a short distance away, half shrouded in the gloom of the thick spruce. She was dressed in what looked like an assortment of animal skins and her white-blonde hair hung over her shoulders in two long pigtails. Barbara didn’t believe in ghosts, but for a moment, she looked just like…
Mercy.
The girl stepped forward and Barbara realized her damn foolishness. Not Mercy. How could it be? This girl was much younger, for a start. And her skin was pale. Mercy’s skin had been dark, in striking contrast to her hair.
And when they drowned her for the fifth or sixth time, it floated like silvery seaweed in the river.
Barbara swallowed. “You okay, sweetheart? You lost?”
She asked the question even though she was pretty sure the girl wasn’t lost. Or a little girl.
“Who’s Mercy?” the girl asked.
Ice slithered down Barbara’s spine. She hadn’t said the name out loud. She forced a smile, and the effort made her cheeks hurt. “Just an old friend. What’s your name?”
“You don’t need to know, old woman.” The girl cocked her head slightly to one side. “You a cop?”
“A detective.”
The girl nodded. “Then you go tell that fuckwit chief that the Colony didn’t kill the boy.”
Barbara flinched a little at the swearword. She was sure the girl had meant her to.
“You from the Colony?” she asked steadily.
The girl smiled, revealing sharp, gold incisors. Her natural incisors must have been broken, or removed, at some point.
“You catch on fast,” she said.
“You know about the murder?”
“I make it my business to know what goes on in the human settlement.” She spat out the word “human” as though it tasted bad.
“Then maybe you could tell me who did kill the boy?”
The girl’s amber eyes appraised her. “Look closer to home.”
“Deadhart?”
“Ask ’em about the Bone House.”
“The Bone House?”
“You heard me. And keep the fuck away from the Colony.”
Before Barbara could ask anything else, the girl was gone, melting into the woods, like she had simply dissolved.
This time Barbara didn’t try to follow. She traipsed back to the cabin, feeling unnerved. Mercy. Why had she thought of her? That memory had been buried a long time ago. But as the saying went—Bad memories are harder to bury than a vampyr.
Nicholls stood outside the cabin, looking worried and annoyed.
“Where the hell did you go?”
“There was someone outside. I followed them into the woods.”
“Well, that was a foolish thing to do.”
Barbara ignored him. “It was a girl. Young, blonde. I think she was from the Colony.”
She saw something in Nicholls’s face. A tiny twitch.
“You know her?”
“The leader of the Colony is a blonde girl called Athelinda. Centuries old but turned when she was a child.”
Barbara felt a chill grip her stomach. There was a reason why turning children had long ago been outlawed by the colonies. A turned child would never mature. Their physical development would simply stop. But their mind would continue to grow, to absorb experiences, gain knowledge. A centuries-old mind forever trapped in the body of a child. Most went slowly mad. Those who managed to maintain their sanity did so at a cost.
“I’ve heard she’s dangerous,” Nicholls continued. “Plenty of stories about hikers who disappeared in the mountains over the years.”
“Plenty of stories about Bigfoot, too…”
He gave her a look. “If she’s down here, this close to town, it means trouble.”
“She said the Colony didn’t kill the boy.”
“Well, I guess she would.”
“She also said something about looking closer to home, and ‘the Bone House’?”
He frowned. “No idea. But I wouldn’t put too much store in anything she has to say. Most folk say she’s insane.” And then, more crisply: “Are we done here?”
“I guess so. For now.”
“Then we should get moving.” He glanced around. “It’ll be dark soon.”
He walked away. Barbara followed, still frowning. The Bone House. There was something there, she thought. Nicholls’s denial was too quick. He knew what it was, but he didn’t want to tell her. Which only made her more curious.
Still, she agreed with him about one thing. Athelinda was dangerous. In fact, there was nothing more dangerous than a child with power…and a few centuries’ worth of resentment.
13
Beau hadn’t been expecting the knock at the door.
But he had been waiting for it.
Like a lot of things, it wasn’t a case of if but when.
He put down his mug, rose from his chair and walked down the hall.
For a moment he paused, composing himself. Then, with a sense of resignation, he unlocked the door and pulled it open.
The man outside was compact, and well dressed. His silver hair was neatly styled, and he sported a small goatee beard. He didn’t really fit in in Deadhart. Never had. But he was a good doctor. He’d been kind to Patricia when she was ill, and for that Beau was always grateful.
“Dr. Dalton,” Beau said. “To what do I owe the home visit?”
“Oh, you know I like to check in on my favorite patients.”
A lie. Dalton hadn’t checked in on Beau since Patricia died.
He was here for a reason. And Beau was pretty sure he knew what. You didn’t take your dog to the vet for their final visit. You had them put down at home.
“Come on through,” he said, holding out his arm for Dalton to step inside.
He shut the door and led Dalton down to the living room.
“Well, well!” Dalton stopped and stared at the mounted heads on the wall. Two mature males. One adolescent.
Beau smiled. “You always admired my trophies.”
“I did. I’m pleased to see them back up on the wall where they belong.”
Patricia had made Beau keep them in his work shed. Said they “gave her the creeps.”
Dalton walked up to the trophies, reached out and stroked the cheek of the young male.
“Handsome devil.”
Beau supposed he was. Jet-black hair, slanted green eyes, alabaster skin. But “devil” was the right word.
“There was a time when every hunter’s lodge would have a dozen of these mounted on the walls,” Beau said. “We were proud of who we were. And it kept the colonies in their place. They knew what would happen if they stepped out of bounds. Now—” He shook his head in disgust. “If we kill them, we’re the criminals. What kind of crap is that?”
“True,” Doc Dalton said. “Those were easier times, Beau.” He was still staring at the heads. “They ever talk to you?”
Beau turned sharply. “What?”
“Some folks believe vampyrs can still communicate, even after they’re dead. Like the colonies have some kind of hive mind?”
“You hear that, old man? A hive mind. Maybe you’re not losing yours after all.”
“Pile of baloney,” Beau said, tone sharper than he meant it to be.
Dalton chuckled. “That’s what I think. Dead is dead, right?” He looked back at the heads. “You know, if you ever want to sell them…”
“I’ve told you before, they’re not for sale.”
“Some people would pay big bucks for heads like these.”
“I said no.”
“Okay. But if you change your mind…”
“I won’t.”
Beau walked away from the trophies, indicating their conversation was over. “Now, you have something to tell me?”
“Shall we sit?”
“Do I need to?”
Dalton smiled. Beau didn’t find it comforting. It was the smile he used to put on when he gave Patricia bad news.
“I think we’d be more comfortable,” he said.
Reluctantly, Beau settled in his worn armchair. Dalton took the other one.
“So, how have you been, Beau?”
“Fine.”
“Except for the voices, right? You didn’t mention those to the Doc?”
Beau brushed at his ear like he was batting at a troublesome insect. The Doc was preoccupied taking some papers out of his briefcase. He settled them on his lap and smiled again.
“I got your results back from the MRI and the other tests.”
“Okay.”
