But Diana doubted it was a joke.
Ahead, she saw a break in the trees. She hesitated.
It suddenly seemed familiar to Diana, as though she had been to this place and seen it before. The images flooded back. The clearing in the woods...the tall trees...the moonlit night...the dark, rich earth and the secrets it held... She had been here in her visions.
She rushed forward to the edge of the clearing, pausing at the trees and rocks that lined its edge, creating a natural barrier from the rest of the woods.
"This is it," she said. "This is it."
She fell to her knees, crying.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Roger had stayed in the house since the police had left. He was tired and hungry, but he didn't eat. He didn't feel like doing anything. His body felt empty, used up and worn out.
He missed the girl. Even though he'd had to kill her, and even though he knew she really didn't like him and probably never would, he missed her. Without her there, without her presence, the house felt terribly empty and sad. It reminded him of the days after his mother died, days when he and his dad stumbled from room to room, not speaking, avoiding each other's eyes. They didn't know what to do to keep the place going. They ate soup from cans and cried in front of the television.
That's how Roger felt now, except worse.
Back then, he at least had his dad. And eventually he had a wife. Now, he had nothing to look forward to. He wouldn't be able to take another wife, and the police might very well come back. He had covered up everything for now. He had cleaned the blood and brains and bits of skull from the bedroom. He had managed to slap on two coats of paint to hide the evidence. But he didn't think it would last. They'd find the cop's truck and they'd find his prints on it and they'd come back. Most definitely, they'd come back.
He sat in the house, in the dark, like a scared little kid.
But after a while, the clearing started talking to him.
He felt the stirring of his member. His mouth went dry.
Someone was there, it told him. Someone was in the clearing.
CHAPTER FORTY
Ludwig told Berding to stop his car on Connors Bend Road near its intersection with County Road 600. He couldn't be certain about the location since it was now dark and every acre of the landscape out there looked like every other acre. But he felt reasonably certain. He thought he recognized the contour of the fields, the distance to the trees.
"Here?" Berding said.
"I think so."
"You think or you know?"
"This is it," Ludwig said, trying to sound brave and certain. How else could he convince a cop of anything?
"So we just get out and walk?"
"There's no road through the woods."
They both stepped out of the car. Ludwig had brought a heavier coat, and he zipped it up. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.
"Just stay close to me," Berding said. "We're trespassing, and if we get caught, it's not going to look good for either one of us. I'm technically out of my jurisdiction."
"Worse for you than me, I'd imagine. I'll let you do the talking."
Berding nodded. "If there's any shooting, stay behind me. Okay?"
"You don't have to tell me twice about that."
"Okay. Let's go."
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Diana raised her head and looked around. Tears blurred her vision. She wiped them away with the palms of her hands.
When she could see again, she looked around the clearing. She saw two areas of disturbed earth close to her. One of them looked freshly dug.
Graves.
"Rachel."
Diana went to the closest one, the freshest one, and sank her hands into the rich earth. She started digging. The ground gave way easily, just as it had in her visions. She moved great handfuls with ease.
"Rachel. I'm sorry. My sweet, baby sister, I'm so sorry. I'm coming for you. I'm coming. I didn't give up on you. I didn't give up."
Diana worked through the top layer of soil. She touched something that wasn't dirt or rock or root. Something fabric. She dug with more urgency, taking great scoopfuls of soil in the crooks of her arms and shoveling it aside as fast as it would go. Dirt covered her to her shoulders and began to adhere to her sweating face. But she kept going.
Soon, a portion of the body was revealed. Diana kept digging, exposing more. She saw the legs, the torso. The hands of a young woman.
"No, no."
Diana moved to the far end of the grave and worked to expose the face. She first saw the neck and the bloody gash, the apparent cause of the woman's death. She worked more and the face came clear, like a slow-to-develop Polaroid.
It wasn't Rachel, but the face of another young woman. The dark and the dirt made it difficult to see. Diana studied the features, the long brown hair, the nearly perfect nose. She'd seen the face before.
Then it clicked.
Jacqueline Foley, the missing Fields' student.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Roger stormed down the path in the dark. It felt as though an invisible rope had been tied around his waist, and something in the clearing was tugging it, supplying an increasing amount of tension that dragged him in that direction. He couldn't have stopped if he wanted to, and he didn't want to. He wanted to see who was there.
When he first reached the clearing, he didn't see anything or anybody, and he thought maybe he'd been wrong. But the clearing had never been wrong.
Something scuttled in the dirt. Roger looked down, thinking it was an animal.
It was a girl, a girl digging up the graves.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The man stood at the edge of the clearing. He was huge and hulking, but his face looked confused, and he resembled an overgrown child.
"What are you doing?" he said.
Diana was still on the ground, kneeling over the Foley girl's grave.
"I'm looking for my sister."
"Your sister?" The man looked confused. He pointed at the Foley girl. "Is she your sister?"
"No. My sister's name is Rachel. She disappeared five years ago. She was fifteen. Do you know her?"
The man still looked confused. "I didn't mean to kill that girl."
"Who? Rachel? Did you hurt Rachel?"
"That girl right there." He pointed again. It was difficult to see in the dark, but it appeared as though the man were starting to cry. He sniffled and wiped at his face with his giant hands. "I didn't mean to hurt her. I didn't want to. They were going to come and take me away and send me to jail. The cop came and I didn't mean to kill him, but he wanted to take the girl away, and then I knew he would take me."
Diana looked around and saw another grave on the far side of the clearing. Jason?
"You killed a police officer?"
"The clearing told me I had to."
His words gave Diana a chill. She wasn't the only one to be drawn by the place. It really did send out messages, except in his case, the messages led to deaths.
Diana stood up. She reached for and brought out the Glock.
"I used to be a police officer. You're going to have to talk to somebody about all this. You're going to have to answer for this. Put your hands on top of your head"
"No..."
"Put them up."
"No."
"Yes. If you need help, you'll get it. But we have to get out of here. Put your hands on top of your head now and turn around."
The man slowly did as he had been told. He brought his thick hands up and rested them on top of his head. While he did so, Diana reached into her coat pocket with her free hand and took out her cell phone. She flipped it open and scrolled to Dan's number with her thumb. She hit send, but before she could speak, the pain came back, an explosion in her skull. It knocked the air out of her, and she fell to her knees, dropping the phone.
"No!"
Her vision clouded and everything went dark.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
"Are we almost there?" Dan said.
To Ludwig, every tree and square foot of ground looked the same. He could have been tromping through the woods in Maine or California for all he knew. He was beginning to doubt himself.
"I'm not sure," he said. "To be honest, when I got close the last time, I felt something, a surge of adrenaline. Something I couldn't really explain logically, I suppose, but it came from the clearing and worked through me."
"Are you feeling that now?"
"No."
"So maybe we're in the wrong place?"
"I don't know..."
Berding's cell phone rang. He muttered a curse and dug into his pocket. While he fumbled with the device, Ludwig looked around more. Maybe they were in the wrong place. Maybe he'd screwed up.
"Diana?" Berding said. "Diana? Where are you? Diana?"
Ludwig waited. The Captain hit the send button, trying to return the call. He waited and waited.
"Nothing," he said. He tried again.
"You might not get a signal out here."
"But it rang once. And I'm getting her voicemail when I call back. Unless..."
"Unless the caller knows we're here," Ludwig said.
Berding sprang forward in a run, and Ludwig hustled to not be left behind.
* * *
Roger watched the girl writhe on the ground. Something was wrong with her. He still had his hands on his head, but he realized now he had his chance. The pressure grew inside him. He felt like he was going to burst. The girl lay helpless before him. He knew he had to take care of her just as he had taken care of the others. He knew the clearing wanted that.
He went to the girl, arms outstretched.
* * *
Diana came back to herself with a great weight pressing on her chest. Something scrambled at her pants and around her throat. Hands. Large, fumbling hands.
She knew it was the man in the clearing. She felt his body press against her, chest to chest, groin to groin. He was full and erect and trying to get her pants open. He must have done this to Jacqueline Foley. He could have done it to so many others.
Diana couldn't push him off. He was too big, and his hot breath blew on her neck like a grizzly bear's. She didn't have the gun anymore.
She reached for her left jacket pocket. Her arm had limited range of motion because of his weight, which pinned the arm to the ground. She moved her wrist and fingers. She could just touch the edge of her pocket and feel the fabric.
The man pushed harder. He undid the button on her jeans and worked on her fly.
The tips of her fingers brushed the canister of pepper spray. She stretched the fingers, wiggled them. She couldn't get a grip on it. He tugged on her fly and brought it down. His other hand applied greater pressure to her throat.
Diana knew time was short. She made a quick, jerking motion to the left. The pepper spray fell out and brushed against her hand. She missed it. Her hand scrambled in the dirt.
The man worked the zipper open and pulled on her pants. He worked them down a little, but as he moved to do that, he granted her a greater range of motion. She reached and touched the pepper spray. She wrapped two fingers around it and moved it. She tucked it into her palm and raised it in the air.
She didn't have time to aim. She might be firing it into her own face. She didn't care.
She depressed the button with her thumb and fired a stream of the liquid. It hit the man flush in the eyes.
He screamed and rolled off of her. He rolled into the Foley girl's grave and landed on top of her.
Diana rolled in the other direction. She started to run out of the clearing, but saw two figures approaching her. One of them had a gun. She stopped and scrambled back, searching on the ground for her own weapon.
"Diana! Diana!"
She recognized the voice.
Dan?
"Diana, are you okay?"
He held his gun on the man on the ground, who was still in the grave with his hands over his eyes, howling in pain.
"Diana?"
"I'm okay," she said. "I'm okay."
"What's going on here?" Dan said.
Diana took a deep breath. She didn't recognize the man with Dan. She didn't really care. At the moment, she hoped it was all over.
"This is a crime scene, Dan. That's the Foley girl's body right there."
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Diana waited in the back of a cruiser in the driveway of the Donahue house while the crime scene was processed. Given the size of the scene and its remote location, it took most of the night. But she stayed awake in the back of the car. She wanted to know what was happening and didn't trust herself to sleep there, so close to the clearing.
Near daybreak, Dan came out to check on her. He slipped into the back of the cruiser, a paper cup of coffee in his hand.
"Well?" Diana said.
He shook his head. "We haven't found what you're looking for," he said. "It's the Foley girl. And Jason. And a body that might be Margaret Todd. The coroner says it looks like she's been dead about a month, but she could be about the right age. There's no obvious sign of trauma."
"Shit."
"Her mom's sending the dental records. She still has them after all these years."
"That doesn't surprise me."
"They should have the ID done in a few hours."
"I'd like to be the one to tell Mrs. Todd."
"Sure. You can come along. But there's no guarantee—"
"Dan, it's her. I know it's her."
Dan didn't contradict her, and she took his silence as a form of agreement. "We're still looking and will be for a while, so there's still a chance. We've found remains that go back a long way, maybe a hundred years. Doctor Ludwig says this doesn't surprise him at all. He's been researching the area for a long time."
"He's already asked to interview me for his book," Diana said. "Are you going to deputize him?"
Dan smiled, but it was forced. She understood that the weight of the night's revelations—especially if Margie Todd's body really did rest in that grave—would come down on him like the sun and the moon and stars. She only wished she could help him more.
"What do you think this place is?" Dan said. "What does it do to people?"
"It draws them here," Diana said. "It gets them to do things they might not ordinarily do."
"It turned this Donahue guy into a killer. He seems harmless enough away from there, but something changed him in that clearing."
"It changed me, too," Diana said.
"How?"
"Remember how you said I spend too much time on the sidelines? That it was easy for me to sit back and judge others without really putting myself out there? Remember?"
Dan smiled a little. "Do you remember any of the good things I said to you?"
"That was a good thing," Diana said. "You were right. I wasn't involved...with anything. In some way, this place got me to do that. I don't know if that was its intent, but it worked."
"You know, we're going to be looking out here for a long time," he said. "We might find something about Rachel."
"I doubt it. But it doesn't really matter."
"Why's that?"
"I don't know. Maybe I wasn't brought out here to find Rachel. Maybe I'm not meant to do that. Maybe I was just meant to stop this. Tonight. Maybe that's enough."
Dan looked thoughtful. "Do you believe that?"
Diana looked out the window of the cruiser where the horizon was just lightening.
"I'm working on it, Dan. I'm working on it."
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
At noon that day, Diana drove to Kay Todd's trailer with Dan. They hadn't called in advance, but when they pulled to the front of the small, pathetic looking trailer, Kay was standing at the door, a cigarette in her hand. When she saw them, she started shaking her head.
"It might be best for me to stay in the car," Dan said.
"I think you're right."
Diana went up the steps and pulled the screen door open.
"No," Kay said, backing away f
rom Diana and into the trailer. "Don't you dare show up here and tell me my baby's dead. Don't you dare do it. Goddamn you."
She collapsed to the floor, sobbing.
"It's not true," Kay said. "It's not true."
She beat at the floor with her withered fist.
Diana walked over and sat on the floor next to her. Kay tried to push her away, but Diana held on.
"No," she said, her voice growing quiet. "No."
"I'm sorry, Kay. I'm so sorry."
Kay leaned on Diana's shoulder and cried and cried.
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