Katie Colbourne’s voice reached Monica.
“I never believed her that there was a witness on the street corner who’d stolen her fatally injured son’s backpack while he lay bleeding in the street, do you know that? Because honestly, who would do a thing like that? Estelle—Stella—claimed it was a woman . . . She’d seen prostitutes on that corner before. But I still didn’t believe her, because no one came forward, and what witness wouldn’t come forward for something like that?”
Sweat prickled over Monica’s body. She was held rigid by Katie’s words. So was Deborah.
“And you know what?” Katie called from above, from somewhere out of Monica’s sight. “I think I know who that woman is now. I think we’re all here. The drivers of that BMW, the mechanic who helped hide it—because that confounded the police. In a neighborhood like that? Someone had to know. They didn’t hide it alone. Silence is a sin, too, you know?”
“Katie, stop,” Deborah said.
Katie Colbourne laughed, the sound mad, shrill. “Why should I stop? Why should I be silent? We’re all in the same boat. All of us around little Zeke Marshall’s death. And do you know who also wanted Estelle Marshall to pay for allowing her six-year-old to run in front of that BMW? The man who told me so in an interview, the man who’d lost his son—Estelle’s husband—Stuart Marshall. I wonder . . . maybe he’s behind this all?”
Deborah suddenly noticed Monica at the front door. She spun to face her. “What are you doing there—what happened to you? Where are the others? What was the gunfire and air horns about?”
Monica could only stare at Deborah. Slowly—very slowly—she stepped inside the great hall. She looked up, saw Katie leaning over the balcony. Her gaze went back to Deborah. The carving that Deborah held in two pieces had been decapitated.
One saw the judge, and then there were five.
“Some . . . something terrible has happened,” Monica whispered, her voice coming out alien to her own ears, her gaze fixed on the headless torso in Deborah’s hand. “I . . . heard a man scream. I think the killer is out there. We need to lock all the doors.”
She suddenly pushed past Deborah and clattered up the stairs. “Don’t let anyone in. Lock yourselves in your rooms!”
“What about the others?” called Deborah.
But Monica rushed into her room and slammed the door. She turned the key, heart jackhammering in her chest.
THE LODGE PARTY
STELLA
Stella crashed through branches and into a small clearing almost simultaneously with Nathan, who burst into the clearing from the opposite side. She froze. So did he.
Steven stood in the center of the clearing over a man’s body, rifle in hand. Hanging from a low branch in front of him was a deer carcass dripping with blood and loops of entrails. A fetid stench—carrion—hung thick in the air. Water dripped everywhere. Steven was shaking, his face and clothes smeared with blood and mud. He looked wild. Like a shell-shocked hunter lost for months among the enemy in the jungles of Vietnam. Both spatially and mentally confused.
Wham, wham, wham. The details registered like physical blows. Stella’s eyes dropped to the body over which Steven stood. Bart.
Nathan made a small noise, like the sound of an animal, his knees sagging slightly. He stumbled to the side and braced his hand against a tree. He bent over and retched. Then again. Strands of spittle dangled from his mouth. He kept his face turned away. Stella came slowly forward.
Bart lay facedown in the mud and moss, arms splayed to the sides. Like a cross. A big meat cleaver stuck out of the back of his head, the skull split. Blood and gray-white brain matter oozed out along the sides of the blade. The cleaver was almost fourteen inches long. It was the one that had been on the chopping board in the kitchen.
Stella stared, numb. A whining sound began inside her head.
“What happened?” she whispered.
Silence.
She looked at Dr. Steven Bodine. He wasn’t all there.
Dangerous was a word that hovered over her mind. Mad. Feral. Her attention went back to the rifle in his hand. She recalled the gunshots. Two. The male screams.
“Are you hurt, Steven? What happened?”
Did you do this? If so, I need to be calm, defuse the situation.
“Steven?”
He seemed unable to move, speak. His jaw hung flaccid.
“Give me that gun.” She held out her hand and took a step toward him.
He tensed, raised the rifle. Both Stella and Nathan froze. Stella eased back. She held both hands in front of her, palms out.
“It’s okay. Just set it down. Set it on the ground.”
Steven bent his head. Stared at Bart.
“Steven. Put the gun down. We need to check on Bart.”
He slowly crouched and laid the rifle carefully upon the moss.
Stella hurried forward and grabbed it. She went to the far edge of the small clearing and set the gun down on a rock.
Nathan moved forward to look at Bart. Steven grabbed him and hugged. Hard. The surgeon rested his head on Nathan’s shoulder and began to sob. Nathan looked distraught, confused. He looked . . . wrong, thought Stella.
We’re all wrong. All mad now. We’ve turned feral. A small tribe under assault. A wildness taking hold in our brains where ordinarily logic would reside.
She hurried over to Bart and dropped to her haunches beside him. She knew basic first aid. It was part of her pilot training. She kept her certification up to date. Stella felt for a pulse.
“He’s dead,” said the cosmetic surgeon from behind her. “He’s dead. Dead. Dead.” He began to sob again. Nathan awkwardly pushed him off.
Caution whispered through Stella. She scanned the shadows among the surrounding trees. It was suddenly getting darker. Rain was coming down heavily again, and the wind was starting to stir.
“Steven,” she said firmly, urgency nipping at the corners of her brain, “what happened? Did . . . did you do this?”
He wiped a shaking hand across his brow, leaving a black-red smear of more mud and blood.
“I . . . Bart and I were following the drag marks into the woods. When we came deeper into the forest, there was more and more blood. The trail grew marked under the thick canopy, where hardly any snow had come through. Then . . . we smelled it. The . . . That thing—we came into this clearing, and saw it hanging there, from those branches.”
Stella’s and Nathan’s attention went to the deer carcass in the tree. Possibly a bear’s kill. Or maybe a cougar had done that, and dragged it up into the tree to stash it.
Steven said, “Bart went closer to look at it. A noise came from the brush. A crack of twigs. Then out it flew—” He gave a horrible sob and choked on his own phlegm. Steven wiped his hand across his mouth. “It just flew at us.”
“What did?” Nathan asked, eyeing the bushes nervously.
“I . . . I don’t know. Big.”
“Animal?” Stella asked.
“I don’t know. Misty. I was looking away.” He cleared his throat. “I heard Bart scream and shoot. Twice.”
She narrowed her eyes on him.
Nathan kept scanning the trees.
“Bear?” Stella asked. “Cougar? Protecting its kill?”
He shook his head.
“Did Bart hit the animal?”
“I . . . I didn’t even look, because as I turned around, that cleaver came whopping through the air, right out of the fog and the shadows. It . . . it struck him in the back of the head. The sound, the thump and crunch of his skull . . .” He fell silent, just stood there with a haunted look in his eyes, as if the real Dr. Bodine had vacated his body. His arms hung limp and bloody at his sides.
“And then?” Stella urged, anxiety tightening inside her chest, fear prickling over her skin.
“Then he was dead. I’m a doctor. I knew. And I grabbed the gun and ran away. But then . . . I thought it might be out there still, waiting for me. So I . . . I came back. I felt for his pulse to be s
ure. There was none.”
Stella turned to Nathan, suddenly registering that he was alone, and that Katie Colbourne had been with him. “Where’s Katie?” she asked.
“Katie went back to the lodge.”
“You weren’t supposed to split up.”
“Monica?” he said, suddenly noticing himself that Stella was alone. “Where’s my wife?”
“She . . . I left her on the trail.”
“What? Where?”
“I heard the screams and the gunshots, so I came running, and she didn’t. I left her right there on the trail. She’ll be fine, Nathan. The path back to the lodge is clearly visible, and we left flagging tape.”
“You separated. How could you separate? How’s she going to get back to—”
“Nathan, I just told you. Calm down. She’ll be able to get back.”
He glanced at Bart, then the carcass. “Not if . . . if that thing is out there. What if it went after Monica next? What if it found her on her way back to the lodge?”
“Listen, focus. We can check on Monica soon, but first we need to take Bart back. We need to find a way to carry him to the lodge.”
“Jesus, Stella,” Nathan whispered, suddenly looking terrified. “It’s getting dark. We—”
“And it’s going to snow again. And whatever animal is out there—” She looked up at the carcass. A chill trickled down her spine. It indeed looked like something inhuman had done this. A monster. An it. She shivered. “We can’t leave Bart for the animal. It’ll eat him, drag him off.”
“We should get back. I’m worried about Monica. What if she didn’t make it back okay? It will be harder to search for her in the dark.”
“Nathan, this man was murdered. What are we not getting here? Someone is going to come for us eventually, and the police will need to see Bart’s body. We need to take him back.”
He palmed off his hat and raked his fingers through his hair. “I’m not as sure as you are that anyone is coming for us.”
Steven cleared his throat at the mention of the police. It seemed to pull him together. “She’s right,” he said, his voice thick. “We need to carry him back.”
With darkness closing in fast, and rain beginning to pummel down again, they managed to drag Bart a short way through the forest until they found the drag marks along the game trail that had led Bart and Steven here. And Stella was certain now that it was a game trail, given the kill hanging gutted from the tree.
They pulled him a short way farther along the trail, Bart’s face dragging through mud and stones. He was heavy. Heavier than Stella had thought he’d be. And the indignity, the awfulness, of dragging him facedown, was eating at her. It was going to tear his face apart. The dirt was going into his mouth and up his nostrils and under his eyelids. Yet turning him over and dragging him on his back would dislodge the cleaver. And she figured it would help law enforcement if they saw it in situ. The cleaver was a murder weapon. It could hold prints. So they tried lifting his corpse well above the ground, and carrying him between the three of them along the trail that twisted through the bushes and trees, but it proved torturous. The trail was too narrow, the body too heavy, the destination too far.
Stella stumbled and almost fell. She was breathing hard, sweat drenching her body under her waterproof jacket.
“I need a break,” she said.
They lowered Bart’s body back to the forest floor. Her muscles ached. Hunger and thirst were beginning to get the better of her.
“This isn’t working,” Nathan said. “We need a tarp or something to make some kind of a stretcher.”
Stella, Nathan, and Steven looked at each other in the beams of their headlamps, which they’d clicked on as the twilight thickened. The wind moved the trees again. Darkness was growing complete. The rain was turning to sleet. Despite the sweat over her body, Stella’s hands were numb with cold, and her fingers were growing uncooperative. A recipe for hypothermia.
“I’ll go back,” she said. “I’ll move fast and fetch that tarp and ropes we saw in the shed. And I’ll check that Monica is there.”
“Why should you go?”
“Well, do one of you guys want to go? Whoever goes will have to leave the gun with whoever stays with Bart’s body, because the blood could attract the animal that killed the deer. And Bart has more bullets in his pockets. We all saw him stash them there. The one who goes can take my can of bear spray.”
All three eyed each other warily. Each unsure of the others. None wanting to stay with a blood-soaked body while a predator lurked in the trees. And none seemed inclined to run alone along the dark forest trail with only a headlamp and no gun. A noise sounded, and they jumped.
“I think it was just slush falling,” Stella said quietly, the beam of her headlamp probing the gloom and bouncing back at her in the fog.
“Okay,” Steven said quietly, darkly, “you go ahead. We’ll keep trying to carry him.”
“I’ll be as fast as I can.”
Stella moved off into the dark of the forest alone. It closed in behind her. And in the whisper of the wind among the trees, she heard the rhyme.
She stopped for a moment, threw up, the rhyme going disjointedly through her head.
Six Little Liars tried hard to stay alive . . . One met an ax . . .
Stella entered the lodge. It was deathly quiet inside. Her senses went on alert.
“Hello?” she called out. “Anyone here?”
Monica’s bedroom door opened upstairs, and she came out onto the balcony above.
Stella shone her flashlight up to the second floor. Monica’s hair looked damp, and she’d changed into clean clothes. She’d showered or bathed.
“Where is everyone?” Stella asked, looking up at Monica. “Where’s Katie? Deborah?”
“In their rooms.”
Monica had been crying, Stella realized. Her voice was thick and her eyes were puffy. She also appeared confused, as though she’d been sleeping.
“Where’s Nathan?” Monica asked, appearing to come slowly to her senses. Her speech quickened. “And the others? Where are the others? Are—” She stopped as she appeared to register the blood and mud on Stella’s arms and down her jeans. “What happened?”
Stella hesitated. The wind banged a shutter. It was picking up, another storm blowing in. Urgency bit. “Monica, Nathan’s fine. He . . . I . . . I needed to get a tarpaulin and some rope. Bart is . . . He’s . . .” She was having trouble saying it. “Bart is dead. We need to move him.”
“What?”
“He got—someone . . . someone killed him.” She fought for words that felt unreal. “They killed him with a meat cleaver.”
Monica stared. She seemed unable to process. Very quietly she said, “You mean he’s dead?”
Stella nodded. “He’s dead.”
Monica’s knees sagged. She crumpled to her haunches, her hands clutching and sliding down two vertical spindles of wood that helped support the balustrade handrail. She began to moan and rock from side to side, like a strange and distressed female mammal in a zoo cage. Or behind prison bars.
Stella had been going to ask for Monica’s help.
But how much help would she be in her state? How much use would any extra person be along the very narrow and twisting trail, anyway?
“Go back to your room, Monica. Lock the door. Stay safe. I’ll return with lights and a tarpaulin. I saw a tarp in the shed, and ropes. We’ll carry him back in a sling between the three of us. And even if we can’t lift him, if we wrap Bart’s body in the tarp, and secure him with ropes, we can protect evidence if we drag him.”
Monica moaned.
Stella cursed inwardly. Everyone was losing their shit, including her. Her hands trembled and adrenaline bashed through her blood as she headed for the rear door in the kitchen. In the distance she heard Monica’s bedroom door shut upstairs.
Focus. Focus. One task, one thing at a time.
She hurried into the cavernous dark kitchen, using her flashlight because
no lanterns had been lit. She stilled as she saw the gaps in the knife board. They’d taken some of the knives out to the shed. But the meat cleaver—it was gone.
The image of the cleaver splitting open Bart Kundera’s head flashed through her brain.
Her own knees started to give. Stella braced against the counter.
You’re a pilot. You’ve handled dire situations. You’re trained for disaster scenarios. You can do this. You have the mental fortitude . . . You have to focus. You will get through this.
Then she looked down at her own terrible, bloody hands. And she wasn’t so sure she would.
For in the end, there can only be one.
But maybe . . .
there shall be none.
She had to make sure she stood a chance of being the one.
The one who survived.
THE LODGE PARTY
DEBORAH
From the kitchen window, Deborah watched Stella, Steven, and Nathan struggling to get Bart’s body into the freezer in the shed. They had rolled him up in the pale-blue tarpaulin, cleaver in his head and all, and trussed him up with rope. He looked heavy, and they appeared exhausted. The work was clearly backbreaking as the trio labored by the quavering, flickering yellow light of the lanterns, faces gleaming with perspiration. Their shapes made grotesque leaping shadows on the shed walls. Like three witches toiling. Shadow puppets.
Monsters.
Deborah shuddered. She didn’t want those three to come inside, to touch the rest of them with the horror of what they’d seen, done.
They finally rolled Bart’s body into the freezer with a thud. She couldn’t hear it, but it must have thudded, from the way it seemed to reverberate through them all. The only thing Deborah could hear through the grimy windows was the chugging of the generator. They’d fueled it with gas from the cans in the shed, and turned on the freezer to preserve Bart’s body for the police as long as they could. Which meant until the gasoline was gone.
The rough engine noise felt strange in the wilderness. Deborah wondered if the freezer and gasoline had been left inside the shed expressly for this purpose.
In the Dark Page 23
