If there was a point of no return, she had reached it. To follow the private lane meant trespassing and admitting that she had placed her fate in the hands of a swarm of cicadas. To turn around was to acquiesce to the fear and live with the ramifications of abandoning all hope.
There really was no choice at all.
She mounted the dirt drive and wended into the morass. Standing water, gray with algae, winked at her through the tree trunks to either side of the mounded track, which grew subtly steeper with each step. Eventually, it opened into a broad clearing, at the center of which was a knoll crowned by a Spanish-style hacienda with a red ceramic-tile roof and porticos flanking either side. That was the extent of the detail she could glean through the mass of cicadas that covered every available surface. They filled the ring of trees around the manicured yard and turned the formerly white house black. All of them had settled. Not a single insect flew through the air. They just watched. She felt millions of blood-red eyes focused upon her.
And none of them made a sound.
The silence was so intense that every noise, from the scuff of her feet on the dirt to the thrum of her pulse in her ears, seemed amplified a hundredfold.
She recognized this place. It had to have been more than five years since she had been here last, but there was no doubt about to whom the house belonged.
And her heart broke.
There was no way that her daughter was here. These were normal people, albeit more reserved: an educated husband, a domestic wife, and a pampered child.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. She had allowed herself to hope, allowed herself to believe that some greater power had sent the cicadas to lead her to Emma. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the grim truth.
Emma wasn't here.
She was undoubtedly buried somewhere in the bayou where the gators and snapping turtles had laid waste to her flesh. Her husband was gone. She was lost and alone. There was nothing at all left for her in this life, and the time had finally come to end it.
Vanessa was just about to turn around and embark upon the last long walk that would end with an overdose of Sominex when something caught her eye. At first, she hadn't noticed it with all of the black insects on the house.
She walked silently across the lawn.
Countless crimson eyes followed.
The majority of the houses built at the edge of the swamp didn't have basements. The water table and the shifting soil forced most to be built upon aboveground foundations. This elevated crest must have provided the necessary stability to support the garden-level basement that featured windows set nearly flush with the ground. From the distance, she had assumed they were hidden behind a living skin of cicadas like the rest of the house...until she caught just the faintest hint of reflected silver light.
As she approached, it became clear why she had been led here. Decorative iron bars capped with florets had been bolted over the windows. Behind the glass, a sheet of metal had been affixed from the inside.
They hadn't been there before.
She thought about the couple who owned this house, about their family...a mirror image of her own.
They had been friends.
Something stirred inside of her, an instinct she hadn't felt this strongly in two years.
Suddenly, everything made sense.
The dying child.
Emma's abduction.
Warren's death.
She needed to get inside the house.
Her daughter was in the basement.
And she was still alive.
* * *
Trey gave up on reaching his sister on her cell. It was readily apparent she wasn't going to answer. He had settled upon a plan. Jefferson was a small town. He could cruise the length of every street in under half an hour. If Vanessa was out there on foot, he would find her in no time at all. Only the diner stayed open twenty-four hours, and there was nowhere else to go. If he didn't find her by the time he reached South Maple Street at the edge of town, then he would call Dr. Montgomery and make him drag his weary ass out of bed and guide him through the clinic's records, even if he had to do so at gunpoint. But what then? Did he propose reading through every file? It wasn't like there was some kind of search function that would allow him to sort through the entire population by disease. He needed to take a step back and evaluate it from scratch, narrow the field to a manageable number.
What were the facts? Whoever buried the child's body had expected it to be found. Why else go to the trouble of planting the clues that would lead to a false identification? Whoever staged the scene had to have a fairly comprehensive understanding of genetics, had to know that the police would be satisfied with two separate means of identification so they wouldn't need to test the skeletal remains separately. The corpse needed to be displayed in such a manner that there would be no doubt about the mechanism of death, the level of violence so stunning and obvious that there would be no reason to suspect anything else.
So what kind of suspect pool did that create?
A cop would be an easy choice, but all of the sheriff's deputies had been accounted for the night of Emma's disappearance. It was possible that one of them might have been in collusion with an unknown party, however unlikely. Trey had looked each of them in the eye every day in the intervening years and just couldn't imagine how they could have fooled him so completely. He couldn't afford to rule out anyone at this stage, but he needed to consider every potential angle. What about medical professionals? A doctor would have the knowledge base to pull it off and free reign over patient records. Montgomery would have been able to access the correct file, and Emma would have known him well enough to walk away with him without causing a scene. He could have just playfully scooped her up and been on his way before anyone---
Then it hit him.
The dental records.
Trey had recognized that the teeth were part of the setup. All of them had been badly broken, with the exception of the five that were necessary to generate the positive identification. They were chipped and fractured, just to nowhere near the same degree. Anyone could have seen which teeth had been filled. But only one person could have known which ones had cavities that had yet to be filled.
Dr. Carlton Matthews.
What had he said?
He had been more than happy to take care of the details on his end. After all, he and his wife had a daughter Emma's age who they schooled at home.
Trey jerked the wheel to the right and pinned the gas. The clinic was only three blocks away, and, if he was right, he didn't have the time to waste trying to rouse Montgomery and force him to open the doors.
Buildings flew past. He blew through stop signs without a sideways glance and locked up the brakes in front of the clinic. The office was dark. He could see the reception counter through the twin glass doors, a dozen empty seats, and tables littered with magazines.
He leapt out and raced up to the doors. A tug on the handles confirmed they were locked. If given the proper tools and enough time, he probably could have picked the lock, but he had neither. A quick survey of the seams around the doors revealed no wires or magnetic strips. No alarm. He raised his right foot and kicked the glass. Hard. Once. Twice. It shattered on the third try and he barreled through, nearly slipping on the shards covering the floor. The door beside the registration desk was unlocked, and the computer behind the counter had only been put to sleep. He jostled the mouse and brought the screen to life. There were a dozen icons. He double-clicked the one labeled RECORDS. It asked for a medical records number rather than a name. He closed it and opened the SCHEDULING program. This one allowed him to enter the last name Matthews. He tabbed to the FIRST NAME box, which gave him three options in a drop-down menu: Carlton, Sandra, and Chelsea. Sandra was the wife's name, so he populated the box with Chelsea. The screen filled in with her biographical data: birth date, social security number, address, phone number, insurance code, and a nine digit MR number. He grabbed a pen, scribbled it on his pal
m, and opened the RECORDS folder again. He typed the number at the prompt and waited.
A string of minimized reports popped up on the left side, labeled by date. The most recent was from twenty-six months ago. He clicked it and saw his brother-in-law's name listed as the treating physician. Several words jumped out at him from the body of the report.
Distal femoral osteoblastic activity.
Metastasis.
End-stage.
Osteosarcoma.
The body they had found belonged to Chelsea Matthews. She'd been six years-old, the same as Emma. Warren had been unable to save her. She had died of her cancer, leaving behind grief-stricken parents unable to rationalize the loss of their only child. Matthews had been Emma's dentist. She would have trusted him well enough to wander off with him. She would have seen him as safe, as a friend.
Did the Matthewses blame Warren for their daughter's death?
He had been more than happy to take care of the details on his end. After all, he and his wife had a daughter Emma's age who they schooled at home.
Was it possible they had somehow snapped and figured that if they couldn't have their child, then neither could the man who let theirs die?
If that was the case then...
Trey jumped up from the desk and sprinted out of the office.
The Jeep's engine roared and its tires screamed on the asphalt as he sped away from town toward the remote area where the Matthewses lived.
* * *
Vanessa pried at the bars over the window, but they didn't budge in the slightest. The windows on the main floor were out of her reach. That meant she either had to use the front or the back door, and surely both were locked. She hadn't thought to bring her cell phone and she was unarmed. She didn't even have a set of keys to hold between her knuckles, but now that she had found Emma, she couldn't bear to leave her here a second longer.
She had come for her daughter, and she wasn't leaving without her.
Vanessa walked right around to the front porch and ascended the short slate staircase. She stood an arm's length from the door. The cicadas scurried away from the door. Heart pounding, she raised her fist and knocked.
The sound echoed hollowly away from her.
She knocked again, harder this time, and listened for approaching footsteps.
Nothing.
She pounded again and again.
The cicadas broke the silence. Their song was deafening. It grew faster, more insistent, raising the hackles on the backs of her arms.
She didn't hear the deadbolt disengage. The door opened inward and a shadow stepped into view. She caught the glint of moonlight from a long blade in time to throw herself backward.
The knife sliced through the air in front of her.
She hit the porch on her back and tumbled down the stairs, twisting her arm underneath her and hitting her head.
A black silhouette stood above her, knife at its side. The face was a wash of shadows, framed by a riot of tousled hair.
The cicada song died.
In the silence, she heard the man breathing.
He stepped down onto the first step.
And then the next.
Vanessa screamed and tried to scrabble away.
The insects took flight at once and the night filled with the buzzing sound of wings.
One moment, the man stood three steps above her, and the next he was swallowed by a dark cloud of cicadas. The blade flashed through the swarm. She heard him scream as he swung the knife. His exertions only served to topple him off-balance. He missed the next stair down and fell toward her.
She rolled out of the way just in time.
There was a loud crack and the screaming stopped.
The insects swarmed around her for several moments before finally lifting, leaving behind a crumpled heap of humanity. The man's legs trailed him up the staircase. His arms were pinned under his body. The tip of the knife stood from the center of his back in an expanding amoeba of blood. His head was cocked to the side at a severe angle. Fluid trickled from the corners of his mouth and his eyes stared blankly through her. She recognized him immediately.
Carlton Matthews.
Her daughter's dentist.
She struggled to her feet, swayed until she found her balance, and mounted the staircase.
The front door was wide open.
There was only darkness beyond.
Cradling her injured arm to her chest, she crossed the threshold and stepped into the silent house.
The cicadas were already ahead of her, clinging to the walls, the furniture, the ceiling...as though giving life to the house itself.
* * *
The Cherokee slewed from side to side on the gravel road, trailing an angry fist of dust. Trey watched the mailboxes hurtle past until he saw the one he was looking for and slammed the brakes. The car skidded sideways and he used the momentum to turn a one-eighty without stopping. He hit the driveway at thirty miles an hour, but didn't dare push it any faster. Miring the vehicle in the swamp wouldn't help anyone. The road wound fairly tightly, and he didn't want to prematurely betray his approach either.
The trees fell away to either side as he drove into the clearing. The first thing he noticed was the open front door. The second was the body collapsed at the foot of the stairs.
He drove right up onto the lawn and braked hard. Turf flew from the rear tires. He was out of the car before it hit the ground.
Trey ran around the hood and crouched beside the body. He didn't need to check for a pulse to know that Matthews was dead. The knife had been driven straight through his chest and the vertebrae of his cervical spine formed lumpy, bruised knots where they had broken and separated from the column.
Drawing his service pistol, a Beretta 92FS, he crept up the stairs toward the front door. The only sound was the soft scuff of his shoes. He sighted the darkness down the barrel and cautiously entered the house.
* * *
Vanessa didn't waste any time searching the main level. She needed to reach the basement. It pulled her onward like an iron filing to a magnet.
The formal living and dining room off the foyer to her right was empty; the hallway leading toward the bedrooms to the left deserted. She found the staircase between a comfortably furnished family room and a kitchen ripped straight from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens. The carpeted steps creaked subtly as she descended. The stairs doubled back upon themselves when she reached the landing. Were it possible, it was even darker down there still. She gripped the railing and pressed on. The damp smell of mildew greeted her, and beneath it something else.
Sweat.
Ammonia.
Fear.
She heard something shuffle ahead of her. A swishing sound, like soft-soled shoes or slippers across carpet. Then the quiet click of a closing door.
Tiny legs scurried across the back of her hand. She brushed the wall when she jerked it away, grazing slick insect exoskeletons.
At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped to gather her bearings and allow her eyes adjust to the darkness. She was standing in a small recreation room. The faint seepage of light around the sealed window showed the vague outlines of furniture, maybe a rocking horse and a toy box on the floor. A hallway led away from her to either side, shadowed and indistinct.
Clicking sounds from her right. She turned and ran her palm along the plaster, knocking off dozens of cicadas. Their wings caught them before they hit the floor. They buzzed around her head before alighting on the wall once more.
Vanessa held her arms out in front of her as she walked. She listened for the shuffling sound to repeat, but heard only the clicking all around her.
Her hands met with resistance and she managed to stop herself before she collided with what felt like a door. She traced the surface until she found a knob and turned it with both hands. The door was heavy, crafted from solid, metal-reinforced wood that dragged on the carpet. She had to lean her shoulder into it to open it wide enough to squeeze through.
She heard shallow, whispered breathing. The sound of a peacefully sleeping child.
Her heart fluttered and whatever control she had maintained over her emotions fled her. She started to cry and pawed at the wall in search of a light switch.
"Emma? Emma! Mommy's here!"
She flicked the switch and the overhead bulb bloomed. The sudden influx of light was blinding, forcing her to bat her eyelids. She saw snippets of the room, like a slideshow of the same image flipping past too quickly. The walls and the ceiling were covered with cicadas. A rocking chair in the right corner, situated across the low table from its much smaller twin. Books on the table: arithmetic and phonics. A television with a DVD player on a stand, stacks of movies underneath. Piles of teddy bears and dolls. A steel eyebolt was set into the middle of the floor. The thick chain attached to it led up under the covers on a four-poster bed with a lace canopy. A sleeping form under a mound of linens. A spill of short blonde hair on the pillow.
Short...blonde...hair.
Vanessa's heart shattered. She grabbed at the pain in her chest. The room started to spin. This wasn't her daughter. Emma had always had the most beautiful ebon hair.
Vanessa fell to her knees and crawled toward the bed.
She had been so sure, so convinced that Emma was here.
The cicadas...why else would they have led her to this house? To this very bedroom?
She hauled herself up onto the edge of the bed and pulled the covers off of the child. Her size was incongruous with Vanessa's memory. This child had to be at least four or five inches taller than the Emma that lived in her memory, the chubbiness in the arms and legs completely absent.
Brood XIX Page 6
